Love and its Critics

MICHAEL BRYSON AND ARPI MOVSESIAN

From the Song of Songs to

Shakespeare and Milton’s Eden

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Love and its Critics

From the Song of Songs

to Shakespeare and Milton’s Eden

Michael Bryson and Arpi Movsesian

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I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And Thou shalt not, writ over the door;

So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,

That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be:

And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

—William Blake, “The Garden of Love”, Songs of Experience

Et si notre âme a valu quelque chose, c’est qu’elle a brûlé plus ardemment

que quelques autres.

—André Gide, Les Nourritures terrestres

Die Wissenschaft unter der Optik des Künstlers zu sehn, die Kunst aber

unter der des Lebens.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik

Contents

Acknowledgements ix

A Note on Sources and Languages x

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics 1

I. The Poetry of Love 1

II. Love’s Nemesis: Demands for Obedience 3

III. Love’s Critics: The Hermeneutics of Suspicion and the

Authoritarian Approach to Criticism

IV. The Critics: Poetry Is About Poetry 23

V. The Critics: The Author Is Dead (or Merely Irrelevant) 29

2. Channeled, Reformulated, and Controlled: Love Poetry from the

Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

I. Love Poetry and the Critics who Allegorize: The Song of Songs 37

II. Love Poetry and the Critics who Reduce: Ovid’s Amores and

Ars Amatoria

III. Love or Obedience in Virgil: Aeneas and Dido 77

IV. Love or Obedience in Ovid: Aeneas, Dido, and the Critics

who Dismiss

3. Love and its Absences in Late Latin and Greek Poetry 97

I. Love in the Poetry of Late Antiquity: Latin 97

II. Love in the Poetry of Late Antiquity: Greek 113

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual 121

I. Why “Courtly Love” Is Not Love 121

II. The Troubadours and Their Critics 136

III. The Troubadours and Love 165

5. Fin’amor Castrated: Abelard, Heloise, and the Critics who Deny 195

6. The Albigensian Crusade and the Death of Fin’amor in Medieval

French and English Poetry

215

I. The Death of Fin’amor: The Albigensian Crusade and its

Aftermath

215

II. Post-Fin’amor French Poetry: The Roman de la Rose 238

III. Post-Fin’amor English Romance: Love of God and Country

in Havelok the Dane and King Horn

275

IV. Post-Fin’amor English Poetry: Mocking “Courtly Love”

in Chaucer—the Knight and the Miller

280

V. Post-Fin’amor English Poetry: Mocking “Auctoritee”

in Chaucer—the Wife of Bath

286

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose, and the Reactions

of the Sixteenth-Century Sonneteers

295

I. The Platonic Ladder of Love 295

II. Post-Fin’amor Italian Poetry: The Sicilian School to Dante

and Petrarch

300

III. Post-Fin’amor Italian Prose: Il Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of

the Courtier)

330

IV. The Sixteenth-Century: Post-Fin’amor Transitions in

Petrarchan-Influenced Poetry

336

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor 353

I. The Value of the Individual in the Sonnets 353

II. Shakespeare’s Plays: Children as Property 367

III. Love as Resistance: Silvia and Hermia 378

IV. Love as Resistance: Juliet and the Critics who Disdain 393

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature 421

I. Carpe Diem in Life and Marriage: John Donne and the

Critics who Distance

422

II. The Lyricist of Carpe Diem: Robert Herrick and the

Critics who Distort

445

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey 467

Epilogue. Belonging to Poetry: A Reparative Reading 501

Bibliography 513

Index 553

Acknowledgements

This book emerges from multiple experiences and perspectives:

teaching students at California State University and the University

of California; leaving a religious tradition, and leaving a country and

an entire way of life; extensive written and verbal conversations with

people from all over the world—from the Middle East, Africa, Sri

Lanka, Western Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Asian Pacific

Rim; and finally, an attempt to understand what has happened to the

study of poetry, especially love poetry, in modern literary education.

Our thanks go out to Alessandra Tosi, Lucy Barnes and Francesca

Giovannetti at Open Book Publishers, who worked tirelessly with

us on the manuscript to make this book possible. Thanks are due

especially to Nazanin Keynejad, who read and commented upon the

first draft of this book, and to Modje Taavon, who provided valuable

insight into the similarities between the early modern European and

contemporary Middle Eastern cultures. Special thanks are also due to

Robert Bryson, Naomi Bryson, Heather Bryson, Alan Wolstrup, Steven

Wolstrup, Yeprem Movsesian, Ruzan Petrosian, Haik Movsesian,

and Edgar Movsesian, not only for their differing experiences and

perspectives, but for personal encouragement and support.

A Note on Sources and Languages

This book works with material that spans two thousand years and

multiple languages. Many, though by no means all, of the sources it

works with are from older editions that are publicly available online.

This is done deliberately in order to allow readers who may not be

attached to insitutions with well-endowed libraries to access as much of

the information that informs this work as possible, without encountering

paywalls or other access restrictions. It was not possible to follow this

procedure in all cases, but every effort has been made. Where the book

works with texts in languages other than English, the original is provided

along with an English translation. This is done in order to emphasize

that the poetic and critical tradition spans both time and place, reflecting

arguments that are conducted in multiple language traditions. This is also

done, frankly, to make a point about language education in the English-

speaking world, especially in the United States, where foreign-language

requirements are increasingly being questioned and enrollment figures

have declined over the last half-century—according to the 2015 MLA

report, language enrollments per 100 American college students stands

at 8.1 as of 2013, which is half of the ratio from 1960 (https://www.mla.

org/content/download/31180/1452509/EMB_enrllmnts_nonEngl_2013.

pdf, 37). Languages matter. Words matter. One of the arguments of

this book is that the specific words and intentions of the poets and the

critics matter; though English translation is necessary, it is not sufficient.

Quoting the original words of the poets and the critics is a way of giving

the authors their voice.

1. Love and Authority:

Love Poetry and its Critics

The Poetry of Love

Love has always had its critics. They range far and wide throughout

history, from Plato and the Neoplatonists, to the Rabbinic and Christian

interpreters of the Song of Songs, from the clerics behind the savage

Albigensian Crusade, to the seventeenth-century English Puritan

author William Prynne, who never met a joy he failed to condemn.

Love has never lacked for those who try to tame it for “higher”

purposes, or those who would argue that “the worst evils have been

committed in the name of love”.

At the same time, love has always

had its passionate defenders, though these have more often tended

to be poets—the Ovids, Shakespeares, and Donnes—than critics of

poetry. The relationship between the two—poets and critics—is one of

the central concerns of this book.

The story this book tells follows two paths: it is a history of love,

a story told through poetry and its often adversarial relationship to

the laws and customs of its times and places. But it is also a history

of the way love and poetry have been treated, not by our poets, but

by those our culture has entrusted with the authority to perpetuate the

understanding, and the memory, of poetry. This authority has been

1 Aharon Ben-Zeev and Ruhama Goussinsky. In the Name of Love: Romantic Ideology

and Its Victims (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 63.

2 Love and its Critics

abused by a tradition of critics and criticism over two thousand years

old, a tradition dedicated to reducing poetry to allegory or ideology,

insisting that the words of poems do not mean what they appear to mean

to the average reader. And yet, love and its poetry fight back, not just

against critics but against all the real and imagined tyrants of the world.

As we will see in the work of Shakespeare, love stands against a system

of arranged marriages in which individual desires are subordinated to

the rule of the Father, property, and inherited wealth. Sometimes, as in

Milton’s Paradise Lost, love will even stand against God himself. As Dante

demonstrates with his account of Paolo and Francesca, love lives the truth

that Milton’s Satan speaks: it is better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

What is this love? And how is it treated in our poetry? Ranging from

the ancients to the early moderns, from the Bible to medieval literature,

from Shakespeare to the poetry of the seventeenth century and our own

modern day, the love presented here is neither exclusively of the body,

nor exclusively of the spirit. It is not merely sex—though some critics

have been eager to dismiss it in just this way. Neither, however, is it

only spiritual, intellectual, emotional, or what is popularly referred to

as Platonic. The love this book considers, and that so much of our poetry

celebrates, is a combination of the physical and the emotional, the sexual

and the intellectual, the embodied and the ethereal. Above all, it is a

matter of mutual choice between lovers who are each at once Lover and

Beloved. Often marginalized by, and in opposition to church, state, and

the institutions of marriage and law, this love is what the troubadour

poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries referred to as fin’amor.

It is

anarchic and threatening to the established order, and a great deal of

cultural energy has gone into taming it.

Fin’amor—passionate and mutually chosen love, desire, and regard—

has been invented and reinvented over the centuries. It appears in

Hellenistic Jerusalem as a glimpse back into the age of Solomon, then

fades into the dim background of Rabbinical and Christian allegory. It

2 This working definition is at odds with much, though by no means all, of the

specialized scholarship on troubadour poetry. One of the major contentions of this

book is that too much of the work by specialists in many literary fields minimizes,

reinterprets, or outright ignores the human elements of love and desire in poetry,

a situation which scholars like Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay admit has gone too

far. See “Introduction”. In Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, eds. The Troubadours: An

Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 6.

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

is revived in France, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, by poets and

an unusual group of Rabbis, only to fade once again, betrayed by later

poets writing under the twin spells of Neoplatonism and Christianizing

allegory. These later poets radically reshape the ideas of love expressed

in the poems of medieval Provençe and the ancient Levant, writing in

what Dante calls the “sweet new style” (dolce stil novo) that changed love

into worship, men into idolators, and women into idols. The influence of

their verse is still observable in the English poetry of Philip Sidney two

hundred years after the death of Petrarch, the dolce stil novo’s high priest.

Subsequently, writers such as Shakespeare, Donne, Herrick, and Milton

re-invent the love that had almost been lost, putting a new version of

fin’amor on the stage and on the page, pulling it back into the light and

out of the shadows of theology, philosophy, and law. For better, or for

worse, fin’amor has been with us ever since.

Love’s Nemesis: Demands for Obedience

Running parallel with the tradition of love poetry is a style of thought

which argues that obedience, rather than passion, is the prime virtue of

humankind. Examples of obedience demanded and given are abundant

in our scriptures, such as the injunction in Genesis against eating from

the Tree of Knowledge; in our poetry, such as the Aeneid’s portrayal

of Aeneas rejecting Dido in obedience to the gods; and even in our

philosophy, as in Aristotle’s distinction between free men and slaves:

“It is true, therefore, that there are by natural origin those who are truly

free men, but also those who are visibly slavish, and for these slavery is

both beneficial and just”.

Such expectations of obedience often appear

in the writing of those who argue that human law derives from divine

law. Augustine argues that though God did not intend that Man should

have dominion over Man, it now exists because of sin:

3 “ὅτι μὲν τοίνυν εἰσὶ φύσει τινὲς οἱ μὲν ἐλεύθεροι οἱ δὲ δοῦλοι, φανερόν, οἷς

καὶ συμφέρει τὸ δουλεύειν καὶ δίκαιόν ἐστιν”(Aristotle. Politics, ed. by Harris

Rackham [Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press],

1932, 1255a, 22, 24). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are ours.

4 Love and its Critics

But by nature, as God first created us, no one was a slave either of man or

of sin. In truth, our present servitude is penal, a penalty which is meant

to preserve the natural order of law and forbids its disturbance; because,

if nothing had been done contrary to that law, there would have been

nothing to restrain by penal servitude.

Nearly a millennium later, Thomas Aquinas argues from a similar

perspective: “The order of justice requires that inferiors obey their

superiors, for otherwise the stability of human affairs could not be

maintained”.

Even a famous rebel like Martin Luther directs ordinary

citizens to obey the law God puts in place: “No man is by nature Christian

or religious, but all are sinful and evil, wherefore God restrains them all

through the law, so that they do not dare to practice their wickedness

externally with works”.

According to John Calvin, absolute obedience

is due not only to benevolent rulers, but also to tyrants. Wicked rulers

are a punishment from God:

Truthfully, if we look at the Word of God, this will lead us further. We

are not only to be subject to their authority, who are honest, and rule by

what ought to be the gift of God’s love to us, but also to the authority

of all those who in any way have come into power, even if their rule is

nothing less than that of the office of the princes of the blind. […] at the

same time he declares that, whatever they may be, they have their rule

and authority from him.

4 “Nullus autem natura, in qua prius Deus hominem condidit, seruus est hominis

aut peccati. Verum et poenalis seruitus ea lege ordinatur, quae naturalem ordinem

conseruari iubet, perturbari uetat; quia si contra eam legem non esset factum, nihil

esset poenali seruitute coërcendum” (Augustine of Hippo. De Civitate Dei [Paris:

1586], Book 19, Chapter 15, 250, https://books.google.com/books?id=pshhAAAAcA

AJ&pg=PA250).

5 “Ordo autem iustitiae requirit ut inferiores suis superioribus obediant, aliter

enim non posset humanarum rerum status conservari” (Thomas Aquinas. Summa

Theologiae: Vol. 41, Virtues of Justice in the Human Community, ed. by T. C. O’Brien

[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 2a2ae. Q104, A6, 72).

6 “Nun aber kein Mensch von Natur Christ oder fromm ist, sondern sie allzumal

Sünder und böse sind, wehret ihnen Gott allen durchs Gesetz, daß sie ihre Bosheit

nicht äußerlich mit Werken nach ihrem Mutwillen zu üben wagen” (Martin Luther.

Von Weltlicher Obrigkeit [Berlin: Tredition Classics, 2012], 10).

7 Verùm si in Dei verbum respicimus, longius nos deducet, ut non eorum modò principú imperio

subditi simus, qui probè, & qua debét fide munere suo erga nos defungútur: sed omnium qui

quoquo modo rerum potiuntur, etiamsi nihil minus praestét quàm quod ex officio principum.

[…] simul tamen declarat, qualescunque sint, nonnisi à se habere imperium.

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

For these thinkers, obedience is the prime duty of humankind, because

it is ultimately in service to the God who established all authority in the

first place. To be obedient is therefore to be pleasing to God.

Such demands for obedience are ancient, and widespread, but

resistance has its own long tradition. Étienne de La Boétie, the sixteenth-

century author, judge, and friend to Michel Montaigne, argues that

human beings have long become so used to servitude that they no

longer know how to be free:

It is incredible how a people, when it becomes subject, falls so suddenly

and profoundly into forgetfulness of its freedom, so that it is not possible

for them to win it back, serving so frankly and so happily that it seems, at

a glance, that they have not lost their freedom but won their servitude.

La Boétie maintains that obedience has become so engrained in most

people, that they regard their subjection as normal and necessary:

They will say they have always been subjects, and their fathers lived the

same way; they will think they are obliged to endure the evil, and they

demonstrate this to themselves by examples, and find themselves in the

length of time to be the possessions of those who lord it over them; but

in reality, the years never gave any the right to do them wrong, and this

magnifies the injury.

This “injury” leads La Boétie to reject the idea of natural obedience,

proposing instead a model through which he accuses “the tyrants”

(“les tyrans”) of carefully inculcating the idea of submission into the

populations they dominate:

Jean Calvin. Institutio Christianae Religionis (Geneva: Oliua Roberti Stephani, 1559),

559, https://books.google.com/books?id=6ysy-UX89f4C&dq=Oliua+Roberti+Stepha

ni,+1559&pg=PA559

8 “Il n’est pas croyable comme le peuple, dès lors qu’il est assujetti, tombe si soudain

en un tel et si profond oubli de la franchise, qu’il n’est pas possible qu’il se réveille

pour la ravoir, servant si franchement et tant volontiers qu’on dirait, à le voir, qu’il a

non pas perdu sa liberté, mais gagné sa servitude” (Étienne de La Boétie. Discours de

la Servitude Volontaire [1576] [Paris: Éditions Bossard, 1922], 67, https://fr.wikisource.

org/wiki/Page:La_Boétie_-_Discours_de_la_servitude_volontaire.djvu/73).

9 “Ils disent qu’ils ont été toujours sujets, que leurs pères ont ainsi vécu; ils pensent

qu’ils sont tenus d’endurer le mal et se font accroire par exemple, et fondent eux-

mêmes sous la longueur du temps la possession de ceux qui les tyrannisent; mais

pour vrai, les ans ne donnent jamais droit de mal faire, ains agrandissent l’injure”

(ibid., 74–75, https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:La_Boétie_-_Discours_de_la_

servitude_volontaire.djvu/80).

6 Love and its Critics

The first reason why men willingly serve, is that they are born serfs and

are nurtured as such. From this comes another easy conclusion: people

become cowardly and effeminate under tyrants.

[…] It has never been

but that tyrants, for their own assurance, have made great efforts to

accustom their people to them, [training them] not only in obedience

and servitude, but also in devotion.

Two centuries later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau raises his voice against the

authority of “les tyrans”, arguing that liberty is the very basis of humanity:

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, the rights of humanity,

even its duties. […] Such a renunciation is incompatible with the nature

of man, and to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality

from his actions. Finally, it is a vain and contradictory convention to

stipulate on the one hand an absolute authority, and on the other an

unlimited obedience.

But what Rousseau calls a renunciation of liberty, framing it as a

conscious act, La Boétie presents as something that is done to rather than

done by average men and women: “they are born as serfs and nurtured as

such”. In the latter’s view, it is those in authority who “nurture” (raise,

nourish, even instruct) their populations into the necessary attitudes of

what Rousseau will later call une obéissance sans bornes.

Such “nurture” performs a pedagogical function, teaching men and

women to think their bondage is natural: for La Boétie, “it is certain

that custom, which in all things has great power over us, has no greater

10 “[L]a première raison pourquoi les hommes servent volontiers, est pour ce qu’ils

naissent serfs et sont nourris tels. De celle-ci en vient une autre, qu’aisément les gens

deviennent, sous les tyrans, lâches et efféminés” (ibid., 77–78, https://fr.wikisource.

org/wiki/Page:La_Boétie_-_Discours_de_la_servitude_volontaire.djvu/83).

11 “il n’a jamais été que les tyrans, pour s’assurer, ne se soient efforcés d’accoutumer

le peuple envers eux, non seulement à obéissance et servitude, mais encore à

dévotion” (ibid., 89, https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:La_Boétie_-_Discours_de_

la_servitude_volontaire.djvu/95).

12 Renoncer à sa liberté, c’est renoncer à sa qualité d’homme, aux droits de l’humanité, même

à ses devoirs. […] Une telle renonciation est incompatible avec la nature de l’homme, et c’est

ôter toute moralité à ses actions que d’ôter toute liberté à sa volonté. Enfin c’est une convention

vaine et contradictoire de stipuler d’une part une autorité absolue et de l’autre une obéissance

sans bornes.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Contrat Social. In The Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rosseau,

Vol. 2, ed. by C. E. Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 28,

https://books.google.com/books?id=IqhBAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA28

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

strength than this, to teach us how to serve”.

Some seventy years later, the

English revolutionary John Milton makes a similar argument, describing

“custom” as part of the double tyranny that keeps mankind in subjection:

If men within themselves would be govern’d by reason and not generally

give up their understanding to a double tyrannie, of custome from

without and blind affections within, they would discerne better what it

is to favour and uphold the Tyrant of a Nation.

Milton, in pamphlets that ridicule the pro-monarchical propaganda

of his day, berates what he calls “the easy literature of custom and

opinion”,

the authoritative-sounding, but empty writing and speaking

that teaches “the most Disciples” and is “silently receiv’d for the best

instructer”, despite the fact that it offers nothing but a “swoln visage of

counterfeit knowledge and literature”.

David Hume later notes “the

easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit

submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions

to those of their rulers”. Hume explains this submission as a function

of “opinion”, or the “sense” that is inculcated into the many “of the

general advantage” to be had by obeying “the particular government

which is established”.

By the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger condemns “tradition”

as a manipulative force that obscures both its agenda and its origins:

The tradition that becomes dominant hereby makes what it “transmits”

so inaccessible that at first, and for the most part, it obscures it instead.

It hands over to the self-evident and obvious what has come down to us,

and blocks access to the original “sources”, from which the traditional

13 “Mais certes la coutume, qui a en toutes choses grand pouvoir sur nous, n’a en

aucun endroit si grande vertu qu’en ceci, de nous enseigner à servir” (La Boétie,

68, https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:La_Boétie_-_Discours_de_la_servitude_

volontaire.djvu/74).

14 John Milton. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (London, 1649), 1, Sig. A2r, http://

quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A50955.0001.001/1:2?rgn=div1;view=fulltext;q1=Te

nure+of+Kings+and+Magistrates and https://books.google.com/books?id=EIg-

AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA1 (1650 edition).

15 John Milton. Eikonoklastes (London, 1650), 3, Sig. A3r, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/

eebo/A50898.0001.001/1:2?rgn= div1;view=fulltext;rgn1=author;q1=Milton%2C+John

16 John Milton. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. London, 1644, Sig. A2r, https://

books.google.com/books?id=6oI-AQAAMAAJ&pg=PP9

17 David Hume. “Of the First Principles of Government”. In Essays, Literary, Moral,

and Political (London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1870), 23, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/

pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t1fj2db8p;view=1up;seq=27

8 Love and its Critics

categories and concepts in part were actually drawn. The tradition even

makes us forget there ever was such an origin.

In contrast, Edward Bernays—a member of the Creel Committee which

influenced American public opinion in favor of entering WWI—regards

such manipulation as necessary to ensure the obedience of the masses:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and

opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.

Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an

invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas

suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.

Though Bernays thinks of such techniques as a good thing

(foreshadowing developments elsewhere in the twentieth century),

for

earlier thinkers like La Boétie, Milton, and Hume, it is crucial to keep a

watchful eye on those who draw “the most Disciples” after them, for

18 “Die hierbei zur Herrschaft kommende Tradition macht zunächst und zumeist

das, was sie ‘übergibt’, so wenig zugänglich, daß sie es vielmehr verdeckt. Sie

überantwortet das Überkommene der Selbstverständlichkeit und verlegt den

Zugang zu den ursprünglichen ‘Quellen’, daraus die überlieferten Kategorien und

Begriffe z. T. in echter Weise geschöpft wurden. Die Tradition macht sogar eine

solche Herkunft überhaupt vergessen” (Sein und Zeit [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer,

1967], 21).

19 Edward Bernays. Propaganda (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), 9, https://archive.

org/details/EdwardL.BernaysPropaganda#page/n3

20 It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that

opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities

of regimenting the public mind. […] If we understand the mechanism and motives

of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according

to our will without them knowing it? (Bernays, 27, 47). Bernays’ ideas are not far

removed from those being promulgated on the other side of the Atlantic ocean by

an aspiring literary critic and author whose Ph.D. in literature was obtained at the

University of Heidelberg in 1921, and whose critical acumen was given a real-world

application approximately a decade later:

Propaganda is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. […] Whether or not it conforms

adequately to aesthetic demands is meaningless. […] The end of our movement was to mobilize

the people, to organize the people, and win them for the idea of national revolution.

Denn Propaganda ist nicht Selbstzweck, sondern Mittel zum Zweck. […] ob es in jedem Falle

nun scharfen ästhetischen Forderungen entspricht oder nicht, ist dabei gleichgültig. […] Der

Zweck unserer Bewegung war, Menschen zu mobilisieren, Menschen zu organisieren und für

die nationalrevolutionäre Idee zu gewinnen. [March 15, 1933].

In Joseph Goebbels, Revolution der Deutschen: 14 Jahre Nationalsozialismus

(Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1933), 139.

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

what they are teaching may well be the lessons of obedience to what

Aleksandr Pushkin calls “Custom, despot between the people”.

Alongside the long narrative of demands for obedience, stands a

counter-narrative and counter-instruction in our poetry, framed in

terms of forbidden love and desire. Love challenges obedience; it is one

of the precious few forces with sufficient power to enable its adherents

to transcend themselves, their fears, and their isolation to such a degree

that it is possible to refuse the demands of power. Love does not always

succeed. But for its more radical devotees—the Dido of Ovid’s Heroides,

the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Occitania,

the famous lovers of Shakespeare, and Milton’s Adam and Eve—love is

revolutionary, an attempt to tear down the world and build it anew, not

in the image of authority, but that of a love that is freely chosen, freely

given, and freely received. Love rejects the claims of law, property,

and custom. It opposes the claims of determinism—whether theological

(Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, and the notions of original sin and

predestination), philosophical (Foucault, and the idea that impersonal

systems of power create “free subjects” in their image), or biological (as in

Baron d’Holbach’s 1770 work Système de la Nature, which maintains that

all human thought and action results from material causes and effects).

These points of view can be found all too frequently, often dressed

in the robes of what John Milton calls “pretended learning, mistaken

among credulous men […] filling each estate of life and profession, with

abject and servil[e] principles”.

But in the more radical examples of our

poetry, love defies servile principles, and is unimpressed by pretended

learning. Neither is love merely a Romantic construct, a product of “the

long nineteenth century [that extends] well into the twenty-first”,

nor

a secular replacement for religious traditions. As Simon May points out,

“[b]y imputing to human love features properly reserved for divine

love, such as the unconditional and the eternal, we falsify the nature

of this most conditional and time-bound and earthly emotion, and

21 “Обычай деспот меж людей”. Evgeny Onegin, 1.25.4. In Aleksandr Sergeevich

Pushkin. Sobraniye Sochinenii. 10 Vols., ed. by D. D. Blagoi, S. M. Bondi, V. V.

Vinogradov and Yu. G. Oksman (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1959),

Vol. 4, 20, http://rvb.ru/pushkin/01text/04onegin/01onegin/0836.htm

22 John Milton. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. London, 1644, Sig. A2r, https://

books.google.com/books?id=6oI-AQAAMAAJ&pg=PP9

23 Simon May. Love: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), xii.

10 Love and its Critics

force it to labor under intolerable expectations”.

It is precisely “time-

bound and earthly” love—a passion that always brings an awareness

of time running out, and the concomitant urge to fight to extend that

time even by the merest moments—that is the powerful counterweight

to the “servil[e] principles” imposed on us by the individuals and

institutions that demand our obedience. Too often, the poetry written

about this love has been ill-served by its ancient and modern critics.

Reading the theological and academic critics of poetry inspires the

troubling realization that many such critics are part of the very system

of authority and obedience which, La Boétie argues, accustoms people

to tyrants, and against which the poetry itself protests.

III

Love’s Critics: The Hermeneutics of Suspicion and the

Authoritarian Approach to Criticism

How does this alignment between literary criticism and repressive

authority function? By denying poetry—particularly love poetry—

the ability to serve as a challenge to the structures of authority in

the societies in which it is written.

As we will see especially clearly

24 Ibid., 4–5.

25 Obedience is the soil in which universities first took root. In their beginnings,

universities were training grounds for service in the church or at court (for those

students who took degrees), and institutions that inculcated obedience in the wider

population. The subversiveness of an Abelard or a Wycliffe—which in each case

came at a far greater cost than any paid, or even contemplated by the academic

critic today—is most clearly understood in that context. This is best illustrated

by the Authentica Habita, the 1158 decree of the German Emperor Frederick I

(Barbarossa) granting special privileges to teachers and students of the still-forming

University of Bologna in order that “students, and divine teachers of the sacred

law, […] may come and live in security” (“scholaribus, et maxime divinarum atque

sacrarum legum professoribus, […] veniant, et in eis secure habitient”). This decree

also outlined what Frederick believed to be the essential purpose of education:

“knowledge of the world is to illuminate and inform the lives of our subjects, to

obey God, and ourself, his minister” (“scientia mundus illuminatur ad obediendum

deo et nobis, eius ministris, vita subjectorum informatur”) (Paul Krueger, Theodor

Mommsen, Rudolf Schoell, and Whilhelm Kroll, eds. Corpus Iuris Civilis, Vol. 2

[Berlin: Apud Weidmannos, 1892], 511, https://books.google.com/books?id=2hvTA

AAAMAAJ&pg=PA511).

26 In the “human sciences”, critics often “act as agents of the micro-physics of power”

(Elisabeth Strowick. “Comparative Epistemology of Suspicion: Psychoanalysis,

Literature, and the Human Sciences”. Science in Context, 18.4 [2005], 654, https://doi.

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

when we consider the commentary that surrounds the poetry of John

Milton, the thinking behind such work often displays “a high degree

of submission to the authorities who are perceived to be established”,

whether that authority is political, cultural, or intellectual. There is an

endless body of criticism that serves not only to undermine poetry’s

potential for political, theological, and even aesthetic resistance, but

to restrict the manner in which readers encounter and understand

poetry. From the beginning, together with the tradition of love poetry,

a tradition of criticism (expressed now from both “conservative” and

“radical” points of view)

has grown that subordinates and dismisses

human passion and desire, often arguing that what merely seems to

be passionate love poetry is actually properly understood as something

else (worship of God, subordination to Empire, entanglement within

the structures of language itself). The pattern of such criticism—from

the earliest readings of the Song of Songs to contemporary articles

written about a carpe diem poem like Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins

to Make Much of Time”—is to argue that the surface of a poem hides

a “real” or “deeper” meaning that undermines the apparent one, and

that the critic’s job is to tear away the misleading surface in order to

expose the “truth” that lies beneath it. Frederic Jameson exemplifies

this technique in his argument that the true function of the critic is to

analyze texts and culture through “a vast interpretive allegory in which

a sequence of historical events or texts and artifacts is rewritten in terms

of some deeper, underlying, and more ‘fundamental’ narrative”.

Louis Althusser describes interpretation similarly, as “detecting the

undetected in the very same text it reads, and relating it to another

org/10.1017/S0269889705000700). Noam Chomsky, when asked how “intellectuals

[…] get away with their complicity [with] powerful interests”, gives a telling

response: “They are not getting away with anything. They are, in fact, performing

a service that is expected of them by the institutions for which they work, and they

willingly, perhaps unconsciously, fulfill the requirements of the doctrinal system”

(“Beyond a Domesticating Education: A Dialogue”. In Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on

Miseducation [Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004], 17).

27 Bob Altermeyer. The Authoritarian Specter (Cambridge: Havard University Press,

1996), 6.

28 Along with the “right-wing” authoritarianism cited above, Altermeyer also defines

a “left-wing” authoritarianism which displays “a high degree of submission to

authorities who are dedicated to overthrowing the established authorities” (219).

29 Frederic Jameson. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 13.

12 Love and its Critics

text, present as a necessary absence in the first”.

We can trace similar

thinking all the way back to the controversies over Homer and Hesiod

in the sixth century BCE:

The Homeric representations of the gods roused a protest on the part of

the founder of the Eleatics, Xenophanes of Colophon (fl. 540–500 B.C),

who says that “Homer and Hesiod have imputed to the gods all that is

blame and shame for men”. […] In reply to protests such as these, some

of the defenders of Homer maintained that the superficial meaning of

his myths was not the true one, and that there was a deeper sense lying

below the surface. This deeper sense was, in the Athenian age, called the

ὑπόνοια[hyponoia–suspicion],andtheὑπόνοιαofthisageassumedthe

name of “allegories” in the times of Plutarch. […] Anaxagoras […] found

in the web of Penelope an emblem of the rules of dialectic, the warp being

the premises, the woof the conclusion, and the flame of the torches, by

which she executed her task, being none other than the light of reason.

[…] But no apologetic interpretation of the Homeric mythology was of

any avail to save Homer from being expelled with all the other poets

from Plato’s ideal Republic.

Such readings originally tried to defend poetry against its critics,

though in a rather different sense than did Eratosthenes, the third-

century BCE librarian of Alexandria, who held that “poets… in all

30 “décèle l’indécelé dans le texte même qu’elle lit, et le rapporte à un autre texte,

présent d’une absence nécessaire dans le premier” (Louis Althusser. Lire le Capital

[Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996], 23).

31 BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era) are used here throughout

(except in quotations, where usage may differ) in lieu of the theologically-inflected

BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini).

32 Sir John Edwin Sandys. A History of Classical Scholarship, Vol. I: From the Sixth

Century B.C. to the End of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1903), 29–31, https://archive.org/stream/historyofclassic00sanduoft#page/29

33 Francois Rabelais, who finds a good reason to laugh at nearly everything, laughs

also at this particular absurdity of literary history:

Do you believe, in faith, that Homer, when he was writing the Iliad and Odyssey, thought of the

allegories that Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticq, Eustalius, and Cornutus dressed him in, and which

Politian took from them? If you believe that, you don’t approach by foot or by hand anywhere

near my opinion.

Croyez vous en vostre foy qu’oncques Homere, escripvant Iliade et Odyssée, pensast es

allegories lesquelles de lui ont calefreté Plutarque, Heraclides Ponticq, Eustatie, Phornute, et

ce d’yceulx Politian ha desrobé? Si li croyez, vous n’aprochez ne de piedz, ne de mains a mon

opinion.) (Francois Rabelais. “Prolog”. Gargantua et Pantagruel. In Œuvres de Rabelais, Vol. 1 [Paris:

Dalibon, 1823], 24–25, https://books.google.com/books?id=a6MGAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA24)

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

things aim to persuade and delight, not instruct”,

or Philip Sidney,

for whom “the Poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth”.

But suspicion has long since been adopted by the critics as a method of

attack, rather more in the spirit of Plato than in the spirit of Sidney or

those early defenders of Homer and Hesiod.

Employing a method Paul Ricoeur calls the hermeneutics of

suspicion (les herméneutiques du soupçon), the modern version of this

reading strategy is a matter of cunning (falsification) encountering

a greater cunning (suspicion), as the “false” appearances of a text are

systematically exposed by the critic:

Three masters, who appear exclusive from each other, are dominant:

Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. […] The fundamental category of

consciousness, for the three of them, is the relation between hidden-

shown or, if one prefers, simulated-manifest. […] What they have all

three tried, by different routes, is to align their “conscious” methods of

decryption with the “unconscious” work of encryption they attributed to

the will to power, to social being, to the unconscious psyche. […] What

then distinguishes Marx, Freud and Nietzsche is the general hypothesis

concerning both the process of “false” consciousness and the decryption

method. The two go together, since the suspicious man reverses the

falsifying work of the deceitful man.

For Ricoeur, the hermeneutics of suspicion is not something that is

simply borrowed from the “three masters”; rather, it is modern literature

itself that teaches a reader to read suspiciously:

34 “Ποιητὴν […] πάντα στοχάζεσθαι ψυχαγωγίας, οὐ διδασκαλίας”. Strabo,

Geography, 1.2.3. In Strabo, Geography, Vol. I: Books 1–2, ed. by Horace Leonard Jones.

Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1917, 54.

35 Philip Sidney. The Defence of Poesie. In The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, Vol. III,

ed. by Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 29, https://

archive.org/stream/completeworks03sidnuoft#page/29

36 Troi maîtres en apperance exclusifs l’un de l’autre la dominent, Marx, Nietzsche et Freud. […]

La catégorie fondamentale de la conscience, pour eux trois, c’est le rapport caché-montré ou, si

l’on préfére, simulé-manifesté. […] Ce qu’ils ont tenté tous trois, sur des voies différentes, ce’st

de faire coïncider leurs methods “conscientes” de déchiffrage avec le travail “inconscient” du

chiffrage qu’ils attribuaient à la volonté de puissance, à l’être social, au psychisme inconscient.

[…] Ce qui distingue alors Marx, Freud et Nietzsche, c’est l’hypothèse gènèrale concernant à la

fois le processus de la conscience “fausse” et la méthode de déchiffrage. Les deux vont de pair,

puisque l’homme du soupçon fait en sens inverse le travail de falsification de l’homme de la ruse.

Paul Ricoeur. De l’interprétation. Essai sur Freud (Paris: Seuil, 1965), 32, 33–34.

14 Love and its Critics

It may be the function of more corrosive literature to contribute to making

a new type of reader appear, a suspicious reader, because the reading

ceases to be a confident journey made in the company of a trustworthy

narrator, but reading becomes a fight with the author involved, a struggle

that brings the reader back to himself.

Yet suspicion is more fundamental, more deeply rooted than can be

explained by the lessons of reading. Not long after outlining his analysis

of the “three masters”, Ricoeur makes an even starker and more

dramatic statement: “A new problem has emerged: that of the lie of

consciousness, and of consciousness as a lie”.

Here, if one desires it, is

a warrant to regard all apparent meaning (indeed, all appearance of any

kind) as a lie in need of being dismantled and exposed. Such ideas, and

the reading strategies they have inspired, have done yeoman’s work in

literary and historical scholarship over the last several decades. But as

with so many useful tools, this one can be, and has been overused.

Rita

Felski pointedly questions why this approach has become “the default

option” for many critics today:

Why is it that critics are so quick off the mark to interrogate, unmask,

expose, subvert, unravel, demystify, destabilize, take issue, and take

umbrage? What sustains their assurance that a text is withholding

something of vital importance, that their task is to ferret out what lies

concealed in its recesses and margins?

37 Ce peut être la fonction de la littérature la plus corrosive de contribuer à faire apparaître un

lecteur d’un nouveau genre, un lecteur lui-même soupçonneux, parce que la lecture cesse

d’être un voyage confiant fait en compagnie d’un narrateur digne de confiance, mais devient

un combat avec l’auteur impliqué, un combat qui le reconduit à lui-même.

Paul Ricoeur. Temps et Récit, Vol. 3: Le Temps Raconté (Paris: Seuil, 1985), 238.

38 “Une problème nouveau est né: celui du mensonge de la conscience, de la

conscience comme mensonge” (Paul Ricoeur. Le Conflit des Interprétations: Essais

D’Herméneutique [Paris: Seuil, 1969], 101).

39 These readings demonstrate

the thought pattern that’s at the basis of literary studies, and of any self-enclosed hermetically

sealed sub-world that seeks to assert theoretical hegemony over the rest of the world. […]

The individual is not the measure of all things: I, the commentator, am the measure of all

things. You always have to wait for me, the academic or theoretician, to explain it to you. For

example, you’re really doing A or B because you’re a member of a certain class and accept its

presuppositions. Or you’re really doing C and D because of now-inaccessible events in your

childhood. What you personally think about this doesn’t matter.

Bruce Fleming. What Literary Studies Could Be, And What It Is (Lanham: University

Press of America, 2008), 100.

40 Rita Felski. The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 5.

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

Maintaining that “suspicious reading has settled into a mandatory method

rather than one approach among others”, Felski describes this method

as “[i]ncreasingly prescriptive as well as excruciatingly predictable”,

portraying its influence as one that “can be stultifying, pushing thought

down predetermined paths and closing our minds to the play of detail,

nuance, quirkiness, contradiction, happenstance”. Literary criticism

that leans heavily on this method can lend itself to an authoritarian

approach to reading, as “the critic conjures up ever more paralyzing

scenarios of coercion and control”,

while readers “have to appeal to

the priestly class that alone can explain”

the text. Such criticism treats

texts as “imaginary opponents to be bested”

in service of an accusatory,

prosecutorial agenda, as “[s]omething, somewhere—a text, an author, a

reader, a genre, a discourse, a discipline—is always already guilty of

some crime”.

The trials have become so zealous and overwhelmingly

numerous that they have long since become formulaic,

products of

a template-driven approach whose verdicts can be anticipated at the

beginning of the essays and books that use this method.

But why? What is the appeal of this approach? Karl Popper suggests

that it is because “[t]hese theories appear to be able to explain practically

everything”, while a devotion to this method has the effect “of an

intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth

hidden from those not yet initiated”. Those who undergo this conversion

behave in much the same way as new cult members, on the lookout for

heresy,

dividing the world into believers and unbelievers: “Once your

41 Ibid., 34.

42 Fleming, 100.

43 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 111.

44 Ibid., 39.

45 As Felski notes:

Anyone who attends academic talks has learned to expect the inevitable question: “But what

about power?” Perhaps it is time to start asking different questions: “But what about love?”

Or: “Where is your theory of attachment?” To ask such questions is not to abandon politics

for aesthetics. It is, rather, to contend that both art and politics are also a matter of connecting,

composing, creating, coproducing, inventing, imagining, making possible: that neither is

reducible to the piercing but one-eyed gaze of critique.

The Limits of Critique, 17–18.

46 Felski traces this attitude back to “the medieval heresy trial”, noting that “[h]eresy

presented a hermeneutic problem of the first order and the transcripts of religious

inquisitions reveal an acute awareness on the part of inquisitors that truth is not

self-evident, that language conceals, distorts, and contains traps for the unwary,

16 Love and its Critics

eyes [are] thus opened you [see] confirmed instances everywhere: the

world [is] full of verifications of the theory […] and unbelievers [are]

clearly people who [do] not want to see the manifest truth; who refuse

to see it”.

In addition to the influence of Ricoeur’s “three masters”, this

approach also hinges on on a widely-diffused (mis)use of the work

of Martin Heidegger, especially his engagement with the meaning

of “truth” or Wahrheit. For Heidegger, “the essence of truth is always

understood in terms of unconcealment”,

a notion he derives from

the Greek term ἀλήθεια (aletheia—discovered or uncovered truth) in

the pre-Socratic philosophers Parmenides and Heraclitus. Heidegger

divides the concept of truth into correctness (Richtigkeit) or accurate

correspondence of ideas with things as they presently are in the world, and

the unconcealedness or discoveredness (Unverborgenheit or Entdecktheit)

of entities. The first is necessarily grounded in, and dependent upon the

second, for there can be no truth about things in the world without things

in the world. For Heidegger, truth as correctness “has its basis in the truth

as unconcealedness”,

while “the unconcealment of Being as such is the

basis for the possibility of correctness”.

Thus Wahrheit is both the surface

truth of what exists and the deeper truth that existence itself exists.

But what has any of this to do with the reading of literature?

Heidegger’s thought proposes a two-level structure, much like that

found in Parmenides, who argued that τὸ ἐὸν—to eon, or What Is—

should be understood in terms of an unchanging reality behind the

changing appearances of the world.

It is also seen in the paradoxes

that words should be treated cautiously and with suspicion” (“Suspicious Minds”.

Poetics Today, 32: 2 [Summer 2011], 219, https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-1261208).

47 Karl Popper. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New

York: Basic Books, 1963), 34.

48 Mark A. Wrathall. Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 12.

49 “hat ihren Grund in der Wahrheit als Unverborgenheit” (Martin Heidegger.

Grundfragen der Philosophie. Ausgewählte “Probleme” der “Logik”. Gesamtausgabe.

II. Abteilung: Vorlesungen 1923–1944. Band 45 [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio

Klostermann Verlag, 1984], 97–98).

50 “Die Unverborgenheit des Seienden als solchen ist der Grund der Möglichkeit der

Richtigkeit” (ibid., 102).

51 In the extant fragments, Parmenides describes τὸ ἐὸν as the kind of eternal,

unchanging whole that later Christian theologians will use as a basis for their

understandings of the divine:

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

of Zeno (designed, as in the example of Achilles and the Tortoise, to

demonstrate the unreality of the world of motion and appearances

and the dialogues of Plato (for whom the eidos or Idea is the ultimate

reality that the world of appearances merely exemplifies or participates

in—μέθεξις / methexis—in an incomplete and shadowy way

Heidegger argues that to get at truth not merely in its surface, concrete,

or ontic sense, but in its deeper, structural, ontological sense, the seeker

must go through a process of unveiling, reaching a state he called

disclosedness (Erschslossenheit), accompanied by a process of clearing

(Lichtung), removing what is inessential and shining a light (Licht) on

the core that remains.

The basic working method of much literary criticism in its modern

European and American forms is indebted to Heidegger’s recovery and

ἔστινἄναρχονἄπαυστον

[…]

Ταὐτόντ’ἐνταὐτῷτεμένονκαθ’ἑαυτότεκεῖται

χοὔτωςἔμπεδοναὖθιμένει·κρατερὴγὰρἈνάγκη

πείρατοςἐνδεσμοῖσινἔχει,τόμινἀμφὶςἐέργει,

οὕνεκενοὐκἀτελεύτητοντὸἐὸνθέμιςεἶναι·.

It exists without beginning or ending

[…]

Identical in its sameness, it remains itself and standing

Thus firmly-set there, for strong and mighty necessity

Limits it, holds it in chains, and shuts it in on both sides.

Because of this, it is right what is should not be incomplete.

Fragment 8, ll. 26, 29–32, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. by Hermann Diels

(Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1903), 124, https://archive.org/stream/

diefragmenteder00krangoog#page/n140

52 According to Aristotle’s summary,

The second of these is called “Achilles”. It is this in which the slowest runner is never overtaken

by the fastest; because since the swifter runner in the chase is always, at any given moment,

first forced to reach the point where the fleeing runner set into motion, of necessity the slowest

runner, who had the headstart, will always be in the lead.

Δεύτερος δ΄ ὁ καλούμενος Ἀχιλλεύς. ἔστι δ΄ οὗτος ὅτι τὸ βραδύτατον οὐδέποτε

καταληφθήσεται θέον ὑπὸ τοῦ ταχίστου· ἔμπροσθεν γὰρ ἀναγκαῖον ἐλθεῖν τὸ διῶκον,

ὅθενὥρμησετὸφεῦγον,ὥστ΄ἀείτιπροέχεινἀναγκαῖοντὸβραδύτερον.

Aristotle, Physics, Vol. II, Books 5–8, ed. by P. H. Wicksteed and F. M. Cornford (Loeb

Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 180, 182. This

paradox is helpfully visualized in the following Open University video: https://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=skM37PcZmWE

53 The Instance (or the Particular) shares in the nature of the Eidos (or form / idea),

though imperfectly: “The term Methexis, Participation […] connote[s] a closer

relation of the Instance to the Eidos […]: the Instance really has something of the

Eidos in it, if not the Eidos in its full purity” (John Niemeyer Findlay. Plato: The

Written and Unwritten Doctrines [New York: Routledge, 1974], 37).

18 Love and its Critics

reformulation of this pre-Socratic notion of truth as disguised, hidden

away, and obscured by a layer of what one might call “lesser truth”

or illusion. Heidegger’s influence on French thinkers like Ricoeur and

Jacques Derrida is profound,

and its traces work their way through

American criticism like that of “Deconstructionists” such as Paul de

Man,

and even the “New Historicist” work of Stephen Greenblatt

(through Foucault

) and the innumerable scholars and critics who

have followed in his wake in recent decades. Much of the criticism we

encounter in this book operates on the assumption that a poem has a

surface (the actual words and relationships between them) that must be

cleared away in order to reveal the truth. The complexity of Heidegger’s

thought is often left behind by such a process,

but what remains is the

54 Walter A. Brogan refers to Derrida’s concept of différance as “a radical and liberated

affirmation of Heidegger’s thought” (“The Original Difference”. Derrida and

Différance, ed. by David Wood and Robert Bernasconi [Evanston: Northwestern

University Press, 1985], 32). As Andre Gingrich notes, “Heidegger’s own

phenomenological appreciation of literature influenced Ricouer’s hermeneutic

approach”, and “[b]oth Ricouer and Derrida acknowledged Heidegger’s strong

influence upon major areas of their respective works” (“Conceptualising Identities:

Anthropological Alternatives to Essentialising Difference and Moralizing

about Othering”. In Gerd Baumann and Andre Gingrich, eds. Grammars of

Identity / Alterity: A Structural Approach [New York: Berghahn Books, 2004], 6–7).

For a comprehensive account of Heidegger’s influence on French intellectuals of

the mid-twentieth century, see Dominique Janicaud’s Heidegger in France, Indiana

University Press, 2015.

55 “De Man’s relation to Heidegger is especially contorted. De Man from the start

contests Heidegger’s signature notion of Being, but does so in an authentically

deconstructive fashion, such that de Man’s own counter-notion of ‘language’

cannot be grasped apart from an appreciation of Heidegger’s project” (Joshua

Kates. “Literary Criticism”. In The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, ed. by

Sebastian Luft [New York: Routledge, 2012], 650–51).

56 In Foucault’s account, “Heidegger has always, for me, been the essential

philosopher” (“Heidegger a toujours été pour moi le philosophe essential”). In his

“Le retour de la morale”. In his Dits et écrits, 1954–1988. Vol. IV: 1980–1988 (Paris:

Gallimard, 1994), 696–707 (703).

57 For Heidegger, art itself (and not its interpretation or interpreters) is that which

reveals (or unconceals) the truth of Being: “The artwork opens the Being of

beings in its own way. In the work this opening, this unconcealing, of the truth

of beings happens. In art, the truth of beings has set itself in motion. Art is the

truth setting itself-into-works” (“Das Kunstwerk eröffnet auf seine Weise das Sein

des Seienden. Im Werk geschieht diese Eröffnung, d.h. das Entbergen, d.h. die

Wahrheit des Seiended. Im Kunstwerk hat sich die Wahrheit des Seienden ins Werk

gesetzt. Die Kunst ist das Sich-ins-Werk-Setzen der Wahrheit”) (“Der Ursprung

des Kunstwerkes”. Holzwege: Gesamtusgabe, Vol. V [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio

Klostermann, 1977], 25).

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

basic notion that the truth of a poem is concealed by its words, and by

its writer, and that the job of the critic is to pull back the curtains.

Some critics argue, however, that “truth” is a naïve concept,

especially where the interpretation of poetry is concerned.

These

critics argue that “to impute a hidden core of meaning [is] to subscribe

to a metaphysics of presence, a retrograde desire for origins, a belief in

an ultimate or foundational reality”.

Richard Rorty addresses the split

between the two camps that Felski calls “Digging Down” and “Standing

Back”

by first emphasizing their similarity, arguing that “they both

start from the pragmatist refusal to think of truth as correspondance to

reality”,

before outlining the crucial difference:

The first kind of critic […] thinks that there really is a secret code and

that once it’s discovered we shall have gotten the text right. He believes

that criticism is discovery rather than creation. [The other kind of critic]

doesn’t care about the distinction between discovery and creation […]

58 For Roland Barthes, the critical search for “truth” is quite useless, as there is no

“truth”, nor even any operant factor in a text, except language itself:

Once the author is removed, the claim to “decipher” a text becomes quite useless. To give an

Author to a text is to impose a knife’s limit on the text, to provide it a final signification, to close

the writing. This design is well suited to criticism, which then wants to give itself the important

task of discovering the Author (or his hypostases: society, history, the psyche, liberty) beneath

the work: the Author found, the text is “explained”, the critic has conquered; so there is nothing

surprising that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, but also that

criticism (even if it be new) should on this day be shaken off at the same time as the Author.

L’Auteur une fois éloigné, la prétention de “déchiffrer” un texte devient tout à fait inutile.

Donner un Auteur à un texte, c’est imposer à ce texte un cran d’arrêt, c’est le pourvoir d’un

signifié dernier, c’est fermer l’écriture. Cette conception convient très bien à la critique, qui veut

alors se donner pour tâche importante de découvrir l’Auteur (ou ses hypostases: la société,

l’histoire, la psyché, la liberté) sous l’œuvre: l’Auteur trouvé, le texte est “expliqué”, le critique

a vaincu; il n’y a donc rien d’étonnant à ce que, historiquement, le règne de l’Auteur ait été aussi

celui du Critique, mais aussi à ce que la critique (fût-elle nouvelle) soit aujourd’hui ébranlée en

même temps que l’Auteur.

“La mort de l’auteur”. In Le Bruissement de la Langue. Essais Critiques IV. Paris: Seuil,

1984, 65–66.

59 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 69.

60 “The first pivots on a division between manifest and latent, overt and covert, what

is revealed and what is concealed. Reading is imagined as an act of digging down

to arrive at a repressed or otherwise obscured reality”, while the second works

by “distancing rather than by digging, by the corrosive force of ironic detachment

rather than intensive interpretation. The goal is now to ‘denaturalize’ the text,

to expose its social construction by expounding on the conditions in which it is

embedded” (ibid., 53, 54).

61 Richard Rorty. The Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1982), 151.

20 Love and its Critics

He is in it for what he can get out of it, not for the satisfaction of getting

something right.

Though Rorty might be accused of cynicism here, there is an identifiable

split between the kinds of critics who apply a hermeneutics of suspicion

in what might be called a “Freudian” sense—digging down through

the layers and strata of a culture or text as a psychoanalyst would dig

through the manifest content of a patient’s dreams in search of a deeper,

but hidden, content (or truth)—and those who apply a hermeneutics

of suspicion in what might be called a “Nietzschean” sense, stripping

away the pretenses and postures of a culture or text in order to

demonstrate that it is pretenses and postures all the way down (that

there is no truth but the provisional one we create, dismantle, modify,

destroy, etc.).

But as Felski points out, “[in] spite of the theoretical and

political disagreements between styles of criticism, there is a striking

resemblance at the level of ethos—one that is nicely captured by François

Cusset in his phrase ‘suspicion without limits’”.

Each kind of criticism

is in the business of near-perpetual unveiling. Where they differ is that

one school seeks to reveal what they believe lies behind the veils, while

the other school seeks to reveal the “fact” that there are only veils with

nothing behind them.

62 Ibid., 152.

63 Such a “Nietzschean” reading can be seen in J. Hillis Miller’s deconstructive reading

of Percy Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life”, in which Miller claims that Shelley’s

poem, “like all texts, is ‘unreadable’, if by ‘readable’ one means open to a single,

definitive, univocal interpretation” (J. Hillis Miller. “The Critic as Host”. Critical

Inquiry, 3: 3 [Spring, 1977], 447).

64 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 20.

65 New Historicism falls into the first camp. It is perpetually in a state of high alert

for the operations of power, and constantly on the lookout for “complicity with

structures of power in whose language [knowledge] would have no choice but

to speak” (Vincent P. Pecora. “The Limits of Local Knowledge”. In Harold Aram

Veeser, ed. The New Historicism [New York: Routledge, 1989], 267). As Foucault—

in many ways, the “godfather” of New Historicism—puts it: “there is no power

relationship without a correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any field

of knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute power relations at the same

time” (“qu’il n’y a pas de relation de pouvoir sans constitution corrélative d’un

champ de savoir, ni de savoir qui ne suppose et ne constitue en même temps des

relations de pouvoir”) (Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison [Paris: Gallimard,

1975], 32). The New Historicist critic looks to unveil or reveal the operations (and

cooperations) of power and knowledge, all the while risking being complicit

with the very structures of power he or she seeks to unmask, since “every act of

unmasking, critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

Such skeptical criticism, whose two branches are more alike than

different, “thinks of itself as battling orthodoxy yet it is now the reigning

orthodoxy, no longer oppositional but obligatory”.

This “obligatory”

stance is frequently taken up in service of what its practitioners

claim is an adversarial agenda, a way of reading texts that resists the

ideologies and practices of power by revealing or unveiling them. It

is in such criticism that we encounter terms like interrogation, with all

of its none-too-subliminal suggestions of violence; a fire-against-fire

use of violent analysis to uncover or reveal (or fabricate) a “violence”

inherent in the text. As Kate McGowan puts it, “[t]he value of unrelenting

interrogation is the value of resistance”.

But it is often “far from evident”

how interrogations of poems, plays, and novels “published in […]

undersubscribed academic journal[s]”

serve as effective resistance to

anything except poetry itself. Such criticism and its “close ties to modes

of professionalization and scholarly gatekeeping make it hard to sustain

the claim that there is something intrinsically radical or resistant”

prey to the practice it exposes” (Harold Aram Veeser. “Introduction”. In his, ed. The

New Historicism, xi). Deconstruction belongs to the second camp. For Paul de Man,

literature obsessively points to “a nothingness”, while “[p]oetic language names

this void […] and never tires of naming it again”. For de Man, “[t]his persistant

naming is what we call literature” (Blindness and Insight, Essays in the Rhetoric of

Contemporary Criticism [New York: Oxford University Press, 1971], 18). For J.

Hillis Miller, an author’s works “are at once open to interpretation and ultimately

indecipherable, unreadable. His texts lead the critic deeper and deeper into a

labyrinth until he confronts a final aporia”. The critic burrows further and further

beneath the veil of surface appearances only to find unresolvability, an impasse,

which leads us to understand that “personification” in literature “will always

be divided against itself, folded, manifold, dialogical rather than monological”.

The final assertion (or unveiling) of the essay is that literature is best understood

through “multiple contradictory readings in a perpetual fleeing away from any

fixed sense” (J. Hillis Miller. “Walter Pater: A Partial Portrait”. Daedalus, 105: 1, In

Praise of Books [Winter, 1976], 112).

66 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 148. Bruce Fleming expresses a similar idea: “[t]he

people in charge of contemporary classrooms see themselves as overthrowing

prejudices, fiercely challenging the status quo. In fact, for the purposes of literary

studies, they are the status quo” (27).

67 Kate McGowan. Key Issues in Critical and Cultural Theory (Buckingham: Open

University Press, 2007), 26. Emphasis added.

68 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 143.

69 Ibid., 138.

22 Love and its Critics

about either its style or its substance.

Suspicion becomes its own point,

perpetuating itself for itself, operating as a tribal shibboleth

that allows

members of an in-group to recognize one another. In Eve Sedgwick’s

view, readings that stem from this method battle with and obscure

poetry, “blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of

understanding or things to understand”.

As these alternative ways of

understanding are blotted out, poetry, and its readers, can be reshaped

into a desired ideological form. This reshaping presents itself in a

number of ways, but two lines of argument have long been dominant:

first, the idea that poetry, and language more generally, refers only to

itself; and second, the idea that the author is “dead” and irrelevant—

perhaps even an impediment—to the understanding of poetry.

70 In Noam Chomsky’s view, such interrogations are impediments to meaningful resistance:

In the United States, for example, it’s mostly confined to Comparative Literature departments.

If they talk to each other in incomprehensible rhetoric, nobody cares. The place where it’s been

really harmful is in the Third World, because Third World intellectuals are badly needed in the

popular movements. They can make contributions, and a lot of them are just drawn away from

this—anthropologists, sociologists, and others—they’re drawn away into these arcane, and in

my view mostly meaningless discourses, and are dissociated from popular struggles.

“Noam Chomsky on French Intellectual Culture & Post-Modernism [3/8]”. Interview

conducted at Leiden University (March 2011. Posted March 15, 2012), https://www.

youtube.com/v/2cqTE_bPh7M&feature=youtu.be&start=409& end=451 [6:49–7:31].

71 This term, from Judges 12:5–6, comes out of a context of war and violence, in which

one tribe needed a quick and easy way of identifying infiltrators from the enemy side:





                                                             

                                 



              

        

And the Gileadites captured the passages of the Jordan to Ephraim, and it happened that when

the fugitive Ephraimites said “let me cross over”, the men of Gilead said to them “are you an

Ephraimite?” And if he said, “no”, then they said, “say Shibboleth”, and if he said “Sibboleth”,

because he could not pronounce it right, then they took him and slew him at the passages of the

Jordan, and there fell at that time forty two thousand Ephraimites.

Unless otherwise noted, all Hebrew Biblical text is quoted from Biblia Hebraica

Stuttgartensia, ed. by Karl Elliger and Willhelm Rudolph (Stuttgart: Deutsche

Bibelgesellschaft, 1983). All Greek Biblical text is quoted from The Greek New

Testament, ed. by Barbara Aland (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2014).

72 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham

and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 131.

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

The Critics: Poetry Is About Poetry

This notion can be traced to Maurice Blanchot, a right-wing journalist

who became a left-wing philosopher and literary critic after the Second

World War. Blanchot argues—in a sideswipe at Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1948

work What is Literature?—that “it has been found, surprisingly, that the

question ‘What is literature?’ has never received anything other than

insignificant answers”.

Sartre argues that the poet writes to escape the

world, while the prose writer engages with it, “for one, art is a flight;

for the other, a means of conquest”.

The politically-committed prose

writer works for the cause of liberty: “the writer, a free man addressing

other free men, has only one subject: liberty”,

and such work only has

meaning in a free society: “the art of prose is tied to the only regime in

which prose holds any meaning: democracy”.

While Sartre’s ideas are certainly contestable, Blanchot goes to the

opposite extreme: what writers seek to accomplish is irrelevant, since

the meaning of literature, its essence, its “one subject” is nothing more

than language itself. For Blanchot, the question of literature only finds

meaningful answers when it is “addressed to language, behind the

man who writes and reads, to the language that becomes literature”.

Literature says nothing except to affirm its own existence: “the work

of art, the literary work—is neither completed nor unfinished: it is.

What it says is only this: it is—and nothing more. Apart from that, it is

nothing. Whoever wants it to express more, will find nothing, find that it

expresses nothing”.

This articulates a view of writing in which words

73 “On a constaté avec surprise que la question: ‘Qu’est-ce que la littérature?’ n’avait

jamais reçu que des réponses insignifiantes” (Maurice Blanchot. “La Littérature et

le droit à la mort”. La Part de Feu [Paris: Gallimard, 1949], 294).

74 “pour celui-ci, l’art est une fuite; pour celui-la, un moyen de conquérir” (Jean-Paul

Sartre. Qu’est-ce que la littérature? [Paris: Gallimard, 1948], 45).

75 “l’écrivain, homme libre s’adressant à des hommes libres, n’a qu’un seul sujet: la

liberté” (ibid., 70).

76 [l]’art de la prose est solidaire du seul régime où la prose garde un sens: la

démocratie” (ibid., 82).

77 “adressée au langage, derrière l’homme qui écrit et lit, par le langage devenu

littérature” (Blanchot. “La Littérature et le droit à la mort”, 293).

78 “l’œuvre d’art, l’œuvre littéraire—n’est nini achevé ni inachevée: elle est. Ce qu’elle

dit, c’est exclusivement cela: qu’elle est—et rien de plus. En dehors de cela, elle

n’est rien. Qui veut lui faire exprimer davantage, ne trouve rien, trouve qu’elle

24 Love and its Critics

do not and cannot represent any world in which writers and readers

live: for Blanchot, the “writer must commit to […] words rather than

the things that words represent. This is nothing less than the writer’s

abandonment of representation’s claim to be able truly to conjure things

before the reader”.

This basic idea informs a great deal of modern criticism, much of it

based in French thought of the latter half of the twentieth century. For

example, Jacques Derrida argues that one cannot understand a text by

referring to something outside it:

Yet if reading must not simply redouble the text, it cannot legitimately

transgress the text toward something other than itself, to a referent

(metaphysical reality, historical, psycho-biographical, etc.) or to a

signified outside text whose content could take place, could have taken

place outside language, that is to say, in the sense that we give here to

that word, outside of writing in general. This is why the methodological

considerations that we risk here on an example are closely dependent on

general propositions that we have elaborated above, as to the absence of

the referent or the transcendental signified. There is no outside-text.

Similarly, Jacques Lacan argues that language is a closed system, in

which our signifiers cannot ever point to a “thing” that is somehow

outside the system:

Therefore, let me specify what language means in that which it

communicates; it is neither signal, nor sign, nor even a sign of the thing

as an external reality. The relationship between signifier and signified

is entirely enclosed in the order of language itself, which completely

determines the two terms.

n’exprime rien” (Maurice Blanchot. “La Solitude Essentielle”. L’Espace Littéraire

[Paris: Gallimard, 1955], 12).

79 Eric Richtmeyer. “Maurice Blanchot: Saboteur of the Writers’ War”. Proceedings of

the Western Society for French History, 35 (2007), 255.

80 Et pourtant, si la lecture ne doit pas se contenter de redouble le texte, elle ne peut légitimement

transgresser le texte vers autre chose que lui, vers un référent (réalité métaphysique, historique,

psycho-biographique, etc.) ou vers un signifié hors texte dont le contenu pourrait avoir lieu,

aurait pu avoir lieu hors de la langue, c’est-à-dire, au sens que nous donnons ici à ce mot, hors de

l’écriture en général. C’est pourquoi les considérations méthodologiques que nous risquons ici sur

un exemple sont étroitement dépendantes des propositions générales que nous avons élaborées

plus haut, quant à l’absence du référent ou du signifié transcendantal. ll n’y a pas de hors-texte.

Jacques Derrida. De la Grammatologie [Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967], 227.

81 “Précisons donc ce que le langage signifie en ce qu’il communique: il n’est ni signal,

ni signe, ni même signe de la chose, en tant que réalité extérieure. La relation entre

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

These ideas can be traced back further to the ideas of the Swiss linguist

Ferdinand de Saussure, whose work (first published in 1916) analyzes

language as a system of signs, which “unite not a thing and a name,

but a concept and a sound-image”

or what he will later refer to as a

signified and a signifier, using ideas that date back to Sextus Empiricus

(c. 160–210 CE) who claimed of the Stoics “three things, they say, are

yoked with one another, the signified, the signifier, and the thing that

happens to exist”.

Saussure, unlike the Stoics, attempts to define

linguistic signs purely internally, with as little reference as possible to

any “thing that happens to exist”. Such signs are not to be read in terms

of any positive content or reference, but in terms of their difference from

other signs in the overall system:

When we say they correspond to concepts, we imply that these are

purely differential, defined not by their positive content but negatively

by their relations with other terms of the system.

In fact, for Saussure, language is entirely composed of differential

relationships, a series of differences without any positive terms:

[I]n language there are only differences. Even more: a difference generally

supposes positive terms between which it is established; but in language

there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the

signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that pre-

exist the language system, but only conceptual differences and phonic

differences issuing from the system.

signifiant et signifié est tout entière incluse dans l’ordre du langage lui-même qui

en conditionne intégralement les deux termes” (“Discours de Jacques Lacan”. La

Psychanalyse, 1 [1956], 243).

82 “unit non une chose et un nom, mais un concept et une image acoustique”

(Ferdinand de Saussure. Cours de Linguistique Générale, ed. by Tullio de Mauro

[Paris: Payot & Rivages, 1967], 98).

83 “τρίαφάμενοισυζυγεῖνἀλλήλοις,τότεσημαινόμενονκαὶτὸσημαῖνονκαὶτὸ

τυγχάνον”(SextusEmpiricus. Against Logicians, 2.11, ed. by R. G. Bury [Cambridge,

MA: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1935], 244).

84 “Quand on dit qu’elles correspondent à des concepts, on sous-entend que ceux-ci

sont purement différentiels, définis non pas positivement par leur contenu, mais

négativement par leurs rapports avec les autres termes du système” (Saussure, 162).

85 dans la langue il n’y a que des différences. Bien plus: une différence suppose en général des

termes positifs entre lesquels elle s’établit; mais dans la langue il n’y a que des différences

sans termes positifs. Qu’on prenne le signifié ou le signifiant, la langue ne comporte ni des

idées ni des sons qui préexisteraient au système linguistique, mais seulement des différences

conceptuelles et des différences phoniques issues de ce système.

26 Love and its Critics

Saussure’s analysis treats language as a sealed system, internally-

focused and without reference.

In Saussure’s view, the basic unit of

language, le signe linguistique, is arbitrary. It has no necessary link with

the world of objects and actions outside of language, and is simply an

association of sounds and concepts:

The unifying link between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, or

again, as we intend by signs the whole that results from the association

of a signifier with a signified, we can say it more simply: the linguistic

sign is arbitrary.

Blanchot views literature in much the same way Derrida, Lacan, and

Saussure view language, and this view of the self-referentiality of

both language and literature has been enormously important for later

critics. “Blanchot […] made possible all discourse on literature” in

Foucault’s view, reducing it to “an empty space that runs as a grand

movement through all literary languages”.

In so doing, Blanchot owes

a significant debt to Hegel, who in his Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik

argues that poetry, properly speaking, is disconnected from materiality

or any concrete reference to the material world: “Poetry is the universal

art of self-liberated spirit, not bound to external sensuous material

for its realization, but moving only in the inner space and inner time

of ideas and feelings”.

However, Blanchot adds a twist to Hegel’s

Ibid., 166.

86 It should be noted here that these observations apply to Sassure’s discussion of

what he calls langue, the system of language (or the abstract rules of a signifying

system), as opposed to parole, the actions of speech and understanding though

which that language is used by human beings. A great deal of so-called Saussurian

and post-Saussurian theory seems to operate as if the latter did not exist.

87 “Le lien unisssant le signifiant au signifié est arbitraire, ou encore, puisque nous

entendons par signe le total résultant de l’association d’un signifiant à un signifié,

nous pouvons dire plus simplement: le signe linguistique est arbitraire” (ibid., 100).

88 “Blanchot […] rendu possible tout discours sur la littérature” […] “un creux

qui parcourt comme un grand mouvement tous les langages littéraires” (Michel

Foucault. “Sur les façons d’écrire l’Histoire” [interview with Raymond Bellour]. Les

Lettres françaises, 1187 (15–21 June 1967), 6–9. Reprinted in his Dits et écrits, Vol. 1:

1954–1975, 593).

89 “Die Dichtkunst ist die allgemeine Kunst des in sich freigewordenen, nicht an

das äußerlich-sinnliche Material zur Realisation gebundenen Geistes, der nur im

inneren Raume und der inneren Zeit der Vorstellungen und Empfindungen sich

ergeht” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik, Vol. 1

[Berlin: Dunder und Humblot, 1835], 115, https://books.google.com/books?id=Fss

9AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA115).

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

disconnection of poetry and materiality by working with an idea of

language as an arbitrary yoking of words and ideas, pursuing an

argument that ultimately derives from Plato in the dialogue Cratylus.

In that work, Hermogenes disputes Cratylus’s notion that words are

derived directly from nature, by insisting that “on the contrary, for

their origins, each name is produced, not by nature, but by the customs,

habits, and character of those who are both accustomed to use it and

called it forth”.

From Hegel’s declaration that poetry is “not bound to external

sensuous material”, to Blanchot’s idea that the question of poetry is

properly “addressed to language” and “expresses nothing” is but a

short step, and thus we find ourselves facing contemporary critics who

advance the argument to insist that poetry is always and only about

itself.

However, the linguistic ideas that underlie much of this (post-

Hegel) have been seriously questioned by recent research:

a careful statistical examination of words from nearly two-thirds of the

world’s languages reveals that unrelated languages very often use (or

avoid) the same sounds for specific referents. For instance, words for

tongue tend to have l or u, “round” often appears with r, and “small” with

i. These striking similarities call for a reexamination of the fundamental

assumption of the arbitrariness of the sign.

90 “οὐγὰρφύσειἑκάστῳπεφυκέναιὄνομαοὐδὲνοὐδενί,ἀλλὰνόμῳκαὶἔθειτῶν

ἐθισάντωντεκαὶκαλούντων”(Plato. Cratylus. Parmenides. Greater Hippias. Lesser

Hippias, ed. by Harold North Fowler [Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library,

Harvard University Press, 1926], 10).

91 In a discussion of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ideas about “propositional” versus

“eminent” or “absolute” texts, Rod Coltman puts the case in the starkest possible

terms: “Because it does not refer to anything outside of itself, there is nothing

beyond the poem that is more important than the poem itself. The text of the poem

remains, in other words, because the poem is not about anything, or rather, it is only

about itself” (Rod Coltman. “Hermeneutics: Literature and Being”. The Blackwell

Companion to Hermeneutics, ed. by Niall Keane and Chris Lawn [Chichester: John

Wiley & Sons, 2016], 550–51). Richard Klein makes a similar point, asserting that

the “fragility of literature, its susceptibility to being lost, is linked to its having no

real referent” (“The Future of Literary Criticism”. PMLA, 125: 4 [October 2010], 920,

https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.4.920).

92 Damián E. Blasia, Søren Wichmannd, Harald Hammarströmb, Peter F. Stadlerc,

and Morten H. Christiansen. “Sound–meaning Association Biases Evidenced across

Thousands of Languages”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113: 39 (27

September 2016, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1605782113).

28 Love and its Critics

These new findings threaten to unsettle the entire line of thought

based on a long-held assumption, including the oft-repeated claims

that language refers only to itself and that poetry refers only to poetry.

Perhaps, at long last, such claims can be reconsidered.

93 The irony of such claims is that a number of later thinkers who engage with

Saussure rewrite him, covertly reversing his relation between the signifier and the

signified. Saussure gives precedence to the concept over the sound-image: “One

cannot reduce language to sound, […] it is merely the instrument of thought,

and does not exist for itself” (“On ne peut donc réduire la langue au son, […] il

n’est que l’instrument de la pensée et n’existe pas pour lui-même”) (24). Jacques

Lacan reverses Saussure’s relation, representing it as S/s, with “S” referring to the

signifier (Saussure’s “sound-image”) and “s” referring to the signified (Saussure’s

“concept”). But rather than acknowledge his wholesale reversal of the relation

of the terms, Lacan ascribes his own formula to Saussure: “the sign thus written,

deserves to be attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure” (“Le signe écrit ainsi, mérite

d’être attribué a Ferdinand de Saussure”) (Écrits [Paris: Seuil, 1966], 497). For

Lacan, the signifier, in its most pristine state, is not what Saussure described as

the instrument of thought; in fact, it signifies nothing at all: “all real signifiers, in

themselves, are signifiers that signify nothing. […] The more a signifier signifies

nothing, the more indestructible it is” (“tout vrai signifiant en tant que tel est un

signifiant qui ne signifie rien. […] car c’est précisément dans la mesure où, plus il

ne signifie rien, plus il est indestructible”) (Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre III:

Les Psychoses: 1955–1956, ed. by Jacques Alain Miller [Paris: Seuil, 1981], 210). This

conception of language had been rejected a decade before by the Danish linguist

Louis Hjelmslev, for whom there can be no signifier without a signified because

“expressional meaning” (“udtryksmening”) is always connected to “expressional

form as expressional substance” (“udtryksform som udtrykssubstans”), due to “the

unity of content-form and expression-form established by the solidarity of what we

have called the sign-function” (“den enhed af indholdsform og udtryksform der

etableres af den solidaritet som vi har kaldt tegnfunktionen”) (Omkring Sprogteoriens

Grundlæggelse [Copenhagen: Bianco Lunos Bogtrykkeri, 1943], 51, 53).

Even before Lacan’s sleight-of-hand rearrangment, Claude Lévi-Strauss had

inverted Saussure’s relation between the signifier and the signified: “symbols are

more real than that which they symbolize; the signifier precedes and determines

the signified” (“les symboles sont plus réels que ce qu’ils symbolisent, le signifiant

précède et détermine le signifié”) (“Introduction à l’œuvre de Marcel Mauss”. In

Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,

1950], xxxii). This latter view makes it possible to “read” language as wholly

determinative of thought, which when combined with Barthes’ and Foucault’s

differing formulations of the “death of the Author”, renders literature—already

denied any externally-referential ability—a mere function of language itself.

Barthes traces this idea back to the French poet Stephan Mallarmé, claiming that

“for Mallarmé, as for us, it is language that speaks, not the author; to write, is

through a prior impersonality […] to reach that point where only language acts,

‘performs’, and not ‘me’” (“pour [Mallarmé], comme pour nous, c’est le langage qui

parle, ce n’est pas l’auteur; écrire, c’est, à travers une impersonnalité préalable […]

atteindre ce point où seul le langage agit, ‘performe’ et non ‘moi’”) (Barthes, “La

mort de l’auteur”, 62). In summary, much literary theory and criticism over the last

century is based on a questionable linguistic paradigm, the terms of which were

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

The Critics: The Author Is Dead (or Merely Irrelevant)

This idea is one we will encounter, among other places, in critical work

on John Donne, a poet whose life and poetry might otherwise seem

inseparable, so closely do the emotional themes of the poetry match

the known struggles of the poet. The idea that emotions, thoughts,

and experiences of the poet are immaterial to an understanding of the

poem is one that has been with us since the advent of the so-called

New Criticism. Wimsatt and Beardsley have argued that the author’s

intentions are both undiscoverable and irrelevant:

[a] poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from

the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend

about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied

in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the

human being, an object of public knowledge.

From the idea that a poem is “embodied in language” and “detached

from the author”, it is but a short step to criticism that insists a poem

is solely about language, and communicates no other meaning of any

kind. At the time Wimsatt and Beardsley were writing this article, this

argument was already being made across the Atlantic.

The irony of the authors’ closing statement—“Critical inquiries are

not settled by consulting the oracle”

—is that too much criticism of

the last several decades has been written by those who have bypassed

consulting the oracle by becoming the oracle. This idea can be seen in

more highly developed form in the notion promulgated by Roland

Barthes and Michel Foucault in the 1960s that the author does not exist

for readers in any traditional sense—what exists or is perceived to exist

is an author function. For Barthes, “we know that in order to give writing

its future, the myth must be reversed: the birth of the reader must be

inverted by its most prominent adherents to allow them to make claims for which

there was otherwise no support.

94 W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and M. C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy”. The Sewanee

Review, 54: 3 (July–September 1946), 470.

95 Ibid., 487.

30 Love and its Critics

paid for by the death of the author”.

In Foucault’s view, writing refers

primarily to two things—language, and the death of the author:

We can say first that today’s writing has freed itself of the theme of

expression: it refers only to itself, and yet it is not caught in the form

of interiority; it identifies with its own unfolded externality. […]

Writing unfolds like a game […] where the writing subject constantly

disappears. […] The writing subject destroys all the signs of his particular

individuality; the writer’s hallmark is nothing more than the singularity

of his absence; he must take the role of death in the game of writing. All

of this is well known; and in its own good time, criticism and philosophy

has taken note of this disappearance or this death of the author.

In turn, the entire concept owes a debt to the nineteenth-century French

poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who in “Crise de Vers” argued for a pure form

of poetry from which the author would be eliminated:

The pure work implies the disappearance of the speaker of poetry,

who yields the initiative to words, mobilized by the clash of their own

inequality; they illuminate each other’s reflections, passing like a virtual

trail of fire on precious stones, replacing the breathing perceptible in the

old lyrical verse or the enthusiastic personality that directed the phrase.

The structure of a book of verse must be everywhere its own, innate,

eliminating chance; still, the author must be omitted.

96 “nous savons que, pour rendre à l’écriture son avenir, il faut en renverser le mythe:

la naissance du lecteur doit se payer de la mort de l’Auteur” (Roland Barthes. “La

mort de l’auteur”. In Le Bruissement de la Langue. Essais Critiques IV [Paris: Seuil,

1984], 67).

97 On peut dire d’abord que l’écriture d’aujourd’hui s’est affranchie du thème de l’expression:

elle n’est référée qu’à elle-même, et pourtant, elle n’est pas prise dans la forme de l’intériorité;

elle s’identifie à sa propre extériorité déployée. […] l’écriture se déploie comme un jeu […] où

le sujet écrivant ne cesse de disparaître. […] le sujet écrivant déroute tous les signes de son

individualité particulière; la marque de l’écrivain n’est plus que la singularité de son absence;

il lui faut tenir le rôle du mort dans le jeu de l’écriture. Tout cela est connu; et il y a beau temps

que la critique et la philosophie ont pris acte de cette disparition ou de cette mort de l’auteur.

Michel Foucault. “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” In his Dits et écrits. Vol. 1, 792–93.

98 L’œuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poëte, qui cède l’initiative aux mots, par

le heurt de leur inégalité mobilisés; ils s’allument de reflets réciproques comme une virtuelle

traînée de feux sur des pierreries, remplaçant la respiration perceptible en l’ancien souffle

lyrique ou la direction personnelle enthousiaste de la phrase. Une ordonnance du livre de vers

poind innée ou partout, élimine le hasard; encore la faut-il, pour omettre l’auteur.

Stéphane Mallarmé. “Crise de Vers”. In Divagations (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier,

1897), 246–47, https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Divagations/Texte_entier

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

This decades-long trend has marked a struggle in which critics have

kidnapped poetry, subordinated it to their own imperatives, and reduced

literature to the status of just one more cultural “text”, or object of analysis,

upon which to demonstrate their acumen. For Paul de Man, such criticism

has a quasi-theological function akin to unmasking idolatry:

Criticism […] functions more and more as a demystification of the belief

that literature is a privileged language. The dominant strategy consists

of showing that certain claims to authenticity attributed to literature

are in fact expressions of a desire that, like all desires, falls prey to the

duplicities of expression. The so-called “idealism” of literature is then

shown to be an idolatry, a fascination with a false image that mimics

the presumed attributes of authenticity when it is in fact just the hollow

mask with which a frustrated, defined consciousness tries to cover up its

own negativity.

Geoffrey Hartman speaks of this as a criticism that “liberates […] critical

activity from its positive or reviewing function, from its subordination

to the thing commented on”.

100

Hartman argues for infinite freedom

for the critic, since “there is no absolute knowledge but rather a textual

infinite, an interminable web of texts or interpretations”, which needn’t

be subordinate to something called “literature” because, as Hartman

puts it, “literary commentary is literature”.

101

With each new “reading” of a poem, or play, or novel, etc., the critics

displace the original authors, making themselves supreme as both

author and interpreter. But not quite all readers have given their assent to

this state of affairs. With the poet John Donne, for example, what upsets

a critic like Deborah Larson is that too many readers refuse to align

themselves with this view, resulting in “the continuing interpretations

of Donne’s poetry through his life and of his life through his poetry”.

102

Larson argues that such meetings of literature and life are wholly

inappropriate, insisting that “Donne’s poems should be recognized as a

group of mainly unrelated monologues, spoken by several varying and

99 Paul de Man. Blindness and Insight, 12.

100 Geoffrey Hartman. Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 191.

101 Ibid., 202.

102 Deborah Larson, John Donne and Twentieth-Century Criticism (London: Associated

University Presses, 1989), 15.

32 Love and its Critics

contradictory personae playing a number of roles”.

103

Note the language

of compulsion, even duty—the poems should be read as unrelated, not

only to the life of the poet, but to each other. The problem, however, is

that too many readers are breaking the rules: otherwise we “would not

have been arguing for the last hundred years over Donne’s rakish youth

and his conversion to ‘sincere’ love, nor would any one of his poses

become the dominant one, as has often happened”.

104

This, in a nutshell, is what a great deal of literary criticism has become

over the last several decades—an explicit argument that art should be

held at a wide remove from life, that art has little or nothing to do with

the artist except as a locus of linguistic, socio-historical, economic, and

political forces, and that art reflects nothing more than a set of sterile

techniques and conventions. This attitude of superiority of the critic to

the poet, with its distancing of life from poetry, is aptly expressed by the

poet-critic T. S. Eliot: “If Donne in youth was a rake, then I suspect he

was a conventional rake; if Donne in age was devout, then I suspect he

was conventionally devout”.

105

The obvious gesture here is reduction—

Donne’s lived experience is described as “conventional”, and therefore

of small importance, scant account, and slight claim on the attention of

the critic who tells readers move along, nothing to see here. But, as Larson

complains, “[b]iographical interpretation […] is difficult to escape from,

even with a conscious effort”.

106

Why should it be escaped from? Why

may it not be one tool among many? Because to the extent that the poet is

allowed to exist, the free reign of the critic is threatened.

107

The authoritarian relationship between critic and poet goes back to

the very beginnings of what we define as the Western tradition:

Philosophy has long had a need to keep poetry in its place—as Plato,

alluding to the “ancient quarrel” between the two, was among the first

to tell us (Rep. 10.607b). But what is striking in Plato’s attitude is that

103 Ibid., 14.

104 Ibid.

105 T. S. Eliot. “Donne in Our Time”. A Garland for John Donne, 1631–1931, ed. by

Theodore Spencer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), 10.

106 Larson, 71.

107 Many critics would sign on to half of Barthes’ death-of-the-author formula, while

ignoring the part that threatens their own profession: “criticism […] should on

this day be shaken off at the same time as the Author” (66) (“la critique […] soit

aujourd’hui ébranlée en même temps que l’Auteur”).

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

[…] he regards poetry at all times and in all its uses with suspicion, as a

substance inherently volatile.

108

Such hostile criticism reduces poetry to mere “convention”, or it views

poetry as a secret code which plays “hide and seek” with its readers,

as critics argue that the “real” meaning of the poetry is either wildly

different from the apparent meaning, or is so lost in textual, contextual,

and linguistic tangles as to be wholly undiscoverable.

This book argues for readings of love poetry that oppose such

hostility, that challenge the free reign of the critics, and resist criticism’s

unrelenting interrogation of poetry. Along the way we will frequently

encounter critics for whom love in poetry must be defined reductively

as a “convention” or a “literary commonplace”, or in one especially

egregious case, as “a citation” of the perceived experiences of others.

We will encounter eminent scholars who describe individual poets

as “sick”, and others who would—if only they could—literally rather

than interpretively rewrite the poems and other texts upon which they

expound.

109

This authoritarian approach to literary criticism is perhaps

an understandable side-effect of what Noam Chomsky calls “the self-

selection for obedience that is […] part of elite education”.

110

It reflects

the goals that Fichte, the German Idealist philosopher, outlines for the

new education (der neuen Erziehung):

If you would have power over a man, you have to do more than merely

address him; you must shape him, and shape him so that he cannot want

otherwise than you would have him want.

111

108 G. R. F. Ferrari. “Plato and Poetry”. In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol.

1: Classical Criticism, ed. by George Alexander Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1989), 92. Emphasis added.

109 The most famous example of this is Paul de Man, who in his work Allegories of

Reading (1979), rewrote (by the simple insertion of ne) a passage from Rousseau’s

Confessions. As first pointed out by Ortwin de Graef, de Man “adds a negation to

Rousseau’s sentence, as if this did not make a difference, as if one was entitled to

do so on the basis of the main clause” (“Silence to be Observed: A Trial for Paul de

Man’s Inexcusable Confessions”. In (Dis)continuities: Essays on Paul de Man, ed. by

Luc Herman, Kris Humbeeck, and Geert Lernout [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989], 61).

110 Noam Chomsky. Online discussion that took place on LBBS, Z-Magazine’s Left

On-Line Bulletin Board. Posted at rec.arts.books, 13 November 1995, 03:21:23,

http://bactra.org/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html

111 “Willst du etwas über ihn vermögen, so mußt du mehr tun, als ihn blos anreden,

du mußt ihn machen, ihn also machen, das er gar nicht anders wollen könne, als du

willst, das er wolle” (Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Fichtes Reden an

34 Love and its Critics

Such critics often seem unable or unwilling to see poetry as anything

other than a self-referential system of conventions, tropes, and signs,

disconnected from life, irrelevant except for the urgent need felt by the

critics to make sure that readers are trained to see as they see, and read

as they read. Obedience, once selected, becomes the lens through which

these critics read, and the method by which they would shape readers

in their own image, so that they cannot want otherwise, a process we

can see at work in the long history of the relation between literature and

criticism, beginning with the allegorical readings of the Song of Songs.

A consideration of the Song of Songs and its interpretive history

reveals that criticism claiming to expose the hidden has a very long

history, shaping the way we have been taught to read and understand

poetry and other literary forms for over two thousand years. The earliest

examples are not rooted merely in suspicion, but in the openly-expressed

desire to exercise authority over the hearts and minds of others, and

many modern examples of suspicion-based criticism retain more than a

trace of that original impulse. But if we can learn to hear their voices once

again, the poems considered here have more than enough power to fight

back against such entrenched ways of reading—not merely through the

brilliance of their surfaces,

112

but through the passionate depths of their

engagements with the love that was once called fin’amor. Such love—

often forbidden by those who would be obeyed—is presented by the

poets as a temptation, a seduction, a siren’s call to the too-easily missed

die Deutsche Nation, ed. by Samantha Nietz [Hamburg: Severus, 2013], 32). Fichte’s

idea is reflected in Spivak’s fairly recent description of Humanities education as

an “uncoercive rearrangement of desires” (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “Righting

Wrongs”. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 103: 2/3 [Spring/Summer 2004], 526).

The “uncoercive” nature of such “rearrangement” is perhaps best attested by

the experience of one of the current authors who had the occasion to observe a

discussion of this idea among a group of Ph.D. students. One student noted the

possibility that such “uncoercive rearrangement” might be a subtle means of

stifling minority opinion. Every other student in the group condemned that idea, and

the discussion was quickly dropped.

112 Though Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus claim that “[i]n the last decade or so, we

have been drawn to modes of reading that attend to the surfaces of texts rather than

plumb their depths” (“Surface Reading: An Introduction”. Representations, 108: 1

[Fall 2009], 1–2), the trends of the last decade and a half seem ephemeral when

compared to a style of reading and interpretation that has held sway for over two

millennia.

1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

experience of being truly and fully alive. As Goethe’s Mephistopheles

slyly observes: “Gray, dear Friend, is all theory, / And green is life’s

golden tree”,

113

and in such beautifully mortal seductions lies the heart

of love’s response to its critics.

113 “Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, / Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum”

(Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe. Faust, Part I, ed. by Walter Kaufmann [New York:

Anchor Books, 1990], 206, ll. 2038–39).

2. Channeled, Reformulated,

and Controlled: Love Poetry from the

Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

Love Poetry and the Critics who Allegorize:

The Song of Songs

Susan Sontag, in her now-classic essay “Against Interpretation”, protests

against a form of criticism which reshapes texts like the Song of Songs

into new and ideologically compliant forms:

Interpretation […] presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning

of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that

discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become

unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical

strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to

repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing

or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He

claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning.

However far the interpreters alter the text ([as in] the Rabbinic and

Christian “spiritual” interpretations of the clearly erotic Song of Songs),

they must claim to be reading off a sense that is already there.

1 Susan Sontag. Against Interpretation: And Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, 2013), 5–6. This kind of interpretation-through-alteration has reached

the point of altering (or suggesting alterations to) texts. Such critical rewriting by

38 Love and its Critics

One of the most powerfully erotic, celebratory, and secular love poems

in all the world’s literature, the Song of Songs ( , or Shir

ha-Shirim) has endured nearly two thousand years of interpretation that

attempts to tame it and explain it away. Traditionally dated to sometime

around 950 BCE, the Song has a complicated textual history.

Illumination for the opening verse of Song of Songs, the Rothschild Mahzor,

Manuscript on parchment. Florence, Italy, 1492.

Gerson Cohen suggests that “while the Song of Songs may contain very

ancient strata, the work as we have it now cannot have been completed

before the Macedonian conquest of the Near East and rise of the

Hellenistic culture”.

Likely written down between 400 and 100 BCE, it

those determined to save the reputations of poetry’s gods has been going on since

the days of Aristotle, who mentions a figure named Hippias of Thasos (unknown

to us) who sought to solve the “problem” of Zeus’ apparent dishonesty in Book

Two of the Iliad, by “following prosody, as in Hippias of Thasos” “we grant to

him that he achieve his prayer” (“κατὰ δὲ προσῳδίαν, ὥσπερ Ἱππίας ἔλυεν

ὁΘάσιος, τὸ “δίδομεν δέοἱεὖχοςἀρέσθαι”) (Poetics, 1461a, 22–23. In Aristotle:

Poetics. Longinus: On the Sublime. Demetrius: On Style, ed. by Stephen Halliwell [Loeb

Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995], 30). As Richard

Janko explains it, “[i]t was thought offensive that Zeus deceives Agamemmnon,

e.g. by Plato (Republic,II383A).Byalteringtheaccenton“grant”(from“δίδομεν”to

“διδόμεν”),HippiastriedtoshifttheblameforthedeceitawayfromZeus”(Aristotle.

Poetics. Trans. by Richard Janko [Indiannapolis: Hackett, 1987], 149, n. 61a21).

2 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Song_of_songs_Rothschild_mahzor.jpg

3 Gerson Cohen. “The Song of Songs and the Jewish Religious Mentality”. In Studies in

the Variety of Rabbinic Cultures (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 13.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

may be, as M. H. Segal argues, “a collection of love poetry of a varied

character” preserved by “oral transmission through the generations”,

collection written in a popular, rather than classical Hebrew, a Mishnaic

Hebrew more like Aramaic than the Hebrew of the prophets.

The Song

looks back to details of city life and attitudes about relations between

the sexes that reflect the Jerusalem of Solomon’s time, as well as the

Jerusalem of the Hellenistic period,

testifying to the power of love and

desire, even staging a sex scene between its male and female lovers. It

is wholly without disapproval and judgment, frank in its depiction of

passion, and absolutely uninterested in a world beyond love—not only

is God not discussed,

neither is the relationship of Israel to its religious

traditions or the surrounding nations. As Zhang Longxi describes it:

“[t]he language of the Song of Songs is the secular language of love. It

speaks of the desire and the joy of love, [but not] of law and covenant,

the fear and worship of God, or sin and forgiveness”.

For that very reason, on both the Judaic and Christian sides of the

controversy, this Hellenistic text that treats of Bronze-age lovers has

been made to wear the mantle of an allegory, cast as a poem describing

the relationship between God and Israel by Rabbinic interpreters, or

between God and the Christian Church by early Church Fathers. In

one of the great ironies of literary history, the Christian tradition of

de-eroticizing the Song is powerfully advanced by Origen

(c. 184–254

CE), a man who castrated himself to avoid the temptations of sexual

desire. As the early Church historian Eusebius tells it:

4 M. H. Segal. “The Song of Songs”. Vetus Testamentum, 12: 4 (October 1962), 477.

5 Ibid., 478.

6 Ibid., 481–82. The method and date of composition of the Song is a matter of ongoing

controversy, and estimates vary from the 10th century BCE to the end of the 2nd

century BCE. For a summation of the various positions, see Abraham Mariaselvam,

The Song of Songs and Ancient Tamil Love Poems: Poetry and Symbolism (Rome: Editrice

Pontificio Intituto Biblico, 1988), 43–44.

7 The only mention of the deity is embedded in the term           (shalhevetyah) in

8:6, which literally translated is “Yahweh-flame”, but serves poetically as a way of

intensifying the idea of flame—shalhevet—into the idea of a “colossal” or “roaring”

flame, like a lightning strike.

8 Zhang Longxi. “The Letter or the Spirit: The Song of Songs, Allegoresis, and the

Book of Poetry”. Comparative Literature, 39: 3 (Summer 1987), 194.

9 Origen composed a ten-book commentary on the Canticle of Canticles [the Song of Songs],

conscious of the work of the great Rabbi Akibah and with the explicit intent of showing how the

Song was of relevance to the Christian canon of the Bible. […] Origen continues the exegetical

tradition of Akibah, who approached the love song allegorically.

40 Love and its Critics

In the time that he was applying himself to the work of teaching in

Alexandria, Origen did a thing which gave surpassing proof of an

incomplete and immature mind, though it also served as a supreme

example of self-restraint. He gave the saying that “there are eunuchs

who make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven” too absolute

and violent an understanding, and thinking at once to fulfill the

Saviour’s utterance, as well as to shut down any suspicion and slander

by unbelievers due to the fact that he, a young man, did not discourse

about divine things only with men, but also with women, he rushed to

complete the Saviour’s words by his deeds.

Origen’s introduction to his commentary on the Song makes his attitude

toward the text clear. It is absolutely not to be read in its literal sense.

A reader who cannot or will not transcend the literal meaning of the

Song’s words should not read it at all:

One who does not know how to listen to the language of love with pure

and chaste ears will distort what he hears and turn from the inner man

to the outer man, and shall be converted from the spirit to the flesh;

nourishing concupiscence and carnality within himself, brought to carnal

lust by reason of the Scriptures. On this account, then, I warn and counsel

everyone who is not yet rid of the molestations of flesh and blood, nor has

John Anthony McGuckin. “The Scholarly Works of Origen”. The Westminster

Handbook to Origen, ed. by John Anthony McGuckin (Louisville: Westminster John

Knox Press, 2004), 31.

10 Ἐν τούτῳ δὲ τῆς κατηχήσεως ἐπὶ τῆς Ἀλεξανδρείας τοὔργον ἐπιτελοῦντι τῷ Ὠριγένει

πρᾶγμά τι πέπρακται φρενὸς μὲν ἀτελοῦς καὶ νεανικῆς, πίστεώς γε μὴν ὁμοῦ καὶ

σωφροσύνης μέγιστον δεῖγμα περιέχον. τὸ γὰρ “εἰσὶν εὐνοῦχοι οἵτινες εὐνούχισαν

ἑαυτοὺςδιὰτὴνβασιλείαντῶνοὐρανῶν”ἁπλούστερονκαὶνεανικώτερονἐκλαβών,ὁμοῦ

μὲνσωτήριονφωνὴνἀποπληροῦνοἰόμενος,ὁμοῦδὲκαὶδιὰτὸνέοντὴνἡλικίανὄνταμὴ

ἀνδράσιμόνον,καὶγυναιξὶδὲτὰθεῖαπροσομιλεῖν,ὡςἂνπᾶσαντὴνπαρὰτοῖςἀπίστοις

αἰσχρᾶςδιαβολῆςὑπόνοιανἀποκλείσειεν,τὴνσωτήριονφωνὴνἔργοιςἐπιτελέσαιὡρμήθη.

Eusebius. Ecclesiastical History, ed. by J. E. L. Oulton (Loeb Classical Library,

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 28.

11 Richard A. Layton differs, arguing that the literal sense is important, but only in

support of the allegorical: Origen “pairs [his] allegorical reading with a pioneering

literal interpretation of the Canticle. He interprets the lovers’ exchanges in the Song

as a drama that unfolds in dialogue among four characters: the bride, the groom

and their respective entourages. […] [T]he letter constitutes an indispensable and

persistent experience in Origen’s reading of the Song” (Richard A. Layton. “Hearing

Love’s Language: The Letter of the Text in Origen’s Commentary on the Song of

Songs”. In The Reception and Interpretation of the Bible in Late Antiquity: Proceedings of

the Montréal Colloquium in Honour of Charles Kannengiesser, 11–13 October 2006, ed. by

Lorenzo DiTommaso and Lucian Turcescu [Leiden: Brill, 2008], 288).

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

withdrawn from the inclinations of the physical, to regulate themselves

by entirely abstaining from the reading of this book.

Origen probably did not use a knife to be “rid of the molestations of flesh

and blood” merely in order that he might read the Song in peace. But he

is at great pains to explain every sensual detail of the poem in terms of

the relationship between Christ (the Bridegroom) and the Church (the

Bride). Origen’s comments on the famous opening of the Song illustrate

his method. First, the poetry:

                 

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for your lovemaking is

better than wine.

And now, Origen’s ingenious attempt to explain what those “kisses”

really mean:

For this reason I beg you, Father of my spouse, pouring out this prayer

that you will have pity for the sake of my love for him, so that not only

will the angels and the prophets speak to me through his ministers,

but that he will come, and “let him kiss me with the kisses of his

mouth” by his own self, that is, to pour his words into my mouth with

his breath, that I might hear him speak, and see him teach. For these

are the kisses of Christ, who offered them to the Church when at his

coming, he made himself present in the flesh, and spoke the words of

faith and love and peace.

12 Audire enim pure et castis auribus amoris nomina nesciens, ab interiore homine ad exteriorem

et carnalem virum omnem deflectet auditum, et a spiritu convertetur ad carnem nutrietque

in semet ipso concupiscentias carnales, et occasione divinae scripturae commoveri et incitari

videbitur ad libendem carnis. Ob hoc ergo moneo, et consilium do omni qui nondum carnis

et sanguinis molestiis caret, neque ab affectu materialis abscedit, ut a lectione libelli huius

eorumque quae in eum dicentur penitus temperet.

Origen. Origene: Commentaire sur le Cantique des Cantiques. Vol. 1. Texte de la Version

Latine de Rufin, ed. by Luc Bresard, Henri Crouzel, and Marcel Borret (Paris:

Éditions du Cerf, 1991), 84.

13 Song of Songs (Song of Solomon) 1:2.

14 Ariel and Chana Bloch point out that the Hebrew     (dodeyka) though often

translated as “your love”, should be more accurately rendered as “your lovemaking”

in order to capture the sense of physical, sexual love that is being referred to in this

verse, and in similar uses of the term in Prov. 7:18, Ezek. 16:8 and 23:17, as well

as elsewhere in the Song of Songs 1:4, 4:10, 5:1, and 7:13 (The Song of Songs: A New

Translation and Commentary [New York: Random House, 1995], 137).

15 Propter hoc ad te Patrem sponsi mei precem fundo et obsecro, ut tandem miseratus amorem

meum mittas eum, ut iam non mihi per ministros suos angelos dumtaxat et prophetas loquatur,

42 Love and its Critics

The lengths to which Origen goes here to explain away the “kisses”

of a lover are revealing. There was no need to wait for Ricoeur’s

hermeneutics of suspicion—the fundamentals of that tradition are here

in Origen’s work.

For Ann Astell, Origen’s entire method is a flight from the literal

toward the mystical, an attempt to leave behind the carnal in favor of a

union with the Spirit:

Origen’s method of exegesis […] moves away from the Canticum’s literal,

carnal meaning to its sensus interioris, [while] the bridal soul, renouncing

what is earthly, reaches out for the invisible and eternal […] An almost

violent departure from the body itself and from literal meaning energizes

the soul’s ascent.

Gerson Cohen suggests something similar about Rabbinical

interpretations of the Song, grounding his case in the marriage imagery

used to describe the human-divine relationship in the Hebrew scriptures.

Putting Israelite religion in the context of the religions of surrounding

cultures, Cohen argues “the Hebrew God alone was spoken of as the

lover and husband of his people, and only the house of Israel spoke of

itself as the bride of the Almighty”.

Perhaps the most famous example

of this marital motif, however, is the negative example found in Hosea,

where Israel is likened to a “wife of whoredom”:

                     

Go take to yourself a wife of whoredom and children of whoredom, for

the land has committed great whoredom by departing from Yahweh.

Though a jealous God promises to take Israel back,

                              

             

sed ipse per semet ipsum veniat et osculetur me ab osculis oris sui, verba scilicet in os meum

sui oris infundat, ipsum audiam loquentem, ipsum videam docentem. Haec enim sunt Christi

oscula quae porrexit ecclesiae, cum in adventu suo ipse praesens in carne positus locutus est ei

verba fidei et caritas et pacis.

Origen, 180.

16 Ann W. Astell. The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1990), 3.

17 Cohen, 6.

18 Hosea 1:2.

19 Ibid., 2:19–20.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

And I will wed you to me forever, in righteousness and justice, in loving

kindness and compassion. I will wed you to me faithfully, and you shall

know Yahweh.

such reconciliation will come only after the “husband” humiliates

the “wife”:

                                       

    



            



   

So I will return and take back my grain in its season, and my wine in

its season, and I will strip away my wool and flax, which clothed her

nakedness. And then I will uncover her shamelessness in her lovers’

eyes, and none shall deliver her from my hand.

More disturbing than the angry-God-as-husband motif in Hosea,

however, is the violently-abusive-God-as-husband of Ezekiel 16. Here,

readers encounter “a fairy tale marriage that has gone horribly awry”.

Ezekiel portrays God as a man who finds an infant girl (Israel) who

has been exposed, thrown out upon the hills or fields to be killed and

eaten by predators, one of the ancient world’s forms of birth control

(Athenians of the fifth century BCE exposed “10 percent or more

of their newborn girls”

). Scholars often claim the Jews refused to

engage in such practices. For example, Margaret King contends that

“Jews and Christians […] steadily opposed the linked practices

of infanticide, exposure, and abortion by which the Greeks and

Romans controlled population”.

But despite such contentions, the

picture in Ezekiel is plain:

                                             

         



             



        



    



    

                             





   



     

20 Ibid., 2:9–10.

21 Nancy R. Bowen. “A Fairy Tale Wedding?” In A God So Near: Essays on Old Testament

Theology in Honor of Patrick D. Miller, ed. by Patrick D. Miller, Brent A. Strawn, and

Nancy R. Bowen (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 65.

22 Mark Golden. “Demography and the Exposure of Girls at Athens”. Phoenix, 35: 4

(Winter 1981), 321.

23 Margaret L. King. “Children in Judaism and Christianity”. In The Routledge History

of Childhood in the Western World, ed. by Paula S. Fass, 39–60 (New York: Routledge,

2013), 47.

24 Ezekiel 16:3–5.

44 Love and its Critics

Thus says the Lord Yahweh to Jerusalem: your origin and your birth is

of the land of Canaan; your father was an Amorite, and your mother a

Hittite. At your birth, on the very day you were born, your navel was

not cut, nor were you washed in cleansing water, massaged with salt, or

wrapped in swaddling bands. No eye had pity on you to do any of these

things for you, but you were cast into an open field, for you were hated

on the day you were born.

Though it is blamed on the Amorites and Hittites, exposure clearly

was not unknown in Israel, as Israel is described here as a baby girl left

outside to die: “Ezekiel’s allegory draws particular attention to the […]

cruel but often regrettably practised offense of leaving an infant girl to

die at birth, because families preferred boys”.

The man who rescues

her describes seeing this baby girl “”—“polluted in [her]

blood” before he says to her

“”—“Live!” and takes her home to raise

her to womanhood. After raising her as his own daughter, he takes a

fancy to her:

                    

For jewels her breasts were well-fashioned, and her hair grown, and

[she] was naked and bare.

The note of father-daughter incest is disturbing enough, but what

follows makes that pale into insignificance:

                                 

                                     

                                      

                       

When I passed by you and looked at you, behold, your season was

the time for love. I spread my garment over you, covering your

nakedness. I made an oath to you, and entered a covenant with you,

declared the Lord Yahweh, and you belonged to me. Then I washed

you with water, thoroughly washing your blood away, and anointed

you with oil. I covered you in embroidered garments, and gave you

leather sandals. I bound you in fine linens and covered you in silks.

25 Ronald E. Clements. Ezekiel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 74.

26 Ezekiel 16:6.

27 Ibid., 16:7.

28 Ibid., 16:8–12.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

I decked you in jewelry, putting bracelets on your wrists, a necklace

around your neck, a ring in your nose, earrings in your ears, and a

glorious crown on your head.

Having taken the child he raised as a daughter and married her

(converting incestuous thoughts into deeds), this much older man (God)

explodes in rage over the infidelities of his young daughter-wife:

                       

[…]

                         

               

[…]

                                      

                    



       

But you trusted in your beauty, and played the whore because of your

fame, and lavished your whorings on any passer-by. […] Because your

filth was poured out and your nakedness uncovered as you whored with

your lovers, and the abominations of your idols, and the blood of your

children that you poured out to them, behold, I will bring together all

your lovers, [and] I will give you into their hands, and they will throw

down your defenses and break down your high places; they will strip

you of your clothes and take your jewels and leave you naked and bare.

They will bring a great multitude against you, and they will stone you

with stones and thrust you through with their swords.

The young girl he had once saved from death, he now has beaten, stoned,

and cut to pieces. Having saved her, claimed her, but been unable to

keep her, God spends his truly impotent rage in the fashion of a violent

cuckold: he turns her over to those men who will brutalize her for him,

and only then will his rage be abated:

    



                            

So toward you I will rest my fury, and abolish my jealousy, and I will be

quiet and calm, and I will not be angry any more.

29 Ibid., 16:15, 36–37, 39–40.

30 Ibid., 16:42.

46 Love and its Critics

After her near-fatal beating, God’s daughter-wife will return to him

in shame—he will accept her back merely so that he may further

humiliate her:

                    



              

So that you will remember and be ashamed, and never let it come to

pass that you open your mouth because of your humiliation, when I am

appeased concerning all that you have done.

It is tempting to think that the infant girl of so many years before might

have been better off if only God had passed her by in that open field,

leaving her to the mercy of beasts less systematically savage than

himself. Hardly a story of love, this “fairy tale marriage gone horribly

awry” is more akin to a tale of domestic abuse, as “the profile of YHWH

in Ezekiel 16 matches that of real-life batterers in significant ways”.

There is no love in these allegorical accounts of what Cohen ominously

calls “the inseverable marital union between God and Israel”,

unless by

“love” we mean ownership and domination, or vengeance and impotent

wrath that uses others to inflict its bloody will, or the desire to silence

and shame a daughter-bride into compliant and docile submission. This

is the powerful impression given by the multiple instances to be found

in the Biblical prophets of the marriage allegory. Whether in Hosea, or

Ezekiel 16 and 23, or in Jeremiah 3 and 13, the portrait of the human-

divine marriage is an overwhelmingly negative one, which the relative

lightness of Isaiah 54 cannot atone for:

                                

                  

                             

For as a forsaken wife Yahweh has called you, pained in spirit like the

wife of a man’s youth when she is refused, said your God. For the briefest

instant I left you, but with great mercy I will gather you. In an outburst of

wrath, for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting loving

kindness I will have mercy on you, says Yahweh, your redeemer.

31 Ibid., 16:63.

32 Linda Day. “Rhetoric and Domestic Violence in Ezekiel 16”. Biblical Interpretation, 8:

3 (July 2000), 218, https://doi.org/10.1163/156851500750096327

33 Cohen, 12.

34 Isaiah 54:6–8.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

Far from being comforting, the latter passage sounds like the insincere

apology uttered by a husband who has just beaten his wife—again.

The relationship described in the Song is radically different—there is

no sense of punishment, and no dominant theme of domestic violence,

rage and bloody revenge. What a reader encounters in this ancient

love poem is something missing elsewhere in the Bible: “whereas the

other books of the Bible do indeed proclaim the bond of love between

Israel and the Lord, only the Song of Songs is a dialogue of love”,

though Cohen insists that the dialogue is between “man and God”.

However this very insistence, grounded as it is in the tradition of the

Christian exegesis of Origen and the Rabbinic exegesis of Akiba (c.

50–137 CE), is just one more instance of the ongoing attempts to tame

the Song, and force it to say what its guardians demand it should say.

Such commentary on love poetry tries to “eliminate any implication of

erotic love and to attach to poetry a significance that demonstrates […]

ethical and political propriety”.

As Cohen explains, “if love could not

be ignored, it could be channeled, reformulated, and controlled, and this

is precisely what the rabbinic [and Christian] allegory of the Song of

Songs attempted to achieve”.

This attempt to channel, reformulate,

and control is exactly what we will see love being subjected to in both

poetry and criticism as we move through time.

One of the most evocative portions of the Song is a wonderfully

explicit scene played out between the young man and woman of the

poem. The young man comes to her door, calling for her in desire, but

when she answers, he has slipped away:

                             

                           

            

                             

              

35 Whereas in Hosea and Ezekiel there is no dialogue—the railed-upon woman gets

no voice.

36 Cohen, 12.

37 Longxi, 207.

38 Cohen, 14. Emphasis added.

39 Song of Songs 5:2–6.

48 Love and its Critics

Open to me, my sister, my darling, my dove, my perfect one: for my head

is drenched with dew, my hair with midnight’s drops. I have stripped

off my garments; how shall I put them back on? I have washed my feet;

how shall I soil them? My lover put in his hand by the hole, and my

womb moved for him. I rose up to open to my lover; and my hands

dripped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, with

my hands upon the bolt of the lock. I opened to my lover; but my lover

had withdrawn, and he was gone.

We do not have commentary by Origen for this passage (of his ten

original volumes, only four remain), so let’s look at something from

seemingly the opposite end of the exegetical spectrum, a book called

Song of Solomon for Teenagers:

Imagine the King of Kings. He is not just a great man. He is God! Imagine

He loved you when you were unlovable. He cleaned you up and made

you somebody. He wants to love you and protect you. He wants to enjoy

you. He wants you to love and enjoy Him. How dare you say no. Don’t

you realize that without Him you can do nothing. […] How dare you

reject One who is altogether lovely. The problem we have is that He is

the one that picks the time of visitation.

Though the lack of question marks can be disconcerting, and the

remarks about enjoying and being enjoyed are borderline disturbing,

the allegorical method of interpreting the Song is essentially the same in

this simple twenty-first-century text as it is in Origen’s complex third-

century writings. The young man in the poem is erased as a human

being and turned into a symbol for God, while the young woman is

denied her sexuality and made to serve as a metaphor for those who

do not turn quickly enough to Him. The story of passion, sex, longing,

and love is completely dismissed in favor of a meaning which is forced

onto the text like the attentions of an unwanted suitor, and this forcing

has a long history: “[t]he fundamental way to justify the canonicity of

the Song of Songs, among both Jews and Christians, has always been

to read the text as an allegory, a piece of writing which does not mean

what it literally says”.

40 Chris Ray. Song of Solomon for Teenagers: And Anyone Else Who Wonders Why They Are

Here (Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2010), 29.

41 Longxi, 195.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

But when the allegory is stripped away and the commentary is

removed, what happens in this exquisite passage? A young man calls

late at night at a girl’s door: “open to me”, he says, “for my head is

drenched with dew, my hair with midnight’s drops”. The young man

is expressing sexual desire for his “darling”, his “perfect one”. She

hesitates: “I have washed my feet; how shall I soil them?” (“Feet” are

often used in the Bible as a euphemism for more intimate parts of the

body—the story of Ruth and Boaz is an excellent example). But he

persists, putting “his hand by the hole”, as her “womb moved for him”.

The Hebrew word here is     (meeh or me-yeh), which when used about a

woman, can generally be translated as “womb” just as it is at Ruth 1:11,

where Naomi bemoans her age and infertility:

                                 

Return, my daughters, why will you go with me? Are there yet sons in

my womb that may become your husbands?

With her womb stirring, the young woman is suddenly wet with myrrh,

her hands and her fingers dripping with the scented, sensual oil. As

she slips her oiled fingers around “the bolt of the lock”, she opens to

him, and the consummation is near. Here, the Hebrew word is   

(manul), which, translated as “bolt”, is like the deadbolt that is inserted

between the door and the doorjamb, making the phallic reference of

the verse obvious. Just as the young woman fondles the manul with her

wet fingers, at that precise moment, the young man had “withdrawn,

and he was gone”, leaving the young woman open, wet with oil, and

absolutely frustrated. In the terms of the Porter from Macbeth, the young

man (and his manul) can stand to, or not stand to,

and in this case, he

and it have done the latter.

Near the end of the Song, it appears that the relationship between the

young man and young woman is illicit, for she wishes he could be as her

brother, so that when they met in public there would be no suspicion:

                          

42 Macbeth 2.3.32. All quotations from the plays are from William Shakespeare: The

Complete Works, ed. by Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (New York: Pelican,

2002).

50 Love and its Critics

                            

              

O that you were as my brother, who sucked the breasts of my mother!

When I should meet you outside, I would kiss you, yes, and no one would

despise me. I would lead you, and bring you to my mother’s house, and

she would teach me; I would give you a drink of the spiced wine of the

juice of my pomegranate. Your left hand would be under my head, and

your right hand would embrace me.

None of this makes any sense if seen through the allegorical lens of

Origen. The young woman is wishing she could invite the young man

home to have sex with her—with his left hand under her head, and

his right hand embracing her, she is imagining them either making

love or dancing the tango (arguably the same thing), and the image of

drinking the spiced wine of the juice of her pomegranate could not be

more obvious. It echoes an earlier scene which is clearly a reference to a

sexual assignation:

         

            

                                   

I am my lover’s, and his desire is for me. Come, my love, let us go into the

field; let us spend the night in the village. Come, let us rise early and go

to the vineyards; let us see whether the vines flourish, the tender grapes

appear, and the pomegranates bud and blossom. There I will give my

love to you.

If the “vines flourish” and the “pomegranates bud and blossom”, then

perhaps this love scene will work out better than the last one.

So how did we get to the point where a poem so obviously sexual

as the Song of Songs is commonly tamed into submission as a religious

allegory, where even teenagers are taught to read a poem that openly

features youthful eroticism and unceasing sexual innuendo as if it were

written by virgins, for virgins, and about virgins? For centuries after its

composition—perhaps as long as a millennium, if the most generous

estimates are correct—the Song appears to have been read and sung in

the spirit of love and desire, for “there is no record of allegorization in

43 Song of Songs 8:1–3.

44 Ibid., 7:11–13.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

the earliest period”.

The allegorical reading of the Song began under

a Roman imperial rule that since the days of Caesar Augustus had

been slowly tightening its grip on the sexual behaviors of its subjects,

developing at approximately the same time among the Jews and the

Christians:

At the council of Jamnia at the end of the first century, […] Rabbi Judah

argued that the Song of Songs defiled the hands, i.e., was taboo or sacred,

hence canonical, while Ecclesiastes did not. Rabbi Jose then expressed

his doubt about the propriety of including the Song in the canon, but

Rabbi Aquiba made a powerful plea [and he] angrily denounced those

who treated this holy Song as an ordinary song (zemîr) and chanted it in

“Banquet Houses”.

Rabbi Akiba argued for the inclusion of the Song in the Hebrew canon

by claiming “all the world is not as worthy as the day on which the

Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the writings are holy, but the

Song of Songs is the holy of holies”.

Arguing against other Rabbis who

thought, based on a literal interpretation, that the text was obscene,

Akiba seems to have been the earliest known advocate for an allegorical

approach to the Song.

In the centuries that follow, allegory becomes orthodoxy. The

Babylonian Talmud makes repeated allegorical references to the Song. In

the Gemara (a section completed c. 500 CE) of the Tractate Sanhedrin,

verses from the Song are interpreted as signifying the Sanhedrin, the

judicial body appointed in each Israelite city:

45 Weston Fields. “Early and Medieval Interpretation of the Song of Songs”, Grace

Theological Journal, 1: 2 (Fall, 1980), 222, https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/gtj/01-

2_221.pdf

46 The urge to allegorize the Song may well have developed in reaction to a changing

imperial atmosphere, in light of a series of laws, penalties, and taxation measures

designed to control the whos, whats, whys, and hows of marriage and sexuality

(laws the poet Ovid seems to have been punished for violating).

47 Longxi, 194.

48 Benjamin Edidin Scolnic. “Why Do We Sing the Song of Songs on Passover?”

Conservative Judaism, 48: 4 (1996), 55, https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/sites/

default/files/public/jewish-law/holidays/pesah/why-do-we-sing-the-song-of-

songs-on-passover.pdf

52 Love and its Critics





Your navel is like a round goblet which lacks no wine: that navel—that is

the Sanhedrin. […] Your belly is like a heap of wheat [Song of Songs 7:2]:

even as we profit from wheat, so also we profit from the Sanhedrin’s

reasonings.

Those reading the Song as a poem about love and desire are condemned

as bringing evil to the world, and unless the Rabbis are condemning

something wholly imaginary, this is evidence that there were still

people who approached the Song in exactly this way:







A reader of a verse from the Song of Songs who sings it at the wrong

time, turning it into a festival song, brings evil into the world. The Torah,

dressed in sackcloth, stands before the Holy One and cries out, “Lord of

the Universe! Your children treat me as a lyre played by scornful fools”.

For centuries, the perspectives of Akiba, Origen, and the Talmud

remain the dominant mode of reading and understanding the Song.

But a change comes at the end of the eleventh century, in France, at the

same time the first of the troubadour poems are appearing in the world.

Rabbi Solomon the Izakhite, known to history as Rashi, champions

the Peshat method of Scriptural interpretation, “the interpretation of

the text according to its ‘plain meaning’”.

Rashi has little use for

the Talmudic idea that the Song should not be sung on festival days;

rather than bringing evil into the world, he regards such singing as

bringing good:

49 Tractate Sanhedrin. In Hebrew English Edition of the Babylonian Talmud, ed. by Rabbi

Isidore Epstein (London: Socino Press, 1969), 37a.

50 Ibid., 101a.

51 Sara Japhet. “Rashi’s Commentary on the Song of Songs: The Revolution of the

Peshat and its Aftermath”. In J. Männchen and T. Reiprich, eds. Mein Haus wird ein

Bethaus für alle Völker genannt werden. Festschrift für Thomas Wille sum 75. Gerburgstag

(Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 2007), 202.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

וילע רמואו ודיב סוכ לטונו ,בוט םוי אוהש ןוגכ ,התשמה לע ונמזב ורמוא םא לבא

םלועל הבוט איבמ-םוי לש ונינעמ םיקוספו הדגה ירבד

But I say the time for the feast is a good day, and for a man to take a glass

in his hand and tell others the words of ancient legends and the verses

relevant to the day—this always brings good to the world.

Rashi also gets right to the “plain meaning”

of the famous “kisses” of

the Song, arguing that they are literal kisses being desired by an actual

woman whose husband has become neglectful. The resulting view of

the text is at once less strained (having no need to compare a woman’s

body to an all-male judiciary), more responsive to textual detail, and

entirely more human than the interpretations of Akiba, Origen, and the

innumerable commentators who follow them:

והיפ תוקישנמ המלש ךלמה ינקשיו ןתי ימ התונמלאבו התולגב היפב תרמוא רישה הז

תקקושו הואתמ ינא ךא ףתכה לעו דיה בג לע ןיקשונש תומוקמ שיש יפל זאמ ומכ

הפ לא הפ הלכ לא ןתחכ ןושארה גהנמכ ימע גהונ ותויהל

52 Rashi’s commentary is quoted here from the Tractate Sanhedrin (101a), Part VII,

Vol. 21. In The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition, ed. by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (New

York: Random House, 1999), 52–53. As is traditional, Steinsaltz uses the semi-

cursive Rashi script, rather than the more familiar square or block Hebrew script, to

reproduce Rashi’s commentary.

53 Edward L. Greenstein suggests that the “plain” meaning is often actually much

more complex than the allegorical meaning. In arguing for historical context as a

crucial element of Rashi’s peshat method of reading, Greenstein makes Rashi sound

like an early ancestor of today’s historicists:

Most secondary literature on Jewish exegesis defines peshat as the “simple”, “plain”, or “literal”

approach, but these terms are misleading. The historical meaning of the biblical text may

actually be complex and figurative, neither simple nor straightforward. […] The peshat method,

therefore, should perhaps be glossed in English as the direct, contextual mode of exegesis, not

“plain” or “literal”, which it often is not. The derash method is the acontextual approach because

it disregards the constrictions of the historical, literary and linguistic condition in which the text

first came to us.

Edward L. Greenstein. “Medieval Bible Commentaries”. In Back to the Sources:

Reading the Classic Jewish Texts, ed. by Barry W. Holtz (New York: Simon & Schuster,

2006), 219, 220.

54 Mikraot Gedolot: Torah with Forty-Two Commentaries (

  ), Vol. 3 (The Widow and Brothers Ram: Truskavets/Glukhov,

Ukraine, 1907), 418, https://books.google.com/books?id=fEUpAAAAYAAJ. Also in

Mikraot Gedolot (), Vol. 4, ed. by Yaakov ben Hayyim. Printed by Daniel

Bomberg (Venice, 1524), 130r, https://archive.org/stream/The_Second_Rabbinic_

Bible_Vol_4/4#page/n261. Further discussed in Yehoshafat Nevo. French Biblical

Interpretation: Studies in the Interpretive Methods of the Bible Commentators in Northern

France in the Middle Ages (

) (Reovot: Moreshet Yaaov, 2004), 274.

54 Love and its Critics

She sings this song with her mouth, in exile and widowhood: “Would

that King Solomon would kiss me, like he used to, with the kisses of

his mouth, since in some places they kiss the back of the hand or the

shoulder, but I long for the familiarity with which he first treated me,

like a bridegroom with his bride, kissing mouth to mouth”.

Rashi may be the first Rabbinical interpreter to apply this “plain

meaning” method to the Song,

but he would not be the last. Two

anonymous commentators of the twelfth century in France take the

Peshat methodology to its logical conclusion, arguing that the Song was

merely a song, was not sacred, and was included in the canon because it

was popular. The first commentator, finally published for the first time

in 1866,

makes the point directly:

the interpretation of “the Song of Songs” is: This is one of the songs

composed by Solomon, who wrote many songs, as it is said: “And his

songs numbered one thousand and five” (1 Kgs 5:12). Why was this one

written [written down and included in the canon] of all the others? It was

written because it was loved by the people.

The second twelfth-century commentator, first published in 1896,

“explained the Song of Songs as a secular love song, did not present

it as a parable, did not regard it as a prophecy, and did not include an

allegorical interpretation”.

At the time the troubadours are working, it appears that the love

poetry of the Song is being read and explained, by at least a few, as

love poetry about human beings desiring each other, regardless of the

laws of God or man. As Japhet explains, “this kind of commentary on

the Song of Songs—an exclusive adherence to the plain meaning and

total avoidance of any kind of allegory—is a unique phenomenon, with

no parallel in the long history of Jewish exegesis of the Song of Songs

until the modern period”.

Sadly, this unique phenomenon does not

last. In the thirteenth century, at about the same time the troubadour

movement is being crushed by the Church, and the notably allegorical

55 Japhet, 202.

56 Ibid., 211.

57 Ibid., 212.

58 Ibid., 214.

59 Ibid., 215.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

“sweet new style” (dolce stil novo) adopted by Dante is taking over, the

Peshat school dies out, and the allegorical reading of the Song returns.

In some quarters, it never disappeared in the first place. For Richard

of St. Victor, the twelfth-century mystical theologian, even the most

erotic portions of the Song are to be interpreted in terms of the visitation

of Grace, or “visitationem gratiae”:

My beloved put in his hand through the hole of the mind, and my belly is

swollen to the touch thereof; and this visitation of grace, is sent through

the hole by the hands that, as through a chink, infuse grace into the souls

of the faithful.

This is also evident in the work of Giles of Rome (Egidio Colonna), the

thirteenth-and fourteenth-century cleric and Archbishop of Bourges,

who argues that “the principal intention of [the Song] is to express the

mutual desire between the bridegroom and bride, or between Christ

and the Church”.

Giles—who served in the same Provençal region

whose theological, sexual, and poetical heresies the Church spent

decades subduing during the Crusades and the Inquisition—insists that

the language of opening to the lover is to be understood in terms of

preaching:

My bridegroom attracted me so much, that being unwilling or unable to

resist him, I got up from contemplation to open to my beloved through

preaching, and not only through preaching in word, but also through

preaching in example. Therefore it continues: my hands, that is, my

works, dripped with myrrh, that is, with the mortification of the flesh.

60 “Dilectus mens misit manum suam per foramen, et venter meus intumuit ad tactum

ejus, Quam visitationem gratiae, missionem manus per foramen vocat. Quasi

enim per rimam gratiam infundit, cum non total animam perfundit” (Richard of

St. Victor. Exposition in Cantica Canticorum. In Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series

Latina, Vol. 196, ed. by Jacques-Paul Migne [Paris, 1855], col. 503c, https://archive.

org/stream/patrologiaecurs104unkngoog#page/n271).

61 “Intentio principalis huius opis est exprimere mutua desideria inter sponsum &

sponsam, sive inter christum & ecclesiam” (Giles of Rome. Librum Solomonis qui

Cantica Canticorum Inscribitur Commentaria D. Aegidii Romani [Rome: Antonium

Bladum, 1555], 2v, https://books.google.com/books?id=ZcjIK13ZCXAC&pg=PP4).

62 “Ita sponsus attraxit me: unde non volens vel valens resistere ei, (surrexi) a

contemplatione, (ut aperirem dilecto meo) per praedicationem; et non solum aperui

ei praedicando verbo, sed etiam praedicando exemplo. Ideo subditur, (manus meae,)

idest, operationes meae, (stillaverunt myrrham,) idest carnis mortificationem”

(ibid., 11v, https://books.google.com/books?id=ZcjIK13ZCXAC&pg=PP22).

56 Love and its Critics

This reading of the Song, insisting that what it really says is opposed

to what it merely seems to say, served the immediate ideological needs

of the Inquisition-era Church, and has remained dominant ever since.

Even now, the movement to restore the erotic sense of the verse is

largely confined to academia, and has little impact on the way most

readers encounter the poem.

The story of the Song is a miniature reflection of the story of this

book. Love, passionate and mutually chosen regard between two

people, without concern for gods, laws, or institutions, has always

struggled to survive in a hostile world. Its literary monuments have

been appropriated for the purposes of those opposed to it, as verses

speaking of desire and frustration, passion and joy, the sensual

details of liquids, oils, and sweets, and open admiration of the body’s

form, are “channeled, reformulated, and controlled” into metaphors,

allegories, and symbols of an eros redirected toward the sky. “It is

amusing”, as Longxi notes, “to see how the priggish commentators

63 Bart Vanden Auweele argues a different case, emphasizing the relatively recent

academic voices that have challenged the secular reading of the Song of Songs:

As long as the Song was read and understood allegorically, it was regarded as one of the

most important, most inspiring and most used books of Scripture. Strangely enough, from the

emergence of modern exegesis onwards, the poem fell gradually into a kind of oblivion as

its obvious meaning became recognised. In the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth

century, the Song was scarcely read in Church and at university. […] Moreover, modern

exegetes approached the Song as a collection of diverse short erotic poems instead of being a

coherent story with a well-constructed plot. […] In recent years, however, the possibility and

legitimacy of a reading of the Song according to its so-called “obvious and literal meaning”

has been challenged. Modern interpreters such as Ricoeur, Patmore and Berder have criticised

secular erotic readings of the Canticle for representing modern reader expectations rather than

expressing a genuine biblical view on sexuality.

Bart Vanden Auweele. “The Song of Songs as Normative Text”. In Religion and

Normativity Vol. 1: The Discursive Struggle over Religious Texts in Antiquity, ed. by

Anders-Christian Jacobson, Bart Vanden Auweele, and Carmen Cvetkovic [Aarhus:

Aarhus University Press, 2009], 158). The irony is that Auweele’s case is based on

critics whose techniques stem from the interpretive strategies of those who reduced

the Song to allegory in the first place. What exactly is “a genuine biblical view on

sexuality” if the Song is not allowed to speak for itself on that matter? Here, we have a

circular argument which insists that the Song is properly read as expressing a “genuine

biblical view”, while that “view” is imposed on the text by critics. The Bible says what

we say it says (a statement to which the Inquisition would have been amenable).

64 For an excellent overview of this process, see J. Paul Tanner, “The History of

Interpretation of the Song of Songs”, Bibliotheca Sacra, 154: 613 (1997), 23–46, https://

biblicalstudies.org.uk/article_song1_tanner.html, or http://www.paultanner.org/

English HTML/Publ Articles/Hist Song of Songs - P Tanner.pdf

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

stretch the words out of all proportion […]. Such farfetched exegeses

[…] consistently read love songs as about anything but love”.

We will

see versions of this pattern repeatedly, as passion becomes worship,

and desire becomes the decorous admiration of objects whose best use

is to transport the admirer beyond the hated and distrusted flesh, and

toward a union with what one cannot speak to, cannot draw near to,

and most definitely cannot touch.

Love Poetry and the Critics who Reduce:

Ovid’s Amores and Ars Amatoria

Two collections of poetry that have no pretensions to being allegories

of the sacred, the Amores and the Ars Amatoria, despite their often

scurrilous reputations, are actually no more explicit in their passions

and descriptions than the Song of Songs. But while the Song, after

much debate, was included in the canons of Judaism and Christianity,

the Ars Amatoria, and Ovid along with it, were banished from Rome to

the shores of the Black Sea. Born in 43 BCE, Ovid was an established

poet by his early twenties, and he “poured forth with uninterrupted

regularity a series of elegiac works that far surpassed anything ever

previously attempted in their open mockery of accepted sexual

morality”.

The Amores (an early work loosely centered around the

poet’s wry and self-aware fascination with a woman he refers to as

Corrina) are completed by the time Ovid was twenty-eight, and by this

time “he had established himself as Rome’s foremost poet, and was

the idol of the capital”.

The Amores have the feel of a young man’s poetry, mixing bravado

with uncertainty in their treatment of love and desire. The poems

often talk of love as something that is sweeter when stolen, especially

in poems like Elegy 1.4, “Amicam qua arte”, and the famous Elegy 1.5

65 Longxi, 207.

66 G. P. Goold. “The Cause of Ovid’s Exile”. Illinois Classical Studies, 8: 1 (Spring 1983),

96, http://hdl.handle.net/2142/11861

67 Ibid.

58 Love and its Critics

“Corrina Concubitus”. The former mockingly bemoans the fact that the

lady’s husband would be at dinner:

Vir tuus est epulas nobis aditurus easdem—

ultima coena tuo sit, precor, illa viro!

ergo ego dilectam tantum conviva puellam

adspiciam?

Your husband will be at the same supper with us—

let that supper, I pray, be your husband’s last!

Shall I be so close to a girl I love

and merely be a guest?

But the lover soon finds the husband’s presence exciting, since it

challenges him to remain undetected in public:

ante veni, quam vir—nec quid, si veneris ante,

possit agi video; sed tamen ante veni.

cum premet ille torum, vultu comes ipsa modesto

ibis, ut accumbas—clam mihi tange pedem!

me specta nutusque meos vultumque loquacem;

excipe furtivas et refer ipsa notas.

verba superciliis sine voce loquentia dicam;

verba leges digitis, verba notata mero.

cum tibi succurret Veneris lascivia nostrae,

purpureas tenero pollice tange genas.

siquid erit, de me tacita quod mente queraris,

pendeat extrema mollis ab aure manus.

cum tibi, quae faciam, mea lux, dicamve, placebunt,

versetur digitis anulus usque tuis.

Come before your husband, why not, come before,

I don’t see what’s possible, but arrive before.

When he lies on the couch, look, with modest

demeanor recline beside him—secretly touch my foot!

68 Ovid. Amores 1.4. In Ovid: Heroides and Amores, ed. by Grant Showerman (Loeb

Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 328, ll. 1–4.

69 Ibid., 328, 330, ll. 13–26.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

Look at me and my nods and my expressive face;

catch my secrets and return them.

Without saying a word, my eyebrows will speak to you;

words from my fingers, words traced in wine.

When you think of the pleasures of our love,

with a tender thumb touch your cheeks.

If you remember some silent complaint against me,

gently grasp the bottom of your ear with your hand.

When you are pleased, my light, with what I do or say,

fiddle with the ring on your finger.

Ironically, the lover giving this advice descends into jealousy. What if

the woman with whom he is cuckolding her husband, cuckolds him

with her husband? An intolerable thought:

nec femori committe femur nec crure cohaere

nec tenerum duro cum pede iunge pedem.

multa miser timeo, quia feci multa proterve,

exemplique metu torqueor, ecce, mei.

Do not engage or touch him with the thigh

not the tip of the foot with his hard foot.

Alas, I fear much, because I have often been wanton,

tormented, look you, by my own example.

The young man (Ovid himself?) wants to believe that his love (Corinna

perhaps, though unnamed in this poem) is faithful to him, despite her

marriage to another. And if necessary, he would prefer that she lie in

order to maintain this belief:

sed quaecumque tamen noctem fortuna sequetur,

cras mihi constanti voce dedisse nega!

Nevertheless, whatever the night’s fortune proves,

tomorrow, in a firm voice, deny that you gave yourself!

70 Ibid., 330, ll. 43–46.

71 Ibid., 332, ll. 69–70.

60 Love and its Critics

The more famous elegy, “Corrina Concubitus”, reflects none of the

teasing and self-tormenting doubts of the fourth elegy, and is filled with

the delights of physical eros, desire and fulfillment. First, the poem gives

voice to the delights of seeing:

ecce, Corinna venit, tunica velata recincta,

candida dividua colla tegente coma—

qualiter in thalamos famosa Semiramis isse

dicitur, et multis Lais amata viris.

Behold, Corinna comes, draped in a loose gown,

hair parted over her white neck—

just as Semiramis came to her bed,

so they say, and Lais loved by many men.

Next, the poem moves to touch mixed with sight:

Deripui tunicam—nec multum rara nocebat;

pugnabat tunica sed tamen illa tegi.

quae cum ita pugnaret, tamquam quae vincere nollet,

victa est non aegre proditione sua.

ut stetit ante oculos posito velamine nostros,

in toto nusquam corpore menda fuit.

quos umeros, quales vidi tetigique lacertos!

forma papillarum quam fuit apta premi!

quam castigato planus sub pectore venter!

quantum et quale latus! quam iuvenale femur!

Singula quid referam? nil non laudabile vidi

et nudam pressi corpus ad usque meum.

I tore off her coat—it was thin, and covered little;

but, she held the tunic, fighting to be covered,

fighting as if she would win,

or be conquered easily, but not by her own betrayal.

As she stood before my eyes with drapery set by,

she hadn’t a flaw in her entire body.

72 Amores 1.5, 334, ll. 9–12.

73 Ibid., ll. 13–24.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

What shoulders, what arms I saw and touched!

The form of her breasts, how fit to be caressed!

How flat is her belly, beneath her breasts!

Her side’s quantity and quality! What a thrilling thigh!

Why refer to more? I saw nothing unpraiseworthy

and pressed her naked body against mine.

Finally, as desire has played its scene, and quiet satisfaction remains,

the poem turns to a wish for many more such afternoons as this one:

Cetera quis nescit? lassi requievimus ambo.

proveniant medii sic mihi saepe dies!

Who knows not what followed? Weary, we rested.

May such afternoons come for me often!

Corinna is neither a goddess, nor an allegory for the sacred. There

has never been a critical impulse to explain “Corrina Concubitus” as

if it were really portraying the relationship between humanity and

the gods. Corinna is portrayed as a flesh-and-blood woman, desired

and worried over by a flesh-and-blood man. If Corinna is a stand-in

for anything or anyone, perhaps it is Julia, the daughter of Augustus,

the Roman Emperor who would, some twenty-plus years after the

publication of the Amores, banish Ovid from Rome for life. While this

possibility has long been a matter of debate,

it does tie in with the

overall feeling in many of the elegies of forbidden love—an eros that is

more exciting because of the possibility of getting caught and severely

punished. If Corinna is Julia, and the famous twofold reason for Ovid’s

banishment (carmen et error, the poem and the mistake Ovid refers to

in his poem Tristia, 2.207) was “for writing the Ars Amatoria and for

committing a transgression”

with her, then what a reader encounters

in both the Amores and the Ars Amatoria is life and experience,

transgression and joy, transformed into poetry that celebrated love

and desire which was enjoyed in the shadow of condemnation and

74 Ibid., ll. 25–26.

75 See John C. Thibault. The Mystery of Ovid’s Exile (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1964), 38–54.

76 Goold, 107.

62 Love and its Critics

banishment. Rather than passion sublimated into a search for the

divine, these poems are perhaps our first clear example, unsullied by

the allegorizing and temporizing mood, of what the troubadours will

call fin’amor, love as an end in itself.

Title page of a 1644 edition of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria.

However, in what will soon become a familiar move in the criticism of

many different authors and periods, some commentary on Ovid’s work

returns it to the realm of allegory, not of the human-divine relationship,

but, in this case, of poetry itself. Reducing Ovid’s work to a series of

conventions and tropes, Peter Allen argues that it amounts to little more

than poetry gazing at its own reflection:

The lesson is in fact a lesson in literary theory. The Ars and Remedia reveal

(though often in indirect ways) that the love described in elegiac poetry

is essentially the same as the poetry itself: both are artistic fantasies,

constructed by the reader and the poetic lover together. Elegiac love

depends for its existence on the presence of recognizable conventions,

which help the reader situate it within a literary context, to recognize

it as fiction. Through such conventions the poet involves the reader in

the act of literary creation, which is itself an amatory relationship and,

77 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ovid_Ars_Amatoria_1644.jpg

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

in fact, the most intimate relationship in these texts; the preceptor’s true

task is to teach the reader how to be a creator, like himself.

Once, in the mid-twentieth century work of a critic like Blanchot, this

kind of argument—reducing literature to a meta-discourse in which

all that literature talks about is itself—might have seemed fresh, even

profound. It draws loosely on the now-familiar idea that language refers

only to language, and that only by a series of shared conventions do we

credit it with an illusory signifying power. Such criticism categorically

denies any possibility of poetry’s intervention in the world, turning

literature into a passive prop for political, military, economic, and

epistemological regimes of power to which it cannot even refer, much

less oppose. It presents an appearance of radicalism, while deliberately

entangling itself in its own refusals and withdrawals.

Such an argument about Ovid insists that, “[d]espite the Amores’

pose of sincerity, well-informed readers will recognize that each of

their characters and situations are conventional”.

Note the rhetorical

pressure applied to the reader—to resist the critic’s insistence that

Ovid’s work is merely conventional, relating only to the experience of

writing about love and not love itself, puts the reader outside the camp of

the “well-informed”. Thus we are told how we should read Ovid, and

how we should not read Ovid; “well-informed” readers will naturally

obey such prescriptions and proscriptions. But this is all a symptom

of an authoritarian strain in criticism that can be seen running all the

way back through Origen, Rabbi Akiba, and Giles of Rome, for whom

the Song of Songs had to be read with the ideological demands of

empire and church in mind. To demand, even implicitly as Allen does,

obedience in the reading of a poet whose delight in disobedience is

reflected throughout his poetry, is more than faintly absurd. And here

we see a new assertion—one we will encounter later in criticism of

medieval poetry: that the “poetic ‘I’” does not represent an individual

point of view (neither that of a poet nor a narrative voice), but is instead a

conventional and collective illusion. It would be ill-informed, according

to such criticism, to believe otherwise:

78 Peter Allen. The Art of Love: Amatory Fiction from Ovid to the Romance of the Rose

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 20.

79 Ibid.

64 Love and its Critics

The amator is little more than a convention himself, a reuse of the traditional

Roman poetic “I”, which derives from Propertius, Tibullus, Gallus, and

Catullus, as well as Catullus’s Alexandrian model, Callimachus. This

poetic “I” is a ventriloquist’s voice, a literary echo of an echo of an echo.

Even the sincerity that post-Romantic readers, at least, traditionally

attribute to the poet-lover is undermined by the amator’s confessions of

infidelity and multifarious desire. His affirmations of love are “sincere”

not in the sense that they unify the amator, the poet, and the historical

Ovid, but in the sense that they create an effective illusion of a poet in

love.

From Allen’s perspective, the “well-informed” reader will also reject

the possibility that “Corrina” had any referent in the world of flesh-

and-blood, regarding it as obvious that “she” is merely another literary

convention:

Corinna is no more real than her lover. Historical identities have been

found for the women in earlier elegy, but literary history is silent on

Corinna, and efforts to re-create her are not only fruitless but even

irrelevant to an understanding of the Amores. Rather than existing as

a person in her own right […] she is the object of the amator’s desire,

the grain of sand that provokes the poetic oyster to produce a string of

literary pearls […]. Poetry, not Corinna, is the true star of the Amores.

And thus the “well-informed” and properly compliant reader will

approach the Amores in order to read about poetry, not about love.

We will see this same move made by other critics, though in different

contexts, ad infinitum. Even a less apparently prescriptive critic like

Alison Sharrock ultimately cannot resist turning Ovid’s poetry into an

allegory for the act of reading: “the Ars itself is a spell (a carmen) with

great seductive power. […] Just as texts are magically seductive, so is

interpretation, so is theory. It is the act of reading that draws us into the

poem. Reading about desire provokes the desire to read”.

Such critics

have become temperamentally averse to the idea of poetry speaking of

anything but itself, as if it were the self-obsessed bore most of us try to

avoid at parties.

80 Allen, 21.

81 Ibid.

82 Alison Sharrock. Seduction and Repetition in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, 2 (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1994), 296.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

But Ovid was anything but a bore. He was the kind of poet dedicated

to “pushing the limits (of convention, genre, discretion) and refusing to

be bound to or by anything other than his own genius”.

Ovid gives

every appearance of refusing to take seriously the pieties that surround

love, and especially refuses to take seriously the laws that surround

marriage and procreation in Augustus’ Rome.

However, he does take

quite seriously the joys of transgressive love itself. For example, “Ad

Auroram”, Elegy 1.13 from the Amores, shows a lover railing against the

rising sun—in a way that foreshadows the passions of the alba form of

twelfth-century Occitania

—for cutting short his time with his beloved:

Quo properas, Aurora? mane!-sic Memnonis umbris

annua sollemni caede parentet avis!

nunc iuvat in teneris dominae iacuisse lacertis;

si quando, lateri nunc bene iuncta meo est.

nunc etiam somni pingues et frigidus aer,

et liquidum tenui gutture cantat avis.

quo properas, ingrata viris, ingrata puellis?

Where do you hurry, Aurora? Stay, so to Memmnon’s shades

his birds may make annual festival in combat!

Now I delight to lie in the tender arms of my mistress;

if at any time, now it is best that she lies close to me.

now, too, sleep is deep and the air is cold,

and slender-throated birds sing liquid songs.

Why do you hurry, unwelcome to men, unwelcome to girls?

The lover berates the oncoming light, knowing his course is futile, but

driven by passion and the desire to remain in his “girl’s soft arms”,

crying out over how many times dawn has torn him away from them:

83 Barbara Weiden Boyd. “The Amores: The Invention of Ovid”. In Brill’s Companion to

Ovid, ed. by Barbara Weiden Boyd (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 116.

84 The Lex Iulia de Maritandis Ordinibus of 18 BCE restricted marriage between the

social classes, and the Lex Iulia de Adulteriis Coercendis of the same year made

adultery punishable by banishment—the latter was applied to Julia in 2 BCE.

85 For a comprehensive survey of this theme across world literature, see Eos: An

Enquiry into the Theme of Lover’s Meetings and Partings at Dawn in Poetry, ed. by

Arthur T. Hatto (The Hague: Mouton & Co.), 1965.

86 Ovid. Amores, 1.13, 368, ll. 3–9.

66 Love and its Critics

optavi quotiens, ne nox tibi cedere vellet,

ne fugerent vultus sidera mota tuos!

optavi quotiens, aut ventus frangeret axem,

aut caderet spissa nube retentus equus!

often have I wished night would not give place to thee,

so that the stars would not flee before your face!

often have I wished the wind would break your axle,

or that a thick cloud would trip and fell your horse!

Then, rehearsing the myth of Aurora, the goddess of dawn who is herself

married to the eternally old Tithonus, the lover accuses the goddess of

hypocrisy for wanting to stay with her young lover Cephalus, while

repeatedly denying the lover of the poem the chance to stay in the arms

of his beloved:

Tithono vellem de te narrare liceret;

fabula non caelo turpior ulla foret.

illum dum refugis, longo quia grandior aevo,

surgis ad invisas a sene mane rotas.

at si, quem mavis, Cephalum conplexa teneres,

clamares: “lente currite, noctis equi!”

Cur ego plectar amans, si vir tibi marcet ab annis?

I wish Tithonus were licensed to tell about you;

there is no more shameful story in heaven.

Fleeing from him, for he is so many ages older than you,

you rise early from the old man, to morning’s chariot wheels.

Whereas, if you had your beloved Cephalus in your embrace,

then you would cry: “Run slowly, horses of the night!”

Why must I suffer in love since your man is wasted with years?

It is especially notable that human desire and frustration are at the center

of Ovid’s poem, and the goddess Aurora, with her serial attractions to,

and affairs with, mortal men, is a reflection of and comment upon the

87 Ibid., 370, ll. 27–30.

88 Ibid., ll. 35–41.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

love between men and women, not a transcendent and otherwise body-

denying goal for which lovers must strive.

Ovid mocks the pretensions of controlling husbands, and by

extension those of Augustus in passing a law against adultery, in “Ad

virum servantem coniugem”, Amores 3.4. This poem laughs at the man

who would too strictly defend the sexual fidelity of a woman; such a

man makes himself a tyrant, a fool, and a cuckold:

Dure vir, inposito tenerae custode puellae

nil agis; ingenio est quaeque tuenda suo.

siqua metu dempto casta est, ea denique casta est;

quae, quia non liceat, non facit, illa facit!

ut iam servaris bene corpus, adultera mens est;

nec custodiri, ne velit, ulla potest.

nec corpus servare potes, licet omnia claudas;

omnibus exclusis intus adulter erit.

Harsh man, setting a guard over your tender girl

gets you nothing; her own character is what will defend her.

If she is chaste when free from fear, then she is pure;

but if she doesn’t sin because she’s not allowed to, she’ll do it!

Even if you have well guarded the body, the mind is adulterous;

no watchman has any power over her will.

Neither can you guard her body, though you close every door,

excluding all; for the adulterer will be within.

In Ovid’s elegy, adultery is a natural response to the tyranny of unwanted

husbands and absurdly impractical laws that create (or enhance) the

very effects they seek to prevent. In fact, the strict laws of the husband

or the emperor inculcate the desire to break those laws and achieve the

forbidden (a motif familiar from Genesis 2–3):

nitimur in vetitum semper cupimusque negata;

sic interdictis imminet aeger aquis.

centum fronte oculos, centum cervice gerebat

Argus—et hos unus saepe fefellit Amor;

89 Ovid. Amores, 3.4, 458, 460, ll. 1–8.

68 Love and its Critics

in thalamum Danae ferro saxoque perennem

quae fuerat virgo tradita, mater erat;

Penelope mansit, quamvis custode carebat,

inter tot iuvenes intemerata procos.

Quidquid servatur cupimus magis, ipsaque furem

cura vocat; pauci, quod sinit alter, amant.

We strive for what is forbidden and desire what is denied;

just as a sick man gazes over prohibited waters.

A hundred eyes before, a hundred behind, had

Argus—and these were often deceived only by Love;

in a chamber of eternal iron and rock Danae was shut,

though she had been shut in as a maid, she became a mother;

Penelope remained steadfast, although without a guard,

among many youthful suitors.

Whatever is guarded we desire the more, the thief

is invited by worry; few love what is permitted by another.

Finally, the elegy ends with a bit of advice for old husbands—pretend,

as Shakespeare will write, to believe her when she says “she is made

of truth”, even though you know she lies. Pretend not to notice the

dalliances, even the affairs, because unless you are willing to be rid of

her, there is really nothing you can do about them:

quo tibi formosam, si non nisi casta placebat?

non possunt ullis ista coire modis.

Si sapis, indulge dominae vultusque severos

exue, nec rigidi iura tuere viri,

et cole quos dederit—multos dabit—uxor amicos.

gratia sic minimo magna labore venit;

sic poteris iuvenum convivia semper inire

et, quae non dederis, multa videre domi.

Why did you marry beauty if only chastity would please you?

Those two things can never be combined.

If you are wise, indulge your lady—and the stern looks?

90 Ibid., 460, ll. 17–26.

91 Ibid., 462, ll. 41–48.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

Ditch them. Do not rigidly insist on the rights of a husband,

and cherish her very generous and loving…friends.

You will receive great thanks, with little effort on your part;

so in this way, you can always celebrate and feast with youths,

and see many gifts at home which you did not give.

The last lines are a wry joke—those gifts the husband did not give to

his much-younger wife may very well be gifts he can no longer give

her: children resulting from sexual encounters with young men who

can still “stand to” in a way that the husband has long since stopped

being able to do.

Beyond pure social and sexual satire, the Amores are a work of pointed

political critique. The passing of such laws as the Lex Iulia de Maritandis

Ordinibus and the Lex Iulia de Adulteriis Coercendis (of 18 and 17 BCE) and

the Lex Papia Poppaea (of 9 CE) represented an ongoing attempt to use

the power of government to “reform Roman private morality”.

Thus,

more than merely claiming that the husband creates or encourages

adultery in a wife over whom he keeps too strict a watch, the Amores

make a political point we might characterize as libertarian today: the

government encourages rebellion by being tyrannical. In such a reading

of the Amores, Augustus is the cuckolded husband who foolishly creates

the conditions and the impetus for his own cuckolding by trying to

control what cannot be controlled—the social and sexual mores of

his “wife”, the Roman people. Read in this way, Ovid’s poems can be

seen as an allegory which describes the relationship between Augustus

and Rome in the terms of relationships between men and women. But

though they can be seen so, there are no powerful cultural forces that

demand they must be seen so, and “[i]t is only in recent years, that

Ovid’s Amores has come to be viewed as a political work”.

The poetry

itself, unlike that of the Song, has not been “channeled, reformulated,

and controlled” to the point that its frankly erotic content has been

subjected to wholesale interpretive erasure, and that is an unqualifiedly

good thing. But the suggestion (not mandate) for reading the Amores in

a political light makes it easier for us to see the way in which love itself

92 These laws proscribed class intermarriage, fornication/adultery, and celibacy,

respectively. P. J. Davis. “Ovid’s Amores: A Political Reading”. Classical Philology,

94: 4 (October 1999), 435, https://doi.org/10.1086/449457

93 Ibid., 431.

70 Love and its Critics

is often “channeled, reformulated, and controlled” in order to serve the

agendas of the powerful.

In passing laws designed to regulate sexuality, Augustus is trying

to establish a Julian dynasty that will survive the vicissitudes of time

and unforeseen circumstance. Just as the early critics like Xenophanes,

Akiba, and Origen seek to control the reading of eros-driven poetry,

Augustus seeks to control eros itself. But like the husband of “Ad virum

servantem coniugem”, he is trying to control the uncontrollable. Ovid

even treats the myth of the founding of Rome, the story of Romulus

and Remus, in a way designed to puncture the pretensions of an

Augustus determined to control private behavior: “Ovid’s treatment of

the Romulus and Remus legend is similarly disrespectful. Where Virgil

chooses his language carefully and speaks of Ilia as merely ‘pregnant

by Mars’ […], Ovid points to Romulus and Remus as the product of

adultery”.

As Ovid puts it:

Rusticus est nimium, quem laedit adultera coniunx,

et notos mores non satis urbis habet

in qua Martigenae non sunt sine crimine nati

Romulus Iliades Iliadesque Remus.

He is a rustic fool, who hurts over an adulterous wife,

and he surely doesn’t know the ways of this city,

in which the sons of Mars were not born without crime,

Romulus, and Remus, Ilia’s twins.

To all the self-important men and women of the world who would

legislate private morality, who would pass laws about who can do

what to whom, with whom, under what circumstances, in what

positions, and with what ends in mind,

Ovid’s Amores say: Oh please,

get over yourselves. In Ovid, we see love being both celebrated for its

own sake and for its subversive potential as a private weapon against

public tyranny.

94 Ibid., 443.

95 Ovid. Amores. 462, ll. 37–40.

96 The Lex Papia Poppaea targeted both celibate people and childless couples.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

This subversive potential is developed to extremes of sharpness and

power in the Ars Amatoria, a work that “exudes urban hipness”,

identifying itself and its ethos with the cosmopolitan and imperial city

of Rome. These are the poems of a sophisticated and experienced older

man, a Pandar-like figure who tells a world full of young men how to

find, approach, speak to, and seduce a world full of women, and in so

doing, undermine the values of the Augustine state:

The poem really is subversive—not in the challenge it offers to the new

morality, or because it has the effrontery to claim for the lover the same

“professional” status as the farmer, the soldier, the holder of high public

office, but because it […] establishes the lover/poet as the emperor of an

alternative and privately constituted state.

One can see why the Augustus, who was busily trying to clean up

Roman morality, restore the wholly imaginary mos maiorum

(the good

old ways of the good old days), and channel Roman sexuality into

childbirth and the maintenance of social class distinctions, would find

offense in a poem that valued the private over the public, the lover over

the warrior, the poet over the emperor.

Subversive notes begin playing almost as soon as the poetry starts.

The Ars Amatoria is “a book that, proposing to teach Romans how to love

and be loved, in fact achieved the result of winning for its author the

implacable hatred of the most important Roman of all”, and is a major

part of “Ovid’s project of constructing his poetic career as a constant

pain in Augustus’ neck”.

100

It isn’t hard to see why, when Ovid’s critique

of Rome’s self-mythologizing is so often front and center in his work.

For example, while recommending that young men look for women in

the theatre, Ovid compares the founding of Rome with rape and the

(im)morality of a military empire:

97 Peter White. “Ovid and the Augustan Mileau”. In Brill’s Companion to Ovid, ed. by

Barbara Weiden Boyd (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 12.

98 Ovid. The Art of Love. Trans. by James Michie. Introduction by David Malouf (New

York: Modern Library, 2002), xii.

99 Karl-J. Hölkeskamp. Reconstructing the Roman Republic: An Ancient Political Culture

and Modern Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 17.

100 Sergio Casali. “The Art of Making Oneself Hated: Rethinking (Anti-)Augustanism

in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria”. In The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria

and Remedia Amoris, ed. by Roy Gibson, Steven Green, and Alison Sharrock (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2006), 216, 219.

72 Love and its Critics

Primus sollicitos fecisti, Romule, ludos,

Cum iuvit viduos rapta Sabina viros.

Tunc neque marmoreo pendebant vela theatro,

Nec fuerant liquido pulpita rubra croco;

Illic quas tulerant nemorosa Palatia, frondes

Simpliciter positae, scena sine arte fuit;

In gradibus sedit populus de caespite factis,

Qualibet hirsutas fronde tegente comas.

Respiciunt, oculisque notant sibi quisque puellam

Quam velit, et tacito pectore multa movent.

[…]

Rex populo praedae signa petita dedit.

Protinus exiliunt, animum clamore fatentes,

Virginibus cupidas iniciuntque manus.

[…]

Siqua repugnarat nimium comitemque negabat,

Sublatam cupido vir tulit ipse sinu,

Atque ita “quid teneros lacrimis corrumpis ocellos?

Quod matri pater est, hoc tibi” dixit “ero”.

Romule, militibus scisti dare commoda solus:

Haec mihi si dederis commoda, miles ero.

101

You first instituted these games, Romulus,

when the single men profited by raping the Sabine women.

Back then no awnings hung over a marble theatre,

nor was the platform stained with red saffron;

there artless and thick Palatine branches

were simply placed, while the stage was unadorned;

the audience sat on steps made from turf,

the branches covering their shaggy hair.

Each cast his eyes around, noting the girls

he wanted, and was deeply stirred in his silent heart.

[…]

The king gave the signal for the rape.

Immediately they burst forth, shouting, betraying their

virgins with greedy, lustful hands.

101 Ovid. Ars Amatoria, 1.101–10, 114–16, 127–32. In Ovid: The Art of Love and other Poems,

ed. by J. H. Mozley (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1962), 18, 20.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

[…]

If a girl resisted too much, or refused her companion,

lifted up on his lustful bosom, the man carried her,

saying, “And what’s that ruining your eyes with tears?

What your father was to your mother, that will I be to you”.

Romulus, only you knew what was fitting:

if you give me such advantages, I will be a soldier too.

The rape, or abduction (from the Latin raptio) of the Sabine women, is

a well-known element of early Roman legend. As Livy tells the story:

The Roman State was now strong enough in war, a match for any of

its neighbors; but the absence of women, and the lack of the right of

intermarriage with their neighbors, meant their greatness would last for

a generation only, for they had no hope of offspring. […] On the advice

of the senate, Romulus sent envoys amongst the surrounding nations

to ask for alliance and intermarriage on behalf of his new community.

[…] Nowhere did the embassy get a friendly hearing. […] Romulus,

disguising his resentment, made elaborate preparations for the games

in honor of equestrian Neptune, which he called Consualia. He ordered

the spectacle proclaimed to the surrounding peoples, and the Romans

began preparations, with every resource of their knowledge and ability,

to celebrate, in order to create amongst the peoples a clear and eager

expectation. […] When the time came for the show, when the peoples’

eyes and minds were together occupied, then the forceful attack arose.

The signal was given for the young Romans to carry off the virgins. A

great part of them were carried off indiscriminately, but some particularly

beautiful girls were marked out for the prime leaders, to whose servants

had been given the task to carry them to their houses.

102

102 Iam res Romana adeo erat valida ut cuilibet finitimarum civitatum bello par esset; sed penuria

mulierum hominis aetatem duratura magnitudo erat, quippe quibus nec domi spes prolis nec

cum finitimis conubia essent. […] ex consilio patrum Romulus legatos circa vicinas gentes

misit, qui societatem conubiumque novo populo peterent. […] nusquam benigne legatio audita

est. […] Romulus, aegritudinem animi dissimulans ludos ex industria parat Neptuno equestri

sollemnis; Consualia vocat. indici deinde finitimis spectaculum iubet, quantoque apparatu tum

sciebant aut poterant, concelebrant, ut rem claram exspectatamque facerent. […] ubi spectaculi

tempus venit deditaeque eo mentes cum oculis erant, tum ex composito orta vis, signoque dato

iuventus Romana ad rapiendas virgines discurrit. magna pars forte, in quem quaeque inciderat,

raptae: quasdam forma excellentes primoribus patrum destinatas ex plebe homines, quibus

datum negotium erat, domos deferebant.

Livy. Titi Livi Ab vrbe condita libri praefatio, liber primvs, Vol. 1, ed. by H. J. Edwards

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 12–14, https://books.google.com/

books?id=gsNEAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA12

74 Love and its Critics

Livy’s tale is one of a necessary action taken out of the need for self-

preservation, because Rome’s “absence of women” meant its “greatness

would last for a generation only”. Brutal and dishonest and wicked as

it was, it had a recognizable motive. The way Ovid transforms the tale,

however, it becomes an extension of the Consualia games, a game in its

own right. The women are “pay” for soldiers and Romulus is praised

for knowing how to treat military men properly. With such rewards,

the poem’s narrator—a lover, not a fighter—would be willing to enlist

right away. The journey from Livy’s earnestness to Ovid’s satire is a

comment on how far Rome has fallen—what was once a republic is now

an empire, a realm in which the emperor, far from being an establisher

of new worlds, is the enforcer of people’s bedrooms.

Later, Ovid continues the none-too-subtle undermining of Augustus,

describing his vainglorious public re-staging of the naval battles between

the Persians and Greeks as a fine place to seduce women:

Quid, modo cum belli navalis imagine Caesar

Persidas induxit Cecropiasque rates?

Nempe ab utroque mari iuvenes, ab utroque puellae

Venere, atque ingens orbis in Urbe fuit.

Quis non invenit turba, quod amaret, in illa?

Eheu, quam multos advena torsit amor!

103

When Ceasar, in the manner of a naval battle,

brought on Persian and Cecropian vessels?

Of course, young men and girls came from both seas,

Venus, the mighty world was in our city.

Who did not find one they might love in that crowd?

Alas, how many were tortured by love!

In ridiculing a mock battle by describing it as a seduction zone where

foreign flames may burn the men who get too close to them, Ovid equates

sex with conquest, and eros with war. From such a vantage point, an

empire is a vast screwing over of the world, and its emperor the screwer

in chief. The result of such accusatory descriptions was predictable:

according to Lanham, “Ovid wanted to be honest and Augustus did

103 Ovid. Ars Amatoria, 1.171–76, 24.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

not. No wonder Augustus banished him”.

104

In a dictatorship, telling

the truth can be, and often is, considered a subversive act, and “Ovid

paid a political penalty for a political crime”.

105

In the final section of Book II, the sharp satire takes a new form,

as “Ovid” becomes a character in the verse, and sets himself up as an

alternative emperor whose name will be shouted throughout the world:

Me vatem celebrate, viri, mihi dicite laudes,

Cantetur toto nomen in orbe meum.

[…]

Sed quicumque meo superarit Amazona ferro,

Inscribat spoliis “Naso magister erat”.

106

Celebrate me as a poet, men, speak my praises,

let my name be known through all the world.

[…]

But whoever shall overcome an Amazon with my steel,

let him inscribe upon his spoils, “Ovid was my master”.

And why not? According to the incisive logic of the poem, why

shouldn’t a poet be emperor of a world based on love, or at the very

least desire? But critics have been in a rush to disapprove, as “‘excess’,

‘irrelevance’, ‘narcissism’, ‘self-indulgence’, [and] ‘vacuity’”, are “the

standard accusations levelled against Ovid” and “Ovidian poetry”

107

more generally. It is nearly impossible to support such a reading of the

poet or his poetry when both are returned to the context of an imperial

dictatorship, but that doesn’t stop critics from trying:

The judgements of two influential critics may be taken as representative

of the long and dominant tradition in Ovidian scholarship, which,

although it has been challenged in recent years, remains the orthodoxy.

Wilkinson says of Ovid’s didactic poetry: “Quite apart from the sameness

of tone, there is too much crambe repetita. Surely we have heard before,

and more than once, of lovers communicating by writing on the table in

104 Richard A. Lanham. The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 63.

105 Ibid.

106 Ibid., 2.739–40, 743–44, 116.

107 Sharrock, 87.

76 Love and its Critics

wine, exchanging glances and signs, drinking from the side of the cup

where the other has drunk, and touching hands” (Wilkinson 1955: 143).

This view is echoed by Otis (1966: 18): “so many of the same themes [as

in the Amores] are repeated and so often repeated in a much less striking

way”. According to this view, the Ars is rather a heavy reworking of the

well known topoi of Latin love elegy.

108

To paraphrase the preacher of Nazareth, “the poor [in poetic spirit] we

will always have with us”. Despite those critics determined to diminish

Ovid, his poems, even at their lightest-seeming, have a serious question

to ask: why? Why must life be dominated by the Augustus Caesars of

the world—who command with soldiers and laws, who banish their

own daughters and granddaughters for adultery, and exile one of the

finest poets in the history of the world for carmen et error, a poem and

a mistake—rather than be gifted to us in all its imaginative possibility

by the Ovids and Shakespeares and Shelleys? Why should not poets, the

“unacknowledged legislators of the world”,

109

be celebrated instead of

emperors, soldiers, and all those who use the power of the sword and the

state to forbid the actions and pursuits that bring men and women joy?

Though Ovid died in exile far from Rome, his influence, his ideas, his

words, even his jokes have survived the millennia in ways that Augustus,

despite his power and the legions at his disposal, has not. The great man

who would both rule the world and banish its adulterers from his sight,

has himself been banished by death, while the poet of love and seduction,

sly satire and disrespect for the rules, lives on in his verses, and in the

works of countless other poets and writers who have been influenced by

him. Ovid “attacks unnamed detractors, censors, thunderbolt-hurlers,

who look suspiciously like Augustus”,

110

the political moralists who

condemn, and the academic critics who dismiss a body of poetic work

that celebrates love and desire against the pinched and pursed-lipped

claims of law and authority. Power and Law may have banished Ovid,

but the poet of Love and Laughter has long since had the last word.

108 Ibid., 3.

109 Percy Shelley. “A Defence of Poetry”. In Essays, Letters From Abroad, Vol.1 (London:

Edward Moxon, 1852), 49, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89000649913;vi

ew=1up;seq=77

110 Casali, “The Art of Making Oneself Hated”, 221.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

III

Love or Obedience in Virgil: Aeneas and Dido

From laughter we come to tragedy, from joy to tears. For in the Aeneid’s

story of Aeneas and Dido, readers encounter one of the best and worst

love stories the ancient world has to offer. Faced with the choice of

human love, or divine will, Dido chooses love, while Aeneas—the epic’s

hero in the most unfortunate sense of the term—chooses as the tamers of

the Song of Songs would have readers choose, and as Augustus would

have Rome choose. Pius Aeneas chooses obedience to the will and law

of the gods, and Dido is destroyed.

Having escaped from burning Troy, Aeneas and his brave but

bedraggled followers have landed at Carthage, on the North African

coast. In part, the story of Aeneas’ devastation of Dido is a poeticizing

of the military relations between Rome and Carthage in a later era,

when after many battles, Carthage is razed to the ground by Rome,

never to rise again. But in the time of the Aeneid, such conflict is a

thousand years in the future: Carthage is rising, founded by exiles

from Tyre who fled violence and bloodshed at home. Aeneas, an exile

from the Trojan war, is in need of mercy. Dido gives it. Perhaps she

shouldn’t have.

Aeneas is the perfect hero for an empire busy tightening its grip

at home while seeking to expand its reach abroad. The Aeneid is

written during the early, expansionist portion of Augustus’ time

as emperor, approximately 29–19 BCE, when “campaigning was

virtually continuous in western and southern Europe”.

111

Unlike the

later Ovid, who ridicules the puritanism of Augustus, Virgil flatters

the emperor by creating a proto-Roman hero whose prime virtue is

obedience.

112

Aeneas is not passionless, at least where love and sex

are concerned, but he prefers to direct his strength, his emotions, his

eros toward mourning for the loss of Troy and founding a new city

111 David Shotter. Rome and Her Empire (New York: Routledge, 2014), 218.

112 There is, in Virgil’s portrayal of Aeneas, very little of the spirit with which he had

once infused his character Gallus (based on his contemporary and friend Gaius

Cornelius Gallus), for whom “Love conquers all; and we must yield to love”

(“Omnia vincit amor; et nos cedamus Amori”) (Eclogue 10.69. In Virgil, 2 vols,

ed. by H. Rushton Fairclough [Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1960], 74).

78 Love and its Critics

for his descendants and those of the men who follow him. His cry,

“Oh fatherland! Troy, home of the gods!”

113

has far more passion and

pathos than does his recounting of the loss of his wife in the final battle

at Troy. Escaping with his family, Aeneas sees to the safety of his father

and son, but leaves his wife, Creusa, vulnerable:

ergo age, care pater, cervici imponere nostrae;

ipse subibo umeris nec me labor iste gravabit;

quo res cumque cadent, unum et commune periclum,

una salus ambobus erit. mihi parvus Iulus

sit comes, et longe servet vestigia coniunx.

114

Come then, dear father, upon my neck;

this task will not be too heavy for my shoulders;

However things may fall, we two have one common peril,

and we will have one salvation. My little Iulus

come with me, and at a distance let my wife follow our steps.

Having his wife follow at a distance leads to the predictable result;

Creusa is lost in the battle, killed by the Greeks:

heu misero coniunx fatone erepta Creusa

substitit, erravitne via seu lapsa resedit,

incertum; nec post oculis est reddita nostris.

nec prius amissam respexi animumue reflexi

quam tumulum antiquae Cereris sedemque sacratam

venimus: hic demum collectis omnibus una

defuit, et comites natumque virumque fefellit.

115

Ah, wretched fate snatched Creusa.

Did she stop for a while, lose the way, or slip and fall back?

I am not certain; nor afterwards was she returned to our eyes.

113 “O patria, o divum domus Ilium” 2.241. All references are from The Aeneid. In Virgil,

2 vols, ed. by H. Rushton Fairclough (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1960).

114 Ibid., 2.707–11.

115 Ibid., 2.738–44.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

Neither did I turn my mind or thought toward my lost one

until to the ancient Ceres’ hallowed home

we came; when all were gathered, she alone

was absent, lost to her son and her husband.

He does not lack emotion when describing her loss, even claiming that

he went back into the battle zone trying to find her, crying out her name

as he “rushed furiously and endlessly from house to house through the

city”.

116

However, the telling detail is that during the initial escape, he

never gave her any thought, and only realized that his wife was missing

after he had brought father and son to safety.

Aeneas is no Odysseus. Odysseus, even amid his serial philandering

and flirting with witches, goddesses, and the daughters of kings,

still longs to be reunited with Penelope, whom the goddess Calypso

describes as “your wife, she that you ever long for daily, in every

way”,

117

and for whom “he cried out, still calling forth tears, / Crying as

he held his beloved, trustworthy, and strong-minded wife”.

118

It appears

the feelings were mutual. From Penelope’s point of view, theirs was a

reunion of joy and passion: “Hers and her husband’s tears mingle, her

knees melt (that sure sign of Aphrodite’s presence), [and] she proceeds

formally to their bed with him, led by a maid with torches, as though to

renew the days of their beginnings”.

119

But far from pining for his wife,

Aeneas can barely be bothered to remember her even as they are trying

to escape from burning Troy. Later, he gives her no more thought while

falling in “love” (or lust) with Dido than he gives Dido after issuing the

orders to sail away from Carthage.

116 “quaerenti et tectis urbis sine fine furenti” (ibid., 2.771).

117 “σὴνἄλοχον,τῆςτ᾽αἰὲνἐέλδεαιἤματαπάντα”(Homer. Odyssey, 5.210. Vol. I:

Books 1–12, ed. by A. T. Murray [Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1919]).

118 “ὣς φάτο, τῷ δ᾿ ἔτι μᾶλλον ὑφ᾿ ἵμερον ὦρσε γόοιο· / κλαῖε δ᾿ ἔχων ἄλοχον

θυμαρέα,κεδνὰἰδυῖαν”(Homer. Odyssey, 23.231–32. Vol. II: Books 13–24, ed. by

A. T. Murray).

119 Jean H. Hagstrum. Esteem Enlivened by Desire: The Couple from Homer to Shakespeare

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 58.

80 Love and its Critics

Dido and Aeneas. Ancient Roman fresco (10 BC–45 AC). Pompeii, Italy.

120

The love story between the two is mostly one-sided, primarily on Dido’s

part. The deck is strangely stacked against her, as well. She falls in love

unwillingly, forced by the gods to play the role that will destroy her,

despite the fact that Juno regards Dido as dying an undeserved death.

The gods—as is their usual course in Homer, Virgil, and most Greek and

Roman mythology—play with human beings like chess pieces on a grand

game board. Dido’s passion comes over her against her will as part of an

ongoing struggle between Juno and Venus that dates all the way back to

the famous judgment of Paris, that Venus was more beautiful than Juno.

Dido is not a tragic figure in the later Senecan model, whose wounds are

often self-inflicted. No, Dido, like so many tragic figures from the earlier

Greek tradition of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, is made a victim

by the gods as they play out their petty rivalries on the human stage,

with mortals as their unwitting proxies. Dido is caught, as Hamlet would

say, between “the pass and fell incensed points / Of mighty opposites”:

121

Juno, who opposed Troy and opposes the founding of Rome, and Venus,

who aids her son Aeneas wherever and whenever possible. Venus sends

Cupid, in the guise of Aeneas’ son, to pierce Dido’s heart with the first

fatal pangs of love for Aeneas:

120 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Affreschi_romani_-_Enea_e_didone_-_

pompei.JPG

121 Hamlet, 5.2.60–61.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

Tu faciem illius noctem non amplius unam

falle dolo, et notos pueri puer indue voltus,

ut, cum te gremio accipiet laetissima Dido

regalis inter mensas laticemque Lyaeum,

cum dabit amplexus atque oscula dulcia figet,

occultum inspires ignem fallasque veneno.

122

Do you, just for this one night,

imitate his form, and boy as you are, take his familiar face,

so that, when Dido takes you into her lap

amidst the royal tables and flowing wine,

and she embraces you and kisses you sweetly,

breathe into her a hidden fire and secretly poison her.

The famous night that Aeneas and Dido spend in a cave while taking

shelter from a rainstorm, the night of their first lovemaking, is arranged

as a trap by the dueling goddesses, Juno and Venus. As Juno designs it:

venatum Aeneas unaque miserrima Dido

in nemus ire parant, ubi primos crastinus ortus

extulerit Titan radiisque retexerit orbem.

his ego nigrantem commixta grandine nimbum,

dum trepidant alae saltusque indagine cingunt,

desuper infundam et tonitru caelum omne ciebo.

diffugient comites et nocte tegentur opaca:

speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem

devenient. adero et, tua si mihi certa voluntas,

conubio iungam stabili propriamque dicabo.

hic hymenaeus erit.

123

Aeneas and unhappy Dido, as one

prepare to go hunting in the woods, where the first risings

Of brilliant Titan will have raised his rays, lighting the world.

I shall pour on them a black storm mixed with hail,

whilst the hunters run back and forth with their nets,

from above I will shake the whole sky with thunder.

122 The Aeneid, 1.683–88.

123 Ibid., 4.117–27.

82 Love and its Critics

The comrades will scatter and be covered with opaque night:

into a cave will Dido and the Trojan chief

vanish. I will be present, and, if your will is firm,

in a stable and proper marriage and wedlock,

this will be a wedding.

Once word spreads of the love affair, as “Rumor runs through Libya’s

great cities”,

124

the common people, King Iarbus (long a suitor for Dido’s

love), and the poem itself turn against the idea of the “marriage” into

which Juno has bound the pair. The people’s talk turns sour and critical,

turning the night in the cave into something sordid and “shameful”:

venisse Aenean Troiano sanguine cretum,

cui se pulchra viro dignetur iungere Dido;

nunc hiemem inter se luxu, quam longa, fovere

regnorum immemores turpique cupidine captos.

haec passim dea foeda virum diffundit in ora.

125

Aeneas is come, born of Trojan blood,

with whom in marriage fair Dido deigns to join;

now, between them, in luxury they waste the length of winter,

reigning heedlessly, enthralled by shameful desire.

These tales the foul goddess spreads through men’s mouths.

Soon enough (too soon, from Dido’s perspective), Jove orders Aeneas

to leave Carthage and sail across the Mediterranean in search of the

shores where he will lay the foundations for the “kingdom of Italy and

Rome”.

126

Immediately, Aeneas “burns to depart in flight, and relinquish

that pleasant land”,

127

strategizing not how to leave, but how to make his

excuses to Dido: “Ah, what could he do? What can he dare say now to

the furious queen / to pacify her? What opening speech could he use?”

128

Aeneas is more concerned with how to manipulate Dido into approving

of his sudden plan than he is with the effect his leaving will have on her.

124 “Libyae magnas it Fama per urbes” (ibid., 4.173).

125 Ibid., 4.191–95.

126 “regnum Italae Romanaque” (ibid., 4.275).

127 “ardet abire fuga dulcisque relinquere terras” (ibid., 4.348).

128 “heu quid agat? quo nunc reginam ambire furentem / audeat adfatu? quae prima

exordia sumat?” (ibid., 4.283–84).

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

As with Creusa, he never looks back, and she does not cross his mind,

except as an immovable anchor he must cut loose and pull away from.

The confrontation between them is heartbreaking and baffling to Dido,

but merely embarrassing for Aeneas, whose eyes are now solely fixed

on his dearly-beloved gods as he seeks to navigate the awkward final

moments of his time with yet another woman he will leave behind on

his journey. Dido begs him, uselessly, not to go:

mene fugis? per ego has lacrimas dextramque tuam te

(quando aliud mihi iam miserae nihil ipsa reliqui),

per conubia nostra, per inceptos hymenaeos,

si bene quid de te merui, fuit aut tibi quicquam

dulce meum, miserere domus labentis et istam,

oro, si quis adhuc precibus locus, exue mentem.

129

You’re running from me? By these tears and by your hand,

(since there is nothing else for my miserable self),

through our marriage, by the way our wedding took place,

if I have deserved well of you, or if there was anything

sweet about me, have mercy on a falling house, and yet,

I pray you, if there is room for prayers, change your mind.

But Aeneas, possessed by an immovable determination to obey the very

gods who have so long betrayed him and his beloved Troy, gives an

answer that sounds like little more than the It’s not you, it’s me cliché of

innumerable modern breakup scenes:

ego te, quae plurima fando

enumerare vales, numquam, regina, negabo

promeritam, nec me meminisse pigebit Elissae

dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus hos regit artus.

[…]

sed nunc Italiam magnam Gryneus Apollo,

Italiam Lyciae iussere capessere sortes;

hic amor, haec patria est.

[…]

129 Ibid., 4.314–19.

84 Love and its Critics

desine meque tuis incendere teque querelis;

Italiam non sponte sequor.

130

I will, because of many things which

you are able to recount, never, queen, deny that you

are deserving, nor shall I regret my memory of Dido

while I am mindful of myself, while breath reigns in this body.

[…]

But now of great Italy has Grynean Apollo spoken,

Italy, his Lycian lots order me to take hold of;

this must be my love, this my fatherland.

[…]

Stop inflaming both of us with your complaints;

I do not go to Italy of my own free will.

Virgil works especially hard here to make Aeneas sympathetic, despite

the fact that such a move comes at the cost of making him seem weak

and dishonest, denying the fact that he chooses to obey power—as he

once did with Priam, and as he now does with Jove. He is at pains to

deny that his relationship with Dido is a marriage—“I never held out

the conjugal torch, / nor ever pretended to such a contract”

131

—despite

the fact that Juno calls it a marriage from the very beginning. Virgil

is so eager to excuse Aeneas, in fact, that his poem blames Dido for

impropriety in getting involved in a relationship arranged by the gods

who call the action “marriage” (this, in a Rome in which Augustus

Caesar is legislating private relationships):

pronuba Iuno

dant signum; fulsere ignes et conscius aether

conubiis summoque ulularunt vertice Nymphae.

ille dies primus leti primusque malorum

causa fuit; neque enim specie famave movetur

nec iam furtivum Dido meditatur amorem:

coniugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam.

132

130 Ibid., 4.333–37, 345–47, 359–60.

131 “nec coniugis umquam / praetendi taedas aut haec in foedera veni” (ibid., 4.422–23).

132 Ibid., 4.166–72.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

Nuptial Juno

gave the signal; fires flashed in the heavens

witnessing the marriage, as Nymphs howl from the peaks.

That day was the first of death and evil,

the cause of woe; no longer does reputation concern her,

nor does Dido dream of a secret love:

she calls it marriage, and in this name covers her guilt.

Any guilt that Dido feels may come from her feeling that she has

somehow betrayed the memory of Sychaeus, her long-dead husband,

by falling in love with Aeneas:

agnosco veteris vestigia flammae.

sed mihi vel tellus optem prius ima dehiscat

[…]

ante, pudor, quam te violo aut tua iura resolvo.

133

I recognize the vestiges of the old flame.

But may the earth open for me to its depths

[…]

before, Shame, I violate you or break your law.

But guilt aside, it is not only Dido that calls the relationship between

herself and Aeneas a marriage. In this case, Aeneas, always so ready

to align himself with the will of the gods, denies what the gods affirm.

According to Macrobius (c. 400 CE), Virgil puts Dido into a completely

untenable position, violently transforming a figure of legendary

faithfulness into the passionate victim of love he portrays in the Aeneid:

[Virgil] imitated whatever, and wherever he found; so that the fourth

book of the Argonautica by Apollonius served as the model for his fourth

book of the Aeneid, upon which he almost entirely formed the tale of

Dido and Aeneas’ love on the wildly incontinent passion Medea bore

for Jason. [Virgil] so elegantly arranged this that his account of a lustful

Dido, which he and all the world knows is false, has for many centuries

maintained the appearance of truth.

134

133 Ibid., 4.23–24, 27.

134 [Virgil] quidquid ubicumque invenit imitandum; adeo ut de Argonauticorum quarto, quorum

scriptor est Apollonius, librum Aeneidos suae quartum totum paene formaverit, ad Didonem

vel Aenean amatoriam incontinentiam Medeae circa Iasonem trasferendo. quod ita elegantius

86 Love and its Critics

There is a split tradition about Dido, a pre-Virgilian tradition “that

represents her only as a leader”

135

and a post-Virgilian account in which

she has been turned into a victim of passion. In the earlier tradition,

“preserved among the fragments attributed to the Greek historian

Timaeus of Tauromenium (ca. 356–260 BCE)” Dido is no one’s victim,

but “is a heroic figure [whose] suicide is an act of defiance that testifies

to the nobility of her nature”.

136

In this story, Dido dies in order to avoid

dishonor to herself and Carthage:

With the success of the opulent wealth of Carthage, Hiarbas of the

Maxitani summoned ten African leaders in order to claim [Dido] in

marriage under threat of war. The deputies, fearing to report this to the

queen of the Carthaginians, acted falsely towards her with the news

that the king asked for and awaited one who could teach he and his

and Africans together a more cultured life; but who could be found,

who would wish to leave his relations and cross over to live among the

barbarians and wild beasts? Then, castigated by the queen, in case they

refused a hard life for the salvation of the rest of the country, to which, if

necessary, their life itself was owed, they disclosed the king’s message,

saying that she will have to act according to the precepts she gives to

others, if she wishes to her city to have security. Taken by this deceit, in

the name of Acerbas she called, for a long time and with many tears and

piteous wailings. At last she replies that she will go where the fate of her

city has summoned her. Taking three months, pyres were built in the

outer quarter of the city, and many victims mounted and were consumed

by the fires, as if she would placate the ghost of her husband, and make her

offerings to him before the wedding; then with a sword she mounted the

pyre, and looking at the people, said that she would go to her husband

just as she was instructed, and ended her life with the sword.

137

auctore digessit, ut fabula lascivientis Didonis, quam falsam novit universitas, per tot tamen

saecula speciem veritatis.

Macrobius. Saturnalia, Books 3–5, ed. by Robert A. Kaster (Loeb Classical Library,

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 408.

135 Marilynn Desmond. Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and Medieval Aeneid

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 24.

136 Ibid.

137 Cum successu rerum florentes Karthaginis opes essent, rex Maxitanorum Hiarbas decem

Poenorum principibus ad se arcessitis Elissae nuptias sub belli denuntiatione petit. Quod

legati reginae referre metuentes Punico cum ea ingenio egerunt, nuntiantes regem aliquem

poscere, qui cultiores victus eum Afrosque perdoceat; sed quem inveniri posse, qui ad barbaros

et ferarum more viventes transire a consanguineis velit? Tunc a regina castigati, si pro salute

patriae asperiorem vitam recusarent, cui etiam ipsa vita, si res exigat, debeatur, regis mandata

aperuere, dicentes quae praecipiat aliis, ipsi facienda esse, si velit urbi consultum. Hoc dolo

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

Virgil also stacks the deck against Dido by portraying her, though her

Tyrian roots and Carthaginian power, as a passionate and irrational

Eastern woman, the very model of the Parthian threat that Rome

faced on its Eastern frontiers, and a clear and contemporary reference

to the all-too-recent troubles brought upon Rome by the dalliance

between Augustus’ defeated rival Marc Antony and the Egyptian

Queen, Cleopatra. She is cast as precisely the kind of “unstable”

element (uncontrolled female desire) that Aeneas is supposedly well

rid of, and that Augustus (in the persons of his daughter Julia, and his

granddaughter Julia) will eventually banish from Rome. Her frenzied

suicide is a far cry from the resigned calm of such Romans as Cato, who

killed himself in a gesture designed to value liberty above life in the

dying days of the Roman Republic:

The night before his death Cato is calm and discusses Stoic philosophy

over dinner with his companions. […] Later that night he tries to kill

himself with his own sword—but because his hand is injured, the blow

is not quite powerful enough. His companions come to his rescue and his

wound is sewn up by a surgeon. But such is Cato’s determination that he

tears open the wound again with his bare hands […]. Cato’s bravery and

determination in taking his own life brought him immediate glory.

138

Dido, on the other hand, is portrayed as wild, out of control, made

insane with passion due to the poison of Cupid. First, she curses Aeneas,

and calls for never-ending war between the people of Carthage and the

future people of Rome:

haec precor, hanc vocem extremam cum sanguine fundo.

tum vos, o Tyrii, stirpem et genus omne futurum

exercete odiis, cinerique haec mittite nostro

capta diu Acherbae viri nomine cum multis lacrimis et lamentatione flebili invocato ad

postremum ituram se quo sua et urbis fata vocarent, respondit. In hoc trium mensium sumpto

spatio, pyra in ultima parte urbis exstructa, velut placatura viri manes inferiasque ante nuptias

missura multas hostias caedit et sumpto gladio pyram conscendit atque ita ad populum

respiciens ituram se ad virum, sicut praeceperint, dixit vitamque gladio finivit

Marcus Junianus Justinus. Epitoma Historiarum Philippicarum Pompei Trogi (Leipzig:

B. G. Teubner, 1886), VI. 1–7, 134–35), https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30

112023680843;view=1up;seq=202

138 Catherine Edwards. Death in Ancient Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press,

2007), 2.

88 Love and its Critics

munera. nullus amor populis nec foedera sunto.

exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor

qui face Dardanios ferroque sequare colonos,

nunc, olim, quocumque dabunt se tempore vires.

litora litoribus contraria, fluctibus undas

imprecor, arma armis: pugnent ipsique nepotesque.

139

This is my prayer, with these words I pour out my blood.

Then do you, O Tyrians, pursue his race, and his children

with hatred, and to my dust offer this

gift—let no love nor federation be between our peoples.

Rise from my ashes, unknown avenger

to fight with fire and sword the Dardan colonies,

now, hereafter, whenever we have the strength.

Let shore clash with shore, waves with waves clash.

This is my curse: endless war between us and their children.

Then, climbing atop the burning pyre on which she will die, she cries

out over the life she has lived, and bemoans the fate that brought Aeneas

to the shores of Carthage:

‘felix, heu nimium felix, si litora tantum

numquam Dardaniae tetigissent nostra carinae’.

dixit, et os impressa toro ‘moriemur inultae,

sed moriamur’ ait. ‘sic, sic iuvat ire sub umbras.

hauriat hunc oculis ignem crudelis ab alto

Dardanus, et nostrae secum ferat omina mortis’.

140

“I had been happy, indeed too happy, if only the

Trojan ships had never touched our shores”.

She spoke, face pressed on the bed: “We die unavenged,

but let us die. Thus, it pleases to go down to the shades.

May he drink this fire with his eyes, from far at sea, that cruel

Trojan, and carry with him omens of our death”.

139 The Aeneid, 4.621–29.

140 Ibid., 4.657–62.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

Dido’s fate, written by Virgil to glorify the authoritarian and imperial

Rome of Augustus Caesar, is to die for love. Aeneas’ fate is to live in the

annals of poetry as the ultimate symbol of those who choose obedience,

and the gods, over passion. An entire tradition of later poetry takes

Aeneas to task, including John Milton, who writes his Adam as the

founder of a world (not merely a city) who chooses love over God. This

tradition has its deepest roots in the poet who most admired Virgil’s

skill, and most despised his politics: Ovid—whose more serious side is

evident in his treatment of Dido, giving her a voice and a dignity that

Virgil denied her.

Love or Obedience in Ovid:

Aeneas, Dido, and the Critics who Dismiss

Dido is a character Ovid would (and does) sympathize with. Aeneas,

the curiously dispassionate son of the goddess of love, and the

unquestioningly obedient servant of power, is the character that

Virgil would have readers admire. We are assured by some classical

scholars that those of us who sympathize with Dido (finding Aeneas a

combination of inexplicable and abhorrent) are simply wrong, because

all Romans read the poem in favor of Aeneas: “His speech, though we

may not like it, was the Roman answer to the conflict between two

compelling forms of love, an answer such as a Roman Brutus once gave,

when he executed his two sons for treason against Rome”.

141

But what of

Ovid? What of the many Roman readers who read, enjoyed, and admired

Ovid’s verse? Were they not Romans as well? Despite Augustus, Rome

was no more monolithic in its literary and political sympathies than had

been Athens before it, or would be London after it.

Ovid’s most famous treatment of the episode is quite short, but more

in line with what might be expected from the author of the Amores than

with the author of the Aeneid. His focus is on Dido, the pain she feels at the

loss of Aeneas, and her death. Aeneas is given no more than a sidelong

glance in the few lines Ovid spends on the story in his Metamorphoses:

141 R. G. Austin. P. Vergili Maronis Aneidos Liber Quartos (Oxford: Clarendon Press

1955), 106.

90 Love and its Critics

excipit Aenean illic animoque domoque

non bene discidium Phrygii latura mariti

Sidonis; inque pyra sacri sub imagine facta

incubuit ferro deceptaque decipit omnes.

142

Aeneas received there her heart and home,

but she could not abide parting from her Phrygian husband;

on a fire intended for sacred rites, she fell upon her sword,

deceiving all, as she had been deceived.

Ovid’s treatment of the relationship, described as a marriage, takes on a

more expansive and unqualifiedly pro-Dido tone in The Heroides, which

appear to be “an early work, contemporary with the earliest Amores”.

143

If so, the sensitivity displayed by a poet still in his twenties makes it

hard to understand what those critics who regard Ovid as having

“excessive desire for himself”

144

are seeing when they read his work.

Far from reflecting anything like narcissism, Ovid’s treatment of Dido

“constitutes one of the earliest surviving reactions to the Aeneid, and one

of the boldest [and most] scathing about Aeneas”.

145

A letter written from Dido’s point of view, Ovid’s Heroides 7, “Dido

to Aeneas”, is one of the single most heart-wrenching things that ever

came from his pen, and gives the lie to scholarly insistence that the

Roman answer to Dido would have been the one Virgil gave to Aeneas.

Ovid writes Dido as someone who sees Aeneas, sees through the pro-

imperial Roman propaganda of the Augustan regime, and no more

reads things the single right Roman way than Ovid does himself:

In the Aeneid, Dido seems never quite able to accept that wandering has

now become a fundamental part of Aeneas’ character. […] Ovid’s Dido,

by contrast, can see that Aeneas is the kind of man who needs to keep

moving, and who avoids facing up to the things he has done by simply

142 Ovid. Metamorphoses. 14.78–82 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998), 332.

143 Peter E. Knox. “The Heroides: Elegaic Voices”. In Brill’s Companion to Ovid, ed. by

Barbara Weiden Boyd (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 120.

144 Sharrock, 293.

145 Richard Tarrant. “Ovid and Ancient Literary History”. In The Cambridge Companion to

Ovid, ed. by Philip R. Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 25.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

leaving town. This Dido sees Aeneas as addicted to wandering, and

doomed to the repetition of his mistakes.

146

Ovid’s Dido does not go wild with anger as does Virgil’s, does not call

down curses, and make predictions of catastrophic future wars; she

merely tells Aeneas, sadly, that he will never find another love like hers:

quando erit, ut condas instar Karthaginis urbem

et videas populos altus ab arce tuos?

omnia ut eveniant, nec di tua vota morentur,

unde tibi, quae te sic amet, uxor erit?

Uror ut inducto ceratae sulpure taedae,

ut pia fumosis addita tura rogis.

Aeneas oculis vigilantis semper inhaeret;

Aenean animo noxque diesque refert.

ille quidem male gratus et ad mea munera surdus

et quo, si non sim stulta, carere velim.

non tamen Aenean, quamvis male cogitat, odi,

sed queror infidum questaque peius amo.

147

When will you establish a city like Carthage,

and see the people from your own high citadel?

Should all take place exactly in the event as in your prayers,

where will you find the lover who loves as I do?

I burn, like waxen torches covered with sulfur,

as the pious incense placed upon a smoking altar.

Aeneas, to you my waking eyes were always drawn;

Aeneas lives in my heart both night and day.

But he is ungrateful, and spurns my gifts,

and were I not a fool, I would be rid of him.

Yet, however ill he thinks of me, I cannot hate him.

I complain of his faithlessness, but my love grows worse.

Ovid also catches Aeneas’s odd remark about having not given his wife

a single thought while helping his father and son escape the fires of

146 Rebecca Armstrong. Ovid and His Love Poetry (London: Bloomsbury Academic,

2005), 111.

147 Ovid. “Heroides VII: Dido to Aeneas”. In Ovid: Heroides and Amores, ed. by Grant

Showerman, 34, ll. 19–30.

92 Love and its Critics

Troy. He gives Dido a sharp, yet gentle response, far from the raving to

which Virgil subjects her. In her Ovidian letter, she reproves Aeneas for

his hypocrisy to his gods and to his previous wife:

quid puer Ascanius, quid di meruere Penates?

ignibus ereptos obruet unda deos?

sed neque fers tecum, nec, quae mihi, perfide, iactas,

presserunt umeros sacra paterque tuos.

omnia mentiris; neque enim tua fallere lingua

incipit a nobis, primaque plector ego:

si quaeras ubi sit formosi mater Iuli—

occidit a duro sola relicta viro!

148

What has little Ascanius done to deserve this fate?

Snatched from the fire only to be drowned in the waves?

No, neither are you bearing them with you, false boaster;

your shoulders neither bore the sacred relics, nor your father.

You lie about everything; and I am not the first victim of your lies,

nor I am the first to suffer a blow from you:

do you ever ask, where Iulus’ mother is?

She died because her unfeeling husband left her behind!

In remarking that she is not the first that Aeneas has abandoned, Dido

makes it clear that she regards herself as his second left-behind wife, a

critique that Ovid employs both here and in the Metamorphoses to reject

Aeneas’ Virgilian excuse that he had never married her. Finally, describing

the form her death will take, Dido places the blame squarely on Aeneas:

scribimus, et gremio Troicus ensis adest;

perque genas lacrimae strictum labuntur in ensem,

qui iam pro lacrimis sanguine tinctus erit.

quam bene conveniunt fato tua munera nostro!

instruis impensa nostra sepulcra brevi.

nec mea nunc primum feriuntur pectora telo:

ille locus saevi vulnus amoris habet.

149

148 Ibid., 88, ll. 77–86.

149 Ibid., 96, ll. 184–90.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

I write, and in my bosom the Trojan sword is here;

over my cheeks the tears run, onto the drawn sword,

which soon will be stained with blood rather than tears.

How fitting is your gift in my fateful hour!

You bring my death so cheaply.

Nor is now the first time my heart feels a weapon’s blow:

it already bears the cruel wounds of love.

Ovid, unlike Virgil, doesn’t lift a finger to make readers sympathize

with Aeneas. Quite the opposite—he portrays his abandonment of Dido

as the betrayal of life as it is lived by ordinary human beings who are

neither emperors, nor the epic heroes meant to justify them:

Ovid transfers Dido’s story from an account of Rome’s imperial origins

to a collection of letters written by classical heroines lamenting erotic

betrayals. A more intimate, cyclical view of history as repeated instances

of male treachery replaces Virgil’s portrait of it as a linear progress from

Troy to Actium. From this feminine perspective, the crucial events are not

the rise and fall of empires but the births, deaths, and love affairs of private

individuals. By disregarding Aeneas’s public accomplishments, Ovid

undermines the official justification for Dido’s abandonment. If Aeneas

is a hero according to one account, he is a traitor according to the other.

150

It should come as no surprise, however, that among Ovid’s critics are

those who would rather sympathize with Augustus, and his proxy figure

Aeneas, than with Dido. Lancelot Patrick Wilkinson dismisses Dido in

Heroides 7, and, in so doing, very neatly embodies a too-common condition

among literary critics—the cultivated inability to respond emotionally to

poetry (except, perhaps, with the impatience of a reader no longer able

to respond other than as a literary-reference-detection machine):

[T]he more Ovid tries to excel, the less he succeeds. The forced epigrams

creak […]. We are not really convinced when Virgil’s Dido, exaggerating

a curse that had come naturally in Homer, less naturally in Catullus, raves

that Aeneas was the son of a Caucasian crag, nurtured by Hyrcanian

tigresses; still less, when Ovid’s Dido attributes his origin to stone and

mountain-oaks, wild beasts or, better still, the sea in storm as now it is.

150 John Watkins. The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1995), 31.

94 Love and its Critics

[…] So it goes on, argument after weary argument, conceit after strained

conceit (to our way of thinking), for close on to two hundred lines.

151

Here we have a glimpse inside the mind of a critic who, recounting

“argument after weary argument”, is no longer able, or willing—so

impressed is he by the Virgilian virtues of warfare and obedience—to

respond to anything in poetry which is not immediately redolent of

masculine blood and iron.

Ovid was never the kind of poet an admirer of power and empire

would find amenable, and such admiration is amply represented in the

critical literature. For example, Howard Jacobson argues that “Ovid’s

[…] inability to separate out his personal feelings from the mythical

situation is one reason why this poem fails”.

152

Here a literary critic

points to a poet and says that the poet’s “inability” to get beyond

“personal feelings” is a reason for poetic failure. It is difficult to think

of a more perfect illustration of the unbridgeable chasm that often

seems to separate poetry and its critics. But more than his “feelings”,

for Jacobson it is Ovid’s politics that represent his real failing: “Ovid

was congenitally averse to the Vergilian world-view and quite unable to

sympathize with a Weltenschauung that could exalt grand, abstract—not

to mention divine—undertakings over simple individual, human and

personal considerations”.

153

This is an extraordinary argument, brutal

in its frank dismissal of the value of individual human life: Ovid was

wrong to the extent that he did not value empire over the individual heart; and

so, too, are you. For Jacobson, Heroides 7 is merely an agon, a struggle of

one poet with another, “Ovid waging war against Vergil”. Ovid, just as

those who admire him, “is doomed to defeat from the start because of

his incapacity and unwillingness to appreciate the Vergilian position”.

154

Note the weasel word, appreciate. Not understand and reject: Ovid failed,

as do readers for whom Ovid’s treatment of Dido is more appealing than

Virgil’s, because of a failure to agree with and align with the obvious

rightness of the imperial, the “grand, abstract [and] divine”, rather than

the “individual, human and personal”.

151 L. P. Wilkinson. Ovid Recalled (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 93.

152 Howard Jacobson. Ovid’s Heroidos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 90.

153 Ibid., 90.

154 Ibid.

2. Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido

But even critics not quite so imperially inclined find reason to

dismiss Ovid’s Dido: for David Scott Wilson-Okamura, “[c]ompared

with Virgil’s Dido, Ovid’s Dido (in Heroides 7) is a simplification. A

mere victim, she is sad, but somehow not tragic—not tragic because not

strong. We pity her more and care about her less”.

155

For such critics,

compared with the martial glories of Virgil’s Aeneas, and even the

rage of Virgil’s Dido, the quiet, sad, but ultimately not-to-be-deceived

understanding of Ovid’s Dido offers too little in the way of excitement

or what is mistaken for strength. But Ovid’s Dido is much stronger

than Virgil’s, for she sees what Aeneas really is (and by extension, what

Rome and its servants really are, what any empire and its servants, even

its academic servants, really are). Such critics ignore a crucial point,

since the “difference between Virgil’s Dido and Ovid’s illuminates the

differences in style and politics between epic and epistle. […] In Ovid,

national glory is irrelevant […]”.

156

All too many (primarily male) literary

critics condescendingly dismiss Dido in the fashion of W. S. Anderson,

who writes of what he calls “a contrast between a heroic and a charming

Dido”,

157

then goes on rather back-handedly to credit Ovid for freeing

Dido “from the grandeur and majesty Virgil sought” while giving her

“arguments [that] tend to produce an impression of a charming, even

coquettish woman of passion”.

158

If you listen carefully there, you can

hear the tsk tsk being delivered along with a pat on the head. But as so

often, the critic says more about himself here than about the poet or the

poem. Perhaps it is ever thus.

For Ovid, and for many of his readers, “[y]ou cannot leave Dido

behind. She will not oblige by sacrificing the private life, the life of

feelings, to the greater glory of Rome”.

159

And yet, from a practical

and political point of view, perhaps Ovid should have left her behind.

Perhaps the poet erred in writing his Dido as he did. In all likelihood, it

was at least partly Ovid’s own poetry, perhaps even his letter from Dido

to Aeneas, that got him into trouble with the imperial dictator. It could

155 David Scott Wilson-Okamura. Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2010), 234.

156 Linda S. Kauffman. Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1986), 48.

157 W. S. Anderson. “The Heroides”. In Ovid, ed. by J. W. Binns (London: Routledge,

1973), 60.

158 Ibid., 61.

159 Lanham, 63.

96 Love and its Critics

well be that “Ovid’s version of an impius Aeneas predisposed Augustus

against him and the Ars, was, as it were, the straw that broke the camel’s

back”.

160

I. K. Horváth tells readers “to take a closer look at Heroides 7,

the so-called Dido-letter, which was, in our opinion, written largely to

offend and annoy Augustus, and is usually dismissed with the simple

statement that in Ovid, ‘Pius’ Aeneas is a ‘worthless liar’”.

161

If it is true that Ovid was making a deliberate jibe at Augustus and the

Roman myth of Aeneas by writing from the point of view of a betrayed

and abandoned Carthaginian queen, then we have in “Dido to Aeneas”

a powerful example of love and its poetry standing up to power and

saying “No”. In giving Aeneas no reply to Dido’s words, the poet of

love, as opposed to imperial piety, throws his weight behind Dido. And

so have countless readers and poets since.

160 Jacobson, 90, n. 26.

161 den VII. Gesang der Heroides näher ins Auge zu fassen, den sogenannten Dido-Brief, der

unserer Überzeugung nach in hohem Masse dazu angetan war, bei Augustus Anstoss und

Ärgernis zu erregen, und der zumeist mit der einfachen Feststellung dessen abgetan wird, dass

aus dem “pius” Aeneas bei Ovid ein “nichtswürdiger Eidbrüchiger” wird.

I. K. Horvath. “Impius Aeneas”. Acta Antiqua: Academiae Scientarum Hungaricae, ed.

by A. Dobrovits, J. Harmatta, and G. Y. Moravcsik. Book 6, Vols 3–4 (1958), 390,

http://real-j.mtak.hu/441/1/ACTAANTIQUA_06.pdf

3. Love and its Absences in

Late Latin and Greek Poetry

Love in the Poetry of Late Antiquity: Latin

After Virgil and Ovid, the poetry of love begins to fade into the

background of the literary scene. Many of the later Latin poets, like

Claudian and Sidonius of the late fourth and the fifth centuries, follow

Lucan rather than Ovid, in a poetic tradition that puts love aside

entirely: “Lucan’s poem, programmatically, declares the absence of

‘love’ at the outset. The Bellum Civile has no ‘love’. It does not have an

Iliadic part […] or an Odyssean part. It has only war”.

Lucan’s epic The

Civil War (or Pharsalia) is a lengthy account of the defeat of Pompey the

Great by Julius Caesar, whose victory at the battle of Pharsalus in 48

BCE put Rome on the path to the empire it would hold for centuries:

“in the Pharsalia [Lucan] universalized his personal grievance into all

Rome’s, and therefore the world’s, loss of libertas […] to the whimsy

of a Caesar”.

Though Lucan was not politically sympathetic either to

Pompey or to Caesar, being instead a great admirer of Cato (a staunch

defender of the old Roman Republic), he looks back with an odd

nostalgia to the saner despot of the previous century. Lucan’s poem is

1 Sergio Casali. “The Bellum Civile as an Anti-Aeneid”. In Brill’s Companion to Lucan,

ed. by Paolo Asso (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 84.

2 Patrick McCloskey and Edward Phinney, Jr. “Ptolemaeus Tyrannus: The

Typification of Nero in the Pharsalia”. Hermes, 96 (1968), 80.

98 Love and its Critics

one in which “two incompatible attitudes are presented […] at least as

long as Lucan remained in Nero’s circle: not only does he praise him, he

does so against his own political beliefs”.

On the other hand, Lucan “did not object to monarchy, but to severe

and despotic tyranny, as practiced in the Hellenized East and in Rome

during Nero’s later years. In the Pharsalia, tyranny was exemplified

by Caesar and Alexander. Its emblem was the sword”.

Julius Caesar

serves Lucan as “the prototype of the tyrant Nero [… though] Caesar

had more virtues than Lucan cared or was able to attribute to Nero”.

And yet, despite his oddly ambivalent attitude toward Nero, Lucan’s

love for Rome, and his longing for the old days of the Republic, shine

through the poem’s portrayal of a charismatic Cato, the last line of

defence, protecting a freedom Lucan had never known:

Actum Romanis fuerat de rebus, et omnis

Indiga servitii fervebat litore plebes:

Erupere ducis sacro de pectore voces:

“Ergo pari voto gessisti bella, iuventus,

Tu quoque pro dominis, et Pompeiana fuisti,

Non Romana manus? quod non in regna laboras,

Quod tibi, non ducibus, vivis morerisque, quod orbem

Adquiris nulli, quod iam tibi vincere tutum est,

Bella fugis

[…]

nunc patriae iugulos ensesque negatis,

Cum prope libertas?

[…]

O famuli turpes, domini post fata prioris

Itis ad heredem.

3 Nigel Holmes. “Nero and Caesar: Lucan 1.33–66”. Classical Philology, 94: 1 (January

1999), 80, https://doi.org/10.1086/449419

4 McCloskey and Phinney, 82.

5 Ibid., 83.

6 Lucan. The Civil War, 9.253–61, 264–65, 274–75, ed. by J. D. Duff (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1962), 522, 524.

3. Love and its Absences in Late Latin and Greek Poetry

The campaign for Rome was nearly ended, and the mob,

on fire for servitude, swarmed across the beach.

Then from the leader’s sacred breast, these words burst forth:

“So did you young men go to war, fighting for the same vows,

defending the masters—and were you the troops of Pompey,

and not of Rome? Now that you no longer labor for a tyrant;

now that your lives and deaths, belong to you, not your leaders;

now that you fight for no one else but yourselves, now you

fly from the war,

[…]

now you deny your country your swords and throats

when freedom is near?

[…]

Cowardly slaves! Your former master has met his fate,

and you go to serve his heir”.

Lucan, who was eventually drawn into a plot to assassinate Nero,

established a pattern, with Pharsalia, of celebrating the greater glories of

an unrecoverable Roman past, longing for a world he portrayed as more

civilized than the present age. At the same time, he perversely praises

the dictator Nero—whom modern historians call “a Caesar worse

than Caesar, a tyrant whose vices were compounded by the petulant

inhumanity of a childlike man who acted thirteen even when he was as

old as thirty-two”

—by describing him as the glorious final goal toward

which all Roman history had been striving:

Quod si non aliam uenturo fata Neroni

[…]

Multum Roma tamen debet ciuilibus armis

Quod tibi res acta est. te, cum statione peracta

Astra petes serus, praelati regia caeli

Excipiet gaudente polo: seu sceptra tenere

Seu te flammigeros Phoebi conscendere currus

Telluremque nihil mutato sole timentem

Igne uago lustrare iuuet, tibi numine ab omni

Cedetur, iurisque tui natura relinquet

Quis deus esse uelis, ubi regnum ponere mundi.

7 McCloskey and Phinney, 87.

8 Lucan, 1.33, 44–52, 25, 27.

100 Love and its Critics

Yet, if fate could in no other way bring Nero,

[…]

much will Rome owe to these civil wars

because they were conducted for you. When your task is done,

and you go to seek the stars, the palaces of heaven will be yours,

heaven will be joyful: and whether you hold a sceptre

or choose to ride Phoebus’ fiery chariot

circling with moving fire the undisturbed earth,

by the light of fire you will be given power, from all

granted to you, and nature will leave you to decide

what god to be, and where to put your universal throne.

We still see this combination of nostalgia and perversity nearly four

centuries later in the work of Claudian, whose panegyrics to a failing

Rome, and its forgettable (and essentially forgotten) ruler Honorius,

show how far poets had declined into grateful subservience since the

days of the banished Ovid:

Agnoscisne tuos, princeps venerande, penates?

haec sunt, quae primis olim miratus in annis

patre pio monstrante puer

[…]

teque rudem vitae, quamvis diademate necdum

cingebare comas, socium sumebat honorum

purpureo fotum gremio, parvumque triumphis

imbuit et magnis docuit praeludere fatis.

et linguis variae gentes missique rogatum

foedera Persarum proceres cum patre sedentem

hac quondam videre domo positoque tiaram

summisere genu.

Do you recognize your house, adored Prince?

It is the same that first you marveled at in the years of old

When your pious Father, showed it to you as a child.

[…]

Though your life was yet rude, and the crown had not yet

9 Claudian. “Panegyric on the Sixth Consulship of the Emperor Honorius”. 28.53–

55, 65–76. Claudian: Vol. II, ed. by Maurice Platnauer (Loeb Classical Library,

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 78.

101

3. Love and its Absences in Late Latin and Greek Poetry

enclosed your head, your father shared his honors,

his royal purple, fondling you in his lap, sharing his triumphs,

teaching you, in your youth, the overture to your mighty destiny.

Peoples of different nations and languages sent requests,

Persian nobles sought treaties while sitting with your father,

but having once seen the crown on your head,

they also bent their knees to you.

One can imagine Ovid’s disdain for such flattery (even Virgil might

find this level of obsequiousness embarrassing). For Claudian “no

exaggeration, however gross, suggested to him that here he must, for

the sake of decency, draw the line”.

If it seems that the purpose of

poetry in the Roman world of the early fifth century (404 CE) was the

unseemly celebration of mediocrity in power, that is because of work

like Claudian’s fawning poem to Honorius, the first Roman Emperor to

see Rome sacked during his reign:

The ambitious Alaric comprehended Honorius’ feebleness and again

invaded Italy, intending to march on Rome. At the time, Honorius

presided over the imperial court from a town on the Adriatic coast,

Ravenna, surrounded by great protective marshes […]. Alaric besieged

Rome three times between 408 and 410, [and] in 410 venerable Rome

finally fell.

But later fifth-century poets would not fail to rise (or sink) to the

challenge represented by Claudian’s flattery. Sidonius Appolinaris,

the fifth-century Bishop of Auvergne, writes his Carmen II, or Panegyric

on Anthemius to address the late-fifth century ruler (the Augustus)

of a nearly-collapsed Western Roman Empire. F. J. E. Raby describes

Sidonius as “the most distinguished literary figure of his day”, famous

for “his panegyrics on successive emperors”, before noting that “the

poems themselves are poor in content”, though they have an “ineffectual

ingenuity”.

It is not hard to tell why: Sidonius’s work, like Claudian’s,

is pure propaganda designed to prop up a weak ruler:

10 F. J. E. Raby. A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1934), 90.

11 William E. Dunstan. Ancient Rome (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,

2011), 515.

12 F. J. E. Raby. A History of Christian-Latin Poetry: From the Beginnings to the Close of the

Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 80, 81.

102 Love and its Critics

Claudian’s panegyrics have been defined as propaganda, and Sidonius’

panegyrics certainly have a definite political purpose, but […] an

important fact should always be borne in mind: Claudian wrote his

imperial panegyrics for an apparently established dynasty, [while] Sidonius

was writing half a century later and lived in a period of political chaos.

By Sidonius’s time, Rome had long since begun its decline. But Sidonius

was loyal to the bitter end, presenting “what remained of the empire as

a model society that was worthy of unquestioning loyalty. To be loyal to

Rome was to be loyal to civilization itself”.

Yet Rome, and its civilization,

had passed its peak long before Sidonius was born. Diocletian had

split the Empire into western and eastern portions in 285 CE, while

Constantine had transferred the center of real power from Rome to

Constantinople sometime between 324 and 330 CE. Since the move

east, the west had become increasingly vulnerable to northern invaders,

such as Alaric in 410, and by the time of Sidonius, it was under foreign

domination: “The years from 456 to 472 saw the Roman west under

the virtual rule of a German named Flavius Ricimer, a Suevian general

whose maternal grandfather had ruled as a Visigothic king. Ricimer

made and unmade a series of puppet emperors occupying the Ravenna

throne”,

one of whom was Anthemius. But despite Anthemius’s status

as Ricimer’s pawn, Sidonius addresses this inconsequential ruler as if he

were the great Augustus Caesar himself:

Auspicio et numero fasces, Auguste, secundos

erige et effulgens trabealis mole metalli

annum pande novum consul vetus ac sine fastu

scribere bis fastis; quamquam diademate crinem

fastigatus eas umerosque ex more priorum

includat Sarrana chlamys, te picta togarum

purpura plus capiat, quia res est semper ab aevo

rara frequens consul, tuque o cui laurea, lane,

annua debetur, religa torpore soluto

13 Lynette Watson. “Representing the Past, Redefining the Future: Sidonius

Appolinaris’ Panegyrics of Avitus and Anthemius”. In The Propaganda of Power: The

Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity, ed. by Mary Whitby (Boston: Brill, 1998), 181.

14 Peter Brown. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of

Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 404.

15 Dunstan, 518.

103

3. Love and its Absences in Late Latin and Greek Poetry

quavis fronde comas, subita nee luce pavescas

principis aut rerum credas elementa moveri.

nil natura novat: sol hie quoque venit ab ortu.

Your fortunes, Augustus, and your second fasces,

take up, and in your ceremonial robe gleaming with gold,

open, as a veteran consul, the new year; without scorn

write your name again in the rolls; though the diadem in your hair,

and your sloping shoulders, are like those of your predecessors

who wore Tyrian robes, your consul’s togas painted

purple might please you more, for since Rome’s earliest years

repeated consulships are rare; and you, Janus, whose laurel

is due to you annually, bind up your weariness,

bind up your hair with leaves, do not give in to sudden fear,

or imagine the elements are all in motion.

Nature is unchanged: the sun rises in the East, but also here.

There is something absurd in lauding a weak western Augustus in an

era in which power has long since flowed east to Constantinople (where

the sun of wealth and power really rises in Sidonius’ era).

No one

there likely knew or cared much about the rump emperors of the feeble

and abandoned west. In all likelihood, no one outside an increasingly

irrelevant Rome would ever have heard or read the propaganda

produced by either Claudian or Sidonius: “whether or not Claudian

found many readers in the East, his propaganda is not likely to have

had much more effect there than communist propaganda in western

capitals today”.

After such unseemly adulation of past power in a perilously fragile

present, the rest is silence. By 476, with the deposition of the western

Emperor Romulus by Flavius Odoacer, who proceeded to call himself

(and reign as) the first king of Italy, the west fell into irrelevance. The

16 Sidonius. “Panegyric on Anthemius”, 2.1–12. In Poems and Letters. 2 Vols, ed. by W.

B. Anderson (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1963), 1: 5, 7.

17 Sidonius seems to have known this, as “he dated his death by the reign of the

eastern emperor, Zeno. Sidonius considered Zeno, as emperor at Constantinople,

to be the sole surviving head of the legitimate Roman empire” (Brown, 406).

18 Alan Cameron. Claudian: Poetry and Propaganda at the Court of Honorius (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1970), 246.

104 Love and its Critics

poems of praise written by a fifth-century bishop seem, in retrospect,

like insincere love letters written to a dying world, as the age of secular

civilization was about to begin its long struggle with the western

Church Sidonius served. Theology would soon begin to dominate Latin

writing, a development reflected in much of the new Christian poetry

of the period. Christianity comes to have a transformative effect (and

not often for the better) on both Latin and later vernacular poetry; its

influence can be seen initially in the poetry of Prudentius, a Roman

Christian of the fourth century. His Hymnus Ante Somnum (Hymn Before

Sleep) is representative:

Fluxit labor diei,

redit et quietis hora,

blandus sopor vicissim

fessos relaxat artus.

[…]

Corpus licet fatiscens

iaceat recline paullum,

Christum tamen sub ipso

meditabimur sopore.

The day’s labor has flowed past,

and the quiet hours return,

the charms of sleep, in turn,

relax our weary limbs.

[…]

The weary body may

recline a short while,

yet in Christ himself

our sleeping thoughts will be.

Rather than the idea of human love being introduced after “the day’s

labor has flowed past” (as one might expect in Ovid), the turn here is

away from the human and toward the divine. This turn is even more

prominent in the sixth-century poet Venantius Fortunatus, who may

19 Prudentius. “Hymnus Ante Somnum”. In Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Vol. 59, ed.

by Jacques Paul Migne (Paris: Apud Garnier Fratres, 1855), cols. 831–41, ll. 9–12,

149–52, https://books.google.com/books?id=jnzYAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PT325

105

3. Love and its Absences in Late Latin and Greek Poetry

well represent the high point of artistic achievement in the Christian

Latin poetry of the period. His hymn, Vexilla Regis, is “one of the first

creations of purely medieval religious feeling”,

a sentiment expressed

in words of joy over a human sacrifice. There is no trace here of the

spirit of Ovid, or the Song of Songs, as all emotion is directed toward

the heavens:

Vexilla regis prodeunt,

fulget crucis mysterium,

quo carne carnis conditor

suspensus est patíbulo.

[…]

Salve ara, salve victima

de passionis gloria,

qua vita mortem pertulit

et morte vitam reddidit.

The Royal banner advances,

the mystical Cross glows,

where the maker of flesh, flesh was made,

suspended on the gallows pole.

[…]

Hail the altar, hail the victim

of the glorious passion,

by which life suffered death,

and life was delivered from death.

Here, poetry serves as a vehicle for worship, a means through which

imagination and emotion can be “channeled, reformulated, and

controlled” away from the here and toward the hereafter. At this point,

poetry is approaching the condition Plato once envisioned, in which

“only hymns to the gods and poems to great men”

can be written. Here

20 Raby, 89.

21 Venantius Fortunatus. Venanti Honori Clementiani Fortunati Presbyteri Italici Opera

Poetica, ed. by Frederick Leo (Berlin: Apud Weidmannos, 1881), 34–35, ll. 1–4, 29–32,

https://archive.org/stream/venantihonoricl00unkngoog#page/n68

22 “μόνον ὕμνους θεοῖς καὶ ἐγκώμια τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς ποιήσεως” (Republic 607a. In

Plato: Republic. Books 6–10, ed. by Christopher Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy

[Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013], 436).

106 Love and its Critics

also we can see the way in which love poetry has often been redirected

and repurposed, not only by such commentators and critics as Akiba

and Origen, but by poets working in the spirit of their ideas (Dante will

be one of the pre-eminent examples of this phenomenon). Christian-

themed Latin poetry such as that of Prudentius and Fortunatus

remained popular

despite the failed attempts of Italian humanists like

Pietro Bembo in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to revive Latin

as the dominant language of secular poetry.

Throughout the Europe

of Bembo’s time, and long before, many of the most talented writers

of love poetry had shifted to the vernacular,

in a creative and poetic

mood that started with the eleventh-century poets of the area we now

know as the South of France.

There are, however, some notable exceptions to the overall trend.

Among them is the fourth-century poet Ausonius (from Bordeaux),

who wrote a wide variety of verse: descriptions of everyday life (the

Ephemeris), epitaphs, idylls (the most famous of which is a loving

description of the Mosel region in Germany, the Mosella), but perhaps

the single most memorable piece he ever wrote was included among his

epigrams, a poem called Ad Uxorem (To My Wife). Here, he celebrates

love and the wife he would lose all too soon upon her death at the age

of twenty-seven:

23 Vexilla Regis was “composed for the the solemn reception of [a] special relic of the

Holy Cross sent by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justin II to Saint Radegund for

a convent of nuns she had founded near Poitiers, and [it is] now [2010] used in

the liturgy for Passiontide” (Gabriel Díaz Patri. “Poetry in the Latin Liturgy”. In

The Genius of the Roman Rite: Historical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspectives on Catholic

Liturgy, ed. by Uwe Michael Lang [Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2010], 45–82, 57)

24 Bembo’s poetry did not have the lasting appeal of the vernacular work of the time,

and in the estimate of a later scholar, it was at least partly because Bembo’s Latin

poetry has “more elegance than vigour”, resulting in a verse that seems “polished

and cold” (John Edwin Sandys. A History of Classical Scholarship Vol. II: From the

Revival of Learning to the End of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, France, England and

the Netherlands [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903], 114, 115, https://

archive.org/stream/historyofclassic02sandiala#page/114).

25 The theoretical justification for this move appears first in Dante: “[t]his concern

first appears in La Vita Nuova, where Dante informs the reader that what drew

him and Guido Cavalcanti together was their agreement that this work would

be written entirely in the vernacular” (Richard J. Quinones. “Dante Alighieri”.

In Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, ed. by Christopher Kleinhenz [New York:

Routledge, 2004], 281).

107

3. Love and its Absences in Late Latin and Greek Poetry

uxor, vivamus quod viximus et teneamus

nomina quae primo sumpsimus in thalamo,

nec ferat ulla dies, ut commutemur in aevo,

quin tibi sim iuvenis tuque puella mihi.

Nestore sim quamvis provectior aemulaque annis

vincas Cumanam tu quoque Deiphoben,

nos ignoremus quid sit matura senectus:

scire aevi meritum, non numerare decet.

Wife, let us live as we have lived and hold fast

to those names we first took privately,

and not be changed by transporting time.

Why should I not be youthful, you a maiden in years?

Though I should live longer than Nestor,

though you should outstrip Cumaean Sibyl,

let us be ignorant of maturity and age,

and know Time’s worth, not count its years.

Remember this poem, when we later encounter theological and academic

critics who deride husbands for “uxoriousness”, or being too much in

love with their wives (and too little in love with God). Remember too,

the pain Ausonius describes feeling—a full thirty-six years later—as he

remembers his wife Sabina:

te iuvenis primis luxi deceptus in annis

perque novem caelebs te fleo Olympiadas,

nec licet obductum senio sopire dolorem;

semper crudescit nam mihi paene recens.

[…]

…tu mihi semper ades.

In my youth, I mourned for you, cheated of the years,

and I have wept, unmarried, for nine Olympiads.

Growing old has not obscured or dulled my sorrow;

26 “Ad Uxorem”, Epigram 20. In Ausonius: Epigrams. Text with Introduction and

Commentary, ed. by Nigel M. Kay (London: Duckworth, 2001), 45.

27 Ausonius. “Attusia Lucana Sabina Uxor”, Parentalia IX. In Ausonius. Vol. I: Books

1–17, ed. by Hugh G. Evelyn-White [Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1919], 70, ll. 7–10, 18.

108 Love and its Critics

for me, the pain ever grows, always recent.

[…]

…you are always with me.

These lines were written “thirty-six years after [Sabina’s] death, when

Ausonius was seventy years old; yet the wound caused by her loss is

still fresh, and time, which to others brings relief, has but intensified his

sorrow”.

This is not a poem that speaks only of poetry itself.

Far from being merely conventional figures, “some of Latin amatory

poetry’s addressees probably were based on real people”, and here

we have a perfect example: “Ausonius’s uxor […] is no figment of his

imagination: she is in fact his wife, nor is Epigram 20 the only occasion

on which he refers to her. The ninth poem of his Parentalia, a collection

of epitaphs for dead family members, tells of her death at the age of

twenty-seven”.

In referencing Catullus’ Fifth Ode (Vivamus mea

Lesbia), “Ausonius’s matrimonial love poem is […] noteworthy for its

engagement with an inherently non-matrimonial tradition”,

a note

that we will hear again, in different ways, in both Shakespeare and John

Donne, over a thousand years later.

The most famous examples of later Latin love poetry, however, do

not appear for centuries after the periods of Claudian, Sidonius, and

Ausonius. Alcuin, the late eighth-to early ninth-century poet and scholar

in the court of Charlemagne, writes some curiously passionate verses to

male friends. John Boswell argues that a “distinctly erotic element […]

is notable in the circle of clerical friends presided over by Alcuin at the

court of Charlemagne. […] The prominence of love in Alcuin’s writings,

all of which are addressed to males, is striking”.

One notable example

is found in the opening lines of Pectus amor nostrum penetravit flamma:

Pectus amor nostrum penetravit flamma

Atque calore novo semper inardet amor.

28 Sister Marie José Byrne. Prolegomena to an Edition of the Works of Decimus Magnus

Ausonius. New York: Columbia University Press, 1916, 12.

29 Robert J. Sklenár. “Ausonius’ Elegiac Wife: Epigram 20 and the Traditions of Latin

Love Poetry”. The Classical Journal, 101: 1 (October-November 2005), 52.

30 Ibid., 51.

31 John Boswell. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western

Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1980), 188–89.

109

3. Love and its Absences in Late Latin and Greek Poetry

Nec mare, nec tellus, montes nec silva vel alpes

Huic obstare queunt aut inhibere viam,

Quo minus, alme pater, semper tua viscera lingat,

Vel lacrimis lavet pectus, amate, tuum.

The flames of our love have penetrated my breast

And new heat always relights this love.

Neither sea, nor land, mountain nor forest, nor the Alps

Can obstruct or inhibit it

In the slightest, bountiful father, from always licking your flesh,

Or bathing your breast, my love, in my tears.

Though scholars after Boswell have been at great pains to explain away

the apparent eroticism of such lines as “semper tua viscera lingat”

(“always licking your flesh”, or perhaps even more intimately, “always

licking your inmost flesh”), it should come as no surprise to anyone

familiar with the history of interpreting the Song of Songs that there are

always ready arguments to explain what appears to be erotic passion as

actually something else. Allen Frantzen, for example, argues that “such

effusions […] belong to a venerable tradition of ‘Christian amicitia’

and need not have any direct relation to sexual passion”, then does his

best to argue that Alcuin “deplored same-sex intercourse”,

although

this claim is undermined because Frantzen mistakes references to

masturbation in Alcuin’s letters for references to sex. David Clark argues

along similar lines, maintaining that while “Boswell is wrong to suggest

that Alcuin did not condemn same-sex activity”, what Alcuin is really

doing is “euphemistically referring to the sin of masturbation”,

in a

32 Alcuin. “Pectus amor nostrum penetravit flamma”. Monumenta Germaniae historica

inde ab anno Christi quingentesimo usque ad annum millesimum et quingentesimum

(Berlin: Apud Weidmannos, 1881), Vol. I: 236, ll. 1–6, https://books.google.com/

books?id=U6woAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA236

33 “Christian friendship”—we will see this argument resorted to again, when scholars

need to explain away what appears to be an “inconvenient” passion in the Occitan

poem “Na Maria”.

34 Allen J. Frantzen. Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from “Beowulf” to “Angels in

America” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 198, 199.

35 David Clark. Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval

English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 79. Clark makes

this argument based on a single passage in Alcuin’s voluminous output. In

Interrogationes et Responsiones in Genesin, Alcuin takes on the following question:

“In the days of Noah, why were the sins of the world punished by water, but those

110 Love and its Critics

letter where he threatens one of his young students that such sinners

will “burn in the flames of Sodom”.

Clark insists that “[i]t is simply

not possible to say whether Alcuin’s […] desires were the outward

expression of personally recognised erotic feelings and whether those

feelings were sexually expressed”, then goes on to make this contrary

claim:

nor is the question important or productive. It is perfectly possible

for an individual to feel and express homoerotic desires and yet be

utterly opposed to, even repulsed by, their physical expression, just

as it is possible for an individual to condemn same-sex acts and yet be

homosexually active.

When trying to understand the apparent passions expressed in a poem

like Pectus amor nostrum penetravit flamma, how can knowledge of the

passions of the author be deemed unimportant and unproductive? No

proof is given for such a claim; readers are apparently simply supposed

to accept this pronouncement without question. This is a prescriptive

style of argument that we will see again and discuss in greater depth,

especially in critical discussion of Donne’s work. Here we will merely

observe that such arguments, which separate the poet from the poem,

of the Sodomites were punished by fire?” (“Quare diebus Noe peccatum mundi

aqua ulciscitur, hoc vero Sodomitarum igne punitur?”) Alcuin answers by drawing

the reliably orthodox conclusion that the sins of Noah’s world were natural, while

those of Sodom were unnatural: “Because the sin of lust with women is natural,

it is condemned as though by a lighter element; but the sin of lust against nature

with men is avenged by the harsher burning element; there the ground is washed

with water and returns to fertility; but this one is made eternally barren, burned by

fire” (“Quia illud naturale libidinus cum feminis peccatum quasi leviori elemento

damnatur: hoc vero contra naturam libidinis peccatum cum viris, aeriois elementi

vindicatur incendio: et illic terra aquis abluta revirescit; hic flammis cremata

aeterna steriliate arescit”.) (Patrologiae Cursus Completus, ed. by Jacques Paul Migne

[Paris: Apud Garnier Fratres, 1863], Vol. 100, col. 543, https://books.google.com/

books?id=-JqsZH3ajIgC&pg=PT202).

36 Frantzen, 199. This letter never explicitly references the sin being spoken of: “What

is it, my son, that I hear of, not from one muttering in a corner, but from many

publicly laughing about the story that you are still devoted to childish uncleanness,

and have never been able to dismiss what you never should have wished to do?”

(“Quid est, fili, quod de te audio, non uno quolibet in angulo susurrante, sed plurimis

publice cum risu narrantibus: quod puerilibus adhuc deservias immunditiis, et

quae nunquam facere debuisses, nunquam dimittere voluisses [velis]”.) (Alcuin.

“Epistola CCVI, Ad Disciplum”. In Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Vol. 100, col.

481–82, https://books.google.com/books?id=-JqsZH3ajIgC&pg=PT171).

37 Clark, 80.

111

3. Love and its Absences in Late Latin and Greek Poetry

often serve to explain away the unruly and uncontrolled desires

expressed in the poetry of love.

The anonymous lyric Iam dulcis amica, a late tenth-or early eleventh-

century poem existing in three versions,

celebrates a love that will

begin to sound very familiar when we consider the vernacular poems

of the troubadours. Peter Dronke explicitly compares this poem to the

Song of Songs, arguing that the “Song of Songs language emerges in the

terms of endearment—soror, amica, electa, dilecta […] but most of all it

belongs to the final strophe of the Paris version, with its linking of the

melting snows and nascent greenness with the quickening warmth of

love”.

This can be seen in the final two stanzas of the Paris manuscript:

Ego fui sola in silva

et dilexi loca secreta:

Frequenter effugi tumultum

et vitavi populum multum.

Iam nix glaciesque liquescit,

Folium et herba virescit,

Philomena iam cantat in alto,

Ardet amor cordis in antro.

I was alone in the forest

and I delighted in secret places:

Frequently I fled from the tumult

and avoided the popular crowds.

Now, as snow and ice melt,

Leaves and grass grow green,

The nightingale sings from high above,

While love burns in the cave of my heart.

As Dronke argues, this song reflects a woman’s perspective, and this

evocation of “the fear and longing, the emotional heights and depths

of the woman in love” owes a great deal “to the Song of Songs”, and

38 See Peter Dronke, The Medieval Poet and His World (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e

Letteratura, 1984), specifically Chapter 8, “The Song of Songs and Medieval Love

Lyric”, 209–36.

39 Ibid., 221–22.

40 Ibid., 234–35. The original text from Paris BnF Latin 1118 fol 247v. is available online

at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/ 12148/btv1b8432314k/f504.item

112 Love and its Critics

“recur[s] spontaneously in similar forms in the ancient Near East, in

medieval Spain [and] Anglo-Saxon England”.

Perhaps more famous still are the Latin poems from the Carmina

Burana, a manuscript from the early thirteenth century collecting Latin

and German songs of mockery, morality, drinking, and love. Among the

best known now, due to the music of Carl Orff, is Tempus est iocundum,

a lyric in the carpe diem tradition:

Tempus est iocundum, o virgines,

modo congaudete vos iuvenes.

Oh-oh, totus floreo, iam amore virginali

totus ardeo,

novus, novus amor est, quo pereo.

[…]

Veni, domicella, cum gaudio;

veni, veni, pulchra, iam pereo.

Oh-oh, totus floreo, iam amore virginali

totus ardeo,

novus, novus amor est, quo pereo.

The time is now for happiness, O virgins,

rejoice together now you young men.

Oh, oh, I am blooming, now with my first love.

totally on fire,

new, new love is what I am dying of.

[…]

Come, my mistress, with joy;

come, come, my beauty, for now I am dying.

Oh, oh, I am blooming, now with my first love,

totally on fire,

new, new love is what I am dying of.

But here, we have reached both the time, and the spirit of the Occitan

troubadours, and have left, properly speaking, the realm of late classical

41 Ibid., 233.

42 Carmina Burana: Lateinische und deutsche Lieder und Gedichte einer Handschrift des

XIII Jahihunderts aus Benedictbeuern auf der K. Bibliothek gu München, ed. by Johann

Andreas Schmeller (Stuttgart: Literarischen Vereins, 1847), 211–12, https://books.

google.com/books?id=0XN3YW-EqacC&pg=PA211

113

3. Love and its Absences in Late Latin and Greek Poetry

and early medieval Latin poetry. In lyrics such as these, we can hear the

voice of Ovid and the Song of Songs once again, and see something of

the essence of fin’amor.

Love in the Poetry of Late Antiquity: Greek

Greek literature, by the early centuries of the Common Era, had long

since been considered lesser than Latin poetry and prose. But for a time,

Greek writers kept love alive in their work, especially through the work

of a group of writers known as the Erotici Graeci, Greek writers of love

stories. Of these, the most famous is Longus, “probably a rhetorician of

the period known as the Second Sophistic, [who] reveals a crafted style,

wide literary learning, and an unusually sophisticated, self-conscious

narrative technique”.

Daphnis and Chloe, Longus’ verse novel of

approximately 200 CE, tells the story of two infants, a boy and a girl,

exposed to die on hillsides about two years apart. In the way of such

stories, the children are rescued before they are eaten by wild animals,

and they are raised by rural families who live in close proximity to each

other. Over the years, the two—the boy Daphnis and the girl Chloe—fall

in love (Chloe when she sees Daphnis bathing, and Daphnis some time

later after Chloe kisses him). However, they haven’t the slightest idea

about the physical aspect of love—sex is a mystery to both of them, and

neither of them knows anyone willing to explain it to them. An aging

cowherd named Philetas, having accidentally encountered the naked god

of love in his orchard, and remembered his long-ago love for a girl named

Amaryllis as a result, tells the pair that the only cure for their condition

is “kissing and embracing and lying down with naked bodies”.

The

young lovers take to this activity with regularity and enthusiasm, but find

themselves confused about the “lying down with naked bodies” part,

43 Richard F. Hardin. Love in a Green Shade: Idyllic Romances Ancient to Modern (Lincoln,

NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 11.

44 “φίλημακαὶπεριβολὴκαὶσυγκατακλινῆναιγυμνοῖςσώμασι”(Longus. Daphnis

and Chloe, ed. by Jeffrey Henderson [Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2009], 2.7.7, 68).

114 Love and its Critics

thinking that “in any case, there must be something in it stronger than

kissing”,

without knowing what that something might be.

In the meantime, a series of misadventures threaten to separate

the pair, often menacing the two lovers through “the forms of sexual

violence to which Chloe—and to a certain extent Daphnis—is subject”.

Daphnis is kidnapped by Tyrian pirates, and is only rescued by Chloe’s

quick thinking in playing a cowherd’s pipe that induces dozens of cows

to jump from a low cliff into the water near the ship (and some even

onto the ship itself), causing the ship to capsize and drown the heavily-

armored pirates, enabling Daphnis to swim back ashore. A fellow

shepherd tries to rape Chloe, and she is abducted by Methymnean

raiders seeking revenge on Daphnis. (They blame him for the loss of

their ship, since one of his goats chewed through the line with which

they had moored their vessel, causing it to float away with the tide

while they were on shore). Longus resorts to a deus ex machina here,

having Pan rescue Chloe.

After a number of misadventures—including an episode in which

Daphnis tries to imitate goats in his absurdly ineffectual claspings with

Chloe

—Daphnis is finally taught how to make use of the “lying down

with naked bodies” advice that has puzzled him for so long:

Finding a freedom from envy and a liberality in the goatherd that she had

not expected, Lycaenium began then to teach Daphnis in this manner.

She ordered him to sit down next to her, and to give her the customary

kind and number of kisses, and to throw his arms around her as he kissed

her, and lie down upon the ground. Then he sat down, and kissed her,

and lay down with her, learning in action to be able and vigorous while

lying upon his side, and as he raised himself up, she slipped beneath him

skillfully, bringing him into that path he had sought for so long. From

45 “πάντωςἐναὐτῷτικρεῖττόνἐστιφιλήματος”(ibid., 2.9.2, 70).

46 John J. Winkler. The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in

Ancient Greece (New York: Routledge, 1990), 103.

47 If the reader is beginning to catch a whiff of a later story like The Princess Bride, he

or she is probably not alone—and yes, it is still probably good advice not to get

involved in a land war in Asia, though your mileage may vary whether or not to go

in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

48 Stephen Epstein raises the serious, yet profoundly comic question: “What purpose

does the text achieve by bringing its male protagonist into such close connection

with goats?” (“The Education of Daphnis: Goats, Gods, the Birds and the Bees”.

Phoenix, 56: 1–2 [Spring-Summer 2002], 26, https://doi.org/10.2307/1192468).

115

3. Love and its Absences in Late Latin and Greek Poetry

that point on, there was no need to take more pains with him; Nature

taught him the rest of what was necessary.

However, Lycaenion also tells Daphnis that the experience will be

different with the virgin Chloe: “Chloe, if you wrestle with her in this

way, will be injured, and cry aloud while bleeding”,

advice which

frightens Daphnis and nearly dissuades him from even kissing Chloe.

Daphnis here shows a concern similar to that found in the poetry of

the later troubadours, as well as the works of Shakespeare and Milton,

a “mutuality in love, so crucial to the meaning of this story, [which]

sets the Greek romances apart”. Daphnis, “exercising restraint out of

consideration for Chloe, shows a different kind of love”,

caring for

her as an individual whose feelings and desires are just as important to

Daphnis as his own.

In the background of the two young lovers’s misadventures, Chloe’s

parents are trying to arrange a financially advantageous marriage for

her, which leaves Daphnis, a poor goatherd, in desperation. In another

deus ex machina, the nymphs of the fields give Daphnis three thousand

drachmas for him to take to Chloe’s father in order that he might be

the chosen suitor. In a further development—as again, is the way with

such stories—events are set in motion which reveal each of the two

lovers to be of high and noble birth, and they are brought together in a

marriage that brings joy to everyone. Finally, “Daphnis himself taught

Lycaenium’s lessons, and then Chloe learned that what had happened

before in the the woods had been but shepherds’ games”.

Their love,

49 ΕὑροῦσαδὴἡΛυκαίνιον αἰπολικὴνἀφθονίαν,οἵαν οὐ προσεδόκησεν,ἤρχετοπαιδεύειν

τὸν Δάφνιν τοῦτον τὸν τρόπον. Ἐκέλευσεν αὐτὸν καθίσαι πλησίον αὐτῆς, ὡς εἶχε, καὶ

φιλήματαφιλεῖν οἷαεἰώθει καὶὅσα, καὶφιλοῦντα ἅμαπεριβάλλειν καὶκατακλίνεσθαι

χαμαί. Ὡς δὲ ἐκαθέσθη καὶ ἐφίλησε καὶ κατεκλίνη, μαθοῦσα ἐνεργεῖν δυνάμενον καὶ

σφριγῶντα, ἀπὸ μὲν τῆς ἐπὶ πλευρὰν κατακλίσεως ἀνίστησιν, αὑτὴν δὲ ὑποστορέσασα

ἐντέχνωςἐςτὴντέως ζητουμένην ὁδὸνἦγε.Τὸ δὲ ἐντεῦθενοὐδὲνπεριειργάζετο ξένον:

αὐτὴγὰρἡφύσιςλοιπὸνἐπαίδευσετὸπρακτέον.

Longus 3.18.3–4, 126. This episode was expurgated from translations of this text as

recently as the 1950s by academics and publishers determined to protect the moral

decency of their readers.

50 “Χλόηδὲσυμπαλαίουσάσοιταύτηντὴνπάληνκαὶοἰμώξεικαὶκλαύσεταικἀν

αἵματικείσεταιπολλῷ”(ibid. 3.19.2, 126).

51 Hardin, 15, 16.

52 “ΔάφνιςὧναὐτὸνἐπαίδευσεΛυκαίνιον,καὶτότεΧλόηπρῶτονἔμαθενὅτιτὰ

ἐπὶτῆςὕληςγενόμεναἦνποιμένωνπαίγνια”(Longus 4.40.3, 196).

116 Love and its Critics

now passionately and physically expressed, brings mutuality and desire

together in the fashion of fin’amor.

In addition to pastoral comedies like Daphnis and Chloe, which Jean

Hagstrum refers to as “one of the subtlest explorations of dawning

love in literature”,

Greek poetry of the first millenium also gives us

Musaeus’ version of the legend of Hero and Leander. Musaeus, a late

fifth-or early sixth century poet, transforms the tale of “the nightly

marriage of Hero” and “the swimming of Leander”

into the tragedy

that will later inspire Renaissance English poets like Christopher

Marlowe and George Chapman (who finishes the version Marlowe left

at his death, and translates Musaeus’ version in 1616). Musaeus’ Hero is

a “priestess of Aphrodite”

and is locked away each night by her father

“in the Tower of her ancestors, dwelling as a neighbor to the sea”,

ostensibly to serve the goddess, but really to keep her out of the reach

of young men. Even so, Leander knows he must have her, “at once let

me die, but let me spend my strength in Hero’s bed”,

because he is on

fire after looking into her eyes: “by means of her eyes’ light, his love rose

high like flames”.

Leander struggles with this new-found passion and

tries to master it, even briefly thinking it shameful that he has been so

overpowered by love, before he determines to venture whatever it takes

to have Hero:

εἷλεδέμιντότεθάμβος,ἀναιδείη,τρόμος,αἰδώς,

ἔτρεμεμὲνκραδίην,αἰδὼςδέμινεἶχενἁλῶναι,

θάμβεεδ᾿εἶδοςἄριστον,ἔρωςδ᾿ἀπενόσφισεναἰδῶ.

seized by astonishment, impudence, trepidation, shame,

he trembled at heart, shame possessed him to be so conquered,

but in amazement at her excellent form, love put shame asunder.

53 Hagstrum, 134.

54 “γάμον ἔννυχον Ἡροῦς” […] “νηχόμενόν τε Λέανδρον” Musaeus. Hero and

Leander, ed. by Thomas Gelzer (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1973), ll. 4–5.

55 “Κύπριδοςἦνἱέρεια”(ibid., l. 31).

56 “πύργονἀπὸπρογόνωνπαρὰγείτονιναῖεθαλάσσῃ”(ibid., l. 32).

57 “αὐτίκατεθναίηνλεχέωνἐπιβήμενοςἩροῦς”(ibid., l. 79).

58 “σὺνβλεφάρωνδ᾿ἀκτῖσινἀέξετοπυρσὸςἘρώτων”(ibid., l. 90).

59 Ibid., ll. 96–98.

117

3. Love and its Absences in Late Latin and Greek Poetry

After Leander ventures, and wins Hero’s love, there is still a problem:

her father.

Hero laments Leander’s eloquence, because her father’s control

over her marriage prospects means “these words are entirely spoken

in vain”.

She then outlines the basic dilemma that we will see

frequently—children (especially daughters) are treated as the property

of their fathers, and cannot love freely where they would:

…πῶςγὰρἀλήτης

ξεῖνοςἐὼνκαὶἄπιστοςἐμοὶφιλότητιμιγείης;

ἀμφαδὸνοὐδυνάμεσθαγάμοιςὁσίοισιπελάσσαι·

οὐγὰρἐμοῖςτοκέεσσινἐπεύαδεν·ἢνδ᾿ἐθελήσῃς

ὡςξεῖνοςπολύφοιτοςἐμὴνεἰςπατρίδαμίμνειν,

οὐδύνασαισκοτόεσσανὑποκλέπτεινἈφροδίτην·

γλῶσσαγὰρἀνθρώπωνφιλοκέρτομος,ἐνδὲσιωπῇ

ἔργονὅπερτελέειτις,ἐνὶτριόδοισινἀκούει.

…how, may a wanderer,

a stranger, not to be trusted, unite with me in love?

We are not able to draw near in holy marriage,

for it is not my father’s will and pleasure; if you wish

as a far-roaming stranger to stay in my father’s land,

you will not be able to shroud Aphrodite in night,

for the tongues of men are fond of jeering, and the silent

deeds of a man are soon heard of in the marketplace.

Despite the fact that Hero is a “priestess of Aphrodite” she is not “the

willingly chaste priestess who seeks the isolation of her tower and

wants to appease the gods of love. According to Hero, it is because of

her parents’ hated decision […] that she lives in the tower outside the

city, with only wind and sea as her neighbours”.

The arrangement the lovers make, as anyone familiar with the legend

has already anticipated, is a dangerous one, as Leander plans to come to

60 “ταῦταδὲπάνταμάτηνἐφθέγξαο”(ibid., l. 177).

61 Ibid., ll. 177–84.

62 Nicola Nina Dümmler. “Musaeus, Hero and Leander: Between Epic and Novel”.

In Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Epyllion and Its Reception, ed. by Manuel

Baumbach and Silvio Bär (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 427.

118 Love and its Critics

her at night by swimming across the Hellespont. All he asks is that Hero

leave the light on:

Παρθένε,σὸνδι᾿ἔρωτακαὶἄγριονοἶδμαπερίήσω,

εἰπυρὶπαφλάζοιτοκαὶἄπλοονἔσσεταιὕδωρ.

οὐτρομέωβαρὺχεῖματεὴνμετανεύμενοςεὐνήν

[…]

μοῦνονἐμοὶἕναλύχνονἀπ᾿ἠλιβάτουσεὸπύργου

ἐκπεράτηςἀνάφαινεκατὰκνέφας,ὄφρανοήσας

ἔσσομαιὁλκὰςἜρωτοςἔχωνσέθενἀστέραλύχνον.

Maiden, for your love, I will cross the wild waves,

though fire boil them, and rain push back the ships,

I fear no heavy storm, in pursuit of your bed.

[…]

Only light me a lamp from your high tower

to shine above the darkness that I may see it;

I will be love’s sailing ship, guided by your light.

At first, it works. Their interval of passion and mutual desire begins as

Hero leads Leander to her tower:

καίμινἑὸνποτὶπύργονἀνήγαγεν·ἐκδὲθυράων

νυμφίονἀσθμαίνονταπεριπτύξασασιωπῇ

ἀφροκόμουςῥαθάμιγγαςἔτιστάζονταθαλάσσης

ἤγαγενυμφοκόμοιομυχοὺςἔπιπαρθενεῶνος.

and she led him to her high tower, where at the doors

her panting bridegroom she silently embraced,

still foam-drenched and dripping from the sea

she led him deep within her bridal chamber.

And for some time to come, Hero and Leander manage both to keep

their love and their secret:

63 Musaeus, ll. 203–05, 210–12.

64 Ibid., ll. 260–63.

119

3. Love and its Absences in Late Latin and Greek Poetry

Ἡρὼδ᾿ἑλκεσίπεπλοςἑοὺςλήθουσατοκῆας

παρθένοςἠματίη,νυχίηγυνή.ἀμφότεροιδὲ

πολλάκιςἠρήσαντοκατελθέμενεἰςδύσινἨῶ.

Hero of the long-trained robes, keeping secret from her father,

maiden was day, but wife by night, and both

often prayed for the setting of the sun.

Many nights that summer they enjoy each other’s love, but as winter

comes, the swim across the Hellespont grows more difficult, until one

night, the waters are too rough to be crossed:

πολλὴδ᾿αὐτόματοςχύσιςὕδατοςἔρρεελαιμῷ,

καὶποτὸνἀχρήιστονἀμαιμακέτουπίενἅλμης.

καὶδὴλύχνονἄπιστονἀπέσβεσεπικρὸςἀήτης

καὶψυχὴνκαὶἔρωταπολυτλήτοιοΛεάνδρου.

Great waves of water poured themselves into his throat,

and he drank deep of the worthless, irresistible brine,

and then the traitorous lamp was blown out by a sharp wind,

and with it died the breath and love of long-suffering Leander.

When Leander does not come that night, Hero fears the worst, and upon

seeing his body washed up on the shore, Hero strips off her robe and

joins him:

ῥοιζηδὸνπροκάρηνοςἀπ᾿ἠλιβάτουπέσεπύργου.

κὰδδ᾿Ἡρὼ1τέθνηκεσὺνὀλλυμένῳπαρακοίτῃ,

ἀλλήλωνδ᾿ἀπόναντοκαὶἐνπυμάτῳπερὀλέθρῳ.

with a rushing sound, she fell head-first from her high tower.

Hero died next to her dead husband,

and at last in death, each had joy in the other.

65 Ibid., ll. 285–87.

66 Ibid., ll. 327–30.

67 Ibid., ll. 341–43.

120 Love and its Critics

As we will also see in poetry from the troubadours to Shakespeare and

Milton, Musaeus emphasizes the “theme of love’s mutuality”, in which

lovers are willing “to take deadly risks in a universe that is careless of

their suffering”.

They will risk all for love, whether the physical danger

of the Hellespont, the death-threats of a god, or the social, legal, and

financial dangers of defying a system of arranged marriages that leaves

no room for any passion (except perhaps for greed), so dedicated is that

system to the profitable gains to be had through marriage and children.

Slowly but surely, however, it is that very pragmatism, combined with

the increasing influence of the church in Europe, that brings the classical

and early-medieval eras of love poetry to their conclusion.

Love and longing are vitally present in the poetry we have so

far encountered, despite the best efforts of societal law-givers and

the frequent attempts of the Akibas and Origens to erase, rewrite

and reinterpret this poetry. There is much more such longing in the

eleventh-and twelfth-century poetry of the troubadours. As we see

love thrive, proving that “powerful passion will not be constrained

by the normal bonds of society”,

so we will also see the attempts to

channel, reformulate, and control it grow stronger, more systematic,

and infinitely more lethal.

68 Pamela Royston Macfie. “Lucan, Marlowe, and the Poetics of Violence”. In

Renaissance Papers 2008, ed. by Christopher Cobb and M. Thomas Hester (Rochester:

Camden House, 2009), 49.

69 Audrey L. Meaney. “The Ides of the Cotton Gnomic Poem”. Medium Ævum, 48: 1

(1979), 36, https://doi.org/10.2307/43628412

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor:

Love, Choice, and the Individual

In Erich Auerbach’s view, “for the Provençal poets and the [Italian]

poets of the new style [dolce stil novo], ‘high love’ was the only major

theme”.

Speaking of die hohe Minne (what French scholars call amour

courtois, and English scholars “courtly love”), Auerbach gives voice to

a critical consensus that over the last century-and-a half has dominated

our understanding of the origins and development of western love

poetry. Both the consensus, and Auerbach, are wrong.

Why “Courtly Love” Is Not Love

Start with adultery. Start, at least, with the idea of adultery. Breaking

the rules, doing something you are not supposed to do. Doing someone

you are not supposed to do. This is the key idea that allows us to

understand a literary tradition that stretches from the troubadours

through Petrarch to Shakespeare, Milton, and beyond. Illicit desire—

whether celebrated in the passionate poems of medieval Occitania, or

sublimated in the poetic tradition of idealized females worshiped by

abject males in Dante, Petrarch and Sidney—is central to the energy

of Shakespeare and the poetic tradition that follows in his wake. Love,

1 “[f]ür die Provenzalen und die Dichter des Neuen Stils war die hohe Minne das

einzige große Thema” (Erich Auerbach. Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der

abendländischen Literatur. 2nd ed. [Bern: Francke, 1959], 180).

122 Love and its Critics

will, desire, and the willingness (even determination) to risk everything,

up to and including death—these are the passions that draw readers

and audiences back again and again.

Centuries of transformation have left many of us ill-equipped to

recognize the frankness and passion of troubadour verse. Some of this

change was wrought merely by time and changing customs, but some

of it was brought about by the best efforts of historians and literary

critics to understand and interpret the past through the expectations,

reverences, and distastes of later eras. Perversely, we often approach

these poems through the lens of late nineteenth-century notions of

propriety and decency that are alien to our own time, and to the time

of the troubadours. The dangerous, even life-risking, desires expressed

in these poems have been carefully tamed, hidden behind the ill-fitting

phrase “courtly love”. This term, invented by Gaston Paris in 1881,

has

become commonplace in critical analyses of troubadour poetry.

Paris

argues that

love is an art, a science, a virtue, which has its rules as chivalry and

courtesy […]. In no French work, as it seems to me, does this courtly

love appear before the Knight of the Cart. The love of Tristran and Isolde

is a different thing: it is a simple passion, ardent, natural, which does

not know the subtleties and refinements of that between Lancelot and

Guinevere. In the poems of Benoit de Sainte-Maure, we find gallantry,

but not this exalted, almost mystical, yet still sensual, love.

2 Appearing as amour courtois in his article “Études sur les romans de la Table Ronde”

in Romania, 10: 40 (October 1881), 465–96, and in “Études sur les romans de la Table

Ronde. Lancelot du Lac, I. Le Lanzelet d’Ulrich de Zatzikhoven; Lancelot du Lac, II.

Le Conte de la charrette”, Romania, 12: 48 (October 1883), 459–534.

3 Even so recent an analysis as that of William M. Reddy relies on this term. Reddy

defines the troubadour conception of fin’amor in terms of “an opposition between

love and desire” (The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South

Asia, and Japan, 900–1200 CE [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012], 2), even

aligning the troubadour concept with what he calls the “‘courtly love’ phenomenon

[that] is well known to medievalists” (2). Reddy, does, however, note that the

literature of so-called “courtly love”, can “represent a kind of resistance”, and an

“escaping [from the mid twelfth-century Church’s] blanket condemnation of all

sexual partnerships as sinful and polluting” (26).

4 l’amour est un art, une science, une vertu, qui a ses règles tout comme la chevalerie ou la

courtoisie […] Dans aucun ouvrage français, autant qu’il me semble, cet amour courtois

n’apparaît avant le Chevalier de la Charrette. L’amour de Tristran et d’Iseut est autre chose: c’est

une passion simple, ardente, naturelle, qui ne connaît pas les subtilités et les raffinements de

celui de Lancelot et de Guenièvre. Dans les poèmes de Benoit de Sainte-More, nous trouvons la

galanterie, mais non cet amour exalté et presque mystique, sans cesser pourtant d’être sensual.

123

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

Tellingly, Paris bases his notion of amour courtois on the only tale by

the northern trouvére Chrétien de Troyes that differs from his normal

pattern: the Knight of the Cart, a story about the adulterous relationship

between Lancelot and Guinevere. Ordinarily, Chrétien opposes the

“new mode of love and the central theme of the Provençal Troubadours

poetry”, by “refusing the adulterous relationship […] and the idolatrous

passion which binds the lovers”.

This refusal is “exemplified in all of

Chrétien’s romances except Lancelot”,

and in all of his other work,

Chrétien “proclaims a mode of love which, dominated by the rules of

reason and the code of courtliness, should lead to marriage and exist

only inside of marriage”.

This bears repeating, for there is something

odd and contradictory at work in the way Paris comes to define his most

famous term: the critical definition of “courtly love” as a chaste and

rule-bound mode of relationship is based on the only one of Chrétien’s

romances that breaks those rules, illustrating a love that “fell outside

Christian teaching and was the exact opposite of the traditional view on

marriage”,

while at the same time, the critic comes to his definition by

underplaying these transgressive features of the poem.

The effect of Paris’ misbegotten definition can be seen by looking at

Andreas Capellanus’ twelfth-century treatise, De amore (Of Love), which

is now (mis)leadingly translated as The Art of Courtly Love. Capellanus’

text begins by addressing itself to a young man named Walter, and by

defining what love is:

Love is some kind of an inborn passion that proceeds from looking

and thinking immoderately on the form of the opposite sex, a passion

that makes one wish more than anything to embrace the other, and by

mutual desire accomplish all of love’s precepts in the other’s embrace.

Gaston Paris, “Études sur les romans de la Table Ronde” (1883), 519, http://www.

persee.fr/ doc/roma_0035–8029_1883_num_12_48_6277

5 Moshe Lazar. “Cupid, the Lady, and the Poet: Modes of Love at Eleanor of

Aquitaine’s Court”. In Eleanor of Aquitaine: Patron and Politician, ed. by William W.

Kibler (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), 42.

6 A common shorthand term for The Knight of the Cart.

7 Lazar, 43.

8 Ibid.

9 “Amor est passio quedam innata procedens ex vision et immoderate cogitatione

formae alterius sexus, ob quam aliquis super Omnia cupit alterius potiri amplexibus

et Omnia de ultriusque voluntate in ipsius amplexu amoris praecepta compleri”

(Andreas Capellanus. De amore libri tres: Von der Liebe. Drei Bücher [Berlin and

Boston: De Gruyter, 2006], 6).

124 Love and its Critics

Paris’ idea of amour courtois has affected the way Capellanus’ text

is understood by rewriting it after the fact. The widely-used English

translation by John Jay Parry reads as a courtly love treatise that

often incorporates the main characteristic of this ethos—suffering.

By translating the text in a way that supports this pre-existing

interpretation, Parry has created a kind of circular argument. The word

passio is translated as “suffering”, although it can also be translated as

“passion”. If passio stood by itself, then either translation might suffice;

however, an “inborn passion” makes more sense with what follows,

even as Parry renders it: “[love] causes each one to wish above all things

the embraces of the other”.

In the following lines, Parry continues his

translation in the same circular manner: “That love is suffering is easy

to see, for before the love becomes equally balanced on both sides there

is no torment greater”.

The word “torment” is meant to stand in for

the Latin angustia, which means narrowness, want, or perplexity. By far

the better choice for translation is want (in the sense of desire and lack).

The lover wants, more than anything else in the world, to gain the object

of his desire. Capellanus makes this clear in a later protion of his work

when he refers to the passion he is discussing as pure love:

Pure love is that which joins and unites the hearts of the two lovers with

the affection of love. This, however, consists in the contemplation of the

mind and the affection of the heart; it proceeds as far as a kiss, the arms’

embrace, and modestly touching the nude lover.

The “pure love” spoken of is both of the body and of the mind, only

“the final consolation is omitted”,

though that, too, is allowed in

what Capellanus calls amor mixtus, mixed, or compounded love. The

flesh in De amore is not marginalized as it is in the later spiritualized

poetry of the Dantean and Petrarchan traditions. The man in De amore

10 Andreas Capellanus. The Art of Courtly Love. Trans. by John Jay Perry (New York: W.

W. Norton & Co., 1941), 28.

11 Ibid. The original is as follows: “Quod amor sit passio facile est videre. Nam

antequam amor sit ex utraque parte libratus, nulla est angustia maior” (Capellanus,

De amore libri tres: Von der Liebe, 6).

12 “Et purus quidem amor est, qui omnimoda directonis affection duorum amantium

corda coniungit. Hic autem in mentis contemplation cordisque consistit affect;

procedit autem usque ad oris osculum lacertique amplexum et verecundum

amantis nudae contactum” (Andreas Capellanus. De amore libri tres: Von der Liebe, 282).

13 “extremo praetermisso solatio” (ibid.).

125

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

prays to God, not for wisdom, not for piety, but for the opportunity to

see his lover again. The manner in which he makes this supplication

resembles the open passions of troubadour poetry: “For not an hour

of the day or night could pass that I did not beg God to allow me the

bounty of seeing you close to me in the flesh”.

Amor purus is both

emotional and physical. It is not the stylized “courtly love” of the later

scholarly tradition.

Perhaps C. S. Lewis did the most to popularize this term, as he traced

“courtly love” in twelfth-century poetry from the southern troubadours

to the northern trouvére Chrétien de Troyes. In so doing, Lewis

identifies four marks—Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion

of Love

—that he claims characterize the “new feeling” that arose in

the poets and the time and place in which they lived. However, though

Lewis acknowledges that “courtly love necessitates adultery”, he also

insists that “adultery hardly necessitates courtly love”.

This revealing

turn of phrase captures the ambiguity, the division in feelings between

excitement and disapproval that characterizes the long poetic tradition

that springs from troubadour roots. Poems of desire that would be

fulfilled, no matter the cost—if only the opportunity manifested itself—

gave rise to later poems of decorous and often tormented sublimations

of desire, using such Neoplatonic metaphors as the ladder of love.

Desire became worship, as flesh became once again an object of shame.

Lewis’s ambivalent refusal to credit fully the significance of the

troubadours and their poetry is exceedingly odd, given that he describes

their work as “momentous” and “revolutionary” and “the background

of European literature for eight hundred years”.

For Lewis, “French

poets, in the eleventh century, discovered or invented, or were the first

to express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were

14 “Non enim poterat diei vel noctis hora pertransire continua, qua Deum non

exorarem attentius, ut corporaliter vos ex propinquo videndi mihi concederet

largitatem” (ibid., 192).

15 C. S. Lewis. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (London: Oxford

University Press, 1936), 2.

16 Ibid., 14.

17 The idea that a lover’s admiration for a beloved serves the lover as the first step on

a ladder, in which each successive rung represents an increasingly refined notion of

love, until by the top, the lover has left earthly love behind in favor of divine love.

18 Ibid., 4.

126 Love and its Critics

still writing about in the nineteenth”.

But his use of French rather than

Provençal or Occitan is telling—Lewis spends as little time with the

troubadours as possible, referencing none of their poetry specifically,

preferring to spend his time with Ovid, the anonymous author of the

twelfth-century Concilium Romarici Montis (a mock-council on love

which references the classical poet as Ovidii Doctoris egregii

), Chrétien

de Troyes, and Andreas Capellanus. As Lewis reads them, each of these

sources are fixated on rules, codes, official judgments, and elaborate

enactments of dominance and submission that parody the rituals of

Catholicism. In his reading of Chrétien’s Lancelot, for example, the

issue is not “love [as] a noble form of experience [and] a theory of

adultery”,

but obedience given too slowly: “The Queen has heard of

his [Lancelot’s] momentary hesitation in stepping on to the tumbril, and

this lukewarmness in the service of love has been held by her sufficient

to annihilate all the merit of his subsequent labours and humiliations”.

Lancelot is momentarily ashamed to ride a cart whose driver

promises to take him to the kidnapped Queen Guenivere, because the

cart is used to carry prisoners, and any knight seen on such a transport

will be shamed, and his reputation for honor destroyed. But though he

hesitates, he climbs aboard, and willingly suffers the resulting shame

(described in several following scenes), in order to be led to the Queen:

Et li chevaliers dit au nain:

«Nains, fet il, por Deu, car me di

Se tu as veü par ici

Passer ma dame la reïne».

Li nains cuiverz de pute orine

Ne l’an vost noveles conter,

Einz li dist: «Se tu viax monter

Sor la charrete que je main,

Savoir porras jusqu’a demain

Que la reïne est devenue».

Tantost a sa voie tenue,

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., 19. The name translates as Ovid the Peerless [or Excellent] Doctor.

21 Ibid., 37.

22 Ibid., 28.

127

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

Qu’il ne l’atant ne pas ne ore.

Tant solemant deus pas demore

Li chevaliers que il n’i monte.

Mar le fist et mar en ot honte

Que maintenant sus ne sailli,

Qu’il s’an tendra por mal bailli!

And the Knight told the dwarf:

Dwarf, for God’s sake, tell me right away

If you have seen here

Pass by my lady the queen.

The perfidious low-born dwarf

Would not tell him the news,

But merely said: If you want to ride

On the cart that I drive,

By tomorrow you’ll be able to know

What happened to the queen.

With that, he maintained his way forward

Without waiting for the other for a moment.

For only the time of two steps

The Knight hesitated to get in.

What a pity he hesitated, ashamed to go,

And he failed to jump without delay,

For this will cause him great suffering!

The momentary delay earns him the displeasure of the Queen, who

berates him for failing to immediately obey Love’s promptings:

Et la reïne li reconte:

«Comant? Don n’eüstes vos honte

De la charrete et si dotastes?

Molt a grant enviz i montastes

Quant vos demorastes deus pas.

Por ce, voir, ne vos vos je pas

Ne aresnier ne esgarder.

23 Chrétien de Troyes. Le Chevalier de la Charrette, ed. by Alfred Foulet and Karl D. Uitti

(Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1989), ll. 352–68.

24 Ibid., ll. 4501–07.

128 Love and its Critics

And the Queen replied:

What? Were you not ashamed

Of the cart and its lowly endowments?

With much hesitation you mounted,

Since you delayed two steps.

For this, I did not want to see you,

Nor speak to you, nor look at you.

And though Chrétien eventually brings the knight and the queen

together physically, he remains somewhat coy (though not as purely

“courtly” as Gaston Paris might suggest):

Or a Lanceloz quanqu’il vialt

Qant la reïne an gré requialt

Sa conpaignie et son solaz,

Qant il la tient antre ses braz

Et ele lui antre les suens.

Tant li est ses jeus dolz et buens

Et del beisier et del santir

Que il lor avint sanz mantir

Une joie et une mervoille

Tel c’onques encore sa paroille

Ne fu oïe ne seüe;

Mes toz jorz iert par moi teüe,

Qu’an conte ne doit estre dite.

Lancelot now has everything he wants,

Because the Queen accepts with joy

His company and solace,

Since he holds her in his arms

And she holds him between hers.

Their pleasure is so sweet and good,

And the kisses and the caresses,

What happened to them, without lying,

Was a joy and a marvel

As has never before been spoken

Nor heard of, nor known;

25 Ibid., ll. 4687–99.

129

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

But still, I maintain the most perfect silence

About what not to say in a story.

Despite this scene, however, there remains throughout the poem an

ever-present sense that the issue is one of knightly obedience rather

than human passion, that the knight and the queen of the tale are less

individual than archetypal, less fully human than artfully allegorical.

As Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner notes, the figure of Lancelot in Chrétien

and the later prose romancers serves primarily as an object lesson in the

relative inferiority and impurity of human desire, when compared to the

purity of a love directed toward the heavens: “Across the large canvas

of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, the Cart episode remains at the center of

Lancelot’s story, even as it marks an important shift in Lancelot as hero,

still the best of Arthurian chivalry, but not ‘the good knight’ who will

achieve the Grail”.

Despite the note of desire in their story, Chrétien’s knight and the

queen he “serves” are ultimately, as Lewis highlights, more allegorical

than human—high examples of what Lewis calls the “allegorical

love poetry of the Middle Ages”

He is correct to call it so, but he is

in a hurry to move past the troubadours for such authors as Chrétien

precisely because the latter is writing allegory and the former are not.

There is nothing allegorical about the passionate poems of Bernart

de Ventadorn,

Guilhem IX, or the Comtessa de Dia, nor is there an

emphasis on rules, ceremonies, mock judgments in high-church style,

or demands for obedience—whether instantly or otherwise delivered.

What Lewis finds discomfiting in the troubadour poetry is precisely

that element of adultery that he repeatedly mentions, but consistently

refuses to illustrate with quotation. He is much happier to tell us the

26 Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner. “‘Redefining the Center’ Verse and Prose Charrette”.

In A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, ed. by Carol Dover (Cambridge, UK:

Brewer, 2003), 95.

27 C. S. Lewis, 1.

28 “Bernart de Ventadorn provides one context in which to read the Lancelot—and

with it, modern discussions of courtly love—since he and Chrétien appear to

have known one another: they exchanged lyric poems in which they debate the

passionate versus the rational aspects of love” (Sarah Kay. “Courts, Clerks, and

Courtly Love”. In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. by Roberta L.

Krueger [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 86.

130 Love and its Critics

opinions of Peter Lombard, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas on

love and passion

than he is to give the Occitan poets their voice.

Of course, Lewis is not the only figure at whose feet can be laid the

blame for the oddly misbegotten notion of “courtly love”, a notion all

too often applied to the troubadours without actually being derived

from their poetry or from an analysis of their poetry. This latter trend

can also be seen in twentieth-century French psychoanalysis, in Jacques

Lacan’s use of the troubadours to develop his own ideas about desire.

The effect of Gaston Paris’s nineteenth-century recasting of fin’amor

as amour courtois is evident in Lacan’s work. Consistently using the

term amour courtois in his own analysis, Lacan dismisses the work of

the troubadours as anything other than “a poetic exercise, a fashion of

playing with a certain number of idealizing and conventional themes,

which could have no actual concrete reality”.

What intrigues him

is what he regards as a contradiction between the “idealizing and

conventional themes” and the obviously non-idealizing behavior of a

poet like Guilhem IX:

The first of the troubadours is named Guilhem IX, seventh Earl of Poitiers,

ninth Duke of Aquitaine, who appears to have been, before he devoted

his inaugural poetic activities to courtly poetry, a most redoubtable

bandit, the type that, my God, all nobleman could be expected to be at

this time. In many historical circumstances that I will not pass on to you,

we see him behave according to the standards of the most iniquitous

shakedowns. These are the services that could be expected of him. Then

at a certain point, he became a poet of this singular love.

29 C. S. Lewis, 15–16.

30 “un exercice poétique, une façon de jouer avec un certain nombre de thèmes de

convention idealisants, qui ne pouvaient avoir aucun repondant concret reel” (Le

Seminiare de Jacques Lacan. Livre VII. L’Éthique de la Psychanalyse [1959–60] [Paris:

Seuil, 1986], 177–78).

31 Le premier des troubadours est un nommé Guillaume de Poitiers, septième comte de Poitiers,

neuvième duc d’Aquitaine, qui paraît avoir été, avant qu’il se consacrât à ses activités poétiques

inaugurales dans la poésie courtoise, un fort redoutable bandit, du type de ce que, mon Dieu,

tout grand seigneur qui se respectait pouvait être à cette époque. En maintes circonstances

historiques que je vous passe, nous le voyons se comporter selon les normes du rançonnage le

plus inique. Voilà les services qu’on pouvait attendre de lui. Puis, à partir d’un certain moment,

il devient poète de cet amour singulier.

Ibid., 177.

131

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

But there is no contradiction at all between the poet of passion and

the faintly criminal nobleman who practiced rançonnage (shakedowns

for ransom) in order to fill his coffers, because the “idealizing and

conventional themes” Lacan speaks of are largely a post-troubadour

invention.

Lacan imposes an entirely extrinsic logic on the poetry of

the troubadours, derived from his own concepts and those borrowed

from Gaston Paris. The irony inherent in the positions of these two

French intellectuals is that each imposes an interpretive violence on the

southern poets from the perspectives of northern Parisian culture—and

as we will see, such impositions, and such violence, reflect the pattern

of a long and shockingly bloody history.

That “courtly love” has very little to do with the troubadours

can be

seen not only in the way that Paris derives the concept from the northern

poet Chrétien, but also because he slights the influence of the southern

poets at every turn. In La Poésie du Moyen Âge, Paris tips his hand. First,

only the literature of the north counts as properly “French” poetry: “the

proper domain of Carolingian [eighth-to-twelfth-century] poetry was the

north of France, the Ile-de-France, Orleans, Anjou, Maine, Champagne,

the Vermandois, Picardy”.

The literature produced south of the Loire

32 Lacan is engaged in a project that is less exegetic (reading out of) than it is eisegetic

(reading on to) where his engagement with troubadour poetry is concerned. For

Lacan “[t]he arbitrary Lady, who is coterminous with privation and inaccessibility

[…] represents both negation and signification and […] is not just a symbolic

function, but a representaton of the rules and limits of the Symbolic” (Nancy

Frelick. “Lacan, Courtly Love and Anamorphosis”. In The Court Reconvenes: Courtly

Literature Across the Disciplines: Selected Papers from the Ninth Triennial Congress of the

International Courtly Literature Society, University of British Columbia, 25–31 July

1998 [Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2003], 110). Rather than using his psychoanalytical

categories to shed light on the poetry, Lacan is using the poetry to shed light on

his categories. He is certainly not alone in approaching troubadour poetry (or any

other poetry) in this way.

33 David F. Hult suggests that Paris’ invention of the term amour courtois had much less

to do with analysis of poetry than it did with “a personal and professional dilemma

in Paris’ career”, arguing that the term’s curious appeal to later generations can

be explained by the “suggestions of a continuity between […] academic life, its

founding disjunction between pleasure and science, and the ideal scheme of an

eroticism grounded in rules and progressive mastery” (David F. Hult. “Gaston Paris

and the Invention of Courtly Love”. In Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. by

R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1996], 216). In other words, Hult implies that “courtly love” is a notion only

an academic could love.

34 “le domaine propre de la poésie carolingienne avait été le nord de la France,

l’Ile-de-France, l’Orléanais, l’Anjou, le Maine, la Champagne, le Vermandois,

132 Love and its Critics

river valley, was that of an entirely different civilization: “all that was

south of the Loire actually belonged to another civilization, where the

Germanic element had penetrated less deeply, and where the language

remained nearer the Latin”,

and that which can be referred to as truly

“French” was produced only in lands of the langue d’oil

in the north:

“literature, like the French language, belongs to northern France”.

For Paris, Chrétien de Troyes was “the first master of French style”,

and French literature was the premier vernacular expression in Europe,

reaching even into southern Italy and the court of Sicily: “Southern

Italy and Sicily also had Norman kings, and there again French

literature found a homeland”.

Paris credits French poetry with the

flourishing of the poetic culture in the thirteenth-century Sicilian court

of Frederick II, though he is forced to acknowledge the influence of that

“autre civilisation” of the south, as he quickly, if reluctantly, mentions

the poetry of Provençe. French poetry flourished “in Sicily, and it

influenced in the thirteenth-century, as much as Provençal poetry, the

birth of Italian poetry”.

Paris further argues that the poetry of the north

influenced the poetry of the south, setting up a hierarchy by which

French poetry could be seen as the original high literary form in any

of the European vernaculars, influencing even the troubadour poets:

“the southern provinces had a language and a literature of their own,

which had grown under conditions and with a quite different character.

la Picardie” (Gaston Paris. La Poesie du Moyen Age [Paris: Librarie Hachette,

1895], 8). Paris does not mention, however, that the vast majority of this period’s

poetry was written in Latin, not the vernacular, https://books.google.com/

books?id=LdHs-jMItRQC&pg=PA8

35 “Tout ce qui se trouvait au sud de la Loire appartenait en réalité à une autre

civilisation, où l’élément germanique avait moins profondément pénétré, et où

la langue était restée plus voisine du latin” (ibid., 9, https://books.google.com/

books?id=LdHs-jMItRQC&pg=PA9).

36 The terms langue d’oil and langue d’oc refer to the way northerners and southerners,

respectively, pronounced the word “yes”.

37 “la littérature, comme la langue française, appartient à la France du nord” (Paris, La

Poesie du Moyen Age, 9).

38 “le premier maître du style français” (ibid., 18, https://books.google.com/

books?id=LdHs-jMItRQC&pg=PA18).

39 “Le sud de l’Italie et la Sicile avaient aussi pour rois des Normands, et là aussi

la littérature française retrouva une patrie” (ibid., 36, https://books.google.com/

books?id=LdHs-jMItRQC&pg=PA36).

40 “en Sicile, et elle y détermina peut-être, au XIIIe siècle, autant que la poésie

provençale, l’éclosion de la poésie italienne” (ibid.).

133

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

It is true, however, that the first effect our literature had on a foreign

literature was that it had on the poetry of the troubadours”.

Paris’ preference is always for the trouvère poets of the north. He

claimed that the troubadours were nourished by French poetry—“it

is our poetry which the troubadours fed themselves on, and to which

they made frequent allusions”

—and all the Romance lands fell under

the influence of French literature, to which Paris subtly subordinates

the poetry of the south: “the Romance nations […] became as it were

branches of the great French school”.

The term amour courtois, or

“courtly love”, refers to the literature its inventor preferred, his

much-favored poetry of the north, rather than the lyrics of that “autre

civilisation” in the troubadour south. Paris’ dismissive attitude reflects

a long history of northern contempt for, and violence against the south

(le Midi), its culture, languages, and poetry. This history stretches back

to the tensions leading up to the Albigensian Crusade of the thirteenth

century, in which the domination of the northern Franks was established

with sword, fire, and blood. The imposition of the term amour courtois on

a poetry that has nothing whatsoever to do with the concept is another

in a long line of acts of domination and erasure. In such ways, often

unnoticed, literary critics reiterate and support the violence of power

and authority by denying poetry its voice.

Many modern scholars have questioned the idea of “courtly love”.

D. W. Robertson, for example, spent years waging war against the whole

notion. Robertson’s view is that the discussion of De amore through this

concept is not only inaccurate, but confusing. Robertson argues that

Capellanus does not reject “worldly delights”, but looks on them as an

unfortunate, if necessary, “malady”. This idea is loosely based on the

twelfth-century philosopher Bernardi Silvestris’ notion that worldly

41 “Les provinces du Midi avaient une langue et une littérature à elles, qui s’étaient

développées dans des conditions et avec des caractères assez différents. C’est donc,

à vrai dire, la première action de notre littérature sur une littérature étrangère que

celle qu’elle exerça sur la poésie des troubadours” (ibid., 38, https://books.google.

com/books?id=LdHs-jMItRQC&pg=PA38).

42 “ce sont nos poèmes dont les troubadours se nourrissaient et auxquels

ils font de fréquentes allusions” (ibid., 39, https://books.google.com/

books?id=LdHs-jMItRQC&pg=PA39).

43 “les nations romanes […] devinrent pour ainsi dire des succursales de la grande école

française” (ibid., 41, https://books.google.com/books?id=LdHs-jMItRQC&pg=PA41).

134 Love and its Critics

love is acceptable as long as it contributes to procreation. Silvestris,

however, expresses this view in a fairly genial fashion:

Corporis extremum lascivum terminat inguen,

Pressa sub occidua parte pudenda latent.

Iocundus que tamen et eorum commodus usus,

Si quando, qualis quantus oportet, erit.

[…]

Cum morte invicti pugnamt genialibus armis,

Naturam reparant perpetuant que genus.

The body ends in the lascivious groin,

Where the use of these private parts, hidden away,

Is pleasant and comfortable, so long as their use

Is in quality, quantity, and opportunity, as it should be.

[…]

Against death they fight invincibly with nuptial arms,

Repair our nature, and perpetuate our kind.

Robertson maintains that Capellanus does not fully embrace the

sublimation and spiritualization of earthly love; in fact, Capellanus

shows inclination for the “natural” Venus.

Cupidity, lust, and sensuality

are only seen as maladies because these are “inborn”, and they often go

against reason. As Robertson puts it, “If ‘Walter’ becomes a lover by

virtue of prolonged lascivious thought, his resulting uneasiness will be

entirely self-engendered”.

In his famous essay “The Concept of Courtly Love”, Robertson goes on

to deny that the whole concept has any validity whatsoever, except as “an

aspect of nineteenth and twentieth century cultural history”. He insists

that “[t]he subject has nothing to do with the Middle Ages, and its use as

a governing concept can only be an impediment to our understanding

of medieval texts”.

Robertson’s is a powerful argument—so far as it

44 Bernardi Silvestris. De Mundi Universitate, ed. by Carl Sigmund Barach and Johann

Wrobel (Innsbruck: Verlag der Wagnerschen Universitaets-Buchandlung, 1876),

14.153–56, 161–62, https://archive.org/stream/bernardisilvest00silvgoog#page/n66

45 D. W. Robertson. “The Subject of the ‘De Amore’ of Andreas Capellanus”. Modern

Philology, 50: 3 (February 1953), 146–48, https://doi.org/10.1086/388953

46 Ibid., 155.

47 D. W. Robertson. “The Concept of Courtly Love”. In The Meaning of Courtly Love,

ed. by F. X. Newman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1968), 17.

Emphasis added.

135

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

goes. But it performs an even more powerful surgical excision of the

Occitan poets than had the arguments of Lewis and Paris. Robertson

builds the “courtly love” concept that he then mockingly tears down,

using the building blocks of French poetry (the Roman de la rose), Latin

prose (Andreas Capellanus’ De amore), and English poetry (Chaucer’s

Troilus and Crysede). The troubadours appear not at all, except in the faint

echoes of their world glancingly referenced by Robertson’s mocking

of “pseudo-Albigensian heresies”, and “pseudo-Arabic doctrines”.

Robertson is partially right, but for the wrong reasons. “Courtly love” is

an invention of “nineteenth and twentieth century cultural history”, but

the term describes a complicated phenomenon with roots that go back

as far as the thirteenth-century writings of Matfré Ermengaud, whose

work serves a very specific ideological purpose: to tame love and desire

(by persuasion if possible, or violence if necessary) into service and

obedience, to reduce the most powerfully anarchic part of the human

spirit into quiescence and tractability. Robertson pursues this agenda by

tacitly and through omission denying that any such love (or any such

poetry) exists at all, except as irony; for Robertson, “if a poet appears to

extol sexual passion his intentions will prove, on a closer inspection, to

be ironical and moralistic”.

This then allows Robertson to bludgeon

“courtly love” into submission in service of a worldview in which the

troubadours are defined out of the very possibility of existence.

Moshe Lazar, examining the stark differences between the terms

most often used to describe and analyze love in this period—courtoise,

amour courtois, and fin’amor—scoffs at the idea that these terms are

interchangeable: “[These words] are used as though it were possible to

lump together all the periods of the Middle Ages and to interchange the

order of authors and works”.

The invented phenomenon of “courtly

love”, in which a young man feels passionate love for an unavailable

woman to whose service he dedicates himself in the absence of any

possibility of sexual union,

is at best a parody of a love that does exist,

48 Ibid.

49 Roger Boase. The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1977), 122.

50 Moshe Lazar. “Fin’amor”. In A Handbook of the Troubadours, ed. by F. R. P. Akehurst

and Judith M. Davis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 64.

51 For Jennifer Wollock, “courtly love” reflects the experience of Gaston Paris more

than it does medieval social mores:

136 Love and its Critics

a love called fin’amor, written about by the eleventh-and twelfth-century

troubadours. Calling it “the direct ancestor of romantic love as we know

it today”, Jennifer Wollock describes fin’amor as a radically subversive

cultural force:

[Fin’amor] gave medieval men and women a vent for their dissatisfaction

with the institution of marriage as it then existed, holding up a

different, much more exciting, and dangerous model of the male-female

relationship. Its socially subversive force can still be felt today not just in

the West but in cultures all across the world where traditional models of

marriage as arranged by parents are still maintained.

The frankly passionate, erotic, and embodied poetry of the troubadours

is transformed into something decorous, pious, and bloodless by a later

tradition of critics and poets. The work of the troubadours has been

subjected to a systematic distortion, one that reflects the values of the

distorters, but does violence to the poetry.

The Troubadours and their Critics

To begin seeing this in the poetry, let’s linger for a moment with Paris’

beloved trouvères, and consider a short snippet of an anonymous late

twelfth-century song:

Soufrés maris, et si ne vous anuit,

Demain m’arés et mes amis anuit.

Je vous deffenc k’un seul mot n’en parlés

—Soufrés, maris, et si ne vous mouvés.—

La nuis est courte, aparmains me rarés,

Quant mes amis ara fait sen deduit.

For Gaston Paris, courtly love was defined by the lover’s worship of an idealized lady. His

love was an ennobling discipline, not necessarily consummated, but based on sexual attraction.

Hult and Bloch have analyzed the psychology of Gaston Paris and his circle as it affected their

understanding of medieval love literature, suggesting that the scholars’ own experiences with

unattainable ladies of the nineteenth century may have led them to stress the unattainability of

the troubadours’ objects of affection.

Jennifer G. Wollock. Rethinking Chivalry and Courtly Love (Santa Barbara: Praeger,

2011), 31.

52 Ibid., 6.

137

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

Soufrés maris, et si ne vous anuit,

Demain m’arés et mes amis anuit.

Suffer in silence husband, be not vexed tonight,

Tomorrow I will be yours, but I am my lover’s tonight.

I forbid you to speak a single word.

—Suffer in silence husband, and do not move.—

The night is short, soon I will be yours again,

When my lover has had his senses’ share.

Suffer in silence husband, be not vexed tonight,

Tomorrow I will be yours, but I am my lover’s tonight.

These lines are not about rules and codes of “courtly” behavior, a

disembodied love, or a sacramentalized eros given to ethereally disembodied

devotion, as one might see in the works of Petrarch, for example. They do

not reflect an ethos which is anti-body, anti-sex, anti-female. Even in the

north, the spirit of a love that is neither courtly nor sacred is thriving.

Among the southern poets during this period there are a number of

female writers, or trobairitz, though the majority are male. Many of the

poets are famous for writing love poems (called cansos), though there are

others who write often caustic verses of war and political conflict (called

sirventes). Bertran de Born is the most exultant example of the latter:

Be·m platz lo gais temps de pascor,

que fai fuoillas e flors venir;

e plai me qand auch la baudor

dels auzels que fant retintir

lo chant per lo boscatge;

e plai me qand vei per los pratz

tendas e pavaillons fermatz;

qan vei per campaignas rengatz

cavalliers e cavals armatz.

53 Eglal Doss-Quinby. Songs of the Women Trouvères (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 2001), 184–86.

54 Bertran de Born. The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born, ed. by William D.

Paden, Tilde Sankovitch, and Patricia H. Stablein (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1986), 339, ll. 1–9.

138 Love and its Critics

I am pleased by the gay season of Spring,

that makes the leaves and the flowers come;

and it pleases me when I overhear

the birds’ faint echoes

of song through the woods;

and it pleases me when I see on the meadow

tents and pavillions well-built;

when I see the fields filled with ranks

of armed knights and horses.

Bertran’s love for war was such that Dante puts him into the Inferno as a

sower of discord for his “persistence in dividing [King] Henry [II] from

the jove rei Engles”, Prince Henry.

Dante has Bertan accuse himself, as

the warrior-troubadour stands amidst the flames:

Io vidi certo, e ancor par ch’io ‘l veggia,

un busto sanza capo andar sì come

andavan li altri de la trista greggia;

e ‘l capo tronco tenea per le chiome,

pesol con mano a guisa di lanterna:

e quel mirava noi e dicea: “Oh me!”.

[…]

“E perché tu di me novella porti,

sappi ch’i’ son Bertram dal Bornio, quelli

che diedi al re giovane i ma’ conforti.

Io feci il padre e ‘l figlio in sé ribelli;

Achitofèl non fé più d’Absalone

e di Davìd coi malvagi punzelli.

Perch’ io parti’ così giunte persone,

partito porto il mio cerebro, lasso!,

dal suo principio ch’è in questo troncone.

Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso”.

55 Ronald Martinez. “Italy”. In A Handbook of the Troubadours, ed. by F. R. P. Akehurst

and Judith M. Davis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 285.

56 Inferno. Canto 28.118–23, 133–42. In La Divina Commedia. Inferno, ed. by Ettore Zolesi

(Rome: Armando, 2009), 470–71.

139

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

I truly saw, and still seem to see it,

a body without a head, walking just like

the others in its dismal herd;

the body carried its severed head by the hair,

swaying in its hand, in the fashion of a lantern;

and it looked at us and said: “Oh me!”

[…]

“And because you will carry news of me,

know that I am Bertran de Born, he

who gave comfort to the young King.

I made father and son turn against each other;

Achitophel did not do more with Absalom

and David, through his malevolent provocations.

Because I severed people so joined,

severed now I bear my brain, alas!,

from its origin, which is in this body.

In this can be seen my retribution”.

But many of the troubadour and trobairitz poems come from, and

represent, the female perspective, and some break boundaries one

might not initially expect. For example, consider a piece called Na Maria,

attributed to a poet named Bietris (or Bieris) de Romans.

Na Maria, pretz e fina valors,

e·l joi e·l sen e la fina beutatz,

e l’aculhir e·l pretz e las onors,

e·l gen parlar e l’avinen solatz,

e la dous car’ e la gaja cuendansa,

e·l dous esgart e l’amoros semblan

que son en vos, don non avetz engansa,

me fan traire vas vos ses cor truan.

Per que vos prec, si·us platz que fin’ amors

e gausiment e dous umilitatz

me posca far ab vos tan de socors,

que mi donetz, bella domna, si·us platz,

so don plus ai d’aver joi e’speransa;

car en vos ai mon cor e mon talan,

e per vos ai tot so qu’ai d’alegransa

e per vos vauc mantas vetz sospiran.

E car beutatz e valors vos enansa

140 Love and its Critics

sobre totas, qu’una no·us es denan,

vos prec, si·us platz, per so que·us es onransa,

que non ametz entendidor truan.

Bella domna, cui pretz e joi enansa,

e gen parlar, a vos mas coblas man,

car en vos es gajess’e alegranssa

e tot lo ben qu’om en domna deman.

Lady Maria, for your esteem and pure worthiness,

joy, wisdom, and pure beauty,

graciousness and praise and distinction,

noble speech and delightful company,

sweet face and lively charm,

the sweet glance and the amorous appearance

that are in you without deception,

I am drawn to you with nothing false in my heart.

For this, I pray, please, let true love

delight and sweet humility

give me, with you, the relief I need,

so you will grant me, beautiful lady, please,

what I most hope to enjoy.

Because in you, alas, are my heart and desire

and for you, alas, are all my joys

and for you, I go, freely sighing many sighs.

And since beauty and merit advances you,

superior to all others, for there is no one before you,

I pray you, please, by all that brings you honor,

do not love those false suitors.

Beautiful Lady, whom praise and joy advances,

and noble speech, my verses are for you,

for in you is merriment and all delight,

and every good thing one could want in a woman.

On an initial reading, this poem seems to be an erotic poem written by

a woman to a woman. Though there are no explicitly sexual details, it

appears to portray a jealous lover trying to fend off rivals, a poem in

the tradition of Sappho, the ancient Greek poet who wrote much of her

57 Bietris de Romans. “Na Maria, prètz e fina valors”. In The Women Troubadours, ed.

by Meg Bogin (New York: Norton & Co., 1980), 132.

141

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

verse describing her erotic longings for beautiful women: “Toward you

bare-shouldered beauties my mind / surely never changes”.

Thus, Na

Maria is not poetically unprecedented, nor in any way to be considered

outside the realm of human erotic experience.

And yet, there is no shortage of claims that this poem is not what it

seems. The apparent lesbian eroticism is explained away through the

use of two arguments, which we will see again and again with only

minor variations. Firstly, the religious or spiritualizing argument that

sublimates love into worship:

This is a metaphor for the Virgin Mary.

This is Daniel E. O’Sullivan’s argument.

He suggests that the line

“so you will grant me, beautiful lady, please / what I most hope to

enjoy” (“qe mi donetz, bella dompna, si·us platz, / so don plus ai d’aver

esperansa”) should be interpreted in the context of “Marian songs, [in

which] the singer makes similar requests of the Virgin where the hoped-

for reward is eternal salvation”.

Though the critic acknowledges

that “the question of asking Mary to shun deceitful lovers or suitors

(entendidor) may seem odd given the Virgin’s role in helping to save

all of mankind”,

he does not let that difficulty discourage him, and

argues that the poet’s entreaty has to do with prayer: “such requests

for divine intercession must be made sincerely, thus the qualification

that such people must not be deceitful (truan)”.

Thus the critic erases

the eroticism that seems evident on the text’s surface, and allegorizes

that eroticism in the traditional way (as seen in the case of the Song of

Songs), by transforming its energy into an expression of divine love.

If that line of argument fails to convince, another line of attack comes

in the form of an historicism that assumes every human expression of a

particular time and place can necessarily be explained by and reduced

58 “ταὶςκάλαισ᾿ὔμμιν<τὸ>νόημματὦμον/οὐδιάμειπτον”(Sappho, Greek Lyric,

Vol. I: Sappho and Alcaeus, ed. by David A. Campbell [Loeb Classical Library,

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982], Fragment 41, 86).

59 “Na Maria: Courtliness and Marian Devotion in Old Occitan Lyric”. In Shaping

Courtliness in Medieval France: Essays in Honor of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, ed. by

Daniel E. O’Sullivan and Laurie Shepard (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2013), 184.

60 Ibid., 195.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

142 Love and its Critics

to the majority standards of that time and place. Such a position leaves

no room for dissent or “non-normative” desires and points of view, thus

dismissing the possibility of any such dissent or desires:

This poem is merely expressing the contemporary reality of an affectionate, but

non-sexual regard between women.

This is the argument of Angelica Rieger, who attempts to bury the passion

of the poem through a series of remarks on its rhetorical reversals:

[c]omposed by a woman and addressed to another, it acquires a special

position not only within the works of the trobairitz but within the entire

Occitan literature of the thirteenth century. Since the troubadour typically

speaks to the domna, it is clear that the inversion of this configuration in

the poems of the trobairitz may be regarded as a marginal phenomenon;

that the masculine element should be eliminated, however, so that the

lyrical dialogue takes place exclusively between one woman and another,

is an extraordinary rarity.

Rare though its female address to another female may be, and as

apparently erotic as its language is, Rieger argues that we misread the

poem if we see it as expressing sexual desire:

The poem is indeed by a woman, addressed to another, but nevertheless

does not concern a lesbian relationship. In addition to the […] rejection

of homosexuality within troubadour poetry, which makes a public,

positive depiction of such a relationship very improbable, the poem does

not contain any indecent passages either. Bieiris addresses Maria only

in a manner customary for her time and her world; she expresses her

sympathy for her in a conventionally codified form—which the choice of

genre would also support—just as one, or better, a woman, speaks with

a female acquaintance, friend, confidante, or close relative. In short, the

63 As Rita Felski has complained, historicism of this stripe has bound us into “a

remarkably static view of meaning, where texts are corralled amidst long-gone

contexts and obsolete intertexts, incarcerated in the past, with no hope of parole”

(The Limits of Critique, 157).

64 This is a varation of the amicitia argument we have already seen used to explain

away the apparent eroticism in Alcuin’s poetry.

65 Angelica Rieger. “Was Bieiris de Romans Lesbian? Women’s Relations with Each

Other in the World of the Troubadours”. In The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives

on the Women Troubadours, ed. by William D. Paden (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 73.

143

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

colloquial tone used between women differed from that used today, and

what modern readers deem erotic was simply tender.

As Rieger would have it, the poem “does not concern a lesbian

relationship” because that would be “improbable”, and therefore

evidently impossible. But to speak of a “rejection of homosexuality

within troubadour poetry” is a very careful circumscribing of the

argument, since troubadour poetry exists within the context of a wider

cultural and poetic practice in which same-sex desire is very much

part of the picture. One need only look at Alain de Lille (Alanus ab

Insulis), and his twelfth-century De Planctu Naturae for confirmation.

Herein, Alain questions Nature about love and sexuality, and explains

the prevalence of same-sex relations through a reference to the gods of

Antiquity: “Jupiter, for the adolescent Ganymede, transferred him to

the heavens, […] and while he made him the governor of his drinks on

the table by day, he made him the subject of his bed by night”.

Though

Alain portrays this state of affairs as the result of a fallen Nature who

has “betrayed her God-given responsibility by placing sexuality in the

hands of Venus [and her] moral licentiousness”,

the very existence of

the discussion makes Rieger’s immediate dismissal of the possibility

of homosexuality in Na Maria problematic.

Further evidence appears

66 Ibid., 82. This is a variation of the amicitia argument we have already seen applied

to Alcuin.

67 “Jupiter enim adolescentem Ganymedem transferens ad superna, […] et quem

in mensa per diem propinandi sibi statuit praepositum, in toro per noctem

sibi fecit suppositum” (Alain de Lille. Alani de Insulis doctoris universalis opera

omnia. In Patrologiae Cursus Completus, ed. by Jacques Paul Migne [Paris:

Apud Garnier Fratres, 1855], Vol. 210, col. 451B, https://books.google.com/

books?id=c10k8WCYMBoC&pg=RA1-PA470).

68 Barbara Newman. Gods and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 87.

69 Alain de Lille only scratches the surface of the possibilities. For other examples,

see the discussions of the anonymous twelfth-century poem “Altercatio Ganimedes

et Helene” in Newman (2003), as well as in John Boswell’s Christianity, Social

Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), and Rolf

Lenzen, “Altercatio Ganimedis et Helene”. Kritische Edition mit Kommentar. In

Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch, 7 (1972), 161–86. As Thomas Stehling argues,

[t]he recurrent reference to classical literature in medieval homosexual poetry represents

more than just an appeal to a shared education; it may also be interpreted as an attempt to

place homosexual love in a respectable context. […] Engaged like other poets in this great

revival of classical learning, poets writing homosexual verse learned to employ this respect

in a particular way.

144 Love and its Critics

in the poetry of Hilarius, or Hilary the Englishman, four of whose five

surviving love poems are written to boys.

Ad Puerum Anglicum makes

the idea fairly clear:

Puer decens, decor floris,

Genma micans, velim noris

Quia tui decus oris

Fuit mihi fax amoris.

Demure boy, beautiful as a flower,

Sparkling jewel, if only you knew

That the glory of your eyes

Has set my love on fire.

Such poetry makes plain that Na Maria exists in a context in which same-

sex desires exist, and are expressed in powerful verse. But Rieger will have

none of it. By trying to erase the very possibility of non-majority desires,

she struggles mightily to force this female-voiced poem to revolve around

a man, not as rival for the poet’s sexual desires and affections (which

would apparently require “indecent passages”), but as the wrong choice

of man among what are presumably better choices of men. Thus the

critic redefines the expressions of desire in the poem in terms of a wish

that Lady Maria make the right choice among male suitors:

Does Maria have a choice between several admirers, and is she to decide

on the “right one”, and are Bieiris’s words spoken out of a sort of maternal

concern that this young, beautiful, and intelligent woman might choose

the wrong one? Or does the man in question stand between the two

women, and is Bieiris’s poem an appeal to Maria not to take him, thereby

making herself and Bieiris unhappy? The list of possible situations could

certainly go on, but the two cited may suffice to demonstrate that Bieiris’s

Thomas Stehling. “To Love a Medieval Boy”. In Literary Versions of Homosexuality,

ed. by Stuart Kellogg (New York: Haworth Press, 1983), 167. Reddy insists,

however, that “recent scholarship on courtly love has accurately characterized the

strict heterosexuality” (25) of the Occitan poetry.

70 Stehling, 161.

71 Hilarius, “Ad Puerum Anglicum II”. ll. 1–4. Hilarii Aurelianensis Versus et Ludi

Epistolae. Mittellateinische Studien und Texte, ed. by Walther Bulst and M. L. Bulst-

Thiele (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1989), Vol. 16, 46.

145

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

canso—following the feminine lyrical tradition—revolves around the

absent third party, the man.

But both O’Sullivan’s and Rieger’s decorous explanations get strained

by the second stanza:

Per que vos prec, si·us platz que fin’ amors

e gausiment e dous umilitatz

me posca far ab vos tan de socors,

que mi donetz, bella domna, si·us platz,

so don plus ai d’aver joi e’speransa;

car en vos ai mon cor e mon talan,

e per vos ai tot so qu’ai d’alegransa

e per vos vauc mantas vetz sospiran.

For this, I pray, please, let true love

delight and sweet humility

give me, with you, the relief I need,

so you will grant me, beautiful lady, please,

what I most hope to enjoy.

Because in you, alas, are my heart and desire

and for you, alas, are all my joys

and for you, I go, freely sighing many sighs.

These lines are practically drenched in anxious longing—the voice we

hear begs for relief, and the fulfilment of desire. In the meantime, she

sighs as she walks abroad, praying that “fin’ amors” will give her the

heart of the woman she so desperately admires. It is tenuous, at best,

to argue that what she prays her bella domna will grant her is to choose

the right man. As the poem concludes, the feminine voice praises Maria

as the embodiment of all that is desirable: “for in you is merriment and

all delight, / and every good thing one could want in a woman”. This,

along with the warning “do not love those false suitors”, especially

when paired with the claim “I am drawn to you with nothing false in

my heart”—sets the female voice of the poem directly in opposition to,

and rivalry with those “entendidor”, the (grammatically, at least) male

72 Rieger, 92.

73 Bietris de Romans, ll. 9–16.

146 Love and its Critics

wooers who will betray and lie to Maria. As Meg Bogin has observed,

“Scholars have resorted to the most ingenious arguments to avoid

concluding that [Bietris] is a woman writing a love poem to another

woman”,

and this, perhaps, is the best indication that Bietris is in

fact writing a love poem to another woman: the scholar doth protest too

much, methinks.

Rieger hedges her bets, admitting that “[t]he possibility of an

element of female jealousy (which might even bear lightly homoerotic

characteristics) need not be ruled out entirely”. Nevertheless, she is

determined to “substantiate that [Bietris’s] poetic motivation does

not spring from a lesbian relationship”.

Alison Ganze, however,

argues undauntedly in the familiar and predictable what appears to be

X is actually Y style of the hermeneutics of suspicion, that it is a “faulty

assumption […] that the erotic language in the poem must be taken as a

literal expression of sexual desire”, before she goes on to assert that “‘Na

Maria’ fits within the conventional mode expressing friendship between

women”.

Note how Ganze’s gesture makes the poem safe, orthodox,

predictable, and not at all disturbing to conservative sensibilities. It’s

just about women being friends. What appears to be erotic longing is

actually just friendship. What appears to be [fill in the blank] is actually

[fill in the blank differently]. William Burgwinkle argues along similar

lines when he suggests that the poem Tanz salutz e tantas amors, perhaps

by the mid-thirteenth century troubadour Uc de Saint Circ, “mocks all

future discussions of whether ladies writing to ladies might be lesbians

by simply pulling the linguistic rug from beneath the supposed signs of

sentiment, the words in question”

Once a critic is in the habit of suspicion,

regarding words as always or even usually meaning something other

than they merely seem to mean, it appears that the habit is never

broken. Thus Burgwinkle argues that love poems are not actually love

poems, because they are really something else, in this case, a currency

for exchange:

74 Meg Bogin. The Women Troubadours (New York: Norton & Co., 1980), 176.

75 Rieger, 92.

76 Alison Ganze. “‘Na Maria, pretz e fina valors’: A New Argument for Female

Authorship”. Romance Notes, 49: [1] (2009), 25–26, https://doi.org/10.1353/

rmc.2009.0010

77 William E. Burgwinkle. Love for Sale: Materialist Readings of the Troubadour Razo

Corpus (New York: Garland, 1997), 100. Emphasis added.

147

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

love songs should probably be seen more as a sort of currency in these

Southern courts than as personal love missives. […]. The “Lady” in such

songs is often more an empty signifier than a flesh-and-blood woman.

As in much of classical literature, the woman is an allegorical stand-in

for something else. [This could be] an actual woman at court, the court

itself, a fiefdom or castle, a male patron, or an empty category.

With the inclusion of the “empty category”, the critic claims that what

appears to be X is not only not X, but is potentially anything in the

world other than X. Burgwinkle decries the fact that troubadour love

poems “continue to be read as personal love missives […] rather than as

musings on language”, repeating the familiar critical move that reduces

poetry only to language, or to a meta-discourse in which it always and

only speaks of itself. He then declares that his argument will “show

just how deeply representation, even of what seems to be the most

personal nature, is imbued with issues of profit, marketing, and self-

promotion”.

Everything that comes after “seems” is the not-X of the

formula. Troubadour love poems seem to be personal, but are actually

[fill in the blank]. This same basic argument is made so often, about so

many different poems, plays, novels, etc., that one begins to wonder

if it is hard-wired into the academic psyche. What Harold Rosenberg

once called “The Herd of Independent Minds”

is alive and well and

publishing books and journal articles.

What we encounter in troubadour poetry, if we allow ourselves

to see it, is a crossing of boundaries, love as resistance to, or rejection

of, the ordinarily assigned categories or roles. It challenges the idea of

faithfulness in marriage and questions the heteronormativity of our

typical approaches to sex and desire.

In the spirit of crossing boundaries, let’s look at the troubadours

for a moment from outside the perspective of specialist scholars in the

field. The popular myth and religion scholar Joseph Campbell wrote

perceptively about the troubadours, and his analysis is acute: all too

often writers, thinkers, theologians, poets, and academics treat love

and desire as if they are definable only in terms of absolute antithesis,

78 Ibid., 100–01.

79 Ibid., 11. Emphasis added.

80 Commentary, 6 (1 Jan 1948), 244–52, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/

articles/the-herd-of-independent-mindshas-the-avant-garde-its-own-mass-culture/

148 Love and its Critics

“writing of agape and eros and their radical opposition, as though these

two were the final terms of the principle of ‘love’”.

It is as if love must

be regarded in terms of extremes: “whatever is at hand, one loves—

either in the angelic way of charity or in the orgiastic, demonic way

of a Dionysian orgy; but in either case, religiously: in renunciation of

ego, ego judgment, and ego choice”.

Such thinking supports either the

idea that impersonal principle is more important than personal choice,

or that the drives of the body are more important than individual

judgment. Campbell suggests that the primary poetic, philosophical,

and cultural importance of this period, of the troubadour movement

itself, is the elevation of the perspectives and choices of the individual

over the impersonal claims of law and dogma and the body’s claims of

lust and desire. This stance often set the troubadours at odds with the

theological ideas of their time:

According to the Gnostic-Manichean view nature is corrupt […] in the

poetry of the troubadours […] nature […] is an end and glory in itself.

[…] Hence, if the courtly cult of amor is to be catalogued according

to heresy, it should be indexed rather as Pelagian than as Gnostic or

Manichean, for […] Pelagius and his followers absolutely rejected the

doctrine of our inheritance of the sin of Adam and Eve, and taught that

we have finally no need of supernatural grace, since our nature itself is

full of grace; no need of a miraculous redemption, but only of awakening

and maturation.

This tension between worldviews, between the insistence that the world

is corrupt, and the celebration of the world as full of its own grace, is

reflected in the simultaneous existence of two groups that the twelfth-

and thirteenth-century church regarded as heretical and dangerous:

the troubadours—who celebrated the body—and the Cathars—who

rejected that body as corrupt and fallen. The name Cathar comes from a

Greek root meaning “purged” or “pure”, and for them, the flesh needed

to be “purged” and the entire physical world was a prison from which

to escape. But the troubadours’ “heresy” was not the more Gnostic,

flesh-and world-denying belief characteristic of the Cathars who were

the primary target of the Albigensian Crusade of the early thirteenth

81 Joseph Campbell. Creative Mythology (New York: Viking, 1968), 177.

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid., 176.

149

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

century: “there is little sign of Cathar influence on [troubadour]

poetry. The delight in the senses found in much of the love-lyric is

hardly compatible with the Cathar notion of the evil of matter”.

If the

troubadours were heretics, theirs was the more life-and world-affirming

heresy (at its root, the word merely means “opinion”) of Pelagius, a

British monk who was a contemporary of the now-famous Augustine

of Hippo. This obscure monk thought the doctrine of original sin was

the single most pernicious thing he had ever heard of, and he devoted a

great deal of his time and energy to arguing against the idea.

Imagine this: from the moment you are conceived, you are flawed,

broken, and sick, while at the same time you are commanded to be well

and denied the medicine that would cure you:

O wearisome condition of humanity,

Borne under one law, to an other bound,

Vainely begot, and yet forbidden vanity,

Created sicke, commanded to be sound.

You are denied this medicine (unless you are one of a lucky few) by the

will of a perfect, just, and unbending deity—and this denial comes as a

result of no action or inaction, no deserving or failing of your own—in

fact, you have not done, and cannot do anything either to elicit or forestall

the pleasure or displeasure of this deity. Judgment was rendered upon

you before the founding of the world into which you would one day be

born as a helpless, broken, and already-condemned infant. Since you

are fatally flawed from the very beginning, the only possibility that

you have of salvation, joy, and fulfillment is the forcible manipulation

of your sin-infected will by God (through a power known as grace),

because you are entirely unable to take any positive responsibility for

your life.

Pelagius opposed all of this in the name of human freedom:

84 Linda M. Paterson. The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society c.1100-c.1300

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 342–43.

85 Fulke Greville. The Tragedy of Mustapha (London: Printed for Nathaniel

Butler, 1609), “Chorus Sacerdotum”, Sig. B2r, https://archive.org/stream/

tragedyofmustaph00grev#page/n16

86 Jean de Meun’s thirteenth-century reaction to this problem takes 625 lines of the

Roman de la Rose to work through what might be called a semi-Pelagian solution,

ending a discussion of free will with the idea that “It is above all destiny / no matter

what will or will not be destined” (“Il est seur toutes destinees, / ja si ne seront

150 Love and its Critics

“the relationship of human freedom to divine grace was the crucial issue

on which Augustine and Pelagius differed. […] Augustine [refused] to

admit that the debate was between freedom and determinism. Pelagius,

on the other hand, was just as adamant in insisting that it was”.

For Pelagius, Augustine’s doctrine of original sin contributes to the

decay of society, and to the breakdown of the ordinary restraints that

our sense of responsibility for our actions puts on our baser impulses.

Pelagius regards “man’s sin as the result not of an inheritance from

Adam but of imitation of his example”.

Pelagius believes that “each

soul was created by God at the time of conception […] and thus could

not come into the world tainted by original sin transmitted from Adam.

[…] Adam’s sin did have disastrous consequences for humanity;

it introduced death and the habit of disobedience. But the latter was

propagated by example, not by physical descent”.

Pelagius argues that Augustine’s doctrine acts as a carte blanche, a

cosmic get-out-of-jail-free card that gives people perverse permission

to abandon themselves to their baser, more aggressive and violent

impulses, resulting in the chaos that Thomas Hobbes describes as the

war of all against all, in which life is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish,

and short”.

In a letter to a follower named Demetrias, Pelagius argues

destinees”) (Lorris and de Meun [1965], v.3. ll. 17695–96). Robert Musil’s modern

reaction to this dilemma is fully Pelagian:

If God predetermined and foreknew everything, how can a man sin? Yes, this is an early

question, but you can see that it is still a very modern question as well. This has created an

extremely intriguing representation of God. We offend him by his own consent; he even forces

us to transgressions for which he will blame us. He not only knows about it beforehand […],

but he caused it!

Wenn Gott alles vorher bestimmt und weiß, wie kann der Mensch sündigen? So wurde ja früher

gefragt, und sehen Sie, es ist noch immer eine ganz moderne Fragestellung. Eine ungemein

intrigante Vorstellung von Gott hatte man sich da gemacht. Man beleidigt ihn mit seinem

Einverständnis, er zwingt den Menschen zu einer Verfehlung, die er ihm übelnehmen wird; er

weiß es ja nicht nur vorher […], sondern er veranlaßt es!

Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften [The Man Without Qualities] (Berlin: Rowohlt Verlag,

1957), 485–86.

87 Brinley Roderick Rees. Pelagius: Life and Letters (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), 54.

88 Ibid., 76.

89 John Toews. The Story of Original Sin (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013), 76.

90 Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan: Or, The Matter, Forme & Power of a Commonwealth,

Ecclesiasticall and Civill (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651), 62, https://books.google.

com/books?id=L3FgBpvIWRkC&pg=PA62

151

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

that “the ignorant vulgar are at fault”

for allowing themselves to be

persuaded “that mankind has not, in truth, been created good, because

it is able to do evil”,

insisting that we are “capable of both good and

evil”,

but that either involves an exercise of will: “neither good nor

evil is done without the will”.

And the will can be trained; it is not

hopelessly corrupt as the result of an inherent fault, a fundamental

brokenness or wickedness in human nature, but weakened as a result

of “being instructed in evil”,

in no small part by those, like Augustine,

who preach that human nature is fundamentally evil due to inherited

sin. Pelagius, like Rousseau, thinks people are basically good and need

only a little development, maturation, and guidance. In the words of

the seventeenth-century English Pelagian, John Milton, they require

education. Milton’s belief that human beings are not irretrievably

wicked is made clear in his 1644 treatise Of Education, where he outlines

the ultimate purpose of human education: “The end of learning is to

repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright,

and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as

we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue”.

The troubadours are more closely aligned to this Pelagian (and

Miltonic) point of view that the world and its people are basically

good. This is the heritage that the troubadours passed down to the

Renaissance and eventually to our own time: the idea that nature is

good and love is an end in itself, not something to be denied or escaped

from, not a trap, not an object of shame, but a source of joy.

It contains

a hint of later ideas to come, like the carpe diem motif of so much English

91 “imperitum vulgus offendit” (Pelagius. Pelagii Sancti et eruditi monachi

Epistola ad Demetriadem, ed. by Johann Salomo Semler [Halae Magdeburgicae:

Carol Herman Hemmerde, 1775], 14, https://books.google.com/books?id=

uw5qbOfGtgoC&pg=PA14).

92 “non vere bonum factum hominem putes, quia is facere malum potest” (ibid.).

93 “boni et mali capacem etiam” (ibid., 32, https://books.google.com/books?id=

uw5qbOfGtgoC&pg=PA32).

94 “nec bonum sine voluntate faciamus, nec malum” (ibid.).

95 “mali etiam esse studuimus” (ibid., 34, https://books.google.com/books?id=

uw5qbOfGtgoC&pg=PA34).

96 John Milton. Of Education (London: 1644), Sig. A1v, https://books.google.com/

books?id=7rJDAAAAcAAJ&pg=PP4

97 The more recognizably orthodox point of view is memorably expressed in the

sixteenth-century English poet George Gascoigne’s poem “Gascoigne’s Good

Morrow”, where readers are informed that we must “deeme our days on earth, / But

hell to heavenly joye” (The Complete Works of George Gascoigne: Vol. 1, The Posies, ed.

152 Love and its Critics

Renaissance poetry. From this point of view, the claims of this life, and

this world, rather than the airy promises of a future existence, take on an

urgency that is otherwise denied them. In the view of the troubadours,

“not heaven but this blossoming earth was to be recognized as the true

domain of love, as it is of life”.

Hand-in-hand with this immediacy of

earthly life and love, goes a concept of individualism that is vital for

understanding the troubadours and their poetry:

The troubadour’s new time expresses a new individualism. […] It is the

Occitan troubadour, with his self-promoting songs of desperate love

for the wife of his patron, who ignores war and nation to disguise a

revolutionary individualist intent (whether as illicit desire or as social

gain) behind the spiritual quality of true love. He is a figure who is from

our perspective recognizably Keatsian, certainly Romantic, and therefore

perceptively modern and out of his time.

There is, of course, no shortage of critics who will deny such a proposition,

arguing instead for the near-inaccessibility of medieval poetry. One

such critic is Paul Zumthor, who insists that “A first obvious piece of

evidence becomes clear to our eyes: the remoteness of the Middle Ages,

and the irrecoverable distance that separates us […]. Medieval poetry

belongs to a universe that has become foreign to us”.

100

For Zumthor:

When a man of our century confronts a work of the twelfth century,

the time that separates one from the other distorts, or even erases the

relationship that ordinarily develops between the author and the reader

through the mediation of the text: such a relationship can hardly be

spoken of any more. What indeed is a true reading, if not an effort that

involves both the reader and the culture in which the reader participates,

an effort corresponding to that textual production involving the author

and his own universe? In respect to a medieval text, the correspondence

no longer occurs spontaneously. The perception of form becomes

ambiguous. Metaphors are darkened, comparisons no longer make

by John W. Cunliffe [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907], 57, https://

archive.org/stream/cu31924013121292#page/n68).

98 Campbell, Creative Mythology, 183.

99 Elizabeth Fay. Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (New

York: Palgrave, 2002), 15.

100 “Une première évidence éclate aux yeux: l’éloignement du moyen âge, la distance

irrécupérable qui nous en sépare […] la poésie médiévale relève d’un univers qui

nous est devenu étranger” (Paul Zumthor. Essai de Poétique Médiévale [Paris: Seuil,

1972], 19).

153

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

sense. The reader remains embedded within his own time; while the

text, through an effect produced by the passage of time, seems timeless,

which is a contradictory situation.

101

But to give in to an idea like this, is to give in to an absolute and

unprovable claim which is structurally identical to the mentalités idea

of Lucien Febvre, who argued in 1947 that there was no such thing as

an atheist in the Renaissance (despite the fact that many were accused

of atheism, and even executed on the charge

102

) because “the mental

equipment available in the sixteenth century made it as good as

impossible for anyone to be an atheist, and, perhaps more important,

[…] an atheist could only have been a solitary figure to whom nobody

would have paid any significant attention”.

103

Febvre’s claim, in turn,

has its roots in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey (1910), for whom

one speaks of the spirit of a time, of the spirit of the Middle Ages, or

the Enlightenment. At the same time, it is a fact that in such epochs

limitations are met with in the form of a life-horizon. By that, I mean the

limit on the people of a time in terms of their life’s thinking, feeling, and

will. There is a proportion of life, lifestyle, experience, and ability to form

concepts, which tightly binds the individual within a certain range of

modifications of opinions, value formation, and purposes. Inevitabilities

rule herein over particular individuals.

104

101 Lorsqu’un homme de notre siècle affronte une œuvre du XIIe siècle, la durée qui les sépare l’un

de l’autre dénature jusqu’à l’effacer la relation qui, ordinairement, s’établit entre l’auteur et le

lecteur par la médiation du texte: c’est à peine si l’on peut parler encore de relation. Qu’est-ce

en effet qu’un lecture vraie, sinon un travail où se trouvent à la fois impliqués le lecteur et la

culture à laquelle il participe? Travail correspondant à celui qui produsuit le texte et où furent

impliqués le auteur et son propre univers. A l’égard d’un texte médiéval, la correspndance

ne se produit plus spontanément. La perception même de la forme devient équivoque. Les

métaphores s’obscurcissent, le comparant s’écarte du comparé. Le lecteur reste engagé dans son

temps; le texte, par un effet tenant à l’accumulation des durées intermédiaires, apparaît comme

hors du temps, ce qui est une situation contradictoire.

Ibid., 20.

102 See Michael Bryson, The Atheist Milton (London: Routledge, 2012), 36–50.

103 Lucien Febvre. The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of

Rabelais. Trans. by Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1985), Translator’s Introduction, xxviii.

104 [S]pricht man vom Geist einer Zeit, vom Geist des Mittelalters, der Aufklärung. Damit ist

zugleich gegeben, daß jede solcher Epochen eine Begrenzung findet in einem Lebenshorizont.

Ich verstehe darunter die Begrenzung, in welcher die Menschen einer Zeit in bezug auf ihr

Denken, Fühlen und Wollen leben. Es besteht in ihr ein Verhältnis von Leben, Lebensbezügen,

Lebenserfahrung und Gedankenbildung, welche die Einzelnen in einem bestimmten Kreis

154 Love and its Critics

Foucault makes a similar argument, insisting that “in a given culture and

time, there is never more than one episteme that defines the conditions

of possibility of all knowledge”.

105

Such claims, if taken seriously,

render it almost futile to read the poetry of any era or any culture that

is separated from one’s own by enough time, and geographic and/or

linguistic difference, because of the differences between the mentalités

and life-horizons (Lebenshorizont) and epistemes of the past and the

present. Claims like this (commonly made, though rarely substantiated)

allow the scholar to put up “No Trespassing” signs, warning away

interested—though non-specialist—readers, and creating what amount

to obscure literary fiefdoms ruled over by critics who have blanketed

their subject areas in a forbidding darkness.

106

Zumthor insists that “the song is its own proper subject, without a

predicate. […] The poem is its own mirror”.

107

From this point of view,

Zumthor sees all poetry as “self-referential”, a structure “in which the

‘I’ who speaks has a purely grammatical function, devoid of reference

to anything other than the act of singing which it performs, records,

re-enacts, and anticipates”.

108

Though Zumthor says that “this is not a

von Modifikationen der Auffassung, Wertbildung und Zwecksetzung festhält und bindet.

Unvermeidlichkeiten regieren hierin über den einzelnen Individuen.

Wilhelm Dilthey. Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften

(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 217.

105 “Dans une culture et à un moment donné, il n’y a jamais qu’une épistémè, qui définit

les conditions de possibilité de tout savoir” (Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des

sciences humaines [Paris: Gallimard, 1966], 179).

106 Rita Felski describes this impulse as one in which “the critic feels impelled to beat

off the barbarians by raising the drawbridge—a too-drastic response that cuts off

the text from the moral, affective, and cognitive bonds that infuse it with energy and

life. Thus the literary work is treated as a fragile and exotic artifact of language, to

be handled only by curators kitted out in kid gloves” (The Limits of Critique, 28). She

then notes that “[s]uch a vision of reading remains notably silent on the question

of how literature enters life” (28–29). R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols

describe a similar attitude, decrying what they see as the use of “philological

expertise […] not as a tool to make medieval literature accessible, but as a cordon

sanitaire to prevent the reading of such works” (“Introduction”. In Medievalism and

the Modern Temper, ed. by R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols [Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996], 3).

107 “Le chanson et ainsi son propre sujet, sans prédicat […] Le poèmee est miroir de

soi” (Zumthor, 218).

108 Simon Gaunt. “The Châtelain de Couci”. In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval

French Literature, ed. by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2008), 96.

155

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

claim for the freezing of the text”,

109

that is, in effect, what has happened to

a great deal of troubadour criticism. Zumthor’s assertion that there is an

unbridgeable gap between the medieval era and our own was followed

by the insistence that the poems must not be understood as being about

love and desire in any real and still-understandable sense, but about

language and performance.

110

This tendency has been exacerbated by

Zumthor’s concomitant claim that any attempt by a modern reader to

read twelfth-century work is doomed because “the period that separates

one from the other distorts, or even erases the relationship” necessary

for understanding. Despite the caveat Zumthor adds about not applying

“simplified analogies and mythical justifications”

111

this is precisely what

a number of critics of the last few decades have done, applying French

feminist thought,

112

or making accusations of troubadour misogyny and

narcissism,

113

or arguing that what appear to be love poems are actually

disguised representations of political struggles. The latter is argued by

Erich Köhler, for whom the more esoteric style of troubadour poetry

(the closed song or trobar clus) indicates a class struggle between higher

and lower levels of nobility: “the persistent element of esotericism in

the attitude of the feudal nobility, becomes more and more a deliberate

stance that crucially separates it from the lower nobility”.

114

Köhler not

only “argued vigorously that the troubadour lyric mediated the tension

between the different sections of the nobility” but he also maintained

109 “On ne prétend pas en cela geler le texte” (Zumthor, 20).

110 This is a curious reworking of what Holmes calls a “Burckhardtian opposition

of medieval conformism, or community values, and Renaissance individualism”

(Olivia Holmes. Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian

Poetry [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000], 3).

111 “des analogies simplifiantes et des justifications mythiques” (Zumthor, 20).

112 See Tilde Sankovitch, “The Trobairitz”. In The Troubadours: An Introduction, ed.

by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),

113–26.

113 See Simon Gaunt, “Poetry of Exclusion: A Feminist Reading of Some Troubadour

Lyrics”. The Modern Language Review, 85: 2 (April 1990), 310–29.

114 “Das beharrende Element der esoterischen Haltung, der Feudaladel, wird sich

mehr und mehr der Interessenverschiebung bewußt, die ihn vom Kleinadel

immer entscheidender trennt” (Erich Köhler. “Zum ‘Trobar Clus’ Der Trobadors”.

Romanische Forschungen, 64: 1–2 [1952], 101). Köhler goes on to argue that the “trobar

clus” serves as as “deepening of the conscious sense of one’s own existence”, and

“as a mystical recovery and concealment of the sense of being” (“Vertiefenwollen

des bewußt werdenden Sinns der eigenen Existenz, als ein mystisches Bergen und

gleichzeitiges Verbergen der vom standischen Sein”) (98).

156 Love and its Critics

that “the erotic love to which the songs were ostensibly devoted was

invariably a metaphor for other desires, other drives”.

115

As E. Jane

Burns explains it, the passions expressed in the troubadour poems are

merely masks, disguising the desire for wealth, status, and power:

[T]roubadour poets’ professed love of the domna actually masked a

concerted social aspiration to be elevated to the status of her husband.

Thus could poor, landless knights of the lower nobility attempt to attain

higher standing (Köhler 1964). […] Provencal love songs [have] less to

do with eroticism, passion, or desire than with class conflict between the

disenfranchised squirine and the established nobility (Köhler 1970).

116

One has to marvel at the lengths to which scholars will go to rewrite

poetry in order to “consistently read love songs as about anything

but love”.

117

And as one follows Burns’ explanation a little further,

the idea at work becomes clear—what is aimed at is nothing less than

the dissolving of the text in the solvent of criticism: “The courtly lady

dissolves further in Lacanian analyses of lyric and romance where she

115 Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay. “Introduction”. In The Troubadours: An Introduction,

ed. by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1999), 4. Emphasis added.

116 E. Jane Burns. “Courtly Love: Who Needs It? Recent Feminist Work in the Medieval

French Tradition”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 27: 1 (Autumn

2001), 40. It is important to note, however, that for Köhler, this is not necessarily

true of the troubadours who write in the “trobar leu” or open style. Speaking of the

poet Guirat de Bornelh, Köhler argues for the importance of recognizing desire and

joy in this style of troubadour poetry: “Whoever knows the meaning of “joy” in the

troubadors, […] in the interrelationship with the woman as the source, […] who

knows this notion as the dominant motif of Provençal poetry, is able to measure

what the light style [or trobar leu] must mean for Guiraut” (“Wer um den Sinn

des ‘joy’ bei den Trobadors wei, […] in der Wechselbeziehung zur Frau als ihrer

Quelle […] wer diese Vorstellung als das beherrschende Motiv der provenzalischen

Dichtung erkennt, vermag zu ermessen, was der leichte Stil für Guiraut bedeuten

mu”) (Köhler, 91–92). In a later article, Köhler makes a clear distinction between

the two styles, arguing that for the high nobility, obscurity served as an insiders’

code from which the lower nobility (to say nothing of the common people) were

excluded: “the obscure and difficult style, the trobar clus, is suitable for the high

nobility, who speak an esoteric language to set up a barrier between the profane and

the treasure of true love, to which they [the high nobility] alone must have access”

(“le style obscur et difficile, le trobar clus, convient à la haute noblesse, qui parle

une langue ésotérique pour mettre à l’abri des profanes le trésor du vrai amour,

auquel elle seule doit avoir accès”) (“Observations historiques et sociologiques sur

la poésie des troubadours”. Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 7: 25 [1964], 31, http://

www.persee.fr/doc/ccmed_0007–9731_1964_num_7_25_1296).

117 Longxi, 207.

157

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

becomes a textualized object of masculine desire, a metaphor for the

enigma of femininity and a cipher for male poetic practice”.

118

This

argument has long been a paradigm in studies of troubadour poetry.

Frederick Goldin argues that the women being addressed in troubadour

poems are essentially mirrors that reflect the troubadour back to

himself, showing him what he “wants to become” but also “what he can

never be”.

119

Burns argues that the apparent passions of the troubadour

poems are actually “a misreading of the feminine in terms of the

masculine”,

120

while O’Sullivan states the case baldly, openly using the

what appears to be X is really Y formula: “[t]he male-authored canso is

narcissistic in nature: while it may be ostensibly about the praiseworthy

Other, it’s really about praising the Self”.

121

Tilde Sankovitch turns

the troubadours into auto-eroticists, claiming that Narcissus serves as

a model for “the troubadours’ self-referential erotic quest for beauty

and perfection” while the poetry refers not to “the domna’s intimate

Otherness but to the poet’s wish to penetrate into his own perfection’s

space”.

122

All of these arguments follow Paris in furthering the trend

of violent ideological impositions tracing back to the early thirteenth

century, by subordinating the troubadours and their poetry to the

concepts and dictates of outside authority. The pen and the sword are

merely different means to the same end.

What is especially noteworthy is how closely the critics adhere to a

basic paradigm, essentially repeating each other’s arguments with some

minor changes in terminology and theory. The effect is like listening to

a chorus singing a song with only one verse, each singer replicating the

others, with minor variations available only in the register and timbre

of the voices, whose individuality is otherwise lost in the repetitiveness

of the musical theme. And it has to be asked, if this is truly all that

118 Burns, 40.

119 Frederick Goldin. The Mirror of Narcissus and the Courtly Love Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1967), 75.

120 Jane E. Burns. Courtly Love Undressed: Reading through Clothes in Medieval French

Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 252, n. 14.

121 Daniel O’Sullivan. “The Man Backing Down from the Lady in Trobairitz Tensos”.

In Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies: Essays in Honor of E. Jane Burns, ed. by

Laine E. Doggett and Daniel E. O’Sullivan (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), 45.

122 Tilde Sankovitch. “Lombarda’s Reluctant Mirror: Speculum of Another Poet”. In

The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours, ed. by William

Paden (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1989), 184, 185.

158 Love and its Critics

troubadour poetry is, why read any of it, much less any of the criticism

which shows so much disdain for it? This kind of argument, despite

its theoretical and secular sheen, is fundamentally religious in nature,

reflecting the assumptions of the Akibas and Origens of the world

for whom a text must be forced to obey, forced to yield a morally (or

theoretically) edifying sense or be righteously and roundly accused,

before being abandoned altogether. As Longxi points out, for such

readers, this has long meant systematically turning away from the literal

meanings of words and texts:

As allegory etymologically means “speaking of the other”, in reading this

we should then understand it as that. Of the four levels (or the fourfold

scheme) of meaning, which constitute the theoretical foundation of

biblical allegory, the least important or relevant to true understanding,

according to the allegorists, is the literal sense. The revelation of the

Spirit must be at the cost of the suppression of the Letter. For Origen and

his followers, the written word should be cast off and forgotten in order

to free the spirit of the Logos from the shell of human language.

123

Along similar lines, and with similar goals in mind, Gregory Stone uses

what he calls a “grammatical” argument—similar to that of Zumthor,

but based on categories from Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia—to erase the

individuality of the troubadour poets by claiming that it never existed

in the first place. His argument is based on the notion of a “mature

rejection of the new Renaissance model of the self-determining singular

ego, a model with which the late Middle Ages is already quite familiar

yet regards as a lie”.

124

While one wonders how such notably retiring,

self-effacing personalities as Guilhem IX and his famous granddaughter

Eleanor of Aquitaine would react to such an idea, Stone goes on to

maintain that “[t]he Middle Ages consciously insists that I am they:

that the individual subject is never singular, is always in some essential

sense general, collective, objective”.

125

Miraculously, an entire era and

all of its people can be described as insisting that “I am they”, as if the

scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where Graham Chapman’s Brian

insists to the crowd “You are all individuals”, while they respond in

123 Longxi, 200.

124 Gregory B. Stone. The Death of the Troubadour: The Late Medieval Resistance to the

Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 4.

125 Ibid.

159

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

unison, “Yes. We are all individuals” has been inverted and turned into

an interpretive principle.

126

As Daniel Heller-Roazen demonstrates, critics frequently claim that

the “I” in medieval texts testifies to the absence of poetic individuality:

[t]he critical works on the problem of the medieval poetic “I” concur

precisely in their uncertainty about the referential status of the first-

person pronoun; and in many instances they deny, implicitly or

explicitly, the possibility of attributing the “I” of a medieval author

to a historical individual. […] the “I” is not the name of an actual

individual but essentially the product of a rhetorical operation, [and]

the significatum of the first-person pronoun in medieval poetry cannot

be presupposed by criticism. […] The “I”, which for many recent critics

of “literary subjectivity” is what names an actual being, is precisely

what, for many medieval authors, appears to express a fundamental

anonymity: something without any determined nature or properties, a

work of artifice and fiction in every sense. The definition of the “I” as the

sign of an existing subject, which appears almost self-evident today, is

therefore foreign to the texts of medieval literature.

127

The syllogistic argument here is as familiar as it is threadbare: 1) Critics

concur about their “uncertainty” over the meaning of “I” in medieval

poetry. 2) The “I” appears to such critics to “express a fundamental

anonymity”. 3) Therefore the “I” (as “the sign of an existing subject”

or actual person) is “foreign to medieval texts”. The conclusion simply

does not follow from the premises, but in arguments of this type that

is almost irrelevant; the authoritative tone is intended to carry the day.

The “I” is simply asserted to be “the product of a rhetorical operation”,

without any argument or evidence being put forward to support

this, and successive critics perform essentially this same maneuver

in analyses of medieval poetry. Their thinking is is “governed to a

remarkable degree by [Jacob] Burckhardt’s apparently ineradicable

[nineteenth-century] assumption that in the Middle Ages ‘man was

conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family,

126 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QereR0CViMY

127 Daniel Heller-Roazen. Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of

Contingency (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 30, 33. And so

Heller-Roazen essentially repeats Stone’s repetition of Zumthor. With such

repetition careers are made. And so it continues…

160 Love and its Critics

or corporation’”,

128

a case that critics like Zumthor, Heller-Roazen, and

Stone repeat practically word-for-word,

129

and which forms one of the

governing assumptions for Stephen Greenblatt’s much-contested book

The Swerve.

130

This repetition from one critic to the next functions as a

kind of groupthink by which modern critics who mimic one another’s

voices deny the individuality of medieval men and women:

128 Lee Patterson. “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval

Studies”. Speculum, 65: 1 (January 1990), 95.

129 In Burckhardt’s formulation, the condescension is nearly overwhelming:

In the Middle Ages the two sides of consciousness—that turned toward the world and that

turned toward the inner self of man—were dreaming or half awake under a common veil. The

veil was woven of faith, childish partiality, and delusion, through which the world and its

history appeared in miraculous hues, but Man recognized himself only as a race, a people, a

party, a corporation, a family, or otherwise in any general or common form.

Im Mittelalter lagen die beiden Seiten des Bewußtseins—nach der Welt hin und nach dem

Innern des Menschen selbst—wie unter einem gemeinsamen Schleier träumend oder

halbwach. Der Schleier war gewoben aus Glauben, Kindesbefangenheit und Wahn; durch

ihn hindurch gesehen erschienen Welt und Geschichte wundersam gefärbt, der Mensch aber

erkannte sich nur als Race, Volk, Partei, Corporation. Familie oder sonst in irgend einer Form

des Allgemeinen.

Jacob Burckhardt. Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch (Basel:

Schweighauser, 1860), 131, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=gri.ark:/13960/

t7fr4fg3z;view=1up;seq=137

130 Greenblatt bases his case on the notion that the Renaissance is responsible for

establishing a sense of individuality of which earlier periods were incapable:

“Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the

constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality,

sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body” (The Swerve: How

the World Became Modern [New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2011], pp. 9–10). But such

expressions of “desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world,

[and] the claims of the body” are readily evident in the poetry of the troubadours,

trobairitz, and Minnesingers, as well as the earlier work of the Greek erotici, Ovid,

and the writer(s) of the Song of Songs. The historian John Monfasani describes

Greenblatt’s book as a “Burckhardtian, or, perhaps more accurately, Voltairean

view of the Renaissance as an outburst of light after a long medieval darkness”,

and calls it an echo of Burckhardt’s “caricature of the poor benighted medievals as

incapable of conceiving of themselves other than as part of some corporate structure

(as opposed to us liberated modern individualists)” (“The Swerve: How the

Renaissance Began”. Reviews in History, 1283, http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/

review/1283). Marjorie Curry Woods argues that Greenblatt “reinforces a tired old

master-narrative, in which one or another renaissance man changes the world”

(“Where’s the Manuscript”. Exemplaria, 25: 4 [Winter 2013], 322), while John Parker

calls Greenblatt’s account “a venerable and familiar story” (“The Epicurean Middle

Ages”. Exemplaria, 25: 4 [Winter 2013], 325), and Lee Morrissey and Will Stockton

refer to it as a kind of monstrosity or caricature: “New Historicism on steroids

(all anecdotes, all the time)” (“What Swirls around The Swerve”. Exemplaria, 25: 4

[Winter 2013], 334, https://doi.org/10.1179/1041257313Z.00000000036).

161

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

What this fashionable prose produces is of course that most reactionary

of accounts, a hierarchical Middle Ages in which not merely alternative

modes of thought but thought per se is proscribed—an account that at

one stroke wipes out not merely the complexity of medieval society but

the centuries of struggle by which medieval men and women sought to

remake their society.

131

Following obediently along with his scholarly tribe, Stone then takes

from Dante the idea that “Grammar, which is nothing else but a kind

of unchangeable identity of speech in different times and places […]

[has] been settled by the common consent of many peoples, [and] seems

exposed to the arbitrary will of none in particular”

132

before going on to

make the crucial gesture of erasure:

The language of troubadour song is “grammatical” in the sense that it is

universal: troubadour song, says Dante, “suffuses its perfume in every

city, yet it has its lair in none”. The locus of song is everywhere in general

and nowhere in particular, its place is no place. […] The language of

troubadour love poetry does not permit the identification of its speaker

as a certain historical and singular individual: the time and place of the I

is no particular time and no particular place. Grammar or the language of

song transcends the concrete historical situation; in Heideggerian terms,

it is an ontological rather than an ontic language; it expresses Being in

general rather than a certain particular being.

133

And thus, rather neatly, individual poets can be erased, and the

passions their poems expressed can be transformed from those of living

men and women to generalized expressions of “Being”, and love—a

passion between individuals who have been lifted clean out of time and

existence—no longer exists except as a function of “grammar”.

Such arguments, reducing individuality to generality, bring to mind

William Blake’s statement that “[t]o generalize is to be an Idiot”.

134

But to be fair, what is on display here is not so much idiocy as it is

a carefully-constructed limiting of poetry’s ability to reach potential

readers. Readings like those of Zumthor or Stone cannot erase the

131 Patterson, 97.

132 G. B. Stone, 4.

133 Ibid., 5.

134 William Blake. The Works of William Blake, Vol. 2, ed. by Edwin John Ellis and

William Butler Yeats (London: Benard Quartich, 1893), 323, https://archive.org/

stream/worksofwilliambl02blakrich#page/323

162 Love and its Critics

existence of the poems, and cannot prevent readers from reading the

poems, but they do attempt to dictate the terms on which readers can

understand those poems. This is one of the primary problems readers

encounter in much of the literary scholarship and criticism of the last

several decades—an insistence, exercised through analytical terms that

seek to make disagreement either impossible or easily-dismissible as

“naive” or “uninformed”, that poetry must be read against its apparent

grain, that its human life and light must be drained out of it as it is

transformed into an allegory for whatever the critic seeks to impose on

readers. In Stone’s case, readers, if they are to avoid being naive, must

understand these poems as mere artifacts of “an anonymous or universal

language, as essentially identical to the language of others”,

135

lifeless

items that are “always repeating the same rather than saying something

different, repeating the topoi, the conventions of courtly love poetry”.

136

It comes as no surprise, then, that from this critical point of view, the

expression of genuine human emotion is impossible, because for such a

critic it seems that there is no genuine human emotion to be expressed

in the first place. Making an argument that sounds like a distillation of

Kafka’s nightmare scenarios of bureaucratic imprisonment and Joseph

Heller’s Catch-22,

137

Stone argues that the attempt to express individual

emotions makes one precisely not individual. Citing Jonathan Culler’s

work On Deconstruction as his authority, Stone delivers what he fancies

is the death blow: “Saying ‘I love you’, […] is always a convention, a

citation; it does not so much distinguish an individual as it makes him

resemble everyone else”.

138

Such a critical position takes a for thee but not for me stance, exempting

itself as the special case to which its own reductive principles do not

apply. My language, says the critic, signifies what I mean it to signify; as

Humpty-Dumpty would have it: “When I use a word […] it means just

what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”.

139

The poet’s language,

however, is merely “conventional”, a series of “tropes” that refer, not to

135 G. B. Stone, 6.

136 Ibid.

137 An infinitely expandable and flexible principle whereby anything can be defined

into or out of existence at the whim of authority.

138 G. B. Stone, 6.

139 Lewis Carroll. Through the Looking Glass: And what Alice Found There (Philadelphia:

Henry Altemus Company, 1897), 123.

163

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

any extra-linguistic reality, but to language itself.

140

Thus, poetry always

and only refers to poetry, revealing the inherent impossibility of its

doing otherwise. But the work of the critic is never conceived as being

subject to the same limitations—criticism does not refer only to itself, but

claims authority over any and all other forms of discourse, including—

and especially—the discourse of poetry. And like Plato, it seems that

critics would deny poetry a place in their carefully-wrought Republic.

There has been some resistance to this trend, notably from Sarah

Kay, whose argument in Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry tries to

recover the notion that the “I” of troubadour lyric may, in fact, refer

to actual persons:

There is evidence of a relationship between the lyric first person and

the characters of other medieval genres, which suggests that medieval

readers were prepared to take the first person as referring to an

ontological entity (a person). […] The subject then, can be read not just

as a grammatical position, but as articulating a self.

141

Truly, a dizzyingly radical notion. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay have

suggested that “perhaps the time has come now to reassess the nature of

love in troubadour poetry and to take what the troubadours said about

themselves seriously again”.

142

The fact that such a statement needs

to be made at all is remarkable. The critics here admit that they have

dismissed the troubadours’ testimony about themselves, and confess

that the trend has gone too far and gone on for too long: “[s]ince 1945

[…] concerted efforts have been made to downplay (or at the very

least to reinterpret) the significance of what made troubadour poetry

140 This idea can be seen, among other places, in Paul de Man’s assertion that language

ultimately refers only to itself, because of a “discrepancy between the power of

words as acts and their power to produce other words” (The Rhetoric of Romanticism

[New York: Columbia University Press, 1984], 101), though he complicates his

argument with the assertion that literature and criticism are one and the same,

equally unreliable: “[l]iterature as well as criticism—the difference between them

being delusive—is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and,

consequently, the most unreliable language in terms of which man names and

transforms himself” (Allegories of Reading, 19).

141 Sarah Kay. Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1990), 212–13.

142 Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay. “Introduction”. In The Troubadours: An Introduction,

ed. by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1999), 6.

164 Love and its Critics

famous in the first place: love”.

143

Such efforts have a lengthy history,

long preceding the period the critics here refer to, and a clear agenda in

service of “the power which demands submission”.

144

But if the critics are set aside, it is easy to see that the troubadours

celebrate love, often with a frank eroticism that is reminiscent of the

Song of Songs. The troubadours celebrate love and desire in a way that

is true to immediate experience, true to the life that men and women

of flesh actually inhabit, an attitude that may have been an unexpected

side-effect of the first Crusades:

[T]he crusaders had discovered the marvels across the seas with their

own eyes. A new world had revealed itself to them: a civilization that

was not Christian, that accorded a positive attitude to life on earth, that

gave free expression to love and sensual pleasures rather than dwelling

on sin, contrition, and penitence.

145

The troubadours are dedicated to an ethos that is “a secular unchristian

idea of love […] a love dominated by a strong expression of sensuality

and eroticism, free from any principle of sin and guilt, achristian and

amoral in the context of prevalent church standards”.

146

And though, as

Lazar bemusedly notes, “[a] good number of scholars have attempted

to allegorize it and represent it as essentially religious and mystical in

nature” these arguments are little more than “a wishful denial of the

adulterous tenor of fin’amor and an exercise in literary exorcism”.

147

The troubadours do not—as Dante and Petrarch will do—climb a

Neoplatonic ladder of love in search of God. In fact, “[i]n the fin’amor

tradition of the twelfth century, one might say that God is always on

the side of the adulterous lovers and never on that of the deceived

husband”.

148

The troubadours and trobairitz write a poetry that insists love and life

is to be experienced now, here, without unnecessary delay and needless

obstacles. The beauty they celebrate is here, in living and breathing

143 Ibid.

144 L. T. Topsfield. Troubadours and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1975), 39.

145 Lazar, 62.

146 Ibid., 71.

147 Ibid., 71–72.

148 Ibid., 74.

165

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

never-to-be-replicated individuals. In a sense, these poems illustrate the

dynamic of the central scene in Raphael’s painting The School of Athens,

where Plato and Aristotle walk together, while Plato points up to the

heavens and Aristotle points down to the Earth to indicate where each

man saw truth, beauty, and reality as having its origin. Unlike so many

of the Italian and English poets who will follow them, the troubadours

point—with Aristotle—to the Earth beneath their feet. In these poems,

you are invited to see, not through an allegory or the doctrines of a

philosophical position, but through a pair of eyes; and what these eyes

are gazing into is not a gateway to a soul, or a vision of the love that

moves the sun and the other stars—they are gazing with rapture and

delight into the eyes of another person just like you.

III

The Troubadours and Love

The roots of the troubadour poetic tradition are obscure. One prominent

argument suggests that it is indebted to Spanish-Arabic poetry of the

eleventh century in terms of its themes and motifs:

Spanish-Arabian poetry […] celebrates love as the highest form of

happiness and the noblest source of inspiration; it sings of the beloved’s

beauty, the sorrow of the rejected lover and the cruelty of the lady.

It introduces new fashions in composition, as in its hymns to Spring.

Anticipating Provençal lyrics by close on two centuries, Hispano-

Moorish poetry was the only one, in Europe, to cultivate those themes

and to exhibit those characteristics.

149

According to this interpretation, it was through “contacts with the courts

of Aragon and Castile, […] intermarriage such as that of Guilhem of

Poitou with Philippa of Aragon in 1094, and [ongoing] political dealings

that knowledge of Hispano-Arabic love philosophies and love poetry

of the tenth and eleventh centuries came to the courts and poets”

150

of Occitania. We can see, if not direct influence, at least shared poetic

149 Robert S. Briffault. The Troubadours (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press,

1965), 25.

150 Elizabeth Salter. “Courts and Courtly Love”. In The Medieval World, ed. by David

Daiches and Anthony Thorlby (London: Aldus Books, 1973), 424.

166 Love and its Critics

genes, by looking at a Spanish Arabic poem contemporary to those of

the troubadours. This twelfth-century work, “Gentle Now, Doves of

the Thornberry and Moringa Thicket”, by a poet named Ibn Arabi,

151

demonstrates many of the same themes of yearning and devotion to

human, embodied love.

The poet fears the “sad cooing”

152

of the doves will betray him, and

asks them not to “reveal the love I hide / the sorrow I hide away”.

153

This love, and its sorrow, leads to thoughts of “a grove of tamarisks”

where “spirits wrestled, / bending the limbs down over me, / passing

me away”, bringing him “yearning”, and “breaking of the heart”.

154

The

tamarisks may reference the story of Abraham, or as the Qur’án refers to

him, Ibrahim, who plants a tamarisk grove in Genesis 21 as a recognition

of the struggle, negotiation, and coming to peace in a property dispute

between Abraham and Abimelech. The wrestling of the spirits could

be those of the two ancient patriarchs, or it could be something more

like the struggle captured in the story of Abraham’s grandson, Jacob,

who wrestles, not with an angel, but with El (God) himself, reflected in

the name he is given in Genesis 32:28 after the dusk-to-dawn wrestling

match, “Israel”, or, “he struggled with God”. Perhaps this captures part

of Arabi’s suggestion, but references to “yearning” and “breaking of the

heart”, raise the possibility that something more intimate and personal

is happening. Is it more of an internal struggle, the spirit who took me

and forced me to struggle with and confront my own yearning? Perhaps

the spirit Arabi is wrestling with is the difficulty he experiences in

discovering the meaning of his own yearnings, the desires that dogmatic

religion would tell him to reject.

This wrestling leads Arabi through images of a “faithless” woman

“who dyes herself red with henna”,

155

a person (perhaps a tradition)

practiced in taking the devotion of another, soaking it up, and then

throwing that other away. The image evokes a woman who soaks up a

dying man’s blood with her own hair, draining the life of a fool who gave

151 The translation used here is that of Michael Sells, in Maria Rosa Menocal, Shards of

Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994),

70–71.

152 Ibid., l. 6.

153 Ibid., ll. 7–8

154 Ibid., ll. 13–18.

155 Ibid., ll. 39–40.

167

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

it in return for nothing. Finally, Arabi comes to the extremity of saying

that “the house of stone” (a house of worship blessed by the Prophet of

Islam) pales in comparison to “a man or a woman”.

156

The Ka’bah, the

cubic building in Mecca that is circled seven times counterclockwise—

what does that mean, what significance does that hold, when compared

to the living reality of the man or woman standing in front of you? Even

the sacred books, the Torah, the Qur’án, are held lightly next to what

Arabi calls “the religion of love”, pledging that “wherever its caravan

turns along the way, / that is the belief, / the faith I keep”.

157

What the

poem suggests is the necessity of struggling with and accepting one’s

own yearnings before coming to a place of peace. We are not sinful

because we desire; we are not broken because we want. This is an

emphatically humane vision.

While this poem is not exactly the same in its emphasis as the

troubadour poems, it makes precisely the same kinds of people

uncomfortable: “the poem is the ‘yes and no’ that makes the Averroist—

and all other priests—blanch […] [due to its] intractable and purposeful

blurring of sacred and profane love”.

158

The power in this work is that

of the individual perspective, of singular passion, of the realization that

there is something more important in this world than can be found

in the traditional symbols and institutions of law, religion, state, and

family. Each of these speak a language that essentially boils down to the

same demand: “obey”. But the “religion of love” is not about obeying. It

is about being led where passion, insight, and desire lead you—the path

Blake called “the road of excess” which “leads to the palace of wisdom”.

159

The road of excess was the favored highway of the first troubadour

poet, Guilhem IX, the duke of Aquitaine and Count of Poitou (modern

Poitiers). He was a man who did not care for any authority other than

his own—twice excommunicated from the Church, on the first occasion

he threatened to behead the bishop who pronounced the sentence, only

to think better of it and tell the cleric whose neck was already extended

for the sword’s blow: “you shall never enter Heaven with the help of

156 Ibid., ll. 35–36.

157 Ibid., ll. 57–60.

158 Menocal, 75.

159 William Blake. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. In The Complete Poetry and Prose

of William Blake, ed. by David V. Erdman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of

California Press, 2008), 35.

168 Love and its Critics

my hand”. The second time, Guilhem was excommunicated for refusing

to give up his mistress, the Viscountess of Châtellraut, telling the bald

bishop of Angoulême that “the comb shall curl your wayward hair

before I give up the Viscountess”.

160

Guilhem was a man of action and of words, who had a “sardonic wit:

he ordered that his mistress’s portrait should be painted on his shield

[…] declaring that ‘it was his will to bear her in battle as she had borne

him in bed’”.

161

His poems combine frank enjoyment of sex with longing

for love, but the clearest indication of his preference for love in deeds

rather than merely in words can be seen in the final lines of his poem Ab

la dolchor del temps novel (In the sweetness of the new times):

Que tal se van d’amor gaban

Nos n’avem la pessa e·l coutel.

162

Those others vainly talk of love

But we have a piece [of bread], and a knife.

Love was not sublimated in worship for Guilhem—its passions were

raw, and its excitements were those of the heart, the eyes, and the senses.

In Farai chansoneta nueva (I will write a new song), Guilhem asks what

the use could possibly be in withdrawing from the world of life, love,

and pleasure:

Qal pro y auretz, s’ieu m’enclostre

E no·m retenetz per vostre?

Totz lo joys del mon es nostre,

Dompna, s’amduy nos amam.

163

What can it bring you if I cloister myself

And you do not keep me for your own?

All the joys of the world are ours

Lady, if we love each other in turn.

160 Topsfield, 12–13.

161 Helen Castor. She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (London:

Faber and Faber, 2010), 133–34.

162 Guillaume IX. Les Chansons de Guillaume IX, Duc d’Aquitaine, ed. by Alfred Jeanroy

(Paris: Honoré Champion, 1913), 26, ll. 29–30, https://archive.org/stream/leschanso

nsdegui00willuoft#page/26

163 Ibid., 21, ll. 25–28, https://archive.org/stream/leschansonsdegui00willuoft#page/21

169

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

This idea of lovers loving each other in turn is one of the first and most

basic elements of the concept that will come to be called fin’amor. As the

later poet Bernart de Ventadorn argues, love must be mutual in order

for it to be true.

Though Guilhem wishes for a mutual love, he also wishes for a

physical love, and the physicality of his desire is made clear in a number

of places. In Ben vuelh que sapchon li pluzor (I want everyone to know),

he writes of “a bawdy game” (“un joc grossier”)—in which, after being

told “your dice are too small” (“vostre dat som menudier”), he “raised

the table” (“levat lo taulier”) and then “tossed the dice” (“empeis los

datz”), upon which toss “two of them rolled and the third plumbed

the depths” (“duy foron cairavallier / e·l terz plombatz”).

164

A poem in

which a man attempts to prove that two of his “dice” are not too small

for that third one to plombatz is not a poem with any great allegorical

potential. Neither is Companho faray un vers…convinen (I will make a

poem as it should be), in which Guilhem compares two mistresses to

horses he greatly enjoys riding:

165

Dos cavalhs ai a ma selha ben e gen;

Bon son e adreg per armas e valen;

Mas no·ls puesc amdos tener que l’us l’autre non cossen.

Si·ls pogues adomesjar e mon talen,

Ja no volgra alhors mudar mon guarnimen,

Que miels for’ encavalguatz de nuill [autr’] ome viven.

166

I have two horses, noble and good for my saddle:

Good and strong in combat and valor;

But I can’t keep both, because they hate each other.

If I could tame them to my desire,

I would not move my equipment anywhere else,

For I would be mounted better than any man alive.

164 Ibid., 15–16, ll. 45, 51, 57–60, https://archive.org/stream/leschansonsdegui00willuoft

#page/15

165 As Peter Dronke asks, “would it ever have occurred to any reader or listener to

interpret” such poems as this, or many other troubadour verses, “in any other

than a sexual way if scholars had not invented the troubadours’ ‘platonic’ love?”

(Dronke, 242, n. 3).

166 Guillaume IX, 1, ll. 7–12, https://archive.org/stream/leschansonsdegui00willuoft#

page/n24

170 Love and its Critics

In Ab la dolchor del temps novel, Guilhem prays for nothing so much as the

gift of more life, and more erotic love—not in words, but in the deeds

forbidden by the churchmen who speak in “foreign Latin”:

Enquer me lais Dieus viure tan

C’aja mas manz soz so mantel.

Qu’eu non ai soing d’estraing lati

Que·m parta de mon Bon Vezi.

167

God give me a life long enough

To get my hands beneath her dress.

For I have no fear that foreign Latin

Will part me from my Good Neighbor.

This is not “courtly love”. This is the expression of frankly physical

desire. The first troubadour was not a man who regarded love as a path

to the divine, or the woman right in front of him as a window through

which he should learn to see God. For the passionate and sometimes

violent Guilhem, love was a crucial part of a life here and now that is to

be celebrated without apology and without genuflection to gods above

or devils below. Love—in all its emotional and physical glories—needed

no justification. Guilhem was a man many modern academics would

not like, and the feeling would probably be mutual.

Ab la dolchor del temps novel is a poem that openly praises “the

physical love which can be desired, hoped for, shared and enjoyed”.

168

The poem’s “switch from delicacy” to “rough desire” is “characteristic

of Guilhem and intentional”—especially in the “jest at those who talk

and never do”,

169

where Guilhem anticipated at least a few of his later

critics. In Mout jauzens me prenc en amar (I take a great joy in love), a

favorite of those commentators who try to squeeze Guilhem into the

category of “courtly love”,

170

he writes of keeping love for himself, “to

167 Ibid., 26, ll. 23–26, https://archive.org/stream/leschansonsdegui00willuoft#page/26

168 Topsfield, 27.

169 Ibid.

170 Sarah Spence, for example, insists that “the lady here is presented as a Christ figure”

(Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1996], 91), basing this on the lines “And since I wish to return to joy / It is right, that

I seek for the best” (“E pus en joy vuelh revertir / Ben dey, si puesc, al mielhs anar”)

171

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

refresh the heart / and renew the flesh”,

171

in verses that present “all

excellence in physical reality”.

172

And yet, Guilhem had something of

the sceptic of Ecclesiastes about him, as if desire’s fulfillment would

never really bring him what he hoped for. In Pus vezem de novel florir

(Since we see new blossoms), Guilhem complains:

Per tal n’ai meyns de bon saber

Quar vuelh so que no puesc aver

173

So I know less than any what is good

Because I want what I cannot get.

This scepticism leads him to the position (adopted perhaps, only in his

more reflective of moments) that Tot is niens—all is nothing, rather in

the fashion of Koheleth, from Ecclesiastes 1:14:

                            

I have seen all the works done beneath the sun; behold, all are vanity, a

striving after the wind.

In Topsfield’s view, “Guilhem appears to reject Amors as an embryonic

regulated system of courtly wooing. He is dissatisfied with it and the

small amount of Jois it affords. He stands to one side and looks for

the Jois which is the reward of each individual man”,

174

an individual

man who loves, wholly and physically, an individual woman, but not

in accordance with anyone’s expected code of behavior, courtly or

otherwise. Discussion of this poem has long been divided over whether

it is “a burlesque” or “a serious love lyric”.

175

The dichotomy is a false

one, reflecting a Neoplatonic, anti-body, anti-sex bias. For Guilhem,

the so-called burlesques (a term imposed by scholars) and the so-called

(Guillaume IX, 21–22, ll. 3–4). The lenses of “courtly love”, once donned, appear to

make it impossible to see otherwise.

171 “Per lo cor dedins refrescar / E per la carn renovellar” (Guillaume IX, 23, ll. 34–35,

https://archive.org/stream/leschansonsdegui00willuoft#page/23).

172 Topsfield, 36.

173 Guillaume IX, 17, ll. 19–20, https://archive.org/stream/leschansonsdegui00willuoft#

page/17

174 Topsfield, 30.

175 Ibid. Reddy repeats this distinction throughout his discussion of Guilhem’s poetry

(92–104).

172 Love and its Critics

serious love lyrics (another imposition) are expressions of different

aspects of the same desire: “He desires the joys of shared love, and that

the lady shall belong to him, and he to her”.

176

Guilhem was a man who bristled at restrictions, found the claims of

those who would tell him what to do intolerable and absurd, and wanted

to find a way to achieve and maintain Jois, an “individual happiness” in

a world in which Amor was constantly threatened with extinction.

177

that way, Guilhem embodies both the troubadours’ distinctiveness and

that which made them a threat to be eliminated by thirteenth-century

Crusaders and Inquisitors, or an embarrassing excess to be allegorized

away by the Akibas and Origens of the modern academy. These poets

sought for a way to find Jois in a world of rules, laws, and demands

for obedience; they sought—even in what many scholars insist on

describing as “conventional” language—to find a way to express a new

(or long-suppressed) desire, not for stability or order, not for matrimony

and fidelity, but for love: mutual, embodied, and not to be abandoned at

the commands of any bishop, bald or otherwise.

The mutuality of fin’amor, the love sought and celebrated by the

troubadours, is wonderfully expressed by Marcabru, a poet often

described as a moralist who condemned the excesses of court life. But

in Per savi·l tenc ses doptanssa (Doubtless, I think him wise), he defines

what he calls bon’Amors (good love, or the best love) as “two desires in

a single longing” (“dos desirs d’un enveia”),

178

and further identifies

Jois as one of the benefits of fin’amor or bon’Amors, which itself is “the

assured happiness of a love which does not deceive”, a love that is

wholly “without deceit and cannot be degraded”.

179

What Marcabru

rails against is what he calls “false love against true” (“Falss’ Amor

encontra fina”), condemning “the group of liars” (“la gen frairina”)

who slander love, and the man “whose love lives by rape and pillage”

(“car s’Amors viu de rapina”).

180

Marcabru finally curses all such liars

and defamers of fin’amor:

176 Ibid., 39.

177 Ibid.

178 Marcabru., ed. by Jean Dejeanne (Toulouse: Édouard Privat, 1909), XXXVII, 178–83,

l. 28, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4240c/f191.image

179 Topsfield, 83–84.

180 Marcabru, ll. 14, 20, 51, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4240c/f191.image and

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4240c/f193.image

173

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

La cuida per qu’el bobanssa

li sia malaventura.

181

Let the ideas they are so proud of

bring them to bad ends.

From the troubadours themselves, we see emerging at this point a

definition of fin’amor that is comprised of mutual desire between lovers,

honesty, and a refusal to let love be defined by social convention, or

become a vehicle of self-interest and rapina.

182

As Topsfield explains:

[B]ehind Marcabru’s Fin'amors there is also the idea of man as part of

the nature which was created by God, and able to respond entirely to

this nature that has been given to him […]. His merit is that he […] can

assimilate his carnal desire, which is his God-given natura, to a higher

concept of love, Fin'amors, which is constant and free from deceit.

183

Here we have a poet for whom human natura is not inherently wicked,

for whom carnal sexuality is not fallen, and the body is not shameful. If

there is a “heresy” here, it is not the “Gnostic” view of the Cathars, but

the rather gentler “Pelagian” view—a belief that human nature is not

fallen and that the world is a good and beautiful place. The fact that this

is a “heresy” speaks volumes about the perversity of “orthodoxy”.

From Marcabru, then, we can add another element to our definition

of fin’amor: the mutuality of bodily and sexual desire between equal

partners. The mutual desire between lovers is both physical and

emotional. It is not merely a repressed or sublimated eros; it is the fully

and powerfully physical expression of love and desire, combined with

mutual choice and honesty. It is a love which does not live by rapina,

by taking, forcing, pillaging, raping. It is a love in which we can see

dos desirs d’un’ enveia, one longing formed from two desires, one heart

formed from two.

181 Ibid., ll. 61–62, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4240c/f194.image

182 Charles Camproux argues that mutuality and equality are the primary characteristics

of fin’amor: “Cette notion d’égalité entre les partenaires est une des plus importantes

qui entrent dans la conception de l’amour chez les troubadours” [This notion of

equality between partners is one of the most important that go into the concept of

love in the troubadours] (Charles Camproux. Le “joy d’amor” des troubadours. Jeu et

joie d’amour [Montpellier: Causse et Castelnau], 1965, 179).

183 Topsfield, 103.

174 Love and its Critics

One reason that Marcabru is often referred to as a moralist may

be because of his oft-made distinction between fin’amor and fals’amor

(or Amar). He is angry with those who would turn love into a tool of

rapina, those for whom the pairings between lovers are either merely

about lust (Amar), or for whom money and power are the primary

motivations for their pairings (a dynamic that will become all too

familiar in Shakespeare’s plays). For Marcabru, such people see the

world as fragmented, frait, rather than whole, entier. To adopt the path

of wholeness requires both body and mind, sexual desire and honesty,

a synthesis of the physical and spiritual that subordinates neither, an

intermingling we will see best exemplified by the centuries-later poetry

of John Donne, in a dynamic he calls a “dialogue of one”. This search for

wholeness and Jois was not a disguised religious quest. The troubadours

wrote “a poetry of desire, telling of the poet’s joy or sorrow as he waits

for his [earthly and embodied] reward”, a point perpetually—and

it seems deliberately—misconstrued by critics who argue for “the

conclusion that the poets, amid their perpetual longing, did not desire

physical intercourse with the beloved. Most of them […] frankly said

that they did. The love of which they spoke was a physical one”.

184

Bernart de Ventadorn, perhaps the most passionate of all the

troubadour poets, even regards love as a necessity for survival: in Non

es meravelha s’eu chan (It is no marvel if I sing), Bernart writes that one

who does not know love is already dead:

Ben es mortz qui d’amor no sen

al cor cal que dousa sabor.

185

He is truly dead who has no sense of love

or its sweet savor in his heart.

Bernart further develops the theme of mutual love and desire that we

have seen in Guilhem and Marcabru. In Chantars no pot gaire valer (A

184 Colin Morris. The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (New York: Harper & Row,

1972), 113.

185 Bernart de Ventadorn. Bernart von Ventadorn, seine Lieder, mit Einleitung und Glossar,

ed. by Carl Appel (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1915), 188, ll. 9–10, https://archive.org/

stream/bernartvonventad00bern#page/188

175

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

song can have no value), Bernart defines fin’amor as agreement and

wanting between two lovers:

En agradar et en voler

es l’amors de dos fis amans.

nula res no i pot pro tener,

si·lh voluntatz non es egaus.

186

In pleasing and in wanting

is the love of two noble lovers.

Nothing in it can be good

If the will is not mutual.

For Bernart, “[i]t was love which gave purpose to life.,

187

and for him,

as for other vernacular poets of the twelfth century, the love poetry of

Ovid had a tremendous influence, serving as “the highest authority in

matters pertaining to love”.

188

This poetic ethos differs from that of the

later Italian poets, in whom one finds “the usual attempt to allegorize

and point a moral”.

189

Bernart, who “goes far outside the conventional

into the language of passion”,

190

is perhaps the best example among the

troubadours of this passionate and non-allegorical ethos.

To see how Bernart both uses and transcends the “conventional”,

look at the first stanza of his poem Can l’erba fresch’e·lh folha par:

Can l’erba fresch’ e·lh folha par

e la flors boton’ el verjan,

e·l rossinhols autet e clar

leva sa votz e mou so chan,

joi ai de lui, e joi ai de la flor

e joi de me e de midons major;

daus totas partz sui de joi claus e sens,

mas sel es jois que totz autres jois vens.

191

186 Ibid., 86, ll. 29–32, https://archive.org/stream/bernartvonventad00bern#page/86

187 Morris, 115.

188 Charles Homer Haskins. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1927), 108.

189 Ibid.

190 Morris, 113.

191 Bernart de Ventadorn, 220, ll. 1–8, https://archive.org/stream/bernartvonventad00

bern#page/220

176 Love and its Critics

When fresh grass and leaves appear

And flowers bloom among the orchards,

And the nightingales, high and clear,

Lift their voices, pouring out their songs;

Joy to them and joy to the flowers,

And joy to me, and to my Lady even more,

Joy is all around me; Joy enfolds my mind,

But here my joy quite overwhelms the rest.

By the time Bernart is writing this, in the mid to late twelfth-century,

this is already a familiar opening. We see it reflected later in Chaucer:

the opening reference to springtime, the budding of growth, and the

reawakening of nature. Chaucer writes his famous opening lines to the

Canterbury Tales, “Whan that April, with his shoures soote, / The drought

of March hath perced to the roote”, some two hundred and forty years

after Bernart, but Bernart has already perfected the metaphor. The

difference is that Bernart, unlike Chaucer, powerfully places himself

(pace Zumthor and the “no-medieval-I” chorus) into the love narrative

of his poems. The main theme is the repeated expression of the painful

effect of the passion he feels, the desire that he has for a woman, the lady

Aliu Anor, better known as Eleanor of Aquitaine. According to the vida

(the later biography of Bernart, ostensibly written by Uc de Saint Circ),

the love was mutual:

Bernart de Ventadorn […] went to the duchess of Normandy, who was

young and of great merit, and devoted herself to reputation and honor

and praise. And the songs and verses of Sir Bernart pleased her very

much, and she received him and welcomed him warmly. He stayed in

her court a long time, and fell in love with her and she with him, and

he made many good songs about her. And while he was with her, King

Henry of England took her as his wife and took her from Normandy and

led her to England. Sir Bernart remained on this side [of the Channel],

sad and grieving, and went to the good Count Raymond of Toulouse,

and stayed with him until the count died. And because of that grief, Sir

Bernart entered the order of Dalon, and there he died.

192

The vidas are later and often fanciful accounts of the poets’ lives, but

“some elements of the vida may be true”.

193

If true, Bernart finds himself

192 William D. Paden and Frances Freeman Paden, trans. Troubadour Poems from the

South of France (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2007), 184.

193 Ibid.

177

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

in an impossible situation. He has developed an urgent passion for

a woman of wealth, nobility, and power, a woman whose station far

exceeds either his reach or his grasp. And though the poems suggest that

perhaps this passion was requited at some point, Bernart often appears

to berate himself over the ridiculous inequality in terms of rank, wealth,

influence, and power between himself and his beloved.

The passion that is gently suggested in Arabi’s poem is frank and

open in Bernart’s work. In Can l’erba fresch’e·lh folha par, Bernart fervently

wishes for the opportunity to find his lover alone:

Be la volgra sola trobar,

que dormis, o·n fezes semblan,

per qu’e·lh embles un doutz baizar,

pus no valh tan qu’eu lo·lh deman.

per Deu, domna, pauc esplecham d’amor!

194

I yearn to find her all alone,

Asleep, or merely seeming so,

Because I’d steal the sweet kiss

That I am not worthy to ask for.

By God, my Lady, we have little success in love!

Bernart cannot act on his desires because of the difference in station

between himself and his love:

Tan am midons e la tenh char,

e tan la dopt’ e la reblan

c’anc de me no·lh auzei parlar,

ni re no·lh quer ni re no·lh man.

195

I so love and cherish my lady,

That I am afraid and draw back;

I do not speak of myself in her hearing,

Nor do I ask for anything from her.

194 Bernart de Ventadorn, 222, ll. 41–45, https://archive.org/stream/bernartvonventad00

bern#page/222

195 Ibid., 221, ll. 25–28, https://archive.org/stream/bernartvonventad00bern#page/221

178 Love and its Critics

This poem is both sexually and socially transgressive. While many

of the troubadours are knights and minor nobles, a number of them

are referred to as Joglars (from which we get our word juggler), mere

performers, like Bernart, who have nothing else to fall back on. Such

performers, because of their art, are invited into circles to which they

would normally have no access. In Bernart’s case, the singer/poet has

fallen in love with the epitome of the unattainable woman. And yet,

desire cannot and will not be reasoned with:

S’eu saubes la gen enchantar,

mei enemic foran efan,

que ja us no saubra triar

ni dir re que·ns tornes a dan.

adoncs sai eu que vira la gensor

e sos bels olhs e sa frescha color,

e baizera·lh la bocha en totz sens,

si que d’un mes i paregra lo sens.

196

If I knew how to cast a spell;

I’d turn my enemies into infants,

So none of them could understand

Gossip, or play its hurtful games.

Then I could see how nobly she turned

Her beautiful eyes, with their vibrant color,

I’d kiss her mouth so sensually,

The mark would show for a month.

Though one is tempted to paraphrase Rosalind from As You Like It—try

the day, without the month—that final image is fascinating. How hard

would you have to kiss someone for the effects to show after an hour,

much less a month?

Such foolishness as Bernart’s could have serious—even life and

death—consequences. The most famous story that illustrates the high

stakes of the loves the troubadour poets celebrate comes from the vida

of Guilhem de Cabestanh:

Guilhem de Cabestanh [loved] a lady who was called My Lady

Sermonda, the wife of Sir Raimon del Castel de Roussillon, who was

196 Ibid., 221–22, ll. 33–40, https://archive.org/stream/bernartvonventad00bern#page/221

179

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

very rich and noble and wicked and cruel and proud. […] And the lady,

who was young and noble and beautiful and pleasing, loved him more

than anything else in the world. And this was told to Raimon del Castel

de Roussillon, and he, like a wrathful and jealous man, investigated the

story and learned that it was true and had his wife guarded closely. And

one day, Raimon del Castel de Roussillon found Guillem eating without

much company and killed him and drew his heart from his body and

had a squire carry it to his lodging and had it roasted and prepared with

a pepper sauce and had it given to his wife to eat. And when the lady

had eaten it, the heart of Sir Guilhem de Cabestanh, Sir Raimon told her

what it was. When she heard this, the lady lost sight and hearing. And

when she came around, she said, “Lord, you have given me such a good

meal that I will never eat another”. And when he heard what she said, he

ran to his sword and tried to strike her on the head, and she went to the

balcony and let herself fall, and she died.

197

This story is difficult to credit as anything like literal truth, but it does

go hand in hand with other stories of the risks taken by troubadour

poets in their declarations of adulterous love. Another poet, Peire Vidal,

is said to have had his tongue cut out by the husband of his love: “a

knight of Saint Gili cut out his tongue because he gave out that he was

his wife’s lover”.

198

The poetic evidence for the danger of the adulterous passions the

troubadours celebrated comes through most strongly from the alba,

the dawn song, in which two adulterous lovers are guarded by a

watchman whose job it is to warn them of the coming of the first rays

of morning.

199

The night, which has been the lovers’ shelter and given

197 Paden, 186.

198 Barbara Smythe. Trobador Poets: Selections from the Poems of Eight Trobadors (New

York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1966), 149.

199 [In] the dawn song (Middle High German tagelied, Old Provençal alba, Old French aube) […]

two lovers embrace in the secrecy of the night before their necessary parting at the arrival

of dawn. A watchman or a little bird may take the role of an ally warning the two of the

encroaching daybreak, with dawn signalling the need for the reluctant lovers to separate in

order to avoid discovery by the spies of courtly society. It is in this moment of anguish that

joy and sorrow intermingle, and the lovers lament their impending separation by desperately

embracing one last time. Then the man leaves his beloved while she expresses her longing to see

him again soon. […] In the forbidden nature of the tryst, the relationship is adulterous since the

lady is married. Because the lovers possess no power to change their predicament, their desire

for each other may be fulfilled only in secret.

Rasma Lazda-Cazers. “Oral Sex in the Songs of Oswald von Wolkenstein: Did

it Really Happen?” In Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: New

Approaches to a Fundamental Cultural-Historical and Literary-Anthropological Theme,

ed. by Albrecht Classen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 581–82.

180 Love and its Critics

them opportunity to act on their mutual desire, is too short, and the

dawn, which comes all too soon, threatens to expose the lovers to the

jealousy and violent reprisals of the angry husband. The most famous

example is the anonymous poem, En un vergier sotz fuella d’albespi:

En un vergier sotz fuella d’albespi

tenc la dompna son amic costa si

tro la gayta crida que l’alba vi,

Oy Dieus! Oy Dieus! de l’alba tan tost ve.

“Plagues a Dieu ia la nueitz non falhis

ni·l mieus amicx lonc de mi no·s partis

ni la gayta iorn ni alba no vis,

Bels dous amicx, baizem nos yeu e vos

aval e·ls pratz on chanto·ls auzellos

tot o fassam en despieg de gilos,

Oy Dieus! Oy Dieus! de l’alba tan tost ve.

Bels dous amicx, fassam un ioc novel

yns el iardi on chanton li auzel

tro la gaita toque son caramelh,

Oy Dieus! Oy Dieus! de l’alba tan tost ve.

Per la doss’aura qu’es venguda de lay

del mieu amic belh e cortes e gay

del sieu alen ai begut un dous ray,

Oy Dieus! Oy Dieus! de l’alba tan tost ve”.

La dompna es agradans e plazens

per sa beutat la gardon mantas gens

et a son cor en amar leyalmens,

Oy Dieus! Oy Dieus! de l’alba tan tost ve.

200

In an orchard under leaves of hawthorn

the lady holds her lover beside her

until the watchman cries out the coming of dawn,

O God! O God! the dawn, it comes too soon.

Please God, do not let the night end already

nor let my lover part from my side

nor let the watchman see the dawn,

200 Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Laurie Shepard, and Sarah White, eds. Songs of the

Women Troubadours (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 134.

181

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

Fair sweet friend, let us kiss, you and I,

down in the meadow where the songbirds sing,

let us do all this in spite of that jealous man.

O God! O God! the dawn, it comes too soon.

Fair sweet friend, let us play a new game

in the garden where the songbirds sing

until the watchman plays his pipe.

O God! O God! the dawn, it comes too soon.

For the gentle breeze which comes from there

from my lover, beautiful, and courteous, and merry,

of his breath I have drunk a sweet ray of sun.

O God! O God! the dawn, it comes too soon.

The lady is delightful and pleasing

And many admire her for her beauty,

and for her heart which is true in love.

O God! O God! the dawn, it comes too soon.

The pathos of this poem is haunting, nearly nine centuries later. Two

lovers, who choose each other in the face of law, arranged marriages,

social convention, church doctrine, and the very real possibility

of getting caught and punished, wish the night could last just a few

moments longer. Only in the darkness is their freedom possible, only

at night can they feel the one they love next to them, hear the rise and

fall of breath, and know themselves as one and at peace. But with light

comes the law, with light come the claims of ownership and property,

church and state. The watchman cries out the coming of dawn so that the

lovers can escape undetected, and hopefully, live to love again another

night. The evident frustration in these poems is fueled by the absurdity

of being unable to love the one of your choice except under the cover of

darkness and lies. This poem expresses an idea we can see as early as

the Song of Songs: the right to decide for oneself, and the insistence that

love is a personal choice, a potentially risky enterprise engaged with,

and embarked upon, by two partners.

The same constellation of ideas is powerfully expressed in the

tagelieder (dawn songs) of the Minnesingers (love singers) from

Germany, perhaps most memorably by the late-twelfth and early-

thirteenth-century poet Wolfram von Eschenbach in his Den morgenblic

bî wahtaeres sange erkôs:

182 Love and its Critics

Den morgenblic bî wahtaeres sange erkôs

ein froue, dâ si tougen

an ir werden friundes arme lac;

dâ von si… freuden vil verlôs.

des muosen liehtiu ougen

aver nazzen. sî sprach ‘ôwê tac!

wilde und zam daz frewet sich dîn

und siht dich gerne,

wan ich ein. wie sol iz mir ergên!

nu enmac niht langer hie bî mir bestên

mîn vriunt: den jaget von mir dîn schîn’.

Der tac mit kraft al durh diu venster dranc.

vil slôze si besluzzen:

daz half niht: des wart in sorge kunt.

diu friundîn den vriunt vast an sich dwanc:

ir ougen diu beguzzen

ir beider wangel. sus sprach zim ir munt.

‘Zwei herze und ein lip hân wir

gar ungescheiden:

unser triuwe mit ein ander vert.

der grôzen liebe der bin ich gar vil verhert,

wan sô du kumest und ich zuo dir’.

Der trûric man nam urloup balde alsus.

ir liehten vel diu slehten

kômen nâher. sus der tac erschein.

weindiu ougen, süezer frouen kus.

sus kunden sî dô vlehten

ir munde, ir brüste, ir arme, ir blankiu bein:

swelch schiltaer entwurfe daz

geselleclîche

als si lâgn, des waere ouch dem genuoc.

ir beider liebe doch vil sorgen truoc.

si pflâgen minne ân allen haz.

201

The morning light shone, and the Watchman sang,

while a lady secretly

lay in the arms of her lover.

201 Wolfram von Eschenbach. Werke, ed. by Karl Lachmann (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1879),

3–4, https://books.google.com/books?id=-rwFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA3

183

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

Because of this, she lost all her joy,

and her moist though beaming eyes

filled with tears. She said, ‘Alas, day!

everything that lives, wild and tame, rejoices over you

and longs to see you,

except for me. What will become of me?

Now my beloved can no longer stay here with me,

for your light chases my lover away.

The day shone powerfully through the windows,

and though they bolted many locks,

they were of no use against sorrow.

The lady pressed her lover tight,

and her eye’s flowing tears

made both cheeks wet. She spoke to him with her lips:

“Two hearts and only one body we have.

Inseparable,

we remain truly connected to each other.

My whole happiness in love is destroyed,

unless you come back to me and I to you”.

The sorrowful man would soon have departed,

but their bright, smooth bodies

came close again, although the day already shone.

With weeping eyes, and the sweet lady’s kiss,

they intertwined themselves,

mouths, breasts, arms and their bright white legs.

Any painter who wanted to represent

their companionship

as they lay beside each other, would be overwhelmed.

Although their love caused them great care,

they gave themselves entirely to each other.

In what may well be the earliest example of a tagelied poem,

202

Slâfest

du, friedel ziere, Dietmar von Aist

203

powerfully expresses the pain of

separation at dawn:

202 “The type first appears in a poem by Dietmar von Aist […], the earliest Minnesinger

who seems to have an acquaintance with troubadour lyrics” (“Tagelied”. In

Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. by Alex Preminger, Frank J. Warnke,

and O. B. Hardison Jr. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972], 841).

203 Dietmar von Aist and Wolfram von Eschenbach were two of the most crucial

figures in the development of the tagelied in German poetry: “[a]round 1170

184 Love and its Critics

“Slâfest du, friedel ziere

man wecket uns leider schiere:

ein vogellîn sô wol getân

daz ist der linden an daz zwî gegân”.

“Ich was vil sanfte entslâfen:

nu rüefestu kint Wâfen.

liep âne leit mac niht gesîn.

swaz du gebiutest, daz leiste ich, friundîn mîn”.

Diu frouwe begunde weinen.

“Du rîtest und lâst mich einen.

wenne wilt du wider her zuo mir?

ôwê, du füerest mîn fröude sament dir!”

204

“Do you sleep still, my dearest love?

Unfortunately, we will both soon awake.

A most beautiful songbird

Has flown into the branches of the tree”.

“I slept gently in your arms,

until you called: child, awake!

Love without suffering cannot be:

what you command, I will do, my love”.

The Lady began to cry:

“You ride away and leave me alone.

When will you return to me again?

Alas, you take my joy away with you!”

In the alba and the tagelied, the lady and her lover are opposed by the

entire structure of the European world in which marriage is a contractual

arrangement of property, while at the lower social and economic levels it

finds its raison d’etre in the pretense of avoiding the “sin” of fornication.

Dietmar von Aist cultivated the Tagelied as a genre already well known; about 1200

Wolfram von Eschenbach turned its conventions upside down” (William D. Paden.

“Introduction”. In Medieval Lyric: Genres in Historical Context, ed. by William D.

Paden [Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000], 11).

204 Dietmar von Aist. “Slâfest du, friedel ziere”. In Des minnesangs frühling, ed. by

Friedrich Vogt (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1920), 37, https://books.google.com/

books?id=DcQPAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA37

185

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

Codex Manesse, UB Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. germ. 848, fol. 314v Herr Günther von

dem Vorste (between 1305 and 1315).

205

It becomes a sacrament of the church, controlled by religion, government,

and God.

206

As Matthew 19:6, written during the height of the Roman

Imperial era, puts it, “What, therefore, God has joined together, let no

man tear apart”.

207

Where is the choice for those who are married? In the

dawn songs like En un vergier sotz fuella d’albespi, and Den morgenblic bî

wahtaeres sange erkôs, we see the awareness that there can be a choice.

208

But the awareness is painful because it comes with the knowledge of

205 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Codex_Manesse_314v_ Günther_von_

dem_Vorste.jpg

206 Catholic theologians are referring to marriage as a sacrament as early as the twelfth

century, though it will not be until the Council of Trent in 1563 that this arrangement

is formalized.

207 “ὃοὖνὁΘεὸςσυνέζευξεν,ἄνθρωποςμὴχωριζέτω”.

208 Though they are a minority, within the Church there are voices at this time beginning

to speak up for individual choice in marriage. In the Decretum Gratiani (c. 1140 CE),

a Benedictine monk named Gratian argues that “mutual consent makes a marriage”

(“consensus utiusque matrimonium facit”) (Corpus Iuris Canonici, Vol. 1: Decretum

Magistri Gratiani [Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1879. Reprint Graz: Akademische

Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1959], 1091, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/

collections/cul/texts/ldpd_6029936_001/pages/ldpd_6029936_001_00000604.html).

186 Love and its Critics

being profoundly trapped. Two hearts and only one body we have, but O

God, the dawn! It comes too soon! The dawn comes, demands a return to

obedience and conformity and custom, and the “one body” of the lovers

torn back in two by the harsh light of day.

None of this is the “courtly love” of Victorian scholarly invention.

Neither are the poems written by the two poets below, who each found

love famously vexing. The twelfth-century troubadour, Raimbaut

d’Aurenga writes with frank and playful passion. In Non chant per auzel

ni per flor (I do not sing for bird or flower), Raimbaut references the

conventional vernal opening to Troubadour poetry by renouncing it. He

then writes directly and openly of his physical desire for his lover, and

the joy he takes in her:

Ben aurai, dompna, grand honor

Si ja de vos m’es jutgada

Honranssa que sotz cobertor

Vos tenga nud’embrassada;

Car vos valetz las meillors cen!

Q’ieu non sui sobregabaire –

Sol del pes ai mon cor gauzen

Plus que s’era emperaire!

209

It shall be, Lady, a great honor

if you will grant me

the benefit under the covers

Of having you in naked embrace;

for you are worth more than a hundred;

And though I do not boast:

At this thought alone my heart joys

more than were I the emperor.

The trobairitz Comtessa de Dia writes in much the same frankly erotic

fashion in the poem Estat ai en greu cossirier, in which she is explicit

about her desire to replace her husband with her lover:

209 Victoria Cirlot, ed. Antología de textos románicos medievales: siglos XII–XIII (Barcelona:

Edicions Universitat Barcelona, 1984), 151–52, ll. 17–24.

187

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

Estat ai en greu cossirier

per un cavallier qu’ai agut,

e vuoil sia totz temps saubut

cum ieu l’ai amat a sobrier.

Ara vei qu’ieu sui trahida

car ieu non li donei m’amor,

don ai estat en gran error

en lieig e quan sui vestida.

Ben volria mon cavallier

tener un ser en mos bratz nut,

qu’el s’en tengra per ereubut

sol qu’a lui fezes cosseillier;

car plus m’en sui abellida

no fetz Floris de Blancheflor;

ieu l’autrei mon cor e m’amor,

mon sen, mos huoills e ma vida.

Bels amics avinens e bos,

cora·us tenrai en mos poder,

e que iagues ab vos un ser,

e que·us des un bais amoros?

Sapchatz, gran talan n’auria

qu·us tengues en luoc del marit

ab so que m’aguessetz plevit

de far tot so qu’eu volria.

210

I have been in great distress

about a knight I once had,

I want it known for all time

how much I loved him

but now, I feel betrayed

because I did not tell him of my love

and I am in great torment

naked in my bed or fully dressed.

If only I could hold my knight

naked in my arms until the dawn,

drunk with my beauty

he’d feel like he was in paradise;

for I am more in love with him

210 Bruckner, et al., 10.

188 Love and its Critics

than Floris was with Blancheflor;

I give him my heart and my love,

my mind, my eyes, and my life.

Sweet lover, so charming and so good,

when will I have you in my power

to lie with you at night

and give you all my passionate kisses?

Know this for certain, I greatly desire

to have you in my husband's place

as soon as you will promise me

to do everything I desire.

This isn’t spiritualized adoration. These two poets do not sing for birds

or flowers, and in this breaking away from the conventional opening

of lyric poetry, these poets also break away from sexual, social, and

even psychological convention. These poets write of lovers who choose.

What else can those last lines mean, “as soon as you will promise

me / to do everything I desire”, except come take me, especially after the

euphemistic line “to have you in my husband's place” (qu·us tengues en

luoc del marit)? The poets express the anxiety that they may not get the

opportunity to act on their desires. For Raimbaut:

Qu’il fetz a son marit crezen

C’anc hom que nasques de maire

Non toques en lieis.—Mantenen

Atrestal podetz vos faire!

211

She made her husband believe

That no man born of woman

Could say he had touched her. Soon

You will be able to prove the same thing of me!

In Raimbaut’s poem, thinking of his lover, and comparing her

situation to that of the legendary Isolde, he bases his hopes on a

deception that may or may not succeed. In the Comtessa de Dia’s

poem, she has been “in great distress”, feels “betrayed”, and suffers

“in bed or fully dressed”.

211 Cirlot, 151–52, ll. 46–48.

189

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

The poems by the troubadours, even the myths that surround them,

belie any notion that the love of which they write is a decorous matter

of rules and codes, of obedience demanded and given. Their poems are

filled with desire, frustration, joy, despair, and the tantalizing possibility

of freedom, of choice, of life lived, not spent in mechanical compliance

with the expectations of others. These are poems of rebellion, not

obedience, of chaos, not conformity. Perhaps this can best be illustrated

by returning briefly to Bertran de Born, the warrior troubadour more

famous for poems of war than for poems of love and desire. Even

Bertran reflects something of the larger troubadour ethos in Be·m platz

lo gais temps de pascor (I Am Pleased by the Gay Season of Spring), a

celebration of war and love in which he mocks the entire notion of sin:

Amors vol drut cavalgador

bon d’armas e larc de servir,

gen parlan e gran donador

e tal qi sapcha far e dir

fors e dinz son estatge

segon lo poder qi l’es datz.

E sia d’avinen solatz,

cortes e d’agradatge.

E domna c’ab aital drut jaz

es monda de totz sos pechatz.

212

Love wants a knightly rider for a lover,

good with arms and generous in service,

noble in speech and a lavish giver

one who knows what to say and what to do

outside and inside his realm

according to the ability he has been given.

Let him be attractive, a good fit,

elegant and pleasing,

and the lady who lies with such a lover

is cleansed of all her sins.

For Bertran, love is not a sin; he laughs at the idea. Love is physical

and vigorous—like war. Clearly, he doesn’t think war is a sin; it’s his

212 Betran de Born, 343, ll. 51–60.

190 Love and its Critics

favorite thing on earth, the very reason for living. For Bertran, the lover

should be a great warrior. The lady who is herself a great warrior in love,

who “wins” her love the way a warrior defeats an honorable enemy,

is cleansed of any foolishly-imagined “sin” of love to begin within. If

there is “sin” here, it is in the attempt to reduce this poem (and the

troubadour/trobairitz corpus in its entirety) to “a mirror of itself”,

213

“mature rejection of the new Renaissance model of the self-determining

singular ego”,

214

or “an ontological rather than an ontic language [which]

expresses Being in general rather than a certain particular being”.

215

With such formulations, scholars attempt to erase a soldier, poet, and

lover who lived more fully than most of us ever will.

The young singer of the anonymous ballad Coindeta Sui would no

doubt concur with Bertran. Though the song is playful, it expresses

serious determination about a serious dilemma. The singer is caught in

an arranged, loveless, and passionless marriage to a much older man.

She is stewing in her own actively hostile emotions, as she is repulsed

by her husband:

Coindeta sui! si cum n’ai greu cossire

per mon marit, quar ne·l voil ne·l desire.

Q’eu be·us dirai per que son aisi drusa,

Coindeta sui!

qar pauca son, ioveneta e tosa,

Coindeta sui!

e degr’aver marit dunt fos ioiosa,

ab cui toz temps pogues iogar e rire:

Coindeta sui!

Ia Deus mi·n sal se ia sui amorosa,

Coindeta sui!

de lui amar mia sui cubitosa,

Coindeta sui!

anz quant lo vei ne son tant vergoignosa

qu’e prec la mort qe·l venga tost aucire.

216

213 Zumthor, 170.

214 G. B. Stone, 4.

215 Ibid., 5.

216 Bruckner et al., 130, ll. 1–15.

191

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

I’m pretty, and yet my heart’s in distress

for I have no desire for my husband.

I’ll tell you all of my longing for love:

I’m pretty!

I’m small, young and well-groomed,

I’m pretty!

and should have a husband who gives me joy

with whom I climb, play and laugh all the time.

I’m pretty!

Now God save me if I ever loved him:

I’m pretty!

I have not the least passion for him,

I’m pretty!

yet seeing his age, I feel so ashamed,

I pray Death will come kill him, and soon.

The song is about what she desires, how she will get it, and what

others should learn from her getting it. After all, she sings so that

“every lady will learn to sing / about my friend whom I so love and

desire”.

217

It is very much in the spirit of Bertran de Born. Imagine a

girl of fifteen married to a man who is fifty. Imagine that they have

nothing in common (unsurprisingly), that he is a tyrant, and that his

body has decayed into undesirability, while his libido still tells him that

he is a young man, so that he is a thoroughgoing combination of all

things that would likely be considered disgusting and oppressive by a

young girl. All too often, marriages in the medieval and early modern

eras were arrangements of contentment, at best. At worst, they were

hellish traps of jealousy, disgust, lack of desire, and differences in

age or temperament. In the world of the troubadours, divorce was no

longer the practical possibility it had once been in the Roman world.

For most, the only way out of a failed marriage was through the death

of the marriage partner.

218

Thus the young girl of Coindeta Sui sings the

line “I pray Death will come kill him and soon”. In such circumstances

of lifelong passionless entrapment, one wonders how often death was

willing and able to oblige.

217 “chant tota domna ensegnada, / del meu amic q’eu tant am e desire” (ibid., ll. 28–29).

218 Even those “who divorced because of adultery by the other party” were forced to “remain

unmarried so long as the first spouse lived” (James A. Brundage. Law, Sex, and Christian

Society in Medieval Europe [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009], 244).

192 Love and its Critics

Passion must and will have an out, especially in this period when

a new way of thinking about life and the individual was emerging.

But the movement these poems participated in was destroyed, as the

troubadour culture and the courts that supported it were crushed in

the Albigensian crusade (1209–29 CE). Due in large part to pressures

applied after the establishment of the Inquisition in 1232, the emphasis

changed in much of the poetry that followed:

[A]fter the crusade against the Albigensians (the heretic Cathars), […]

there begins a process of psychological inhibition and repression in the

domain of love songs, a trend toward spiritualization and allegorization

that would eventually lead to the Roman de la Rose, to the dolce stil novo of

Guido Guinizelli or Cavalcanti, and to the Vita Nuova of Dante.

219

However, despite the fact that the spirit of poetry was changed and

softened by a later tradition, the troubadour poems and their spirit

survived, though in dormancy. The basic assumptions of the modern

Western world have long rested on the foundational idea of individual

choice that the troubadours fought for bravely, but unsuccessfully. We,

through Shakespeare and the poets who followed him, now live, for

better or worse, in the world of the troubadour ethos—a spirit which

Shakespeare makes his own in his most powerful plays, and around

which Milton centers his crucial scene of human choice in Paradise Lost.

By the seventeenth century in England, the troubadours have won a

victory more complete than the Crusaders of thirteenth-century France

could ever have imagined.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a movement so radical

as that of the troubadours was crushed. Perhaps it should be even less

surprising that so many contemporary scholars have worked so hard to

insist that there was nothing particularly remarkable about this poetry.

Authority often has its way both by force and by deception, and those

who stand against “the power which demands submission”

220

are often

defeated. Though “Ovid defended love against the vulgar material

Roman capitalists, [and] Bernart and his fellows seem to have faced down

the Church”,

221

each suffered the consequences. Ovid was banished for

219 Lazar, 92.

220 Topsfield, 39.

221 James J. Wilhelm. Seven Troubadours: The Creators of Modern Verse (University Park:

Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970), 113.

193

4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual

life, never to see his beloved Rome again. And the troubadours, their

way of life, and even their language, were all quite nearly removed

from the Earth: “In 1539, the Ordonnance de Villers-Cotterêts established

French as the only authorized language for official documents [while]

Occitan was progressively banned from public and high-prestige

contexts and relegated to private use”.

222

This denigration of all non-

langue d’oil forms reached new levels of intensity with the release of

Abbé Grégoire’s Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir le patois,

et d’universaliser l’usage de la langue française (Report on the Need and

Means to Annihilate the Patois and to Universalize the Use of the French

Language) to the French National Convention in 1794. There, Gregoire

argues that the question of language use is properly to be determined

by the winners of the centuries-long struggle between north and south

in France, while acknowledging that the contest could have turned out

differently: “probably, instead of the language of Trouvères, we would

now be speaking the language of the Troubadours, if Paris, the center of

government, had been located on the left bank of the Loire”.

223

Even today, while “Italian and Catalan scholars” are commonly

taught Occitan because the language “remains a necessary step in the

acquisition of philological expertise”, in France the attitude is different:

“The northern French academy […] has gradually backed away from

medieval Occitan studies […] as something that either does not really

concern it, or as a phenomenon that can simply be alluded to—a stepping

stone to something better that replaced it’.

224

This dismissive attitude

is hardly new, as demonstrated by Antoine de Rivarol’s Discours de

l’Universalité de la langue Française (1784), where he writes approvingly

of “la Langue Latine”, and “la Langue Toscane”, while referring

222 Rafëu Sichel-Bazin, Carolin Buthke and Trudel Meisenburg. “Prosody in Language

Contact: Occitan and French”. Prosody and Language in Contact: L2 Acquisition,

Attrition and Languages in Multilingual Situations, ed. by Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie,

Mathieu Avanzi, and Sophie Herment (Berlin: Springer, 2015), 73–74.

223 “probablement, au lieu de la langue des Trouvères, nous parlerions celle des

Troubadours, si Paris, le centre du gouvernement, avoit été situé sur la rive gauche

de la Loire” (Henri Grégoire. Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir le patois,

et d’universaliser l’usage de la langue française [Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1794], 8,

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8PB2RBNrLZYC&pg=PA8).

224 William Burgwinkle. “The Troubadours: The Occitan Model”. In The Cambridge

History of French Literature, ed. by William E. Burgwinkle, Nicholas Hammond, and

Emma Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 21.

194 Love and its Critics

dismissively to “le patois des Troubadours”.

225

With the educational

reforms of Jules Ferry in 1881–82 came measures designed to prevent

schoolchildren from speaking anything other than “standard” Parisian

French.

226

Visitors to le Midi can still encounter evidence of this in a sign

in an abandoned schoolhouse in Ayguatébia which says Parlez Français,

Soyez Propres—“Speak French, Be Clean”—marking what locals call la

vergonha, a policy of shaming people who speak one of the Occitanian

languages. Such words illustrate how far the enemies of troubadour

culture have been willing to go in order to “channel, reformulate, and

control” its ideas, the language(s) in which they were expressed, and

the human joys and freedoms they tried to convey. And yet, despite a

history of theological, governmental, and critical disdain and erasure,

the poetry survives.

225 12–13.

226 See R. Anthony Lodge. French: From Dialect to Standard (London: Routledge, 1993), 219.

5. Fin’amor Castrated: Abelard, Heloise,

and the Critics who Deny

The brief flowering of the troubadours helps us to understand the

love story, in twelfth-century Paris, of Peter Abelard and Heloise

d’Argenteuil, who lived the passions and the dangers often spoken of

in the poetry of the age. The letters between Abelard and Heloise are

among the world’s most vibrant embodiments of fin’amor,

as well as

its most tragic testaments to the violence and determination of those

who would prevent men and women from living and loving as they

choose. Written around 1128, this Latin correspondence tells a story of

love that is both of the body and the mind. It is a painful account of what

Shakespeare would one day call the “marriage of true minds”, as the

lovers are separated by difficult circumstances including a jealous uncle,

castration, character assassination, shame, inner conflict, and religion.

Abelard was an esteemed teacher and philosopher in Paris whose

lectures drew students from all over Europe:

[Abelard’s] fame as a teacher and great reputation as a scholar helped

establish the University of Paris as students arrived from all over Europe

to study with him […]. In Paris, Abelard was regarded as a young [star]

among the schoolmen of the monastic orders, whose theological lectures

were considered dusty and boring as they commented endlessly on the

traditions of the church fathers and earlier medieval thinkers. Abelard’s

1 Jean Hagstrum observes that the story of Abelard and Heloise is “an invaluable

guide to what lies behind the imaginative literatures of love” (Hagstrum 203).

196 Love and its Critics

lectures challenged revered traditions, and his students were often

rowdy and disrespectful to the accepted traditions of the church.

During his time in the schools of Paris, Abelard was hired to tutor

Heloise, the niece of one of the city’s most influential citizens, a secular

canon named Fulbert. According to Abelard, this new pupil Heloise,

“in her outward appearance, was not the lowest; but for her wealth in

letters, she was supreme”.

Abelard tells the story of how they met in

Historia calamitatum or A Story of His Misfortunes, which he addresses

to a “Friend”. Who exactly this piece was meant for is unknown, but it

has long served to give readers an intimate and painful portrait of the

significant details of Abelard’s love for Heloise and the price both he

and she paid for that love. In the Letters, Heloise remembers the secret

and passionate love-making in the convents and in her uncle’s house,

clandestine meetings which resulted in Heloise getting pregnant. After

“being found in bed together”,

Abelard and Heloise secretly married,

in a failed attempt to satisfy Fulbert, even though neither had a high

opinion of the institution.

The Church disapproved of Abelard’s

marriage (during this period, clerical celibacy was slowly being imposed

2 Roger E. Olson. The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition & Reform

(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 326.

3 “Quae cum per faciem non esset infirma, per abundantium litterarum erat

suprema” (Peter Abelard and Heloise d’Argenteuil. Magistri Petri Abaelardi

epistola quae est Historia calamitatum: Heloissae et Abaelardi epistolae, ed. by Johann

Caspar von Orelli [Turici: Officina Ulrichiana, 1841], 6, https://archive.org/stream/

magistripetriaba00abel#page/6).

4 Betty Radice. “Introduction”. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Trans. by Betty

Radice (London: Penguin, 1974), 16.

5 Heloise seems to have had an even lower opinion of marriage than did Abelard

(practiced, as it was, primarily for economic reasons):

This one is not better because he is richer or more powerful; the latter depends on fortune, the

former on virtue. Nor should she be estimated as less than venal, who freely marries the rich

man rather than the poor one, and desires what her husband has more than what he is. To such

a one, certainly, pay is due rather than gratitude. Certainly it is true that she thinks more of his

property than of him, and she, if she could, would prostitute herself to a richer man.

[N]on enim quo quisque ditior sive potentior, ideo et melior; fortunae illud est, hoc virtutis. Nec

se minime venalem aestimet esse, quae libentius ditiori quam pauperi nubit, et plus in marito

sua quam ipsum concupiscit. Certe quamcunque ad nuptias haec concupiscentia ducit, merces

ei potius quam gratia debetur. Certum quippe est eam res ipsas, non hominem sequi, et se, si

posset, velle prostituere ditiori.

Peter Abelard and Heloise d’Argenteuil, 33, https://archive.org/stream/

magistripetriaba00abel#page/n40

197

5. Fin’amor Castrated: Abelard, Heloise, and the Critics who Deny

on the Western Church

), and his once-promising career ground to a

halt (something we will see again centuries later in the story of John and

Anne Donne).

In his later years, Abelard was accused of heresy by the French abbot

Bernard of Clairvaux.

Bernard (the heresy-hunter

whose preaching

6 In 1031, the Council of Bourges declared that “[p]riests, deacons and subdeacons

were to refrain from taking wives and concubines, and those already married were

to separate from their wives, or face the threat of degradation” (Helen Parish.

Clerical Celibacy in the West: C.1100–1700 [Farnham: Ashgate, 2010], 96). By 1059,

instructions were given that “the laity should refuse the sacraments of married

priests” (97). In 1095, the Council of Clermont demanded that “any priest, deacon,

or subdeacon who was married must refrain from the celebration of the Mass” (103),

and by 1119, “Pope Calixtus II made further attempts to enforce the prohibitions

on clerical marriage at the Council of Rheims […], at which it was determined that

all married clergy were to be expelled from their benefices, and threatened with

the penalty of excommunication if they did not separate from their wives” (103).

Abelard and Heloise’s relationship takes place in a context in which the primary

employer of intellectuals (the Church) is in the process of forbidding them to have

anything like a “normal” sexual and emotional life. It is this same institution that

will soon establish the Inquisition and come to dominate the university:

Gregory IX, in 1231, endowed the University [of Paris] with the great Papal privilege that

completed its organization. It was the self-same Pope, who in 1233 entrusted the Dominicans

with the office of the Inquisition. The Church, that under the great Innocent III (1198–1216)

had reached the peak of its power, regarded this as a necessary defense against the heretical

movements of the twelfth century. But the Church also saw a danger in the laity’s culture at

the end of the twelfth century, so it felt it had to subject education to its control. Thus, there is

a close internal link between the introduction of the Inquisition and the enforcement of papal

supervision of the universities.

[S]tattete Gregor IX. im Jahre 1231 die Universität mit dem großen päpstlichen Privileg aus,

das ihre Organisation abschloß. Es was derselbe Papst, der 1233 den Dominikanern das Amt

der Inquisition übertrug. Gegen die ketzerischen Bewegungen des 12. Jahrhunderts schien der

Kirche, die unter dem großen Innozenz III (1198–1216) den Höhenpunkt ihrer Machstellung

erreicht hatte, diese Gegenwehr geboten. Sie durfte aber auch in der stark von Alterum

befruchteten Laienkultur des ausgehenden 12. Jahrhunderts eine Gefahr sehen, mußte also das

Bildungswesen ihrer Kontrolle unterwerfen. So hängt die Einfürung der Inquisition und die

Durchsetzung der päpistlichen Oberaufsicht über die Universitäten innerlich zusammen.

Ernst Robert Curtius. Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter. Berlin: A.

Francke, 1948, 63. Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that the methods of

academic and theological critics of poetry can so often seem identical.

7 Joseph R. Strayer. Western Europe in the Middle Ages: A Short History (New York:

Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1955), 130.

8 “Otto of Freising described Bernard of Clairvaux as rather too ready to pounce upon

hints of heresy, and Bernard was instrumental in branding innovative philosophy

as dangerous heresy” (Christine Caldwell Ames. Medieval Heresies: Christianity,

Judaism, and Islam [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015], 199).

198 Love and its Critics

against Henry the Monk

was part of the long ideological buildup to

the Albigensian Crusade) “considered that Abelard did not so much

invent a new heresy, as reassert old heresies, whether that of Arius,

Pelagius, or Nestorius, all of which had been condemned by the Fathers

of the Church”.

Abelard’s acute and competitive interest in combining

philosophical and theological questions got him into trouble: “his first

theological work, on the Trinity”, was “condemned as heretical”.

During the course of his academic career, Abelard made enemies by

being too willing to mock current teaching methods, while others were

more reliably orthodox:

Other men used methods which were essentially like his, and even

borrowed directly from his work, without losing their reputation for

orthodoxy. […] They were less shocking than Abelard because they were

not innovators and because they were careful not to claim too much for

their methods. They admitted that some articles of the faith were beyond

rational analysis and they were careful to find orthodox solution to

problems in which they had cited conflicting authorities.

In all likelihood, however, it was not primarily his innovative thinking and

lecturing that got him into so much trouble, but rather his complicated,

and impolitic personality: “[a]rrogant and abrasive—he could not find a

teacher smarter than he, and made this blazingly clear”.

Abelard was a proudly independent thinker, who reveled in

controversy, and “was not blindly submissive to his authorities […]; he

knew how to compare them, criticize them, and combine them”, while

letting reason have “the last word”.

Abelard emphasized intellectual

independence in his teaching, and his students were “enthralled by

9 “Henry led a popular anti-clerical uprising, proclaiming a reform of marriage and

elimination of degrees of consanguinity” (Ryan P. Freeburn. Hugh of Amiens and the

Twelfth-Century Renaissance [Farnham: Ashgate, 2011], 150–51).

10 Constant J. Mews. “Accusations of Heresy and Error in the Twelfth Century

Schools: The Witness of Gerhoh of Reichersberg and Otto of Freising”. In Heresy in

Transition: Transforming Ideas of Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London:

Routledge, 2005), 44.

11 John Marenbon. Medieval Philosophy: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction

(London: Routledge, 2007), 136.

12 Strayer, 130.

13 Ames, 199.

14 Jacques Le Goff, ed. The Medieval World. Trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (London:

Collins & Brown, 1990), 21.

199

5. Fin’amor Castrated: Abelard, Heloise, and the Critics who Deny

the novelty of his pedagogy, which challenged them not just to absorb

the definitive statements (auctoritates) in revered authors (auctores), but

also to interrogate the texts and passages with the strength of their own

logic”.

Abelard’s students, seemingly willing to follow him anywhere

in order to learn from him, were often notably loyal, though none were

finally more loyal than Heloise.

Abelard writes frankly of Heloise in his Historia calamitatum, revealing

his fascination with her intelligence and determination. They are now

thought to have met sometime in 1115,

at a time when Heloise was

still fairly young.

Very few women of the time, much less women so

young, knew how to read and write, especially in formal Latin, or were

educated in the classics: “this gift of the science of letters, which is rare

in women, highly recommended the young girl, and made her highly

praised throughout the entire realm”,

writes Abelard, describing

Heloise’s intelligence, the shared quality that aroused their passion and

led to their perilous choice. “I began to hold an estimate of myself as

the only philosopher in the world, with no reason to fear anyone, and

so I relaxed and gave in to my lustful desires”.

The negative emphasis

he puts on his recollections, reducing his love for Heloise to “lustful

desires”, is understandable, given the mutilated state of his body while

writing these lines. It is impossible fully to imagine the horror he must

15 Jan M. Ziolowski, editor and translator. Letters of Peter Abelard, Beyond the Personal

(Washington: The Catholic University Press of America, 2008), xxii.

16 Denis de Rougemont differs, positing a first meeting in 1118. L’Amour et l’Occident

(Paris: Plon, 1939), n. 12, 289.

17 The ages of Abelard and Heloise in 1115 are dated from a birthdate for Abelard

of 1079, and for Heloise of 1100, making Abelard thirty six and Heloise fifteen.

However, Constant Mews has recently argued that “[t]he tradition that she was

born in 1100, and thus only a teenager when she met Abelard, is a pious fabrication

from the seventeenth century, without any firm foundation. In 1115, she is more

likely to have been around twenty-one years old” (Constant J. Mews, Abelard and

Heloise [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], 59).

18 “Nam quo bonum hoc, litteratorie scilicet scientiae, in mulieres es rarius: eo amplius

puellam commendabat, et in toto regno nominatissimam fecerat” (Peter Abelard and

Heloise d’Argenteuil, 6, https://archive.org/stream/magistripetriaba00abel#page/6).

19 “cum iam me solum in mundo superesse philosophum aestimarem, nec ullam

ulterius inquietationem formidarem, frena libidini coepi laxare” (ibid., 5–6, https://

archive.org/stream/magistripetriaba00abel#page/5).

200 Love and its Critics

have experienced the night when, “sleeping in my private lodging”,

hired thugs took Fulbert’s revenge on him:

They cut off those parts of my body with which I had committed the act

about which they mourned. […] First thing the next morning, the entire

city gathered before my house, and the crying out stunned with wonder,

the prostrated lamentations, the upsetting and exasperating moaning and

weeping is difficult, even impossible to describe. Honestly, it was primarily

the clerks and my students who crucified me with their intolerable grieving

and lamenting, and I suffered more from their sympathy than from the

pain of the wound, and I felt the shame more than the dismemberment.

[…] From then on, I applied myself principally to the study of the sacred

lessons, which to my present state was more convenient.

What we see here is not the extinguishing or renouncing of Abelard’s

once-passionate love, but the words of a man who has built a protective

wall behind which he can hide so that he will not be further harmed.

Historia calamitatum reflects the guarded inner world that its author

creates as a direct response to his mutilation and humiliation. In a way,

it also reflects a painful internalization of the judgment rendered on him,

and his love, by the world. A letter from his former teacher, Roscelin of

Compiègne, provides powerful testimony to that judgment:

I saw in Paris, in the house of a stranger, a certain clerk by the name

of Fulbert received you and fed you with honor at his table, treating

you as a member of his household and as an intimate friend. He also

introduced you to his niece, a young girl of great abilities, and great

prudence, engaging you to be her teacher. You were not unmindful, but

contemptuous, in the way you treated that man of noble birth, your host

and Lord, a clergyman, the canon of the church of Paris, who hosted you

free of charge and with honor. Not sparing the virgin, whom you should

have preserved and taught as a disciple, instead, with your spirit tossed

about by unbridled lust, you taught her not to argue, but to commit

20 “dormientem in secreta hospicii mei camera” (ibid., 11, https://archive.org/stream/

magistripetriaba00abel#page/11).

21 eis videlicet corporis mei partibus amputatis, quibus id quod plangebant commiseram, […]

Mane autem facto, tota ad me civitas congregata, quanta stuperet admiratione, quanta se

affligeret lamentatione, quanto me clamore vexarent, quanto planctu perturbarent: difficile,

immo impossibile est exprimi. Maxime vero clerici ac precipue scolares nostri intolerabilibus

me lamentis et eiulatibus cruciabant, ut multo amplius ex eorum compassione quam ex vulneris

lederer passione, et plus erubescentiam quam plagam sentirem. […] quod professioni meae

convenientius erat, sacre plurimum lectioni studium intendens.

Ibid., 11–12, 13, https://archive.org/stream/magistripetriaba00abel#page/12

201

5. Fin’amor Castrated: Abelard, Heloise, and the Critics who Deny

fornication. In this one fact you are guilty of many crimes: of treason,

and fornication, and the filthiest violation of virginal modesty. But the

Lord God, to whom vengeance belongs, has freely acted, depriving you

of that part by which you sinned.

Of his later escape to Troyes, Abelard describes himself as one hiding

away from condemnation: “Here, hidden alone, except for one of our

clerks, I could truly sing out to the Lord: ‘Lo! I’ve become a fugitive from

the world, and have found refuge in solitude’”.

But even the solitude

does not lessen his sense of shame or relieve his anguish. At some

point he considers joining the “gentes” or “heathens” and “passing the

boundaries of Christendom”.

Having been forcibly separated from Abelard for years, Heloise,

now abbess of the Paraclete in Ferreux-Quincey, reads his Historia

calamitatum only after it is brought to her by chance.

The letters Heloise

writes in response reveal a passionate woman who agonizes over

Abelard’s misfortunes and “his life’s continual persecutions”.

Heloise,

unlike Abelard, rejects the derision of society,

voicing that rejection

22 Vidi siquidem Parisius, quod quidam clericus nomine Fulbertus te ut hospitem in domo sua

recepit, te in mensa sua ut amicum familiarem et domesticum honorifice pavit, neptim etiam

suam, puellam prudentissimam et indolis egregiae, ad docendum commisit. Tu vero viri

illius nobilis et clerici, Parisiensis etiam ecclesiae canonici, hospitis insuper tui ac domini, et

gratis et honorifice te procurantis non immemor, sed contemptor, commissae tibi virgini non

parcens, quam conservare ut commissam, docere ut discipulam debueras, effreno luxuriae

spiritu agitatus non argumentari, sed eam fornicari docuisti, in uno facto multorum criminum,

proditionis scilicet et fornicationis, reus et virginei pudoris violator spurcissimus. Sed Deus

ultionum, Dominus Deus ultionum, libere egit, qui ea qua tantum parte peccaveras te privavit.

Roscelin of Compiègne. “Epistola XV: Quae est Roscelini ad P. Abaelardum”.

Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Vol. 178, ed. by Jacques Paul Migne (Paris:

Apud Garnier Fratres, 1885), col. 369, https://archive.org/stream/patrologia

ecurs53unkngoog#page/n189

23 “ubi cum quodam clerico nostro latitans, illud vere Domino poteram decantare:

‘Ecce elongavi fugiens et mansi in solitudine’” (Peter Abelard and Heloise

d’Argenteuil, 19, https://archive.org/stream/magistripetriaba00abel#page/19).

24 “ut Christianorum finibus excessis” (ibid., 23, https://archive.org/stream/magistri

petriaba00abel#page/n31).

25 “Missam ad amicum pro consolatione epistolam, dilectissime, vestram ad me

forte quidam nuper attulit” [Recently it chanced, most beloved, that the letter of

consolation you sent to a friend was brought to me] (ibid., 30, https://archive.org/

stream/magistripetriaba00abel#page/n37).

26 “continuas vitae persecutiones” (ibid., 30, https://archive.org/stream/magistri petri

aba00abel#page/n37).

27 What made Peter Abelard so unusual in the eyes of Heloise was his gift for combining his skill

in philosophy with a gift for composing and singing songs of love. When she read the Historia

202 Love and its Critics

in the words of two intensely passionate letters, and then a third, more

philosophical and intellectual in its approach. In each case, what she

appears to be seeking is not absolution, but a restored connection to

Abelard, a return of words for words. As Barbara Newman describes

the correspondence, it moves from passion to intellectual exchange:

In the early 1130s Peter Abelard received three letters from Heloise, once

his mistress and wife, now his sister and daughter in religion. The first

two made such painful reading that he must have thought twice before

scanning the third, in which Heloise resolutely turned from the subject of

tragic love to the minutiae of monastic observance. For romantic readers,

the correspondence lapses from titillation into tedium with this epistle.

But Abelard was no doubt immensely relieved. Laying aside her griefs,

Heloise now wrote to him as abbess to abbot, asking for only two things:

a treatise explaining “how the order of nuns began”, and a rule for her

daughters at the Paraclete.

And yet, one can imagine why Heloise asks for these things in her

third letter—she had been, and was still, in love with Abelard’s mind,

and such a request would elicit more words, more thoughts, more of

Abelard’s voice to which Heloise could return in the most intimate of

unions, hearing her long-absent husband in the quiet hours of night and

morning as she scanned the words he would send her. They needn’t be

words of love—his words alone would sustain her.

But in her first two letters, Heloise’s words overflow with passion and

the bittersweet memories of the sensual and emotional delights she had

shared with Abelard. She often reveals her sexual frustrations and longing,

writing of her desire to be with the man she loves, despite the disapproval

of the world. But only her memories will allow her that luxury:

But those stimuli of the flesh, these instigators of sensuality, the very

passions of youth, with the experience of longing and delight and

pleasure, all greatly inflame [me]. […] They praise me as chaste, when

calamitum, she reminded him of these public declarations of love and of the incessant letters

he had showered on her in the past. From her perspective, a true relationship was not an illicit

sexual encounter but a mutual profession of true love.

Constant J. Mews. The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard (New York: Palgrave

MacMillan, 1999), 82.

28 Barbara Newman. From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion

and Literature (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 19.

203

5. Fin’amor Castrated: Abelard, Heloise, and the Critics who Deny

they do not see that I am a hypocrite. They think of the cleanness of the

flesh as virtue, but virtue is not of the body, but of the soul.

Nothing could sublimate or redirect Heloise’s love, not even being a nun,

for she says she feels “immoderate love”—“immoderato amore”,

not

for God, but for Abelard. She makes her preference for Abelard above

all others on Earth or in Heaven clear when she tells him that “only you

have the power to make me sad, or to bring me delight or comfort”.

her words were put to music, one could hear the troubadours and their

songs of fin’amor. Bernart de Ventadorn’s poem, Tant ai mo cor ple de joya

(My heart is full of joy), in its treatment of love and comfort, echoes

Heloise’s paradoxical sense of naked exposure and warm reassurance

in her confessions of love to Abelard:

Anar posc ses vestidura,

nutz en ma chamiza,

car fin’ amors m’asegura

de la freja biza.

I walk undressed,

naked in my shirt,

for love secures me

from the coldest winds.

Sometimes, Heloise’s tone becomes more urgent, even demanding,

as she desires to love and be loved despite Fulbert, the Church, or the

jealous God himself. However, Abelard cannot respond in the way that

Heloise yearns for. After his intial diffidence, Heloise’s words become

even more intensely heartfelt, revealing the passionate and courageous

29 “Hos autem in me stimulos carnis, haec incentiva libidinis ipse iuvenilis fervor

aetatis, et iocundissimarum experientia volputatum, plurimum accendunt. […]

Castam me raedicant, qui non deprehenderunt hypocritum. Munditiam carnis

conferunt in virtutem, cum non sit corporis, sed animi virtus” (Peter Abelard and

Heloise d’Argenteuil, 43–44, https://archive.org/stream/magistripetriaba00abel#p

age/43).

30 Ibid., 32, https://archive.org/stream/magistripetriaba00abel#page/n39

31 “Solus quippe es, qui me contristare, qui me laetificare seu consolari valeas” (ibid.)

32 Bernart de Ventadorn, 260–63, ll. 13–16, https://archive.org/stream/bernartvon

ventad00bern#page/260

204 Love and its Critics

person she has always been, determined to love fully, and on her own

terms, despite a world that disdains her love for Abelard:

God knows I have never required anything from you except for yourself;

I only wanted you, not anything that belonged to you. […] And if the

name of wife appears more sacred and honorable, for me the word

friend will always be sweeter, or—though you might be indignant—

concubine or whore. […] I preferred love to marriage, freedom to fetters.

I call God as witness, if Augustus, the whole world’s ruler, had deemed

me worthy of marriage, and raised me to preside with him over the earth

forever, it would have been dearer to me to be called your whore than

his Empress.

Heloise refuses the idea that she may only love Abelard for the sake

of God, and in that way, she is more akin to the troubadours than to

the later Italian poets who see love as a ladder by which to reach the

divine: “[w]hen Heloise protested that she desired him for himself,

[she] echoed the Ciceronium dictum that one should love a friend, for

that person’s sake—without reference to loving someone for the sake

of God”.

Heloise is unwilling to believe that such love is a sin: “I am

innocent”—“sum innocens”,

for she views love as something greater

than anything the world can oppose it with:

She wants freedom from compulsion in loving her paragon, who had

every grace of mind and body, making her the envy of queens and

great ladies. She wants him for herself alone, without the restraints

or sanctions of marriage—her love is single, obsessive, possessive,

eternal, extramarital. And nothing can overcome her passion, not his

castration, not his unavailability, not his theological arguments, not her

33 Nihil unquam, deus scit, in te nisi requisiui; te pure, non tua concupiscens. […] Et si uxoris

nomen sanctius ac validius videtur, dulcius mihi semper exstitit amicae ocabulum, aut, si non

indigneris, concubinae vel scorti. […] sed plerisque tacitis, quibus amorem coniugio, libertatem

vinculo praeferebam. Deum leslcm invoco, si me Augustus universo praesidens mundo

matrimonii honore dignaretur totumque mihi orbem confirmaret in perpetuo praesidendum,

carius mihi et dignius videretur tua dici meretrix, quam illius imperatrix.

Peter Abelard and Heloise d’Argenteuil, 32–33, https://archive.org/stream/magistri

petriaba00abel#page/n40

34 Constant J. Mews. “Abelard, Heloise, and Discussion of Love in the Twelfth-

Century Schools”. In Babette S. Hellemans, eds. Rethinking Abelard: A Collection of

Critical Essays (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 26.

35 Peter Abelard and Heloise d’Argenteuil, 34, https://archive.org/stream/magistri

petriaba00abel#page/n41

205

5. Fin’amor Castrated: Abelard, Heloise, and the Critics who Deny

administrative duties in a convent, and certainly not her vows, which

were far from freely or religiously taken.

She makes it painfully clear that she never chose the religious life, and

that had she been free to make her own choices, both their lives would

have been very different:

Truthfully, the young girl had no calling for the monastic profession,

nor any religious devotion, but I did this to obey you. And if, in that,

I deserve nothing from you, be the judge yourself of how vain all my

hardships are. I expect no reward from God, for certainly I have never

done anything for the love of him. You hurried to God, and I followed

in the habit; indeed, I went first. […] I have never had the slightest

hesitation, were it to run into the Vulcanian flames of Hell, to follow you

or precede you at your bidding. My heart was not with me, but with you.

Even now, if it is not wholly with you, it is nowhere. In fact, without you,

it does not exist at all.

Heloise’s love for Abelard, after many years of separation, shows no

signs of having diminished. This is painfully clear in the way she begins

and ends her letters. She addresses her first letter, “To her lord, or rather

her father, to her husband, or rather her brother; his servant, or rather his

daughter, his wife, or rather his sister; to Abelard, Heloise”.

Abelard,

in contrast, distances himself from Heloise by opening the letters with

“To Heloise, his dearly beloved sister in Christ, Abelard her brother

in the same”.

The ending of the letters play almost the same notes:

“Farewell, my only”,

versus “Live, but in Christ I pray, remember

36 Hagstrum, 204.

37 quam quidem iuvenculam ad monastice conversationis asperitatem non religionis devotio

sed tua tantum pertraxit iussio. Ubi si nihil a te promerear, quam frustra laborem, diiudica.

Nulla mihi super hoc merces exspectanda est a deo, cuius adhuc amore nihil me constat egisse.

Properantem te ad deum secuta sum habitu, immo praecessi. […] Ege autem (deus scit) ad

Vulcania loca te properantem praecedere vel sequi pro iussu tuo minime dubitarem. Non enim

mecum animus meus sed tecum erat. Sed et nunc maxime si tecum non est, nusquam est: esse

vero sine te nequaquam potest.

Peter Abelard and Heloise d’Argenteuil, 34, https://archive.org/stream/magistri

petriaba00abel#page/n41

38 “Domino suo, immo patri; coniugi suo, immo fratri; ancilla sua, immo filia, ipsius uxor,

immo soror” (ibid., 30, https://archive.org/stream/magistripetriaba00abel#page/n37).

39 “Heloissae, dilectissimae sorori suae in Christo, Abaelardus, frater eius in ipso”

(ibid., 35, https://archive.org/stream/magistripetriaba00abel#page/n42).

40 “Vale unice” (ibid.).

206 Love and its Critics

me”.

As Newman notes, “Abelard’s Historia is a quasipublic document

[…]. But Heloise’s letters are relentlessly private […]. While Heloise,

like an Ovidian heroine, gestures toward the whole world as witness to

her woes, she addresses her appeal to Abelard alone”.

There is, perhaps, a physical as well as emotional explanation for

Abelard’s detached style: “Disgust with his mutilated person may have

made him want to shut the past out of his mind; he was changed, and

[…] he may have been all too ready to believe that she was changed

too”.

Abelard’s stiffness can easily be seen as selfishness on his part,

and yet, his attempts at formality may well lie in his desire to shut

out what he feels cannot be restored, passions he can remember but

no longer feel physically, insisting, despite the pain of loss, on what

he thinks is best for both of them. Perhaps he believed that if he kept

holding on to the past, his suffering, and hers, would never diminish.

However, in Historia calamitatum, when he is not yet corresponding with

Heloise, and allows himself room for honesty, Abelard shows the true

colors of his love; it is fleshly, sensual, and romantic:

First we were joined together in one house, soon we joined by mind and

spirit. Using her instruction as an occasion for privacy, we gave all our

time to love, and the secret recesses that love chose, and that her studies

afforded us. With our books open, we spent more words on love than on

our readings; we shared more kisses than sentences. My hands found

their way to her bosom more often than to our books. […] No stage of

love is skipped by cupid-struck people such as we. […] It was incredibly

irritating for me to have to go to the School, and equally irritating when

I had to maintain nightly vigils to love, and then turn around and study

all the next day.

41 “Vivite, sed Christo quaeso mei memores” (ibid., 39, https://archive.org/stream/

magistripetriaba00abel#page/39)

42 Newman, 56.

43 Radice, 27.

44 Primum domo una coniungimur, postmodum animo. Sub occasione itaque disciplinae amori

penitus vacabamus, et secretos regressus, quos amor optabat, studium lectionis offerebat.

Apertis itaque libris, plura de amore, quam de lectione verba se ingerebant, plura erant

oscula, quam sententiae. Saepius ad sinus quam ad libros educebantur manus. […] nullus

a cupidis intermissus est gradus amoris. […] Taediosum mihi vehementer erat ad scholas

procedere, vel in eis morari; pariter et laboriosum, cum nocturnas amori vigilias et diurnas

studio conservarem.

Peter Abelard and Heloise d’Argenteuil, 7, https://archive.org/stream/

magistripetriaba00abel#page/7

207

5. Fin’amor Castrated: Abelard, Heloise, and the Critics who Deny

Here, his passions are uninhibited, and his words belong to the pages that

tell the story of fin’amor. Similar words and passions can be found in his

songs. One notable development in Latin song, from about 1100 (thus

co-existent with the songs of the troubadours and Minnesingers), is what

are called “planctus or laments”.

Abelard “wrote six planctus”,

including

one based on the laments of David over the deaths of Saul and Jonathan.

But in the scriptural story, a reader can still hear Abelard’s passion:

Heu! cur consilio

acquievi pessimo,

ut tibi praesidio

non essem in praelio?

Vel confossus pariter

morerer feliciter

cum, quid amor faciat

majus hoc non habeat,

Et me post te vivere

mori sit assidue

nec ad vitam anima

satis sit dimidia.

Alas! Why did I plan,

acquiescing to debasement,

that you would protect yourself

and I would not be in the battle?

Even pierced alike

we would die happily

when love would fashion it so.

Greater than this we cannot have.

And to live after you

would be to die continually

For with only half a soul

Life is not enough.

45 Alice V. Clark. “From Abbey to Cathedral and Court: Music Under the Merovingian,

Carolingian and Capetian Kings in France until Louis IX”. The Cambridge Companion

to French Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 12.

46 Ibid., 13.

47 Latin text from Lorenz Weinrich. “‘Dolorum solatium’: Text und Musik von

Abaelards Planctus”. Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch, 5 (1968), 72, ll. 69–80.

208 Love and its Critics

His “letters of direction”, as the latter highly didactic letters are called,

might bear the mask of indifference, but as a result of Heloise’s letters,

Abelard throws himself into a frenzy of literary activity on her behalf:

in addition to the famous, if painfully diffident letters, Abelard wrote

“a hundred hymns, thirty-five sermons, […] a substantial series of

solutions of Heloise’s theological problems [and a] half-dozen Planctus

[…] which touch very closely on the state of mind of Heloise and

himself”. Through these works, “Abelard had found an acceptable

medium in which to express his love for Heloise”.

On top of all of this,

it is evident that Abelard’s heart remained with Heloise when he asked

if she would bury him: “by whatever cause I go the way of all flesh,

proceeding absent from you, I pray you to bring my body, whether it lie

buried or exposed, to your cemetary”.

Years later, “Peter the Venerable

[…] made sure to return the body to Heloise” and when Heloise herself

died, she “was laid to rest next to Abelard”.

Her jealous uncle, his

hired thugs, and the society in which they lived, may have separated the

lovers physically, but they could not extinguish their love. Their words

and cries of desire and suffering echo yet another poem by Bernart de

Ventadorn, Can vei la lauzeta mover (When I see the lark move):

Ai, las! Tan cuidava saber

d’amor, e tan petit en sai,

car eu d’amor no·m posc tener

celeis don ja pro non aurai.

Tout m’a mo cor, e tout m’a me

e se mezeis e tot lo mon;

e can se.m tolc, no·m laisset re

mas desirer e cor volon.

48 W. G. East. “This Body of Death: Abelard, Heloise and the Religious Life”. In

Peter Biller and Alastair J. Minnis, eds. Medieval Theology and the Natural Body

(Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1997), 51.

49 “quocunque casu viam universae carnis absens a vobis ingrediar, cadaver obsecro

nostrum, ubicunque vel sepultum vel expositum iacuerit, ad cimiterium vestrum

deferri faciatis” (Peter Abelard and Heloise d’Argenteuil, 39).

50 Charles J. Reid. Power Over the Body, Equality in the Family: Rights and Domestic

Relations in Medieval Canon Law (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), 130.

51 Bernart de Ventadorn, 250–54, ll. 9–16, https://archive.org/stream/bernartvon

ventad00bern#page/250

209

5. Fin’amor Castrated: Abelard, Heloise, and the Critics who Deny

Alas! So much, I believed I knew

about love, and how little I really know

because I cannot hold back from loving

her, the lady I will not ever have.

All my heart, and all of me,

myself and the whole world,

she has taken, and left behind nothing

except desire and a yearning heart.

And yet, in a now-familiar pattern, literary critics devoted to a “thou

shalt” and “thou shalt not” authoritarian style of interpretation have

long insisted that these letters are not about love, with some going to the

extent of arguing that the letters are not even genuine. Barbara Newman

argues strenuously against those critics who deny the authenticity of

Heloise’s letters, identifying their aim as “not only the repression of

Heloise’s desire, but the complete obliteration of her voice”, locating

the urge to obliterate that voice “in a priori notions of what a medieval

abbess could write, frank disapproval of what Heloise did write, and

at times outright misogyny”.

Newman takes D. W. Robertson as her

prime example:

Robertson’s condescension toward Heloise is blatant. He refers to her

twice as “poor Heloise” and once even as “little Heloise”; at least a half

dozen times, he calls her discourse on marriage in the Historia calamitatum

a “little sermon”. In a display of stunning inconsistency, he manages

to deny that “little Heloise actually said anything like” what Abelard

records, and at the same time to ridicule her for saying it. Embodying

all the negative stereotypes of the feminine, Robertson’s Heloise is both

minx and shrew.

As Newman observes, “Robertson himself would read these letters,

like all medieval texts that purport to celebrate erotic love, as witty

and ironic; they form part of an exemplary conversion narrative

authored by Abelard”.

Robertson is a wonderful example of the

kind of authoritarian reader Longxi refers to when he observes that

critics attempt to transform literature into “a model of propriety

and good conduct, something that carries a peculiar ethico-political

52 Newman, 47.

53 Ibid., 49.

54 Ibid., 50.

210 Love and its Critics

import”.

In pointing out that the works of Marie de France, “one of

the most celebrated erotic writers of the twelfth century”, enjoyed

widespread popularity in their day, Newman remarks that “some

twelfth-century audiences were less fastidious in these matters than

their modern interpreters”.

The tradition of scholars and critics arguing that the love story of

Abelard and Heloise is not what it seems to be has been active since

Ignaz Fessler in 1806, who first suggested that the letters between

Abelard and Heloise were a fraud.

In 1972, John Benton argued that

the letters were the result of a collaborative forgery between two men,

a “‘twelfth-century epistolary ‘novelist’ and a ‘thirteenth-century

institutional scoundrel’”.

Though Benton later abandoned this theory,

Hubert Silvestre persisted, arguing in 1985 that:

The Historia and the correspondence are […] the work of a late thirteenth-

century forger, working on the basis of some authentic material, who

wished to uphold the right of clerics to have a concubine, and who

found a powerful way of doing so by putting the arguments for clerical

concubinage not into the mouth of a man, as might be expected, but of

an outstanding woman. This forger was none other than the famous poet

Jean de Meun, whose vast completion of Guillaume de Lorris’ Roman de la

Rose, one of the most widely read French works of the later Middle Ages,

contains a passage recounting the romance of Abelard and Heloise, and

who translated the Historia and the correspondence into French.

But as John Marenbon notes, this theory is simply illogical:

There are […] a number of instances in the Old French translation, not

explicable by variants in the Latin text or defects in the manuscript

of the French, where Jean de Meun, failing to grasp the meaning of a

phrase in the correspondence, mistranslates it. How could Jean de Meun

misunderstand a text which he himself had forged?

The compulsion that many critics have to “channel, reformulate, and

control” texts that describe human love is enabled by “the wish, among

55 Longxi, 205.

56 Newman, 52.

57 Ignas Fessler. Abälard und Heloise, Vol. II (Berlin, 1806), 352.

58 John Marenbon. The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press. 1997), 83.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid., 83–84.

211

5. Fin’amor Castrated: Abelard, Heloise, and the Critics who Deny

some literary theorists, to treat texts as if they were not the products

of their authors, but independent signifiers, awaiting the reader

to interpret them in one of the unlimited ways in which they can be

understood”.

That this wish drives the Bentons and Silvestres of the

world to spin elaborate (and ultimately unsupportable) theories of

fraud and conspiracy is at once sad and instructive. But such an impulse

needn’t drive us. Those who contend that the letters are a fraud because

they were composed by Abelard himself, make claims that are entirely

free of any actual evidence: “[t]here is nothing intrinsically impossible

about the suggestion, but it requires strong evidence. This its supporters

signally fail to provide”.

Abelard and Eloise confessing their love to his brother monks and her

sister nuns. Coloured stipple engraving by Miss Martin after Perolia.

The passionate love of Abelard and Heloise, with all its struggles and

complications, is not a fraud perpetrated by “novelists”, “scoundrels” or

by Abelard himself. The sheer energy that has gone into constructing and

defending such arguments (primarily by male critics) speaks eloquently

of the determination to achieve “not only the repression of Heloise’s

61 Ibid., 93.

62 Ibid., 90.

63 Wellcome Images, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abelard_and_Eloise_

confessing_their_love_to_his_brother_monk_Wellcome_V0033159.jpg

212 Love and its Critics

desire, but the complete obliteration of her voice”.

What is it about the

idea of a powerfully intellectual and passionately eros-driven Heloise

that so disturbs such critics? It is “neither improbable nor anachronistic

to attribute to Heloise the sentiments expressed in her letters”,

despite

the urge of moralizing critics to explain them away. Nor does the love

of Abelard and Heloise fit the bloodless and library-bound scholarly

idea of “courtly love”, a passionless construct that reveals its adherents’

disdain: “Abelard and Heloise speak a different language of sensuous

frankness […]. Their relationship found physical expression, and

Heloise is neither cold nor remote but loving and generous, eager to

give service and not to demand it”.

Far from being something so bloodless as Robertson’s “exemplary

conversion narrative authored by Abelard”,

the story of Abelard

and Heloise is defined by passion, desire, and loss. Their love cannot

be confined to an academic’s tale, a somnolent morality play that fits

comfortably within the paradigm of “courtly love”, with its emphasis

on love as a flawed if necessary path to Heaven. Theirs is a tale of the

delights and dangers of fin’amor in a world determined to control love

and sexuality—a world in which too many seem determined to write

such a story out of existence by insisting that it does not really mean

what it says. But as Zang Longxi reminds us, in response to those critics

who would torture texts into “saying” what they do not say, while

vigorously denying what they do say: “the plain literal sense of the text

must always act as a restraint to keep interpretation from going wild,

[…] bringing the letter into harmony with the spirit, rather than into

opposition to it”.

64 Newman, 47.

65 Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard, 89.

66 Radice, 49.

67 Newman, 50.

68 Longxi, 215. The response to this position is predictable. As David Dawson argues,

although the “literal sense” has often been thought of as an inherent quality of a literary text that

gives it a specific and invariant character (often, a “realistic” character), the phrase is simply

an honorific title given to a kind of meaning that is culturally expected and automatically

recognized by readers. It is the “normal”, “commonsensical” meaning, the product of a

conventional, customary reading. The “literal sense” thus stems from a community’s generally

unself-conscious decision to adopt and promote a certain kind of meaning, rather than from its

recognition of a text’s inherent and self-evident sense.

Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1992), 7–8. Note how often the critic resorts to

213

5. Fin’amor Castrated: Abelard, Heloise, and the Critics who Deny

The history of Abelard and Heloise is one of delight and suffering—

real suffering, not the stylized variety of the courtly stories—and just

perhaps, it is also a story of a new joy at being reunited, through words

on a page (one can only imagine how many times Abelard read and read

again those words Heloise had given him, and as for Heloise, she leaves

us in no doubt). For beside the sensual delight each took in the other,

what else more than their words, their intellects, their thoughts, brought

Abelard and Heloise together as two sighted lovers amidst the eyeless

crowds? Those who would condemn Heloise’s passions, argue that her

words were really not her own, or adopt any other tactic that might serve

to explain her away, will always be with us. But they need no longer

have any claim on our attention, much less our readerly obedience to

their insistent demands that we read as they do. Abelard and Heloise

loved as few ever will, and Heloise in particular stands above the mean

and base denunciations of the passionless, and sanctimonious critics

who would silence or shame her across the centuries. Heloise was a

woman of strength, substance, and character who would merely laugh

at her modern detractors, for her focus was always on love: “[m]ore than

any ancient Roman, perhaps, Heloise fulfilled to perfection the classical

ideal of the univim, the woman who belonged solely and wholly to

a single man. Whatever the role she played, Abelard was always her

solus, her unicus, he alone could grieve her, comfort her, instruct her,

command her, destroy her, or save her”.

In the end, love found a way to thrive, through the lovers’ passionate

and painful lines, and through our own open and honest reading of

those lines nearly a thousand years later. The love of Abelard and

Heloise was neither ironic, nor faked—such claims say more about the

critics than about the words of two twelfth-century lovers who, even

now, face the condemnation of the moral scolds among us who never

miss a chance to drain the joy out of life, love, and poetry.

condescending language that insists on the naïveté and “conventional” quality of

readings that attempt to recover a literal sense of a text. Such readings are “unself-

conscious”, “conventional”, “customary”, and otherwise to be revealed, unmasked,

and debunked by the clear-eyed, self-conscious, and most definitely unconventional

critic. Who benefits from such relentless and widely-shared (in some sense also

“conventional” and “customary”) interpretive stances by critics? Other, that is, than

the critics themselves?

69 Newman, 70.

6. The Albigensian Crusade and the

Death of Fin’amor in Medieval

French and English Poetry

The Death of Fin’amor: The Albigensian Crusade

and its Aftermath

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, everything changed. In

its earliest days, the mood in Provençe was ebullient and defiant. It

radiates from the tale of Aucassin et Nicolette, which, though written in

the northern dialect of Picardy, “gives a faithful picture”

of the attitudes

held in Occitania—sensual, anticlerical, and fiercely independent:

In Paradise what would I do? I do not seek to enter there, but only wish

for Nicolette, my sweet friend that I love so much. For no one goes to

Paradise except the kinds of people I will tell you about now: there is

where the old priests go, crippled and maimed old men, who cower all

day and night in front of the altars, and in the crypts; and people wearing

old tattered cloaks, naked and with no shoes, covered in sores, diseased

and dying of hunger and thirst and cold. These are the people who go

to Paradise; I want nothing to do with them. I would rather go to Hell,

where there are fine clerks and knights, who have died in tournaments

and noble wars, brave soldiers and noble men. These are who I would

1 Briffault, 132.

216 Love and its Critics

go with. And there, also, are the beautiful and courteous women who

have two or three lovers in addition to their husbands. There is to be

found all gold, silver, fine furs, musicians and poets, and the prince of

this world. Let me go with these, as long as I have Nicolette, my sweet

love, with me.

Marianne Stokes, Aucassin and Nicolette (1898).

Better to love in hell, than serve in heaven. Such rhetorical bravery was still

relatively easy in 1200, nine years before the opening of the Albigensian

Crusade with the wholesale slaughter of the men, women, and children

of the southern town of Béziers. Occitania was still cosmopolitan and

2 En paradis qu’ai je a faire? Je n’i quier entrer, mais que j’aie Nicolete, ma tres douce amie que

j’aim tant. C’en paradis ne vont fors tex gens con je vous dirai. Il i vont ci viel prestre et cil viel

clop et cil manke, qui tote jor et tote nuit cropent devant ces autex et en ces viés creutes, et cil

a ces viés capes eraéses et a ces viés tateceles vestues, qui sont nu et decauç et estrumelé, qui

moeurent de faim et de soi et de froit et de mesaises. Icil vont en paradis; avec ciax n’ai jou que

faire; mais en infer voil jou aler. Car en infer vont li bel clerc, et li bel cevalier, qui sont mort as

tornois et as rices gueres, et li boin sergant, et li franc home. Aveuc ciax voil jou aler. Et s’i vont

les beles dames cortoises, que eles ont .ii. amis ou .iii. avoc leur barons. Et s’i va li ors et li argens,

et li vairs et li gris; et si i vont harpeor et jogleor et li roi del siecle. Avoc ciax voil jou aler, mais

quĕj’aieNicolete,matresdouceamie,aveucmi.

Aucassin et Nicolette, ed. by Francis William Bourdillon (London: Kegan Paul, Trench

& Co., 1887), 14–17, https://archive.org/stream/AucassinEtNicoletteALoveStory/

Aucassin_et_Nicolette_Bourdillon_1887#page/n102

3 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marianne_Stokes05.jpg

217

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

tolerant, a place in which “the influence of the Church never went as

deep […] as it did in the Kingdom of the Franks”.

The people were

characterized by a “political particularism” which “was intensified by

their traditional opposition to the religion of the French”.

All seemed well, especially because Occitan culture was successful

and growing. The poetic culture of the troubadours had spread beyond

the borders of Occitania into Italy and Spain. One of the most powerful

areas of troubadour influence was in Germany, where a group of poets

known as the Minnesingers followed in the footsteps of the troubadours

“with a time lag of some fifteen years”.

The most famous of these,

Walther von der Vogelweide (c. 1170–1230) illustrates the spread of the

idea of fin’amor as passionate, embodied, and often forbidden love from

the lands of the langue d’oc to the valley of the Rhine:

Under der linden

an der heide,

dâ unser zweier bette was,

dâ mugent ir vinden

schône beide

gebrochen bluomen unde grass.

vor dem walde in einem tal,

tandaradei,

schône sane diu nahtegal.

Ich kam gegangen

zuo der ouwe:

dô was min friedel komen ê.

dâ wart ich enpfangen,

hêre frouwe,

daz ich bin sælic iemer mê.

kuster mich? wol tûsentstunt:

tandaradei,

seht wie rôt mir ist der munt.

Dô hât er gemachet

alsô riche

4 Briffault, 130.

5 Ibid., 131.

6 Nigel F. Palmer. “The High and later Middle Ages (1100–1450)”. In Hellen

Watanabe-O’Kelly, ed. The Cambridge History of German Literature (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1997), 47–48.

218 Love and its Critics

von bluomen eine bettestat.

des wirt noch gelachet

inneclîche,

kumt iemen an daz selbe pfat.

bî den rôsen er wol mac,

tandaradei,

merken wâ mirz houbet lac.

Daz er bî mir læge,

wessez iemen,

(nu enwelle got!), sô schamt ich mich.

wes er mit mir pflæge,

niemer niemen

bevinde daz, wan er unt ich,

und ein kleinez vogellîn,

tanderadei,

daz mac wol getriuwe sin.

Under the Linden

Out on the heath,

Where our bed for two was,

You may still find

Beauty both

In broken blooms and grass,

Where, in a field at the forests’ edge,

Tandaradei!

So sweetly sang the nightingale.

I came walking

Through the meadow:

My lover had come before.

And he greeted me,

Highest Lady!

So that my joy is always with me.

Did he kiss me? A thousand times:

Tandaradei!

See how red my mouth is.

He prepared for us a place

7 Walther von der Vogelweide. “Under der linden”. In Karl Lachmann, ed. Die

Gedichte Walthers von der Vogelweide (Berlin: George Reimer, 1891), 39–40, https://

archive.org/stream/diegedichtewalt00lachgoog#page/n62

219

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

Of riches

A bed from flowers.

It made me laugh

With delight.

One who comes along the same path,

At the roses he may well

Tandaradei!

Mark where I lay my head.

That he lay with me,

If anyone knew,

God forbid—I would be shamed.

What there he did with me,

None must ever know,

Except for he and I,

And a little bird,

Tandaradei!

Who will probably be true.

What the lovers of Under der linden enjoy, and what the notably female

voice describes, is the freedom to love each other passionately, and

physically, removed from the constraints of the world of law, authority,

and religion. This poem has none of the “sterile”, and “exhausted”

quality of poetry in which love “rested not on an emotion or even a noble

heart but on a feudal concept of service”.

It is, rather, a demonstration

of Walther’s idea that “true love [is] mutual and natural”.

We have not

yet reached the stage at which love and desire are wholly sublimated

into service and worship, the stage that most comfortably fits the

term “courtly love”. Under der linden has nothing in common with the

romances of Chrétien de Troyes, in which a figure like Lancelot can and

will be punished by his lady for a failure of swift and cheerful obedience.

“The song does not sing of spiritual frailty or squandered joy. Instead,

it sings of the joys of consummated love”.

Hovering over this poem’s

8 W. T. H. Jackson. “Faith Unfaithful—The German Reaction to Courtly Love”. In F.

X. Newman, ed. The Meaning of Courtly Love (Albany: State University of New York

Press, 1968), 74.

9 Jackson, 74.

10 Andreas Krass. “Saying It with Flowers: Post-Foucauldian Literary History and the

Poetics of Taboo in a Premodern German Love Song”. In Scott Spector, Helmut

Puff, and Dagmar Herzog, eds. After the History of Sexuality: German Genealogies with

and Beyond Foucault (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 64.

220 Love and its Critics

delight is a powerful awareness “of the moral taboo that looms over

extramarital love affairs”,

a sense of the ever-present shadow of the

oppressive and disapproving world, precisely the kind of place, in fact,

in which love and desire will be turned into service and obedience. The

lady would be shamed if anyone knew of the love she and her lover

shared, if anyone but the (probably) discreet birds could ever tell of her

love. Even here, it seems, joy must be stolen in small moments hidden

from a society determined to grind its inhabitants into a dry and near-

lifeless compliance.

In Occitania, however, love, music, and passion were not yet lost.

Located primarily between the Rhone and the Pyrenees, the world of

the troubadours was a desirable one. The most powerful people of the

time, including the lords of Montpellier, the viscounts of Narbonne,

and the Trencavels, maintained tight political alliances, which along

with strategic marriages between the powerful families of Poitiers and

Toulouse, consolidated regional powers and rivalries that lasted until

the Albigensian Crusade of the early thirteenth century:

The counts of Poitiers arranged a marriage between Count William

VII of Poitou (also known as William IX of Aquitaine, the first known

troubadour) and Philippa, the daughter of Count William IV of Toulouse.

Duke William X, Philippa’s son inherited all the titles, and passed on to

his only child, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Eleanor of Aquitaine’s royal husbands, Louis VII of France and Henry

II of England also had influence in the region. These men, along with

Henry II’s sons, Geoffrey, Henry, Richard, and John, knew many of the

troubadours of the time, and one is known to have composed his own

lyrics. Richard, who would later become Richard I, loved music, and

“would stand alongside the choir at the royal chapel, urging them with

his hands to sing louder”.

The era that gleamed with poetic inspiration was also a period of

cosmopolitan spirit. It was a culture characterized by a sophisticated

ethic of tolerance regarding opinion and belief, whose ethos could be

11 Ibid.

12 Frederic L. Cheyettee. Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 2001), 4.

13 David Boyle. Troubadour’s Song: The Capture, Imprisonment and Ransom of Richard the

Lionheart (New York: Walker & Co., 2005), 5.

221

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

summed up in the word paratge, a word meaning: “honor, righteousness,

equality, denial of the right of the strongest, respect for the human

person for itself and for others. Paratge applies in all fields, political,

religious, and emotional”.

Such a concept led “the lords of the South

[…] against the Crusaders to defend and not to plunder”.

But in the background, under the bright surfaces of life in a relatively

liberal and highly cultured Occitania, trouble was slowly coming to a

boil. The First Crusade in 1099 brought turmoil to the region, including

pogroms against the Jews

(a group that had long been treated relatively

well in Occitan culture

). This period also saw the rise of heretical sects,

especially a religious group known to present-day historians as the

Cathars, who established themselves in the south, with an openly-run

diocese in the town of Albi (thus the name “Albigensians”). Cathars,

literally, “the cleansed” or “the purged”, spread through Languedoc

and into major cities of northern Italy. The religion of the Cathars—or

“boni homines, ‘good men’, […] the popular Occitan name for the Cathar

‘Perfects’”

—allowed for something like gender equality,

and became

so influential by the mid-twelfth century that they could hold public

debates with the bishops of Albi and Toulouse. For powerful churchmen,

such independence was intolerable, as “this was also a period when the

centralized Church was turning its back on women again and found

14 “honneur, droiture, égalité, négation du droit du plus fort, respect de la personne

humaine pour soi et pour les autres. Le paratge s’applique dans tous les domaines,

politique, religieux, sentimental” (Ferdinand Niel, Albigeois et Cathares [Paris:

Presses Universitaires de France, 1974], 67).

15 “Les seigneurs du Midi […] contre les Croises pour la defendre et non pour la

spolier” (Charles Camproux. Le “joy d’amor” des troubadours. Jeu et joie d’amour

[Montpellier: Causse et Castelnau, 1965], 95).

16 On the massacres of Jews in Cologne, Metz, Trier and anti-Jewish hostilities

brought about by the First Crusade toward the end of the eleventh century see

Norman Golb, The Jews in Medieval Normandy: A Social and Intellectual History (NY:

Cambridge, University Press, 1998).

17 Paratge, with its basic “respect for human beings was also applied to Jews”, a state

of affairs which did not sit well with the Catholic authorities under Innocent III, so

“at the Council of Saint Gilles, Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, and twelve of his

major vassals had to swear they would stop giving official positions to Jews” (Henri

Jeanjean. “Flamenca: A Wake for a Dying Civilization?”, Parergon, 16: 1 [July 1998],

21, http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2958&context=artspapers).

18 Cheyettee, 295.

19 Approximately 45% of Cathar ministers were female (Richard Abels and Ellen

Harrison. “The Participation of Women in Languedocian Catharism”. Mediaeval

Studies, 41 [1979], 225, https://doi.org/10.1484/J.MS.2.306245).

222 Love and its Critics

the influence of the powerful women behind Cathar society particularly

threatening”.

The widespread practice of a religion that so openly challenged

social and political norms, while it rejected the orthodox claims of

Rome, made the weak and indecisive Count Raymond V of Toulouse

nervous enough that he wrote a letter in 1177 explaining the situation to

Church authorities:

The disease of heresy has grown so strong in my lands that almost all

those who follow it believe that they are serving God… The priesthood

is corrupted with heresy; ancient churches, once held in reverence, are

no longer used for divine worship but have fallen into ruins; baptism

is denied; the Mass is hated; confession is derided… Worst of all, the

doctrine of two principles is taught.

The “doctrine of two principles” refers to the dualist Cathar belief,

familiar from various strands of Gnosticism, and Plato’s Timaeus, that the

creator of this world was a demiurge, an inferior—and for the Cathars,

evil—god who “kept the divine souls of humans imprisoned in their

physical bodies (or other warm-blooded animals), condemning them to

perpetual reincarnation. This cycle could only be broken by adherence

to Cathar beliefs”.

The Cathar belief system, in its skepticism and

refusal of Catholic authority, represented just the latest in a long line of

rebellious sentiments in the Languedoc:

Skeptical Provençe was the natural refuge of all heretics. From the ninth

century, when the Adoptionist heresy spread from Toledo, where it

originated, over Languedoc, down to the foretokenings of Protestantism,

medieval heresies were primarily inspired by revolt against the spiritual

and material tyranny of the Roman Church. […] The teachings of the

Cathars [were] affiliated with similar kernels of resistance scattered

throughout Christendom, and deriving in direct continuity from the

earliest years of the Church.

This resistance was shared nearly across the board in Occitania, even by

those who were not Cathar believers. The differences between the north

20 Boyle, 282.

21 Sean McGlynn. Kill Them All: Cathars and Carnage in the Albigensian Crusade (Stroud:

The History Press, 2015), 16.

22 Ibid., 17.

23 Briffault, 137.

223

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

and south were as much cultural and linguistic as they were religious:

“for southerners, the langue d’oil of northern France was more of a foreign

language”.

The southerners, whose langue d’oc was closer to Catalan

than to the language of Paris, regarded the northerners as uncultured

barbarians: “crude, unrefined, brutish and bellicose, altogether lacking

in manners and culture”,

and the northerners regarded the residents

of Languedoc as the twelfth-and thirteenth-century equivalents of

Chardonnay-sipping elitists, “sybaritic, indulgent, indolent and

effete”.

Occitania was a rich land as well, and made a tempting prize

for less wealthy northern nobles when the Church-sponsored invasion

of the south began in 1209. The Cathar refusal of Catholic authority

was certainly what rankled Pope Innocent III, who had attempted to

rouse the northern nobles to a crusade against the south in 1205 and

1207 before his successful effort of 1209. But it was money, land, and

power that motivated the warriors who besieged the towns of Béziers,

Carcassone, and Albi (and others over the following decades). Occitania,

as McGlynn notes, had a booming economy “boosted by trade across

the Mediterranean, including with Egypt and Syria; they exported

wine, dyed woollens, olive oil and grain while importing spices, silks

and luxury items”.

In the leadup to the Crusade, Pope Innocent III demanded both the

submission of Raymond VI, and the turning over of Cathar heretics

to Catholic authorities. Northern nobles like Simon de Montfort, as

orthodox as they may have been, were primarily interested in wealth,

seeing the chance to enrich themselves by dispossessing the southern

nobility. The pope had bigger concerns, since he saw himself as

inhabiting a unique position of power and responsibility: “no pope had

ever envisioned himself with so magnificent a mandate over the world”,

and as he saw it, the heresy of the south had to be eliminated—“if it were

not obliterated […] then all Christian existence would come to an end.

[…] The crusade against heresy in the lands of the count of Toulouse

was a holy war for the very survival of Christendom”.

But the pope

24 McGlynn, 24.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., 24–25.

27 Ibid., 25.

28 Simon Pegg. A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christian

Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 60–61.

224 Love and its Critics

was a practical man who knew how to win the princes and nobles of the

north to his cause—money talks, then as now. In a letter of November

17, 1207, Innocent III appealed to King Philip II of France, complaining

of what he called “[t]he age-old seduction of wicked heresy, which is

constantly sprouting in the regions of Toulouse”,

and promising both

“remission of sins” for the crusaders and the confiscation “of all the

goods of the heretics themselves”.

The offer was clear: go to war in the

south, clear out the heretics, and your reward will be their lands and

possessions, with no need to worry about sin in the process. At Béziers,

when the papal legate Arnaud Amaury was asked by the Crusaders

how they would be able to tell heretics from the orthodox, he told them

not to worry about it:

Those who realized that Catholics and heretics were mixed together, said

to the Abbot: “What shall we do, my lord? We can not discern between

the good and the evil”. Both the Abbot and the rest feared the heretics

would pretend to be Catholics, from fear of death, and afterwards return

again to their perfidy; so he is reported to have said: “Kill them. For the

Lord knows who are his”.

According to Guilhem de Tudela, one of two early thirteenth-century

authors of the Cansó de la croisada, or Song of the Crusade, the slaughter

was meant to terrorize the entire region into submission to both the

Church and the French King in Paris:

Le barnatges de Fransa e sels devas Paris

E li clerc e li laic li princeps els marchis

E li un e li autre an entre lor empris

Que a calque castel en que la o’st venguis

Que nos volguessan redre entro que lost les prezis

29 Catherine Léglu, Rebecca Rist, and Claire Taylor, eds. The Cathars and The Albigensian

Crusade: A Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 2014), 64.

30 Ibid., 65.

31 Cognoscentes ex confessionibus illorum catholicos cum haereticis esse permixtos, dixerunt

Abbati: Quid faciemus, domine? Non possumus discenere inter bonos et malos. Timens

tam Abbas quam reliqui, ne tantum timore mortis se catholicos simularent, et post ipsorum

abcessum iterum ad perfidiam redirent, fertur dixisse: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui

sunt eius.

(Caesarii Heisterbacences. Dialogus Miraculorum, ed. by Josephus Strange, 2

Vols. [Cologne: H. Lempertz & Co., 1851], 1, 302), https://archive.org/stream/

caesariiheister00stragoog#page/n318

225

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

Quaneson a la espaza e quom les aucezis

E pois no trobarian qui vas lor se tenguis

Per paor que aurian e per so cauran vist

[…]

Perso son a Bezers destruit e a mal mis

Que trastotz los aucisdron no lor podo far pis

E totz sels aucizian quel mostier se son mis

Que nols pot gandir crotz autar ni cruzifis

E los clercs aucizian li fols ribautz mendics

E femnas e efans canc no cug us nichis

Dieus recepia las armas sil platz en paradis

Canc mais tan fera mort del temps Sarrazinis.

The lords of France and those of Paris

And the clerics and princes and marquises

And all others employed between them

Were of the same mind: a castle whose owner

Would not surrender to the gathered forces

Should be put to the sword, even the animals.

And then they would find no others to resist them,

For fear of what had already been seen.

[…]

This is why those of Béziers were destroyed,

For it was the most evil that could be done.

And they killed all who fled into the church,

No cross, nor altar, nor crucifix saved them,

And the madmen killed the clerks like beasts,

And women and children, I think none survived.

May God please to take them in his arms to heaven:

Such death has not been known since Saracen times.

Such slaughter often goes by the name of genocide today. The

contemporary chronicler Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay defends and even

celebrates the near-extermination by claiming that the population was

consumed by “heretical depravity which infected the citizens of Béziers,

who are not only heretics, but also robbers, lawbreakers, adulterers,

32 Guilhem de Tudela and Anonymous. Historie de la Croisade contre les Hérétiques

Alibgeois, ed. by M. C. Fauriel (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1837), ll. 481–88, 492–99,

https://archive.org/stream/histoiredelacroi00guil#page/36

226 Love and its Critics

and thieves, all of the worst sort, filled with every kind of sin”.

After

noting that nearly all of these “heretics” had been killed, Peter revels

in the fact that “the city was captured on what is often called the feast

day of Saint Mary Magdalene”,

calling the timing of the mass murder

of the men, women, and children of Béziers “a just measure of divine

dispensation”.

Reports of the numbers of dead differ widely. “The Song does not

give a number; William of Puylaurens simply and starkly says ‘many

thousands’; Peter of Vaux de Cernay claims ‘7,000’ were killed in the

church of St Mary Magdalene; in a letter to Rome the legates wrote

that ‘none was spared’ and that ‘almost 20,000’ were put to the sword.

William the Breton heard that 60,000 perished; others take it up to

100,000”.

Estimates of the total number of dead in the years from

1209–1229 range from 200,000

to 1,000,000 or more.

Such a massacre changes a world, and the southern region of

Occitania, the land of langue d’oc, would never again be the same:

“Béziers introduced the people of Occitania to the high stakes they

faced. These included inevitable punishment, if not execution, for

recalcitrant Cathars, changes in religious practices for those afraid to

die for their beliefs, and political domination from the outside even

for those who had always remained faithful to the church”.

Those

who had participated—and continued to participate—in the ongoing

slaughter were rewarded: “On 24 June 1213, in a field outside the walls

of Castelnaudary, between Toulouse and Carcassonne, Amaury of

33 “hereticae, pravitatis infecta nec solú haeretici cives Biterrenses, sed erant raptores

iniusti, adulteri, latrones pessimi, pleni omni genere peccatorum” (Pierre de Vaux-

Cernay. Historia Albigensium et sacri belli in eos anno MCCIX [Trecis: Venundantur

Parisiis, Apud N. Rousset, 1617], 42). One detects the faintest hint of the fin’amor

ethos of the troubadours in the reference to “adulterers”, https://archive.org/

stream/historiaalbigens00pier#page/n73

34 “Fuit autem capta civitas saepe dicta in festo S. Mariae Magdalenai” (ibid., 44,

https://archive.org/stream/historiaalbigens00pier#page/n75).

35 “justissima divinae dispensationis mensura” (ibid.).

36 McGlynn, 61.

37 Stephen Pinker. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined (New

York: Viking, 2011), 141.

38 Michael C. Thomsett. Heresy in the Roman Catholic Church: A History (Jefferson:

McFarland Publishers, 2011), 3.

39 Laurence W. Marvin. The Occitan War: A Military and Political History of the Albigensian

Crusade, 1209–1218 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 45.

227

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

Montfort was knighted by Bishop Manasses of Orléans”.

The close

relationship between the crusaders and the Church, the military and

theological powers of the day, is made evident in this gesture. Under

a cloak of sanctity, the Church had its way by force of bloody arms.

Four years before the ceremony, Simon de Montfort, Amaury’s father,

had been made the commander of the forces that would carry out the

Albigensian Crusade. In order to be safe from any and all criticism

for the slaughters, Simon urged the bishop to dub his son, Amaury, a

knight of Christ. The father-son duo fully dedicated itself to Innocent

III’s vision of “sacred” violence, using bloodshed to restore the power of

the Church in Occitania: “The Castelnaudary ceremony […] represented

[…] the rededication of the Montfort clan to Pope Innocent III’s vision of

holy violence by creating almost a fresh category of knight, dedicated to

Christ’s war yet without the religious vows of the military orders”.

was as much a political as an economic move, and the sanctifying of the

knights meant one thing in particular:

[It] emphasized the sanction of orthodox religion in the exercise of

political authority, a crude identification of church and secular power

that disconcerted the bishop of Orléans. Castelnaudary showed how

Simon specifically identified his and his family’s mission as holy. The

primacy of the anti-heretical message that had inspired Innocent III

to call for a crusade in 1208–9 was increasingly drowned out by the

secular implications of Simon’s conquests: the political reorganization

of Languedoc.

The brutal massacres of the Albigensian Crusade destroyed the once-

optimistic and humanistic culture of Occitania, and “[r]epression now

was the spirit of the age”.

The Crusade granted new lands and wealth

to the northern French nobility, who along with the Church, made sure

that much of what remained of a vibrant culture in the south was rooted

out over the next century. The Inquisition was established in 1229

precisely in order to ensure that heresy would be found wherever it

was hiding, with confessions extracted and “heretics” burned, an effort

40 Christopher Tyerman. God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (Cambridge, MA:

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 563.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid., 566.

43 Boyle, 284.

228 Love and its Critics

to enforce theological and political conformity that began with the

slaughter at Béziers which Innocent III blandly referred to as negotium

pacis et fidei,

a “business of peace and the faith” that looks like genocide:

The pope argued that all peaceful efforts of the Church had failed because

of the obstinacy of the heretics, and that only armed action could help to

resolve the situation. This official “reconstruction” […] aimed to impose

the idea of the crusade as a final solution.

It is difficult to pinpoint one cause of the atrocities that began in 1209,

as there is no single factor that can be isolated. The troubadours and

the Cathars, each in their different ways, contributed to what might

be called a twelfth-century Renaissance, the ideals of which did not

necessarily serve the interests of numerous powerful players in the

region. Territorial greed, the ambitions of the northern French nobility,

the blossoming of the Cathars and their independence, all played a role

in triggering the Albigensian Crusade. Even the Cansó de la croisada

takes two different points of view. The poem has two authors, one

anonymous and one Guilhem de Tudela, and consists of two parts.

Guilhem is eager to condemn heresy, and his verse energetically

denounces the heretical sects in the south of France. In his accounts of

Simon de Montfort’s pillaging of the town of Lavaur, Guilhem often

tries to depict de Montfort as a courteous and gentle knight, perfoming

the most praiseworthy of deeds:

Oi Dieus dizon trastuil dama santa Maria

Co a fait gran proeza e granda cortezia!

“Oh God, and our holy lady Mary,

What a deed of great prowess and grand courtesy!”

44 Pierre de Vaux-Cernay, 296, https://archive.org/stream/historiaalbigens00pier#page/n327

45 “Le pape soutint que tous les efforts pacifiques de l’Église avaient échoué à cause

de la pertinacia des hérétiques, et que seule une action armée pouvait permettre de

résoudre la situation. Cette reconstruction officielle […] visait à imposer l’idée de la

croisade comme extrema ratio” (Marco Meschini. “‘Smoking sword’: le meurtre du

legat Pierre de Castelnau et la premiere croisade albigeoise”. In Michel Balard, ed.

La Papauté et les Croisades [Farnham: Ashgate, 2011], 72).

46 Guilhem de Tudela and Anonymous. Historie de la Croisade contre les Hérétiques

Alibgeois, ll. 1499–1500, https://archive.org/stream/histoiredelacroi00guil#page/108

229

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

But what underlines Guilhem’s support for de Montfort and the

crusaders is a powerfully authoritarian ideal:

Lai doncas fo laor faita aitant grans mortaldat

Quentro la fm del mon cug quen sia parlat

Senhor be sen devrian ilh estre castiat

Que so vi e auzi e son trop malaurat

Car no fan so quels mando li clerc e li Crozad.

Then there was so great a mortal slaughter

I believe it will be talked of to the world’s end.

My lords, it is right they should be chastised,

For, unfortunately, as I have seen and heard,

They refuse obedience to the clerks and crusaders.

The anonymous author, however, deplores the bloodthirsty attitudes of

the crusaders and sides with the southerners. This author provides more

dialogue and information from the other side, but most importantly, a

certain sympathy for those who have chosen to live how their hearts

desired, combined with a caustic cynicism toward the crusaders and

the Church, whom he describes as having “shamed and disgraced

Christianity”.

One cleric, Folquet de Marselha—himself a former

troubadour

—comes in for especially sharp criticism:

E dic vos de lavesque que tant nes afortitz

Quen la sua semblansa es Dieus e nos trazitz

Quab cansos messongeiras e ab motz coladitz

Dont totz hom es perdutz quels canta ni os ditz

Ez ab sos reproverbis afdatz e forbitz

Ez ab los nostres dos don fo enjotglaritz

47 Ibid., ll. 1566–70, https://archive.org/stream/histoiredelacroi00guil#page/112

48 “totz crestianesmes aonitz abassatz” (ibid., l. 2933, https://archive.org/stream/histoi

redelacroi00guil#page/210).

49 This former troubadour understood the non-spiritual nature of fin’amor: he

“displayed his awareness of the distinction between the kind of love he portrayed

as fin’amor, and the spiritual love appropriate to religious sentiments, by doing

penance whenever he heard the love songs he had written” (Nicole M. Schulman.

Where Troubadours Were Bishops [London: Routledge, 2001], 18).

230 Love and its Critics

Ez ab mala doctrina es tant fort enriquitz

Com non auza ren diire a so quel contraditz.

And of this bishop, so full of his own righteousness,

He with his false-seeming betrayed God and us,

With his chants and his smoothly-polished lies,

And his songs, the damnation of any who sing them.

And by his powerfully sharp and slick reproofs,

And by our gifts whereby he lived like a celebrity,

And by his evil doctrines, he has risen so high,

That no one dares say anything to contradict him.

The author depicts the crusaders’ opponent, Raymond VI, the count of

Toulouse, in a notably positive light:

Que sieu ai enemics ni mals ni orgulhos

Si degus mes laupart eu li serei leos.

I defy the strongest and most wicked enemies,

and I will be like a lion or a leopard unto them.

But the same author has withering contempt for the crusaders’ leader,

Simon de Monfort:

Si per homes aucirre ni per sanc espandir,

Ni per esperitz perdre ni per mortz cosentir,

E per mals cosselhs creire, e per focs abrandir,

E per baros destruire, e per Paratge aunir,

E per Las terras toldre, e per Orgilh suffrir,

E per los mals escendre, e pel[s] bes escantir,

E per donas aucirre e per efans delire,

Pot hom en aquest segle Jhesu Crist comquerir,

El deu porta corona e el cel resplandir!

50 Guilhem de Tudela and Anonymous, ll. 3309–16, https://archive.org/stream/

histoiredelacroi00guil#page/234

51 Ibid., ll. 3809–10, https://archive.org/stream/histoiredelacroi00guil#page/268

52 Ibid., ll. 8685–96, https://archive.org/stream/histoiredelacroi00guil#page/586

231

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

If by killing men and spilling their blood,

Or by wasting their souls and preaching murder,

And by following evil counsel, and setting fires,

And by destroying barons, and dishonoring Paratge,

And by stealing lands and exalting pride,

And by praising evil and scanting good,

And by massacring women and their children,

A man can win Jesus Christ in this world,

Then he surely wears a splendid crown in heaven.

The decades-long crusade altered the course of the European world. But

for our purposes, the most dramatic change brought about by Béziers

and all the massacres that followed affected the poetry of the thirteenth

century. No longer were poets free to flout the morality of the Church

without trepidation. Fear now dominated the land, and in turn, the

minds and hearts of those who would write of love. Decades after the

Albigensian Crusade, poetry had lost its sensual edge, and repression

had triumphed: “A manuscript of trouvère music in the British Library,

dating from the middle of the thirteenth century, includes the songs

of Blondel and his contemporaries, but some of the words have been

scrubbed out and replaced with religious ones”.

As the Church moved

against heresy, poetry was immediately put under tighter controls:

“The Papal Legate made noble knights swear never again to compose

verses”.

From now on, verse was to conform to the demands of Church

orthodoxy, as evidenced by the example of the prior of Villemeir, “a

zealous Dominican” who “published a theological poem addressed

to recalcitrant poets, in which the truths of each article of faith [were]

reinforced”

by the use of an ominous and repeated formula: “If

you refuse to believe this, turn your eyes to the flames in which your

companions are roasting. Answer forthwith, in one word or two; either

you will burn in that fire or you will join us”.

Given the sudden and

violent changes brought by the crusaders, “[t]hese forcible arguments

did not fail in their appeal. In the minds of the poets, inspired by holy

53 Boyle, 288.

54 Briffault, 148.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid., 149.

232 Love and its Critics

terror, they speeded with marvelous effect the transformation in their

‘conception of love’”.

The slaughter at Béziers changed everything: “Corpses fouled rivers.

[…] Skulls were crushed. Murder was a path to redemption. Vines and

fields were devastated. […] Good men became heretics. […] Heretics

dangled from walnut trees. Very few who began the war lasted to the

end. The world was changed forever”.

As the world changed, so did

poetry: “the activity of a few poets of Languedoc continued for a while

on a much reduced scale, and in a form almost unrecognizable […].

Prior to that date, nothing is to be found in the poetry of the troubadours

that suggests a platonic idealization of passion”.

After the violent

destruction of Occitanian culture, troubadour poetry—what little was

left of it—became a tool of Church-mandated morality. In so doing,

the poetry all but died: “[t]he change took place in the corruption and

dissolution of the grave”.

The effects of this change can be seen in the work of Guilhem

Montanhagol, who worked sometime between 1233 and 1268, during

the time in which the Inquisition was established to finish the job the

Albigensian Crusade had started. Montanhagol’s poetry is a kind of

adaptation-as-appeasement, reacting to the Inquisition’s condemnation

of fin’amor by recasting love in more “acceptable” terms:

It is not only love, but the entirety of courtly life that Montanhagol’s

poems show us being transformed. The new doctrine of love is indeed a

form of change in the spirit of the times. We cannot explain one without

the other. They are the consequence of the domination of religious

power. The theory of chaste love, as the new ideal of life, was born of

a moral and religious idea. […] This Provençal poetry, which is soon to

succumb to the enmity of the clergy, first seems to have tried to disarm

its opponent. Accused of immorality and prosecuted as an accomplice

of heresy, it tries to comply with the moral orthodoxy of Christianity

in order to survive. This is an interesting attempt and one of the most

curious periods in the history of Provençal poetry.

57 Ibid.

58 Pegg, 191.

59 Briffault, 104.

60 Ibid., 128.

61 Ce n’est donc pas seulement l’amour, mais la vie courtoise tout entière que les poésies de

Montanhagol nous montrent transformée. La nouvelle doctrine de l’amour n’est à vrai dire

qu’une forme du changement survenu dans l’esprit du temps. On ne peut l’expliquer l’une sans

233

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

Perhaps Montanhagol’s most famous line is from his canso entitled Ar

ab lo coinde pascor.

In this work, his claim is that “chastity comes from

love”, “d’amor mou castitatz” (l.18). This is a far cry from the earlier

Guilhem IX, for whom amor led to anything but castitatz. But times have

changed for Montanhagol, and the idea of love portrayed in the poetry

of the thirteenth century has changed with them. This was a necessary

transformation, if poetry was to survive:

In reality, this transformation […] was primarily from necessity; in order

that love songs could survive, they had to accommodate themselves to

the requirements of religious power. The troubadours now had to sing

of a love consistent with Christian morality, rejecting evil desires for the

essence of virtue and chastity.

With poetry no longer free to celebrate fin’amor, Platonic love became

the refuge to which new and conformist poets quickly learned to fly:

“[t]he principles governing this remarkable reform are set forth in […]

the Brevaries of Love, by Master Matfré Ermengaud. The excellence of

platonic love is therein demonstrated [and] supported with quotations

drawn from the troubadours”.

So old is the tradition of making

the troubadours say what they do not say, and so old are the clearly

identifiable and repressive purposes for doing so. Matfré’s late-

thirteenth-century work is an “encyclopedia describing the universe

l’autre. Elles sont la conséquence de la domination du pouvoir religieux. La théorie de l’amour

chaste, comme le nouvel idéal de la vie, est née d’une idée morale et religieuse. […] Cette poésie

provençale, qui doit bientôt succomber sous l’inimitié du clergé, semble d’abord s’être efforcée

de désarmer son adversaire. Accusée d’immoralité & poursuivie comme complice de l’hérésie,

elle veut se conformer à l’orthodoxie & à la morale chrétiennes afin de conserver le droit de

vivre. C’est une tentative intéressante & une des périodes les plus curieuses de l’histoire de la

poésie provençale.

Jules Coulet, in Guilhem Montanhagol, Le troubadour Guilhem Montanhagol, ed. by

Jules Coulet [Toulouse: Imprimerie et Librairie Édouard Privat, 1898], 54–55, 57,

https://archive.org/stream/letroubadourguil00guil#page/54

62 Ibid., 69–75, https://archive.org/stream/letroubadourguil00guil#page/70

63 En réalité, cette transformation […] était avant tout une nécessité j pour que la chanson d’amour

pût vivre, il fallait qu’elle s’accommodât aux exigences du pouvoir religieux. Les troubadours

ne pouvaient désormais chanter qu’un amour conforme à la morale chrétienne, ignorant des

désirs mauvais & par essence vertueux chaste.

Ibid., 52, https://archive.org/stream/letroubadourguil00guil#page/52

64 Briffault, 151.

234 Love and its Critics

as emanating from God’s love”,

a nearly thirty-five-thousand-verse

poem which “surveys the natural and moral orders and concludes with

an exhortation to human marital love”,

precisely the opposite of that

fin’amor celebrated by the troubadours. Even more interesting, however,

is the critical impulse behind Matfré’s writing:

He claims to be writing at the request of his fellow troubadours in order

to expound what is worthwhile (and what reprehensible) in the poetry of

fin’amors. […] Sexuality, we are taught, has its place in human behavior

so long as it is morally vitruous and oriented toward reproduction.

Matfré makes this emphasis clear, arguing that the highest forms of

amor must be redirected from earth to the heavens:

Si tôt nol connoisson lh’enfan,

Mas ges en quascun home gran,

Quez a de Dieu conoissensa,

Non habita, ses falhensa,

Si non l’ama d’aquel amor

Qu’om deu amar son creator,

Quar non habita mas els bos.

An infant does not understand everything,

But not so the noble man

Who knows God:

It is not life, but disloyalty,

Nor is it true love, this love of women,

For a man owes love to his creator,

If he would live, not in evil, but in goodness.

For Matfré, fin’amor must be “chaste”, and “prefer wisdom to the folly of

the world”, and “defend and praise ladies”.

But, as must be painfully

65 Sarah Kay. Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of

European Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 5.

66 Sarah Kay. The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic

Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 23.

67 Ibid., 24.

68 Matfré Ermengaud. Le Breviari d’Amor, ed. by Gabriel Azaïs (Béziers: Secrétariat

de la Société archéologique, scientifigue et littéraire de Béziers, 1862), ll. 1657–63,

https://archive.org/stream/lebreviaridamor01ermeuoft#page/63

69 Sarah Kay, The Place of Thought, 33.

235

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

evident at this point, Matfré’s notion of fin’amor is radically different

from, even directly opposed to those of Guilhem IX, or Bernart de

Ventadorn, or the Comtessa de Dia. For Matfré, the Holy Spirit “is the

source and root of love”.

Here we see the origins of the sublimated

(and un-troubadour-like) version of love that Gaston Paris will come

to define as “courtly” in the nineteenth century. When William Reddy

describes the troubadours’ “dissent against the Gregorian Reform

doctrine that all sexual behavior […] longing, [and] pleasure was bound

up with the realm of sin”

he is right about the erotic dissent, but wrong

to describe it as “courtly love”. Especially as defined and used since

Paris, that deliberately misleading term has been part of a rearguard

action meant to declaw and domesticate the love the troubadours called

fin’amor by deemphasizing its physical and illicit aspects, in order to

“channel, reformulate, and control” desire.

This imperative can already

be seen in the work of a thirteenth-century cleric who was determined,

at the behest of a demonstrably violent and authoritarian Church, to

rewrite troubadour poetry into a demure and acceptably Christian

form, reflecting the belief that “only God is, and nothing else is”,

that

all things have their existence through God, and that all love is love of

God. Matfré even claims authority for this rewriting of the troubadours

by describing himself as a truer lover than any who have written, or

been written about, before:

[Doncx] pueis la natura d’amor

Sabon li veray amador,

Ne dey hien saber tot quan n’es,

Quar plus fis aymans non veg ges,

Ni fo anc plus fis en amor

70 “es d’amor fons e razitz” (Matfré Ermengaud, ll. 659–60, https://archive.org/stream/

lebreviaridamor01ermeuoft#page/28).

71 Reddy, 106.

72 The effects of this can be seen in Reddy’s insistence on reading fin’amor as something

that somehow transcends “mere” desire: “Fin’amors, in its most developed form,

combined […] sublimity, patience, and loyalty […] and the satisfactions it offered

were a “hundredfold” greater than the satisfaction of mere desire” (162). With

“sublimity”, and its superiority to “mere desire”, we enter the territory of Matfré

Ermengaud and Gaston Paris, an over seven-century-long tradition of rewriting the

troubadours.

73 “Sol Dieus es e non es res als” (Matfré Ermengaud, l. 1373, https://archive.org/

stream/lebreviaridamor01ermeuoft#page/53).

236 Love and its Critics

De me Floris am Blanca flor

Ni Tisbes anc ni Piramus

Ni Serena ni Elidus,

Alion ni Filomena

Ni Paris ni Elena

Ni l bel’ [Ise]uts ni Tristans.

Therefore, since the nature of love

is known by true lovers,

None should know everything better than me,

For there is no lover alive,

Who was ever truer in love

Than me, neither Floris nor Blancheflor,

Neither Thisbe nor Piramus,

Neither Serena nor Elidus,

Not even Filomena

Or Paris, or Helen,

Or beautiful Isolde, or Tristan.

Just in case there is any doubt about the extent and intensity of the

priestly attitudes toward love and the status of women in the new

world, in which the troubadours have been turned into the mouthpieces

of Catholic orthodoxy, Matfré explains:

Cert es qu’a luy la port naelhor;

E qui Dieu per bes temporals

Ama, l’amor non es corals

Ni veraia ni certana,

Ans es amors de putana.

Certain it is that he whose end is women;

Who for God has but a temporal

Love, whose love is not of the heart,

Neither true nor certain,

Follows after the love of whores.

74 Ibid., ll. 27833–43, https://archive.org/stream/lebreviaridamor02ermeuoft#page/431

75 Ibid., ll. 9330–34, https://archive.org/stream/lebreviaridamor01ermeuoft#page/318

237

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

From Bernart de Ventadorn, even from Guilhem IX, this is a fall from

the heights of joy and sensuality into the depths of pious wickedness.

Though he is writing decades after the violence of the Albigensian

Crusade, the shadow of orthodoxy’s war on heresy further darkens

Matfré’s verse beyond his frequent expressions of misogyny, increasing

the disdain with which he regards those who would cling too tightly to

the “sins” of life, love, and independently-chosen faith that the Crusade

had attempted to destroy in the south:

Writing in the third quarter of the thirteenth century in Languedoc,

Matfre is surrounded by the continuing battles with heterodoxy and

in particular with Cathar heresy. Matfre himself is a native of Béziers,

which was the first city taken during the Albigensian crusade. […] As

a result, the Breviari reflects the contemporary anxiety of the thirteenth-

century Church concerning widespread heterodoxy, particularly in

southern France.

Matfré regarded the troubadours as having been all too often the

unwitting servants of the devil himself: “Satan […] in his desire to make

men suffer, inspires them with an idolatrous love for women. Instead

of adoring their Creator […] they entertain guilty passions for women,

whom they transform into divinities”.

Ironically, however, the latter

part of Matfré’s pious accusation can serve as a nearly-perfect description

of exactly the path that love poetry will follow as it moves into its later

French, Italian, and English incarnations, as women are removed from

their bodies, denied their sexuality, idolized, dehumanized, and turned

into goddesses of light and air.

76 Michelle Bolduc. “The Breviari d’Amor: Rhetoric and Preaching in Thirteenth-

Century Languedoc”. Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, 24: 4 (Autumn

2006), 419.

77 Briffault, 151.

78 The tendency in northern French poetry to portray women as idealized saints is

traceable all the way back to the ninth century, though it comes to full flower in the

thirteenth century. The ninth-century poem Séquence de sainte Eulalie tells the story

of “a young Spanish maiden who was tortured and burned to death in Merida

around the year 304”, while it “exalts death by martyrdom as the ultimate Christian

achievement” (Brigitte Cazelles. The Lady as Saint [University Park: University of

Pennsylvannia Press, 1991], 27). There is something more than faintly pornographic

about the narrative, as Eulalia’s death puts her in the role of “a powerless victim

whose death engenders life” for others (29), even as the poem makes note of her

budding sexuality:

238 Love and its Critics

Post-Fin’amor French Poetry: The Roman de la Rose

This process, as well as hints of resistance to the process, can be seen in

the thirteenth-century French poem Roman de la Rose. The Roman is the

work of two authors, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, whose

writing styles are radically different, but whose attitudes towards love

and its sublimation into worship have more in common than might

initially appear. Their collaboration, although they were separated by

decades and by death, produced the dream vision of a young man,

Lover (Amant), who falls in love with a rosebud, Rose. In the dream,

Lover wanders into a garden where he meets the God of Love (Li dex

d’Amors), who shoots Lover with an arrow, subjecting him to great

pain and suffering. At the same time, Lover sees and falls hopelessly

in love with Rose, though he is kept at a distance from her by various

characters, Resistance (Dangier), Shame (Honte), Jealousy (Jalousie), Fair

Welcoming (Bel Acueil), and Chastity (Chasteé), among others. Lover

does not want to give up on Rose, and as he pursues his desire, many

other characters, including Venus and Reason (Reson) try to help, giving

him different, and often contradictory advice. After much suffering,

Buona pulcella fut eulalia.

Bel auret corps bellezour anima

Voldrent la ueintre li deo Inimi.

Voldrent la faire diaule seruir

[…]

Melz sostendreiet les empedementz

Qu’elle perdesse sa virginitét.

Eulalia was a good girl.

She had a beautiful body, a more beautiful soul.

They would force her will, the enemies of God.

They would force her will to serve the devil.

[…]

But she would rather endure prison and torture

Than lose her virginity.

Léopold Eugène Constans. “Séquence de Sainte Eulalie”. In Chrestomathie de l’ancien

français (IXe-XVe siécles) (Paris and Leipzig: H. Welter, 1906), 28–29, ll. 1–4, 16–17),

https://archive.org/stream/chrestomathiede00cons#page/28

The poem treats Eulalia’s subsequent burning and beheading as a substitute

for sexuality, as an even more intense version of le petit mort, subjecting the girl’s

“beautiful body” to the sensations of burning flames rather than burning passion,

with le gran mort as the climax, emphasizing what Cazelles refers to as “an ultimate

exposure of the female body” (81), in service of “the traditionally sacrificial

interpretation of female holiness” (83).

239

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

persuasion, and confusion, Lover finally possesses Rose. Much more

than telling a simple story of desire, however, the poem creates a space

within which both authors argue for love and condemn the Church and

its violence to tell the story of fin’amor, its forceful sublimation, and the

nostalgic urge to return to the days of “pure love”. Ultimately, the goal

of the poem is for “Lover to be successful in [his] defeat of Christian and

courtly morality”.

A more conservative view of the Roman and its depictions of love

suggests that “Lover’s desire for the rose is the classic form of cupidity,

a love of an earthly object for its own sake rather than for the sake of

God”.

Here, Charles Dahlberg expresses the doctrine of the thirteenth-

century Church, which insisted that all love, properly channeled, was

love of God. However, this is precisely the position we have already

seen rejected by Héloïse d’Argenteuil, who references Cicero, not the

Bible or any Christian thinker, in support of her view that love is both

of and for the beloved, without reference to God: “How can friendship

be possible, or who can be a friend to anyone, who does not love him

for himself?”

The Roman hinges principally on these opposing views

of love: love for the sake of God, or love for the sake of the beloved.

This opposition controls the poem’s development, and the way the

poem shows love manifesting in different forms is its way of dealing

with the transition from the fin’amor ethos present in the work of the

troubadours to the Christianized form of love that comes to dominate

post-Albigensian-Crusade poetry.

Guillaume de Lorris begins the poem with a cautionary statement

about dreams seeming deceitful at first, solely because of the fact that

they are dreams. However, Lover, who tells the story, asserts that dreams

should be taken seriously, because Macrobius, a Roman philosopher

from the fifth century, “did not think dreams at all deceitful”.

Despite

79 Christine McWebb. “Hermeneutics of Irony: Lady Reason and the Romance of the

Rose”. Dalhousie French Studies, 69 (Winter 2004), 3–13, 411.

80 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The Romance of the Rose. Trans. and ed. by

Charles Dahlberg. 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 15.

81 “Amicitiae vero locus ubi esse potest aut quis amicus esse cuiquam, quem non

ipsum amet propter ipsum?” Cicero. De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum. In Cicero,

On Ends, ed. by H. Rackham (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1914), 2.78, 168.

82 “ne tine pas songes a lobes” (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Le Roman de la

Rose. 3 vols, ed. by Felix Lecoy [Paris: Honoré Champion, 1965], Vol. 1, l. 8).

240 Love and its Critics

the disbelief of others, Lover maintains that “most men dream at

night / many hidden things / which later may be seen openly”.

Similar to the famous opening of the Canterbury Tales, the dream

vision of the Roman begins with the description of spring when Lover,

“in joyful May, so I dreamed, / the amorous time, full of joy”,

wanders

alone and enjoys the delights of nature. In poetry, such images of

springtime have long been associated with rebirth, sex, and a time

when “the trees recover their green”.

Similarly, there are certain

words that have become “code” for recognizing certain authors and

their themes. We associate the word “pandemonium” with Milton,

“prick” with Shakespeare, and so on. The word that appears frequently

in both sections of the Roman is the word “joy”. The relation to the

work of the troubadours is immediately evident—if one opens a book

of troubadour poetry to nearly any page, the word joy will appear.

Sensual like the lyrics of the troubadours, the Roman has the perfume

of fin’amor, disguised within a dream vision. Heather M. Arden, in her

explication of the Roman, notes the connection between the poem and

the troubadours, though with some diffidence:

This new view of love had gone through three stages by the time it

reached Guillaume de Lorris. It began at the end of the eleventh century

in southern France and was expressed in the songs of the troubadours.

[…] Several important themes in courtly songs recur in the first part

of the Rose. The main theme of the songs is the lover’s simultaneous

feelings of great joy and great suffering.

Arden’s move is one often made in criticism of the troubadours. To

assume that the troubadour poems were “courtly” is to assume that

their songs had the characteristics of the later invention called “courtly

love”. But this is a typical, and, one begins to suspect, deliberate

confusion, for fin’amor is highly sexual and earthly, while “courtly love”

is spiritualized, sublimated, and censored.

83 “li plusors songent de nuitz / Maintes choses couvertement / Que l’en voit puis

apertement” (ibid., ll. 18–20).

84 “qu’en may estoie, ce sonjoie, / el tens enmoreus, plain de joie” (ibid., ll. 47–48).

85 “Li bois recueverent lor vedure” (ibid., l.53).

86 Heather M. Arden. The Romance of the Rose (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 22.

87 This censored quality can be seen even in the love-making scene in Chrétien’s La

Chevalier de la Charrette (the romance upon which Gaston Paris constructed his idea

241

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

Meister des Rosenromans, Dancing before the genius of love,

in Roman de la Rose (ca. 1420–1430).

Writers often use their villains to assert certain inconvenient truths.

Milton does this with his Satan; Shakespeare does this with his Edmund,

and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun do this with a number of

their characters. What can be confusing about the the Roman, however,

is the fact that criticisms about a wide variety of things come from every

character and even from the narration; the reader is left to decide what is

“trifling” and what is truth. One common thread is hypocrisy, which is

underscored in both sections of the poem, and often revisited directly or

indirectly. Lover walks through the garden and sees a wall covered with

images. He describes each one carefully, and when he gets to the image

of Hypocrisy (Papelardie), he gives a particularly cutting description:

C’est cele qui en reclee,

quant nus ne s’en puet peure garde,

de nul man fere n’est coarde;

et fet dehors le marmiteus,

of amor courtois), where Chrétien slyly suggests, but will not speak of, the joys of

Lancelot and Guinevere.

88 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meister_des_Rosenromans_001.jpg

242 Love and its Critics

s’a ele vis simple et pietus

et semble seinte creature.

It is she who, in private,

when no one can see her,

of no evil-doing is afraid;

In public faith she is an apostle,

her face is simple and pious

and she resembles a saintly creature.

This is an obvious criticism of the Church and its hypocritical repression

of love and sexuality, clothed with terms like “pietus” and “semble”,

and in this section of the Roman, it is not difficult to see a number of

pointedly pro-fin’amor allusions being made. The songbirds that Lover

admires during his walk sings of “les dances d’amors”.

The description

of “a girl / who was both gentle and beautiful”

whom Lover meets is not

a “courtly” account; her “flesh more tender than a chick’s”

is depicted

in great detail. Lover tells his readers, “into a small gap / I entered

where Delight [or Diversion] was”,

where he meets another lady,

named Joy, who has a “voice clear and pure”.

Not only is the entire

troubadour frame of reference in place here, but Lover even seems to

see the troubadours, as he views the part of the garden where there are

“flutists / and minstrels and jongleurs”.

The perfect or “pure” garden

of these loving singers, as the story shows, goes through a major change.

Not only does the poem allude to the troubadours (in the references to

“minstrels and jongleurs”), but also to the trobairitz, as “many ladies in

the middle danced / and played on tambourines”.

However, in the middle of the festivities is a character named

Diversion (Deduiz) who appears “with great nobility” (“par grant

89 Lorris and de Meun (1965), Vol. 1, ll. 408–13.

90 One also catches a whiff here of pius Aeneas, who can go toe-to-toe with anyone

where hypocrisy is concerned.

91 Ibid., l. 493.

92 “une pucele, / qui estoit assez gente et bele” (ibid., ll. 523–24).

93 “char plus tender que poucins” (ibid., l. 526).

94 “en un reduit / m’en entrai ou Deduiz estoit” (ibid., ll. 716–17).

95 “voiz clere et saine” (ibid., l. 733).

96 “fleüteors / et menestreus et jugleors” (ibid., ll. 745–46).

97 “[m]out i avoit tableteresses / ilec entor et timberesses” (ibid., ll. 751–52).

243

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

noblece”),

and the “courtly” sublimation and spiritualized redirection

of fin’amor is clearly referenced as the “Diversion” that it really is. The

moment another character, Courtesy (Cortoisie), who “was worthy in

any court / to be an empress or queen”,

enters the garden, the language

shifts, and the scene changes from pleasant songbirds and joy to the

“highly ornamented” description of Diversion. The earlier instances of

the “flesh” and desire are sublimated to a “dance” and a mere “kiss”

where Diversion courts Joy.

After the appearance of the God of Love, love in the Roman becomes

about suffering. The grief comes from different obstacles, but Arden

emphasizes two in particular: “social barriers due to the status of

the beloved which is higher than the lover’s, or barriers set up by the

aloofness or coldness of the lady”.

100

As a result, the experience of the

lover is one of suffering until he receives the pity of his lady. In the

Roman, pity becomes the key that will open the prison in which Lover

finds himself, just as the character Pity softens up Resistance who guides

and protects the Rose. Arden notes that the “rules guide the lover in his

relations with others and with the beloved in particular, they condemn

certain vices […] and urge certain virtues”.

101

The “courtly lover” is

imprisoned by a set of clearly-defined and rigidly-enforced codes, while

“love” is a matter of regulated and controlled behaviors prescribed for

anyone in the scripted role of “the lover” to follow. In the Roman, the

God of Love commands Lover as just such a prisoner:

Vasaus, pris estes, rien n’i a

de destorner ne de desfendre,

ne fai pas dangier de toi render.

Quant plus volentiers te rendras,

et plus tost a meri vendras.

Il est fox qui moine dangier

vers celui que doit losengier

et qu’il covient a souplier.

102

98 Ibid., l. 760.

99 “ert en totes corz bien dine / d’estre empereriz ou roïne” (ibid., ll. 1241–42).

100 Arden, 22–23.

101 Ibid., 25.

102 Lorris and de Meun (1965), Vol. 1, ll. 1882–89.

244 Love and its Critics

Vassal, you are taken, do not hope

for escape or defense,

now faithfully surrender to my power.

The more willingly you surrender

the sooner you will have mercy.

He is a fool who resists my power

when he should flatter

and desire to make supplication.

In the Roman, the description of the arrows used by the God of Love

illustrate authority, but they also invoke images from the Albigensian

Crusade and its horrific slaughter, as well as the Church’s frequent use

of “Bel Samblant” or “Fair Seeming” to achieve its goals:

La meillor et la plus isnele

de ces floiches, et la plus bele,

et cele ou li melor penon

furent ante, Biautez ot non.

Une de cles qui plus bleice

rot non, ce m’est avis, Simpleice.

Una autre en i ot, apelee

Franchise: cele iert empanee

de valor et de cortoisie.

La quarte avoit non Compaignie:

en cele ot mout pesant saiete,

el n’iere pas d’aler loig preste;

mes qui de pres en vosist traire,

il em peust assez mal feire.

La cinquieme ot non Bel Samblant:

ce fu toute la mains grevant;

ne por quant el fet mout grant plaie;

[…].

.v. floiches i ot d’autre guise,

qui furent laides a devise;

li fust estoient et li fer

plus noir que deables d’enfer.

La premiere avoit non Orguelz;

l’autre, qui ne valoit pas melz,

fu apelee Vilennie:

cele si fu de felonnie

245

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

tote tainte et envenimee;

la tierce fu Honte clamee,

et la quarte Desesperance;

Noviaus Pensers fu sanz doutance

Pelee la derreniere.

103

The best and most swift

of these arrows, the most beautiful,

and the one with the best feathers

affixed to its tail, was called Beauty.

The one that gave the deepest wounds

was, in my view, Simplicity.

Another one there was, called

Freedom: this one was feathered

with valor and courtesy.

The fourth was called Company:

this arrow had a very heavy point,

it was not ready to fly far;

but if fired from close range,

could cause a terrible wound.

The fifth was named Fair Seeming:

and though of all, his was the least grievous,

nonetheless, it could leave a serious hurt;

[…]

Five arrows of another sort there were,

as ugly as you can imagine;

whose shafts and points were by far

blacker than all the devils of hell.

The first was known as Pride;

the other, which had no more value,

was named Villany:

that one was filled with crimes,

wholly tainted and venomous;

the third called Disgrace,

and the fourth Despair;

New Thought was without doubt

the name of the last.

103 Lorris and de Meun (1965), Vol. 1, ll. 935–69.

246 Love and its Critics

What the Albigensian Crusade accomplished was to divorce passion

from the obedient minds of the faithful, and what was brought forth by

the Crusade’s horrific violence, was, as Lover says, a “New Thought”.

Despite Innocent III’s hand-wringing about Cathar heresy, the lands

and wealth of Occitania were major motivators of the Crusade, and

Guillaume de Lorris does not disregard that kind of venality in his

verse. In the passages on wealth and its rich purple robe, Lover uses

a revealing phrase that alerts a reader to look carefully for a trick: “do

not take this as a trick of flattery or deceit”.

104

The trick, of course, is a

reference to Diversion—the favored technique of a Church that would

have its flock believe that human love is sinful, and that slaughter is

negotium pacis et fidei, “the business of peace and faith”.

Even though already well into the time of love’s sublimation into

piety, Guillaume de Lorris, through the character of Lover, includes

vestiges of troubadour sensuality. Referring to Saracens and paganism,

Lover describes a lady named Generosity, and finds it delightful that

la cheveçaille ert overte,

s’avoit sa gorge descoverte

si que par outre la chemise

li blancheoit la char alise”

105

her hood and collar were open,

and her neck revealed

so that beyond her blouse

her soft flesh showed its whiteness.

Before being struck by an arrow and “poisoned” with sublimation, for

a moment Lover describes couples who sang and danced together. Of

them he speaks:

Dex! Com menoient bone vie!

Fox est qui n’a de tel envie!

Qui autel vie avoir porroit,

de meillor bien se soufreoit,

104 “nu tenez ore pas a lobe” (ibid., l. 1052).

105 Ibid., ll. 1169–72.

247

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

qu’il n’est nus graindres paradis

d’avoir amie a son devis.

106

God knows what a wonderful life they led!

Only fools do not envy them!

He who might live this way,

can do without any greater good,

since there is no grander paradise

than to be with the love of one’s choice.

It almost sounds nostalgic, as if the author is speaking here of

something that has been lost, something precious that may already be

unrecoverable. In the same yearning tone, the author alludes to the the

topography of the south of France:

Mes mout rembelissoit l’afaire

li leus, qui ere de tel aire

qu’il i avoit de flore planté

tot jorz et iver et esté:

violete i avoit trop bele.

107

But the best thing about the state of things

was that the land would always

have flowers and plants

all through the winter and the summer:

the violets were especially beautiful.

Even now, summer visitors to Provençe will see lavender fields full of

the violet flowers the author speaks of—similar to those that perhaps

inspired troubadour lyrics.

By this point of the Roman, Lover has lost touch with the fin’amor ethos

of the troubadours, and is fully infected by “courtly love”. By the fountain

“which revealed to [Lover] the thousand things that appeared there”,

108

multitude of things Lover is no longer able to experience, he sits and sighs.

Pierced by an arrow shot by the God of Love, Lover gives in to suffering,

106 Ibid., ll. 1293–98.

107 Ibid., ll. 1397–1401.

108 “qui me mostroient / mil choses qui entor estoinet” (ibid., ll. 1603–04).

248 Love and its Critics

later claiming that “Death would not grieve me, / if I might die in the

arms of my lover. / I am much grieved and tormented by Love”.

109

Far

from the joi spoken of by the troubadours, suffering consumes the courtly

lover, since for him there is no greater pain (and perversely, no greater

pleasure) than the desire for the unattainable beloved. Lover realizes that

he can remove Love’s arrow shaft “without great effort”,

110

but no matter

how hard he tries, he cannot remove the point or head of the arrow, for

“the point remains within”.

111

Lover is now “weak and defeated”,

112

and

in passage after passage, the descriptions of his condition mine the poet’s

vocabulary for words synonymous with “sad”.

After the demise of fin’amor, love becomes sacrificial; this is one crucial

aspect of diverted pure love (a diversion we can already see at work

in Ermengaud). In later poetry, lovers are often portrayed as martyrs.

In fact, the similarity between the treatments of love and sacrifice

becomes so strong that some later English romances resemble another

genre, saints’ lives (vita). While every genre has its own vocabulary,

“courtly love” romances are replete with such terms as suffering, pain,

pity, mercy, angelic, courtesy, noble, and gentle. The language leaves

no doubt that “courtly love”, unlike fin’amor, is a Christianized and

sublimated form of love. But scholars continue to blur the lines between

the two ideas:

In place of the theologian, courtly love has the troubadour. Instead of

God (or in some instances Mary), courtly love posits the lady. In place

of the monastery, monks, and contemplation, courtly love speaks of the

courts, knights, and battle.

113

The idea that “[i]n place of the theologian, courtly love has the

troubadour” is risible when one thinks of actual troubadours like

Guilhem IX. Such an interpretation does violence to the poetry, as can

be seen when looking at Arnaut Daniel’s Lo ferm voler qu’el cor m’intra

(The firm will that enters my heart), which has precisely nothing to do

with either Christianity or Platonic thought:

109 “la mort ne me greveroit mie, / se ge moroie es braz m’amie. / Mout me grieve

Amors et tormente” (ibid., ll. 2449–51).

110 “sanz grant contenz” (ibid., l. 1745).

111 “la saiete remaint enz” (ibid., l. 1746).

112 “foibles et vains” (ibid., l. 1792).

113 Bernard V. Brady. Christian Love (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2003), 152.

249

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

Del cors li fos, non de l’arma,

e cossentis m’a celat dinz sa cambra!

Que plus mi nafra·l cor que colps de verga

car lo sieus sers lai on il es non intra;

totz temps serai ab lieis cum carns et ongla,

e non creirai chastic d’amic ni d’oncle.

114

I would be of her body, not of her soul,

if she would consent to hide me in her chamber!

Since it wounds my heart more than blows of the rod

that her servant is not entering there:

with her I will be as flesh and nail

and believe no chastisement of friend or of uncle.

The change from fin’amor to spiritualized and sublimated “courtly

love” is not particularly subtle, and it involves an inordinate amount

of violence—physical violence in the Crusade, physical, “moral”, and

psychological violence in the subsequent Inquisition, and intellectual

violence in the long tradition of allegorically-inspired literary criticism

dedicated to rewriting the poetry of love in its own passionless image.

Such a change is not obscured in the Roman. The God of Love’s

commandments are just one aspect of this alteration, which Lover

points out:

Li diex d’Amors lors m’encharja,

tot issi com vos oroiz ja,

mot a mot ses copmmandemenz.

Bien les devise cist romanz.

115

The God of Love then charged me,

as you shall hear them now,

word for word, with his commandments;

this romance is an excellent device.

Before Lover was wounded with the arrow of (courtly) love, he referred

to this poem as a “songes” or dream that was not to be considered a

114 Daniel, 112, ll. 13–18.

115 Lorris and de Meun (1965), Vol. 1, ll. 2055–58.

250 Love and its Critics

mere fable. Now, however, this has changed, as his story has become

more serious, taking on a spiritual vocabulary and theme. When Love

speaks to Lover, he says:

Si maudi et escommenie

touz ceus qui aiment Vilenie.

[…]

vilains est fel et sanz pitié

sanz servise et sanz amitié.

116

I curse and excommunicate

all those who love wickedness.

[…]

A wicked man is cruel and without pity;

without service and without friendship.

Many things are forbidden to Lover, including obscene language:

“Next, be on your guard that you never use / any filthy words or

ribaldry. / Do not name base things, / and never open your mouth to

disclose them”.

117

Baseness does not only refer to language here, but

also to passions, which are animalistic, and thus not highly regarded in

the new, post-crusade and post-fin’amor world (the poems of Guilhem

IX, would doubtless be regarded as “base” in this context—that, as

much as anything else, illustrates the extent and nature of the change

we are dealing with). The God of Love urges Lover, on many occasions,

to serve well and be courteous, for decorum is expected (and in this

case demanded). Resistance, who guards the Rose, gives similar advice:

“You are free to love, as long as you keep / always far away from my

roses”.

118

Look, he says, but do not touch.

Passionate love is viewed negatively by many of the characters in

this section of the Roman. Religious language becomes steadily more

prominent toward the end of Guillaume de Lorris’ portion, but in the

116 Ibid., ll. 2073e-f, i-j.

117 “Aprés gardes que tu ne dies / ces orz moz ne ces ribaudies: / ja por nomer vilainne

chose / ne doit ta bouche ester desclouse” (ibid., ll. 2097–2100).

118 “Adés aime, mes que tu soies / loing de mes roses totes voies” (ibid., ll. 3183–84).

251

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

midst of the poem’s increasingly powerful air of sublimation, a burst of

erotic passion shines through in this speech by Lover:

Si con j’oi la rose apressie,

un poi la trovai engroisie

et vi qu’ele estoit puis creüe

que quant je l’oi premiers veüe.

La rose auques s’eslargissoit

par amont, si m’abellissoit

ce qu’el n’iere pas si overte

que la graine fust descovierte;

ençois estoit encor enclose

entre les fueilles de la rose

qui amont droites se levoient

et la place dedenz emploient,

si ne pooit paroir la graine

por la rose qui estoit pleine.

Ele fu, Diex la beneïe!

asez plus bele espanie

qu’el n’iere avant, et plus vermeille,

dont m’esbahis de la mervoille;

et Amors plus et plus me lie

de tant come ele est embelie,

et tot adés estraint ses laz

tant con je voi plus de solaz.

119

When I approached the rose,

I found it had grown

and was larger than it had been

the first time I had seen it.

The rosebud was a little bigger

at the top, but I was happy

to see that it was not so open

as to reveal its seed within,

but was still enclosed

by the leaves of the rose

which made it stand upright

119 Ibid., ll. 3339–60.

252 Love and its Critics

and fill the place within

so that the seed could not appear

though the rose was full.

And thanks be to God’s blessing!

it was even more beautiful,

more open, and redder than before.

I was amazed at the marvel;

and Love more and more bound me,

to the extent its beauty grew,

the cords tightened to restrain me

and my pleasure grew all the more.

Torn between his passions and courtesy, Lover still desires to possess

the Rose. He meets Venus, the mother of the God of Love. Interestingly,

mother and son differ in their principles, and with the mother’s help,

Lover “a kiss sweet and delicious / took from the rose immediately”.

120

If Lover had strictly followed the “courtly” rules, then he would have

been satisfied with the kiss; however, this is not the case, as he desires

the Rose in more ways than permitted. Guillaume de Lorris, speaking

through Lover, informs the reader that “[he] will pursue the whole

history, / and never be lazy in writing it down”.

121

This is exactly what

he does: he writes about the love he and his forefathers knew, and what

has become of it. It is a cautious portrait, replete with complexity and

subtlety, and it ends with Lover’s sorrow over his apparent frustration

at not being able to love fully. He is in despair, but more than anything,

he fears: “for my fear and pain, I think, means death”.

122

More satirical than Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun continues

the Roman from this point by pursuing the love theme that unifies the

poem. De Meun’s portion of the Roman is “a promotional treatise of

procreative love versus […] chaste, regulated courtly love”,

123

and his

satire of courtly love is apparent from the opening lines which show

Lover in great sorrow: “And if I have lost hope, / then I am at the point

120 “un besier douz et savoré / pris de la rose erraument” (ibid., ll. 3460–61).

121 “Tote l’estoire veil parsuivre, / ja ne m’est parece d’escrivre” (ibid., ll. 3487–88).

122 “qui me donront, ce croi, la mort” (ibid., l. 4014).

123 McWebb, 10.

253

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

of despair. / Despair! Alas!”

124

Such exclamation recalls Shakespeare’s

treatment of the disingenuous hysteria in the Capulet household as

they mourn over Juliet’s (seeming) death on the day of her arranged

marriage to the County Paris:

CAPULET’S WIFE

Alack the day, she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead!

CAPULET

Ha! let me see her. Out alas!

[…]

NURSE

O lamentable day!

125

This nearly comical grief goes on for another page, replete with

exclamations that underscore the hysterics of the characters in the scene.

Even the musicians who are there to play wedding music recognize the

histrionics of the Capulet family: “Faith, we may put up our pipes and

be gone”.

126

Jean de Meun makes fun of such behavior throughout his

portion of the Roman:

Et se vos ne poez plorer,

covertement sanz demorer

de vostre salive pregniez,

ou jus d’oignons, et l’esprengniez,

ou d’auz ou d’autres liqueurs meintes,

don voz palperes soient teintes;

s’ainsinc le fetez, si plorrez

toutes les foiz que vos vorrez.

127

And if you cannot cry,

fake it without delay,

mix your saliva

with the juice of onions, and squeeze it out

124 “Et si l’ai je perdue, espoir, / a poi que ne m’en desespoir. / Desespoir! Las!” (Lorris

and de Meun [1965], Vol. 1, ll. 4029–31).

125 Romeo and Juliet, 4.5.24–25, 30.

126 Ibid. 4.5.96.

127 Lorris and de Meun (1965), Vol. 1, ll. 7433–40.

254 Love and its Critics

into your eyes (many other liquors will do),

anoint your eyelids with these stains;

if you make this preparation, you may cry

as often as you like.

The difference that is apparent between the authors of the Roman is not

only the treatment of the theme of love, but the writing style as well.

When Guillaume de Lorris’ Lover spoke of despair and sorrow, he did

not use overwrought exclamations; Jean de Meun uses them to mock

courtliness and decorum and the artificiality of the love they underscore.

Jean de Meun’s satirical verse opposes “the inhibitions of courtly and

ecclesiastical moralism, and [seeks] to exempt vernacular poetry from

euphemistic censorship and rigid rules of literary decorum”.

128

Intially, Jean de Meun maintains Guillaume de Lorris’ take on

sublimated, sacrificial love by portraying love as salvation, and Lover

as a saint:

Donc n’i a mes fors du soffrir

et mon cors a martire offrir

et d’atendre en bone esperance

tant qu’Amors m’envoit alejance.

Atendre merci me couvient.

129

So there is nothing for me to do but suffer

and offer my heart and body to martyrdom

and wait in good hope

until Love sends me relief.

I will wait for mercy to come to me.

Here, love is not for another person on Earth, but it is aimed toward

martydom and Heaven. However, Jean de Meun, through his character

Reason, defines for Lover a rather different kind of love. Reason’s

explication of love describes it as an emotion that cannot be easily

explained:

128 Noah Guynn. Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2007), 138.

129 Lorris and de Meun (1965), Vol. 1, ll. 4145–49.

255

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

Par mon chief, je la t’en veill prendre,

puis que tes queurs i veust entendre.

Or te demonstreré sanz fable

chose qui n’est pas demonstrable,

si savras tantost sanz sciance

et connoistras sanz connoissance

ce qui ne peut estre seü

ne demonstré ne conneü.

130

By my head, I want to teach you,

if your heart is ready to understand,

I will give to you without falsehood

things that are in no other way demonstrable,

and you will know without science

and understand without understanding

What can in no other way be shown

Demonstrated or understood.

Reason then goes on to describe love in the most negative terms she can

muster as an irrational meeting of opposites:

Amors, ce est pez haïneuse,

Amors, c’est haïne amoureuse;

[…]

c’est reson toute forsenable,

c’est forcenerie resnable;

[…]

c’est la soif qui toujors est ivre,

ivrece qui de soif s’enivre.

131

Love is a peaceful hate,

Love is a hateful affection;

[…]

It is a reason gone insane;

It is insanity in reason;

[…]

130 Ibid., ll. 4247–54.

131 Ibid., ll. 4263–64, 4269–70, 4279–80.

256 Love and its Critics

It is the thirst that is always drunk,

A drunkenness that always thirsts.

Replete with oxymorons, Reason’s description conveys the essentially

irrational truth—love is undefinable and unrestrainable. This assertion

by Reason is in clear opposition to the commandments of the God

of Love that dictate how Lover should feel, as if it were a rationally

codifiable and controllable activity, a game that can and should be

played by following prescribed rules. Such “courtly love” is a sanctified

and sanctimonious fraud, but as Reason indicates, love does not wish to

follow rules or play games, and realizes that “good lovers are found / in

both coarse clothes and rich fabrics”.

132

Lover patiently listens to Reason

until she begins trying to dissuade him from the path he has chosen.

Then Lover objects strongly:

Dame, bien me voulez traïr.

Doi je donques les genz haïr?

Donc harré je toutes persones?

Puis qu’amors ne sunt mie bones,

ja mes n’ameré d’amors fines,

ainz vivrai toujorz en haïnes?

133

Lady, your good to me is treason.

Should I hate everyone?

Must I despise all people?

If Love is not favorable to me,

Then must I not love purely,

But live in hatred of all?

As Lover later says, “I cannot be other than I am”.

134

What Lover desires

is not the highly-codified and stylized artifice of “courtly love”, but the

reality—messy and irrational as it can be—of fin’amor, a love purged of

religion, whose gaze is brought from the heavens back down to Earth.

It is the human, and humane, version of the “natural love” of which

132 “car ausint bien sunt amoretes / souz bureaus conme souz brunets” (ibid., ll.

4303–04).

133 Ibid., ll. 4615–20.

134 “ne peut autre ester” (ibid., l. 6871).

257

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

Reason speaks, when she says “This love, […] / deserves neither praise nor

blame nor merit”.

135

Reason then takes Lover on a journey through history,

demonstrating how love underwent the process of sublimation, losing its

passion along the way. Speaking of “pure love”, Reason notes that

Neïs Tulles, qui mist grant cure

en cerchier secrez d’escripture,

n’i pot tant son engin debatre

qu’onc plus de .iii. pere ou de .iiii.,

de touz les siecles trespassez

puis que cist mond fu conpassez.

136

Even Cicero, who took great care

in searching the secrets of ancient texts,

could not find, no matter his ingenuity,

more than three or four pairs of such loves

in all the centuries that have passed

since the world was composed.

Then Reason encourages Lover to pursue his desires:

et s’ainsinc voloies amer,

l’en t’en devroit quite clamer;

et ceste iés tu tenuz a sivre,

sanz ceste ne doit nus hom vivre.

137

And if you want to love in this way,

men should not exclaim against you;

for this is the love you must follow,

and no man should suffer without it.

The reference to “men” instead of the “God of Love” or any other

character standing in Lover’s way, brings this dream vision back to

reality. It is men using religion and violence who have created barriers

135 “Ceste amor, […] / n’a los ne blame ne merite, / n’en font n’a blamer n’a loer” (ibid.,

ll. 5747–48).

136 Ibid., ll. 5375–80.

137 Ibid., ll. 5425–28.

258 Love and its Critics

for love. Reason then condemns Justice, for Justice has all too often been

unjust, especially where love is concerned:

[…] Amor

simplement que ne fet Joutice,

[…]

car se ne fust maus et pechiez,

dom li mondes est entechiez,

l’en n’eüst onques roi veü

ne juige en terre conneü.

Si s’i preuvent il malement,

qu’il deüssent premierement

els meïsme justifier,

[…]

Mes or vendent les juigemanz

et bestornent les erremanz

et taillent et content et raient,

et les povres genz trestout paient:

[…]

Tels juiges fet le larron pendre,

qui mieuz deüst estre penduz.

138

[…] Love

alone is better than Justice,

[…]

because without evil or sin,

with which everyone is tainted,

we would have never seen kings

or judges on this Earth.

Such men judge with malice

where their first obligation

is to judge and justify themselves,

[…]

But they sell the judgments,

and reverse the mistakes,

and tally, and count, and erase,

and the poor people pay for everything.

138 Ibid., ll. 5532–33, 5537–43, 5549–52, 5554–55.

259

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

[…]

Such judges condemn thieves,

when they ought to be hanged themselves.

Justice and judges are a none-too-subtle reference to the power and

corruption of the Church, and in this obvious criticism of its workings,

Jean de Meun does not hold back. According to Innocent III, “justice”

was served by the Albigensian Crusade, which “tallied”, “counted”, and

evidently, “erased”, what it willed of the material and cultural wealth

of the south, while the poor paid in blood. The criticism of the Church

continues throughout the poem, though often in less direct form: “Now

tell me, not in Latin, but in French, how you wish me to serve you?”

139

Latin, the language of the Church (and of scholarship), is here figured as

the language of dishonesty and manipulation, in contrast to the truthful

and straightforward vernacular.

Jean de Meun is most severely critical in his portrayal of the character

False Seeming, equating the character and the Church:

Faus Semblant, qui bien se ratorne,

ot, ausinc con por essaier,

vestuz les dras frere Saier.

La chiere ot mout simple et piteuse,

ne regardeüre orgueilleuse

n’ot il pas, mes douce et pesible.

A son col portoit une bible.

Emprés s’en va sanz esquier,

et por ses menbres apuier

ot ausinc con par impotance

de traïson une potance,

et fist en sa manche glacier

un bien trainchant rasoer d’acier

qu’il fist forgier en une forge

que l’en apele Coupe Gorge.

140

139 “Or me dites donques ainceis, / non en latin, mes en françois, / de quoi volez vos

que je serve?” (ibid., ll. 5809–11).

140 Lorris and de Meun (1965), Vol. 2, ll. 12052–66.

260 Love and its Critics

False Seeming, who arrayed himself well,

had, as if to give it a try,

dressed himself as a faithful friar.

His features were simple, even piteous;

nor was his gaze proud,

but rather sweet and peaceful.

And he had a Bible hanging from his neck.

He went without a squire,

but to support his members as he walked,

he carried, against his weakness,

a crutch of treason,

and he slipped his into his sleeve

a razor-sharp blade

which he had made in a forge

and named Cut-Throat.

The heavy censorship exercised by the Church and its ongoing

Inquisition is here personified in the figure of the single most

untrustworthy character of the Roman. Innocent III’s “sharp steel razor”

was the military force of northern French nobleman led by Simon de

Montfort. This razor cut through Occitania, slicing through the land of

fin’amor and its poetic expression. The violence inflicted on the citizens of

Béziers is reenacted when the innocent-looking False Seeming commits

a sudden atrocity against Foul Mouth as he

par la gorge l’ahert,

a .ii. poinz l’estraint, si l’estrangle,

si li a tolue la jangle:

la langue a son rasoer li oste.

141

grabbed [him] by the throat,

and with two hands held and strangled him,

then silenced his foolish talk

by cutting his tongue out with a razor.

141 Ibid., ll. 12334–37.

261

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

In this scene, Foul Mouth—who accuses Lover of “a corrupt liason”

142

—

is more than the malicious gossip of Guillaume’s portion of the Roman as

here he personifies those voices and ideas the Church would suppress,

such as the troubadours and their free expression of love, whether of

the mind or the body. Foul Mouth also recalls the religious liberty of

the Cathars, and their free expression of a faith that fell afoul of the

requirements of the Church for obedience in all matters of heart, mind,

body, and conscience. The strangling and the cutting of the tongue are

intentional and meaningful choices of attack. Like the troubadours,

Foul Mouth is silenced in horrific circumstances by a corrupt authority.

The troubadours before the Albigensian Crusade did not censor their

lyrics, and through this incident, Lover is taught that such a free way of

speaking will not be tolerated. A “courteous” society does not express

itself in bawdy terms and phrases like those of Guilhem IX, Bernart de

Ventadorn, or Bertran de Born, and it most certainly does not insist on

liberty of conscience, as did the Cathars. The effect of all this can be seen

in Lover in the Roman, who, manipulated by various authority figures

in his dream, has been so addled by the process of attitude-shaping that

he censures Reason for using the terms for genitalia:

Si ne vos tiegn pas a cortaise

quant ci m’avez coilles nomees,

qui ne sunt pas bien renomees

en bouche a cortaise pucele.

Vos, qui tant estes sage et bele,

ne sai con nomer les osastes,

au mains quant le mot ne glosastes

par quelque cortaise parole,

si con preude fame en parole.

143

But I do not think of you as courteous

when you have named the testicles to me,

they are not well thought of

in the mouth of a courteous girl.

How can you, who are so wise and beautiful,

142 “un mauves acointement” (Lorris and de Meun [1965], Vol. 1, l. 3507).

143 Ibid., ll. 6898–6906.

262 Love and its Critics

name such things aloud

without giving the word a euphemistic gloss,

some courteous word instead,

to fit the honest speech of a woman.

The apparent criticism here of the phenomenon of glossing and

definition is important, and one we will later see in Chaucer. The

sublimation of passionate love after the Albigensian Crusade was made

possible not only through erasure, but also through the substitution

of original words with a more “proper” language. This has been done

to the songs of the troubadours, both through the imposition of the

“courtly love” concept and, in some cases, through translations and

interpretations that hide more than they reveal. Translations of the

Roman have suffered likewise. The first modern English translation of

the “entire” poem, done by Frederick Startridge Ellis, leaves its ending

untranslated for reasons of “decency”:

With a view to justify the plan adopted of giving a summary conclusion

to the story in place of following the author’s text to the end, the original

is here printed of the lines which the translator of the rest has forborne to

put into English. He believes that those who read them will allow that he

is justified in leaving them in the obscurity of the original.

144

But Ellis does not merely refuse to translate the ending. He actually

rewrites it:

The remainder of the poem, in which the story of Pygmalion and

the image is introduced, is mixed with a symbolism which certainly

could not be put into English without giving reasonable offence, and

the translator has therefore had the hardihood to bring the story to a

conclusion by an invention of his own. Whether he is to be pardoned

for so doing, apart from any defect in his work, those will be the most

competent judges who take the trouble to read the original, which is

given by way of appendix.

145

Apparently, those “who take the trouble to read the original” in the Old

French, are mature enough to be entrusted with the erotic secrets of Jean

de Meun’s conclusion, while those readers who have only English will

have Ellis to protect their delicate moral state for them. The paternalistic

144 F. S. Ellis, trans. The Romance of the Rose. 3 Vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1900), 3, xii.

145 Ibid.

263

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

arrogance is overwhelming (and it should be noted that the era that gave

us Ellis’ morally improved version of the Roman, is the same Victorian

era that gave us the concept of “courtly love”).

The irony, of course is that the Roman anticipates such priggish

bowdlerizing, by having Reason suggest that euphemistic and

allegorical readings of texts, far from illuminating meaning, serve as a

deliberate disguise behind which meaning is hidden:

et qui bien entendroit la letre,

le sen verroit en l’escriture,

qui esclarcist la fable occure.

146

he that understands the letter well,

can see the truth in the writing

which clarifies the obscurity of the fable.

Jean de Meun censures this kind of hypocrisy frequently, often

approaching it through criticisms of ecclesiastical dishonesty. The

characters Hypocrisy and False Seeming frequently represent such

views, since the Roman “suggests the continuity of love in order to

highlight the corrupting effect that False Seeming has on it”.

147

Nature’s

speech on mirrors brings the theme of hypocrisy into the visual realm of

deception and illusion:

Si font bien diverses distances,

sanz mirouers, granz decevances:

[…]

Neïs d’un si tres petit home

que chascuns a nain le renome

font eus parair aus euz veanz

qu’il soit plus granz que .x. geanz,

[…]

et li geant nain i resamblent

par les euz qui si les desvoient

quant si diversement les voient.

146 Lorris and de Meun (1965), Vol. 1, ll. 7132–34.

147 Joanna Luft. “The Play of Repetition and Resemblance in The Romance of the Rose”.

The Romanic Review, 102: 1–2 (2011), 50.

264 Love and its Critics

[…]

qui leur ont fet tex demontrances,

si vont puis au peuple et se vantent,

et ne dient pas voir, ainz mantent,

qu’il ont les deables veüz.

148

The great differences between distances,

with mirrors, can greatly deceive us:

[…]

One born a very small man

who is called a dwarf by everyone

can be made to watching eyes

seem higher than ten giants,

[…]

and yet, Giants might resemble the dwarves

because the eyes are deceived

by the differences in appearances.

[…]

Those who have seen such things

will go to the people and boast,

and do not speak truths, but many lies,

saying they have seen the devils.

Such mirrors and deceptions abound, not only in the poem, but in critical

readings. A common critical move is to posit an endless multiplicity of

possible readings and meanings; while this may be true in some cases,

it is an argument that can be made to insist there is no particular value

to any one reading: thus, troubadour poetry may just as well be about

rivalry between different classes of Occitanian nobility as about love,

and the Song of Songs may just as well be about the love of a god who

plays no role in the text at all as about the love of human beings. Thus,

for a critic like Joanna Luft, it is impossible to know just what the Roman

shows us when Lover plucks his Rose:

the account of the plucking cannot be fixed as either one type of sexual

activity or another—as either heterosexual, homosexual, or autoerotic.

All are possible readings of what the Narrator describes. While the

allegorical meaning of the Lover’s picking the rosebud cannot be reduced

148 Lorris and de Meun (1965), Vol. 3, ll. 18179–80, 18191–94, 18198–18200, 18204–07.

265

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

to one reading, this does not mean that no reading is valid. Rather, a

number are. The indeterminacies that permeate the Rose create tensions

that are irresolvable and force the reader to acknowledge that any one

reading of the rosebud, and the allegory itself, is partial. […] In its

evasion of fixed meaning, the rosebud is a synecdoche of the poem itself.

Like the rosebud, the poem cannot be pinned down to one reading.

149

Those who argue for indeterminacy in readings of poetry which might

otherwise be interpreted as challenges to power, serve the interests of

that power by insisting that no such (defiant) reading can be established:

if a critic is determined enough, “a text may be demonstrated to mean

ever more fully, comprising even that which it is not, and affording no

resistance”.

150

To return for a moment to Longxi’s observations about

why there is such a thing as a better or worse reading of a text, it serves

no reader well to be inculcated with the idea of the endless multiplicity

of equally “valid” readings, any more than it serves a reader well to

be hammered with the notion that there is always only one. When

used well, interpretation contributes to a reader’s experience and

understanding of a text a basis for making choices between readings:

“To put it simply, one reading is better than another if it accounts for

more details of the text, bringing the letter into harmony with the spirit,

rather than into opposition to it”.

151

It is only through the ability to choose

that we have any hope of resisting the blandishments of False Seeming

and the threatenings of those who would demand our obedience as

readers, and as citizens, in things both small and great.

Curiously, however, one thing critics have not been shy about fixing

beyond notions of indeterminacy or multiplicity have been accusations

of misogyny and immorality in Jean de Meun’s portion of the Roman.

The poet has been on the receiving end of such criticism ever since the

fourteenth-and fifteenth-century author Christine de Pizan objected to

his treatment of women and equality in the Roman:

Christine took issue with essentially three interrelated aspects of the

work: its verbal obscenity and the indecency of the concluding allegorical

description of sexual intercourse; the negative portrayals of women,

149 Luft, 60–61.

150 Alan Sinfield. Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural

Materialism (London: Routledge, 2006), 92. Emphasis added.

151 Longxi, 215.

266 Love and its Critics

which tended to treat them as a group and not as individuals, thereby

making their “vices” natural and universal; the work’s ambiguity, the

absence of a clear authorial voice and intention which would serve as a

moral guide to susceptible or ignorant readers.

152

For Pizan, the issue is one of decency and of the attitudes of some of

the characters toward women (while she conflates the author and his

characters):

In my opinion, which seems to be accordant with facts not to be

contradicted, he speaks most dishonestly in certain parts, and especially

through the person he calls Reason, who names the secret members

plainly by name. […] Since he blames all women generally, for that

reason, I am constrained to believe that he never had the acquaintance

of any honorable or virtuous women, but having haunted the paths of

dissolute and evil women (as is common with lustful men) he believes

that all women are like this, for he has had no knowledge of others. And if

only he had blamed dishonest women alone, advising others to flee from

them, this would have been a good and just lesson. But no, he accuses all

without exception. But having gone so far past the limits of reason, the

author’s charges and accusations and false judgments of women should

not be imputed to them, but to the one who tells such lies (so incredible

and wildly off the mark), since the opposite is plainly manifest.

153

For Pizan’s contemporary, the theologian Jean Gerson, de Meun’s

work was of a kind with the “writings, words, and pictures that are

152 David F. Hult. “The Roman de la Rose, Christine de Pizan, and the querelle des femmes”.

In Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval

Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 186.

153 Mais en accordant a l’oppinion a laquelle contrediséz, sans faille a mon avis, trop traicte

deshonnestment en aucunes pars—et mesmement ou personnage que il claime Raison, laquelle

nommes les secréz membres plainement par nom. […] Mais vrayement puis que en general

ainsi toutes blasma, de croire par ceste raison suis contrainte que oneques n’ot accoinctance ne

hantise de femme honnourable ne vertueuse, mais par pluseurs femmes dissolues et de male vie

hanter—comme font communement les luxurieux—, cuida ou faingny savoir que toutes telles

feussent, car d’autres n’avoit congnoissance. Et se seullement eust blasmé les deshonnestes et

conseillié elles fuir, bon enseignement et juste seroit. Mais non! ains sans exception toutes les

accuse. Mais se tant oultre les mettes de raison se charga l’aucteur de elles accuser ou jugier

nonveritablement, blasme aucun n’en doit estre imputé a elles, mais a cellui qui si loing de

veritéditlamençongequin’estmieсrеablе,commelecontraireapperemanifestement.

Christine de Pizan. Le Débat sur le Roman de la Rose, ed. by Eric Hicks (Paris: Honoré

Champion, 1977), 13, 18.

267

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

provocative, libidinous, and lacivious that should be utterly abhorred

and excluded from a Christian republic”.

154

A modern critic like Noah Guynn aligns himself with this morally

condemnatory tradition of reading Jean de Meun’s poetry by rejecting

the idea that the “attacks on women in the Rose are neutralized by the

poem’s dialectical structure, its relativist, ironic critique of opinion, or its

avoidance of an overarching, sovereign authorial voice”.

155

Despite the

“dialectical structure” of the poem, its “relativist, ironic critique”, and its

deliberate “avoidance” of a “sovereign authorial voice”, for Guynn, the

entire poem is to be accused and convicted of misogyny because of the

attitudes of individual characters (like the jealous husband). This should

probably come as no surprise from a critic who also argues that the poem

appears to do one thing, while it really does another: “the poem appears

to celebrate unfettered, procreative desire and offers a formidable critique

of celibacy”, but it actually “seeks a shelter for male power in the

apparent disruption and demystification, but also the subtle affirmation

and perpetuation, of a variety of patriarchal cultural codes”.

156

The poem, according to the critic, apparently disrupts and demystifies,

but actually affirms and perpetuates. As Rita Felski remarks, “we are

regularly apprised”, by critics inclined to this maneuver, “that what looks

like difference is yet another form of sameness, that what appears to be

subversion is a more discreet form of containment, that any attempt[s]

at inclusion spawn yet more exclusions”.

157

By such logic, the speech

Shakespeare will give Shylock (“Hath not a Jew eyes?”) subtly supports,

154 “scripta, verba et picturas provacatrices libidinose lascivie penitus excecrandas esse

et a re publica christiane religionis exulandas” (Christine McWebb, ed. Debating the

Roman de la Rose: A Critical Anthology [London: Routledge, 2007], 352).

155 Guynn, 138.

156 Ibid., 140. This X-is-actually-Y move has been made even by defenders of the poem.

In a strategy that goes all the way back to the original guardians of Homer, Jean

Molinet, the late-fifteenth century author, “accuses Gerson of having misread”

the work, whose “actual meaning […] is sweet, savory, and moral” (Renate

Blumenfeld-Kosinski. “Jean Gerson and the Debate on the Romance of the Rose”.

In Brian Patrick McGuire, eds. A Companion to Jean Gerson [Leiden: Brill, 2006], 355).

“For Molinet” the “text means whatever Molinet wants it to mean” (366).

157 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 128.

268 Love and its Critics

rather than vigorously contests, anti-Semitism—and for anyone, poet or

otherwise, to write or say “X” is really to mean “not-X”.

158

In the case of the Roman, however, the jealous husband’s

“misogynistic” point of view is rejected, even mocked, by the character

Friend in his “equality” speech about husbands and wives:

Ja ses vices ne li reproche

ne ne la bate ne ne toche,

car cil qui veust sa fame batre

por soi mieuz en s’amour enbatre,

quant la veust aprés rapesier,

c’est cil qui por aprivesier

bat son chat et puis le rapele

por le lier en sa cordele.

159

He must not reproach her with her vices

Nor must he ever beat or touch her.

For he who beats a women

To make her love him better,

When he wants to soothe her later,

Is like one who tries to tame

His cat by beating it, and calls it back

To try to get it to wear a collar.

158 David F. Hult argues that

the most outrageous (and most frequently criticized) instance of antifeminist haranguing occurs

in the speech of the “jealous husband” that is used as an illustrative example by the allegorical

character Friend (Ami), who is, in turn, interacting with the Lover inside the allegorical dream

construct. No fewer than three distinct fictional frames separate him from the voice of the

narrator. What justification, then, do we have for deeming Jean de Meun a misogynist?

David F. Hult. “Jean de Meun’s Continuation of Le Roman de la Rose”. In Denis

Hollier, ed. A New History of French Literaure [Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1989], 101). The answer to Hult’s question is that there is no justification, other than

the desire of the critics to put the text on trial and find it guilty. As previously

noted, Rita Felski traces this desire back to “the medieval heresy trial”, a practice

that emerged from the Inquisition, which was itself established shortly after the

Albigensian Crusade to deal with heresy in southern France (“Suspicious Minds”.

Poetics Today, 32: 2 [Summer 2011], 219). Where earlier inquisitors tortured bodies,

our modern variety torture texts, https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-1261208

159 Lorris and de Meun (1965), Vol. 2, ll. 9703–10.

269

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

Love, additionally, should be about equality of regard, not one-sided

worship. In fact, Friend warns quite specifically against the danger of

“courtly love” based on service and obedience, warning that it is little

more than an illusion that will quickly spoil:

li conmandast: “Amis, sailliez!”

ou: “Ceste chose me bailliez”,

tantost li baillast sanz faillir,

et saillist s’el mandast saillir.

Voire neïs, que qu’el deïst,

saillet il por qu’el le veïst,

car tout avoit mis son desir

en fere li tout son plesir.

Mes quant sunt puis entrespousé,

si con ci raconté vous é,

lors est tornee la roële,

si que cil qui seut servir cele

conmande que cele le serve

ausinc con s’ele fust sa serve,

et la tient courte et li conmande

que de ses fez conte li rande,

et sa dame ainceis l’apela!

160

If she commanded: “Lover, Jump!”

Or: “Give that thing to me’”,

He would give it to her immediately,

and jump whenever she ordered him.

In fact, whatever she might demand,

he would jump for her sight,

because he had invested all his desires

in doing her pleasure in everything.

But after they get married,

as I have told you before,

the wheel turns,

so that he who was used to serving her

commands her to serve him,

treating her exactly like his slave,

160 Ibid., ll. 9427–43.

270 Love and its Critics

holding her with a short leash,

demanding that she account for her doings.

She whom he used to call his lady!

Friend preaches against the dangers of “courtly love”, and explains how

it can turn into (and may very well start out as) misogyny. However,

Friend expresses great admiration for true lovers, for whom “love […]

is honest and free in the heart”.

161

Referring to the passionate lovers,

Abelard and Heloise, and speaking particularly of Heloise’s boldness

and passion, Friend says, “I can hardly credit, by my soul, / that there

ever lived another such woman”.

162

After that note of homage to Heloise, Friend finishes his speech on a

liberating and optimistic note:

uant vos en serez en sesine,

si conme esperance devine,

et vostre joie avrez pleniere,

si la gardez en tel maniere

con l’en doit garder tel florete.

Lors si jorrez de l’amorete

a cui nul autre ne comper;

vos ne troveriez son per

espoir en .xiiii. citez.

163

When at last you are in possession,

As your hope divines,

And your joys are plentiful,

Guard it in the manner

In which one should guard such a flower.

Then will you enjoy a little love

With which no other can compare;

You will not find its like,

Perhaps, in fourteen cities.

The passage echoes Shakespeare in one of his most outstanding

manifestations of earthly love, the closing couplet of his sonnet 130:

161 “Amor […] en queur franc et delivre” (ibid., ll. 9411–12).

162 “Mes je ne croi mie, par m’ame, / c’onques puis fust nule tel fame” (ibid., ll. 8795–96).

163 Ibid., ll. 9961–69.

271

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

“And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with

false compare”. What Friend refers to as “a little love / With which

no other can compare” is akin to Shakespeare’s declaration that the

quite ordinary “she” of his sonnet is, in fact, anything but ordinary

at all. She is beyond compare, not a symbol of higher love, not a

gateway to God, and not to be loved for the sake of God. She is her

own argument for love, and her equal will not be found “in fourteen

cities” or fourteen thousand.

In that speech by Friend, Jean de Meun gives away the game. No

longer is he writing about the love that must be directed toward the

heavens, offered to a jealous God who cannot stand the idea that any

affection in the universe might be directed anywhere other than him.

This “little love” is the kind that topples such gods, and changes worlds.

But in the thirteenth century, it is still something that must be carefully

hidden, kept safe from the prying eyes and savage hands, arms, and

armories of the post-Albigensian-Crusade world. To keep love safe will

require wisdom, and the advice and strategies of those old enough to

remember how different the past had been—here, the somewhat cynical

Old Woman fits the bill nicely. La Vielle, whose later equivalent will

be found in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, speaks of”the games of Love”,

164

passing on what she has learned:

Bele iere, et jenne et nice et fole,

N’onc ne fui d’Amors a escole

ou l’en leüst la theorique,

mes je sai tout par la practique.

165

I was beautiful, and young, wild and foolish,

And never went to any school of Love

Or read in its theory,

But I know it all through practical experience.

She emphasizes the same point throughout her speech in which she

underscores the importance of nature. Loving is a natural act, and

as Old Woman says, “Nature cannot lie, / who makes a man feel

164 “des geus d’amors” (ibid., l. 12733).

165 Ibid., ll. 12771–74

272 Love and its Critics

freedom, / […] / A most powerful thing is Nature; / she surpasses even

nurture”.

166

Finally, despite all obstacles of obedience, violence, and outright

dishonesty, Lover reaches the Rose, and he is in ecstasy. Once again,

the description of spring returns, and Lover advises young people who

seek its pleasures:

quant la douce seson vandra,

seigneur vallet, qu’il convandra

que vos ailliez cueillir les roses,

ou les ouvertes ou les closes.

167

When the sweet season comes again,

You will find it necessary

To go plucking roses yourselves,

Whether they be opened or closed.

There is no more insistence here on “courtly” codes and mannerisms. In

an openly erotic speech reminiscent of Guilhem IX, Lover describes his

initial misadventures:

Par la santele que j’ai dite,

qui tant iert estroite et petite,

par ou le passaige quis ai,

le paliz au bourdon brisai,

sui moi dedanz l’archiere mis,

mes je n’i antrai pas demis.

Pesoit moi que plus n’i antraie,

mes outre poair ne poaie.

Mes por riens nule ne lessasse

que le bourdon tout n’i passasse.

168

166 “Mes Nature ne peut mentir, / qui franchise li fet sentir, / […] / Trop est fort chose

que Nature, / el passe neïs nourreture” (ibid., ll. 13987–88, 14007–08).

167 Ibid., ll. 21647–50.

168 Ibid., ll. 21607–16.

273

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

But this passage I have told you of,

which was both narrow and small,

through which I sought to pass,

I broke down the barrier with my staff,

placed myself inside the opening,

but I could not enter more than halfway.

I was peeved at being unable to enter further,

but I did not have the power to go on.

I would slacken for nothing

though, till I had pushed my staff in all the way.

And after that brief comic interlude, Lover relates his final success:

Par les rains saisi le rosier,

qui plus sunt franc que nul osier;

et quant a .ii. mains m’i poi joindre,

tretout soavet, san moi poindre,

le bouton pris a elloichier,

qu’anviz l’eüsse san hoichier.

Toutes an fis par estovoir

les branches croller et mouvoir,

san ja nul des rains depecier,

car n’i vouloie riens blecier;

et si m’an convint il a force

entamer un po de l’escorce,

qu’autrement avoir ne savoie

ce don si grant desir avoie.

169

By its branches I seized the rosebush,

fresher and more noble than any willow;

and when I could grasp it with both hands,

I began, gently, and without pricking myself,

to slowly shake the bud,

for I wanted to disturb it as little as possible.

Though I could not help but cause

the branches to shake and move,

169 Ibid., ll. 21765–88.

274 Love and its Critics

I did not destroy any of them,

for I did not wish to wound anything;

and yet, I had to force my way a little,

but did little damage to the bark,

for I did not know how else to enjoy

the beauty which I so much desired.

Within a dream filled with images of “courtly love” and all the

cultural, clerical, and even military authority behind it, glimpses of

fin’amor shine through, telling readers that the love celebrated by the

troubadours has not completely disappeared, though it is now well-

hidden and to be found only by the few. The Roman carefully, but

compellingly, condemns love’s sublimation and those responsible

for it. In a dream vision created for a courtly and controlled world,

the authors hold out hope for love’s return in and through future

generations (and ongoing generation):

Mes nature, douce et piteuse,

quant el voit que Mort l’envieuse,

antre lui et Corrupcion,

vienent metre a destrucion

quan qu’el treuvent, dedanz sa forge

torjorz martele, torjorz forge,

tourjorz ses pieces renovele

par generacion novele.

170

When Nature, sweet and piteous,

through her vision sees envious Death

join together with Corruption,

to measure out destruction

to whatever the find within her forge,

she continues to hammer and forge,

always renewing the pieces of life

through new generation.

170 Lorris and de Meun (1965), Vol. 2, ll. 15975–82.

275

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

III

Post-Fin’amor English Romance: Love of God and

Country in Havelok the Dane and King Horn

In the Roman de la Rose, something of the old spirit of the troubadours

can still be felt. Across the water to the west, however, in early English

romances, we find the sublimated and spiritualized forms of love so

enthusiastically approved by the Akibas, Origens, and Ermengauds of

the world, the authoritative glossators and critics for whom poetry and

passion must be turned to higher purposes.

Laud Misc. 108 (a late thirteenth-century manuscript referred to

hereafter as L) contains a collection of saints’ lives—the South English

Legendary (SEL), the two Middle English romances Havelok the Dane

171

and King Horn,

172

the poems Somer Soneday and Sayings of St. Bernard, the

dream narrative Vision of St. Paul, and the Dispute Between the Body and

the Soul.

173

The sanctification of love is a common element found among

the various tales and protagonists of the manuscript, and the possible

differences between saints and lovers do not seem to have preoccupied

the authors of the texts. Although seemingly very distinct genres, the

presence in L of both the saints’ lives and the romances suggests that

there was more in common between the two than might be supposed,

and together they further explain how human love had been transformed

into worship and earthly gazes redirected toward the heavens.

A common misconception about England after the Norman Conquest

is that English was the silenced language, at least when it came to legal,

political, religious, and literary use. This is only partially true, even in

the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the evidence of a thirteenth-

century manuscript such as L, written entirely in English, demonstrates

that the use of English was significant, not only in oral practice, but also

as a written medium. The preparation of such a manuscript in terms of

its copying and ornamentation, and the assembling of texts of different

171 All quotations are from “Havelok the Dane”. In Ronald B. Herzman, Graham

Drake, and Eve Salisbury, eds. Four Romances of England (Kalamazoo: Medieval

Institute Publications, 1999), 73–160.

172 All quotations are from “King Horn”. In Four Romances of England, 11–57.

173 See Kimberly K. Bell and Julie Nelson Couch. The Texts and Context of Oxford, Bodleian

Library, MS Laud Misc. 108 (Boston: Brill, 2011), especially the Introduction and Part

One, for an insightful analysis on the manuscript, its compilation and provenance.

276 Love and its Critics

genres therein, reflect a clear sense of purpose, and suggest that it

was intended for a wide audience and not merely for private use.

174

These works seem to have served a pedagogical function, and though

originally such collections were for clerical reading in the context of

the church, by the thirteenth century, manuscripts of saints’ lives were

made available to the laity.

This period in England saw great efforts by the Church to dominate,

order, and unify the English people. This was necessary for the Church

to implement its agenda in a more peaceful fashion than it had used in

the chaotic environment of early-thirteenth century Occitania. If, during

the Albigensian Crusade, the motto was “for the love of God, get rid of

heresy”, in England it was “for the love of the nation, get rid of heresy”.

Thus, in the lives of these saints, their connection with England is

strongly emphasized; in this way, the agenda of the Church is wrapped

in the flag of nationalism, and human passions are directed away from

love and toward Nation and Deity. St. Augustine, for example, begins

with “SEint Augustin, þat cristendom: brouhte in-to Engelonde”,

175

stating this connection outright. A few lines down, the vita introduces

St. Gregory, who “pope was of Rome, / Engelond he louede muche”.

176

References to England are many, and the focus on everything English

is quite consistent. It is not surprising that the Roman pope’s love for

England abounds, as does his eagerness to “love” it even more by

Christianizing it and subordinating it to his will.

177

Upon his arrival in

England, Augustine is rather saddened, “for he ne couþe: þe speche of

174 For a detailed explanation on medieval manuscript culture, text, and audience,

see Chapter 6 of Peter Brown, ed. A Companion to Medieval English Literature and

Culture: c.1350–1500 (Malden: Blackwell, 2007). Such purposes can be seen in a

text’s physical form: “a text acquires new meanings within the physical context of

the codex. The manuscript’s illustrations, rubrics, and other paratextual features, as

well as any other texts that are transmitted along with it, influence the reception of

a text by its readers” (Lori J. Walters. “‘The Foot on Which He Limps’: Jean Gerson

and the Rehabilitation of Jean de Meun in Arsenal 3339”. Digital Philology, 1: 1

[Spring 2012], 112, https://doi.org/10.1353/dph.2012.0006).

175 Carl Horstmann, ed. “St. Austyn”. The Early South English Legendary or Lives

of Saints (London: N. Trubner, 1887), 24, l. 1, https://archive.org/stream/

earlysouthenglis00hors#page/24

176 Ibid., ll. 3–4.

177 As Innocent III tried to do in 1213, taking control of England from King John only to

restore it, on John’s submission, as a papal fiefdom—a humilating agreement John

promptly broke in 1214.

277

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

Engelonde”.

178

This line points out the fact that Augustine was initially

an outsider, sent by Pope Gregory the Great to undertake the mission

of Christianizing England. Augustine’s non-Englishness is indicated by

the author’s choice of not giving Augustine any direct lines. In order to

create an atmosphere in which the English king and his people appear

to be fully self-determining, the king has more lines than the saint. This

is a subtle technique to make readers feel that the king is one of them,

and as he receives the Christian faith, they receive it through him.

In L, one might think that the romances would be different from the

saints’ lives, that their distinguishing feature would be love; however,

that is the subject with which the romances are least concerned. As

a whole, L suggests a sacralizing and nationalist agenda. The most

important subjects are England, the sanctifying of a newly-formed

nation, and God: “The writers and audience of L acknowledge their own

innate, inherited, God-given power of identity and defining that identity

in terms of Englishness”.

179

Some scholars have even suggested that the

two romances of L can be seen as continuations of the saints’ lives: “the

rubricator who titled many of the lives in red ink titled Havelok as a vita:

[Incipit] Vita Hauelok quondam Rex Anglie. Et Denmarchie”.

180

This is not

accidental, for Havelok acts as a saint and a martyr, building monasteries

and going through suffering in order to restore the two nations England

and Denmark. Havelok is also often portrayed as a Christ figure who

has a special destiny, indicated by the “kynmerk” on his right shoulder

and the fiery light that shines from his mouth while he is sleeping; these

traits are common romance devices, emphasizing the special destiny of

the person to whom they are attributed, despite any outward changes

of state the character may have to endure due to villainy, usury, or other

aspects of fortune or malice. This distinctiveness is also seen through the

poet’s constant use of the adjectives “fair” and “bold” when describing

Havelok. These features are also used to describe the saints, who are

martyrs, endowed with celestial identity, who sacrifice themselves for

a specific cause.

There is, in fact, some ambiguity about the genre of Havelok. Many

editors have treated it as an English equivalent of the Anglo-Norman

178 Carl Horstman, ed. “St. Austyn”, l. 15.

179 Bell and Couch, 250.

180 Ibid., 9.

278 Love and its Critics

Lai d’Haveloc. That poem is in fact called a “lai” in its opening lines,

and there might be reasons for composing a Breton lay about a Danish

prince, considering the fact that after the death of Edmund Ironside

in 1016, England was ruled by Danish kings for about thirty years,

181

though Havelok could also be derived from Geoffrey Gaimar’s Estoire

des Engleis (c. 1136–1140).

182

Toward the end of the poem, Havelok calls

itself a gest: “Nu have ye heard the gest al thoru / Of Havelok and of

Goldeboru”;

183

it is the gesta, the doings, the history of these two that

bring about religious order. But while there is ambiguity here about

genre, there is none about purpose. Although the poem opens in a

leisurely fashion, a firmly didactic tone is consistently maintained

throughout, making it clear that the poem and its lessons will concern

virtues and villains, law and disorder. Havelok is not intended only for a

noble audience, but for all types of people; in the beginning, the narrator

addresses “gode men—/ wives, maydnes, and alle men”,

184

solidly

planting the poem in an everyman’s England where religious order

and peace are the predominant factors upon which a nation is founded.

Ordinary life is described in great detail, and the poem extols Havelok’s

humble nature. Havelok possesses Christ-like features, and lives in a

similarly simple way, despite his royal origins. Havelok grows up with

the people, and it is the people who nourish and care for him, which

enables Havelok’s eventual defeat of his enemies, and the restoration of

England as a Christian nation.

The narrative of King Horn is quite similar, as the heroes in both

romances appear first as vulnerable children who are in danger of

being killed, but grow to be bold and strong men who defeat their

enemies. Horn and Havelok take their thrones as rightful heirs, and

each restores order. At first, King Horn appears to be about the love of

Horn and Rymenhild, but soon it becomes clear that Horn is more saint

than lover: he is “well kene”, “gret and strong, / Fair and evene long”,

181 See Peter Hunter Blair, Ango-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1959), Chapter 2, “England and the Vikings”, for more on the Danish rule

and Danish presence in English life.

182 On the reworkings of Havelok and its speculative history, see Scott Kleinman,

“Animal Imagery and Oral Discourse in Havelok’s First Fight”, Viator: Medieval and

Renaissance Studies, 35 (2004), 311–27, https://doi.org/10.1484/J.VIATOR.2.300201

183 Herzman, “Havelok”, ll. 2984–85.

184 Ibid., ll. 1–2.

279

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

and his fairness reflects the goodness of God.

185

Horn’s Christian piety

is reflected in his defeat of the Saracens, and in the fact that England

and Christianity always come first for him, whereas his love for the

lady Rymenhild is never more than a secondary concern. The lovers do

finally get married and rule the realm of Suddene together in happiness,

but their marriage takes place only after all other pressing matters are

resolved. Before departing to regain his father’s lands from the pagans,

Horn tells Rymenhild, “beo stille! / Ich wulle don al thi wille”, but “I

schal furst ride, / And mi knighthod prove”.

186

Rymenhild must wait for

seven years, until Horn restores the stability that Suddene had enjoyed

during his father Athulf’s reign. Any love Horn has for Rymenhild is

completely sublimated here into the “higher” concerns of Christianity

and the English nation, while Rymenhild must wait patiently with

religion as her solace, an increasingly common situation in the period:

“[f]rom the Anglo-Saxon period through the Middle Ages, […] Christian

religion was increasingly central to the routines of women’s daily lives

and to the ways in which their culture viewed women as a group”.

187

Christianity has contributed to a very long tradition of seeing women

as inferior beings, and though a prominent thinker like Augustine

argues “that women are created human and in the image of God, […]

ultimately sexual difference stands at the foundation of his theology”.

188

It is that sexual difference which is thrown into sharp focus in post

fin’amor poetry and prose, as no longer do women have the voice given

them by the trobairitz poets, nor even the sympathetic portrayals of them

as desiring and desirable human beings created by the troubadours. The

status of women may well mirror the status of love (and poetry) itself,

and in the time of Havelok and King Horn women are supporting players

at best, existing at a time in which the love written of in poetry is not

directed from person to person, but to the Nation, the Church, and God.

185 Herzman, “King Horn”, ll. 95, 97–98.

186 Ibid., ll. 545–46, 548–49.

187 Theresa D. Kemp. Women in the Age of Shakespeare (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Press,

2010), 12.

188 Ibid.

280 Love and its Critics

Post-Fin’amor English Poetry: Mocking “Courtly Love”

in Chaucer—the Knight and the Miller

By the late fourteenth century in England, things are beginning to

change. Geoffrey Chaucer was by that time certainly aware of the

approach to love that would later be described by scholars as “courtly”.

His works often parody this attitude, and in the Canterbury Tales,

Chaucer provides rich soil for just such a parody in the “Knight’s Tale” a

long and highly stylized romance that is reworked by the bawdy Miller.

The tension between mind and matter, soul and body, is at the root of

much of the poetry written after the decline of fin’amor, until the ideas

of the troubadour ethos slowly begin to reappear in Chaucer’s works.

Chaucer satirizes the sublimated, desexualized, and “courtly” love of

the “Knight’s Tale” through the raucous and unapologetic celebration

of sexuality and the senses in the “Miller’s Tale”. The Knight recounts a

medieval romance with “courtly” lovers, daring battles, and a beautiful

and worship-inspiring lady named Emily. After hearing the tale,

Chaucer’s pilgrims all agree that they regard it as a “noble storie”.

189

Canterbury Tales mural by Ezra Winter (1939). North Reading Room, west wall,

Library of Congress John Adams Building, Washington.

190

The beloved in such “noble storie[s]” is a perfect, or near-perfect being,

and “in character, she is distinguished for her courtesy, kindness,

refinement, and good sense”.

191

Arcite cannot go anywhere in the world

that would require him to leave behind the sight of Emily: “Oonly the

sighte of hire whom that I serve, / Though that I nevere hir grace may

189 Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales: Complete, ed. by Larry D. Benson (Boston:

Wadsworth, 2000), I. 3111.

190 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canterbury-west-Winter-Highsmith.

jpeg?uselang=en-gb

191 William George Dodd. Courtly Love in Chaucer and Gower (Gloucester: Peter Smith,

1959), 9.

281

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

deserve, / Wolde han suffised right ynough for me”.

192

Similarly, Palamon

is a hapless and helpless worshiper of Emily. Both are madly in love with

her, or with the idea of her. As Theseus describes Palamon to Emily, he

is her servant: “That gentil Palamon, youre owene knyght, / That serveth

yow with wille, herte, and myght / And ever hath doon syn ye first

hym knewe”.

193

This dynamic is common in “courtly” tales: “[a]mong

the most familiar devices taken into romance is the address to an absent

and uncaring object of love”.

194

In the “Knight’s Tale”, Chaucer parodies

the extreme sublimation of love in romances of his time, and sets up

both Palamon and Arcite for further suffering and heartache, ensuring

that readers will not miss the ridiculousness of the many situations in

which the two “courtly” lovers find themselves. Arcite, when praying

to Mars, complains that Emily does not seem to care whether he lives

or dies: “For she that dooth me al this wo endure, / Ne reccheth nevere

wher I synke or fleete”.

195

Emily’s portrayal, as the female object of courtly adoration, is

replete with religious symbolism; she appears in the garden on a May

morning, singing “as an aungel hevenysshly”,

196

embodying purity,

beauty, and inaccessibility. Here, springtime is not about eroticism

and the awakening of sensual desires, but about the transcendence of

such things with heaven as the ultimate goal. It is unclear to Palamon

and Arcite “wheither she be a woman or goddesse!”

197

For the courtly

lover, “[the beloved] can never be reduced to a mere object of physical

gratification”,

198

nor, it seems, even be thought of in terms of anything

like human love and desire.

Courtly love, as depicted in the “Knight’s Tale”, is a Neoplatonized

and Christianized caricature of fin’amor. Unlike the lovers in troubadour

poetry, the lovers in the “Knight’s Tale” relegate the object (not subject)

of their love to a position of near-irrelevance. Palamon and Arcite are so

eager to find out whether Emily is “my lady” or “thy lady” that they are

192 Chaucer, I. 1231–33.

193 Ibid., I. 3077–79.

194 Susan Crane. Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1994), 51.

195 Chaucer, I. 2396–97.

196 Chaucer, I. 1055.

197 Ibid., I. 1157.

198 Margaret Hallissy. A Companion to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Westport: Greenwood

Press, 1995), 59.

282 Love and its Critics

willing to die without any response from her. In contrast, the “Miller’s

Tale” tells a story in which a response is definitely expected from the

lady, and physical fulfillment is not denied, though the common critical

reaction is tellingly reductive: “Love [in the “Miller’s Tale”] is a matter

not of the heart, mind, and spirit as it is in the romance, but of the body

only”.

199

By pairing the Knight’s and Miller’s tales, Chaucer strongly

suggests that love must be a matter of heart, mind, spirit, and body all

at once—a combination of elements that is much closer to the spirit of

fin’amor than to that of “courtly love”.

Generally categorized as an example of the fabliaux, a genre whose

inventor may have been Guilhem IX, the first troubadour,

200

the “Miller’s

Tale” satirizes the courtly attitudes of the “Knight’s Tale”. In contrast

with romances, such tales:

exaggerate the real as much as allegory exaggerates the ideal. Their

heroes are clever tricksters; their victims are the naïve and the stupid. All

women in the fabliaux are lustful; all priests are gluttons or lechers; most

representatives of public authority are corrupt. The peasant who makes

a fool of his priest, the woman who makes a fool of her husband, and the

priest who makes a fool of his bishop are glorified.

201

The reader is comically warned about the Miller and his less-than-courtly

sensibilities in advance of the tale: “What sholde I moore seyn, but this

Millere / He nolde his wordes for no man forbere, / But tolde his cherles

tale in his manere”.

202

The reader is also encouraged to “turne over the

leef and chese another tale” if he prefers “storial thyng that toucheth

gentillesse, / And eek moralitee and hoolynesse”,

203

a rhetorical move

designed to increase the transgressive appeal of the tale that follows.

What a reader who does not “chese another tale” will find, however,

is that the “courtly idealism of love, initially a theme picked up from

the Knight’s Tale, is present throughout the Miller’s Tale as an implied

and ludicrously inappropriate standard of conduct”,

204

which enables

the laugh-out-loud humor of the story. What had been initially elevated

199 Hallissy, 75.

200 Reddy suggests that Guilhem IX was “the author of the first fabliau” (101–02).

201 Joseph R. Strayer. Western Europe in the Middle Ages: A Short History (New York:

Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955), 183.

202 Chaucer, I. 3167–69.

203 Ibid., I. 3179–80.

204 Derek Pearsall. The Canterbury Tales (New York: Routledge, 2002), 178.

283

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

almost to the heavens in the language and content of the “Knight’s Tale”

topples to the ground in the “Miller’s Tale”, and is brought back to more

recognizably earthly matters. Elements of courtly love are taken out of

the context of romance and put into a frame where the celebration of

“divine” ideals and figures seem like the ridiculous obsessions of the

“naïve and the stupid”.

205

A look at the main characters of the “Miller’s

Tale” offers ample evidence for this conclusion.

After the Knight’s long story, the Miller will tell a “legend and a

lyf”,

206

not of a saint-like figure or a Platonic lover, but “of a down-to-

earth, here-and-now lover, who wins a real flesh-and-blood woman”.

207

The female character of the “Miller’s Tale”, Alison, is not an Emily,

and the younger men showing interest in her do not act like Arcite or

Palamon. The Miller tells of two lovers, just like the Knight does, but

with a difference: the Miller portrays one of his tale’s lovers, Nicholas,

as a realist who knows what he wants and goes after it without illusions.

The other lover, Absolon, is afflicted with self-delusion and pretensions

to grand manners and high style, and is both tricked, and foiled in his

planned revenge for the trick. In all this, we can see a small victory for

fin’amor over “courtly love”.

In dramatic contrast to the goddess-like, yet absent Emily, Alison

has a mind of her own: she is an unmistakably human creature. In

her genteel protestations and appeals to Nicholas’s “curteisye”,

208

she

embodies a deliberate parody of a courtly lady. While the introduction of

Alison is “modeled after the descriptio feminae which would traditionally

introduce the heroine of a romance”,

209

one should not miss the

description of Alison in terms of animal imagery at the beginning of the

tale,

210

comparisons which illustrate the physical passions highlighted

by the fabliau. Alison knows the rules of that world, and lives her life

in accordance with nature, without pretense and affectation. She does

what she wants, chooses and refuses whom she pleases.

Alison is most definitely not the courtly lady who is described in

religious terms, and although this “goode wyf” attends church to “Cristes

205 Strayer, 183.

206 Chaucer, I. 3441.

207 Bernard F. Huppé. A Reading of the Canterbury Tales (Albany: SUNY Press, 1964), 76.

208 Chaucer, I. 3287.

209 Pearsall, 176.

210 Chaucer, I. 3233–70.

284 Love and its Critics

owene werkes for to wirche”, church is not the setting of an episode of

courtly love here as it might have been in a traditional romance.

211

She

is not the heroine of such a romance, nor is the absurd and preening

Absolon, whom she meets at the church, its hero. Religious allusions

in this story are placed in an entirely different context from that of the

“Knight’s Tale”; they are not celebrations of courtly love, but devices

indicating the distance of the fabliau characters from the world of the

“sacred” and “spiritual”, where physical desires are objectionable, since

these characters live in an unabashedly fleshly world in which such

body-denying ideals are viewed as comical.

The humour of the treatment of courtly ideals in the “Miller’s Tale”

increases when one remembers the extreme length and artificiality of

the wooing of Emily by Palamon and Arcite; thousands of lines pass

during which no thoughts of sexual desire ever cross either of the two

knights’ minds. In the “Miller’s Tale”, sexual thoughts are present

right from the beginning, starting with the way Chaucer plays with the

knowledge and established expectations of his audience in the case of

Absolon. His biblical namesake, Absolom the rebellious son of King

David, is described as incomparably fair:

212

               



              

And as for Absolom, there was no man for beauty in all Israel so much to

be praised; from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, there was

no defect in him.

Absolom is also described as someone more than willing to use his

nearly-uncontrollable lust as a weapon:

213

                       



    

They spread for Absolom a tent on the roof, and Absolom went in to his

father’s concubines before the eyes of all Israel.

Chaucer’s Absolon is not nearly so ambitious as the son of Israel’s king,

though he is quite nearly as lustful and deceptive. Although Absolon

“assume[s] all the poses of the courtly lover (more music, sleepless

211 Ibid., I. 3308, I.3307.

212 II Sam. 14: 25.

213 Ibid., 16: 22.

285

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

nights, gifts)”,

214

and uses “high style language […] right out of the

courtly love tradition”,

215

he is not quite what anyone would expect

a courtly lover to be. It is through Absolon that Chaucer satirizes the

pain and suffering involved in the concept of courtly love by displaying

the young man’s wooing of Alison in all its comic absurdity. Absolon’s

“unfortunate kiss [of Alison’s unwashed rear] is preceded by a love-

song”, which is “charged with the echoes of the Song of Songs”.

216

Absolon’s singing and ass-kissing bring the parody of courtly love to an

absurdly comic climax.

The “song” element can also be seen with Nicholas, whose initial

wooing of Alison includes an angel’s song that salutes the Virgin: “And

Angelus ad virginem he song”.

217

Nonetheless, what might seem like

courtliness is deflated when “prively he caughte hire by the queynte”.

218

Once more, a religious and sacred image is taken out of its context,

and put in the realm of its non-spiritual, fleshly opposite. Although

described “lyk a mayden meke for to see”,

219

Nicholas is anything but

maiden-like or meek, as far as his behavior toward Alison is concerned.

He is attracted to her, and with no signs of hesitation, he makes his

attraction known.

The “Miller’s Tale” certainly stands as a work on its own; however,

its context in the Canterbury Tales gives it greater satirical power than it

might otherwise have, by serving as a direct contrast with the “Knight’s

Tale”. The description of Alison establishes her as the sensuous contrast

to the remote and saint-like Emily. The Neoplatonized and Christianized

love of the “Knight’s Tale” is parodied in the “Miller’s Tale”, where the

“courtly” ideals are treated as a joke and the pointless, and seemingly-

endless suffering of Palamon and Arcite is implicitly mocked. Romance

entertains the illusion that humans are more angel than animal, all mind

and heart and soul, while the fabliau declares that humans are animals,

bodies whose passions and sensual desires are not to be restrained.

214 Hallissy, 78.

215 Ibid., 81.

216 Winthrop Wetherbee. Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1989), 58.

217 Chaucer, I. 3215.

218 Ibid.,I. 3276. Forthoseunfamiliarwith the meaning of“queynte”(kānt), simply

change the first vowel sound. The meaning will become clear.

219 Ibid., I. 3202.

286 Love and its Critics

Chaucer’s attitude toward the “courtly” idealizing of love, on the

whole, is a critical one, and the pairing of the Knight’s and Miller’s tales

strongly suggests an ideal that is to be found in the real, a combination

of mind, heart, soul, and body. In this respect, Chaucer’s treatment of

love is closer to the spirit of fin’amor than to that of “courtly love”.

Post-Fin’amor English Poetry: Mocking “Auctoritee”

in Chaucer—the Wife of Bath

The sublimation and spiritualization of love that took place between

the times of the troubadours and Chaucer was not only accomplished

through the Inquisition and the Albigensian Crusade’s wholesale

slaughter. It was also effected in a subtler fashion, through the glossing

and alteration of what had once been an openly sensual literature (a

practice that continues in too much modern criticism). Many authors

no longer wrote in the fashion of Guilhem IX or Bernart de Ventadorn,

but told tales of miracles, citing Christian authority figures in order to

add weight to their lines. Chaucer’s pilgrims, for example, often quote

Christian figures. The Middle English word “auctoritee” is often used

in the Canterbury Tales, and is a key term in the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue

and Tale”. The word comes from the Latin auctōritās, meaning authority,

reputation, credibility. To medieval readers, this word signified the

important thoughts of the past as recorded and glossed in texts. However,

the education required to become familiar with the ideas of previous

auctōrēs was the privilege of a small minority. The majority of texts were

in Latin, and illiteracy rates in medieval England were extremely high,

running to about 90 per cent of males and 99 per cent of females.

220

Even

among that ten per cent of literate men, however, only the clergy were

educated in the languages of scholarship; thus, the books of the great

authority figures were mainly read by clerics. However, these clerics

did more than just read and study; they aimed to interpret and gloss,

which in many cases amounts to a revision and rewriting of the texts in

question (as we have seen with the Song of Songs).

220 Helen M. Jewell. Women in Medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 1996), 16.

287

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

Opening page of the “Prologue of the Wife of Bath’s Tale”, from the Ellesmere

manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (early fifteenth century).

221

To medieval readers, this pool of writing, which the Wife of Bath calls

“auctoritee”, was not to be questioned lightly, though the challenging

spirit of Wycliffe and the so-called Lollards can already be seen in

Richard II’s rejection of the petition of the Commons in 1391 which

sought to restrict education to the nobility, “that no neif or villein shall

henceforth put his children to school in order to advance them”.

222

This

was part of a movement that by 1406 resulted in the Statute of Education

in which “Parliament declared that ‘every man or woman, of what state

or condition that he be, shall be free to set their son or daughter to

take learning at any school that pleaseth them within the realm’ […]

a triumph for Wycklifism”.

223

Though formal education had formerly

been considered strictly a matter of men teaching authoritative men’s

thoughts and glosses to other men, things were slowly changing.

221 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wife-of-Bath-ms.jpg

222 James Edward Geoffrey De Montmorency. The Progress of Education in England: A

Sketch of the Development of English Educational Organization from Early Times to the

Year 1904 (London: Knight & Co., 1904), 27.

223 Ibid., 28.

288 Love and its Critics

Chaucer illustrates some of this change by having the Wife seize

“auctoritee”, and as a result, appropriate the interpretive authority of

the masculine, clerical glossators (the academics and critics of Chaucer’s

day).

224

The post-Albigensian period gave rise to an energetic proliferation

of such glosses, in which the marginal commentary often undermined

the primary text.

225

What is notable about glossing in this period is that

Scripture is not the only work that is being glossed; secular writing is

also undergoing heavy glossing. “To give a false appearance”, one of

today’s definitions of the term gloss, conveys the self-interestedness that

is potentially expressed in the act of glossing, which can be understood

as a form of appropriation. The glosser speaks the text, asserts authority

over it, provides an explanation, and consequently, limits (and even

seeks to prevent) the possibility of other meanings.

226

As the friar

from the “Summoner’s Tale” testifies, “Glosynge is a glorious thyng,

certeyn, / For lettre sleeth, so as we clerkes seyn”,

227

describing a process

in which he “twists the text of Scripture to serve his own material needs

224 The word “gloss” today has a few different meanings: “luster”, “sheen”, or “to give

false a false appearance ofacceptableness”. The Greek wordfor gloss, γλώσσα,

and the Latin word, glossa both mean “tongue, speech” (Francis E. Gigot. “Glosses,

Scriptural—I. Etymology and Principal Meanings”. In The Catholic Encyclopedia:

An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and

History of the Catholic Church: Father to Gregory, ed. by Charles G. Herbermann,

et. al. [New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907], Vol. 6, 588, https://archive.

org/stream/07470918.6.emory.edu/07470918_6#page/n665). More broadly, the

term means an “interpretation or explanation of isolated words. […] A glossary

is therefore a collection of words about which observations and notes have been

gathered, and a glossarist is one who thus explains and illustrates given texts”

(Gigot, 588). In its early usage, the term was assigned to “words of Greek texts that

required some exposition” (Gigot, 588). It was only later that “gloss” came to refer

to the interpretation itself.

225 Early Greek grammarians and Christian writers, who commented on Scripture,

adopted the word “gloss” to indicate ambiguous verbal usage, whether foreign

or obsolete, as opposed to an interpretation of difficult doctrinal or theological

passages. Such glosses were mainly written on the margins of manuscripts.

However, as glossing became more popular, the word “gloss” referred to more

elaborate explication of Scripture, ranging from interpretative sentences to large

commentaries on entire books that would either be marginal or interlinear. The

exemplum of glossing, Glossa Ordinaria, or The Gloss, was a compilation of all

glosses on the Bible, which itself consisted of layers of glosses (Gigot, 587).

226 On this point, see C. S. Lewis, who in A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1942), openly states that his aim is to “prevent the reader from

ever raising certain questions” (69).

227 Chaucer, III. 1793–94.

289

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

and those of his brother friars”.

228

“Glosynge” subordinates the text to

the desires of the critic: “it is all too easy for this act of interpretation to

become a matter of reading something into the text […]. The text then

becomes no more than a tool to serve the interests of the interpreter,

meaning whatever he or she wishes it to”.

229

The Wife rebels against all of this, but especially against the idea

that other people (notably men) are entitled to tell her how she should

read and understand the texts of her day, which in turn influence how

she lives (and understands) her life. The Wife is an earth-bound woman

who wants to control her own existence and her own loves, rather than

submit to another’s pre-scripted role, courtly or otherwise. In pursuit of

this control, the Wife of Bath defies the walls built by “auctoritee” and

its attempts to rewrite poetry.

However, though the Wife’s prologue and tale can be understood

as her attempts to address the misogynistic assumptions, and the

misrepresentations of women found in “courtly love”, some critics

view her narrative as ambiguous, regarding it as both feminist and anti-

feminist. Other arguments insist that in her prologue, the Wife is merely

enacting an anti-feminist stereotype of the rapacious and imperious wife,

and rather than being the embodiment of what misogynistic discourse

can’t say, she is embodying precisely what it does say. According to

Catherine Cox, for example, the Wife of Bath does not, in any sense,

produce what can be described as feminine discourse: “This sense of

the narrative becomes clearer when we consider the Wife to be a textual

‘feminine’ representation, one constructed within the parameters of

‘masculine’ discourse and articulated in masculine terms”.

230

From this

point of view, the Wife’s arguments are not essentially different from

those of her cleric husband, Jankyn, who often quotes “auctoritee” in his

anti-feminist literature in order to justify his actions toward the Wife,

reading to her from his book of “wicked wives” that contains passages

from Adversus Jovinianum, Dissuasio Ad Rufinum, the Golden Book on

Marriage, Tertulan, and other misogynistic works.

228 Alastair Minnis. Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 261.

229 Jill Mann. Life in Words: Essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, and Malory (Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2014), 82.

230 Catherine S. Cox. Gender and Language in Chaucer (Tampa: University Press of

Florida, 1997), 19.

290 Love and its Critics

But far from being confined to the thralldom of an anti-feminist

discourse, the Wife speaks as the dismissed “other”, explicitly mimicking

the operations of patriarchal (and explicitly anti-fin’amor) discourse in

order to mock it, defuse it, and deny it any power over her. When she

delivers her tirade against her three previous husbands, she repeats the

very words anti-feminist writers have used about domineering wives:

“When [Alison] accuses her old husbands […] she cites the stereotype

within her performance of it, establishing a link but also a distinction

between the proverbial ‘chidying wyves’ and her own chiding objection

to the proverb”.

231

The Wife’s performance is an instance of imitation

designed to defuse the rhetorical attacks made against her, “a strategic

repetition of sanctioned positions on gender from the crucially different

position of a feminine voice”.

232

The Wife refuses to play the roles

assigned to her by the “courtly” and other misogynistic discourses of

her era, and so she becomes, through imitation and appropriation, her

own “auctour”, her own “auctoritee”.

The Wife’s defiance goes beyond language, expressing itself also

through her clothing and outward presentation. At the time of the

pilgrimage that frames the Canterbury Tales, she is a widow. As such,

she is expected “to wear widow’s garb [and] modest attire in a somber

hue”,

233

and even more importantly, “her demeanor should match her

clothing”.

234

And yet, the Wife’s exterior defies those expectations: “Hir

coverchiefs ful fyne weren of ground; / […] Hir hosen weren of fyn

scarlet reed, / Ful streite yteyd, and shoes ful moyste and newe”.

235

The

Wife is not about to accept anyone else’s terms, and by being flamboyant

in demeanor and assertive in speech, the Wife defies auctoritee, while

at the same time claiming her own, and reveling in her seductive and

vibrant appearance. She is not afraid of sensuality, nor is she willing to

have it “glossed” for her by any dry-as-dust and cloistered clerics (like

Ermengaud, for example) who presume to counsel men and women

of the world about human sexuality. She is the “other” that the gloss,

written by clerical, anti-body and anti-pleasure men, opposes—the gloss

231 Susan Crane. Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Princeton: Princeton,

University Press, 1994), 116.

232 Ibid.

233 Hallissy, 103.

234 Ibid.

235 Chaucer, General Prologue, 453, 456–57.

291

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

that runs on the notion that all women are functionally interchangeable.

The Wife, though her opposition to and appropriation of this patriarchal

hermeneutic, turns the tables and puts men in the same position:

“Yblessed be God that I have wedded five! / Welcome the sixte, whan

that evere he shal”.

236

The Wife of Bath, through her imitation and

appropriation, makes it abundantly clear what “auctoritee” refuses to

acknowledge, or reluctantly acknowledges only by seeing it as “other”.

The beginning of the Wife’s prologue repeats the points of the

unorthodox theologian Jovinian (a fourth-century-CE opponent of

Christian asceticism), but it also mimics the rather drearily orthodox,

anti-feminist (and ascetic) Jerome. If the Wife’s reasoning is inconsistent,

a point that provokes a number of critics to reprove her, it is because

there is inconsistency and disagreement in the texts from which she

quotes, especially, perhaps, in the anti-feminist texts: “Commenting on

Saint Paul’s statement that it is good for a man to be unmarried […]

Jerome contends, ‘If it is good for a man to be so, then it is bad for a

man not to be so’”.

237

Impeccable logic, to be sure. It is thus unsurprising

that the Wife revamps biblical passages to fit her arguments; she is but

imitating the techniques of the male glossators who adjust and alter

texts to fit their ideology.

Toward the end of her prologue, in her descriptions of her last

marriage, the Wife not only speaks of joys and woes in a marriage, but

also depicts a relationship between women and (male) glossators. The

conclusion of her prologue suggests that despite her appropriation of

“auctoritee” and talk of “maistrie”, and “soveraynetee”, what the Wife

most wants is mutuality and satisfaction of desires, much like the ideal

expressed by Marcabru as “dos desirs d’un enveia”—“two desires in a

single longing” and by Bernart de Ventadorn when he writes that love

requires mutuality between the lovers: “Nothing in it can be good / If the

will is not mutual” (“Nula res no i pot pro tener, / Si·lh voluntatz non

es egaus”). She is yearning for the equality written of by Jean de Meun,

for whom “love and lordship / do not keep each other company”.

238

But

236 Ibid., III. 44–46.

237 Carolyn Dinshaw. Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

1989), 124.

238 “amor et seigneurie / ne s’entrefirent compaignie” (Lorris, Guillaume and Jean de

Meun, ll. 8421–22).

292 Love and its Critics

the Wife of Bath lives in a different time, a post Albigensian-Crusade era

dominated by religious dogma, and so such equality is hard, perhaps

even impossible, to find. However, once Jankyn apologizes and burns

the misogynistic book with which he has has caused her so much “wo”

and “pyne”,

239

she becomes loving and kind to him, and she gains

“soveraynetee” (the key term of her tale). But the question of whether or

not she actually has attained her desire, despite her positive declaration

of the fact, is made difficult to answer because of the very language in

which she makes her declaration: it is the language of a fairy tale; as

the Wife says, it is “in this matere a queynte fantasye”.

240

There is no

equality; there is no fin’amor. These are (yet) things of the past. And yet,

in her words, there is a return of at least the imagined possibility for full

understanding between husband and wife.

When the Wife of Bath manipulates authoritative texts, she suggests

something about glossing and its misogynistic strategy: it deprives

the female of her significance and therefore completely undermines

both female and male sexuality. In this light, her tale of the knight and

the Loathly Lady is a tale of resistance, an instance of the interpreted

siezing control of the act of interpretation. The domestic sphere of the

tale has as its main participants a married couple—King Arthur and

his queen—and a knight who, overcome with lust and his own sense

of entitlement, has raped a young maiden, and is to be executed for

his crime.

241

But after intercession on his behalf by the queen and other

ladies of the court, the knight is given one chance to save his life. If he is

to do so, he must find the answer to the question, “what thyng is it that

women moost desiren”.

242

As the tale goes on, the answer is revealed:

“Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee / As wel over hir housbound

as hir love, / And for to been in maistrie hym above”.

243

By the tale’s end,

the rapist knight, who both embodies and enacts the patriarchal power

structure of female oppression (and the glossator’s/critic’s structure

239 Chaucer, III.787.

240 Ibid., III.516. The potential double meaning here of “queynte’ also presents difficulties.

241 Jean Hagstrum argues that “[t]he raped solitary country girl of the Arthurian

landscape in the tale surely symbolizes what society had done to Alisoun in her

loveless marriages” (271).

242 Chaucer, III.905.

243 Ibid., III.1038–40.

293

6. The Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry

of poetic oppression), must learn his lesson and act in deference to

feminine desire.

For the Wife, “Auctoritee involves not only being an author, but

also a master or a teacher”.

244

This state, seldom achieved by females

in the medieval period, is the one to which both the Wife of Bath and

the Loathly Lady aspire. The Wife has been a student of marriage

through five unions, and though she claims, “Experience, though noon

auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynogh for me / To speke of wo

that is in marriage”,

245

she still quotes authority, realizing that experience

alone is not enough to adopt “auctoritee”. The Loathly Lady lectures her

husband by quoting great “auctours”, such as Dante, Seneca, Boethius,

and others. Her monologue, also known as the “pillow lecture”, argues

that women should be valued not only for their beauty and youth, but

also for their intelligence. The knight does not learn his lesson from

authoritative texts, or from “courtly” tales that strip the flesh-and-blood

humanity from women, but by listening to his wife’s lecture. He learns

from the real woman who is right there in front of him.

However, the tale ends with a contradiction. Despite the tale’s

declaration, “And thus they lyve unto hir lyves ende / In parfit joye”,

246

the lines before it contend that “she obeyed hym in every thyng / That

myghte doon hym plesance or liking”.

247

This ending seems to bring

the reader back to the realm of romance and “courtly love” literature,

where the beloved is only exalted in the wooing period. But the Wife

ends her tale with a hint of the mutuality of which Marcabru and

Bernart wrote, a relationship in which each renders to each “every

thyng / That myghte doon hym [and her] plesance or likyng”, and in

which love is, as Jean de Meun described it, “en queur franc et delivre”,

honest and free in the heart.

By Chaucer’s time, the troubadours had been gone for well over a

century. Since that time, passionate, embodied, and erotic love had often

been treated as a dangerous element, one which Christian “auctors”

had laboriously identified as a sin. In Chaucer’s world, book learning

244 Crane, 131.

245 Chaucer, III.1–3.

246 Ibid., III.1257–58.

247 Ibid., III.1255–56.

294 Love and its Critics

conveyed “auctoritee”, and in his portrayal of the Wife, the Loathly

Lady of her tale, and the anti-feminist discourse the Wife rails against,

Chaucer imagines patriarchy from the “other’s” perspective, carefully

reckoning the costs of misogynistic clerical and “courtly” discourse.

Chaucer, through the Wife of Bath, maintains that women’s desire, and

desire in general, cannot be denied.

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry

and Prose, and the Reactions of the

Sixteenth-Century Sonneteers

The Platonic Ladder of Love

Despite the changes that are beginning to appear in fourteenth-century

England, by the same time in Italy the sublimation and spiritualization

of love has long established itself as the dominant theme of European

poetry, a theme that is exported to England in the sixteenth century,

briefly sweeping aside much of the spirit we have seen developing in

Chaucer. To understand how and why this happened, we will have to

circle back and spend a little time with Plato.

Perhaps the single most basic element of Platonic metaphysical

thought is the separation between the world we see and the world we

do not see, a temporal world of motion and change, and an eternal

realm of stasis. This idea stems from earlier Greek philosophers, such

pre-Socratics as Heraclitus, for example, who is most famous for

trying to illustrate the difference between the two realms, as well as

their interdependence, with the image of a river (stasis) in which new

waters continually flow (motion). But in Plato, this theme of the relation

between the eternal and the temporal reaches its most powerfully

articulated form, and his ideas are traceable through the history of

thought in literature and art in the Western world.

296 Love and its Critics

In the Symposium this theme takes shape in an argument that

posits an idea of Forms and Copies—not merely the idea of a realm

of eternal Forms or Ideas which are the templates for the individual

and ephemeral Copies we see here in the world of flux and change,

but the idea that there are higher and lower, nobler and baser ways of

using those Copies as ways to understand those eternal Forms. The

Symposium regards the baser ways of understanding with suspicion,

because they are stuck within the changing conditions of a world in

which, as Shakespeare says, “everything that grows holds in perfection

but a little moment”, but they are also necessary, a means to an end. In

what becomes the well-worn image of a “ladder of love”, the dialogue

pictures such baser understandings as the lower rung on a ladder that

leads to higher understandings, a progression in which lower forms of

love lead to higher loves, and eventually the highest love of all—the

love of the Forms.

Organized around a series of speeches offering competing definitions

of love, the Symposium reaches its philosophical climax when Socrates

tells the story of his conversation with the prophetess Diotima. Diotima

first defines what love is, then moves on to an elaborate description of

how love may be realized or achieved: “think not that love is of the

beautiful”,

rather, love “is for the engendering and producing offspring

upon beauty”.

Why?

That is because it is an undying thing in our mortal life. Immortality

constrains us to set our hearts upon it even as we pursue the good, and so

it comes about that love always exists as one’s highest good. Necessarily

then, from this reckoning, love is of immortality.

But how can we fulfill such longing for immortality? In Diotima’s

conception, we do so through generation. As Diotima puts it, “the mortal

condition always desires to enter an immortal existence. This is possible

only through engendering, so that in the future, a young generation

1 “ἔφη,οὐτοῦκαλοῦὁἔρως,ὡςσὺοἴει”(Plato. Symposium, ed. by W. R. M. Lamb

[Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925], 206e).

2 “γεννήσεωςκαὶτοῦτόκουἐντῷκαλῷ”(ibid.).

3 ὅτιἀειγενέςἐστικαὶἀθάνατονὡςθνητῷἡγέννησις.ἀθανασίαςδὲἀναγκαῖονἐπιθυμεῖν

μετὰ ἀγαθοῦ ἐκ τῶν ὡμολογημένων, εἴπερ τοῦ ἀγαθὸν1 ἑαυτῷ εἶναι ἀεὶ ἔρως ἐστίν.

ἀναγκαῖονδὴἐκτούτουτοῦλόγουκαὶτῆςἀθανασίαςτὸνἔρωταεἶναι.

Ibid., 206e-207a.

297

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

can take the place of the old one”.

But the generation—or “increase”—

being referred to is of two different kinds, a lower and higher. There is

the physical generation engaged in by those who are “pregnant in the

body”.

These “turn toward women”

and “through begetting children

they achieve immortality”.

The higher example, however, is a spiritual

generation, engaged in by those with “the pregnancy of the spirit”.

is to these that wisdom truly belongs, and their realm is that of Beauty

itself: they have “prudence and goodness, which exist in all poets and

creators and skilled craftsmen who are called inventors”.

This splitting of “pregnancy” into attempts to achieve immortality

through the flesh and through the spirit leads Diotima to describe—

using the metaphor of a ladder—a pedagogical process by which

a student of Love and Beauty may move from first lessons to a final

revelation. This process starts at the lowest rung of the ladder, where

the student needs “to devote himself to the beautiful and good in the

body”.

The student then must

thereupon in his true self understand that the beauty of that body is that

of many associated bodies that exist, and he if means to pursue the idea

and form of beauty, it would be great foolishness not to consider and

establish for himself the whole, how the beauty of one body is like the

the beauty of all bodies.

Stepping from the first rung to the second rung of the ladder involves

moving from individual example to collective examples—but it does not

yet involve moving from example to concept, from concrete to abstract.

That is the work of the third and fourth steps. Step three demands that

4 “θνητὴ φύσιςζητεῖ κατὰ τὸ δυνατὸν ἀεὶ τὸεἶναι ἀθάνατος. δύναται δὲ ταύτῃ

μόνον,τῇγενέσει,ὅτιἀεὶκαταλείπειἕτεροννέονἀντὶτοῦπαλαιοῦ”(ibid., 207d).

5 “ἐγκύμονες[…]κατὰσώματα”(ibid., 209a).

6 “πρὸςτὰςγυναῖκας”(ibid.).

7 “διὰπαιδογονίαςἀθανασίαν”(ibid.).

8 “δὲκατὰτὴνψυχήν”(ibid.).

9 “φρόνησίντεκαὶτὴνἄλληνἀρετήν·ὧνδήεἰσικαὶοἱποιηταὶπάντεςγεννήτορες

καὶτῶνδημιουργῶνὅσοιλέγονταιεὑρετικοὶ”(ibid.).

10 “ἑνὸςαὐτὸνσώματοςἐρᾶνκαὶἐνταῦθαγεννᾶνBλόγουςκαλούς”(ibid., 210b).

11 ἔπειταδὲαὐτὸνκατανοῆσαι,ὅτι τὸ κάλλοςτὸἐπὶὁτῳοῦν σώματι τῷἐπὶἑτέρῳ σώματι

ἀδελφόνἐστι,καὶεἰδεῖδιώκειντὸἐπ᾿εἴδεικαλόν,πολλὴἄνοιαμὴοὐχἕντεκαὶταὐτὸν

ἡγεῖσθαιτὸἐπὶπᾶσιτοῖςσώμασικάλλος·τοῦτοδ᾿ἐννοήσαντακαταστῆναιπάντωντῶν

καλῶνσωμάτωνἐραστήν.

Ibid.

298 Love and its Critics

“besides this, in the meantime he must understand what is the soul’s

beauty, worthiness, and value over that of the body”,

and learn to

see “beauty in the laws”.

This definitively moves the student’s focus

beyond the individual and toward the collective and conceptual: no

longer will he direct his love toward “beauty in a boy or a man”,

but

he will instead turn “toward the mighty sea of beauty”.

Here, at last,

the student is ready to climb to the top of the ladder, ready for the final

revelation of the true nature of beauty as eternity: “indeed it always

existed, and neither comes into being nor is destroyed”.

Finally,

Diotima gives a summary description of how the student learns to move

from lower to higher forms of devotion:

Beginning with the beauty of the individual, the quest for beauty always

rises, even as it were using the steps of a ladder, from one to two, and

from two to all beautiful bodies, and from the beauty in all bodies to

the beauty of of customs and observances, and from the customs and

observances to the beauty of knowledge and mathematics, and from

such knowledge to the individual learning that has its end solely in the

knowledge of the existence of beauty itself.

From Plato we come to the later Neoplatonist philosopher, Plotinus.

The modification Plotinus makes to Platonic thought pushes it to the

point of religiosity, transforming Platonic philosophy into a theology

in all but name that is first cousin to Christianity. Plotinus describes

the reality of everything that exists in a layered or structured form, like

that presented in the Symposium, but with an extra twist. There is an

ultimate level of reality, beyond all description, conception, idea, and

imagination.Plotinuscallsthislevelτὸἕν, or the One:

12 “μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα τὸ ἐν ταῖς ψυχαῖς κάλλος τιμιώτερον ἡγήσασθαι τοῦ ἐν τῷ

σώματι”(ibid., 210c).

13 “τοῖςνόμοιςκαλὸν”(ibid.).

14 “παιδαρίουκάλλοςἢἀνθρώπου”(ibid., 210d).

15 “ἐπὶτὸπολὺπέλαγοςτετραμμένοςτοῦκαλοῦ”(ibid.).

16 “μὲνἀεὶὂνκαὶοὔτεγιγνόμενονοὔτεἀπολλύμενον”(ibid., 211a).

17 τῶνδετῶνκαλῶνἐκείνουἕνεκατοῦκαλοῦἀεὶἐπανιέναι,ὥσπερἐπαναβαθμοῖςχρώμενον,

ἀπὸἑνὸςἐπὶδύοκαὶἀπὸδυοῖνἐπὶπάντατὰκαλὰσώματα,καὶἀπὸτῶνκαλῶνσωμάτων

ἐπὶτὰκαλὰἐπιτηδεύματα,καὶἀπὸτῶνἐπιτηδευμάτωνἐπὶτὰκαλὰμαθήματα,καὶἀπὸ

τῶνμαθημάτωνἐπ᾿ἐκεῖνοτὸμάθηματελευτῆσαι,ὅἐστινοὐκἄλλουἢαὐτοῦἐκείνουτοῦ

καλοῦμάθημα.

Ibid., 211c.

299

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

In this manner we can proclaim a Principle, which exists beyond

Being—the One. […] Existing next in order to the One is Mind. Third is

Spirit, and then physical Nature, which by this procession is shown and

brought to light.

All things proceed from the One. From this indescribable source the

next level emanates, in what Plotinus describes as an unwilled process

of creation in which lower levels come from higher levels, but not due

to any purpose held by those higher levels. This next level is called

Nous, or Mind. Here is where all thought, reason, ideas exist. Nous, for

Plotinus, is the level Plato described as the realm of the Forms. Nous then

produces Psyche or Spirit, the level of soul, engagement, and (willed)

creative activity. Finally, from Psyche, comes the physical world of

matter. Everything emanates from the one ultimate, indescribable, non-

understandable source. Emanation proceeds downward, but is part of a

cyclical process, conducted within a self-contained environment.

How? Because, according to Plotinus, the proper motion of

emotional, intellectual, and spiritual life is never a focus here, on the

world in which we live as physical and mortal beings, but above, to

the realms from which matter emanated. Plotinus paints a picture of

yearning and desire, though not of bodies for other bodies. The yearning

Plotinus describes is of the mortal for the immortal, the temporary for

the permanent, the changing for the changeless. As Plotinus describes it,

this yearning is for one’s origin:

Everything longs for, and in this way loves its engenderer, and especially

whenever they are solitary the engendered seeks the engenderer; but

when the engenderer is the highest good, the engendered does so out of

necessity, divided, existing alone in its otherness and distinction.

We desire, if properly oriented and instructed, that level of existence

that exceeds our own, and this upward-focus is reflected in the process

of emanation (non-willed creation that descends from higher to lower

18 “Ὅτιδὲοὕτωχρὴνομίζεινἔχειν,ὡςἔστιμὲντὸἐπέκειναὄντοςτὸἕν,[…]ἔστι

δὲἐφεξῆςτὸὂνκαὶνοῦς,τρίτηδὲἡτῆςψυχῆςφύσις,ἤδηδέδεικται”(Plotinus.

Ennead, Vol. V, ed. by A. H. Armstrong [Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1984], 5.1.10, 44, 46).

19 “Ποθεῖ δὲ πᾶν τὸ γεννῆσαν καὶ τοῦτο ἀγαπᾷ, καὶ μάλιστα ὅταν ὦσι μόνοι

τὸγεννῆσανκαὶτὸγεγεννημένον·ὅτανδὲκαὶτὸἄριστονᾖτὸγεννῆσαν,ἐξ

ἀνάγκηςσύνεστιναὐτῷ,ὡςτῇἑτερότητιμόνονκεχωρίσθαι”(ibid., 5.1.6, 32).

300 Love and its Critics

levels) and return (a willed focus that ascends from lower to higher

levels). For the Neoplatonists who follow Plotinus, love is properly

understood as an ascent through higher levels of experience, thought,

and awareness, with a corresponding move away from a focus on or

attachment to the here and now. According to this way of thinking,

love is not love for an individual. It seeks to leave behind the embodied

physical experiences of life. This movement away from the individual

and physical, and toward the eternal and ethereal leads to something

divine. In the Symposium it leads to the finest sense of knowledge. In

Plotinus—and in the Christian thinkers and writers who incorporate his

thought into their own—it becomes something like a God beyond God,

what the thirteenth-century German mystic Meister Eckhart called the

God that you must leave for God’s sake.

Where Plato stops a step short

of that, Plotinus’s structure puts an unknowable “divine” principle at

the top. This idea of love as a yearning for the divine and immortal, a

yearning which must be shaped and trained away from individuals, is

taken up by Dante, Petrarch, and other Italian poets, and passed down

through them to English sixteenth-century authors. This idea works

against the destabilizing effect of individual choice in love (which

itself undermines the force of Church, State, and marital and social

conventions) that is so powerfully emphasized in troubadour poetry.

Post-Fin’amor Italian Poetry: The Sicilian School to

Dante and Petrarch

Among the earliest poetry in the Italian tradition was the work of

the Sicilian poets in the court of Frederick II (1194–1250). Frederick’s

was a court that anticipated many of the great aesthetic and academic

achievements of the Renaissance:

20 “The highest and final thing that a man may leave is this: that he leaves God

for God” (“Daz hœhste unde daz nêhste, daz der mensche gelàzen mac, daz

ist, daz er got dur got làze” [“Qui audit me, non confundetur”]). Franz Pfeiffer,

ed. Deutsche Mystiker des Vierzehnten Jahrhunderts: Bd. Meister Eckhart. Erste

Abtheilung (Leipzig: G. J. Göschen, 1857), 310, ll. 34–35, https://books.google.com/

books?id=-78FAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA310

301

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who ruled from 1208 to 1250 […],

was an absolute ruler, but an enlightened and (for those days) tolerant

one […]; the philosophy and literature of the Arabs, of the Sicilian and

Byzantine Greeks, of classical and neo-Latin Italy, and of southern

France and Spain, all flowed into Frederick’s realm […]. [A] patron of

scholars, translators, poets and musicians, as he moved about among his

various cities and castles, […] he required the centralised control of the

imperium to be administered by a highly loyal staff of professional legal

administrators […]. It was to this secular corps that the inventor of the

sonnet belonged.

This new poetry was written in a style heavily influenced by the

troubadours, as the poets “modeled their songs on the Occitan […]

themes, but composed in the Sicilian dialect”.

However, these poets

added three crucial elements: first, their radically enhanced “descriptions

of the pain and sorrow of love, which had enormous emotional power”,

and second, their “invention of the sonnet, which became the dominant

form for love poetry, not only in renaissance Italy but all over Europe”.

The third element, however, is the most important: the Sicilian poets

wrote in service and deference to imperial authority: “It was probably

Frederick II […] who encouraged the composition of poetry on the

model of that of the troubadours at his Sicilian court. […] Thus the

foundations of the Italian lyric were laid”.

In this more deferential

poetry, something new appears—the tendency, which grows more

pronounced in the poetry that follows, to turn love into worship and

women into divine objects of adoration:

The Sicilians followed closely in the track of the Provençal poets […].

The subject matter of this imitative poetry was love—but love that bore

a peculiar relation to ordinary human feeling. Woman was regarded as

an ideal being, to be approached with worship bordering on adoration.

The lover derived personal force, virtue, elevation, energy, from his

21 Michael R. G. Spiller. The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London:

Routledge, 1992), 14.

22 Ffiona Swabey. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Courtly Love, and the Troubadours (Westport:

Greenwood Press, 2004), 67.

23 Ibid.

24 Olive Sayce. Exemplary Comparison from Homer to Petrarch (Cambridge, UK: Brewer,

2008), 289.

302 Love and its Critics

enthusiastic passion. […] Love was the consummation of spiritual

felicity, which surpassed all other modes of happiness in its beatitude.

One of the best examples of the Sicilian style survives in the work of the

man usually credited with the invention of the sonnet form, Giacomo

da Lentini.

Working at the court of Frederick in the early thirteenth

century, Giacomo’s lyrics straddle the line between troubadour

sensuality, and the later spiritualization of the poets of the dolce stil

novo, a style that “owed much to the Sicilian school, [but most of whose

practitioners] were from Florence and wrote in the Tuscan dialect”.

In perhaps his most famous poem, Io m’aggio posto in core a Dio servire,

Giacomo writes of being torn between love of God and love of his Lady,

and is not at all sure that the former outweighs the latter:

Io m’aggio posto in core a Dio servire

com’io potesse gire in paradiso,

al santo loco c’aggio audito dire

si mantien sollazo, gioco, e riso.

Sanza mia donna non vi voria gire

(quella c’a blonda testa e claro viso)

che sanza lei non poteria gaudire,

estando da la mia donna diriso.

Ma non lo dico a tale intendimento

perch’io pecato ci volesse fare,

se non veder lo suo bel portamento,

lo bel viso, e l[o] morbido aguardare:

25 John Addington Symonds. Renaissance in Italy, Vol. 4, part 1 (London: Mith, Elder &

Co., 1881), 59–60, https://books.google.com/books?id=K4sTAQAAIAAJ&dq=Symo

nds+Renaissance+in+Italy+1881&pg=PA59

26 Sayce 290. See also Martin J. Duffell’s brief outlining of the history of the sonnet

form in A New History of English Metre (London: Modern Humanities Research

Association and Maney Publishing, 2008), 117–18, and Ernest Hatch Wilkins’

account in The Invention of the Sonnet and Other Studies in Italian Literature (Rome:

Edizioni de Storia e Letteratura, 1959), 14–17, as well as Pierre Blanc’s account of

the cultural and political forces that shaped the sonnet in the court of Frederick II,

in “Sonnet des origines, origine du sonnet: Giacomo da Lentini”. Yvonne Bellenger,

ed. Le Sonnet a la Renaissance: Des Origenes au XVIIe Siecle (Paris: Aux Amateurs de

Livres, 1998), 9–18. Finally, and most importantly, see Paul Oppenheimer’s account

of the origin of the sonnet in The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the

Invention of the Sonnet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), and his earlier article

“The Origin of the Sonnet”, Comparative Literature, 34: 4 (Autumn 1982), 289–304.

27 Swabey, 67–68.

303

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

che lo mi teria in gran consolamento,

vegiendo la mia donna in ghiora stare.

I have it deeply in my heart to serve God,

so that I will come into paradise,

The holy place I hear everywhere spoken of,

where always is solace, joy and laughter.

Without my lady I would not want to go,

she with the blond hair and bright face,

for without her, I could take no pleasure,

being separated from my lady.

Although I do not intend to say

that I would sin with her there;

if I did not see her beautiful bearing,

and her beautiful face and soft look,

I could not have great consolation

unless I saw my lady standing there in glory.

The poet bargains with God over the love he has for his lady—assuring

heaven’s monarch, or trying to, that he means not to “sin”, but insisting

that if she were not in heaven, he “would not want to go”, and would

“take no pleasure”. The sentiments of Giacomo’s poem and those of

Aucassin in Aucassin et Nicolette seem to have rather more in common

than might appear at a first glance. While Aucassin speaks harshly of the

corruption of heaven and of those who are ticketed for that particularly

joyless destination, a place of “naked folks and shoeless, and covered

with sores, perishing of hunger and thirst, and of cold, and of little

ease”, Giacomo’s lover speaks more quietly, perhaps a bit timorously,

but no less determinedly of his distaste for a heaven in which his lady

might not be found.

Elsewhere, however, the developing tendency to idealize the lady,

to both raise and reduce her by comparing her to jewels, the stars, the

sun, can be seen in Giacomo’s sonnet Diamante, né smeraldo, né zaffino.

The lady is worth more than any jewel, and is like the stars themselves:

28 Giacomo da Lentini. A Critical Edition of the Poetry of Giacomo da Lentini, ed. by

Stephen Popolizio (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1975; Ann Arbor

Michigan: University Microfilms, 1980), 156.

304 Love and its Critics

[D]iamante, nè smiraldo, nè zaffino,

nè vernul’altra gemma prezïosa,

topazo, nè giaquinto, nè rubino,

nè l’aritropia, ch’è sì vertudiosa,

nè l’amatisto, nè’l carbonchio fino,

lo qual è molto risprendente cosa,

non àno tanta beleze in domino,

quant’a in se la mia donna amorosa.

E di vertute tutte l’altre avanza,

somigliante [a stella è] di splendore

co la sua conta e gaia innamoranza;

e più bellè[sti] che rose e che frore.

Cristo le doni vita ed alegranza,

e sì l’acresca in gran pregio ed onore.

Diamonds, nor emeralds, nor sapphires,

nor any other precious gems,

topaz, nor pearl, nor rubies,

neither heliotrope, so great in power,

nor amethyst, nor the finest stones,

the things which are most resplendent,

none have beauty and power,

so much as is in my beloved lady.

And her virtue advances beyond all others,

it shines like the stars in its splendor

through her cheerful and charming face.

She is more beautiful than a rose, or a flower.

Christ give her the gifts of life and joy,

and may she grow great in praise and honor.

At the same time, she exceeds the stars in brilliance; indeed, she is the

sun itself in Giacomo’s Dolce cominciamento:

Dolce cominciamento

canto per la più fina

che sia, al mio parimento

d’Agri infino in Messina,

ciòe la più avenente,

29 Ibid., 193.

305

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

‘O stella rilucente,

che levi la maitina.

quando m’apar davanti,

li tuo’ dolzi sembianti

mi’ncendon la corina’.

Sweet beginning,

I sing for the finest

there is, in my opinion,

from Agri, all the way to Messina,

that is the most charming and fair.

“Oh shining star,

that rises at dawn!

When you appear before me,

your sweet face

sets fire to my heart”.

As beautiful as this is, what has gone missing, even at this early stage,

is precisely what goes missing from the poetry of a post-Crusade

troubadour like Guilhem Montanhagol: the open description and

celebration of physical passion and sexual desire as an element of love.

Even in Giacomo’s verse, whose lover seems on the precipice of refusing

heaven if his lady is not to be there, the ideas of God and heaven and

future punishment and reward are working their way prominently into

the poetry. Here, we are entering a period in which poetry withdraws

from individual passions, taking refuge in idealized descriptions: “Love

became an art, with its code of laws and customs. There was no longer

this or that particular woman, but a woman with fixed shapes and

features, as conceived in books of chivalry. All women were alike”.

This is a distinct departure from the work of the Occitan poets: Giacomo

is “deliberately turning away from the kinds of songs made and sung by

30 Ibid., 107.

31 “L’amore divenne un’arte, col suo codice di leggi e costumi. Non ci fu più questa o

quella donna, ma la donna con forme e lineamenti fissati, così come era concepita

ne’ libri di cavalleria. Tutte le donne sono simili” (Francesco De Sanctis. Storia della

letteratura italiana, Vol. 1 [Neaples: Morano, 1870], 11, https://books.google.com/

books?id=VtuDUIv5cvUC&pg=PA11).

306 Love and its Critics

the troubadours”.

His poems are not expressions of person-to-person

love, but “lyric[s] sung by the soul to the soul, in the silent music of

the soul”, songs that “echo those celestial and silent proportions and

ratios described by Plato”, constructed “according to the architecture

of the soul and of heaven”.

One can imagine Guilhem IX snorting at

such ideas, but such was the change from the late eleventh to the early

thirteenth centuries, as the Church grew more powerful, and learned to

exert more control over the lives of those under its sway, even dictating

what would, and would not, be appropriate in the realm of art and poetry:

The Church proscribed the poets of antiquity; and it had become an

axiom that poetry was the art of lies. Poetry was hardly suffered to exist

except as a veil to cloak some hidden doctrine; and allegory presented a

middle way of escape, whereby the pleasure of art could be enjoyed with

a safe conscience.

The effects of this increasing control can be seen as we move from

the Sicilians to the practitioners of what Dante calls the dolce stil novo.

Guido Guinizelli (c. 1230–1276) is writing at about the same time as

Montanhagol, while the last of the old troubadour spirit in Occitania is

dying. In Guinizelli’s poems, a transition between the embodied love of

the troubadours and the spiritualized love of the emerging allegorical

and Neoplatonist tradition is evident. There is still a powerful sense of

bodily desire, but in Chi vedesse a Lucia un var cappuzzo (Who sees Lucia in

her fur hat) something has gone wrong, and become twisted into the foul

deformity of a rape fantasy:

Ah, prender lei a forza, ultra a su’ grato

e bagiarli la bocca e ‘l bel visaggio

e li occhi suoi, ch’èn due fiamme de foco!

Ma, pentomi, però che m’ho pensato,

ch’esto fatto poria portar dannaggio

ch’altrui despiaceria forse non poco.

32 Paul Oppenheimer. “The Origin of the Sonnet”. Comparative Literature, 34: 4

(Autumn 1982), 297, https://doi.org/10.2307/1771151

33 Ibid., 304.

34 Symonds, 81, https://books.google.com/books?id=K4sTAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA81

35 Guido Guinizelli. The Poetry of Guido Guinizelli, ed. by Robert Edwards (New York:

Garland Publishing, 1987), 54, ll. 9–14.

307

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

Oh, to take her by force, even against her will,

And kiss her mouth and beautiful face

And her eyes, like two flames of fire!

But I repent that thought,

For this would cause harm and sorrow,

And displease her not a little.

The violent lust of this poem may partly explain why Dante puts

Guinizelli in hell: “In canto XXVI, amidst a band of the lustful, sodomites

and others, Dante meets Guido Guinizelli. He salutes him by the name

of the ‘father’, because he was both the initiator and [Dante’s] master

in the [dolce stil novo’s] third way, sensual and scholarly”.

Alongside

the hellish note, there is a ring of the future in Guinizelli’s poem, a hint

of the poetry that will follow a Neoplatonic path, with the increasingly

intense sublimation of the physical into the spiritual, the rhetorical

excesses of the comparisons of the beloved’s eyes to the stars of heaven,

the beloved’s voice to the music of angels, or the beloved’s eyelids

to flame. The women of these poems will be described in ways that

separate them from the realm of physically identifiable human beings.

The woman is light, a star, radiant; she is not embodied, but a spiritual

figure who draws the male poet toward heaven. In the above example,

we can clearly see that the “Lucia” of the poem is not regarded by the

narrator as a fully human woman; rather, she is an object—either of

rape fantasies, or of worship—not a desired and desiring subject. The

change in the lady’s status in Guinizelli (as opposed to Marcabru or

Bernart de Ventadorn) is already obvious.

The sublimation and spiritualization that is merely hinted at elsewhere

is openly expressed in Guinizelli’s Al cor gentil (Of the gentle heart):

Splende ‘n la ‘ntelligenzïa del cielo

Deo Crïator più che ‘n nostr’ occhi ‘l sole:

ella intende suo fattor oltra ‘l cielo,

e ‘l ciel volgiando, a lui obedir tole,

e con’ segue al primero

36 “Au chant XXVI, parmi une bande de luxurieux, sodomites et autres, Dante

rencontre Guido Guinicelli. Il le salue du nom de ‘père’, lui qui fut son initiateur et

son maître dans sa 3 e manière, sensuelle et savante” (René Lavaud, in Daniel, 133,

https://archive.org/stream/lesposiesdarna00arna#page/133).

308 Love and its Critics

del giusto Deo beato compimento,

così dar dovria, al vero,

la bella donna, poi che ‘n gli occhi splende

del suo gentil, talento

che mai di lei obedir non si disprende.

So shines in the Intelligence of heaven

God the creator, more than sun in our eyes;

She understands her maker beyond heaven,

And turning to heaven, prepares to obey;

And in first consequence thereof,

As God blesses the just

So in her true duty

The beautiful lady, whose eyes shine

On the gentle, and talented,

Blesses those who do not cease to obey her.

Here, the lady is a conduit between the poet and God, a spiritual

figure in whose eyes truth is glorified, and to whose service the poet is

dedicated. In this poem, the beloved is barely a woman at all; instead, she

is something more like a saint, an object of devotion and praise whose

main purpose is to bring the poet to God. The shift—even as early as

Guinizelli—is evident and profound: rather than being regarded as an

individual (as a subject) who is desired by the male for her own beauties

and merits, as in the troubadour poems, this woman is portrayed as the

personification of an abstract principle—truth—and is desired primarily

for her function or utility (as an object) in bringing the poet to God.

This is an idea we can trace to an Inquisition-era troubadour, Uc

de Saint Circ, who was writing in northern Italy in the mid-thirteenth

century, perhaps a generation before Guinizelli. Uc writes of aspiring to

heaven through a lady:

De ma vida·m faitz esmenda,

Bella de dura merce,

Ab sol que soffratz de me

Qu’eu per vos al cel entenda.

37 Guinizelli, 22, ll. 41–50.

38 “Servit aurai longamen”, ll. 46–49. In Alfred Jeanroy, ed. Poesies de Uc de Saint-

Circ (Toulouse: Édouard Privat, 1913), 30–34, https://archive.org/stream/

309

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

Take my life in homage,

Beautiful unmerciful one,

As long as you suffer me

To aspire through you to heaven.

This is the point at which the emphasis of love poetry clearly changes,

shifting its focus from here to the hereafter. Though it may well be

true that “Guinizelli […] refuses to define sacred and profane love as

mutually exclusive”, this merely leads us back to Diotima’s notion that

human love is nothing more than a transitional stage in the seeking of

divine love, especially since Guinizelli appeals to “a subtle Augustinian

philosophical sense of love as a continuum from human to divine”, and

“treats the amatory situation as an inward and high-mindedly ethical

event, connected with the larger process of order and purpose in God’s

universe”.

In Guinizelli’s poetry, the woman praised by the poet is

not an end in herself, but a glorified means to an end. In fact, Guinizelli

expresses anxiety lest he had at any point slipped up and paid too much

regard to the woman, and therefore not enough to God: “It was not my

fault, to fall in love with her”.

God is portrayed here as jealous because not all praise and love is

going to him. Part of it may have, in quiet moments, gone too directly

to the unnamed “her” of Guinizelli’s song, making that “her” a rival to

God, another deity. Such a gesture makes clear that this woman is not a

woman, or at the very least is not treated so by the poem. This woman

is a paragon, no mere fleshly mortal, and the poem goes to great lengths

to give love a Christian doctrinal basis:

The dramatized self-justification leaves the lady still enhanced and

angel-like and at the same time allows a distant analogy to the Virgin.

Thus [Guinizelli] by his mode of argument puts the love situation on an

inward ethical basis, connects it with the macro-cosmic process of God’s

universe, and gives it a Christian justification.

posiesdeucdesa00ucde#page/32

39 William J. Kennedy. “European Beginnings and Transmissions: Dante Petrarch,

and the Sonnet Sequence”. In A. D. Cousins and Peter Horwarth, eds. The

Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2011), 87.

40 “non me fu fallo, s’in lei posi amanza” (Guinizelli, 22, l.60).

41 Lowry Nelson. Poetic Configurations: Essays in Literary History and Criticism

(University Park: Penn State University Press, 1992), 100.

310 Love and its Critics

Guinizelli’s sonnet Io vogl’ del ver la mia donna laudare is less blatant in

its treatment of the “lady” as a means rather than an end than is Al cor

gentil. But even here, the reader encounters a meditation on a subject

that serves to ennoble the meditator, and represents the woman as a

glorious means to a higher and even more glorious end:

Io vogl’ del ver la mia donna laudare

ed asembrarli la rosa e lo giglio:

più che stella dïana splende e pare,

e ciò, ch’è lassù è bello a lei somiglio.

I will in truth praise my lady,

Comparing her to the rose and the lily.

She shines brighter than Diana’s star;

And so, all that is beautiful, resembles her.

Again, we see the comparison of the woman to heaven, to “Diana’s star”

(Venus, or the “morning star”) which the unnamed lady exceeds. It’s

lovely. The poetry of this period and place is aesthetically at least equal

to, and arguably an advance beyond, much of the earlier troubadour

poetry. But it also represents a significant shift in point of view and

philosophical orientation. Far from being desirable for beauty, from

passion, and through disregard for the consequences attending a nearly-

always adulterous inclination and arousal, the woman is treated as an

exemplar, a spiritual guide for the righteous man, and a transcendent

agent of shame and reproach for the unrighteous man:

e fa ‘l di nostra fè se non la crede.

e non la pò appressare om che sia vile;

ancor ve dirò c’ha maggior virtute;

null’uom pò mal pensar fin che la vede.

She makes you of our faith, if you do not believe.

For no man can be near her, if he is vile:

I tell you, she has an even greater strength;

No man can think evil who has seen her.

42 Guinizelli, 40, ll. 1–4.

43 Ibid., ll. 11–14.

311

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

All of this eloquence is put into the service of an argument which is

essentially this: love is only that which leads to, and is finally revealed

as having always been, love of God: “To Guido Guinizelli love, always

guided by reason, is a pure form of man’s aspiration toward God.

Originating largely in the aesthetic admiration of physical beauty, love

thereafter turns to the moral beauty which is its true goal. In the cor

gentil the beautiful lady may induce a blessedness that is the image

of the beatitude of heaven”.

The love of another, the love of a freely

chosen individual, a flesh and blood man or woman, is next door to

idolatry. Such love of another is only excusable if it leads you to the

love of God. And while the veils between idolatry and love of God

here might seem thin, that is only because they are thin. The early

Italian poets, much like the late troubadour Montanhagol, are trying

to shoehorn notions of eros (from a tradition that spans from Ovid

through the high-period troubadours) into the new dispensation, the

rules set down by the post-Albigensian-Crusade Church (in which

the theological and military powers-that-be demonstrated that they

were ready and willing to turn against Europeans, not just a distant

Muslim “other”). How far, at this point, we have come from the letters

of Héloïse, and the poems of the troubadours.

One final poem from Guinizelli brings a number of ideas together

in one place. In Tegno di folle ‘mpres’, a lo ver dire, the poet distinguishes

his love from other women by resorting to the now familiar comparison

to the sun: “Among others she is a shining sun”.

The woman of this

canzone, however, is also proud, perhaps a touch too proud, in the

poet’s view:

ella non mette cura di neente

ma vassen disdegnosa,

ché si vede alta, bella, e avvenente.

Ben si pò tener alta quanto vòle;

ché la plu bella donna è che si trove

44 Marianne Shapiro. Woman Earthly and Divine in the Comedy of Dante (Lexington:

University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 28.

45 “Ed infra l’altre par lucente sole” (Guinizelli, 2, l.23).

46 Ibid., ll. 18–22.

312 Love and its Critics

She does not care about a single thing,

But walks away disdainfully,

Seeing herself as beautiful and fair.

Well, she can have all the pride she wants,

For she is the most beautiful woman anywhere.

The implication is that because the lover loves, the beloved is supposed

to have mercy on, extend favor to, and in some cases reciprocate the

love of the lover. When she does not, she is described as haughty, even

imperious, while the man who loves her is a helpless fool:

Tegno di folle ‘mpres’, a lo ver dire,

chi s’abandona inver’ troppo possente,

si como gli occhi miei che fér esmire

nincontr’ a quelli de la più avenente.

che sol per lor è vinti

senza ch’altre bellezze li dian forza,

ché a ciò far son pinti.

I think him foolish, truthfully,

who abandons himself to a power too strong,

like I, with my eyes, have done in this sort

to the power of those eyes most fair,

and by them are overcome.

No need for other beauties to lend their force,

To what had gone before.

This idea of the proud and unmerciful lady who refuses her love to the

young male who pines for it is one that appears often in the later poetry

of Petrarch, and in the verses of English poets like Philip Sidney. In

Guinizelli, we can see an early example of what will become a well-worn

pairing: the ladder of love, and the pride or intractability of the beloved. This

pairing strongly suggests that the female is responsible for the spiritual

life and death of the male. If the woman is the conduit through which the

man is to learn to ascend to heaven on the ladder of his own increasingly

refined, and upward-directed thoughts and emotions, and the woman is

too proud to be as affable and obedient as the male would have her be,

47 Ibid.,11.1–7

313

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

then the man will fail to ascend, suffer spiritual death, and end up in a

hell of eternal judgment and torment. From this develops the idea that

love is something you die for, or die of, rather than live for. In his work,

Petrarch makes frequent use of this idea, and Shakespeare will often

mock characters who give voice to such weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Guinizelli’s contemporary, Guido delle Colonne, develops the idea

of the lady’s pride and failure to be “affable” in Amor, che lungiamente

m’hai menato (Love, which so long has driven me):

Non dico c’ a la vostra gran bellezza

orgoglio non convegna e stiale bene,

c’a bella donna orgoglio ben convene,

che si mantene—in pregio ed in grandezza.

Troppa alterezza—è quella che sconvene;

di grande orgoglio mai ben non avene.

Però, madonna, la vostra durezza

convertasi in pietanza e si rinfreni:

non si distenda tanto ch’io ne pèra.

Lo sole è alto, e sì face lumera,

e tanto più quanto ‘n altura pare:

vostr’ argogliare—donqua e vostra altezze

facciami prode e tornimi in dolcezze.

I do not say, that with your great beauty

Pride does not agree, it serves you well;

That pride in a beautiful woman is fitting

Which maintains esteem and grandeur.

But too much pride, that is not fitting;

A great and haughty pride is never attractive.

But my lady, your harshness

Convert to pity, and restraint;

Do not stretch so much, to seem so posh.

The sun is high, and brilliantly lighted,

And even more so, the higher it seems:

So let your pride and your haughtiness

Turn its face to me in sweetness and delight.

48 Piero Cudini, ed. Poesia Italiana. Il Duecento (Milan: Lampi di Stampa, 1999), 27, ll.

27–39.

314 Love and its Critics

In the terms of these lines, if the poet does not gain the love of the figure

he refers to possessively as “my lady”, then he will rail at length about

her “haughty pride” and “harshness”, berating her for her lack of “pity”,

while never considering her desires even for a moment. Nowhere is

it clearer than in these lines that the beloved is a means, not an end

in herself. In the troubadour poems, what is different is the idea of

individual value and mutual desire. In those poems, the will is mutual,

as is the choice. Where is the volition of the women being spoken of in

the poems of Guinizelli and Colonne? Where is the voice of the female?

She has become a beautifully spoken-of but slightly-regarded object, a

consistent feature of Colonne’s larger body of work, where “[h]is tone

is overtly moralizing and didactic [and] he muses on the instability of

human affairs, the unpredictable workings of Fortune, and […] the

fickleness of women and their dangerous and corrupting influence”.

This crucial shift in perspective lays down the foundations of ideas and

imagery that work their way through a developing poetic tradition that

has enormous influence on the poetry of later centuries. Colonne’s final

lines bring this point home:

Gli occi a lo core sono gli messaggi

de’ suoi incominciamenti per natura.

Dunqua. madonna, gli occhi e lo meo core

avete in vostra mano, entro e di fore,

c’Amor me sbatte e smena, che no abento,

sì come vento—smena nava in onda:

voi siete meo pennel che non affonda.

The eyes bring messages to the heart

Of all that begins by nature.

Therefore, my lady, my eyes and my heart

You have in your hand, inside and out;

That love leads my life into battle,

And beats, as the winds against a ship,

But you are my banner, which will not sink.

49 Jane E. Everson. The Italian Romance Epic in the Age of Humanism: The Matter of Italy

and the World of Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 44.

50 Cudini, 28, ll. 54–60.

315

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

And yet where is this lady in those gorgeous lines? She is a thing that

exists in his emotions, in his head, in his thoughts, in his language, in

his verse. She is given no detailed description, no voice or validity or

ability to speak back except as an adjunct to his desires or an aid to what

he would have. If we look at the poem as a powerful expression of what

the poet most desires, aesthetically it is beautiful. But when we consider

how that desire is spoken, what use the poems make of the idea of the

beloved, that desire, and that poem, become dark and troubling things.

By the time we come to the poetry of Dante, written in the late

thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, we are on ground that is

more familiar to many readers. His collection La Vita Nuova (The new

life) contains even clearer alterations of troubadour themes than do the

works of his predecessors. These verses describe the effect on the poet

that is wrought by seeing a young girl named Beatrice, who will become

the muse of La Divina Commedia, or The Divine Comedy. The sonnet Negli

occhi porta la mia donna Amore makes the effect especially clear:

Negli occhi porta la mia donna Amore;

Per che si fa gentil ciò ch’ ella mira:

Ov’ ella passa ogni uom ver lei si gira:

E cui saluta fa tremar lo core;

Sì che bassando il viso tutto smore,

E d’ogni suo difetto allor sospira:

Fugge davanti a lei superbia, ed ira.

Aitatemi voi, donne, a farle onore.

Ogni dolcezza, ogni pensiero umile

Nasce nel core a chi parlar la sente;

Ond’ è beato chi prima la vide.

Quel ch’ella par quando un poco sorride

Non si può dicer, nè tenere a mente,

Si è nuovo miracolo e gentile.

The door to love is in my lady’s eyes,

So where she looks all things grow gentle;

And where she passes all men turn to her,

51 Dante. The Canzoniere of Dante Alighieri, ed. by Charles Lyell (London: James Bohn,

1840), 36, https://books.google.com/books?id=E6JWAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA36

316 Love and its Critics

And those she blesses tremble to their core,

Cast their faces down in shame, wholly pale,

And instantly confess their every sin in sighs.

Pride and anger flee before her,

Help me honor her, noble ladies.

All sweetness, all humble thoughts

Be born in the hearts that hear her speak;

And blessed be they who have once known

How she appeared with a little smile;

Nor words nor thoughts can describe her,

She is so new and noble a miracle.

Dante describes this young girl as a “miracle” more than she is a flesh-

and-blood human being; her value is not in her humanity, but in her

function. Beatrice transforms (“where she looks all things grow gentle”)

the wicked hearts of evil men, who, as they “[c]ast their faces down in

shame, wholly pale, / And instantly confess their every fault in sighs”,

become suddenly aware of their insufficiency in the face, not of a girl, but

of a goddess. This sacramental function that Dante assigns to Beatrice is

even clearer in the following lines from Io mi sentii svegliar dentro a lo core:

Io mi sentii svegliar dentro a lo core

Un spirito amoroso che dormia,

E poi vidi venir di lungi Amore,

Allegro sì che appena il conoscìa,

Dicendo: or pensa pur di farmi onore;

E ciascuna parola sua ridia:

E, poco stando, meco il mio signore,

Guardando in quella parte ond’ ei venia,

Io vidi monna Vanna e monna Bice

Venire in verso il loco dov’ io era,

L’una appresso dell’ altra meraviglia.

E sì, come la mente mi ridice,

Amor mi disse: questa è Primavera,

E quella ha nome Amor, sì mi somiglia.

I felt awakening in my inmost heart

Love’s spirit, sleeping there.

52 Ibid., 50, https://books.google.com/books?id=E6JWAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA36

317

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

And I saw Love himself approach from afar,

So cheerfully, I scarcely recognized him,

He said, think now to give me honor;

And with every word he laughed.

And, when my Lord had stayed a little while,

I gazed in the direction from which he came

And saw lady Vanna and lady Beatrice

Coming to the place where I stood,

The one surpassing the other as a marvel,

And now, as memory brings back their words

Love said to me, this lady is the Springtime,

But this one is called Love, she so resembles me.

Beatrice, as were the various “ladies” of the Guinizelli and Colonne

poems, is made an abstraction, stripped of humanity in order better to

serve to stir the poet’s heart, and work him into an attitude of worship.

In the sonnet Di donne io vidi una gentile schiera, Dante takes the

deifying and sacralizing of Beatrice even further. Here, Beatrice is not

merely Love itself, no mere miracle—rather, she is “an angel through

whom man reaches God”,

accompanied by Love as by an attendant, a

lady birthed in Heaven itself:

Di donne io vidi una gentile schiera

Quest’ Ognissanti prossimo passato;

Ed una ne venia quasi primiera,

Seco menando Amor dal destro lato.

Dagli occhi suoi gittava una lumiera,

La qual pareva un spirito infiammato;

Ed i’ ebbi tanto ardir, che la sua cera

Guardando, vidi un angiol figurato.

A chi era degno poi dava salute

Con gli occhi suoi quella benigna e piana,

Empiendo il core a ciascun di virtute.

Credo che in ciel nascesse esta soprana,

E venne in terra per nostra salute:

Dunque beata chi l’è prossimana.

53 Hagstrum, 236.

54 Dante, Canzoniere, 378, https://books.google.com/books?id=E6JWAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA378

318 Love and its Critics

I saw a group of gentle ladies

On All Saint’s Day just past;

And one, without apology, as if the prime,

Led Love along at her right hand.

From her eyes shone forth a light,

That seemed a spirit burning in flame;

With great daring, at her form

I gazed, and saw an angel’s figure.

Then with dignity and calm she blessed

With her eyes, kindly and simply, all those

Wicked at heart, filling them all with virtue.

I believe she was born in highest heaven,

And came to earth to be our blessing,

So blissful are those who are close to her.

Here again, love for the “woman” is not love of a human being, but

worship of an angel, and a conduit for salvation: “Beatrice gradually

becomes a bearer not only of health and of salutation […] but of

salvation. Dante’s overwhelming experience of love […] for Beatrice

becomes transformed into a sacred spiritual force”.

Ary Scheffer, Dante and Beatrice (1851). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

55 Nelson, 100.

56 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ary_Scheffer_-_Dante_and_Beatrice.

jpg?uselang=en-gb

319

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

At this point, we have long since left behind the idea of love as a radically

destabilizing force, between two people who have no business choosing

each other, yet do, despite all the boundaries that separate them. We

have moved from that, to a poetry that describes love in sacred terms,

a love that is amenable to being channeled within the Church, a love

that is not an anarchic threat. The love described by Guinizelli and

Colonne, and even more powerfully by Dante, is not a two-way choice,

but something that begins to reflect increasingly a single point of view:

the desires of the male heart, the male voice, and the male passions,

while the female heart, voice, and passions are set aside, and the female

herself is increasingly dehumanized, dematerialized, and deified:

Dante may be said to have rediscovered the Platonic mystery, whereby

love is an initiation into the secrets of the spiritual world. […] In

proportion as Beatrice personified abstractions, she ceased to be a

woman even for her lover; nor was it possible except by diminishing

her individuality, to regard her as a symbol, of the universal. She passed

from the sphere of the human into the divine.

One of the most outstanding examples of Dante’s sublimation of love into

a spiritual value is found, not in his sonnets, but in his epic. In Inferno,

Dante rehearses the then-already-famous story of the lovers Paolo and

Francesca. Brought together by the circumstances of an arranged

marriage between Francesca da Rimini and Paolo’s brother Gianciotto

de Malatesta, the lovers carried on an affair for years before getting

caught in the bedroom by Gianciotto, who stabs them to death, affixing

them both on his sword at the same time. As Dante’s pilgrim is guided

through Hell by Virgil, he encounters Francesca, who tells her story:

“Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto

di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse;

soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto.

Per più fiate li occhi ci sospinse

quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso;

ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse.

Quando leggemmo il disiato riso

esser basciato da cotanto amante,

57 Symonds, 90, https://books.google.com/books?id=K4sTAQAAIAAJ&dq= Symonds

Renaissance in Italy 1881&pg=PA90

320 Love and its Critics

questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,

la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.

Galeotto fu ‘l libro e chi lo scrisse:

quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante”.

Mentre che l’uno spirto questo disse,

l’altro piangea; sì che di pietade

io venni men così com’io morisse.

E caddi come corpo morto cade.

“We were reading, one day, to our delight,

Of Lancelot, held tightly by love;

We were alone, without doubt or suspicion.

Many times, our eyes were drawn together

By that reading, and the color left our faces:

But one point only had defeated us.

When we read of the longed-for lips

Being kissed by the happy lover,

He, from whom may I never be parted,

Kissed me, trembling, on the mouth.

A Galahad was the book and its author,

But that day we read no further”.

While the one spirit said this,

The other wept, and from pity

I grew sick, as if to die,

And I fell as a dead body falls.

Dante is playing a sly game of poetic sleight-of-hand here. As so often

in the vidas, the imaginative biographies of the troubadours, the costs

of passion between two people who choose each other in the face of

law, marriage, church, and other institutional impediments, can be

enormous. Viewed from that perspective, Dante has written, in this

scene with Francesca, the most devastatingly romantic vida of them all.

But from the perspective of those Dantean poems which regard love as

a vehicle for disembodied sublimation and worship, Dante has given

Paolo and Francesca the most lasting of punishments for having dared

to love each other rather than God, for having dared to be devoted

58 Dante. Inferno, Canto 5.127–42. In La Divina Commedia. Inferno, ed. by Ettore Zolesi

(Rome: Armando, 2009), 124–25.

321

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

to each other rather than to the laws, codes, and expectations of their

time and place. They will spend an eternity in Hell, suffering infinite

punishment for a finite period of human sin, at the hands of a God who

also arranges for them to regret and weep eternally over the love they

had shared.

As far as some literary critics are concerned, this is all to the good, for

such lovers, in the eyes of our rigid moralists, deserve to be punished,

and tormented for eternity: Barbara Reynolds argues that Dante puts

Francesca in hell “for a reason; [her words] are a key to her character, as

is her use of poetry to justify her adultery and of Arthurian romance to

blame for its influence”.

Edoardo Sanguineti condemns Francesca as

“a [Madame] Bovary of the thirteenth century, who dreams of kissing

Lancelot, and who enjoys, in tragic reduction, the embraces of her

brother-in-law”.

Elspeth Kennedy blames not only poor moral choices

but also faulty reading habits for Paolo and Francesca’s consignment

to an eternity of torment: “If Paolo and Francesca had read the whole

of the cyclic romance, they too might have seen the kiss of Lancelot

and Guinevere in a different way and resisted their own desire to

imitate it”.

Antonio Enzo Quaglio dismisses Francesca as an immoral

dilettante, who should have left reading to her moral betters, sneering at

“this bookish woman, this creature of print, [who,] projecting shadows

on the pilgrim’s own moral ambivalence, seems drawn as an ancient

cartoon […] from the poetic prehistory of the Commedia”.

And in a

move so dismissive it reads as high comedy, Mary Kay-Gamel reduces

Francesca and her eternal torment to the (apparently deserved) agonies

of a failed graduate student:

59 Barbara Reynolds. Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man (London: I. B.Tauris,

2007), 135.

60 “una Bovary del Duecento, che sogna i baci di Lancillotto, e fruisce, in tragica

riduzione, degli abbracciamenti del cognate” (Edoardo Sanguineti. Il Realismo di

Dante [Florence: Sansoni, 1966], 28).

61 Elspeth Kennedy. “The Rewriting and Re-reading of a Text: The Evolution of the

Prose Lancelot”. In Alison Adams, Armel H. Diverres, and Karen Stern, eds. The

Changing Face of Arthurian Romance: Essays on Arthurian Prose Romance in Memory of

Cedric E. Pickford (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 1986), 9.

62 “questa donna libresca, questa creatura cartecea, che proietta sul pellegrino le

ombre della propria ambivalenza morale, sembra disegnata su antichi cartoni

[…] nella preistoria poetica della Commedia” (Antonio Enzo Quaglio. Al di là di

Francesca e Laura [Padova: Liviana Editrice, 1973], 29).

322 Love and its Critics

Francesca is not a well-trained student of literature. She doesn’t finish

the work, she misremembers an important detail (Guinevere kisses

Lancelot, not vice versa), she is guilty of the intentional fallacy, and her

interpretation is entirely too mimetic. If she had read further, she would

have discovered how grave, in emotional and spiritual terms, were the

consequences of Lancelot and Guinevere’s illicit love, and she might have

acted differently. Francesca is a female reader who does not adequately

question the object of her reading, the method she uses to read, and the use

to which she puts her reading.

But far from being the conventionally moral tale that satisfies the

instincts of the moral scolds within academia (or the moral scold within

Dante himself), the speech of Francesca da Rimini powerfully illustrates

the immorality at the heart of the Christian myth, and the shocking

cruelty of the “moral” codes that take their inspiration from it. Greater

than all the Inferno’s scenes of torture and pain, greater even than the

agony of Count Ugolino, who will spend eternity chewing on the bloody

skull of his most hated rival, the passion and punishment of Paolo and

Francesca walks a tightrope between fascination and condemnation,

between the old attitudes of the troubadours, and the new dispensation

in which love will be disembodied, tamed, and turned toward the very

God who sentences human beings to an eternity of agony for a finite

lifetime of human “error”, a God whom Dante describes in the final line

of Paradiso, as l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle, the love that moves the

sun and the other stars. From fin’amor, we have now come to the kind of

amor that consigns lovers to Hell and torment forever.

Less famously, but perhaps even more astoundingly, the forced

Christianizing of the poetic tradition, and the shoehorning of the

troubadours into the new, spiritualized poetry of love, is nowhere

made more evident than in Dante’s treatment of Arnaut Daniel, the poet

among the troubadours whom he most admired. In Purgatorio, “Arnaut

boasts of achieving the impossible”,

while Dante has the troubadour

speak as though he regrets his life and work, and looks forward only to

being fully purged of his sin as he ascends toward God:

63 Mary-Kay Gamel. “This Day We Read Further: Feminist Interpretation and the

Study of Literature”. Pacific Coast Philology, 22: 1–2 (November 1987), 8.

64 “Arnaut se vante de réaliser l’impossible” (René Lavaud, in Daniel, 134).

323

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

Tan mabellis vostre cortes deman,

qu’ieu no me puesc ni voill a vos cobrire.

Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan;

consiros vei la passada folor,

e vei jausen lo joi qu’esper, denan.

Ara vos prec, per aquella valor

que vos guida al som de l’escalina,

sovenha vos a temps de ma dolor!

I am so pleased by your courteous question,

That I am not able or willing to hide from you.

I am Arnaut, who goes weeping in song;

Grieving, I look back on my past folly,

And I foresee with joy the hope before me.

So now I beg you, by that brave merit

That guides you to the summit of the stairway,

Remember, when the time comes, my sorrow.

In the eloquence and economy of this gesture, and in the pathos of the

scene, a reader may miss the enormity of what Dante has just done. He

has reduced an entire world, an entire language, an entire way of life, an

entire experience of love and delight to the status of benighted sin. And

though he could not bring himself to condemn to Hell the poet he so

admired (whom he has another of his heroes, Guinizelli, describe as “the

greater maker” (“il miglior fabbro”), he reduces him to a mouthpiece for

the newly-ascendant orthodoxy of an Inquisition-era Roman Church.

In this moment, and through this gesture, Dante—among the greatest

poets our world has ever seen, or will ever see—climbs his mountain

of Purgatory, and the new literary mountain of the dolce stil novo, as a

traitor to poetry.

At the peak of this new literary mountain, we find the later figure

of Petrarch. Though he is one of the towering figures in the Western

literary tradition, Petrarch is not a solitary genius who establishes a

new poetic point of view, creating ex nihilo a poetic form that had not

existed before. His original contribution is more evident in terms of

emphasis than form: it is not the choice to write about love, sublimated

65 Dante. Purgatorio, Canto 26.139–48. In La Divina Commedia. Purgatorio, ed. by Ettore

Zolesi (Rome: Armando, 2003), 428–29.

324 Love and its Critics

into a passion for heaven, but rather to make the subject of sublimated,

spiritualized love the dominant focus of his verse, and to change the

vocabulary of love poetry. “Petrarch effected the first major stage in

the spiritualization of love and beauty through his insistence upon the

spiritual nature of womanly beauty—he contributed, as well, a unique

vocabulary which permeates most of the love poetry which follows his:

the beloved as tormenter, [and] the lover as sufferer”.

Much of the imagery and point of view in Petrarch’s poetry is similar

to what we have already seen. The idea of personified love appears

first in Sonnet 3: captured and unable to defend himself because “your

eyes, lady, had bound me”,

Petrarch’s narrator complains that “Love

found me altogether disarmed / and opened the way to the heart

through my eyes / which have become the doors and gates of tears”.

Captured by Love, and bound by the eyes of the “lady” the reader

will soon know as Laura, Petrarch’s poetic voice grows increasingly

pained and desperate. In Sonnet 11 it begins to appear evident this

love is not returned. In fact his expression of love gets in the way and

makes the beloved weary of him:

Mentr’io portava i be’ pensier’ celati,

ch’ànno la mente desïando morta,

vidivi di pietate ornare il volto;

ma poi ch’Amor di me vi fece accorta,

fuor i biondi capelli allor velati

et l’amoroso sguardo in sé raccolto.

Quel ch’i’ piú desiava in voi m’è tolto.

While I kept my loving thoughts hidden,

that brought my mind to wish for death,

I beheld Pity’s face adorned;

but when Love made you notice me,

66 Neal L. Goldstien. “Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Renaissance Vision of Love”. In

Stephen Orgel and Sean Kellen, eds. Shakespeare and the Literary Tradition (London:

Routledge, 1999), 205.

67 “vostr’ occhi, Donna, mi legaro” (Francesco Petrarca. Il Canzoniere, ed. by Paola

Vecchi Galli [Milan: Rizzoli, 1954], 3.4). All further references to Petrarch’s

Canzionere will be to this volume.

68 “Trovommi Amor del tutto disarmato, / et aperta la via per gli occhi al core, / che di

lagrime son fatti uscio et varco” (ibid., 3.9–11).

69 Ibid., 11.5–11.

325

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

you hid your blond hair behind a veil,

and drew back your loving gaze.

What I wanted most in you, he took from me.

Sonnet 12 describes his life as one of “bitter torment” (“l’aspro

tormento”)

that might yet afford him the opportunity to gaze once

more upon:

cape’ d’oro fin farsi d’argento,

et lassar le ghirlande e i verdi panni,

e ‘l viso scolorir che ne’ miei danni

a llamentar mi fa pauroso et lento

a head of golden hair spun like silver,

and the garlands laid by and green cloth,

and your pale face that wounds me

making my lamentations slow and fearful.

At other, more optimistic moments, Petrarch’s narrator is less pained

by than grateful for the opportunity to worship his beloved from afar:

“I bless the place, the time and the hour / that brought so high the

gazing of my eyes”.

But more often, it is pain that characterizes love

in Petrarch’s verse. Sonnet 36 meditates on the possibility of escaping

this agony by dying:

S’io credesse per morte essere scarco

del pensiero amoroso che m’atterra,

colle mie mani avrei già posto in terra

queste mie membra noiose, et quello incarco.

If I believed that by death I could be released

from amorous thoughts that bind me to earth,

with my hands I would already have buried

these my tiresome limbs, and that burden

70 Ibid., 12.1.

71 Ibid., 12.5–8.

72 “I’ benedico il loco e ‘l tempo et l’ora / che sí alto miraron gli occhi mei” (ibid.,

13.5–6).

73 Ibid., 36.1–4.

326 Love and its Critics

But by Sonnet 90, Petrarch is reliably trading on the imagery of earlier

poets like Guinizelli, Colonne, and Dante, including the kinds of

objectification and idealisation that will be a staple of the English poets

who model themselves after Petrarch in the sixteenth century:

Non era l’andar suo cosa mortale,

ma d’angelica forma; et le parole

sonavan altro che pur voce humana:

uno spirito celeste, un vivo sole

fu quel ch’i’ vidi; et se non fosse or tale,

piagha per allentar d’arco non sana.

The way she moved was not a mortal thing,

but in the form of the angels, and her speech

soared higher than any human voice.

A celestial spirit, a living sun

was what I saw there; if she is no longer so,

my wound, though the bow be slack, will not heal.

Like his predecessors, Petrarch does not write of love for a woman. He

writes of passion incited by an object in female form, whose embodied

reality he is all too ready to transform into a living goddess.

Petrarch and Laura. Fresco in Petrarch’s house in Arquà Petrarca.

74 Ibid., 90.9–14.

75 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Affresco_di_Petrarca_e_Laura,_Casa_

del_Petrarca_(Arquà_Petrarca).JPG?uselang=en-gb

327

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

The same transformation is evident in Sonnet 106, where the poet’s

beloved is “a new little angel on graceful wings”,

who captures the

poet in “a silk-woven net”,

while “a sweet light issued forth from her

eyes”.

In Sonnet 121 we see the now-familiar idea that the beloved

is haughty for not returning love. In this case, the beloved should be

punished by Love for this failure:

Or vedi, Amor, che giovenetta donna

tuo regno sprezza e del mio mal non cura,

e tra duo ta’ nemici è sì secura.

Tu se’ armato, et ella in treccie e ‘n gonna

si siede, e scalza, in mezzo i fiori e l’erba,

vèr’ me spietata, e ‘n contra te superba.

I’ son pregion; ma se pietà ancor serba

l’arco tuo saldo, e qualcuna saetta,

fa di te, e di me, signor, vendetta.

Now see, Love, how this young lady

despises your rule, cares not for my pain,

and between two enemies is so secure.

You are in arms, and she in tresses and gown

sits barefoot amidst flowers and the grass,

without pity for me, set against you in pride.

I am in prison, but if some mercy still keeps

your bow strong, with a few arrows,

for yourself and me, my Lord, take revenge.

The popular image of Petrarch is that of the long-suffering lover who

pines with desire, but a recurring feature of his poetry is resentment.

The lover in his poems expresses resentment over the refusal of the

beloved to love in return, and expresses the desire that the beloved be

made to pay for this.

76 “Nova angeletta sovra l’ale accorta” (ibid. 106.1).

77 “un laccio che di seta ordiva” (ibid., 106.5).

78 “sí dolce lume uscia degli occhi suoi” (ibid., 106.8).

79 Ibid., 121.1–9.

328 Love and its Critics

Sonnets 133 and 183 are similar expressions of another common idea:

the lover is wounded by the experience of love and by the mere glance of

the beloved. In Sonnet 133, the beloved is blamed for failing to have mercy:

[…] son già roco,

donna, mercé chiamando, e voi non cale.

Da gli occhi vostri uscìo ‘l colpo mortale,

contra cui non mi val tempo né loco;

da voi sola procede, e parvi un gioco,

il sole e ‘l foco e ‘l vento ond’io son tale.

[…] I am already hoarse,

lady, from begging mercy, and you disregard me.

From your eyes issued the mortal blow

from which I’ve no help, not time or place;

from you all proceeds, and you think it a joke,

the sun, fire, and wind that make me so.

In Sonnet 183, the beloved can kill the poet with the merest look,

for “that

sweet glance of hers can kill me, / and her gentle shrewd little words”,

and women in general are berated for being unreliable and fickle in love:

Femina è cosa mobil per natura;

ond’io so ben ch’un amoroso stato

in cor di donna picciol tempo dura.

A woman is changeable by nature;

And I know well that love’s state

in the heart of a lady lasts but a short time.

80 Ibid., 133.3–8.

81 This idea of the woman’s ability to kill her lover by failing to return his affections is

already present in Le Roman de la Rose, where they are warned that God will punish

them for cruelty: “Ladies, learn from this example, / those of you who mistreat

your lovers, / for if you let them die, / God will know well how to repay you”

(“Dames, cest essample aprenez, / qui vers vos amis mesprenez; / car se vos les

lessiez morir, / Dex le vos savra bien merir”) (Vol. 1, l. 1505–08).

82 “‘l dolce sguardo di costei m’ancide / et le soavi parolette accorte” (Francesco

Petrarca. Il Canzoniere. 183.1–2).

83 Ibid., 183.12–14.

329

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

As Petrarch’s sequence of poems nears its end, it becomes evident that

the beloved Laura is now dead. Sonnet 364 makes reference to having

been held, “burning”, for “twenty-one years” before her death:

Tennemi Amor anni vent’uno ardendo,

lieto nel foco, e nel duol pien di speme;

poi che madonna e ‘l mio cor seco inseme

saliro al ciel, dieci altri anni piangendo.

Love held me burning twenty-one years,

happy in the fire, in my grief, full of hope;

then, when my lady took my heart with her

rising to Heaven, another ten years crying.

As the lover asks to be released by God, it is distressingly clear that

the thirty-one years of focus testified to by the poems were not spent

meditating upon an individual in a relationship of mutual choice,

passion, and regard. Those years were spent instead in something like

worship, not of an individual, but of a paragon, an idol, or a goddess. By

the end of Petrarch’s less-famous collection, the Triunfi, the poet looks to

Laura as a promise of heaven itself:

Amor mi diè per lei sì lunga guerra

che la memoria ancora il cor accenna.

Felice sasso che ‘l bel viso serra!

ché, poi ch’avrà ripreso il suo bel velo,

se fu beato chi la vide in terra,

or che fia dunque a rivederla in cielo?

Love gave to me for her so long a war

that the memory still marks my heart.

Happy the stone that covers her face!

For now that she has resumed her beautiful veil,

if he was blessed who saw her on Earth,

What will it be to see her again in heaven?

84 Ibid., 364.1–4.

85 “Trionfo della Divinita, Capitolo Unico”. ll. 140–45. In Triunfi, ed. by Cristoforo

Pasqualigo (Venezia: Giuseppe Bresciani, 1874), 116, https://books.google.com/

books?id=5_0FAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA115

330 Love and its Critics

Beautiful but unattainable, the beloved Laura of Petrarch’s poems

serves as a passion-drenched metaphor, a stairway to heaven, salvation,

and God. She was never loved as a woman, at least not by Petrarch. She

was an object, not a subject, a means, not an end. She was merely a rung

on the ladder of love for the poet to climb.

III

Post-Fin’amor Italian Prose: Il Libro del Cortegiano

(The Book of the Courtier)

As we can see in Il Libro del Cortegiano, by the Italian courtier and

author Baldassarre Castiglione, Diotima’s ladder of love becomes a

powerful inspiration to the thinking of the Italian literati. Written some

time after 1507 (the year during which its conversations take place),

and first published in 1528, it is a relatively late, though still useful,

encapsulation of Neoplatonic thought in the Italian Renaissance. For the

English Renaissance, however, it arrived right on time. First translated

into English by Thomas Hoby in 1561, The Book of the Courtier became

enormously influential on English literature. In the work’s famous final

section, the main speaker is an actual Italian courtier named Pietro

Bembo, who was thirty-seven years old at the time of the writing. When

Bembo describes the difference between the young and old courtiers, it

is important to remember that the old Courtier is still relatively young,

and that he is speaking from the perspective of high Neoplatonism.

Bembo is at pains to define love as a spiritual and idealized force

corrupted by its association with human bodies and physical beauty.

Already, we can see how forceful is the retreat from the frank eroticism

and individualism of troubadour poetry:

[A]fter a steady dialectical movement that respects man and woman, soul

and body, the humanist and Neoplatonist Pietro Bembo’s climactically

placed hymn to love turns out to be another grand evasion of the human

and an exaltation of angelic beauty and virtue in the tradition of Dante

[and] Petrarch.

86 Hagstrum, 300.

331

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

For Bembo’s ideal courtier, sexual passion and the love of an individual

woman is dangerous, something that needs to be tightly reined in by

the firm hand of philosophy, and this is why he says of courtiers that

“the old can not only love without blame, but more happily than the

young”.

By “the young”, he means boys of an age with Shakespearean

teenagers such as Romeo, Lysander, and Valentine. For Bembo, a

man in his mid-thirties can love more happily than a boy in his mid-

teens because young men lack the capacity Bembo assumes he has—a

capacity to resist physical and emotional desires and redirect them onto

something like a sacred path.

What the Romeos of the world have to do (according to Bembo) is

learn how to transcend the love engaged in by ordinary people who

adore what is right in front of them. This will enable foolish young men

to become wise courtiers, who know how “to love outside the custom

of the profane [and] vulgar”,

by turning their attention away from

beautiful individuals to Beauty itself:

The Courtier, feeling caught, must get rid of every ugliness and totally

escape vulgar love, and so enter into the divine way of love with the

guidance of reason; and first consider that the body in which that beauty

shines, is not the source from which it is born; indeed that beauty is an

incorporeal thing, and (as we have said) a divine ray, and it loses much

of its dignity being combined with that vile and corruptible subject,

because it is the more perfect, the less it participates in matter, and it is

most perfect, when entirely separate.

With this sense of the vileness of the flesh established, the rest of the

Courtier’s mental and emotional journey is a sequential and upward

bound chain: “remove from yourself the blind judgment of sense […]

87 “i vecchi possano non solamente amar senza biasimo, ma talor più felicemente che i

giovani” (Baldassarre Castiglione. Il Libro del Cortegiano [Milano: Giovanni Silvestri,

1822], 448, https://archive.org/stream/illibrodelcorteg00cast#page/448

88 “amar fuor della consuetudine del profano vulgo” (ibid., 462, https://archive.org/

stream/illibrodelcorteg00cast#page/462).

89 il Cortegiano, sentendosi preso, deliberarsi totalmente di fuggir ogni bruttezza dell’amor

vulgare, e così entrar nella divina strada amorosa con la guida della ragione; e prima considerar

che’l corpo, ove quella bellezza risplende, non è il fonte ond’ella nasce; anzi che la bellezza, per

esser cosa incorporea, e (come avemo detto) un raggio divino, perde molto della sua dignità

trovandosi congiunta con quel subietto vile e corruttibile perchè tanto più è perfetta, quanto

men di lui participa e da quello in tutto separata è perfettissima.

Ibid., 463, https://archive.org/stream/illibrodelcorteg00cast#page/463

332 Love and its Critics

and love her no less for the beauty of her soul than of her body”.

The

point is to “devour sweet food for his soul […] without going to the

body with appetites anything less than honest”.

And while loving the

beauty of the soul is a wonderful thing, that love takes on an oddly

pedagogical tone, for the Courtier must become the moral instructor of

the woman who has inspired him with the passion he is trying to deny

in himself by turning it to “higher” purposes:

But let him be careful not to let her run into some error, but with

admonitions and good reminders always try to induce in her modesty,

temperance, true honesty; and be sure that in her mind there come to

be no thoughts but those that are candid and alien to all ugliness and

vice; and thus spreading virtue in the garden of her soul, he will reap

beautiful fruits, and taste them with wonder and delight; and this will be

the true generation and expression of beauty in beauty, which is said by

some to be the purpose and purity of love.

This directly echoes Pausanius’ speech on the Heavenly and Earthly

Aphrodites in the Symposium. For Pausanius, as for Bembo, the higher

love revolves around education and development of the capacities—

moral, intellectual, ethical—of the beloved (though for Pausanius, the

beloved is a young male rather than Bembo’s young female). While the

male is to be the patient, reason-driven teacher, the female is to be the

pliant and willing pupil:

she always will show herself obedient and respectful, sweet and affable,

and as eager to please him, as to be loved by him; and the desires of each

90 “Rimovasi adunque dal cieco giudizio del senso […] e in lei ami non meno la

bellezza dell’animo, che quella del corpo” (ibid., 463–64, https://archive.org/stream/

illibrodelcorteg00cast#page/463).

91 “pascerà di dolcissimo cibo l’anima […] senza passar col desiderio verso il corpo ad

appetito alcuno men che onesto” (ibid., 464, https://archive.org/stream/illibrodelcor

teg00cast#page/464).

92 però tenga cura di non lasciarla incorrere in errore alcuno, ma con le ammonizioni e buoni

ricordi cerchi sempre d’ indurla alla modestia, alla temperanza, alla vera onestà; e faccia che

in lei non abbian mai luogo se non pensieri candidi e alieni da ogni bruttezza di vizi; e cosi

seminando virtù nel giardìn di quel bell’animo, raccorrà ancora frutti di bellissimi costumi,

e gusteragli con mirabil diletto; e questo sarà il vero generare, ed esprimere la bellezza nella

bellezza, il che da alcuni si dice esser il fin d’amore.

Ibid., 464, https://archive.org/stream/illibrodelcorteg00cast#page/464

333

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

will be in harmony with those of the other; and consequently they will

both be happy.

A great deal of Italian and English poetry plays with this notion of the

male who expects the female to be both “obedient” and “affable” where

the pedagogical efforts of his love are concerned, although he is often

disappointed in this regard. Bembo suggests that even kissing should be

regarded as part of this drive toward the spiritual and moral education

of both the male and the “obedient” female. The reasonable lover knows

that mouths are where speech comes from, which reflects rational

thoughts and interprets the soul. Kissing as an erotic act is, for Bembo,

something to be feared, but kissing as a spiritual act is something very

much to be desired:

Because a kiss is the conjoining of body and soul, the danger is that the

sensual lover may be more inclined to the body, than to the soul, but

the rational lover knows that though the mouth is part of the body, it is

the source of words, which are interpreters of souls, […] and because of

this a man delights in bringing his mouth to the mouth of his beloved

lady, not for dishonest desires, but because he feels that the bond is a

transfusion of souls from one body to another […] the kiss, you could

say, is the union of souls instead of bodies; because it has so much force,

that it pulls the soul, and almost separates it from the body; which is why

all chaste lovers want a kiss, as a union of souls.

Any physically-based passion is described as dishonest, filthy, a

distraction, so a kiss isn’t engaged for desire, nor does it raise any. The

kiss, when properly understood by the Courtier, does not take place at

the level of flesh, but points lovers upward on the ladder of love.

93 “essa sempre se gli mostrerà ossequente, dolce e affabile, e così desiderosa di

compiacergli, come d’esser da lui amata; e le voglie dell un e dell’altro saranno

onestissime e concordi; ed essi conseguentemente saranno felicissimi” (ibid., 464,

https://archive.org/stream/illibrodelcorteg00cast#page/464).

94 perchè per essere il bacio congiungimento e dei corpo e dell’anima, pericolo è che l’amante

sensuale non inclini più alla parte dei corpo, che a quella dell’anima, ma l’a mante razionale

conosce che ancora che la bocca sia parte del corpo, nientedimeno per quella si dà esito alle

parole, che sono interpreti dell’anima, […] e perciò si diletta d’unir la sua bocca con quella della

donna amata col bacio, non per moversi a desiderio alcuno disonesto, ma perchè sente che

quello legame è un aprir l’adito alle anime, che tratte dal desiderio l’una dell’altra si trasfondono

alternamente ancor l’una nel corpo dell’altra […] il bacio si può più presto dir congiungimento

d’anima, che di corpo; perchè in quella ha tanta forza, che la tira a sé, e quasi ìa separa dal corpo;

per questo tutti gì’ innamorati casti desiderano il bacio, come congiungimento d’anima.

Ibid., 466–67, https://archive.org/stream/illibrodelcorteg00cast#page/466

334 Love and its Critics

Through Peter Bembo’s speech, Castiglione repeatedly makes the

point that love of an individual, appreciation for human beauty and

erotic attraction are impure and degraded forms of love,

which the

Courtier is wise to reject in favor of Beauty itself:

To escape torment, then, and enjoy beauty without passion, it is necessary

that the Courtier, with the help of reason, revokes entirely his desire to

enjoy beauty in the body, and, as much as he can, meditates on beauty

as something simple and pure, and in the imagination abstract its form

from matter, making it friendly and dear to his soul, and there enjoy

it, keeping it day and night, in any time and place without ever losing

it; always remembering that the body is something very different from

beauty, and not only does not increase it, but decreases its perfection.

For the Courtier who is well-instructed and who governs his passions

appropriately, love leads beyond the mortal and fleshly beloved,

directly to God:

Therefore, we must direct all the thoughts and powers of our souls to

this most holy light that shows us the way that leads to heaven, and

following it, strip off the affects in which we were dressed as we fell,

and by the lowest rung on the ladder that bears the image of sensual

95 There are voices that oppose this notion at the time. One especially notable example

can be found in the work of Tullia d’Aragona, in her Dialogo dell’infinità d’amore of

1547, where the eponymous character claims that erotic love is not to be blamed,

since it arises wholly from nature:

At first I say, that I know well that of those things that we are by nature, we can be neither

blamed nor praised; and therefore, neither plants nor animals can be blamed or praised for such

love; neither should it be called lascivious, or dishonest in them, nor even in men.

Al primo dico, che io so bene che di quelle cose, che ci vengono dalla natura, non possiamo

essere biasmati, né lodati; e perciò né nelle piante, né negli animali non si può biasmar cotale

amore; né in loro si chiama lascivo, o disonesto, né negli uomini ancora.

Tullia d’Aragona. Dialogo della infinità d’amore (1547). In Della infinita d’amore dialogo

di Tullia D’Aragona (Milan: G. Daelli & Co., 1864), 67, https://archive.org/stream/

bub_gb_1FOekK6PUbsC#page/n103

96 Per fuggir adunque il tormento di questa assenza, e goder la bellezza senza passione, bisogna

che l Cortegiano con l’aiuto della ragione, revochi in tutto il desiderio dal corpo alla bellezza

sola, e, quanto più può, la contempli in sé stessa semplice e pura, e dentro nella im imaginazione

la formi astratta da ogni materia e così la faccia amica e cara all’anima sua, ed ivi la goda, e seco

l’abbia giorno e notte, in ogni tempo e luogo senza dubbio di perderla mai; tornandosi sempre

a memoria che l corpo è cosa diversissima dalia bellezza, e non solamente non le accresce, ma

le diminuisce la sua perfezione.

Castiglione, 469, https://archive.org/stream/illibrodelcorteg00cast#page/469

335

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

beauty, ascend to the sublime rooms where the heavenly, lovable, and

real beauty lives, secreted in the hidden chambers of God, so that the

profane eye cannot see it.

In such thought the individual is valuable only in terms of its connection

to the universal. The beauty of an individual person is only of any

significance in that it points beyond that individual, serving as a symbol

for the universal concept of beauty.

From this point of view, the body is a prison to be escaped from.

For Bembo, a focus on the body distracts lovers from the holy way of

love dependent on reason, which leads them from the world of matter,

through the higher contemplative stages, on a spiritual approach to the

divine. As Agnolo Firenzuola expressed it in 1548:

a beautiful woman is the most beautiful object you will ever see, and

beauty is the greatest gift God has given all human creatures; and

through its virtue, the soul is guided to contemplation, and through

contemplation to the desire of all the things of heaven.

From this point of view, love is reason coupled with informed desire

for the highest beauty, the highest reality, for God himself. In short, for

the wise older Courtier, love is a spiritual exercise that is approached

through bodies that are left behind as soon as possible.

97 Indrizziamo adunque tutti i pensieri e le forze dell’anima nostra a questo santissimo lume che

ci mostra la via che al ciel conduce, e drieto a quello, spogliandoci gli affetti che nei descendere

ci eravamo vestiti, per la scala che neìl’ infimo grado tiene l’ombra di bellezza sensuale,

ascendiamo alla sublime stanza ove abita la celeste, amabile e vera bellezza che nei secreti

penetrali di Dio sta nascosta, acciocché gli occhi profani veder non la possano.

Ibid., 474, https://archive.org/stream/illibrodelcorteg00cast#page/474

98 “la donna bella, è il piu bello obietto che si rimiri: et la belleza è il maggior dono

che faceβe Iddio all humana creatura. Concio sia che per la di lei uirtù, noi ne

indiriziamo l’animo alla contemplatione, et per la contemplatione al desiderio delle

cose del Cielo” (Agnolo Firenzuola. “Belleza delle Donne”. In Prose di M. Agnolo

Firenzuola Fiorentino [Florence: Bernardo Guinta, 1548], 62, https://archive.org/

stream/bub_gb_hdGH5df6NxIC#page/n127).

336 Love and its Critics

The Sixteenth-Century: Post-Fin’amor Transitions

in Petrarchan-Influenced Poetry

It was eventually in England that the troubadour spirit—quite nearly

destroyed by the ascendancy of the Inquisition in Europe—once again

found rich soil in which to take root and thrive. In a nation of “heretics”

the idea of human love was resurrected from the pious grave into which

Innocent III had tried to have it eternally immured. Ironically, the

Occitan poets disappeared quite nearly without a trace in France, where

Neopetrarchism took hold in the sixteenth-century work of, among

others, Maurice Scève and Louise Labé. Scève’s work, in ten-line units

called dizains, is thematically modeled after Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and

faithful to the traditions of Plato and Diotima:

Bien que raison soit nourrice de l’ame,

Alimenté est le sens du doulx songe

De vain plaisir, qui en tous lieux m’entame,

Me penetrant, comme l’eau en l’esponge.

Dedans lequel il m’abysme, & me plonge

Me suffocquant toute vigueur intime.

Dont pour excuse, & cause legitime

Je ne me doibs grandement esbahir,

Si ma tressaincte, & sage Dyotime

Tousjours m’enseigne a aymer, & hair.

Though reason is nursemaid to the soul,

The sweet power of my sensuous dreams

Of vain pleasure, follows me everywhere,

Penetrating me, like water in a sponge,

Thrusting and plunging me into the abyss,

Suffocating me in my inmost heart.

This for excuse, although legitimate

Cannot amaze me or leave me in shock,

If my holy and wise Diotima

Still teaches me to love, and how to hate.

99 Maurice Scève. “Délie 439”. In I. D. McFarlane, ed. The Délie of Maurice Scève

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 360.

337

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

Labé, on the other hand, writes a Petrarchan style of verse that reverses

the typical gender roles of the genre: the voice of the lover who burns

unrequitedly is female, while the cruel and unforthcoming beloved is

male. In her sixteenth sonnet, Apres qu’un tems la gresle et le tonnere, she

laments what appears to be her lover’s sexual impotence:

Après qu’un tems la gresle et le tonnerre

Ont le haut mont de Caucase batu,

Le beau jour vient, de lueur revêtu.

Quand Phebus ha son cerne fait en terre,

Et l’Ocean il regaigne à grand erre,

Sa seur se montre avec son chef pointu.

Quand quelque tems le Parthe ha combatu,

Il prent la fuite et son arc il desserre.

Un tems fay vù et consolé pleintif,

Et defiant de mon feu peu hatif;

Mais, maintenant que tu m’as embrasée

Et suis au point auquel tu me voulois,

Tu as ta flame en quelque eau arrosée,

Et es plus froit qu’estre je ne soulois.

100

After a time in which hail and thunder

Have beaten the top of Mount Caucasus,

A beautiful day comes, clothed again in light.

When Phoebus encircles his land again,

And dives into the sea, his pale sister

Moves back into our view with pointed crown.

When for too long the Parthian warrior fights,

He turns from his arc and loosens his bow.

I consoled you once when I saw you sad,

And that aroused my long slow-burning fire;

But now that you have brought me to a burn

And brought me to the point you wished,

You’ve doused your flame with flowing drink,

And yours is colder than mine can ever be.

100 Louise Labé. “Sonnet 16”. Oeuvres de Louise Labé, ed. by Prosper Blancheman

(Paris: Librarie des Bibliophiles, 1875), 124, https://books.google.com/books?id=

w_fl8BM3_SUC&pg=PA124

338 Love and its Critics

Here, the woman pines in vain desire for the man, and must, like poor

Petrarch, rest in unrest, and abide in perpetual frustration. Still, despite

the change of gender roles, the song remains the same—the beloved

remains just as inaccessible in the sixteenth-century Lyonaisse poetry of

Labé as in the fourteenth-century Tuscan poetry of Petrarch. Even in her

famous eighteenth sonnet, Baise m’encor, rebaise moy et baise, a reworking

of Catullus’ fifth ode Let Us Live, My Lesbia, and Let Us Love (Vivamus,

mea Lesbia, atque amemus), Labé writes of a love that is passionate, but

frustrated and impossible to encompass fully:

Baise m’encor, rebaise moy et baise;

Donne m’en un de tes plus savoureus,

Donne m’en un de tes plus amoureus:

Je t’en rendray quatre plus chaus que braise.

Las! te pleins tu? Ça, que ce mal j’apaise,

En t’en donnant dix autres doucereus.

Ainsi meslans nos baisers tant heureus,

Jouissons nous l’un de l’autre à notre aise.

Lors double vie à chacun en suivra;

Chacun en soy et son ami vivra.

Permets m’Amour penser quelque folie:

Tousjours suis mal, vivant discrettement,

Et ne me puis donner contentement

Si hors de moy ne fay quelque saillie.

101

Kiss me again, kiss and kiss me once more;

Give me one of your most savory,

Give me one of your most amorous,

I’ll return them four times hotter than coals.

Does sadness fill you? I’ll appease that pain,

By giving you ten other sweets;

Thus mixing our happy kisses

We may enjoy each other at our ease.

Then we will live twice:

Each ourselves, and each in the other’s love.

Love, let me dream about such foolish things:

It hurts me, living so discreetly,

101 Labé. “Sonnet 18”, 126, https://books.google.com/books?id=w_fl8BM3_SUC&pg=PA126

339

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

And nothing will give me contentment

Unless I break outside myself.

Despite the open eroticism of this sonnet, with the double meaning of

“baise” (kiss and/or fuck—make the latter choice and the poem feels

somewhat different), the troubadour notes are overwhelmed by the

Petrarchan score: “Permets m’Amour penser quelque folie”—human love

will only be a dream, and a foolish one at that. There will be no kisses,

and no contentment. Compare this to Catullus’ poem, in which there is

no dominant note of frustration, though condemnation is reserved for

the old moralists who would prevent lovers from enjoying each other:

Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus,

rumoresque senum severiorum

omnes unius aestimemus assis!

soles occidere et redire possunt:

nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,

nox est perpetua una dormienda.

da mi basia mille, deinde centum,

dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,

deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.

dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,

conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,

aut ne quis malus invidere possit,

cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

102

Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,

and the rumors of the old and strict

all value as a single penny!

The sun sets and dies but will return again:

But for us, when our brief light has died,

The night is eternal sleep.

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,

then another thousand, then a second hundred,

then yet another thousand, then a hundred.

Then, when we have made many thousands,

102 Gaius Valerius Catullus. Catullus. Tibullus. Pervigilium Veneris, ed. by F. W. Cornish

(Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913), 6,8.

340 Love and its Critics

jumble the count, refuse to know the total,

lest anyone judge with an evil eye,

when he knows how many have been our kisses.

By way of contrast, in a distant area of the continent where the Inquisition

had been relatively weak,

103

and the urge to transform the passion of

love poetry into the piety of worship had not found expression in a

dolce stil novo, love poetry has much of the passionate essence found

in troubadour verse, without the note of frustration and failure often

found in Labé. The sixteenth-century Armenian poet Nahaphet Quchak,

known for his short lyric poems of love, or hayren, writes in a frankly

passionate and physical manner that is reminiscent of Guilhem IX:

Իմ սիրծ ի qո վար սիրւդ’

զետ աշնան խազել կւ դոխայ։

Արծւնq ի յերեսս Ի վեր’

զետ գարնան անձրեվ կւ ծոխայ։

Հոգիս ի յիսնե ելավ՝

մեկ մի qո ծոծոյդ ճար արա։

Ծոծիկս ե ծոծիդ սովոր՝

այլ ւհնդ վոր յերտայ՝ մեկ ասա’.

104

From your burning love,

my heart trembles like an autumnal leaf:

My tears streaming down my face:

as if a spring rain drizzles.

My soul is being tortured,

Give me the cure of your bosom.

My breast is used to your breasts,

Tell me, how will I live if they leave?

103 “About 1370 Gregory XI appointed the Dominican Friar John Gallus as inquisitor

in the East, who in conjunction with Friar Elias Petit planted the institution […]

in Armenia” (Henry Charles Lea. A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages,

Vol. 1 [New York: Macmillan, 1906], 355). Gregory “regarded the members of the

Armenian Church in Cilicia as schismatics” (Krzysztof Stopka. Armenia Christiana:

Armenian Religious Identity and the Churches of Constantinople and Rome [Krakow:

Jagiellonian University Press, 2016], 270), but the fall of the Cilician Kingdom in

1375 placed the area under Muslim rule, and beyond the reach of any Pope.

104 Hayren 20. Nahaphet Quchak, Haryur u mek hayren, ed. by Arshak Madoyan and

Irina Karumyan (Yerevan: Sovetakan Grokh, 1976).

341

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

For Quchak, love is physical and joyful, not something to be sublimated

into spiritual devotion, or made to serve as a means to an end, the

merest first rung on a ladder of love leading from Earth to Heaven. For

Quchak, as for the troubadours, heaven is here, and its temple is the

body of his beloved:

Qանի մարն զիս բերեր՝

qահանի ճեմ խոստովաներ։

Ւրտեխ qահանայ տեսեր՝

նայ ծրեր ճամպւս ւ յելեր։

Վորտեխ մեկ ախվոր տեսել’

գիրկ ւ ծոծ վի դեմ գնածեր։

Ծոծիկն եմ ձամպտւն արել՝

ծւհծերւն եմ խոստովաներ.

105

How many faults are born,

I haven’t confessed to the priest:

Wherever a priest I’ve seen,

I’ve changed my route and left:

Wherever a beauty I’ve seen,

I’ve straight gone to her bosom and embrace,

Made her bosom my altar,

To her tits I’ve made my confessions.

In the final line, the refusal of euphemism drives home the point: love

is its own justification, and needn’t apologize to anyone or pretend its

desires are in any way shameful. Quite the opposite, in fact; love is to be

celebrated in wine and song:

Իմ բարծրագնած լւսին՝

շատ բարեվ տար իմ կիվսելին:

—Զ բարեվդ յես Ի ւր տանեմ՝

ճեմ գիտեր ւհզտւնն կիվզելին:

—Գնա Ի վերայ տախին՝

բարձր պատ ւ ծարն Ի միձին։

Նստեր Ի ծարի շqին՝

կ խմե իր լւրձ ապիկին՝

105 Ibid., Hayren 65.

342 Love and its Critics

Խմե ւ հայրեն կ’ասե։

տ’ «Ինճ անւշ ե սերն ւ գինին».

106

My high and noble moon,

Take many greetings to my beauty

—Where should I take your greeting?

I don’t know the house of your beauty.

—Go to the upper neighborhood

Where she sits between high wall and tree:

Sitting in the shadow of the tree,

Drinking with seriousness,

Drinking and singing hayrens:

As “How sweet are love and wine!”

It is this spirit—this unapologetic celebration of passion and desire, so like

that of the troubadours—that French and Italian poetry lost, and English

poetry would successfully struggle to recover: “the Provençal tradition

was much more continuous and lasting in England than in France. […]

The manner, style, metrical models, and the very themes and conceits

of the troubadour tradition, [were] transported bodily one might say,

into England”.

107

For decades, however, the influence of Petrarch, and

not the troubadours, was the dominant force in the English poetry of

the sixteenth century before Shakespeare. Such early Tudor sonneteers

as Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, and later

Elizabethan figures like Philip Sidney both borrow from and struggle

against Petrarch, creating a new vocabulary of poetry in English. These

poems often reveal their Petrarchan roots, as they treat such subjects

as the impossibility of being loved in return by the chosen object of the

poet’s love. Wyatt made extensive use of Petrarch in his own poetry:

Of the Italian poets it was Petrarch whom Wyatt copied most freely.

From Petrarch he derived the sonnet and certain conventional

sentiments, which, once introduced into English love poetry, formed its

staple subject-matter, with certain interruptions and revolts, for about a

century and a half.

108

106 Ibid., Hayren 81.

107 Briffault, 193–94.

108 E. M. W. Tillyard. In E. M. W. Tillyard, ed. The Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt (London:

The Scholartis Press, 1929), 23.

343

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

For example, Wyatt’s famous 1557 sonnet, “Whoso List to Hunt”, makes clear

the poet’s painful longing, his extensive borrowings from Petrarch, and his

acute awareness of how love and desire are affected by rank and station:

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,

But as for me, helas, I may no more.

The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,

I am of them that farthest cometh behind.

Yet may I by no means my wearied mind

Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore

Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,

Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.

Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,

As well as I may spend his time in vain.

And graven with diamonds in letters plain

There is written, her fair neck round about:

‘Noli me tangere for Caesar’s I am,

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame’.

109

Wyatt’s sonnet, a loose adaptation of Petrarch’s Sonnet 190, borrows the

Petrarchan model while changing its terms:

Wyatt’s [Caesar] is secular, possessive and tyrannous, but his Diere is also

secular and arguably powerful herself. Wyatt’s added description of her

as “wylde for to hold: though I seme tame” hints at a powerful duplicity

not present in Petrarch. There is a suggestion that this duplicity might

equally be exercised against the speaker, his rivals, or [Caesar] himself.

110

The “hind” in all likelihood was Anne Boleyn, the paramour, later the

wife, of Henry VIII, and Wyatt’s poem captures the angst of a man who

desires a high-placed woman whom he can never have, in much the

same way that Bernart de Ventadorn’s twelfth-century poem, When

Fresh Leaves and Shoots Appear (Can l’erba fresch’e·lh folha par), describes

the passionate devotion of Bernart for Eleanor of Aquitaine. Just as

Bernart’s poem describes the impossibility of loving the Queen of

109 Thomas Wyatt. Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems, ed. by R. A. Rebholz (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 77.

110 Rachel Falconer. “A Reading of Wyatt’s ‘Who so list to hunt’”. In Michael Hattaway,

ed. A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (London: Blackwell,

2003), 181.

344 Love and its Critics

Henry II, Wyatt’s poem recognizes the futility and danger of crossing

the power of Henry VIII, the “Caesar” of the poem.

111

Wyatt’s sonnets often feature the kinds of woman-as-cruel-angel

imagery seen in Petrarch, including the comparisons of the beloved’s

eyes with fire, or sparks, or the stars and sun. In “Such Vain Thought as

Wonted to Mislead Me”, the beloved is described as “her whom reason

bids me flee”

112

before the poet cries out in resignation, “She fleeth as

fast by gentle cruelty / And after her my heart would fain be gone, / But

armed sighs my way do stop anon, / ‘Twixt hope and dread locking my

liberty”.

113

In another sonnet, “The Lively Sparks that Issue from those

Eyes”, Wyatt’s lines bemoan the power of the beloved’s gaze:

Was never man could any thing devise

Sunbeams to turn with so great vehemence

To daze man’s sight, as by their bright presence

Dazed am I; much like unto the guise

Of one stricken with dint of lightning,

Blind with the stroke, and crying here and there.

114

111 Though the question of whether or not Wyatt had an affair with Anne Boylen has

been long debated, it does not seem likely ever to be proven on the positive side.

“There is no evidence that Wyatt’s verses or his attention ever deeply moved Anne,

for she played for higher stakes, with the crown as her goal” (Retha M. Warnicke.

“The Eternal Triangle and Court Politics: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Sir Thomas

Wyatt”. Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 18: 4 [Winter,

1986], 578, https://doi.org/10.2307/4050130). There is also “no record linking Anne’s

name to Wyatt’s […] prior to the date of his imprisonment in 1536 when five

other men were executed for committing adultery and incest with her” (Retha M.

Warnicke. The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII

[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 65). Modern scholarship denies

the latter charges, seeing them as part of the vicious push and pull of Tudor politics,

as illustrated in Adam Blackwood’s pamphlet broadside: “The marriage of the King

with Anne Boleyn could not stand by any law in the world, Anne being his natural

daughter. [It is] an illegitimate marriage, and that which it begot a bastard […],

Elizabeth” (“Le mariage du Roy avec Anne Boullen ne pouvoit subsister par aucune

loy du monde, estant icelle Anne sa filie naturelle, [c’est un] mariage illegitime, &

celle qui en estoit procree bastarde […], Elizabet”) (Martyre de la Royne d’Escosse.

Edimbourg, 1587, Sig. C3v, 37 [misprinted as 73], https://books.google.com/

books?id=_mZUAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA37).

112 Wyatt (1978), 84, l. 4.

113 Ibid., ll. 5–8.

114 Ibid., 84, ll. 5–10.

345

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

Wyatt’s poems also work the theme of the lady who cruelly fails to

be “tractable” and “willing” where a man’s professions of love are

concerned. In “Behold, Love, Thy Power How She Despiseth” (a loose

translation of Petrarch’s Sonnet 121), the beloved who refuses love in

return is to be punished:

Behold, Love.

I am in hold. If thee pity moveth,

Go bend thy bow that stony hearts breaketh

And with some stroke revenge the displeasure

Of thee and him that sorrow doth endure

And, as his lord, thee lowly entreateth.

115

At times, however, Wyatt will depart from his Petrarchan model in

serious and purposeful ways: “Wyatt was writing from within a culture

in which erotic love was not a celebrated subject of contemplation”, and

that fact “needs to be fully accounted for when we consider the changes

he made to Petrarch’s poems”.

116

One of the most striking differences is

the attitude taken toward the woman in the works:

Whereas Petrarch famously idealizes Laura’s virtues in a manner

comparable to Dante’s depiction of the heavenly Beatrice in La Vita

Nuova, Wyatt is reluctant to praise his mistress, either physically or

spiritually. There are almost no descriptions of Wyatt’s mistress in any

of his poems—no blazons or paeans to her beauty—and she is certainly

not treated as a flawless angelic creature.

117

Another major difference is that “Wyatt conspicuously avoids […]

Petrarch’s notion that dying of love is the desired end. […] Thus in the

sonnet that begins, ‘Eche man me telleth I chaunge moost my devise’,

Wyatt informs his mistress that he shall remain steadfast in his affection

so long as his body and soul remain together”, but no longer.

118

Nor does

Wyatt write of human love as a ladder or pathway to divine love: “When

Wyatt wants to write about love of God, he does not move through the

vehicle of loving an earthly woman. Instead, in a pattern that becomes

115 Ibid., 71, ll. 9–13.

116 Raimie Targoff. Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 50.

117 Ibid.

118 Ibid., 66.

346 Love and its Critics

typical of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English poets, he shifts

decisively from erotic to devotional poetry”.

119

Wyatt’s verse will also

turn to bitter humor, as it casts a cynical eye on the subject of truth and

lies in a poem written to his tongue, “Because I have thee still kept from

lies and blame”, in which Wyatt berates that often-speechless organ for

failing to keep faith with him, like an intractable and unwilling beloved:

Unkind tongue, right ill hast thou me rendered,

For such desert to do me wreak and shame.

[…]

Then are ye gone when I should make my moan.

And you so ready sighs to make me shright,

Then are ye slack when that ye should outstart,

And only my look declareth my heart.

120

Where Wyatt both uses and resists Petrarch, altering his themes in

critical ways, the Earl of Surrey, Henry Howard, is at once more faithful

and more whimsical an imitator of his Italian model, often letting flights

of fancy loose while expressing the familiar themes of the cruel lady, the

blazing power of her eyes, and the pain of the rejected lover. In “Each

Beast can Choose his Fere According to his Mind”, first published in

Tottel’s Miscellany in 1557, Howard creates a beast fable to dramatize the

cruelty of a lady who refused to dance with a man who asked her. The

man is described as a noble lion, while the woman is a coy wolf:

A lion saw I late, as white as any snow,

Which seemed well to lead the race, his port the same did show.

Upon the gentle beast to gaze it pleased me,

For still methought he seemed well of noble blood to be.

And as he pranced before, still seeking for a make,

As who would say, ‘There is none here, I trow, will me forsake’,

I might perceive a Wolf as white as whalèsbone,

A fairer beast of fresher hue, beheld I never none;

Save that her looks were coy, and froward eke her grace.

121

119 Ibid., 78.

120 Wyatt (1978), 79, ll. 3–4, 11–14.

121 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. The Poetical Works of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, ed.

by Robert Bell (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1854), 79, ll. 3–11, https://archive.org/

347

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

On asking her to dance, the lion is repulsed by the wolf in no

uncertain terms:

‘Lion’, she said, ‘if thou hadst known my mind before,

Thou hadst not spent thy travail thus, nor all thy pain for-lore.

Do way! I let thee weet, thou shalt not play with me:

Go range about, where thou mayst find some meeter fere for thee’.

122

The lion’s response is at once indignant and impotent, filled with the

rage of the lover who expects the beloved to be compliant and responsive

to his advances:

‘Cruel! you do me wrong, to set me thus so light;

Without desert for my good will to shew me such despite.

[…]

And thus farewell, Unkind, to whom I bent and bow;

I would you wist, the ship is safe that bare his sails so low.

Sith that a Lion’s heart is for a Wolf no prey,

With bloody mouth go slake your thirst on simple sheep, I say’.

123

Elsewhere, Howard is more typically Petrarchan, as in a poem that

bemoans a young woman’s refusal to show her face or hair to a man

who has declared his love for her. In “I Never Saw my Lady Lay

Apart” (a translation of Petrarch’s Sonnet 11, Lassare il velo per sole o

per ombra), the poet writes of the pain of being refused the sight for

which he longs:

Yet since she knew I did her love and serve,

Her golden tresses clad alway with black,

Her smiling looks that hid thus evermore,

And that restrains which I desire so sore.

124

Here, the reader is at home in the familiar language and imagery of

the Italian sonnets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The lover

stream/poeticalworkshe00vauxgoog#page/n89

122 Ibid., 80, ll. 18–21, https://archive.org/stream/poeticalworkshe00vauxgoog#page/n90

123 Ibid., 81–82, ll. 26–27, 68–71, https://archive.org/stream/poeticalworkshe00vaux

goog#page/n91

124 Ibid., 52–53, ll. 8–11, https://archive.org/stream/poeticalworkshe00vauxgoog#page/n62

348 Love and its Critics

is denied access to even the sight of his beloved; the lady is described

as cruel—denying the lover specifically because he loves, the ultimate

in intractable and unwilling behavior. Love is described as painful,

dangerous, and next door to fatal in these poems, and as Howard

ends his poem “When summer took in hand the winter to assail”, the

poet warns readers away from love: “A mirror let me be unto ye lovers

all; / Strive not with love; for if ye do, it will ye thus befall”.

125

But though Wyatt and Howard are important, by far the more

famous, and still more widely-read poet is Philip Sidney. Soldier,

courtier, diplomat, and poet, Sidney packed more into his not-quite

thirty-two years than many of us do into a span of seventy or eighty.

He defended poetry, in The Defence of Poesie, against anti-theatricalists

and moralists like Stephen Gosson (himself a failed playwright). He

wrote one of the most popular and influential prose romances in the

English language—The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia—which exists in

multiple forms due to his death mid-revision. But most famously, he

is the author of the first of the so-called sonnet sequences in English.

Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (first printed in 1591, five years after his

death), took the passion and pain, the devotion and loneliness, the hope

and despair of Petrarch’s poetry and made them English. However,

what Michael Drayton would, in 1619, call a “Muse […] rightly of the

English strain”,

126

is not quite what we see in Sidney. Though he was—

along with Spenser—the most brilliant lyric poet of his time, he was

heavily in debt to his Petrarchan model, no matter how powerfully he

reworked it into English verse.

The physical imagery with which Sidney has Astrophil (star-lover)

describe Stella (star) demonstrates the debt. Right away, we see the

focus on the eyes of the beloved, in sonnet 7: “When Nature made her

chiefe worke, Stella’s eyes, / In colour blacke why wrapt she beames so

bright?”

127

Stella’s eyes are so bright, in fact, that if “if no vaile those brave

gleames did disguise, / They sun-like should more dazle than delight”.

128

125 Ibid., 47, ll. 47–48, https://archive.org/stream/poeticalworkshe00vauxgoog#page/n57

126 Michael Drayton. “To the Reader of these Sonnets”, l. 13. Idea. In Arundell Esdaile, ed.

Daniel’s Delia and Drayton’s Idea (London: Chatto & Windus, 1908), 67, https://books.

google.com/books?id=mOiobc0PmsgC&pg=PA67

127 Philip Sidney. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. by William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1962), 168, ll. 1–2.

128 Ibid., ll. 7–8.

349

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

Sonnet 12 describes Stella in terms that fit squarely within the tradition

seen in Bembo’s speech and Petrarch’s poetry of regarding the beloved

as cruel and intractable for refusing to return the love of the young man

who worships her: “O no, her heart is such a Cittadell, / So fortified with

wit, stor’d with disdaine, / That to win it, is all the skill and paine”.

129

The “cruelty” of the beloved who rejects the lover leads, in Sonnet 48,

to a declaration that the lover will die from his wounds, and a plea for the

beloved to kill him quickly if she cannot love him: “Yet since my death-

wound is already got, / Deare Killer, spare not thy sweet cruell shot: / A

kind of grace it is to kill with speed”.

130

We can hear echos of Petrarch’s

Sonnets 133 and 183 in these lines, in which the lady can kill with a look.

Perhaps the most famous of Sidney’s sonnets, Sonnet 71, appears

initially to be a sublime mix of Petrarchan ingredients: Stella’s eyes

are like the sun (“inward sun in thine eyes shineth”); love for Stella is

soon turned toward away from physical desire and toward love for the

spiritual good (“So while thy beauty draws the heart to love, / As fast

thy virtue bends that love to good”:); and Astrophil is in pain for the

lack of Stella, the physical absence of Stella metaphorized as food (“‘But

ah’, Desire still cries, ‘give me some food’”.):

Who will in fairest booke of Nature know

How Vertue may best lodg’d in beauty be;

Let him but learne of Love to reade in thee,

Stella, those faire lines which true goodnesse show.

There shall he find all vices’ overthrow,

Not by rude force, but sweetest soveraigntie

Of reason, from whose light those night-birds flie;

That inward sunne in thine eyes shineth so.

And not content to be Perfection’s heire

Thy selfe, doest strive all minds that way to move,

Who marke in thee what is in thee most faire.

So while thy beautie drawes the heart to love,

As fast thy Vertue bends that love to good:

“But ah”, Desire still cries, “give me some food”.

131

129 Ibid., 171, ll. 12–14.

130 Ibid., 189, ll. 12–14.

131 Ibid., 201, ll. 1–14.

350 Love and its Critics

But in this poem, one can hear a touch of the troubadour melody mixed

into the Petrarchan score. While Astrophil extravagantly praises his

beloved, he does not necessarily idealize her, describing Stella’s virtues

as impediments to his desire. This conflict is clearly evident in Sonnet 72:

Desire, though thou my old companion art,

And oft so clings to my pure Love, that I

One from the other scarcely can descrie,

While each doth blow the fier of my hart;

Now from thy fellowship I needs must part,

Venus is taught with Dian’s wings to flie:

I must no more in thy sweet passions lie;

Vertue’s gold now must head my Cupid’s dart.

Service and Honor, wonder with delight,

Feare to offend, will worthie to appeare,

Care shining in mine eyes, faith in my sprite,

These things are left me by my only Deare;

But thou Desire, because thou wouldst have all,

Now banisht art, but yet alas how shall?

132

Sidney makes his Astrophil suffer from unsatisfied desire, no matter

how purifying his love for Stella should be from the Neoplatonist or

Petrarchan point of view. In the tension between Astrophil’s often-

Petrarchan attitudes and his powerful desire, we can also see the

influence of Dante, for whom Beatrice’s beauty was figured as a solemn

promise of heavenly reward. Astrophil’s contemplation of Stella’s

beauty educates him as a lover, but it also spurs his will and desire:

“No matter how fallen Astrophil’s will becomes, he remains valiant and

ready for self-sacrifice, although he cannot resolve the psychic tension

resulting from the opposing demands of love and virtue in his mind”.

133

It is in Sidney’s later sonnets where the carefully-constructed

Neoplatonic balance between “love and virtue” topples to the ground.

Sidney does this by changing the poems’ focus from the divine powers

of the beloved’s beauty to the human anguish of the lover’s emotional

conflict. The poems of Sidney’s sequence read like a painful exercise in

132 Ibid., 202, ll. 1–14.

133 Katona Gábor. “The Lover’s Education: Psychic Development in Sidney’s ‘Astrophil

and Stella’”. Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 1: 2 (1995), 4.

351

7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose

a young man’s trying (and failing) to tamp down physical desire—a

desire that will never be sated, consummated, or satisfied—while

attempting to convince himself that it is acceptable to sublimate or

spiritualize that desire for a woman he will never have, against whom

he now and then breaks out into resentful accusation, and for whom

his physical and emotional desires never slacken even in the slightest.

The orthodox Neoplatonist position outlined by Peter Bembo in The

Book of the Courtier insists that such a resolution is not only acceptable,

but decidedly preferable. But as Astrophil bids farewell to the world,

at the end of the sequence, the stated preference for “Eternal Love”,

the love of heaven, seems forced: “Then farewell world; thy uttermost

I see: / Eternal Love, maintain thy life in me”. One cannot help but hear,

if faintly, the earlier plea of Desire: “give me some food”.

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

The Value of the Individual in the Sonnets

The true recovery of the troubadour tradition comes with Shakespeare,

the poet and playwright who “towers like a mountain peak above

the surrounding foothills, but is one substance and structure with

them”.

Most truly “of the English strain”, Shakespeare’s sonnets are a

reversing, even a mocking of the Petrarchan mode and the Neoplatonic

sublimation of passion into worship that sometimes marks the poetry

of Sidney. Rather than treating the individual as a means to an end, the

lowest rung on the ladder of love, Shakespeare’s sonnets reverse this

emphasis, valuing the individual as an end in itself, not a means to some

higher goal.

In effecting this reversal, Sonnet 1 begins with a recognizably Platonic

image, “beauty’s rose”, which is something like the form of rose, rather

than the tangible flower which, for a good Platonist or Neoplatonist,

is merely a copy of the higher reality. In the terms of the sonnet, “we”

want to see a proliferation of such copies in order that the form or idea

will not disappear from the world:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,

That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

1 Briffault, 197.

354 Love and its Critics

But as the riper should by time decease,

His tender heir might bear his memory;

In the following lines the young man addressed in the sonnet is chided

for not reproducing himself and his beauty, thus removing that beauty

from the world, and limiting the ability of others to perceive the higher

form due to the slow degradation of the copy.

But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,

Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,

Making a famine where abundance lies,

Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:

The young man is accused of being what we might call a narcissist

today. He is “contracted” (married, bound) to his own eyes, rather than

the brilliantly blazing eyes of a Petrarchan beloved; he seems in love

with himself, like someone who wakes up, looks in the mirror, and falls

in love all over again every morning. So far, the sonnet seems to fit the

religious and allegorical frame with which Helen Vendler surrounds it:

When God saw his creatures, he commanded them to increase and

multiply. Shakespeare, in this first sonnet of the sequence, suggests

we have internalized the paradisal command in an aestheticized form

[…] We are also educated in the speaker’s culture—here, in such stock

figures as the medieval Rose of beauty, […] the command from Genesis

to increase and multiply, the dynastic obligation to produce heirs, and

so on.

However, as the sonnet continues, it becomes clear that the religious and

allegorical frame does not fit; the poet regards this young man’s beauty

as something both important and tragically ephemeral, a moment’s

brightness that will soon be overwhelmed by the darkness of the grave.

2 William Shakespeare. “Sonnet 1”, ll. 1–4. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works,

ed. by Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (New York: Pelican, 2002), 67. All

further references to the sonnets will be from this edition, and will be referenced in

the notes by sonnet number and line number(s).

3 1. 5–8.

4 Helen Vendler. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of

Harvard University Press, 1997), 46.

355

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,

And only herald to the gaudy spring,

Within thine own bud buriest thy content,

And tender churl mak’st waste in niggarding:

Pity the world, or else this glutton be,

To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

The shift in emphasis is already clear—rather than being primarily

concerned with “beauty’s rose”, the form of beauty, or with any

God-given command to reproduce, this poem is concerned with the

preservation of the individual rose (the young man himself), or at least

with the preservation of the memory of that rose.

The next several sonnets make that concern obvious. Their power

depends on the tragic sense of watching as a beautiful individual slowly

but surely fades away. These sonnets focus on the value inherent in the

person, not on preserving the form of Beauty for the next generation.

That can take care of itself; the poems speak of preserving the all-too-

ephemeral beauty of an individual subject to time, decay, and death.

As with the troubadour poems, the individual takes center stage here, a

flesh-and-blood mortal who is of worth in himself.

In Sonnet 3 the young man is placed in a sequence of acts of

memory—each generation’s beauty serving, not to remind onlookers

of Beauty itself, but to remind them of the beauty of those individuals

Time and Death have taken or will soon take. The young man is asked

to consider his mother:

Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime.

Your mother’s beauty, the poem suggests, is preserved in you. In turn,

it is important that the young man have a child, in order to pass on

the memory of his own beauty. The concern here is for the memory

of individuals, the attempt to preserve what a Diotima or Bembo

would regard as copies of the real, not the real itself. But the sonnets

disagree—what is important is precisely the individual, the so-called

5 Shakespeare, 1. 9–14.

6 Ibid., 3.9–10.

356 Love and its Critics

copy, the unique manifestation of beauty, not a philosophical ideal. In

taking action—through reproduction—to preserve the memory of his

own beauty, the young man will ensure that he does not disappear, like

tears in rain, in the never-ceasing flow of Time:

So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,

Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.

But if thou live remembered not to be,

Die single and thine image dies with thee.

By Sonnet 15, however, Time has become a more pressing factor. How

long can the memory of individual beauty can be preserved merely

through reproduction? Edmondson and Wells insist that nothing has

changed:

Sonnets 1–17 are concerned with procreation, with breeding and

re-creating the image of oneself in another living and autonomous

being in order to combat the ravages of Time and so vicariously to

achieve everlasting life. In this respect they are grounded firmly in the

Platonic ideal of procreative love expressed in the Symposium, “because

procreation is the nearest thing to perpetuity and immortality that a

mortal being can attain”. It is through procreation that Shakespeare wills

the re-creation and transcendence of his lover through time.

But something has changed. Reproduction through children, though

still encouraged in this poem, and a number of those that follow, is

no longer put forward as the most effective preservation technique. In

Goethe’s formulation, “Art is long! And our life is short”.

Everything

and everyone, in the terms of Sonnet 15, is a thing of a moment, soon to

disappear. In Neoplatonic terms, even in Petrarchan terms, this is only

a problem of incorrect perception and valuation. What Diotima teaches,

what Bembo describes, and what Sidney’s Astrophil struggles to

believe and act upon, is the idea that individual beauty—no matter how

compelling—is only a doorway to wider spaces and greater wonders, a

7 Ibid., 3.11–14.

8 Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells. Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2004), 65.

9 “Die Kunst ist lang! Und kurz ist unser Leben” (Goethe. Faust, Part I, 106, ll. 558–59).

Goethe reverses the emphasis of Hippocrates of Cos (460–370 BCE): “Life is short,

andartislong”(“Ὁβίοςβραχύς,ἡδὲτέχνημακρή”).

357

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

window through which one can see the light, though it is not the light

itself. Sonnet 15 rejects these ideas in no uncertain terms. It starts with

a seemingly orthodox statement of the ephemerality of all things in this

world of flux and change:

When I consider every thing that grows

Holds in perfection but a little moment.

Everything that grows, eventually dies. Our peak moments, our

moments of “perfection”, are but “little”, consigned to the past as soon

as they arrive in the ever-changing present:

When I perceive that men as plants increase,

Cheered and checked even by the self-same sky:

Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,

And wear their brave state out of memory.

None of us are exempt. No philosophical or theological conceits of being

somehow one with a larger universe, an emanation of a larger One, or

the creation of an immortal God who promises mortals an eternity of

blessing or punishment, can stop even the simplest movement of one

moment to the next, or the loss of a single hair in the perceptible process

of aging and eventual death. This idea of inevitable loss brings the poem

to Art, to poetry itself:

Then the conceit of this inconstant stay,

Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,

Where wasteful time debateth with decay

To change your day of youth to sullied night,

And all in war with Time for love of you,

As he takes from you, I engraft you new.

In a war against Time itself, who can do anything but lose? Each of us

will die, and many of us will go through the process of saying goodbye

to the things and people we love. If we have enough time, we will bid

10 Shakespeare, 15.1–2.

11 Ibid., 15.5–8.

12 Ibid., 15.9–14.

358 Love and its Critics

farewell to ourselves, to our sense of who and what we have been in

a world into which we were thrown without preparation, and from

which we are taken without remorse. It is a war we all lose, eventually.

But the war this poem, and this poet, fights is slightly different. Art

cannot keep the young man from aging and eventually dying. But it

can lift a moment out of Time, describe it, keep it, and pass it on to

those who will live their own all-too-short lives in the future. This is the

power the sonnet describes—poetry as immortalization: “[t]he theme of

Horace’s Censorinus ode, Donarem pateras, often reappears: […] the gifts

bestowed by the poets will endure forever”.

It may be a Pyrrhic victory, achieved at great cost and impossible to

hold for long, but it is the only victory the artist, the poet, the mortal can

win. To say to Time and Death, No. Not this one. Not this moment. You

can’t have him. You can’t have her. You can’t have this. This we will save. This

we will preserve, as best we can, against you—this is the “war with Time”

the sonnet fights.

Far from valuing the young man as a Beatrice, or as

a Laura, or as a Stella, as a means to higher ends, this sonnet, and others

that follow, value the temporary over the permanent, the ephemeral

over the eternal. The fight to recognize, revalue, and preserve the

individual is powerfully expressed in one of the most famous of all the

sonnets, number 18:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

13 J. B. Leishman. Themes and Variations in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: Routledge,

1961), 41.

14 The most profound of modern work often shares the same spirit. It can be found,

for example, in Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film Det sjunde inseglet, or The Seventh Seal,

especially in the scene where the Crusades-era knight Antonius Bloch realizes

how precious the ordinary moments can be in a life much too intimately engaged

with death: “I will remember this moment. The stillness, the twilight, the bowl of

strawberries, the bowl of milk, your faces in the evening light. […] And it will serve

as a sign for me, and it will be enough" (“Jag ska minnas den här stunden. Stillheten,

skymningen, skålen med smultron, skålen med mjölk, era ansikten i kvällsljuset.

[…] Och detta ska vara mig ett tecken och en stor tillräcklighet”.) (55:39–56:25)

15 Shakespeare, 18.1–4.

359

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

A summer’s day is the perfect comparison to the beauty of the young

man. The day will not last, and neither will he or his beauty. It is here

for a moment, then gone forever, and though other days may follow,

none of them are that day, none are quite the same. From the perspective

of this sonnet, it is that day, that beauty, that individual that must be

preserved in the face of inevitable loss. Since summer days are not equal

in their beauty, they are not interchangeable:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:

Therefore, this one must be kept, no matter the cost, using every power

and technique at the poet’s disposal:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Perhaps the cliché is true—perhaps the pen really is mightier than the

sword, for who has gone to war with Time, wielding, as Hamlet puts

it, “a bare bodkin”? Though the troubadours do not speak of fighting

against time and death in their poetry, their spirit is here, much more

than is the spirit of the Dante who would put Paolo and Francesca in

Hell, or the spirit of the Petrarch who transforms a young girl into a

symbol for heavenly transcendence. These sonnets value one man’s life

far more than they value philosophical or theological abstractions.

This is not to say, however, that the philosophical heights of a Bembo

have no place in Shakespeare’s sonnets—such heights are scaled, most

notably in a sonnet often used in perhaps the most inappropriate

context of all: wedding ceremonies. It seems a rare experience to attend

a wedding in an English-speaking country in which Sonnet 116 does

16 Ibid., 18.5–8.

17 Ibid., 18.9–14.

360 Love and its Critics

not make an appearance, and it has been popular with “[g]enerations of

readers [who] have understood this poem to constitute a lyrical definition

of true love, that is, love that transcends time and is unperturbed by age

and change”.

This famous sonnet is often included beside the words

of Paul from 1 Corinthians 13:4–8, which is usually read aloud from a

modern translation that renders the central term as “love”. For example,

the popular New International Version (NIV) translation expresses the

passage this way:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not

proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily

angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but

rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes,

always perseveres. Love never fails.

A lovely sentiment, this passage as it is usually read seems to establish

“love” as the basis for a marriage between two people who have chosen

each other freely, and are solemnizing that choice in a modern marriage

ceremony. The only problem is that the translation is misleading—while

the word “love” is not, strictly speaking, inaccurate, the word “charity”

would be closer to the mark. The King James Bible (or Authorized

Version of 1611) renders the passage with “charity” in place of “love”:

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth

not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh

not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in

iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things,

hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth.

The English sense of the two passages is quite different. Love may, or

may not, be “patient” or “suffereth long”. But charity, from the Latin

caritas, definitely is, and does. The difference is found in the shadings

of meaning offered by the three classical Greek words used for love:

eros (desire, lack, a need to have an emptiness filled), philia (friendship,

familial affection, close familiarity and warmth), and agape (a love based

on principle, respect and acknowledgment of the value of another—in

that sense, a very unPetrarchan love).

18 Dympna Callaghan. Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), 62.

361

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

The “charity”

of the King James rendition, based on the Latin caritas,

which is itself a translation of the Greek agape, comes much closer to the

sense of “love” as it appears in Sonnet 116. As John Kerrigan cynically

notes, “[t]his sonnet has been misread so often and so mawkishly that it

is necessary to say at once, if brutally, that Shakespeare is writing about

what cannot be attained”.

While it may be too much to insist that the

“love” of Sonnet 116 “cannot be attained”, it is important to understand

that, rather than being a celebration of desire, or even of friendship,

Sonnet 116 celebrates the relative permanency of a “love” defined in

terms of principle and an unchanging recognition of the inherent value

of another person:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments, love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

The union is not between true hearts or bodies (though these are by no

means incompatible), but “true minds”. Even here, it is the individual

that is valued for his or her own sake, for the value and truth of the mind

each brings to the other. Each is regarded as an end in itself, and love, in

the sense of agape, caritas, and charity is fixed and constant:

O no, it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken[.]

The passage of time will not, cannot, alter this love, for it is both freely

given, and freely received, a love of choice, of mutual recognition of

19 Charity, however, has taken on a rather different sense in the twenty-first century

than the seventeenth century, and there may not be a one-word translation

in contemporary English that can capture the complexity in the orginal term

ἀγάπη[agape]. The closest analog available may be the Hindu concept of bhakti,

a word that, though usually translated as devotion, is probably better rendered as

participation. Thus, agape or caritas might be most accurately translated as “the love

that participates in highest things”.

20 John Kerrigan. The Sonnets; and A Lover’s Complaint (New York: Penguin, 1986), 53.

21 Shakespeare, 116.1–4.

22 Ibid., 116.5–8.

362 Love and its Critics

each other as inherently valuable, an appreciation of truth, substance,

and goodness as found in each other, not as a guidepost to something

or someone greater. Those who give and receive this love will not be

dissuaded from it:

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come,

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

As Héloïse d’Argenteuil proves in her letters, and as Milton demonstrates

in Paradise Lost, those who love with even a spark of this unalterable

regard, will defy God himself in its name.

As we have seen, and will often see again, there are any number of

literary critics dedicated to diminishing poetry’s power, telling readers

that poems do not mean what they merely seem to say (or that they do not

mean at all, in some extreme cases). Dypmna Callaghan has remarked

on this phenomenon with Sonnet 116, and “the many ways in which

critics and editors have argued that this poem does not mean what it

says”,

a point borne out by both Vendler and Stephen Booth. Booth

argues that the virtues of Sonnet 116 “are more than usually susceptible

to dehydration in critical comment. The more one thinks about this

grand, noble, absolute, convincing and moving gesture, the less there

seems to be to it”,

while Vendler regards Sonnet 116 as a statement

against love by a faithless lover:

The young man has, after all, said, “I did love you once, but now

impediments have arisen through alterations and removes”. The

speaker argues by means of the couplet that the performative speech-

act of Platonic fidelity in quasi-marital mental love cannot be qualified;

if it is qualified, it does not represent love. […] The poem entertains,

in the couplet, the deconstructive notion of its own self-dissolution; the

impossibility of error is proved by the contrary-to-fact hypothesis, I never

writ. […] The young man, by his mentioning of “impediments”, has

23 Ibid., 116.9–14.

24 Callaghan (2007), 61.

25 Stephen Booth. Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 387.

363

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

announced the waning of his own attachment to the speaker, dissolving

the “marriage of true minds”.

Where the sonnet speaks of a love that does not admit impediments,

the critic has rewritten it into a scenario in which impediments are the

very thing that has altered—even ended—a love that was not of “true

minds”. With that familiar what-seems-to-be-X-is-actually-Y move, the

sonnet is inverted, and made to represent the opposite of what its words

seem to convey. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that a

critic has become so deeply engaged with his or her terms of analysis

that a text has simply become invisible under the bright light of the

critic’s scrutiny. But it is not necessary to submit to the idea “that the

consensus of generations of readers is so completely wide of the mark

as some recent editors suggest”.

Shakespeare’s sonnets are not always concerned with so high and

noble a conception of love as is Sonnet 116. Their feet are more likely to

tread on the ground, to paraphrase another of the most famous sonnets,

number 130. This poem is “a clever piece of literary satire” in which “we

see [Shakespeare’s] amused and discerning awareness of Petrarchan

excess”.

In this poem, Shakespeare openly mocks the Petrarchan

mode, holding up most of its major themes for ridicule: “Shakespeare

proclaims his independence from convention in Sonnet 130 in which,

while declaring love for his mistress, he mocks the standard vocabulary

of praise”.

For example, the beloved, here rendered as “mistress”, thus

discarding the sense of a woman who is angelic and unapproachable,

does not have, as do so many Petrarchan and Neopetrarchan beloveds,

eyes like the sun or hair like flaxen strands of gold:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,

Coral is far more red, than her lips red,

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun:

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head:

26 Vendler, 491, 493.

27 Callaghan (2007), 64.

28 Philip Martin. Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Self, Love and Art (Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 1972), 123.

29 Edmondson and Wells, 15.

30 Shakespeare, 130.1–4.

364 Love and its Critics

His mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun, and a good thing too. A

woman with eyes like the sun would be well and truly unapproachable,

for who could make eye contact with a woman whose eyes had the power

to strike one blind? In the very first line of the sonnet, Shakespeare has

dismantled the most common of the Petrarchan conceits—the lady as

somehow heavenly or divine—and the next lines proceed to dismantle

poetic notions of the lady’s physical perfection. As the sonnet continues,

the embodied reality of the mistress is celebrated, while the poetic cliché

is mocked:

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks,

And in some perfumes is there more delight,

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know,

That music hath a far more pleasing sound:

I grant I never saw a goddess go,

My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.

Here we have a woman whose breath stinks,

whose voice is delicately

described as being less pleasing than music, and whose feet, unlike

those of a goddess, walk on English dirt. This description has sometimes

caused readers to react negatively, so accustomed are they to the inflated

praise of the “divine lady” in the tradition of poetry beginning with

Giacomo da Lentini and working its way through Petrarch to Sidney:

“Shakespeare’s mock-blazon has sometimes been thought misogynistic,

in part because readers have formed their idea of it from its octave,

where nothing positive is predicated of the mistress”.

But this is a

mistake, for all of the criticisms that come before the closing couplet are

rejections of Petrarchan clichés, not of the woman herself. The woman

being described in these lines is no poetic ideal, no angel or goddess.

This is a real woman with faults of the flesh. But the last two lines of the

31 Ibid., 130.5–12.

32 The modern bristle toothbrush, though invented by the Chinese Tang dynasty of

609–917 CE, did not make its first appearance in England, even among the wealthy,

until 1690. See Michael Olmert. Milton’s Teeth & Ovid’s Umbrella: Curiouser and

Curiouser Adventures in History (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 62.

33 Vendler, 557.

365

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

sonnet, even more than the previous twelve, blow the Petrarchan mode

of idealized description right out of the water:

And yet by heaven I think my love as rare,

As any she belied with false compare.

Perhaps the most romantic lines in all of English literature, this final

couplet declares for the individual over the ideal, for the flesh over

the spirit, for immediate desire over sublimated worship. The woman

described in this poem exists in the world where everything that grows

holds in perfection but a little moment, and she is very probably past that

little moment. But she is “rare”, more singular and valuable than any of the

laughably false “shes” of the post-troubadour poetic tradition who have

been misrepresented through the “false compare” of poets less attuned to

the beauty of this world than to the imperious demands of worlds beyond.

The final couplet “effects a shift from the lyrical to the colloquial register in

order to demonstrate that even goddesses are overrated”.

Even more cutting in its rejection of the Petrarchan mode is the

description of a relationship between a man and a (much younger) woman

in Sonnet 138. This poem gives us a picture of compromise and lies as

the basis for an apparently successful relationship. No ladder of love or

pathway to the divine here: this poem describes a union in which each

deceives the other in order to keep the other reasonably, if not ecstatically,

happy. The lies, such as they are, seem thin, relatively harmless, and

perhaps even necessary if the two are going to stay together:

When my love swears that she is made of truth,

I do believe her, though I know she lies,

That she might think me some untutored youth,

Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.

We begin with the depiction of two lies: the speaker’s lover “swears

that she is made of truth” (a more obvious lie is almost inconceivable),

and the speaker knows that she lies; but the speaker also pretends to

“believe her”, to give an impression of simplicity and youthfulness

34 Shakespeare, 130.13–14.

35 Callaghan (2007), 57.

36 Shakespeare, 138.1–4.

366 Love and its Critics

in order to manipulate her thinking: “That she might think me some

untutored youth”. He pretends to believe her lies because it is useful to

him to have her believe that he is falling for those lies. The subject of her

lies is probably his greater age (and possibly her desire for a younger

man), as evidenced by the following lines:

Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,

Although she knows my days are past the best,

Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue,

On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed:

The speaker is both vain (trying to pretend to himself that he is still

young, and that she is buying into his pretense), and thinking in vain,

thinking thoughts which are obviously not true, as neither he nor she

really regard him as young, because “she knows” his days are “past

the best”. But he pretends to believe her when she says he is young,

both simply (without criticism or confrontation about what each knows

is a lie) and as if a simpleton (thus furthering his own lie of being too

naïve to catch on to her lies). When the speaker thinks about this, he gets

angry for a moment, but then recovers his balance, and remembers his

reasons for compromise:

But wherefore says she not she is unjust?

And wherefore say not I that I am old?

O love’s best habit is in seeming trust,

And age in love, loves not to have years told.

Why don’t they just drop the masks, stop lying, and tell each other the

truth? Because that would upset the delicate balance of a relationship

that neither one of them is apparently willing to see come to an end. She

is unjust, and he is old (and unjust in his own way), but honesty in love

is not always the best policy. This couple, who have found something

in each other (perhaps once it was eros, and perhaps philia has settled in,

and there might even be a touch of agape or caritas in there somewhere),

clearly do not intend to upset the delicate balance they have achieved

37 Ibid., 138.5–8

38 Ibid., 138.9–12.

367

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

by insisting on absolute truth between them. In fact, “seeming trust”

is their love’s “best habit” (best repeated action, and best guise or

disguise), and since neither one of them broaches the topic of “age in

love”, those “years” will not be “told”. The final couplet makes the

compromise clear:

Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,

And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

Here is no Astrophil agonizing over a Stella, Dante worshiping a

Beatrice, or Petrarch gazing to the point of idolatry on his own carefully-

wrought “she belied with false compare”. The love described in this

poem does not point the way to heaven or to higher philosophical truth.

It merely enables two people to keep and maintain companionship in

an often lonely world where at least one of the poem’s figures held “in

perfection but a little moment” a very long time ago. Sonnet 138 portrays

a relationship in which two people compromise the ideal in favor of the

real. Without the rhetorical heights of more famous poems like Sonnet

18 or Sonnet 116, and without the visual humor and obvious mocking

of Petrarchism in Sonnet 130, Sonnet 138, in its quiet way, is the most

thorough rejection of the Beatrices, Lauras, and Stellas of Italian and

English poetry. It returns, as does Shakespeare’s larger body of work,

to the spirit of the troubadours, and to the spirit of Ovid, for whom

love may have involved compromise and lies, but was always love of

an individual. It returns to love as it was in the Song of Songs—love of a

man or woman of flesh and blood, rather than a God.

Shakespeare’s Plays: Children as Property

In Shakespeare’s plays love thrives, not as allegory, but as the passionate

desire and regard between two who choose each other, often in the face

of fierce resistance. To trace the power and presentation of love, we will

consider two elements: the treatment of children as property by fathers,

and the claims of love, individual choice, and agency that defy paternal

39 Ibid., 138.13–14.

368 Love and its Critics

demands in order to assert the rights of one’s own heart. In so doing, we

will look at three daughters—Silvia, Hermia, and Juliet—whose desires

are regarded as impediments to the plans, purposes, and passions of the

fathers who begot them, before turning to the occasionally successful,

sometimes disastrous, but always disruptive challenges that love

and lovers will make to the forces that demand the exclusive right to

obedience, fidelity, and life itself.

Shakespeare is not staging his plays of love in the face of resistance

in order to demonstrate, as the historian Lawrence Stone would have

it, that “the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, [lay] in the way they brought

destruction upon themselves by violating the norms of the society in

which they lived”.

Many members of Shakespeare’s audience may

have thought as Stone thinks—initially. But others did not. And during

the 1590s and 1600s, Shakespeare’s plays consistently present characters

that reject the forces of tradition:

In the comedies and romantic tragedies, love emerges as a force of

inspiration and renewal for individuals and the enduring bond that

comprises human society. Time and again, he presents young men and

women who marry for love, rejecting the traditional arrangements of

their parents. The moral vision in Shakespeare’s plays is not ironclad

obedience to the ancién regime but a new moral order based on free will,

choice, and commitment, a personal bond of love and trust between two

individuals that becomes an inspiration to their world.

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet does not condemn its title characters,

but sympathizes with the lovers whose disobedience brings them

momentarily to the brink of a truly chosen life, only to be crushed by the

forces of obedience, law, and profit. Such a work does not criticize those

who violate the norms of society; rather, it criticizes the norms themselves.

Shakespeare writes during a time of transition. His life and career

cross over the end of the sixteenth-century Elizabethan world into

the beginnings of the seventeenth-century Stuart dynasty, which

will eventually see a people rise against its king, a gentleman farmer

become the Lord Protector of England, and a poet of revolution become

40 Lawrence Stone. The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (New York:

Harper and Row, 1977), 87.

41 Diane Dreher. Domination and Defiance: Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare

(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 38.

369

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

the country’s international voice. Even as he is writing his earliest

plays, such as Two Gentlemen of Verona, England is already beginning

to stir with discontent and the unmistakable signs of future rebellion.

The resentment of Catholic citizens at being forced to conform to the

doctrines and disciplines of a new faith, denying the dictates of their

consciences, will soon enough burst out into the attempt to assassinate

a king and a parliament together in the infamous Gunpowder Plot. The

discontents of many Protestants with the quasi-Catholic ceremonies,

hierarchies, and vestments of the English Church break out into

vituperative pamphlet broadsides such as the Marprelate controversy

of 1588–89. Elizabeth’s last Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift,

uses his position to enforce conformity in religion, attempting to

crush the Presbyterian and Independent church movements, even

as he moves to codify and mandate English belief in the Calvinist

doctrine of predestination with the Lambeth Articles of 1595. Francis

Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster, makes the 1570s and 1580s a period

of repression and abject terror for the country’s Catholics, who can be

jailed for celebrating Mass or hiding a priest (who was himself liable to

execution for carrying out his then-illegal function). England undergoes

tremendous upheaval during Shakespeare’s lifetime, moving from

majority Catholic at his birth to majority Protestant at his death, while

matters of faith, family, marriage, and emotion are all too often matters

of conformity and obedience to the imperious demands of authority:

whether that of God, the monarch, or the father.

In a sense, Stone may be right—“an Elizabethan courtier [who

saw] where duty lay”

may have condemned the disobedience of a

character like Juliet. But courtiers were a minority among the public

theatre audiences of the 1590s and early 1600s,

for whom the distinctly

uncourtly scenario presented in Arden of Faversham (1592)

was already

42 L. Stone, 87.

43 For detailed discussions of the composition of such audiences (in terms of

economics, gender, and numerous other factors), see Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in

London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

44 The as yet unsolved question of the authorship of this play revolves primarily

around two candidates: William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd. Arguments

for Kyd go back to Charles Crawford and Walter Miksch in the early twentieth

century (in, respectively, “The Authorship of Arden of Faversham”. In Jahrbuch der

Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, 39 [1903], 74–86, and Die verfasserschaft des Arden

of Feversham [Breslau: H. Fleischmann, 1907]), and have recently been championed

370 Love and its Critics

familiar. In that play, a wife named Alice is willing—even eager—to

murder her husband in order to be with her lover, Mosby. And despite

the fact that this is presented as a crime which will be punished, the

idea is still present that marriage without love is a despotism in which

the husband is an illegitimate usurper, whose fate is to be cast out and

overthrown. As Alice expresses it:

Sweet Mosby is the man that hath my heart,

And he [Arden] usurps it, having nought but this,

That I am tied to him by marriage.

Love is a god, and marriage is but words;

And therefore Mosby’s title is the best.

Shakespeare’s audiences filled the Globe Theatre for spectacles

of disobedience and passionate assertions of the right to choose,

performances which enabled them to imagine themselves, not as

criminals, but as living and loving in the same free and chosen manner

as those men and women they saw enacted on the stage. Far from being a

bastion of convention-confirming conservatism—as Stephen Greenblatt

contends through his idea of subversion and containment, a process

which continually produces rebellion and tames it at the same time

(thus subverting and containing the rebellious force)

—Shakespeare’s

by Brian Vickers (“Thomas Kyd, Secret Sharer”. Times Literary Supplement [18 April

2008], 13–15). The most recent argument for Shakespeare’s authorship (especially

of the middle section of the play) has been made by MacDonald P. Jackson in

Determining the Shakespeare Canon: “Arden of Faversham” and “A Lover’s Complaint”

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), while the editors of The New

Oxford Shakespeare (Gary Taylor, et al., 2016) include the play, listing its authorship

as by Anonymous and Shakespeare.

45 Arden of Faversham. In Martin Wiggins, ed. A Woman Killed with Kindness and Other

Domestic Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1.98–102.

46 See Greenblatt’s argument—published in several different forms—in Shakespearean

Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and

Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998); ‘Invisible Bullets: Renaissance

Authority and its Subversion’, in Glyph 8: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 40–61; ‘Invisible Bullets: Renaissance

Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V’, in Political Shakespeare:

New Essays in Cultural Materialism, eds, Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 18–47; and in “Invisible Bullets:

Renaissance Authority and its Subversion”, in eds. Peter Erickson and Coppélia

Kahn, Shakespeare’s ‘Rough Magic’: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber

(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 276–302. This argument, as Gabriel

371

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

plays not only encourage, but as we will see in Two Gentlemen of Verona,

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet, they celebrate

disobedience in the name of love, the power of men and women to

choose their own hearts’ path, and the right to live as they see fit. The

driving force behind this celebration of disobedience, this rejection of the

notion that children are the property of their parents and citizens are the

helpless subjects of their monarch, is the power of an old idea—fin’amor:

Beginning as a purely extra-marital emotion in troubadour literature of

the twelfth century, it was transformed by the invention of the printing

press and the spread of literacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

It was a theme which dominated the poetry, theatre and romances of the

late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and found its way into real life

in the mid-eighteenth century.

However, the mid-eighteenth century is far too late a period to identify

as the time in which the love described in poetry, theatre, and romances

works its way into real life. One only need look at the story of John Donne

and Anne More, discussed in Chapter 9, to be disabused of that notion.

This is very much a development of the literature of Shakespeare’s time,

and “the movement of lovers toward each other may well be the most

important single motive force in Elizabethan literature”.

Love is not “a

reality which existed in one very restricted social group”, nor is it merely

“the subject of much poetry of the sixteenth and early seventeenth

centuries, and of many of Shakespeare’s plays”.

For many, both in

Shakespeare’s audience and his larger world, love is an urgent concern.

It is here and now that love enters “real life”, as art and life engage in a

mutually affirming, mutually embracing dance of cultural, intellectual,

and philosophical upheaval which moves the world from one in which

all human devotion is directed upward—to God, monarch, and father—

to one in which love is shared between relative equals; a move away

Egan explains, insists that any resistance to authority portrayed in Shakespeare,

Marlowe, and others was merely illusory, because “the theatre industry of

Shakespeare’s time was a special device for the containment of progressive forces

precisely because it appeared to produce subversion” (Gabriel Egan. Shakespeare

and Marx [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 95).

47 L. Stone, 490–91.

48 Roger Stilling. Love and Death in Renaissance Tragedy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

University Press, 1976), 148.

49 L.Stone, 103.

372 Love and its Critics

from a world in which love, beauty, and other people are means to an

end, steps on a ladder leading to the divine, and to a world in which

love, beauty, and all our beloveds are ends in themselves. In his way,

Shakespeare helps to push the intellectual world from Plato to Kant,

from the forms to the things in themselves, from a focus on the abstract

idea of a rose, to the beauty of the rose that is right in front of us. Harold

Bloom, that old Falstaff of American literary criticism, was at least partly

right: Shakespeare helped to invent the modern sense of what it means

to be a human being in the Western world.

Unfortunately, it is not hyperbolic to describe the parent-child

relationships of Early Modern England as proprietary. Though Stone’s

thesis of the cold emotional detachment of parents from their children

in the period may have been overstated,

the hierarchical relationships

within families are well-documented. As late as 1658, in an era of

revolution and upheaval, the pater familias-style conservatism of parent-

child relations, though beginning its decline, is still alive and well and

speaking with a clear voice about the rights of parents to determine the

marital and family futures of their children. From this perspective, for

sons or daughters to choose their own mates is among the worst kinds

of disobedience possible:

50 As Bloom lays out the case,

[t]he idea of Western character, of the self as a moral agent, has many sources: Homer and Plato,

Aristotle and Sophocles, the Bible and St. Augustine, Dante and Kant, and all you might care

to add. Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare’s

greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness. Insofar as we

ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and of Hamlet,

and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare’s theater of what might be called the

colors of the spirit.

Harold Bloom. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Penguin, 1998), 4.

51 For a review and critique, see Linda A. Pollock. Forgotten Children: Parent-Child

Relations from 1500 to 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 1–67. See

also Lois G. Schwoerer, “Seventeenth-Century English Women Engraved in Stone?”

Albion, 16.4 (1984), 389–403, who analyzes Stone’s work from a feminist perspective;

Alan MacFarlane, “The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England”, History and Theory,

18 (1979), 103–26, who critiques Stone’s readings of secondary material; Philippe

Ariès, “Lawrence Stone. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800”,

American Historical Review, 83 (1978), 1221–24, who, in an otherwise complimentary

review, argues that Stone distorts early modern child-rearing practices; and John

Gillis, “Affective Individualism and the English Poor”, Journal of Interdisciplinary

History, 10 (1979), 121–28, who argues that Stone ignores the lower economic levels

of society in his work.

373

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

But of all acts of disobedience, that of marrying against the consent of

the Parent, is one of the highest. Children are so much the goods, the

possessions of the Parent, that they cannot without a kind of theft, give away

themselves without the allowance of those, that have the right in them.

From this point of view, children are portable wealth; not as fixed as

land, though not so permanent either, children represent an opportunity

to improve the family’s fortunes through advantageously-arranged

marriages. And the fathers of the respective families that were matched

in such a union were not about to allow the romantic notions of their

children to interfere with business. The era struggled with

a clear conflict of values between the idealization of love by some

poets, playwrights and the authors of romances on the one hand, and

its rejection as a form of imprudent folly and even madness by all

theologians, moralists, authors of manuals of conduct, and parents and

adults in general.

It was the fathers who stood most to gain from the marriages they arranged

for their children: “[t]he marital pactum was too important to be created

by the individuals concerned; instead it was forged by the two men who

headed the two families involved. Negotiations resembled statecraft on

a smaller scale”.

For many generations, marriage had been treated

as a business deal, an economic exchange between families—or more

precisely, between fathers, in what Foucault describes as “a deployment

of alliance: a system of marriage, of the securing and developing of

kinship ties, of the transmission of names and possessions”.

As a result

52 Richard Allestree. The Practice of Christian Graces, or The Whole Duty of Man (London:

Printed by D. Maxwell for T. Garthwait, 1658), 291, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/

cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?cc=eebo;c=eebo;idno=a23760.0001.001;node=A23760.000

1.001%3A19;seq=318;vid=96830;page=root;view=text

53 L. Stone, 181.

54 Hagstrum, 220.

55 “un dispositif d’alliance: système de mariage, de fixation et de développement

des parentés, de transmission des noms et des biens” (Michael Foucault. Histoire

de La Sexualité Vol. 1: la Volonté de Savoir [Paris: Gallimard, 1976], 140). Foucault

opposes this “deployment of alliance” not with the concept of fin’amor that we are

identifying here as a combination of love, mutual recognition, and mutual choice

between lovers, but with what he calls “the deployment of sexuality” (“le dispositif de

sexualité”) (140), a concept he defines as operating “based on techniques of power

that are mobile, polymorphous, and cyclical” (“d’après des techniques mobiles,

polymorphes et conjoncturelles de pouvoir”), and as concerned with “the body’s

sensations, the quality of its pleasures, and the nature of its impressions, as tenuous

374 Love and its Critics

of this system of alliance-forming, “[m]ost marriages in the sixteenth

and early seventeenth centuries were arranged by parents or guardians

[and] economic interests and parental pressures prevailed, [though]

the poor, with no considerations of lineage and property, could often

choose for themselves”.

The idea that money was often, if not always,

at the root of such arranged marriages is supported by English court

documents, in which “[o]f all the depositions studied for the period

1542–1600, at least a third sufficiently illustrates the weighting of

financial considerations in the making of marriages”.

It was not, of course, the situation that no child ever had any

input into the choice of his or her eventual spouse. But neither were

theirs the voices that spoke most persuasively on the matter: “‘I must

be ruled by my friends’, said Elizabeth Fletcher of Canterbury, ‘as

well as by myself’”.

Even in cases where individual expression was

accommodated, children were expected, in keeping with their role as

goods and possessions, to maintain obedience. This expectation was

especially pronounced where the subject of marriage was concerned:

The choice of marriage partner concerned both boys and girls and was

especially important in a society where there were large financial and

political stakes in marriage and where divorce was virtually impossible.

Almost all children until the end of the sixteenth century were so

conditioned by their upbringing and so financially helpless that they

acquiesced without much objection in the matches contrived for them

by their parents.

While “[t]he notion of children as property”, seems inhumane to us,

it “was deeply imbedded in Renaissance thought. Children were their

or imperceptible as these may be” (“les sensations du corps, la qualité des plaisirs,

la nature des impressions aussi ténues ou imperceptibles qu’elles soient”) (140).

But far from being anything like an avenue for resistance to the authorities of a

given time and place, for Foucault, this alliance of sexuality is merely one more

means of control: “The deployment of sexuality does not have its reason for being

in reproduction, but in […] controlling populations in an ever more global manner”

(“Le dispositif de sexualité a pour raison d’être non de se reproduire, mais de […]

contrôler les populations de manière de plus en plus globale”) (141).

56 Dreher, 28.

57 Diana O’Hara. Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor

England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 215.

58 Ibid., 32.

59 L. Stone, 180.

375

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

parents’ goods, to be used as they saw fit, and owed them lifelong

obedience for begetting them”.

Even titled children, who outranked

their parents in the hierarchy of the nation, were expected to perform

acts of fealty and submission that seem incredible today. For example,

the playwright, translator, and author Elizabeth Cary (née Tanfield),

became Lady Falkland the Viscountess Falkland, when her husband

was made Viscount in 1634. And yet she was still required to show,

not merely respect, but outright submission to her mother: “Elizabeth,

Countess of Falkland, always knelt in her mother’s presence, sometimes

for an hour at a time, despite the fact that she had married above her

parents into the peerage, and that she was ‘but an ill kneeler and worse

riser’”.

And though Cary’s case seems especially counter-intuitive

today, it was far from uncommon in her time:

[the] stress on domestic discipline and the utter subordination of the

child found expression in extraordinary outward marks of deference

which English children were expected to pay to their parents in the

sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It was customary for them

when at home to kneel before their parents to ask their blessing every

morning, and even as adults on arrival at and departure from the home.

This was a symbolic gesture of submission which John Donne believed

to be unique in Europe.

As John Aubrey describes conditions of the period:

The child perfectly loathed the sight of his parents as the slave his torture.

Gentlemen of 30 and 40 years old were to stand like mutes and fools

bareheaded before their parents; and the daughters […] were to stand

at the cupboard-side, during the whole time of the proud Mother’s visit

[until] they had done sufficient penance in standing.

Failure to obey, especially in the matter of marital choice, could have serious

negative consequences even with one’s siblings, much less one’s parents:

No amount of pleading would move some kinsmen. The widow

Christine Marsh fell down on her knees before her brother George

60 Dreher, 21.

61 L. Stone, 171.

62 Ibid.

63 John Aubrey. Wiltshire. The Topographical Collections of John Aubrey, 1659–70, ed. by

John Edward Jackson (London: Longman, 1862), 16, https://archive.org/stream/

wiltshiretopogra00aubr#page/16

376 Love and its Critics

Coppyn, desiring him to be a good brother unto her and a friend also,

for he had rebuked and threatened her for the promise she had made to

George Gaunt.

To marry without permission often brought financial repercussions, as

displeased parents would use the threat of disinheritance to prevent

and/or punish the “disobedience” involved in making one’s own choice.

Elizabeth Evelyn was punished in precisely this way by her father, who

describes with a certain methodical and self-righteous tone the reasons

for his decision to disinherit his eldest child:

[July] 27 This night when we were all asleep went my daughter Elizabeth

away to meet a young fellow, nephew to Sir John Tippet (Surveyor of the

Navy, and one of the Commissioners), whom she married the next day,

being Tuesday, without in the least acquainting either of her parents,

or any soul in the house. […] This accident caused me to alter my will,

as was reasonable; for though there may be a reconciliation upon her

repentance, and that she suffered her folly; yet I must let her see what

her undutifulness in this action deprives her of, as to the provision she

else might have expected, solicitous as she knew I now was of bestowing

her very worthily.

The fathers of Shakespeare’s plays, who may well seem to modern

readers and spectators like so many tinpot dictators, were not at all

unusual for their time. To Shakespeare’s contemporaries, they would

have been entirely familiar, on-and off-stage. Hamlet explains why: art

serves “to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her

own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the

time his form and pressure”.

In giving this speech to the players, he

is not telling them that art uncritically mirrors the values and practices

of a civilization to its members while encouraging them to remain

compliant. His entire purpose for the play-within-the-play is angry and

accusatory. That is what art—Shakespeare’s art—is when at its best.

Art holds up the mirror to show the time and place within which it

appears, to which it reacts, and against which it often struggles, that the

64 O’Hara, 33.

65 Ralph A. Houlbrooke, ed. “‘Stealing a Marriage’: The Marriage of Elizabeth Evelyn

in 1685 Described by Her Father”. English Family Life, 1576–1716: An Anthology from

Diaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 39.

66 Hamlet 3.1.21–24.

377

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

“customs of [its] island and tribe are [not] the laws of nature”.

Thus,

when portraying the Duke of Milan in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, or

Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Capulet in Romeo and Juliet,

Shakespeare is not soothing, he is savaging, He is holding them up for

scorn as images of what not to do rather than as examples of the idea

that Father knows best. The play’s the thing, in which he will catch the

consciences of countless fathers who think themselves king.

The plots initially revolve around marriage as a bond, not between a

young man and a young woman, but between two men over and through

the body of a woman. In what Eve Sedgwick describes as a dynamic of

homosociality,

the fathers in these plays bond themselves to men of

their choosing (often quite a bit older than their daughters), who offer

advantages in terms of wealth, land, and power. Sedgwick, following

Gayle Rubin, describes this as “traffic in women”, or “the use of women

as exchangeable, perhaps symbolic, property for the primary purpose of

cementing the bonds of men with men”.

In this claim, she rearticulates

the argument of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss:

[t]he overall relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not

established between a man and a woman, in which everyone has rights

and everyone gets something: it is between two groups of men, and the

woman figures as one of the objects of exchange, and not as one of the

partners between whom exchange occurs.

In just this fashion, the fathers in Shakespeare attempt to partner with

other men, while using their daughters as “objects of exchange”. Love—

passionate and mutually chosen attachment between those who would

otherwise be caught up in the pattern—serves as the primary means of

resistance. Silvia and Hermia choose their loves despite their fathers,

67 George Bernard Shaw. “Caesar and Cleopatra”. Three Plays for Puritans (New York:

Brentano’s, 1906), 119, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044014213078;v

iew=1up;seq=167

68 A term originally coined in 1976 by Jean Lipmen-Blumen to describe a social, rather

than sexual, preference for members of one’s own sex.

69 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 26.

70 [l]a relation globale d’échange qui constitue le mariage ne s’établit pas entre un homme et

une femme qui chacun doit, et chacun reçoit quelque chose: elle s’établit entre deux groupes

d’hommes, et la femme y figure comme un des objets des objets d l’échange, et non comme un

des partenaires entre lesquels il a lieu.

Claude Lévi-Strauss. Les Structures Élémentaires de la Parenté (Berlin: De Gruyter), 2002).

378 Love and its Critics

and would likely do so again, despite the hardships that ensue. Romeo

and Juliet choose each other in the face of family hatred and violence,

even enacting their own version of a dawn song in which they lament

the coming of day and the short moments they have left to be together.

In many of his most powerful plays, Shakespeare casts love and its

pursuit in the light of rebellions that are both justified and long overdue.

As wielded in Shakespeare’s plays, love serves as the primary challenge

to the authority of fathers and rulers who claim obedience from children

and subjects alike.

III

Love as Resistance: Silvia and Hermia

As the Troubadour poet Giraut de Borneilh (1138–1215) describes it,

love enters through the eyes:

Tam cum los oills el cor ama parvenza

Car li oill son del cor drogoman

E ill oill van vezer,

Lo cal cor plaz retener.

So through the eyes love enters the heart,

Because the eyes are the agents of the heart

And the eyes go forth to gaze,

On what the heart would like to own.

For Giraut, love cannot be tamed and controlled, nor does it develop as

an emotional balm to heal the frictions of an arranged marriage between

strangers; rather it is something that hits from the outside and works its

way inwards in a near-immediate process of transformation. Gottfried

Von Strassburg’s image for this is the effect of the love-drink: meant to

provide the bond between King Mark and his young bride-to-be Isot

(Iseult or Isolde in other versions of the story), it instead transforms

71 John Rutherford, ed. The Troubadours: Their Loves and their Lyrics (London:

Smith, Elder & Co., 1873), 34, ll. 1–4, https://archive.org/stream/troubadoursthei

01ruthgoog#page/n48

379

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

Tristan and Isot from two into one, “who had both one heart”.

It is this

transformative power that causes Gottfried’s lovers to defy King Mark,

and this power is shown again and again in Shakespeare as the driving

force behind the resistance to the homosocial structure of exchange.

Such resistance can be seen initially in the early comedy The Two

Gentleman of Verona. In this relatively light, yet humorously bizarre and

revealing play, the triangular pattern of fathers matching themselves to

men through their daughters is evident. But Shakespeare uses an old

comic device, the cuckolding plot, to add a fourth element: a young

man who will try to break up the sexual match between the often-older

man and the daughter by stealing her away (with her enthusiastic

assistance), thus scotching the proposed partnership between the men.

The Duke of Milan wishes to match his daughter Silvia (whom he

keeps locked in a tower at night) to a wealthy, if otherwise unappealing

man named Thurio. He is swayed in this choice because Thurio is rich,

despite an evident lack of any other desirable qualities. As Valentine

describes Thurio, he is a “foolish rival, that her father likes / Only for his

possessions are so huge”.

But in arranging this match, the Duke has a

problem: Silvia despises Thurio, and has fallen in love with Valentine. As

Valentine is busily arranging to run away with Silvia by using a rope

ladder (which he is hiding underneath his cloak), he encounters the

Duke, who complains of his daughter’s disobedience:

she is peevish, sullen, froward,

Proud, disobedient, stubborn, lacking duty,

Neither regarding that she is my child

Nor fearing me as if I were her father;

And, may I say to thee, this pride of hers,

Upon advice, hath drawn my love from her;

And, where I thought the remnant of mine age

Should have been cherished by her child-like duty,

I now am full resolved to take a wife

And turn her out to who will take her in:

72 “si heten beide ein herze” (Gottfried Von Strassburg. Tristan, l. 11,731, ed. by

Karl Marold [Leipzig: E. Avenarius, 1906], https://archive.org/stream/gottfried

vonstr00unkngoog#page/n240).

73 Two Gentlemen of Verona 2.4.172–73.

380 Love and its Critics

Then let her beauty be her wedding-dower;

For me and my possessions she esteems not.

In this speech, we encounter elements we will see again. The father

demands his daughter’s obedience, in this case specifically to his will in

terms of his choice for her marriage partner. When she does not comply

with his will, he threatens to disown her, despite the fact that he had

planned to rely on her as a caretaker as he aged, and resolves to throw

her out of his house and let her fend for herself by living the life of an

early modern vagrant.

However, the perspective the Duke either does not understand or

does not care to understand—his daughter’s side of the question—is

exactly what the play highlights for its audience, showing “the very age

and body of the time his form and pressure”. Silvia regards the match

with Thurio, not merely as undesirable, but as unholy. In pleading with

a gentleman to help her escape, she describes the match as one worthy

of punishment by heaven itself:

Thou art not ignorant what dear good will

I bear unto the banished Valentine,

Nor how my father would enforce me marry

Vain Thurio, whom my very soul abhors.

[…]

Urge not my father’s anger, Eglamour,

But think upon my grief, a lady’s grief,

And on the justice of my flying hence,

To keep me from a most unholy match,

Which heaven and fortune still rewards with plagues.

This is no mere foolery, or adolescent madness, nor is Shakespeare here

running “directly across the norms and practices of [his audience]”.

This is Shakespeare showing his audience that “the norms and practices”

of their society run “directly across” their hearts. Silvia wants and needs

to be stolen from her father, in a “theft’ that involves giving herself away

74 Ibid., 3.1.68–79.

75 See Linda Woodbridge. Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).

76 Two Gentlemen of Verona 4.3.14–17, 27–31.

77 L. Stone, 180.

381

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

“without the allowance of those, that have the right in [her]”.

But in

their mutual defiance of her father’s will, Valentine and Silvia seek no

harm each to the other, nor any dominance one over the other. The same

cannot be said of the “lover” Proteus.

Proteus’ love is destructive, and actively seeks to subordinate the

will of others. Proteus does not so much rebel against the authority of

the Duke of Milan as try to sneak around it, pretending to serve the

Duke while imposing himself on Silvia, who absolutely does not want

him. Proteus, who feared his father at the beginning of the play,

fears

any honest confrontation with the Duke as much or more, and takes

the coward’s way out consistently. Determining to betray his friendship

with Valentine because “I to myself am dearer than a friend”,

and

because the merest sight of Silvia has “dazzled [his] reason’s light”,

Proteus behaves as if Silvia owes him her love because of the frequent,

though unwelcome, declarations he makes of his love.

It is in Proteus’ threat to rape Silvia, and the odd way that threat

plays out—not between himself and Silvia, but between himself and

Valentine—where this play’s most unusual twist on love can be found.

Despite the fact that Silvia has declared that she would rather be eaten,

digested, and then presumably excreted by a “hungry lion”

than have

anything to do with Proteus, the perversely determined young man

simply will not take “no” for an answer. Insisting that he will finally

bend Silvia’s will to his own, and not about to be satisfied with any

courtly tricks or delays, Proteus declares that he will love Silvia “‘gainst

the nature of love” by forcing her to submit to his desire.

Whatever

else may be said of fin’amor, it is not rape. The ultimate in fals’amor, rape

seeks, not mutual choice in a one-to-one relationship, but a perverse

form of obedience. Rape seeks exactly the opposite of that sought by

love. Where love wishes to be free from the authority of the father, rape

reimposes that authority by the most intimately violent means, changing

the agent or enactor of that authority from the father to the rapist. In

78 Allestree, 291.

79 Two Gentlemen of Verona 1.3.78–87.

80 Ibid., 2.6.23.

81 Ibid., 2.4.208.

82 Ibid., 2.4.33.

83 Ibid., 5.4.59.

382 Love and its Critics

essence, Proteus does not seek to rebel against the Duke so much as become

the Duke: declaring his authority over the flesh, the sexuality, of Silvia.

Even odder, and to many contemporary readers less explicable, is

Valentine’s reaction. Rather than show any concern for Silvia, he directs

his emotional investment—not merely anger, but what looks like the

genuine disappointment of a jilted lover—toward Proteus:

[…] Proteus,

I am sorry I must never trust thee more,

But count the world a stranger for thy sake.

The private wound is deepest: O time most accurst,

‘Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!

Valentine is less worried about the trauma inflicted on Silvia than he is

about his own feelings of betrayal. If it is true that the ones we love the

most also have the power to hurt us most deeply, then it is apparent

that Valentine’s “true” love is Proteus, not Silvia. He demonstrates that

by quickly accepting the thinnest of apologies from Proteus—whom

the play has been at pains to portray as genuinely untrustworthy—and

then simply giving Silvia to him: “that my love may appear plain and

free, / All that was mine in Silvia I give thee”.

In this gesture, Valentine

behaves as if Silvia’s love, and his “right” to it, is a transferable property.

Far from being the mutual partner she was with Valentine in their earlier

plan of escape, Silvia is now given no voice at all, leaving many readers

and audiences wondering if something has gone wrong:

To a modern audience accustomed to a sex/gender system that clearly

designates cross-sex marriage as more important than same-sex

friendship and furthermore sees same-sex and cross-sex affection as

linked to mutually exclusive categories of identity, Valentine’s valuation

of his love of Proteus over his love of Silvia is unexpected, and has struck

many critics and directors of the play as simply erroneous.

We are on firmer ground, however, if we see this ending, not as a

mistake, but as part of the play’s design. Far from being erroneous,

84 Ibid., 5.468–72.

85 Ibid., 5.4.82–83.

86 Jeffrey Masten. “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”. A Companion to Shakespeare’s

Works, Vol. III (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), 273.

383

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

the odd ending of this play suggests that we have been following the

misadventures of young people who play at love, whether cross-sex or

same-sex, without ever really understanding it, or lending themselves

to its power. The “Gentlemen” neither choose their female loves, nor

ever have the courage to do anything more than faintly and indirectly

choose each other, through Valentine’s declaration that their wedding

days shall be “One feast, one house, one mutual happiness”.

Their

rebellions are in form only, resisting the “property” claims of older men

to women that they themselves go on to treat as exchangable property,

and the two “Gentlemen” seem especially happy to be received back

into the arms of authority at the end, as the Duke declares:

[…] Sir Valentine,

Thou art a gentleman and well derived;

Take thou thy Silvia, for thou hast deserved her.

Rather than challenge authority as Silvia does, Proteus and Valentine

adopt its roles, acting as the fathers and older males act, by

exchanging (or intending to exchange) Silvia between them, just as

the Duke had meant to do with Thurio. Not yet the love of mutual

choice in defiance of authority, the loves toyed with by Valentine and

Proteus are but that—toys.

A more powerful resistance to the “between men” structure can be

seen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Love and marriage—not always

in tandem—are central to the play. But of the human pairs presented

therein, only one is not brought together by violence or an authoritarian

insistence on obedience to the force of another’s will, sword, or magic.

Theseus and Hippolyta, the ruling pair of the play, are the couple of

the will crossed with the sword, as Theseus “wooed [her] with [his]

sword, / And won [her] love doing [her] injuries”,

while the eventual

pairing of Demetrius with Helena is the result of an herb which “[t]he

juice of it on eyelids laid, / Will make man or woman madly dote”.

What the play illustrates and condemns through these pairings is an

87 Two Gentlemen of Verona 5.4.175.

88 Ibid., 5.4.145–47.

89 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1.16–17.

90 Ibid., 2.1.170–71.

384 Love and its Critics

“obedience […] enforced with brutality”.

Only Hermia and Lysander

freely choose each other—in the midst of the delightful chaos of this

play, is that supposed to be the example of what Stone calls love’s

“imprudent folly and even madness”?

Or, as Alan Sinfield suggests, is

it merely the illusion of choice?

If I were directing the play […] the more effective move would be to

disclose the tragedy in the conventional ending. This would involve

presenting the boys and girls as manifestly brainwashed and infantilized

by Puck’s manipulations of their minds and bodies into cross-gender

pairings. […] Puck could be shown putting electrodes on to their heads;

they would lose their vigour and engagement with life, and sink into

marriage as into a stupor.

These critics’ urge to discount and dismiss Hermia’s choice is cut from

the same cloth as the tyranny of her father. Critic and father are closer

together than it might initially seem. One may not expect a literary critic

to adopt the emphatic physical presence of an actor. Neither might one

expect a dramatic character to express himself in the terms of academic

prose. But the dismissal of Hermia’s will features prominently in the

thinking of both figures. Egeus storms into the presence of the Duke,

demanding that the public State enforce his private authority: he is “full

of vexation” and “complaint” with Hermia,

who has refused his choice

of marriage partner for her—the “spotted and inconstant” Demetrius

—

and has further defied his will by, in “a kind of theft”,

giving her

love to Lysander. Egeus rages at Lysander for having used witchcraft

(Sinfield’s “manipulations”) to steal his daughter away from him:

This [man] hath bewitched the bosom of my child;

Thou, thou, Lysander, thou hast given her rhymes,

And interchanged love-tokens with my child:

Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung,

With feigning voice verses of feigning love,

And stolen the impression of her fantasy

91 L. Stone, 112.

92 Ibid., 181.

93 Sinfield, 109.

94 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1.22.

95 Ibid., 1.1.110.

96 Allestree, 291.

385

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

With bracelets of thy hair, rings, gawds, conceits,

Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats, messengers

Of strong prevailment in unharden’d youth:

With cunning hast thou filch’d my daughter’s heart,

Turn’d her obedience, which is due to me,

To stubborn harshness.

Egeus demands either that his daughter be forced to obey him, or be

forced to face the death penalty:

Be it so she will not here before your grace

Consent to marry with Demetrius,

I beg the ancient privilege of Athens,

As she is mine, I may dispose of her:

Which shall be either to this gentleman

Or to her death, according to our law

Immediately provided in that case.

Even harsher than the Duke of Milan, Egeus would rather that

his daughter die than be allowed to exercise a will and judgment

independent of, or even slightly different from his own. Egeus’ demands

appear to put Theseus—with the conspicuously silent Hippolyta beside

him—in something of an awkward position. He can give Egeus his will,

and sit back while the raving old man makes a mockery of the authority

of his state by demanding that public justice be meted out for private

faults. He can simply dismiss Egeus, possibly creating trouble for

himself with the patrician class of Athens. Or, he can do what so many

of Shakespeare’s characters do: seem to do, say, or think one thing while

acting in an entirely different manner. In this case, Theseus seems to take

Egeus’ side, telling Hermia that she must subordinate her judgment

(and her eyes—thus, her attraction to Lysander) to her father. When

Hermia says “I would that my father looked but with my eyes”,

a line

practically calculated to appeal to the anti-authoritarian sentiments

that the poetry and drama of this period are increasingly trading on,

97 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1.27–38.

98 Ibid., 1.1.39–45.

99 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1.56.

386 Love and its Critics

Theseus responds with the conservative instruction: “Rather your eyes

must with his judgment look”.

100

So far, so predictable.

But the Thesean “fix” is in, though Egeus is too dull-witted to see

it. As the conversation between the warrior duke and the spirited

daughter of a tyrant-father proceeds, it becomes evident that Theseus

is looking for a loophole, a way to bend the rules. When Hermia asks

what the worst-case scenario is if she refuses to obey Egeus, Theseus

subtly alters the terms of the old man’s demands: Hermia will be forced

“Either to die the death or to abjure / For ever the society of men”.

101

There is the loophole. Hermia has a choice—limited though it is—of

three options: obedience, “austerity and single life”,

102

or death. It is not

nearly as draconian a choice as the obedience or death ultimatum that

Egeus would impose.

As the scene progresses, Egeus’ absurdity, and Demetrius’ unsavory

character, each becomes more evident. In a clever mocking of the entire

“between men” structure, Lysander turns to Demetrius and demands

that he leave off his pursuit of Hermia: “You have her father’s love,

Demetrius; / Let me have Hermia’s: do you marry him”.

103

And why

not? Why not just cut out the middle woman? If this bond is to be one

between Egeus and Demetrius, what need for so obvious an object of

exchange as Hermia? And though this is a laugh-line, and a big one,

Egeus steps right into the role of the butt of the joke, insisting on his

right to dispose of both his love and his property as he sees fit:

Scornful Lysander! true, he hath my love,

And what is mine my love shall render him.

And she is mine, and all my right of her

I do estate unto Demetrius.

104

Demetrius has Egeus’ “love”, and as a sign of that soon-to-be-bonded

love between men, Egeus will “estate” (like the value of moveable

goods that can be passed from one owner to another) his daughter upon

the man of his love’s choice. The joke here, if the audience has ears to

100 Ibid., 1.1.57.

101 Ibid., 1.1.65–66. Emphasis added.

102 Ibid., 1.1.90.

103 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1.91–92.

104 Ibid., 1.1.95–98.

387

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

hear, and the reader has eyes to see, is that it is not “love” that is being

portrayed here as folly or madness—it is the absurdity of allowing the

eros of the father to be the sole legitimate and determining factor in the

making of a marriage. “Do you marry him”, indeed.

Another notable point about the ridiculous nature of Egeus’

insistence on estating his daughter unto Demetrius, is that Demetrius

has a reputation as what we might now call a player. As Lysander

charges, with no self-defense whatsoever coming from the accused:

Demetrius, I’ll avouch it to his head,

Made love to Nedar’s daughter, Helena,

And won her soul; and she, sweet lady, dotes,

Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry,

Upon this spotted and inconstant man.

105

Demetrius has cruelly dallied with Helena, and is now, apparently

to be “estated” with another young girl for his troubles. As Theseus,

somewhat perturbed at this, notes: “I must confess that I have heard

so much, / And with Demetrius thought to have spoke thereof”.

106

this point, Theseus goes from finding the loophole to finding the escape

clause. He tells both Demetrius and Egeus to come with him:

I must employ you in some business

Against our nuptial and confer with you

Of something nearly that concerns yourselves.

107

In so doing, he creates the situation in which, being left utterly alone,

Hermia and Lysander can do as they will—obey, escape, or pursue

whatever other options occur to them. Theseus has worked his way out

of an awkward, ridiculous, and unwanted situation, and given himself

a layer of plausible deniability as a shield against any further trouble.

From this point, “the course of true love” may not “run smooth”,

108

but

at least it has a fighting chance.

105 Ibid., 1.1.106–10.

106 Ibid., 1.1.111–12.

107 Ibid., 1.1.123–126.

108 Ibid., 1.1.134.

388 Love and its Critics

The relation of judgment to the eyes, seeing, sight, and insight, and

their association with love are the dominant themes of the mix of magic

and comedy that plays out in the forest scenes in the middle of the

play. It is through the eyes, manipulated with herbal magic, that love

is changed, conjured out of nothing, and (for some) restored. The comic

action suggests both the fragility and the power of love, the ease with

which surfaces can be mistaken for depths, especially for the young

men of the play—though even the fairy queen Titania finds herself

“enamored of an ass”.

109

Edwin Henry Landseer, Scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Titania and

Bottom (1848–1851).

110

The fairy king Oberon, who orders his servant Puck to fetch “a little

western flower” on which “the bolt of Cupid fell”, determines to use

“the juice of it, on sleeping eyelids laid”

111

to control who will pair with

whom. In so doing, he acts as a satire on Egeus and the entire structure of a

society in which marriage and love not only “keep little company together

nowadays”,

112

but are regarded as incompatible, while “love” is regarded

as madness, and marriage—arranged, of course, by the father—is thought

109 Ibid., 4.1.76.

110 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edwin_Landseer_-_Scene_from_A_

Midsummer_Night's_Dream._Titania_and_Bottom_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

111 Ibid., 2.1.165–66, 70.

112 Ibid., 3.1.139.

389

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

to be the “reasonable” and “sane” alternative. In the Comedy-of-Errors-style

identity confusion that the plot relies on, Puck ends up squeezing the juice

into the eyes of both young men, rather than merely putting Demetrius

under its magic spell, and then the game is on. Lysander, in love with

Hermia at the beginning, now wakes up and finds Helena irresistible,

and is filled with the urge to fight Demetrius for her love:

113

Transparent Helena! Nature shows art,

That through thy bosom makes me see thy heart.

Where is Demetrius? O, how fit a word

Is that vile name to perish on my sword!

114

When Helena, naturally enough, is shocked by Lysander’s sudden outburst,

and reminds him of his love for Hermia, the formerly stable young man

illustrates the extremes of thought and behavior to which the drug can lead

(in a comic illustration of the effects of authority and obedience):

Content with Hermia! No; I do repent

The tedious minutes I with her have spent.

Not Hermia but Helena I love:

Who will not change a raven for a dove?

The will of man is by his reason swayed;

And reason says you are the worthier maid.

Things growing are not ripe until their season

So I, being young, till now ripe not to reason;

And touching now the point of human skill,

Reason becomes the marshal to my will

And leads me to your eyes, where I o’erlook

Love’s stories written in love’s richest book.

115

Reason, as much or more than love, is mocked by this speech. Reason,

which as John Milton will write, “also is choice”, cannot operate when

the will is overridden, when it is “[u]seless and vain, of freedom both

113 The drug apparently makes Lysander forgetful of more than his love for Hermia,

as he seems to have forgotten the fact that Demetrius—until he is also drugged—

wants nothing to do with Helena.

114 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.2.103–07.

115 Ibid., 2.2.111–22.

390 Love and its Critics

despoiled, / Made passive”, and made to serve “necessitie”.

116

Under the

influence of the drug that has been applied to his eyes, Lysander is less

free to use, as Bertram would, “[t]he help of [his] own eyes”

117

than he

was when confronting the authority of Egeus and Theseus. Lysander,

who while pursuing the goals of fin’amor was willing to stand with

Hermia before the authority of the father and the state, is now, while

under the influence of fals’amor, a toady, a lackey, a slave who speaks

and acts as authority—the drug—would have him speak and act. This

is especially obvious to Hermia, when Lysander explains his sudden

transformation:

HERMIA What love could press Lysander from my side?

LYSANDER Lysander’s love, that would not let him bide,

Fair Helena, who more engilds the night

Than all you fiery oes and eyes of light.

Why seek’st thou me? could not this make thee know,

The hate I bear thee made me leave thee so?

HERMIA You speak not as you think: it cannot be.

118

Hermia is right for two reasons: Lysander speaks not as he thinks because

he is not actually thinking, merely reacting obediently to the power of

the drug—the former rebel now a comically absurd conformist—and

Lysander speaks not as himself, but as someone under the influence, not

of a chosen love, a fin’amor, but of a drug that renders his will “useless

and vain”. Hermia knows Lysander; her sight is insight, as Lysander’s

had been before the drug. Thus, far from being a lover like Proteus,

who can find in one object the same superficial attractions he finds in

any other object, Hermia is the kind of lover of whom the troubadours

wrote—one who knows the beloved, and chooses, despite the trouble it

may cause, love over obedience.

Demetrius and Helena are at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Neither of them appears to have any insight whatsoever, as Helena

continues to chase a man who has little but contempt for her, and

116 John Milton. Paradise Lost 3.108, 109–10. All citations of Milton’s poetry are from

John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. by Merritt Hughes (New York:

Odyssey Press, 1957).

117 All’s Well that Ends Well 2.3.106–07.

118 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.2.185–91.

391

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

Demetrius—before being drugged—continues to chase a woman who

wants nothing to do with him. Demetrius’ reasons for his behavior—

venal and mercenary as they are—are at least rational. Helena, on the

other hand, is the one of the four who is portrayed as helpless in the face

of an unchosen passion, almost as if she were a female version of Sidney’s

Astrophil, or of Petrarch himself, chasing an always-uncatchable Stella

or Laura. The effect of this unfortunate sickness is to make her think

herself uniquely undesirable in comparison with Hermia:

[…] I am as ugly as a bear;

For beasts that meet me run away for fear:

Therefore no marvel though Demetrius

Do, as a monster fly my presence thus.

What wicked and dissembling glass of mine

Made me compare with Hermia’s sphery eyne?

119

Demetrius, in contrast, suffers no such negative self-opinion. His

beloved is not, like a heavenly principality, beyond his grasp, nor would

it be sullied by his touch, because his beloved is Egeus and his money.

As the play makes clear, that love is most certainly requited. But under

the influence of the drug, Demetrius becomes just as untrue to money as

Lysander becomes to Hermia:

O Helena, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!

To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne?

Crystal is muddy. O, how ripe in show

Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow!

That pure congealed white, high Taurus snow,

Fann’d with the eastern wind, turns to a crow

When thou hold’st up thy hand: O, let me kiss

This princess of pure white, this seal of bliss!

120

The effect of the drug is to override the will, rendering it compliant to

the demands of the one who administers it, and in a sense, of the readers

and audiences who look on in mirth. Underneath the laughter is a dark

thread of reflection on just how fragile love can be as a challenger to the

119 Ibid., 2.2.93–99.

120 Ibid., 3.2.137–44.

392 Love and its Critics

claims of authority and power, when the human will can so easily be

manipulated, even in those cases in which it could not be intimidated.

Lysander, who like Hermia, is a good judge of character, a young

man with insight (it was he, after all, who “outed” Demetrius as the

unsavoury man he is), does not have that ability beaten out of him, but

drugged out of him. Egeus would likely give a pretty penny to have the

juice of that magic flower with which to cancel his daughter’s will, and

bring her back to heel.

Beyond the mere enforcement of the administrator’s will, the drug

serves a punitive function when it is administered to Titania, who has

dared defy Oberon over his request for “a little changeling boy / To be

[his] henchman”.

121

As they argue and then part, Oberon darkly mutters

“[t]hou shalt not from this grove / Till I torment thee for this injury”.

122

Titania’s refusal to obey is punished by having her sight manipulated

and her will stripped away by being made a foolish slave to the effects

of the flower whose “liquor” is squeezed upon her eyes:

Having once this juice,

I’ll watch Titania when she is asleep,

And drop the liquor of it in her eyes.

The next thing then she waking looks upon,

[…]

She shall pursue it with the soul of love.

123

The first thing Titania sees on awakening, of course, is the comic

character Bottom, who has been transformed by Puck so that he has the

head of an ass. Titania’s drugged reaction is to do exactly as Oberon had

demanded: “on the first view”, she says while gazing into the eyes of the

ass, “I love thee”.

124

This is, of course, not love, and that is exactly the joke.

So much of what passes for love in a culture of arranged marriages is a

command performance, intended to gloss the ugly reality of having been

bought and sold into a relationship and a life not of one’s own choosing,

from which there are few avenues of escape, except for perhaps “the

ecclesiastical separation a mensa et thoro”—a separation from bed and

121 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.120–21.

122 Ibid., 2.1.136–37.

123 Ibid., 2.1.176–79, 182.

124 Ibid., 3.1.136.

393

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

board under which an “ecclesiastical judge permitted a man and wife

to live apart, but without granting them the right to remarry”.

125

Unlike

comedy, in the real world no one was magically released from arranged

marriages from which only death (theirs or their spouse’s) would

release them. But in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lysander is released

to be himself again, and once more be able to choose Hermia. Titania is

released from her punishment of foolish illusion, and is shown the very

ass of whom she thought she had been enamored. Even Egeus’ claims

of “the law, the law”

126

are swept away in a grand gesture by Theseus,

who tells the old tyrant that “I will overbear your will”.

127

Everything is

made right, and all is restored.

Except that it isn’t. One man, Demetrius, is left under the influence of

the drug, forced to love Helena, while at the same time, Helena is trapped

in a situation in which the man she loves—for whatever inexplicably

pathetic Petrarchan reasons—does not really love her. Oh certainly,

he plays the part well, unbeknownst even to himself, but Demetrius

does not choose Helena. In effect, he is left under the spell of authority

and obedience for the rest of his life. Readers and audience members

who approve this as part of a “happy ending” should ask themselves

if they would like to have their own wills rendered useless, or whether

that is a treatment they would reserve strictly for people of whom they

disapprove. For thee, but not for me.

Love as Resistance: Juliet and the Critics who Disdain

Moving from comedy to tragedy, we see the same pattern at work. A

father seeks to match himself to another man, using the daughter as

a medium of exchange, while a fourth element—the younger man—

interferes with the planned match, aided by the enthusiastic participation

of the daughter. In Romeo and Juliet, the father is Capulet, the leader of

one of the two rival families in Verona. His family’s ongoing contention

125 Monique Vleeschouwers-Van Melkebeek. “Separation and Marital Property”.

In Mia Korpiola, ed. Regional Variations in Matrimonial Law and Custom in Europe,

1150–1600 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 81–82.

126 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.2.154.

127 Ibid., 4.2.178.

394 Love and its Critics

with the Montague family—expressed in Capulet’s early determination

to strike because “Old Montague is come / And flourishes his blade in

spite of me”

128

—has caused enough trouble that the Prince has warned

both houses: “If ever you disturb our streets again, / Your lives shall pay

the forfeit of the peace”.

129

Capulet needs a way to best “Old Montague”,

and what better way than by matching himself to a foreign nobleman

who is kinsman to the Prince—the County Paris—in order to raise the

status of his family, trump Montague, and do a little flourishing in spite

of him? Capulet’s daughter, Juliet, will be the glue that seals the two

men together, if only Paris will be patient enough to let her grow up a

little more. Capulet says that she is too young:

My child is yet a stranger in the world;

She hath not seen the change of fourteen years,

Let two more summers wither in their pride,

Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.

130

Paris thinks she is old enough at thirteen, an idea with more than

adequate precedent in English history, even among the Tudors—Henry

VII’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, was thirteen while pregnant with the

child that would eventually win the kingship at Bosworth Field.

131

Paris notes: “Younger than she are happy mothers made”,

132

a position

indirectly supported by Juliet’s mother, who tells the girl that she had

already been her mother “much upon these years / That you are now

a maid”,

133

and that younger girls than Juliet “in Verona, ladies of

esteem, / Are already made mothers”.

134

This kind of early marriage,

while shocking today, is not unusual in Shakespeare’s time:

Child betrothals and adolescent marriages are a source for scandal in the

West today […] but were quite normal for much of our history. Catherine

128 Romeo and Juliet 1.1.76–77.

129 Ibid., 1.1.95–96.

130 Ibid., 1.2.8–11.

131 See Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood. The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret

Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1993), 95.

132 Romeo and Juliet 1.1.12.

133 Ibid., 1.3.72–73.

134 Ibid., 1.3.70–71.

395

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

of Aragon was betrothed at age three to Arthur, son of Henry VII of

England, and married to him when she was fifteen.

135

But Capulet is reluctant: “And too soon marred are those so early

made”.

136

At this point in the play, the father seems at least as concerned

with his daughter’s welfare, even with her heart and will, as he is with

making the match between himself and Paris. He tells the suitor to take

his time, get to know Juliet, and see if something develops organically.

He, Capulet, cannot or will not force his daughter’s heart, so Paris will

have to appeal to Juliet on his own:

But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart,

My will to her consent is but a part;

An she agree, within her scope of choice

Lies my consent and fair according voice.

137

Capulet will play a quite different tune, of course, when matters grow

more urgent later in the play.

Juliet’s mother is working, not the other side of the match, but the

proposed object of exchange for the match, as she questions Juliet.

“How stands your disposition to be married?”

138

she asks, telling Juliet

“[t]he valiant Paris seeks you for his love”.

139

Unlike Silvia and Hermia,

who find their fathers’ choices repellent, Juliet appears amenable. When

her mother presses the point—“Speak briefly, can you like of Paris’

love?”

140

—Juliet responds as a model of obedience and cooperation: “I’ll

look to like, if looking liking move: / But no more deep will I endart

mine eye / Than your consent gives strength to make it fly”.

141

All of this,

of course, flies out of the proverbial balcony window after she meets,

falls in love with, and secretly marries Romeo—a state of affairs about

which her parents are entirely unaware.

135 Hanne Blank. Virgin: The Untouched History (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), 14.

136 Romeo and Juliet 1.2.13.

137 Ibid., 1.2.16–19.

138 Ibid., 1.3.65.

139 Ibid., 1.3.74.

140 Ibid., 1.3.96.

141 Ibid., 1.3.97–99.

396 Love and its Critics

Frank Dicksee, Romeo and Juliet (1884). Southampton City Art Gallery.

142

When her initial willingness to cooperate changes into what seems to

him an inexplicable and moody resistance, Capulet makes it clear what

Juliet’s position is:

Hang thee, young baggage! disobedient wretch!

I tell thee what: get thee to church o’ Thursday,

Or never after look me in the face:

Speak not, reply not, do not answer me;

My fingers itch.

143

Because of the tumult that has arisen in Verona over the street brawl that

resulted in the deaths of Tybalt and Mercutio, as well as the banishment

of Romeo, Capulet acts quickly to seal the match between himself and

Paris. There is now no time for wooing, and Capulet’s will is now the

whole, not just a part, of Juliet’s consent. Or so he thinks, as he threatens

to beat his daughter for her disobedience. All the while, Juliet finds

herself unable—out of fear—to tell him why she is suddenly refusing

the marriage to Paris. Her stammerings further enrage Capulet, who—

having reached a nearly Jehovean state of wrath—tells his daughter that

she will obey, or else be thrown out with the trash:

142 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DickseeRomeoandJuliet.jpg

143 Romeo and Juliet 3.5.161–65.

397

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

Look to’t, think on’t, I do not use to jest.

Thursday is near; lay hand on heart, advise:

An you be mine, I’ll give you to my friend;

And you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets,

For, by my soul, I’ll ne’er acknowledge thee,

Nor what is mine shall never do thee good:

Trust to’t, bethink you; I’ll not be forsworn.

144

In this outburst, Capulet makes it perfectly clear what Juliet is—property.

At this point, even his wife thinks that he is “too hot”, while the Nurse

tells him that he “is to blame […] to rate her so”.

145

But these proxies

for audience reaction are nowhere near powerful enough to change

Capulet’s mind. His daughter—who in his mind owes him obedience

for her begetting, and should be to him as creation is to its god—will

either obey the commandments wrapped in his titanic thundering, or

she will be thrown out into the streets. An you be mine, I’ll give you to my

friend. A starker statement of proprietary relationship can scarcely be

found. Juliet is capital, a movable good that can be used as a medium

of exchange in the purchase of something lasting and valuable. To

Capulet, her lack of obedience lowers her value to nothing, and he

finds her assertion of will enraging and confusing all at once—as if a

man’s cash suddenly lost all of its value, even announcing that it was

not going to be used to make purchases. Capulet, in his moment of rage,

would rather see Juliet in prison, in alehouses, a criminal, than allow

her to make up her own mind and exercise her own heart’s will. Juliet’s

“scope of choice” is the same the Father will later give Adam and Eve in

Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Obey or be cast out.

Capulet may seem less extreme than Egeus, since he is not openly

demanding his daughter’s death. However, Juliet’s fear hints that

Capulet may be more dangerous than he appears. Even as she begs

her “[g]ood father” to hear her “but to speak a word”,

146

she is terrified

of telling him that she is already married—contracted in the presence

of witnesses, solemnified by the Friar, and consummated through a

144 Ibid., 3.5.191–97.

145 Ibid., 3.5.176, 170.

146 Ibid., 3.5.159–60.

398 Love and its Critics

clandestine night’s passion—and for her to marry Paris would be a

crime and a sin. But she is so afraid of her storming, raging father, that

she would rather fake her own death than tell him the truth.

She has good reason to be afraid. His “fingers itch” in a time and

place in which the killing of “disobedient” daughters was far from

unheard of. The phenomenon known as “honor killing” was well-

known in sixteenth-century Italy, with a particularly famous instance

of it occurring in the killing by Giovanni Battista of his wife, Vittoria

Savelli on 26 July 1563: “He first hit her forehead and then slit her throat,

cutting her head half off, […] the method used to dispatch livestock”.

147

Another such incident, in 1555, involved a father killing his daughter in

the same fashion: “the father took his [pregnant] daughter by the elbow

and, under the eyes of the whole village, led her across the field to her

lover’s corpse. There, as all watched, as if she were his heifer, he slit her

throat”.

148

Having been told by her father to “Graze where [she] will”,

149

as if she were an animal, Juliet is right to be afraid, and she is never fully

able to break out of the role of “baggage” that her father assigns her. The

audiences that watched this play for the first time were being “offered

an alternative model to that of blind obedience to paternal dictate”,

150

but they were also being shown with what violent fury paternal dictate

will defend its prerogatives.

In terror and confusion, Juliet seeks the intervention of Friar

Lawrence, a significantly less powerful advocate than the one Hermia

finds in Theseus. Even more manipulative than the “fantastical duke

of dark corners” who spends his time posing as a friar in Measure for

147 Thomas V. Cohen. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2004, 27).

148 Elizabeth S. Cohen and Thomas V. Cohen. Daily Life in Renaissance Italy (Westport:

Greenwood Press, 2001), 93. Astonishingly, “the notion of honor killing disappeared

from the Italian Penal code only as recently as 1981 with the law no. 442 of 5 August

called ‘Abrogazione della rilevanza penale della causa d’onore e del matrimonio

riparatore’ [Abolishment of the ‘honour motive’ and of ‘shotgun’ marriages in

criminal proceedings]” (Donatella Barazzetti, Franca Garreffa, and Rosaria Marsico.

National Report: Italia. Daphne Project: Proposing New Indicators: Measuring Violence’s

Effects. University of Calabria, Rende: Italy, 2007, 3, http://www.surt.org/gvei/docs/

national_report_italy.pdf). Credit for this insight is due to Modje Taavon, who in

conversation pointed out the similarities between the Renaissance and modern

practices of “honor killing”.

149 Romeo and Juliet 3.5.190.

150 L. Stone, 218.

399

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

Measure,

151

Friar Lawrence is at once more than faintly disreputable,

and nearly as afraid of direct confrontation as Juliet is. His plan

is practically the archetype of a cowardly and foolish brand of

Machiavellian scheming:

Tomorrow night look that thou lie alone;

Let not thy nurse lie with thee in thy chamber:

Take thou this vial, being then in bed,

And this distilled liquor drink thou off;

[…]

Each part, deprived of supple government,

Shall, stiff and stark and cold, appear like death:

And in this borrow’d likeness of shrunk death

Thou shalt continue two and forty hours,

And then awake as from a pleasant sleep.

152

The plot has its intended effect, getting her out of the marriage to Paris,

but at the cost of sowing the seeds of Juliet’s real, rather than merely

pretended, death.

Even upon discovering her “dead”, however, the grief Capulet

expresses centers more on the loss of his match with Paris, than it does on

the loss of his daughter. Paris will now not be his son-in-law, since that

position is already taken (though by someone other than he assumes):

Death is my son-in-law, Death is my heir;

My daughter he hath wedded: I will die,

And leave him all; life, living, all is Death’s.

153

His concern here is over the question of the “heir” to whom he will

leave his wealth and estate. He grieves that he has been unable to

match himself with Paris, and has instead matched himself with Death

(to whom all are matched in the end): “I will die, / And leave him all;

[…] all is Death’s”. He has lost the one thing that mattered most to

him in life—the mechanism though which he would be able to pass on

his property, wealth, and inheritable legacy. Juliet, while valuable, is

151 Measure for Measure 4.4.156–57.

152 Romeo and Juliet 4.1.91–94, 102–06.

153 Ibid., 4.5.38–40.

400 Love and its Critics

enumerated as merely a possession, now lost, among all those that will

be bequeathed to Death.

Through the tragic outcome of Romeo and Juliet, we can easily see

how love functions as a challenge to and a rejection of the authority

of the father. Romeo starts out unpromisingly, as the young man in

love with Love, more Neopetrarchan than neo-troubadourian, moping,

sighing and crying in a way that makes some want to reassure him and

others to smack him. According to his father, Romeo spends most of his

pre-dawn mornings in a competition with himself over how intensely

he can grieve:

With tears augmenting the fresh morning dew.

Adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs;

But all so soon as the all-cheering sun

Should in the furthest east begin to draw

The shady curtains from Aurora’s bed,

Away from the light steals home my heavy son,

And private in his chamber pens himself,

Shuts up his windows, locks far daylight out

And makes himself an artificial night.

154

All this excessive emotion is related to Romeo’s unsuccessful courting

of a girl named Rosaline, whose identity we learn from Romeo’s

friend, Benvolio, rather than from Romeo himself. She will simply

not cooperate with, or be impressed by, any of Romeo’s shopworn

techniques. First, Romeo claims that the as-yet-unnamed Rosaline will

“not be hit / With Cupid’s arrow; she hath Dian’s wit”.

155

Diana, the

Roman goddess of the hunt who is strongly associated with images of

lesbian love in the Renaissance, if “subtly authorized under the idiom

of chastity”,

156

serves as Romeo’s shorthand explanation to Benvolio

for his failure. Romeo seems unable (or unwilling) to imagine that his

failure to attract Rosaline has anything to do with him. It must be her. In

Romeo’s mind, she apparently also has a deaf ear for poetry: “She will

154 Ibid., 1.1.131–39.

155 Ibid., 1.1.207–08.

156 Valerie Traub. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002), 237. See especially her discussion of Thomas

Heywood’s 1609 play The Golden Age.

401

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

not stay the siege of loving terms”.

157

How is it that his verses—staged

as they are in military terms as weapons with which to force his way

past the defenses of the walled town of Rosaline’s assent—are unable

to conquer her resistance? It must be that she hath Dian’s wit. That same

“wit” must be why she will not “bide the encounter of assailing eyes”

or “ope her lap to saint-seducing gold”

158

either. Romeo cannot talk his

way, stalk his way, or buy his way into Rosaline’s affections.

Wisely, Benvolio does not comment on any of this nonsense, except

by telling his ridiculous young friend to turn his attention elsewhere,

“[b]y giving liberty to thine eyes”, and examining “other beauties”.

159

Romeo’s response is straight out of the Petrarchan lover’s handbook.

Rosaline—whom he has just absurdly implied is a tin-eared lesbian—is

also the unreachable measure of all other beauties, any one of whom

would serve merely as “a note / Where [he] may read” of his beloved’s

beauty, as if Rosaline (whose name Romeo never actually pronounces)

were the Platonic form of which all other women were merely copies.

160

Romeo is made idiotic as he follows the path of superficial, sight-

without-insight fals’amor. But he will soon learn what Giraut de Borneilh

meant when he wrote “through the eyes love enters the heart”, as

what Romeo terms “the devout religion of mine eye”

161

—an image of

obedience, doctrine, and authority—gives way to fin’amor, whose only

doctrines are wonder and desire.

At the feast Capulet gives to mark what is meant to be the matching

of Juliet to the County Paris, Romeo sees something he claims, at least,

never to have seen before: true beauty. Watching Juliet dance, possibly

with Paris himself, Romeo is flabbergasted:

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!

It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night

Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear;

Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!

So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows,

As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows.

157 Romeo and Juliet 1.1.211.

158 Ibid., 1.1.212–13.

159 Ibid., 1.1.226–27.

160 Ibid., 1.1.234–35.

161 Ibid., 1.l2.90.

402 Love and its Critics

The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand,

And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand.

Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!

For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.

162

At this point, it is hard to know how much of this is genuine passion,

the entering of love through the eyes, and how much of it is Romeo’s

established mode of framing everything in terms of poetic opposites,

filtering lived experience through the “devout religion” of his eye.

Does he truly see here, and if so, what can he possibly be seeing?

A beautiful girl, with every grace imaginable, dancing with another

man—thus adding a hint of the adulterous, or quasi-adulterous angle

of so much troubadour and trobairitz poetry—Juliet is, to this point,

someone with whom he has never exchanged so much as a single

word. What does he know of her? What can he know of her? As the

scene reveals, he does not even know her name when he approaches

her, and speaks to her for the first time.

And then, something remarkable happens. In true troubadour and

trobaritz fashion, this young man and young woman, who do not

know each other at all, discover that they have “one joy in two hearts”

(“zweier herzen wünne”),

163

as they compose a sonnet, together, as their

first meeting and first words. Romeo approaches, and begins:

If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

164

Admittedly, it is difficult not to wonder whether or not this is an

example of the “siege of loving terms” that had worked so poorly with

Rosaline. Is this a stanza that Romeo has memorized, and keeps for

occasions such as these? Perhaps. But even if so, perhaps especially if

162 Ibid., 1.5.45–54.

163 Walther von der Vogelweide. “Saget mir ieman, waz ist minne?” In Karl Lachmann,

ed., Die Gedichte Walthers von der Vogelweide (Berlin: George Reimer, 1891), 69,

https://archive.org/stream/diegedichtewalt00lachgoog#page/n92

164 Romeo and Juliet 1.5.94–97.

403

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

so, what he then encounters—in Juliet’s like-for-like response—has to

be all the more amazing.

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

165

Some might argue that this exchange is merely conventional. Even so

respected a critic as Ralph Berry argues in this way. For him the sonnet

that Romeo and Juliet compose together is part of “a tranced process of

courtly reciprocity”, an “inward-turning, acquiescent” phenomena that

reflects “the fluency, the intensity, and the superficiality of the means

through which this society orders its experience, and its relationships”.

166

One of the current authors had a graduate professor some years ago

who professed to be thrilled during the first few minutes of the 1993

Kenneth Branagh film of Much Ado About Nothing because, “someone

has finally figured out that love is merely a construct in Shakespeare, a

conventional game”. She then related her disappointment at the way the

film departed from her reading of the play. The remark made in response

to her observations, “Shakespeare doesn’t belong to academics”, did not

go over well. But it is just as true now as it was then.

Literary critics are too often, despite pretensions to be defenders of

the unfettered intellect, among the most conformist members of society.

We follow the fashionable codes of our “discourse communities” in

looking for ways to tame our material, to allegorize it—if not through

the categories of religion, then through those of history or theory—into

saying something very different from what a “naive” or “surface”

reading of the text might suggest to an ordinary reader, one less artfully

trained in the ways of interrogating a literary object in order to bend it

to one’s will, or make it disappear entirely. Regardless of whether or not

Romeo’s first stanza is a memorized performance piece, a Petrarchan

pick-up line that he has at the ready, Juliet’s response is not preplanned,

rehearsed, or otherwise the kind of utterance that Nietzsche argues

is only possible because the sentiment it expresses is already dead in

165 Ibid., 1.5.98–101.

166 Ralph Berry. The Shakespearean Metaphor (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 38.

404 Love and its Critics

our hearts.

167

Juliet’s response is only conventional in the sense that it

uses a known form in order to express thoughts and emotions of her

own—in that same sense, the guitar solo in Carlos Santana’s Europa is

“conventional”, as is the fourth movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony

No. 6, the Pathetique.

Juliet’s response does not indicate that she is a slave to convention;

she is a mere girl who has yet to become sophisticated enough to be

knowing and jaded about the poetical and musical forms of her time.

Juliet gives us an example of what a more generous critic like Regina

Schwartz calls a “communication [that] is instantaneous and complete”,

which teaches both lovers to “[leave] behind the Petrarchan lover’s

conventions”, in favor of “a devotion without guile and without

measure”.

168

In fact, what makes Juliet’s response at once more bracing

and delightful is that she gets the form of the sonnet ever so slightly

wrong—a deliberate cue, it seems, on the author’s part to the freshness

and originality of her response to Romeo. Where Romeo is predictably

correct in following his author’s ABAB rhyme scheme (hand, this,

stand, kiss), Juliet’s improvised response, while beautiful, is written as a

mistaking of the typical scheme for the second stanza of a Shakespearean

sonnet. Rather than CDCD, introducing two new rhymes to the mix,

Juliet introduces only one new rhyme, while re-using one of Romeo’s in

a CBCB scheme (much, this, touch, kiss). However, one might read this,

not as a mistake, but as an adaptation of the form that makes Juliet’s

second stanza even more responsive to Romeo’s first than a purely

“conventional” second stanza might have been. In this case, far from

a girl who is merely giving the expected, “acquiescent” response her

167 “Whatever we have words for, we are already beyond” (“Wofür wir Worte haben,

darüber sind wir auch schon hinaus”) (Friedrich Nietzsche. Zur Genealogie der

Moral [1887] Götzendämmerung [1889] [Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2013], 244).

Robert Musil expresses a similar idea: “The truth between two people cannot be

spoken. As soon as we speak, we close doors; words are best used for insubstantial

messages; we speak in the hours in which we are not alive” (“Die wahre Wahrheit

zwischen zwei Menschen kann nicht ausgesprochen werden. Sobald wir sprechen,

schließen sich Türen; das Wort dient mehr den unwirklichen Mitteilungen, man

spricht in den Stunden, wo man nicht lebt”) (Musil, 516). The Russian poet Fyodor

Tyutchev makes much the same observation in his poem Silentium: “The thought,

spoken,isalie”(“Мысльизреченнаяестьложь”)(StephenPrickett,ed.European

Romanticism: A Reader [London: Bloomsbury, 2010], 638, l. 10).

168 Regina Schwartz. Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2016), 50, 51.

405

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

culture demands, we have an artist, a poet in her own right, who then

matches Romeo line by line in composing the sonnet:

ROMEO Havenotsaintslips,andholypalmerstoo?

JULIET Ay,pilgrim,lipsthattheymustuseinprayer.

ROMEO O,then,dearsaint,letlipsdowhathandsdo;Theypray,

grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET Saintsdonotmove,thoughgrantforprayers’sake.

ROMEO Thenmovenot,whilemyprayer’seffectItake.

169

The couple then starts another sonnet, this time getting through only

the first four lines, before they are interrupted. But even though Romeo

may, as Juliet observes, “kiss by th’ book”,

170

and though Juliet may

be expressing herself with unnecessary emphasis by declaring that

if Romeo is “marriéd, / My grave is like to be my wedding bed”,

171

hardly seems necessary to dismiss them as mere puppets of structural

expectations and conventions:

The young lovers feel intensely that which the [sonnet] mode incites

them to feel. Confronted with the image of the ideal lover, each reverts to

stereotype. What we have here is an existential drama of sonnet-life. The

world of Romeo and Juliet […] is a world of fixed relations and closed

assumptions. They appear as quotations, and they speak in quotations:

the cliché, of which the sonnet is exemplar, is the dominant thought-

form of Verona.

172

Here we have a touch of the Zumthor/Stone/Heller-Roazen argument

that seeks to erase individuality. One begins to wonder what it is in

this argument that appeals to the academic mind. Understood in this

way, one also wonders why anyone would bother paying the price

of admission to see this play. Kiernan Ryan, in a brilliant chapter on

King Lear, addresses the reductive nature of too much critical writing

about these plays, and about literature and art in general, and boils the

problem down into three ingredients that are applicable to any number

of other plays:

169 Romeo and Juliet 1.5.102–07.

170 Ibid., 1.5.111.

171 Ibid., 1.5.135–36.

172 Berry, 40.

406 Love and its Critics

The first is [the critics’] supposition that the tragedy is the symptom of

some ulterior phenomenon, whether it be language, the unconscious,

patriarchy, or power. The play’s autonomy and integrity as a work of

art are ditched by critics bent on recruiting it to confirm their theoretical

assumptions or preconceptions of the past. The second reason is

endemic to critics raring to immure [the play] in its early modern matrix:

a blindness to the possibility that the tragedy may not be fully intelligible

in terms of its time, because its gaze is fixed on horizons that still lie

ahead of our time. Even when radical historicists like Patterson hold [the

play] must have been subversive in Shakespeare’s day, it remains the

imprint of an obsolete era, the pawn of a purely retrospective viewpoint.

And the third reason is the failure to engage in detail with the poetic

language and dramatic form […], which in some cases, as Greenblatt’s

essays demonstrate, simply furnishes a pretext for expounding another

text altogether.

173

But there is no shortage of interesting material in the plays, despite the

desire of many critics to rewrite the texts, or, as Ryan suggests, abandon

them for others. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet addresses fundamental

questions of identity, politics, and love’s tenuous existence in a world in

which so many will fight for so long over what finally amounts to so little.

In asking “wherefore art thou Romeo?” and “What’s Montague?”

174

Juliet

shows that her thinking is already more advanced than is Romeo’s, who

is still half caught in his own facility with Petrarchan poetic imagery, as

he compares her to the sun and the stars, and wishes—rather than to be

with her at the moment—to be a glove upon her hand so that he might

touch her cheek:

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

[…]

It is my lady, O, it is my love!

O, that she knew she were!

[…]

Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,

Having some business, do entreat her eyes

173 Kiernan Ryan. “King Lear”. In A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. 1, The

Tragedies, ed. by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Maldan, MA: Blackwell,

2003), 376–77.

174 Romeo and Juliet 2.2.33, 40.

407

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

To twinkle in their spheres till they return.

[…]

See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand!

O, that I were a glove upon that hand,

That I might touch that cheek!

175

In contrast, Juliet is already thinking about the practical obstacles to their

ability to be together, and how those obstacles might be overcome, pace

Denis De Rougemont’s argument that it is the obstacles themselves that are

the incitements to love.

176

In Juliet’s speech, “‘Tis but thy name that is my

enemy”,

177

and the obstacles of name and position can be overcome if the

lovers will see beyond the historically contingent categories of politics

and Veronese identity to the nature or essence of what each person is, or

can be In referring to body parts like hand and foot, arm and face,

178

Juliet

argues that in moving beyond what a Renaissance thinker, following

Aristotle, would call “the accidental”,

179

she and Romeo can find love in

spite of the obstacles that stand between them.

Whether or not this is possible, or even desirable, is contested. For

some, like Callaghan, Romeo and Juliet serves to create and impose “a

certain formation of desiring subjectivity attendant upon Protestant and

especially Puritan ideologies of marriage and the family required by

175 Ibid., 2.2.1–3, 10–11, 15–17, 23–25.

176 Between joy and its external cause there is always some separation and some obstacle: society,

sin, virtue, our bodies, our separate selves. And from this arises the heat of passion. And from

this comes the fact that our wish for total union is bound indissolubly with a desire for the death

that frees us.

Entre la joie et sa cause extérieure il y a toujours quelque séparation et quelque obstacle: la

societé, le peché, la vertu, notre corps, notre moi distinct. Et de là vient l’ardeur de la passion.

Et de là vient que le desir d’union totale se lie indissolublement au désir de la mort qui libere.

Denis de Rougemont. L’Amour et l’Occident (Paris: Plon, 1939), 176.

177 Romeo and Juliet 2.2.38.

178 Ibid., 2.2.40–41.

179 Al-Ghāzalī, an eleventh-and twelfth-century interpreter of Aristotle explained the

distinction as a matter of prior and latter categories:

In the sentence: “This human being is white and an animal”, the predication of “white” and

“animal” of “human being” is quite different. Al-Ghāzalī calls the first accidental and the

second essential. […] He seems to mean, as Aristotle indeed thought, that what is essentially

tied to each other is also ordered in a special way, namely in the sense that animal is prior to

human being [and thus prior still to white].

Henrik Lagerlund. “The Assimilation of Aristotelian and Arabic Logic up to the

Later Thirteenth Century”. Medieval and Renaissance Logic, ed. by Dov M. Gabbay

and John Woods (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2008), 288.

408 Love and its Critics

[…] the emergent economic formation of capitalism”.

180

Callaghan also

argues that the play has served as a powerful artifact that supports the

“dominant ideology of romantic love”, which oppressively “relegates

homosexuality to the sphere of deviance, secures women’s submission

to the asymmetrical distribution of power between men and women,

and bolsters individualism by positing sexual love as the expression

of authentic identity”.

181

For Julia Kristeva, the play’s portrayal of

love disguises a dark undercurrent in which, if Romeo and Juliet

had survived, their passion would have revealed “the whole range

of sadomasochism that both partners had already announced in the

relatively quiet version of the Shakespearean text”.

182

But if that is what

Romeo and Juliet depicts, if Callaghan’s argument about the play being

oppressive is correct, or Kristeva’s contention about its love’s perversity

is correct, then what should the play portray instead? Rather than

presenting what these critics regard as an oppressively heterosexual

and/or sadomasochistic “romantic love”, should it, after all, proceed

with the orderly demonstration of Juliet’s obedience to her father?

Would unfettered patriarchy be preferable? Or should it show Romeo

and Mercutio running off together, while Juliet finds happiness with

Rosaline or expresses her “authentic identity” through celibacy, or

perhaps a hobby of some sort? Perhaps, as Sinfield suggests, it would

be more interesting if the play were rewritten in order that “every man

or woman may have his or her Jack and his or her Jill”, so that we might

have combinations that go beyond “even same-gender couples”?

183

Maybe it would be preferable to “amputate” the play, after the fashion of

the avant-garde writer/director Carmelo Bene, who, in Gilles Deleuze’s

view, opens up amazing possibilities by eliminating Romeo altogether?

CB [Carmelo Bene] […] subtracts something from the original piece.

[…] For example, he amputates Romeo, neutralizes Romeo in the

original piece. […] If you ampute Romeo, you will witness an amazing

180 Dympna Callaghan. “The Ideology of Romantic Love: the Case of Romeo and

Juliet”. The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics (Cambridge, MA:

Blackwell, 1994), 59.

181 Ibid., 60.

182 “la gamme du sado-masochisme que les deux partenaires avaient annoncé déjà

dans la version pourtant relativement paisible du texte shakespearien” (Julia

Kristeva. Histoires d’amour. Paris: Denoël, 1983, 210).

183 Sinfield, 112, 111.

409

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

development. Mercutio was only a virtuality in Shakespeare’s play.

Mercutio dies quickly in Shakespeare, but in [Carmelo Bene’s version]

he does not want to die, cannot die, cannot reach the point of dying, since

he is going to constitute the new play.

184

Or should it, perhaps, remain exactly as it is, serving as an object

of scorn tied to the critical whipping-post while modern, morally

superior critics vent their spleens? At long last, it becomes impossible

to tell whether there is any sense of decency left in criticism, as so

many of us pound a work until it threatens to die beneath our urgent

bludgeoning. This entire dynamic of morally outraged criticism is

wonderfully described by Ryan:

One of the least appealing features of literary studies today is the smug

diagnostic attitude that has swept through them like foot-and-mouth

disease through a fine herd of Friesians. It is this attitude that reduces

Shakespeare’s drama to an allegory or appendix of something else and

then passes sentence on it from the supposedly superior vantage point of

hindsight. It thereby denies the plays the power not only to arraign the

world in which they were first forged and the world in which we now

encounter them, but also to foreshadow futures that would otherwise

remain intangible. It is an approach that goes hand in hand with a scorn

for close reading, a contempt for the belief that there is something special

about the creative use of language and form in imaginative writing at its

best that sets it apart from other kinds of discourse and gives us ways of

seeing the world which no other kind of writing can deliver.

185

Perhaps it is in the dawn-song scene of Act 3 where Romeo and Juliet

might mount a defense against its more disdainful critics. In a scene

in which two young people, who about to be separated forever, have

fallen in love—not to injure anyone, and certainly not to “relegate”

anything or anyone “to the sphere of deviance”—and now face the

full power of the father and the state arrayed against them, perhaps

184 CB [Carmelo Bene] […] soustrait quelque chose de la pièce originaire. […] Mais, par exemple, il

ampute Roméo, il neutralise Roméo dans la pièce originaire. […] Si vous amputez Roméo, vous

allez assister à un étonnant développement, le développement de. Mercuzio, qui n’était qu’une

virtualité dans la pièce de Shakespeare. Mercuzio meurt vite chez Shakespeare, mais, chez CB,

il ne veut pas mourir, il ne peut pas mourir, n’arrive pas à mourir, puisqu’il va constituer la

nouvelle pièce.

Gilles Deleuze. “Un manifeste de moins”. Superpositions (Paris: Éditions de Minuit,

1979), 87–88.

185 Ryan, “King Lear”, 377–78.

410 Love and its Critics

here some redeeming value might be found in the play. The scene is

nearly a point-by-point recreation of the alba form of the troubadour

poets. The genre assumes an oppressive and tightly-controlled world

of social, financial, and political power. It includes marriage, not, as

De Rougemont would have it, as the happy cure to love,

186

but as the

oppressive institution through which love’s flourishing is strangled in

its cradle. And yet, authority fails. Love flourishes in spite of the power

of the jealous husband (lo gilos), as the eyes go forth to gaze and desire

(ill oill van vezer) despite the demands of authority and obedience. The

lovers, invariably adulterous, can only meet in secrecy, under cover of

darkness, and they need a watchman or guard to warn them as soon as

the first rays of the too-quickly rising sun appear.

These poems are not biographical, of course, though the situations

they describe are well within the range of human experience. They are

literary constructions—as is Romeo and Juliet—whose effect depends

on their contact with lived events and emotion. However, if regarded

as merely literary constructions, or the occasions for formal dramatic

performances, or as self-ironizing and self-aggrandizing pieces

reflecting the narcissism and misogyny of the poets,

187

then they are just

as dead as their authors. If were are to believe that “[a] poet wrote albas,

not because he had experienced the situation depicted by the alba, and

not even because he fancied himself experiencing it with a particular woman he

was in love with, but simply because it was one of the current literary

genres”,

188

then we are being asked to believe that the most passionate

poems written at the very dawn of the modern Western literary tradition

can, and should, be coolly regarded as mere exercises in form, a day’s

work at the poet’s office in eleventh-and twelfth-century Occitania.

186 “Then anguish satisfied by response, longing satisfied by presence, we cease to

call for a sensitive and delicate happiness, cease to suffer, accept our day. And

then marriage is possible, for we two are contented” (“Alors l’angoisse comblée

par la réponse, la nostalgie comblée par la présence cessent d’appeler un bonheur

sensible, cessent de souffrir, acceptent notre jour. Et alors le mariage est possible.

Nous sommes deux dans le contentement”) (Denis de Rougemont, 273).

187 See Simon Gaunt. “Poetry of Exclusion: A Feminist Reading of Some Troubadour

Lyrics”. The Modern Language Review, 85: 2 (April 1990), 310–329, https://doi.

org/10.2307/3731812

188 Jonathan Saville. The Medieval Erotic Alba: Structure as Meaning (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1972), 122. Emphasis added.

411

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

With friends like these, what need has poetry of enemies? Finally, what

comes to mind are these lines by William Butler Yeats:

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,

Old, learned, respectable bald heads

Edit and annotate the lines

That young men, tossing on their beds,

Rhymed out in love’s despair

To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;

All wear the carpet with their shoes;

All think what other people think;

All know the man their neighbour knows.

Lord, what would they say

Did their Catullus walk that way?

189

Yeat’s riposte is one of the classic examples of a poet speaking back to

critics, and is of a piece with the picture the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky

gives of a particular critic, a character named Stepan Verkhovensky,

who represents a “creed [that] unavoidably involves a degree of

alienation—from the concrete immediacy of life, from our feeling for

what is”.

190

As Dostoevsky describes him, this critic is all surfaces and

no depths, a proto-nihilistic poseur who has little real use for either

poetry or scholarship. Verkhovensky is “the cleverest man and a gifted

man, so to speak, even a scholar, though, indeed, in scholarship… well,

in a word, in scholarship, he did not so much, and it seems, nothing.

But with the scholarship we have in Russia this very often happens”.

191

Despite the “Old, learned, respectable bald heads”, whose work both

the poet and the novelist appear to regard as “not so much, and it

seems, nothing”, passionate poetry is not mere form, no matter how

many books and journal articles pile up claiming that it is so, nor is it

189 William Butler Yeats. The Scholars [1929 version], in Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose:

Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism, ed. by James Pethica (New York: W. W.

Norton & Co., 2000), 60.

190 Ewan Fernie. The Demonic: Literature and Experience (New York: Routledge, 2013), 88.

191 “человек умнейший и даровитейший, человек, так сказать, даже науки,

хотя,впрочем,внауке…ну,однимсловом,внаукеонсделалнетакмногои,

кажется,совсемничего.НоведьслюдьминаукиунаснаРусиэтосплошьда

рядомслучается"(FyodorDostoevesky.Бесы [Demons, aka The Possessed, or The

Devils] [St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2008], 20).

412 Love and its Critics

reducible to ideology, nor, finally, is it merely biography (which could

be seen, in a mean-spirited way, as narcissism). It is an attempt to reflect,

capture, transmit, and communicate at least some part of the experience

(or range of experiences) that people have when they love, for good

or ill, another than themselves in a passionate, vulnerable, sometimes

possessive and insecure, and erotic way. It is not mere lust these poems

describe. It is not mere poetic form that they rehearse. If the latter were

all that such poetry had to offer, few besides Yeats’ imagined scholars

would read any of it.

But such has not been the fate of the troubadour albas, nor has it been

the fate of Romeo and Juliet, whose alba, or dawn-song, is among the most

affecting moments in the play despite the attempts of authority—that of

Capulet in the play, and that of too many academic critics in the modern

world—to eliminate its power. As Aileen Ann Macdonald observes:

The alba […] recounts the continuing events of a love affair after it has

been initiated, for it describes the lovers’ clandestine meetings at night,

culminating in their passionate and poignant parting as dawn breaks.

[…] It has been suggested […] that the alba was in the beginning another

woman’s song, where the lady laments that dawn is coming to part her

from her lover—just as does Juliet in the most famous alba of all after her

night of love with Romeo.

192

Juliet’s alba is the emotional core of a play designed to take audiences

and readers on a wrenching journey of what Aristotle once called

catharsis(κάθαρσις)—the raising of intenseemotionthat is held, and

then released during the play.

193

Far from being rendered merely

“conventional”, Juliet’s emotions and predicament are even more

192 Aileen Ann Macdonald. “A Refusal to be Silenced or to Rejoice in any Joy that Love

may Bring: The anonymous Old Occitan canso, ‘Per ioi que d’amor m’avegna’”.

Dalhousie French Studies, 36 (Fall 1996), 10.

193 In Aristotle’s definition:

Tragedy, then, is imitation of an elevated action that is both great and complete, in language

embellished by distinctive forms in each section, rendered by action and not by recitation,

accomplishing through pity and fear the catharsis of such sufferings.

ἔστινοὖντραγῳδίαμίμησιςπράξεωςσπουδαίαςκαὶτελείαςμέγεθοςἐχούσης,ἡδυσμένῳ

λόγῳχωρὶςἑκάστῳτῶνεἰδῶνἐντοῖςμορίοις,δρώντωνκαὶοὐδι᾿ἀπαγγελίας,δι᾿ἐλέουκαὶ

φόβουπεραίνουσατὴντῶντοιούτωνπαθημάτωνκάθαρσιν.

Aristotle, Poetics, ed. by Stephen Halliwell. In Aristotle: Poetics. Longinus: On the

Sublime. Demetrius: On Style (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1995, 46, 1449b 24–28).

413

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

powerfully expressed through the use of the alba, especially since she

and her husband do not belong in the situation the genre describes.

Romeo and Juliet are married, not an adulterous couple, and the jealous

male here (lo gilos) is a father, not a husband.

Though the couple’s marriage is clandestine and not yet formalized

with a church ceremony, it is legally-binding, and would be known to

be so by the English audience watching this play for the first time:

Consensus facit nuptias had been a principle of Roman and early canonical

law […]. The church wanted a union of hearts as well as hearths, and

so private vows and promises with or without consummation were

understood to constitute a valid marriage, and the desponsatio (betrothal)

became more important than the final ceremony.

194

There were forces that opposed such marriages, but “clandestine

contracts” remained part of the tapestry of marriage practices, in spite

of the opposition:

A note of “matters to be moved by the clergy” in the Parliament and

Synod of 1563 included pleas […] for the raising of the age of consent

for girls to fifteen; for sterner punishments of adulterers, fornicators, and

abductors; and pleas that both the marriage of minors without parental

permission and “all clandestine contracts” be made void.

195

The anger such clandestine marriages caused fathers who were thereby

deprived of their ability to control—and profit from—the marriages of

their children is attested to by a letter, dated June 3 1587 and written

by Richard Bagot to Richard Broughton. In the letter, Bagot complains

bitterly about his daughter Margaret’s secret marriage, describing his

“daughters lewde dealings in this her match, [which] hath not a litle

trobled me and her mother”. Bagot then wonders how he will ever be

able to “digest such a villainy”, before wishing that “god give them joye

and some sorrowe, as they have given us cause of grief”.

196

The secret—

194 Hagstrum, 221.

195 R. B. Outhwaite. Clandestine Marriage in England, 1500–1850 (London: Hambledon

Press, 1995), 7.

196 Richard Bagot. “Letter from Richard Bagot to Richard Broughton, 1587 June 3”.

Papers of the Bagot Family of Blithfield, Staffordshire, 1428–1671 (bulk 1557–1671).

Folger MS L.a.68 (Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, http://luna.

folger.edu/luna/servlet/workspace/handleMediaPlayer?lunaMediaId=FOLGE

RCM1~6~6~361296~130605).

414 Love and its Critics

and not-so-secret—rebellions that Shakespeare presents on stage are

already beginning to take root in the England from which he derives his

audiences and readers.

Romeo and Juliet should not be in this position, and yet, due to the

authority of Prince Escalus, who has banished Romeo over the killing

of Tybalt, the overbearing authority of Capulet, and Juliet’s fear of

confronting him, here they are—in a strangely misplaced alba, hoping

that it is not the dawn’s first light they are seeing, light that will separate

them forever. The female voice—Juliet—begins, noting and denying the

coming of day:

Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:

It was the nightingale, and not the lark,

That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;

Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:

Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

197

And as they had begun, composing their poetry in the scene of their first

meeting, so they end, writing the final poem of their vanishingly brief

marriage. Romeo responds by acknowledging the light, and framing his

choice between life and banishment, or love and death:

It was the lark, the herald of the morn,

No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks

Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east:

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day

Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

I must be gone and live, or stay and die.

198

After several more lines of back and forth, during which they switch

rhetorical and emotional positions, with Juliet now urging Romeo to

escape, Romeo pledging to stay and die, and each bemoaning how little

time they have left together, the watchman of the alba enters. Juliet’s

nurse, who has aided and abetted the relationship between Romeo and

Juliet to the best of her ability, comes in to warn them of the coming

of day: “Your lady mother is coming to your chamber: / The day is

197 Romeo and Juliet 3.5.1–5.

198 Ibid., 3.5.6–11.

415

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

broke; be wary, look about”.

199

With each wondering if they “shall ever

meet again”,

200

Romeo says Adieu, adieu! as he escapes out the balcony

window, and they are never truly together again.

What renders this scene so powerful is the feeling of helplessness in

the face of hostile and jealous authority that the alba genre brings with

it, amplified by Shakespeare’s modification of the marital situations

usually found therein. These are lovers who should be together, who

have every right to be together, and whom every single person in an

audience wants to see together. The sense of love and unjust interference

is palpable, powerful, and profound. To remark, as if there were some

particularly insightful observation contained therein, that Shakespeare

is merely making use of “one of the current [or past] literary genres” is

to miss, even actively to obscure, the point. It does not matter whether,

while writing these words, Shakespeare was, or had recently been,

experiencing the emotions his work evokes. What matters is that the

emotions are evoked, that art and an audience have similar enough

frames of reference (“conventional” thoughts and objects of thought,

if one must use such ground-to-dust terminology) that sympathy,

empathy, even pity and fear can be evoked—that lived experience can be

recalled, reframed, and made new again, even if only for a moment. Art

“reveals in a more concentrated or intense way what ordinary life reveals

in its expressive aspects”.

201

This is what Dostoevsky refers to when he

describeseverydaypeopleas“разбавляетсяводой”

202

—“diluted with

water”, or “watered-down” versions of literary characters—not that

human beings in their ordinary lives are less than real, but that our artistic

representations of ourselves and our experiences are concentrated and

199 Ibid., 3.5.39–40.

200 Ibid., 3.5.51.

201 Colin Falck. Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Postmodernism (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1989), 122.

202 So, without going into a more serious explanation, we will say only that, in reality, the typicality

of persons is, as it were, diluted with water, and all those Georges Dandins and Podkoleosins

are actually there scurrying and running in front of us every day, but as if in a somewhat

liquefied state.

Итак,невдаваясьвболеесерьезныеобъяснения,мыскажемтолько,чтовдействительности

типичность лиц как бы разбавляется водой, и все эти Жорж-Дандены и Подколесины

существуютдействительно,снуютибегаютпреднамиежедневно,нокакбынескольков

разжиженномсостоянии.

Fyodor Dostoevsky. Идиот [The Idiot] (St. Petersburg: A. Suvorin, 1884), 452.

416 Love and its Critics

sharpened to a point. Just as we depend on our art for an intensified

experience of life, our art depends on us for contact with everyday

reality. Art, perhaps especially narrative and dramatic art, depends on

its ability to refer to and represent the lived experience of human beings

in order for it to have any power at all. It cannot be locked away inside

the structures of language, or inside a self-referentiality of techniques

and formal elements from which it cannot escape. Denied that contact

with “ordinary life”, literature, music, painting, sculpture, dance, dies,

just as do Romeo and Juliet, alone, and with no one to mourn until it is

too late.

The love between the young pair has served as their impetus to defy

authority and social convention, while risking the sharp disapproval

(and possible violence) of their families. But it has not given them the

strength to stand up, and openly acknowledge what they have done.

Romeo’s banishment, and Juliet’s faked death, show each of them

turning in fear from the face of authority, as their celebrated love is

not enough to enable them to face the wrath of those to whom they

have long been in the habit of submissiveness. And that is their tragedy,

not in “violating the norms of the society in which they lived”,

203

but

in failing to sufficiently honor love, and each other, by bringing their

disobedience and rejection of those norms out into the open. Juliet, who

is in some ways the stronger of the two, is still too young, and is not yet

sure-footed and strong-willed enough to defy Capulet; she “possesses

the strength to choose a Montague for her husband, but not to stand up

to her father”.

204

Given Capulet’s wrath and potential for violence, it is

all too easy to understand why.

One of the starkest differences between this pair, who are otherwise

presented as having “zweier herzen wünne”, is revealed in their death

scenes. Romeo still has a bit too much of the Petrarchan sonneteer about

him, and despite his love for Juliet, has not yet learned to see her apart

from his own poetic fantasies of the ideal love she represents to him. Had

he only been given time, he might have grown beyond his idealizing

tendencies; but time is what the play—and all its sources, from the works

of Arthur Brooke, to Pierre Boaistuau, to Matteo Bandello—will not give

203 L. Stone, 87.

204 Evelyn Gajowski. The Art of Loving: Female Subjectivity and Male Discursive Traditions

in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1992), 52.

417

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

him. In the heart of the Capulet mausoleum, with Juliet’s awakening

face and form in front of him, Romeo does not see. Her “two and forty

hours”

205

of unconsciousness are all but up, and Romeo’s own remarks

indicate that she is warming and nearly surfacing past the waters of

unconsciousness even as he looks at her. Far from being a cold corpse

that will suddenly reanimate, Juliet is ruddy of cheek and lip; she looks

alive, and Romeo finds that puzzling:

O my love! my wife!

Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,

Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty:

Thou art not conquered; beauty’s ensign yet

Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,

And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.

206

But rather than stop for a moment with Juliet, he turns and speaks to the

body of Tybalt, lying in a “bloody sheet”,

207

though perhaps something

now registers with him about the contrast between the two bodies. He

turns back to Juliet, and asks—as if speaking to her one last time—why

she looks so much like she is still alive:

Ah, dear Juliet,

Why art thou yet so fair? shall I believe

That unsubstantial death is amorous,

And that the lean abhorred monster keeps

Thee here in dark to be his paramour?

208

The simple solution to the problem, of course, is that Juliet is alive.

But Romeo, overwhelmed by a grief the like of which he has never

experienced, that he can only understand through the Petrarchan and

Platonic images and concepts he has not yet had time enough to master

and move beyond, does not adopt the simple solution. In fact, it does

not even occur to him. Instead, he mythologizes and poeticizes Juliet’s

death-which-is-not-death, by casting Juliet in the part of Eurydice in

205 Romeo and Juliet 4.1.105.

206 Ibid., 5.3.91–96.

207 Ibid., 5.3.97.

208 Ibid., 5.3.101–05.

418 Love and its Critics

the myth of Orpheus, especially perhaps, the version from Phaedrus’

speech in Plato’s Symposium:

The gods let loose their wonder for the works of love, and haste to

hold valour in high honor. Orpheus, son of Oeagrus, they sent away

unsuccessful from Hades, showing him only the ghost of the wife he

had come for, and did not deliver her true self to him. For they regarded

him as soft of purpose, like a mere player and singer of songs, because

he lacked the courage to die for love as Alcestis had, but sought to enter

Hades alive.

209

Perhaps with the idea of “the ghost of [his] wife” in mind, and not

wanting to be thought “soft” like Phaedrus’ version of Orpheus, Romeo

proceeds to die for love, while indulging in one last poetic speech:

Eyes, look your last!

Arms, take your last embrace! and, lips, O you

The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss

A dateless bargain to engrossing death!

Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide!

Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on

The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark!

Here’s to my love! [Drinks] O true apothecary!

Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.

210

As he kisses her, is he so wrapped up in the poetry of the Orphean

myth

211

that he does not feel the warmth of Juliet’s lips? It is impossible

to know, but given the focus on himself and his own emotions Romeo

has shown throughout the play, it seems the likely answer is “yes”.

209 ἀνεῖσαν ἀγασθέντες τῷ ἔργῳ οὕτωκαὶθεοὶτὴνπερὶτὸνἔρωτασπουδήντεκαὶἀρετὴν

μάλιστατιμῶσιν.ὈρφέαδὲτὸνΟἰάγρουἀτελῆἀπέπεμψανἐξἍιδου,φάσμαδείξαντεςτῆς

γυναικὸςἐφ᾿ἣνἧκεν,αὐτὴνδὲοὐδόντες,ὅτιμαλθακίζεσθαιἐδόκει,ἅτεὢνκιθαρῳδός,

καὶοὐτολμᾶνἕνεκατοῦἔρωτοςἀποθνῄσκεινὥσπερἌλκηστις,ἀλλὰδιαμηχανᾶσθαιζῶν

εἰσιέναιεἰςἍιδου.

Plato. Symposium, ed. by W. R. M. Lamb (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1925), 179D.

210 Romeo and Juliet, 5.3.112–20.

211 Romeo is a kind of inverted Orpheus—one who loses his Eurydice, not because he

looks back at her, but because he cannot get his head out of his songs.

419

8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor

Juliet, on the other hand, sees Romeo. As she awakes and takes stock

of where she is and what is going on, she sees Romeo’s lifeless body,

mere moments after it had crossed over into death. As she kisses him,

she feels traces of life: “Thy lips are warm!”

212

In that moment, more

than any other in the play, the full tragedy of love, fear, and authority

hits home, and catharsis kicks into high gear. These two never had a

chance, to love, to live, even to grow up past the initial blooming of

their passions and potential. The story of their lives and deaths does

not bolster “individualism by positing sexual love as the expression of

authentic identity”;

213

rather, it shows how an attempt to use such love

as an expression of identity can be ruthlessly crushed by the “dominant

ideology”, not of love, but of (usually male) authority and its demands

for “submission to the asymmetrical distribution of power” between

fathers and daughters, fathers and sons. The Gramscian hegemon in this

play, which embodies the cultural norms promoted by an elite class to

maintain dominance over everyone else,

214

is hardly “romantic love”,

nor does that love relegate anything to “the realm of deviance”. It is that

love itself which is regarded as deviant by the authority figures of the

play, only to have the play turn the tables on them by showing them

to be blind and tyrannical murderers of their own children. As Prince

Escalus bitterly sums up:

Where be these enemies? Capulet! Montague!

212 Ibid., 5.3.167.

213 Callaghan (1994), 59.

214 In Gramsci’s thought, literary critics—at least as much as, if not more than,

poets and playwrights and and novelists—are complicit in the dissemination of

the ruling ideas of a given time and place. Gramsci proposed what he called “a

study of how, in fact, the ideological structure of the dominant class is organized”

(“Uno studio di come è organizzata di fatto la struttura ideologica di una classe

dominante”), before noting that “the most remarkable and dynamic part of it is the

press in general: publishers (that have implicit and explicit programs, and support

a determined, or pre-given, current), political journals, and magazines of all kinds,

scientific, literary, philological, popular, etc., various periodicals even down to

church parish bulletins” (“La parte più ragguardevole e più dinamica di esso è la

stampa in generale: case editrici (che hanno implicito ed esplicito un programma e

si appoggiano a una determinata corrente), giornali politici, riviste di ogni genere,

scientifiche, letterarie, filologiche, di divulgazione ecc., periodici vari fino ai

bollettini parrocchiali”) (Antonio Gramsci. Quarderi del carcere, Vol. I, Quaderni 1–5,

ed. by Valentino Gerratana [Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1977], Q3§ 49, 332–33).

420 Love and its Critics

See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate,

That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.

And I for winking at your discords too

Have lost a brace of kinsmen: all are punished.

215

It is as if Shakespeare is making the argument of a prosecutor in a

courtroom in which, rather than the lovers, their parents, their city, their

world are on trial: “Shakespeare […] is making a closing demonstration:

‘Look at the corpses in front of you—your own son and daughter! Why

are they dead? For God’s sake think!’ And he is requiring his audience

to do the same”.

216

Far from being any kind of dominant ideology, in

Romeo and Juliet, love is portrayed as a breathtaking, bittersweet, but

doomed challenger to paternal authority and its demands for obedience.

Love, unsublimated passion for another human being, the fin’amor of the

troubadour and trobairitz poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries,

is no idle game in Shakespeare. It is a tool of resistance in a contest

between generations that is all too often, a matter of life and death.

215 Romeo and Juliet, 5.3.291–95.

216 John Vyvyan. Shakespeare and the Rose of Love (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1960), 134.

9. Love and its Costs in

Seventeenth-Century Literature

The theme of love as resistance to authority is transformed and amplified

in the lyric poetry of John Donne and Robert Herrick. In work filled with

a sense of the fragility and shortness of life, these poets contribute to an

ethos that has come to be known by the name carpe diem, a phrase made

famous by Horace, “who in Ode, I. xi, tells his mistress that […] life is

short, so they must ‘enjoy the day’, for they do not know if there will

be a tomorrow”.

Horace’s line, “carpe diem quam minimum credula

postero”

(“Seize the day, put little trust in tomorrow”), tells Leuconoe,

and all who have followed since, to live now, and love now, because

each second of scruple, doubt, and delay brings men and women closer

to a death that is non-negotiable and eternal. In poetry, and in life,

the idea of death becomes love’s greatest ally in its battle against the

demands of authority, convention, and law.

Death hovers over the poetry of this period, and “English love

poetry evolved through an understanding of human love as mortal”, a

perspective that shines clearly through carpe diem poetry. These poems

“magnify the pleasures of this world at the expense of the next”, drawing

much of their power from “the nothingness that awaits lovers in the

afterlife” as a means to persuade readers to live now and “embrace

1 Ruth F. Glancy. Thematic Guide to British Poetry (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002),

43.

2 Horace. Horace: Epodes and Odes, ed. by Daniel H. Garrison (Norman: University of

Oklahoma Press, 1998), 39.

422 Love and its Critics

what this life has to offer”.

We can explicitly connect this poetry to the

earlier work of Shakespeare, as “English carpe diem poetry [follows] in

the path of Romeo and Juliet, [imagining] the intensification of erotic

experience by virtue of its temporal limits”.

This intensification played

upon an emerging sense of what we would now call atheism, rejecting

the authority of father and state, religion and church:

For English Renaissance poets, the act of writing carpe diem lyrics

required a decisive break with Christian metaphysics. There could be

no mention of the soul’s eventual journey to heaven in poems that urge

an immediate seizing of the present; there could be no deferral of joy in

poems that imagine this day as the lovers’ only chance for bliss.

In a worldview that rejects the notion of an afterlife, that breaks with

“Christian metaphysics”, and sees love in terms of “an immediate seizing

of the present”, we see an intensification of the troubadour ethos. The

carpe diem poems are revolutionary, “a stripping from the afterlife of all

forms of pleasure that could compensate for erotic loss, […] overturning

both Petrarchan ideas of heavenly continuity and English reactions to

this Petrarchan paradigm”.

In the carpe diem poets, the reactionary

and flesh-denying poetics of the tradition running through Akiba and

Origen to Dante and Petrarch meets its strongest challenge yet. Love,

though it cannot prevent death, becomes the primary power behind the

urge to live one’s own life and to make one’s own choices before that

“necessary end”

finally comes.

Carpe Diem in Life and Marriage: John Donne and the

Critics who Distance

John Donne is perhaps the most famous writer of love poetry in the

English language, a man who lived the carpe diem motif even more

powerfully than he used it in his poetry; however, to dig to any depth

3 Targoff, 165.

4 Ibid., 166.

5 Ibid., 171.

6 Ibid., 176.

7 Julius Caesar 2.2.36.

423

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

in the commentary that surrounds him is to wander into territory

filled with dramatic conflicts. Some critics—like Ilona Bell—portray

a flawed but fascinating writer whose work is filled with passionate

desire for beautiful women, and devoted love for a particular woman,

while others—like Stanley Fish—regard Donne’s work as “sick”, and

the poet himself equally so, someone who can be read only through

“the pleasures of diagnosis”.

Such extremes of analysis probably tell

us more about the analysts than about Donne, as John Roberts observes:

“I often feel that many books and essays on Donne tell me more about

the critics writing them than they do about Donne’s poetry”.

For

Roberts, the goal of criticism should be to make “Donne’s poetry more,

not less accessible to an even wider reading audience than he enjoys at

the present time”.

One wonders how declaring the poet and his work

“sick” helps accomplish that goal.

John Donne, portrait after Isaac Oliver (possibly late 17th century,

based on a work of 1616).

8 Stanley Fish. “Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power”. In Elizabeth

D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus, eds. Soliciting Interpretation: Literary

Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1990), 223.

9 John Roberts. “John Donne’s Poetry: An Assessment of Modern Criticism”. John

Donne Journal, 1 (1982), 60.

10 Ibid., 67.

11 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Donne_by_Isaac_Oliver.jpg

424 Love and its Critics

To understand Donne and his poetry, we will need to engage with

his critics, but not, as William Empson remarks, on their terms: “The

habitual mean-mindedness of modern academic criticism, its moral

emptiness combined with incessant moral nagging, its scrubbed prison-

like isolation, are particularly misleading in the case of Donne; in fact,

we are the ones who need rescuing, not the poet”.

Where the critics

enlighten, and even where they usefully enrage, we will look to them.

But the weakness of such critical and scholarly communities is that they

tend to talk primarily to each other, despite the best intentions of scholars

such as Achsah Guibbory, who tries to make her work “accessible to

the educated, interested general reader and the intelligent student”.

Donne did not seek to be read by scholars, any more than Yeats or his

imagined Catullus did, nor do “interested general reader[s]” often seek

to approach his work through the various lenses of academic literary

criticism rather than what Nietzsche calls “the lens of life” (“der Optik

[…] des Lebens”).

Critical work insisting that a poem like “Elegy 19:

To His Mistress Going to Bed” is merely an instance of “scopophilic

male narcissism”,

or that “the love poems of John Donne” express

the “imperatives of empire” in which “[d]esire is boundless [and]

formulated in a series of imperatives that do not invite debate”,

has

little or no interest in making “Donne’s poetry more, not less accessible”.

Such work is primarily concerned with establishing the credentials of

its various authors as properly “serious” and “professional” members

of an academic literary establishment that long ago signaled its lack of

concern with “the educated, interested general reader” who reads love

poetry as something other than a coded expression of all the darkest

impulses of the human species.

12 William Empson. “Rescuing Donne”. In John Haffenden, ed. Essays on Renaissance

Literature, Vol. One: Donne and the New Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1993), 159.

13 Achsah Guibbory. Returning to John Donne (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 3.

14 Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (Leipzig: C. G. Naumann, 1894) 4,

https://books.google.com/books?id=lSk2AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA4

15 Anthony Easthope. Poetry and Phantasy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1989), 193.

16 Catherine Belsey. Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1994), 133.

425

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

Donne’s passionate poetry reflects his turbulent life. Though the

poetry is not a straightforward biography (a simple account of his

life in verse), it is an emotional representation (impressionist, if not

photorealist) of the complex man who wrote it. And while Donne’s

poems engage with and challenge pre-existing literary forms like the

Ovidian elegy and the Petrarchan sonnet, they are no more reducible

to those forms than they are to “imperatives of empire” or “scopophilic

male narcissism”. To read poetry in this way, reduced to “the pleasures

of diagnosis”, is more lawyerly than literary, more prosecutorial than

poetic. Poetry treated in this way is essentially a corpse undergoing an

autopsy, dead to the very readers that academics as teachers ostensibly

hope to reach, if as Guibbory argues, “the survival of the humanities”

is of any concern.

It is in the life of the poet that we will find the life of the poetry.

Born in 1572 to a Catholic family in a militantly Protestant England,

John Donne spent a lifetime never quite fitting in, never quite belonging

to any group or institution to which he attached himself. By his late

twenties, Donne had been a sailor on military expeditions, a student

of law at the Inns of Court in London, and had already shown the

tendency to restlessness and contradiction that would characterize him

throughout his life. Donne was “not dissolute, but very neat; a great

visiter of Ladies, a great frequenter of Playes, a great writer of conceited

Verses” who later in life “became so rare a Preacher, that he was not

only commended, but even admired by all that heard him”.

The “great

visiter of Ladies” can perhaps be seen in the famous—and critically

oft-abused—Elegy 19, “On His Mistress Going to Bed”. In urging “His

Mistress” to remove her clothes just a little more quickly (“in a series

of imperatives” that according to Catherine Belsey apparently should

have invited “debate”—one can only imagine the Parliamentary-style

bedroom encounter the critic imagines as more appropriate), Donne

praises the glories of nakedness:

17 Guibbory, 3.

18 Richard Baker. A Chronicle of the Kings of England (London: Printed by George

Sawbridge at the Bible on Ludgate-hill, 1670), 447, https://books.google.com/

books?id=BnIVsU0RtzUC&pg=PA447

426 Love and its Critics

Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee.

As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be

To taste whole joys […].

Here, Donne matches two ideas he will often pair in his writing—the

Neoplatonic concern (seen in Peter Bembo’s speech from The Courtier)

with ascending beyond the body to experience the fullness of joy, and

the more radical idea of experiencing “whole joys” in and through the

body itself. This pairing is incredibly important for understanding the

dynamics of love, especially erotic love in Donne’s poetry. His insistence

that bodies are not shameful fleshly prisons inside which noble souls

are entrapped, but beautiful and worthy of celebration, exploration, and

desire, is the next step in the journey we have already seen Shakespeare

taking, away from the nearly disembodied idolatry expressed by the

poetry of Dante and Petrarch. Donne returns to the open eroticism, the

fleshly sexuality and passion of the troubadour and trobairitz poetry.

We see further evidence of this ethos in the Elegy, when Donne’s speaker

both uses and mocks the religious imagery of love:

Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread

In this love’s hallowed temple, this soft bed.

In such white robes, heaven’s angels used to be

Received by men; thou, angel, bring’st with thee

A heaven like Mahomet’s paradise; and though

Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know

By this these angels from an evil sprite,

Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.

While the male speaker very likely has his “flesh upright” here, the phrase

has a less humorously salacious meaning as well: flesh is “upright”,

good, worthy to be praised and not condemned. It is not the flesh and

its desires that come in for mocking here so much as the urge to cloak

that flesh in the robes of religion—the joke is made rather obvious by

the reference to “Mahomet’s Paradise”, an image of “infidelity” (from a

19 John Donne. John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. by A. J. Smith (New York:

Penguin, 1971), 125, ll. 33–35. Further references to this volume will be by line

number, Donne, and page number.

20 ll. 17–24, Donne, 125.

427

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

Christian perspective) that both satirizes and amplifies the philosophical

and theological unease of bien pensant readers, whose “right thinking”

takes human sexuality and warps it into sin, while promising—in

“Paradise”—to reward abstinence with delight (referencing the myth

of the seventy-two virgins—houris—promised in the Islamic concept

of heaven, loosely derived from the Qur’an, 56:35–37). Here the idea of

carpe diem is presented as opposing the claims of religion—though with

the safety of hiding behind the notion of “false” religion, as an English

reader would see it. Erotic love, practiced with “Full nakedness”, not

only redeems flesh (or demonstrates that it never needed redemption in

the first place) by showing it “upright”, but it renders “angels” (whether

from good or evil “sprite[s]”) unnecessary.

However, it is the motif of exploration that catches the eye of many

critics today. Donne’s speaker requests permission to “explore’ the naked

body of “His Mistress” like a Walter Raleigh licensed by Elizabeth I:

Licence my roving hands, and let them go

Before, behind, between, above, below.

O my America, my new found land,

My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,

My mine of precious stones, my empery,

How blest am I in this discovering thee!

To enter in these bonds is to be free;

Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.

Guibbory argues that this is a masculine power play, and a metaphor

for politics: “Donne repeatedly in these poems envisions relations

between the sexes as a site of conflict, thereby mirroring a larger society

in which there is considerable anxiety about the lines and boundaries

of power”.

Where the present authors see love in Donne (and others)

as anti-authoritarian, Guibbory sees its use as authoritarian and as part

of a pattern of “persistent misogyny”,

as the male speaker subjugates

both the mistress and the “new-found-land”:

21 ll. 25–32, Donne, 125.

22 Achsah Guibbory. “‘Oh Let Mee Not Serve So’: The Politics of Love in

Donne’s Elegies”. English Literary History, 57: 4 (Winter 1990), 812, https://doi.

org/10.2307/2873086

23 Ibid.

428 Love and its Critics

At the beginning of this passage the woman is the monarch, providing a

license, but the moment she gives this license she loses her sovereignty.

[…] The man becomes not only explorer but conquerer, and she becomes

his land and kingdom. The repeated possessives reinforce the sense of his

mastery, and by the end of this passage he has now become the monarch,

setting his “seal”.

Guibbory goes on to argue that Donne’s poetry “betrays a discomfort

with (indeed, a rejection of) the political structure headed by a female

monarch. Intimate private relations between man and woman and the

power structure of the body politic mirror and reinforce each other”.

But in her drive to read the Elegy as mysognistic and patriarchal,

Guibbory underplays any sense of the mutuality of the power

dynamic—dominance and submission

—in her own description of

the poem. The speaker asks for “License”, performing his exploration

of the woman who is figured as both Queen and land, dominant and

submissive. The speaker remains licensed throughout—that formal

permission is neither usurped nor withdrawn—and is thus submissive,

while he remains the explorer, and is thus dominant. The logic is one

of contraries as complements, a yin-yang of eroticism whose key can

be found in the line “To enter in these bonds is to be free”. Bound and

free—on both sides.

The “licensing” power of the woman is further enhanced by being

transformed from monarchical to divine power; all women, including

the “Mistress” being spoken to here, “are mystic books, which only

we / Whom their imputed grace will dignify / Must see revealed”.

The idea of “grace” here places the male speaker in a position distinctly

inferior to that of the woman being addressed, who is figured as God

reaching out in mercy toward a sinner. Grace, the divinely-given power

that compensates for the inability of “fallen man” to “save himself in

his own corrupt nature” repairs the ability of the sinner to reach toward

24 Ibid., 822.

25 Ibid., 821.

26 Here, the observation of Foucault is useful: “The relationship of power and the

rebelliousness of freedom cannot be separated” (“La relation de pouvoir et

l’insoumission de la liberté ne peuvent donc être séparées”) (“Le Sujet e le Pouvoir”.

In his Dits et Écrits. Vol. IV: 1980–1988, 237).

27 ll. 41–43, Donne, 125.

429

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

the good, as “freedom of will is precisely what grace restores”.

Having

grace “imputed” to them, the “we” who are so gifted are treated as if

worthy of the gift, much in the same manner that a sinner who has grace

imputed to him is treated as if he is worthy of God.

Not only do we not

have an image of masculine subjugation of the feminine here, but we

have something entirely different: an image of nearly-godlike female

power over a male supplicant.

Readers and interpreters who are determined—for professional

or political reasons—to see this poem as “evidence” that John Donne

rejects “the political structure headed by a female monarch” transform

his poetry into a tool of oppression (while arguing that they are merely

“revealing” the oppression already inherent therein). Such critics reflect

the voices of the gilos (the jealous and controlling spouses), rather than

those of the lovers in troubadour and trobaritz poetry. But “On His

Mistress Going to Bed” is only evidence of imperialistic misogyny if one

can no longer see the poetic forest for the critical trees. Psychologists

describe such thinking as confirmation bias, a filtering of ideas whereby

we “seek confirmation rather than disconfirmation of what we already

believe”. For example, “a doctor [who] assumes that a patient has

condition X, […] may interpret the set of symptoms as supporting the

diagnosis” without regard to any counter-evidence of any kind.

other words, we see what we are determined to see. So, at least, does

Bell describe recent trends among Donne’s critics:

For theoretical or ideological reasons, twentieth-[and twenty-first-]

century critics generally assume that the woman in Donne’s poems is

a shadowy figure, the object or reflection of male desire, a pretext for

self-fashioning, a metaphor […]. a sex object […]. In the last two decades

28 R. V. Young. Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-century Poetry: Studies in Donne,

Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2000), 75.

29 For further discussion, see Michael Bryson, The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection

of God as King (London: Associated University Presses, 2004), 119–22.

30 Here we can see in Donne a reworking of the idea of the woman as angel, found

in so much Italian poetry of the period between Lentini and Petrarch, through the

recovery of the idea of eroticism and desire in a dynamic in which power is mutual.

31 Robert Sternberg. Cognitive Psychology (Belmont: Wadsworth Cengage, 2009), 512.

This kind of thinking is rampant in what Karl Popper calls “pseudo-science”. Popper

maintains that “It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every

theory—if we look for confirmations”, but that “[e]very genuine test of a theory is

an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it” (Karl Popper, 36, 37).

430 Love and its Critics

[…] it has become clear that it was not Donne, but the critics who

disembodied and disregarded the women in Donne’s poems.

What critics see—and authoritatively present to students and general

readers as that which there is to see—in poetry and other forms of

literature changes with the passing of the years, decades, and centuries.

But the poetry remains, its words unchanged by the changing fashions

of academic and cultural authority.

Even Bell, whose readings of Donne are less pinched than those of

other critics, cannot resist describing the dynamics of “On His Mistress

Going to Bed” as a matter of “masculine desire to conquer and control”,

and “masculine dominion” over the woman,

while ignoring the line in

which the speaker sues for “Licence” from the woman. It is the woman—

in the role of monarch and grace-giving deity—who grants that “Licence”

to the male explorer, whose exclamations of joy at his “kingdom” and

“empery”

are made over “dominion” (to borrow Bell’s term) which

is merely on loan, not owned by the male of the poem. One begins to

wonder at the unanimity of critics who insist on morally condemning

the poem and its male speaker, as if there is a misandrist imperative at

work which demands that male sexuality (at least in relation to women)

be regarded and described negatively. When even an obvious admirer

of Donne and his poetry seems compelled to describe male sexuality in

the poem as “a military campaign”, as “control”, and as “dominion”, it

is tempting to think that there are barely-suppressed whispers of rape in

the background. Would a poem by Sappho, or a diary entry by Anaïs

Nin be treated in the same way?

Perhaps Donne himself can be looked to for some guidance. In his

third Satire, he emphasizes the need to judge in terms of particulars.

He gives two examples: “Careless Phrygius”, who “doth abhor / All,

because all cannot be good, as one / Knowing some women whores,

dares marry none”,

and “Gracchus”, who “loves all as one, and thinks

that so / As women do in divers countries goe / In divers habits, yet

32 Ilona Bell. “Gender Matters: The Women in Donne’s Poems”. In Achsah Guibbory,

ed. The Cambridge Companion to John Donne (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2006), 201.

33 Ibid., 208.

34 ll. 28–29, Donne, 125.

35 ll. 62–64, Donne, 162.

431

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

are all still one kind”.

Phrygius mistakenly thinks all women bad,

while Gracchus mistakenly believes all women good. But reason

demands that we throw off such indiscriminate “blindness”

and value

the particular, the individual, while leaving behind the generalizing

patterns of ideology and ignorance: “and forced but one allow”.

Far

from there being any “persistent misogyny” in his poetry, Donne’s

verse often shows us women and men who choose each other under

circumstances of extreme duress, neither one using the other in any

kind of power play, but facing the consequences of their mutual choice

together. Donne’s shortest poems, his epigrams, show us “clandestine

lovers whose daring and devotion triumph over the death they incur”.

This can easily be seen in “Hero and Leander”:

Both robbed of air, we both lie in one ground,

Both whom one fire had burnt, one water drowned.

And in “Pyramus and Thisbe”:

Two, by themselves, each other, love and fear

Slain, cruel friends, by parting have joined here.

“Disinherited” paints a rather stark portrait of the economic consequences

that could ensue for such “clandestine lovers” in Donne’s own day:

Thy father all from thee, by his last will,

Gave to the poor; thou hast good title still.

This latter situation is exactly what Donne experienced when he became

just such a clandestine lover as Leander or Pyramus. No longer content

to be a “great visiter of Ladies”, Donne fell in love with Anne More, the

daughter of Sir George More (the Chancellor of the Garter), and the

niece by marriage to Sir Thomas Egerton (the Lord Keeper of the Great

36 ll. 65–67, Donne, 162.

37 l. 68, Donne, 162.

38 l. 70, Donne, 162.

39 Bell, 204.

40 ll. 1–2, Donne, 149.

41 ll. 1–2, Donne, 149.

42 ll. 1–2, Donne, 151.

432 Love and its Critics

Seal, and Donne’s own employer). Socially, Anne More was of a much

higher rank than Donne, and any officially sanctioned match between

the pair was impossible. The growing love between the mismatched

couple (also mismatched in age, as Donne was in his late twenties, while

More was in her mid-to-late teens when their relationship began), and

the difficult position that their affection put the lovers in, is reflected in

Donne’s poetry, where he writes of “two situations which he had never

experienced before and which changed the course of his life: courting

a young woman whom he desperately wanted to marry despite the

obvious difficulties, and being married in defiance of society’s code

of conduct and at the cost of his career”.

Getting marrried cost them

everything: money, career, and future prospects. But like the lovers of

his epigrams, John and Anne chose each other in spite of the worst the

rule-bound world of fathers and monarchs could throw at them.

In late 1601, “about three weeks before Christmas”,

John Donne

and Anne More married in a secret ceremony. The anxiety that ensued

“about the trouble that he and [Anne] had now brought on themselves”

resulted in the circulation of “a joke about the furtive couple’s situation”:

Doctor Donne after he was married to a Maid, whose name was Anne, in

a frolick (on his Wedding day) chalkt this on the back-side of his Kitchin-

door, John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone.

The consequences were as severe as they were immediate when George

More found out about the clandestine marriage, from Donne’s own

letter to him on 2 February 1602. After informing More of the marriage,

Donne tries to explain why he and Anne had deceived him by marrying

secretly, and asks More not to be too angry with either Anne or himself:

I knew my present estate lesse then fitt for her; I knew, (yet I knew not

why) that I stood not right in your Opinion; I knew that to have giuen

any intimacion of yt had been to impossibilitate the whole Matter. […]

But for her whom I tender much more, then my fortunes, or lyfe (els I

would I might neyther ioy in this lyfe, nor enioy the next) I humbly beg

of yow, that she may not, to her danger, feele the terror of your sodaine

anger. […] if yow incense my lordship [Thomas Egerton], yow Destroy

her and me; that yt is easye to give vs happines, And that my Endevors

43 David Edwards. John Donne: Man of Flesh and Spirit (New York: Continuum, 2001), 282.

44 John Stubbs. John Donne: The Reformed Soul (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006), 154.

45 Ibid., 154.

433

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

and industrie, if it please yow to prosper them, may soone make me

somewhat worthyer of her.

The letter simply enraged More, setting him on to do exactly what Donne

had hoped he would not do: turn Egerton against Donne, who was

immediately fired from his position as Egerton’s secretary, imprisoned,

and on his release, left without any practical prospects for employment.

A poem like “The Canonization” reflects this experience of forbidden

love, punished by all the forces a society determined to control the

marriages of its (adult) children can bring to bear. Its first stanza

captures the sense of frustration and helplessness at being punished for

following one’s own heart:

For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,

Or chide my palsy, or my gout,

My five grey hairs, or ruined fortune flout,

With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,

Take you a course, get you a place,

Observe his Honour, or his Grace,

Or the King’s real, or his stampèd face

Contemplate; what you will, approve,

So you will let me love.

A critic like Nancy Andreasen reduces this poem to a mere rehearsal of

conventional elements, claiming that “Donne is dramatizing the stock

comic situation of an extramarital love affair between an aging man

of the world and a youthful mistress, an affair which further injures

the debilitated rake’s already-ruined fortune”.

But this shrinking

of the poem from a howl of protest against an unjust world (in

which daughters are the property of fathers, marriages are economic

arrangements made by and for those fathers, and lives can be ruined

by the simple, yet radical, act of choosing for oneself) to a rather tired

exercise in comic convention is of a piece with many of the readings we

46 L.b.526: Letter from John Donne, The Savoy, London, to Sir George More, 1601/1602

February 2. Early Modern Manuscripts Online, http://emmo.folger.edu/view/Lb526/

semiDiplomatic

47 ll. 1–9, Donne, 47.

48 Nancy Jo Coover Andreasen. John Donne: Conservative Revolutionary (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1967). Quoted in Larson, 164.

434 Love and its Critics

have already encountered. It is a perfect example of how critics often

rewrite poems. But the “five grey hairs” of the third line are not those

of an aging man of the world—whose worldliness and age would have

gifted him with many more than five—nor is the “ruined fortune” that

of a rake who has simply spent too much keeping up with the young

girls he likes to entertain and be entertained by. All of this can be seen

in the references to official positions, the kind Donne depended on, and

has now lost: “get you a place”, but “let me love”; “Observe his Honour,

or his Grace”, but “let me love”. It can also be seen in the mention of

approval, a social currency the “rake”

actively disdains, but on whose

continuance Donne had absolutely relied: “what you will, approve”,

but “let me love”.

The poem’s second stanza raises another howl of protest. Whom

have we injured with our love? The answer, of course, in an economy in

which daughters are valuable property, is George More:

Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love?

What merchant’s ships have my sighs drowned?

Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?

When did my colds a forward spring remove?

When did the heats which my veins fill

Add one more to the plaguy bill?

Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still

Litigious men, which quarrels move,

Though she and I do love.

49 The most infamous of the “rakes” was John Wilmott, the 2nd Earl of Rochester,

whose life and poetry was a scandal in the court of Charles II. As Samuel Johnson

describes his life and death:

[I]n a course of drunken gaiety, and gross sensuality, with intervals of study, perhaps, yet more

criminal, with an avowed contempt of all decency and order, a total disregard of every moral,

and a resolute denial of every religious obligation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed

out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness, till, at the age of one-and-thirty, he had

exhausted the fund of life, and reduced himself to a state of weakness and decay [and] died July

26, 1680, before he had completed his thirty-fourth year.

Samuel Johnson. The Lives of the Most Eminent English poets, with Critical Observations

on Their Works, Vol. 1. (London: J. Fergusson, 1819), 150–51, https://books.google.

com/books?id=e_sTAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA150).

50 ll. 10–18, Donne, 47.

435

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

Lawyers and litigious men trying to move quarrels began to interfere in

Donne’s situation immediately: “Sir George determined to extricate his

daughter from Donne if it was humanly and legally possible. He had

instigated proceedings, and a hearing was due at the High Commission

to assess the legality of the marriage”.

But both Anne and John Donne

insisted that they had not only plighted troth (a standard of commitment

often held to be as binding as a public marriage ceremony), but were

legally married. Some weeks later, “the Archbishop of Canterbury himself

finally ruled that the marriage was valid in the eyes of the established

Church”.

For the Donnes, however, the economic struggles had only

just begun, as John Donne would be turned down for every position to

which he applied, with the exception of a temporary job as the traveling

secretary to Sir Robert Drury in 1611–12, until he took orders in the

church in 1615. For fourteen years, the Donnes struggled, as the society

of their time and place punished them for choosing each other, rather

than allowing a father (or fathers) to choose instead. In this context, the

fourth stanza of “The Canonization” takes on a meaning wholly alien to

Andreasen’s scenario of a ruined rake with a young mistress:

We can die by it, if not live by love,

And if unfit for tombs and hearse

Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;

And if no piece of chronicle we prove,

We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;

As well a well-wrought urn becomes

The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,

And by these hymns, all shall approve

Us canonized for love.

The “pretty rooms” are refuges against the bruising demands of a world

that sneers at the foolishness of lovers, and if the world will afford no

place for love, at least “a well-wrought urn” will give the lovers a final

unified resting place, much after the fashion and feeling of those resting

places afforded to the lovers in the epigrams. As the poem ends, the idea

of it being reducible to a stock comic situation becomes contemptible and

51 Stubbs, 170.

52 Ibid., 174.

53 ll. 28–36, Donne, 47–48.

436 Love and its Critics

absurd. After their deaths, the lovers become a pilgrimage destination

for future lovers who are still struggling with the Egeuses, Capulets, and

Mores of the world. At the grave, these new lovers pray that their own

fathers will learn from the example of the dead couple, now canonized

as saints, and grow mild: “Countries, towns, courts: beg from above / A

pattern of your love!”

But as powerfully evocative as “The Canonization” is, we do not have

a precise date for its composition, which opens the door to those critics

who wish to separate the poet from the poem. As Guibbory argues:

Readers have long identified the “mutual love” poems with Donne’s secret

courtship and marriage to Anne More. […] Certain lyrics that privilege

the sacred space of clandestine love and describe the world’s opposition

fit with what we know of Donne’s situation at the time. Yet so long as

we lack evidence for the dates and occasions of Donne’s lyrics, poems

like “The Relique” or “The good-morrow” [or “The Canonization”] must

frustrate the autobiographical readings they invite.

Must? Note the language of compulsion and authoritative limitation.

The poems may “fit with what we know of Donne’s situation at the

time”, yet we are told, ex cathedra, that “we lack evidence” (or what the

critic considers admissable as evidence, a dated manuscript), and we

must continue to hold off identifying the life of a poet who lived fin’amor,

from the poetry which describes fin’amor, love between individuals who

face all the consequences the world can throw at them for making their

choice. Just as much current scholarship on the troubadours would

deny readers the ability to see love poems as anything other than

documentary evidence of misogyny and performative narcissism, so it

would seem that many specialists in John Donne are determined to tell

us to reject the evidence of the words in the poems themselves, and

reject what we know about the correlation between those words and the

known facts of the love and life of John and Anne Donne. The argument

is an oddly familiar one, that correlation is not causation. But while

such reasoning is valid in the realm of statistics, it is a great deal shakier

in other realms (there is a reason that the argument is often resorted

54 ll. 44–45, Donne, 48.

55 Achsah Guibbory. “Erotic Poetry”. In her, ed. The Cambridge Companion to John

Donne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 138.

437

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

to by tobacco companies and climate-change deniers), and it sounds

especially jarring coming from literary critics.

But despite his critics, Donne’s passions will not be contained—even

the long Platonic tradition of regarding human love as the lowest rung

on a ladder leading to the divine are made to serve the purposes of

a poet who will not be reduced to quiet submission and conformity.

In “The Extasie”, Donne writes of a love between two who are one, a

passion at once reflective and active, spiritual and embodied. Beginning

with a description of “A pregnant bank swell’d up to rest”

where the

lovers “Sat we two, one another’s best”,

the poem portrays these two

who are one as being both in and out of their bodies as they silently gaze

at one another. Their hands and eyes are joined:

Our hands were firmly cemented

With a fast balm, which thence did spring,

Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread

Our eyes upon one double string;

So to’ intergraft our hands, as yet

Was all our means to make us one,

And pictures in our eyes to get

Was all our propagation.

At the same time, their “souls” are suspended outside of their bodies, in

the same silent contemplation of each other:

As ‘twixt two equal armies Fate

Suspends uncertain victory,

Our souls (which to advance their state

Were gone out) hung ‘twixt her and me.

And whilst our souls negotiate there,

We like sepulchral statues lay;

All day, the same our postures were,

And we said nothing, all the day.

56 l.2, Donne, 53.

57 l.4, Donne, 53.

58 ll. 5–13, Donne, 53–54.

59 ll. 14–20, Donne, 54.

438 Love and its Critics

There is no “masculine desire to conquer and control” or “masculine

dominion” here, despite the metaphor of souls as armies. Instead, we

have silent mutuality, a communication that does not require words, as

painfully sincere yet artfully deceitful as words can so often be. We have

a sense of souls and bodies that are—like the lovers—themselves two-

who-are-one. The souls can come forth from, but are always grounded in

the bodies that are crucial parts of the “We” who “like sepulchral statues

lay”. The bodies are not mere objects, not fallen flesh to be derided and

condemned, but a crucial part of the entire two-in-one reality that is

being described. Each dynamic is fueled by love—between the two

lovers, and between the bodies and souls themselves. The pairing is

mutually desired and mutually sustaining, and that is the secret referred

to by the following lines:

If any, so by love refined

That he soul’s language understood,

And by good love were grown all mind,

Within convenient distance stood,

He (though he knew not which soul spake

Because both meant, both spake the same)

Might thence a new concoction take

And part far purer than he came.

The “soul’s language” is silence—mutually understood—a touch that

is offered and accepted, felt both with and without the bodies of the

lovers. The imagined audience here is someone who understands that

these bodies and souls are not opposites, but necessary complements,

ingredients or elements of a far more complex synthesis, a “new

concoction” (using the language of alchemy as psychological and/

or spiritual transformation and purification as well as physical

transmutation). Observing this, even hearing this, the imagined other

is himself or herself transformed through the realization that the binary

division between body and soul is an illusion, just as is the binary

between lover and lover. The two are one, for those with ears to hear

and eyes to see.

60 ll. 21–28, Donne, 54.

61 A similar spirit is found in Shakespeare’s poem “The Phoenix and the Turtle”

(published in Robert Chester’s Loves Martyr of 1601), where two lovers “lov’d, as

439

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

The poem then goes on to make explicit that bodies and souls are a

synthesis of elements that forms the individual self of each lover, who are

themselves one, a union that forms the highest and most profound whole:

But O alas, so long, so far

Our bodies why do we forbear?

They are ours, though they are not we, we are

The intelligences, they the sphere.

We owe them thanks, because they thus,

Did us, to us, at first convey,

Yielded their forces, sense, to us,

Nor are dross to us, but allay.

Their bodies are a necessary part of the synthesis, the whole. The

“intelligences” without “the sphere” are like an energy without a

vehicle through which to express itself, thus the bodies are not “dross”

(unnecessary trash) but “allay” (part of an alloy, two substances

combined into a stronger and more complex whole). Returning once

again to the imagined other who sees, hears, and understands all of this,

the poem concludes by erasing the difference between the disembodied

and embodied lovers:

To our bodies turn we then, that so

Weak men on love revealed may look;

Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,

But yet the body is his book.

And if some lover, such as we,

Have heard this dialogue of one,

Let him still mark us, he shall see

Small change, when we’are to bodies gone.

This “dialogue of one” is a dialogue of oneness: the oneness of opposites

that are not opposites. The “lover” who understands this, who sees

“Small change” between the language spoken in silence between the

lovers without and within their bodies, understands the both sacred

love in twain / Had the essence but in one; / Two distincts, division none: / Number

there in love was slain” (ll. 25–28).

62 ll. 49–56, Donne, 55.

63 ll. 68–76, Donne, 55–56.

440 Love and its Critics

and radically secular point this poem makes about love: the highest

form of love is that which is had here, now, with that he or she who is

right in front of you.

Much of the essence of “The Extasie” is expressed in that idea, and

much of the challenge this poem makes to Platonic and Neoplatonic

orthodoxies about love can be understood through this idea as well.

There is no need to climb a “ladder of love”, no need to turn one’s focus

away from those beloveds in the here and now, in the world of flesh

and blood, in order to experience the “true” or “transcendent” love that

will allow the lover, as Diotima argues, to come to know “the soul’s

beauty”.

There is no need to believe, in Peter Bembo’s terms, that

“the body is something very different from beauty, and not only does

not increase beauty but lessens its perfection”.

“The Extasie” sweeps

all of this aside as so much body-shaming, flesh-hating, life-denying

nonsense. The love portrayed in “The Extasie” is already fully embodied

and fully spiritual, passionately physical and supremely sacred all at

once. Let those understand who are able, the poem suggests, and they

will part more pure and whole than when they came.

And yet, this poem has caused more arguments between the critics

than perhaps any other of Donne’s works. With “The Extasie”, the

critical drive to allegory, to diagnosis, to a hermeneutics of suspicion,

to seeing the poem in terms of anything other than open, embodied

passion becomes crystal clear. As far back as 1932, Merritt Hughes

is arguing that the poem is not passionate at all, but is “merely the

dramatisation of a conflict and reconciliation of ideas which had long

been familiar in Italy and France, if not in England”.

Hughes works

hard to put “The Extasie” back in the cramped box of convention by

insisting that it is a “minor heresy [to believe] that The Extasie was felt by

its author as a revolt against Platonism”,

and by arguing that “we owe

The Extasie to the stream of tradition rather than to an original dramatic

impulse on Donne’s part”.

In this last gesture, we can see the early

64 “ταῖςψυχαῖςκάλλος”(Plato. Symposium 210c).

65 “l corpo è cosa diversissima dalia bellezza, e non solamente non le accresce, ma le

diminuisce la sua perfezione” (Castiglione, 254–55).

66 Merritt Hughes. “The Lineage of ‘The Extasie’”. Modern Language Review, 27: 1

(January 1932), 2, https://doi.org/10.2307/3716215

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid.

441

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

stages of the “death of the author” impulse at work. “Tradition” wrote

the poem, not Donne. By 1934, Frank Doggett is reclaiming the poem

for passion by describing “The Extasie as “Donne’s most complete

declaration of the nature of love, and of the part taken by soul and by

body in that passion”,

arguing that “[t]he inner meaning of Donne’s

thought, here, is the necessity of the functions of both soul and body

for complete love”.

At the same time, however, Doggett contends that

Donne’s poem is essentially in agreement with the anti-body mysticism

of Bembo in The Courtier.

By the 1960s, Charles Mitchell argues that “The Extasie” portrays a

love in which body and soul are indispensable parts of a larger whole.

But Mitchell’s emphasis is Neoplatonic, for “The Extasie” does its work

by showing “how the outward union of man and woman effects the

union of body and soul within man”.

Lovers (and observers) are

shown in the poem as having “grown inwardly from a mere body to a

synthesis of body and soul by the outgoing power of love”.

Katherine

Thompson reverses that emphasis in 1982, making an argument that

serves as a counterpoint to those who try to shoehorn “The Extasie” into

a tidy Neoplatonic container:

Even the initial stroke of wit in “The Extasie” depends on Donne’s

turning the tables on the conventional Neoplatonists, or one should say,

it depends on Donne’s inversion of their ladder of love. […] Donne, by

fiat, begins with ecstasy achieved […then proves] the compatibility of

the lovers at the level of soul; and then has his speaker argue for descent

on the ladder rather than ascent.

As Catherine Gimelli Martin observes, modern critical reaction to “The

Extasie” has tended toward a reductive and cynical view:

69 Frank A. Doggett. “Donne’s Platonism”. The Sewanee Review, 42: 3 (July–September

1934), 285.

70 Ibid., 288.

71 Ibid., 289–90.

72 Charles Mitchell. “Donne’s ‘The Extasie’: Love’s Sublime Knot”. Studies in English

Literature, 1500–1900, 8: 1, The English Renaissance (Winter 1968), 92, https://doi.

org/10.2307/449412

73 Ibid., 100.

74 T. Katharine Thomason. “Plotinian Metaphysics and Donne’s ‘Extasie’”. Studies in

English Literature, 1500–1900, 22: 1, The English Renaissance (Winter 1982), 93–94,

https://doi.org/10.2307/450219

442 Love and its Critics

most modern critics seem to agree that [Donne’s poetry] is typically or

even universally put to cynically seductive purposes. But this consensus

is both newer and more tenuous than it seems; only a generation ago,

literary critics regularly followed Herbert J. C. Grierson and Helen

Gardner in regarding the major love lyrics as sincere […]. This view

first faded under the influence of Pierre Legouis, whose rereading of

“The Extasie” as a seduction poem proved broadly influential among

second-generation New Critics, for whom the ironic mode was fast

becoming the insincere mode later canonized in Stephen Greenblatt’s

Renaissance Self-Fashioning.

What Martin calls “the new orthodoxy”

insists that readers discount

the presence of love and desire in Donne’s poetry as nothing more than

a cynically seductive lie. But “The Extasie” shows us a Donne who

cannot be contained by criticism that reduces sincere passion to tattered

convention, turning “all forms of inwardness […] into mere social

constructions”.

Again, one wonders what it is about such reductively

life-denying arguments that appeals to so many critics. It is as if we

have trained several generations of academics to be like the man who,

as Blake puts it, “sees the Ratio only” and thus “sees himself only”,

incapable or unwilling are they to see past what the troubadour poet

Marcabru calls the fragmented, frait, in order to glimpse the whole,

entier. Donne’s work demands that we see past the Ratio, past the

fragmented, past the commitments of any contemporary critical school,

in order to understand his desire. Perhaps a little less dissection and

a little more synthesis is in order. As Martin argues, “[m]ore than any

other poet of the period, Donne represents his inner search for religious

and erotic authenticity”

through the passionate intensity of his work.

75 Catherine Gimelli Martin. “The Erotology of Donne’s ‘Extasie’ and the Secret

History of Voluptuous Rationalism”. Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 44: 1

(2004), 123, https://doi.org/10.1353/sel.2004.0008

76 Ibid., 123.

77 Ibid.

78 William Blake. “There is No Natural Religion”. In The Complete Poetry and Prose of

William Blake, ed. by David V. Erdman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of

California Press, 2008), 3.

79 Martin, 123, quoting from Robert Watson, The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation

in the English Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,

1994), 164.

443

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

Donne, like Shakespeare, like Milton, is an entire world—a writer

of astonishing virtuosity and versatility, a poet who can inhabit

experience, emotion, and passion, yet maintain an ironic distance—he

is at once an artist of the inside and the outside, the “is” and the “seems”

of Hamlet’s retort to Getrude.

One thing remains consistent, however.

Donne’s poetry, far from being the merely conventional fare described

by those critics who “wear the carpet with their shoes”, gives love its

due. A more immediately playful poem like “The Sun Rising”, shows

us a Donne who regards love and its pleasures and demands as far

more important, and far worthier of respect, than the demands of the

world and its temporary rulers. Starting with a variation on the alba

form of the troubadours, the poem decries the presence of the sun, and

its interference with the pleasures of love:

Busy old fool, unruly sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?

In the alba, the rising of the sun threatens to betray the lovers, and calls

an end to the all too brief night they have spent together, out of the

reach and beyond the prying eyes of jealous spouses and a controlling

world. Donne captures that sense of resentment against the sun, against

the demands of the daylight world of law, loveless marriages, and

obedience which ends only in death, by calling the sun a “fool” that

serves the interests of the hateful and powerful, enforcing the schedule

of a world that demands conformity. The question “Must to thy motions

lovers’ seasons run?” has only one practical answer: yes. But Donne

rejects and mocks the practical answer, insisting that such drudgery is

for those even more foolish than the sun their messenger:

Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide

Late school-boys and sour prentices,

80 Hamlet 1.2.76.

81 ll. 1–4, Donne, 80.

444 Love and its Critics

Go tell court-huntsmen that the King will ride,

Call country ants to harvest offices;

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

The “pedantic” sun (fussy, punctilious, and over-eager to obey times

and seasons) is a fit alarum for children and workers chained to the

drudgery of low pay and long hours, a proper herald for foolish kings

and the greater fools who serve them, a necessary prompter for the

activities of insects, but it is no authority for those men and women

who love. Love transcends the petty rules and forms, the bowings and

scrapings of lives spent jostling for position in a hierarchical society,

the strict schedulings of time into “hours, days, months”, man-made

concepts which are merely “rags”. Love rejects the calls of the world

for obedience, for Love is its own law, its own world, as Donne tells

the unwelcome and too-bright morning star that has intruded upon

love’s peace and quiet: “Princes do but play us; compared to this, / All

honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy”.

Finally, love makes lovers a world entire unto themselves, their own

rulers, their own subjects, beholden to no one but each other. And it is in

this state that true human happiness can be sought and found:

Thou sun art half as happy as we,

In that the world’s contracted thus;

Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be

To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

Where the lovers of “The Extasie” are two who are one, united each

with the other in body and soul, the lovers of “The Sun Rising” become

an entire world in their private room, within whose walls no laws but

those of love hold sway.

82 Ibid., ll. 5–10.

83 ll. 23–24 Donne, 81.

84 Ibid., ll. 25–30.

445

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

The Lyricist of Carpe Diem: Robert Herrick and

the Critics who Distort

Though his name may not be as well-recognized as Donne’s, there are

probably more readers who recognize fragments of the poetry of Robert

Herrick than almost any other English poet save Shakespeare.

Robert Herrick, portrait by Edward Everett Hale,

in The Hawthorne Readers, Book 4 (1904).

His most famous poem, “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time”, is for

many readers the very definition of the carpe diem poem:

Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying:

And this same flower that smiles to day,

To morrow will be dying.

The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun,

The higher he’s a-getting;

The sooner will his Race be run,

And neerer he’s to Setting.

That Age is best, which is the first,

85 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Robert_Herrick_(poet).jpg

446 Love and its Critics

When Youth and Blood are warmer;

But being spent, the worse, and worst

Times, still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time;

And while ye may, goe marry:

For having lost but once your prime,

You may for ever tarry.

The famous carpe diem lyric is also a carpe florem poem: pluck the flower

(of virginity) before it begins to fade. As Shakespeare observes in the

opening lines of Sonnet 15, “everything that grows / Holds in perfection

but a little moment”, and Herrick here asks, why wait? What are you

waiting for? This deceptively simple poem challenges everything. In the

absence of an afterlife (and the irony must be noted that Herrick was

an Anglican minister, having been ordained at the age of 32 in 1623),

life must be lived now, and time lost will never be regained, thus it

is absolutely vital to “use your time”. Those who choose to be “coy”,

holding back out of fear of consequences for “sin” or disobedience, will

be punished by the only authority that matters: death. In a world for

which there may be no heaven that looks on and takes anyone’s part,

Herrick’s famous exhortation is no mere literary cliché, no mere exercise

in convention. It is a powerful and beautiful statement of the outrageous,

sad, and ultimately fatal predicament we all find ourselves in.

Yet, for some critics, Herrick’s most famous poem is curiously

removed from life, and, as Sarah Gilead argues, incapable of anything

other than pointing to “the deceptive capacity of language to contain

experience”.

The intellectual genealogy of this idea is clear enough,

partaking as it does of the flavor of Paul de Man’s assertion that

“Language always occurs within a range of deceptive appearances

which it created itself; for that reason, it always endangers its own

86 Robert Herrick. The Complete Poems of Robert Herrick, ed. by Alexander B. Grosart.

3 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1876), Vol. 1, 144–45, ll. 1–16, https://books.

google.com/books?id=n14JAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA144. Further references to these

volumes will be by line number, Herrick, volume number, and page number.

87 Macbeth 4.3.230–31.

88 Sarah Gilead. “Ungathering ‘Gather ye Rosebuds’: Herrick’s Misreading of Carpe

Diem”. Criticism, 27: 2 (Spring 1985), 135.

447

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

innermost being, that is, the authentic act of saying”.

Consistent with

the “hermeneutics of suspicion”, the idea Gilead shares with de Man

is that language conceals what it pretends to reveal, and thus poetic

language does not actually say what it seems to say. This idea that

language conceals, that language is an unstable and untrustworthy

medium, is widely shared in mid-to-late twentieth-century continental

(and continentally-influenced) thought. For philosophers like Maurice

Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, “it is in language that the

unconcealment of things happens. Yet every disclosure, every revelation,

is, at the same time, a concealment; language covers things over in the

very process of thematization or unconcealment”.

Jacques Derrida falls

right in line by declaring that we have reached a point in which “the

simple signifying nature of language appears very uncertain, partial, or

inessential”.

Literary criticism that takes such ideas as a starting point

regards poetry as a pretense of meaning that needs to be exposed as

meaningless in order that the machinations of languguage and ideology

might be revealed.

Making use of these ideas with enough ingenuity and determination,

a remorselessly skilled critical practitioner can quite nearly destroy any

sense of life-affirmation in Herrick’s poem, rewriting it to the point of

turning it into a verse tract on suicide. The first step is to assert and then

emphasize the contradictory nature of Herrick’s theme:

A carpe diem poem exists within an established literary subcategory,

inhabits an enclosed ontological and significatory space. […] the

meanings of the poem are secured by both external traditions

(conventional motifs, arguments, moods and tropes) and by the poem’s

internal patterning. And yet the carpe diem theme itself celebrates not

the rule-bound realms of art, conventionality, contextualization, but

rather pure sensory experience. That is, it recommends that which by

its form it denies. Pure experience is precisely what language does not

offer; experience is always processed, mediated by the cultural forms

(including language and art) through which we apprehend it. The carpe

89 Paul de Man. The Paul de Man Notebooks, ed. by Martin McQuillan (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 174.

90 Martin C. Dillon. Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Evanston: Northwestern University

Press, 1997), 179.

91 “la nature simplement signitive du langage paraît bien incertaine, partielle ou

inessentielle” (Jacques Derrida. L’Ecriture et la Différence [Paris: Seuil, 1967], 9–10).

448 Love and its Critics

diem poem seems to point to, even provide access to, a mysteriously life-

enhancing realm of experience but simultaneously substitutes a highly

artificial construct—itself—for such experience.

Let’s break that last sentence down. In order to do that, we will move

from direct statements to indirect statements, and as Polonius would

say, “by indirections find directions out”.

First, let’s look at the

simplest and most direct level of meaning available: “The carpe diem

poem […] point[s] to […] a […] life-enhancing realm of experience”.

That would be a direct, straightforward, and relatively uncontroversial

statement. But note how the critic builds (or tears down) from that

basis. The simple suggestion of seeming is added: “The carpe diem poem

seems to point to […] a life-enhancing realm of experience”. Though still

quite straightforward, this version introduces the smallest of doubts.

Next, the critic adds a disingenuous claim about the poem’s power, an

absurd strawman: “The carpe diem poem seems to point to, even provide

access to, a […] life-enhancing realm of experience”. It is easy to see how

a poem might point to such a thing, but how could a poem provide

access thereto? The obvious answer is that it cannot. Through the sly

suggestion that a poem might seem to have powers that it cannot have,

our critic establishes a “sensible” or “common sense” doubt about the

poem’s seeming in general. From here, the critic adds more doubt: “The

carpe diem poem seems to point to, even provide access to, a mysteriously

life-enhancing realm of experience”. This introduces the idea that the

seeming is not limited to the poem, but to the world of experience that

the poem only seems to point to (and with each move, Herrick’s verse

recedes further and further to invisibility). Finally, the finishing touch

is added: “The carpe diem poem seems to point to, even provide access to,

a mysteriously life-enhancing realm of experience but simultaneously

substitutes a highly artificial construct—itself—for such experience”. This

last move relies on meaningless inflation of its terms. What is “a highly

artificial construct”? As all constructs are “artificial” (made by and

through art and artifice), how is it possible for such a construct to be

highly artificial, as opposed to simply and plainly artificial? The effect

looked for, however, is not precision of definition, so much as it is the

92 Gilead, 135.

93 Hamlet, 2.1.65.

449

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

enhancement—through rhetorical inflation—of an already threadbare

line of reasoning. The last assertion—as no evidence whatsoever is

given for the notion that the poem substitutes for experience—completes

the trick whereby Herrick’s poem is replaced by an absurd version

written by the critic, for the critic, with the express purpose of being

deconstructed by the critic.

Rewritten in this way, Herrick’s “To the Virgins” is merely a

tiresome rehearsal of “established” literary forms and ideas, trapped

within an old-fashioned and no-longer-negotiable set of conventions

regarding life and the communication of emotions and ideas. For the

critic, the “meaning” that “naive” readers take from this poem is a

philosophical version of fast food: prepackaged in familiar wrapping

(the “conventional motifs, arguments, moods and tropes”) with

standardized cooking and presentation techniques (“the poem’s internal

patterning”). As refashioned by the critic, the product does not, indeed

cannot, deliver on its promises.

With the first, and most crucial step now taken (the construction

of a strawman version of the poem), the second step is to distance it

from any aspect of life that does not somehow refer to poetry itself,

and is not somehow about the acts of writing and meaning. For Gilead,

Herrick’s poem can be reduced to “a metaphor for the act of reading

and interpreting (‘gathering’ a message)”. For the critic, “the persuasion

to pleasure of Herrick’s carpe diem may be read as a persuasion to seek

signification: textuality replaces sexuality”.

This move makes it possible

to claim that Herrick’s lyric is an artifact of ruthless competitiveness,

a testament to the demands of the male poet’s ego (an idea borrowed

from T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and Harold

Bloom’s book The Anxiety of Influence): “Herrick’s ‘To the Virgins’

is compensatorily self-effacing, quiet, small, innocent, easy, almost

anonymous-seeming. But its modesty, its virginal unaggressiveness

conceals, perhaps, a kind of textual ruthlessness”.

This critical formula

relies heavily on the use of “shocking” reversals and combinations

of ideas, images, and even sound patterns all strung together on the

extremely thin thread of “perhaps”. “Textual” is intended to remind

the reader of “sexual”, and “virginal […] ruthlessness” is designed to

94 Ibid.

95 Ibid., 140.

450 Love and its Critics

raise the spectre of violence, even rape. Naturally, what else would we

expect to find concealed behind “virginal unaggressiveness”, other than

“textual ruthlessness”? For the critic, that “ruthlessness” reveals itself in

an Oedipal competition in which Herrick establishes his poetic persona

as an “aggressive rival to and replacement of the poetic father” through

the “acts of textual castration that create ‘To the Virgins’ from the bits

and pieces of precursor texts” from “the classical age which produces

the literary genera Herrick follows”.

As the critical assertions mount ever higher, the third step is to employ

the “hermeneutics of suspicion” to argue that the poem does not mean

what it merely seems to mean, and may, in fact, mean quite the opposite:

By illustrating the unstoppable rush of time, the need to seize the day is

made manifest. But the poem’s “aging” also undermines the carpe diem

assertion, for if the linear succession from “best” to “worst” is absolutely

impervious to human will, action, or decision, then the choice between

seizing the day or letting it pass is no choice at all. Not to tarry, not to

defer the gathering of rosebuds, is not to defer death, the final gathering,

the end of the race. Thus the poem simultaneously illustrates both the

wisdom and the folly of heeding its message.

Again, the argument relies on unsubstantiated claims that present

themselves as authoritative critical judgments. The critic supplies

no evidence at all for the “shocking” conclusion that “the poem

simultaneously illustrates both the wisdom and the folly of heeding its

message”. It is true, of course, that “not to defer”

gathering rosebuds “is

not to defer” death itself. But that is not what the poem claims. Instead

it asserts that to defer gathering rosebuds is to defer (possibly until it is

too late) the all-too-short experience of the most pleasurable aspects of

life. Death is not the question of the poem—the question is what each of

us will do with the time left before death. To argue seriously that there is

“no choice at all” between grabbing experience and allowing it to pass

96 Gilead, 141.

97 Ibid., 146.

98 Note how the critic uses the negation, the inversion there to add the appearance

of complexity: “not to defer gathering”, rather than merely “gathering”. Gathering

rosebuds does not defer death—this is a simple, straightforward statement. Not to

defer gathering rosebuds is not to defer death—this statement cloaks itself, through its

negations and convolutions, in an appearance of profundity, which lends a kind of

thinly-woven authority to the statement that follows.

451

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

by, between living actively in the face of inevitable death and waiting

passively and obediently for that death to arrive, is to reveal oneself as

incapable of (or uninterested in) coherent argument. Only a critic who

cannot or will not see past his or her ideological commitments could

expect to be taken seriously when advancing this argument. But this is

the kind of reasoning required by the step-by-step, paint-by-numbers

process of the hermeneutics of suspicion method of reading.

Finally, the fourth and most crucial step is to reveal the “hidden”

meaning of the poem, which in this case means rewriting the entire carpe

diem motif. For the critic, far from urging that life be lived to the fullest

while there is yet time, Herrick’s famous poem rushes headlong toward

death, driven by its own desire into a form of suicide:

The carpe diem strategy posits sexual pleasure as life-intensifying, and thus

a defense against mortality; intense pleasure, whether in anticipation,

experience, or memory, in a sense displaces the consciousness or fear of

death. But sexuality viewed not as pleasure but as reproduction makes

the individual, his experiences, his consciousness, and his very existence,

superfluous, expendable. The only perfect defense against fear of death,

against the paralyzing anxiety of the coy virgin, is death itself. […] Carpe

diem urges “satisfaction” of desire, the feeding of it, but to satisfy desire

is to get rid of desire, to destroy desire in the total discharge of need that

is accomplished by death. The final rosebud to be gathered is death itself

[…] Aggression against the self thus occurs both in rejecting desire and in

seeking it; the first denies to the self a range of possible experiences […];

the second is that impulse through which is created the replacement for

the self in the next generation […]—to seek desire is thus, paradoxically,

a form of indirect suicide.

Here we have a veritable tour de force of sleights-of-hand,

100

reversals,

and unsupported assertions dressing themselves up as arguments.

Sexuality as reproduction makes the individual expendable. Proof? None is

offered. The only perfect defense against the fear of death is death itself. Proof?

None. Seeking desire is a form of “indirect suicide”. Proof? Of course not.

The point of that final statement lies, not in any actual truth claim, but

in its rhetorical effect. Dress up a series of counter-intuitive reversals

99 Ibid., 147–48.

100 Note the sly way in which the critic shifts the ground beneath sexuality from

“pleasure” to “reproduction”, before making the unsupported assertion that

“reproduction makes the individual […] expendable”.

452 Love and its Critics

in negations and inverted syntax, repeat those reversals in forceful

language, backed up by the “authority” lent by the reputable journal

or publishing house which has printed the piece in which the reversals

appear, and wait for compliant, graduate-school-trained readers to fall

in line, and start repeating your claims in their presentations, papers,

and other “intellectual” productions. After being put through this

process, the poem that generations of readers thought they had read

has nearly disappeared,

101

and the most famous of carpe diem poems

has been transformed into a carpe mortem poem. From the critical point

of view offered by Gilead, there is no call to life and love in “To the

Virgins”, only literary convention, the remorseless progress of time, and

the inevitability of death.

Inherent in much of the criticism this book discusses are the twin

ideas that literature inevitably serves the interests of the powerful, and

that resistance is impossible. Jacques Lacan, for example, insists that

resistance always traps one inside the discourse of the power one is

resisting, “the revolutionary aspiration has only one possible outcome,

always, the discourse of the master. This is what experience proves.

What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a Master. You will have one”.

102

From this point of view, criticism like Gilead’s ends up arguing that the

appearance of a radically life-affirming spirit in Herrick’s poem actually

undermines itself, and ends up affirming death. What is perhaps even

more astonishing than these oddly authoritarian ideas is how little

thought is necessary to put them to use in an interpretive process whose

template-driven results are determined in advance of the reading: follow

the steps, complete the formula, and voilà, the critic has “revealed” that

a poem long-thought to say “X” actually says “not-X”.

Gilead’s article is an artifact of its time, the mid 1980’s, and its place, a

Ph.D. written at Northwestern University in 1980, during the peak of the

101 This is consistent with the “nothingness” de Man claims is at the heart of literature:

“Here the human self has experienced the void within itself, and the invented

fiction, far from filling the void, asserts itself as a pure nothingness, our nothingness

stated and restated by a subject that is the agent of its own instability” (Blindness and

Insight, 19).

102 “l’aspiration révolutionnaire, ça n’a qu’une chance d’aboutir, toujours, au discours

du maître. C’est ce que l’expérience en a fait la preuve. Ce à quoi vous aspirez

comme révolutionnaire, c’est à un Maître. Vous l’aurez” (Jacques Lacan. Le Séminaire

de Jacques Lacan, Livre XVII: L’envers de la Psychanalyse, ed. by Jacques Alain Miller

[Paris: Seuil, 1991], 239).

453

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

fascination with deconstruction that swept through English departments

in American academia. But it is part of a much longer story in literary

criticism and interpretation, one that stretches back all the way to Akiba

and Origen and their insistence that the Song of Songs be read against its

own text. Theological interpreters of the Song of Songs take great care in

telling us that the poem’s frankly erotic treatment of love between a man

and a woman is really a metaphor for loving God. Modern academic

criticism of the troubadours is at pains to assure us that the poetry does

not actually mean what it merely appears to mean. Much new historicist

and cultural materialist criticism of Shakespeare aims to convince us

that despite their anti-authoritarian appearances, Shakespeare’s plays

are part of the apparatus of Elizabethan and Jacobean state control.

103

Many Donne scholars are particularly concerned with separating the

poet’s life from the poet’s written work, as part of a strategy of larger

claims that insist that the poems are misogynist and imperialist. And

a critic like Gilead tells us that the message of the carpe diem motif in

Herrick’s “To the Virgins” is impossible to find: “The longer the reader

searches for the carpe diem message in Herrick’s obviously carpe diem

poem, the greater difficulty she has in finding it. […] Herrick’s poem

disintegrates into a tangle of conflicting concepts, images, and tropes”.

104

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is a form of critical violence that

works to undermine poetry’s potential for resistance, and dismiss the

sense that poetry is something that might be enjoyed. Such criticism is

often written in the kind of deliberately obtuse language that illustrates

Montaigne’s maxim: “Difficulty is the currency that the learned employ,

like tricksters, in order not to reveal the vanity of their art, and which

human stupidity is easily led to take as payment”.

105

Things do not seem

103 One notable exception to this trend has been Alexander Leggatt, who regrets what he

calls “a current tendency to see society as a structure of oppression and exploitation,

and to read Shakespeare accordingly” (Alexander Leggatt. Shakespeare’s Political

Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays [New York: Routledge, 2003], viii).

104 Gilead, 150.

105 “La difficulté est une monoye que les sçavans employent, comme les joueurs de

passe-passe, pour ne descouvrir la vanité de leur art, et de la quelle l’humaine bestise

se paye ayséement” (Michel de Montaigne. “Apologie de Raimond de Sebonde”. In

Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, Vol. 2, ed. by Fortunat Strowski [Bordeaux: Pech,

1906], 234, https://archive.org/stream/lesessaisdemi02mont#page/234). Montaigne

goes on to quote from Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura 1.639, 641–42, speaking of the

famously obscure Heraclitus, who was:

454 Love and its Critics

to have changed since Montaigne’s time: as Felski notes, the “sheer

difficulty [of a work] accentuate[s] its allure to a certain kind of critic,

convinced, akin to Burke commenting on the sublime, that the obscure

is inherently more affecting and awe-inspiring than the clear”.

106

There is “a fannish dimension” to this work, “evidenced in a cult of

exclusiveness and intense attachment to charismatic figures”.

107

What

this kind of literary criticism reveals is an antagonism toward poetry,

or as Derrida describes it, with an eye on the tradition stretching back

to Plato, an intolerance for poetry as a threat to the dominance of the

prose-bound philosopher:

the history of philosophy is the history of prose; or, if you will, the

prosifying of the world. Philosophy is the invention of prose. Philosophy

speaks in prose. […] Before writing, verse served as a kind of spontaneous

engraving, a writing before the letter. Intolerant of poetry, philosophy

took writing to be the letter.

108

Clarus, ob obscurum linguam, magis inter inanes,

Omnia enim stolidi magis admirantur amantque

Inversis quae sub verbis latitantia cernunt.

Celebrated for his obscurity, especially among the inane,

For all the stupid greatly admire and love

That which is concealed beneath inverted words.

Aristotle makes a similar comment when he notes that “knowing themselves

ignorant,menworshipthosewhosespeechliesabovetheirreckoning”(συνειδότες

δ᾽ ἑαυτοῖς ἄγνοιαν τοὺς μέγα τι καὶ ὑπὲρ αὐτοὺς λέγοντας θαυμάζουσιν)

(Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics I, ed. by H. Rackham [Loeb Classical Library,

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926], 10, ll. 26–27). In writing of the

Paul de Man affair, Robert Alter sounds like a modern (if somewhat angrier)

Montaigne, as he describes the situation as one in which “to his American admirers,

with their cultural inferiority complex, it seemed that if things were difficult to

grasp, something profound was being said”, and that de Man “got away with

it because of the gullibility of American scholars” (“Paul de Man Was a Total

Fraud”. New Republic. April 5, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/117020/

paul-de-man-was-total-fraud-evelyn-barish-reviewed).

106 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 27. This kind of devotion to the difficult can be seen

in the almost de rigueur political contempt for the idea of clarity expressed (with

ironic clarity) by Trink T. Minh-ha: “Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both

of official taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power: together

they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order” (Trink T. Minh-ha.

Woman, Native, Other [Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1989, 16–17).

107 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 27.

108 l’histoire de la philosophie est l’histoire de la prose; ou plutôt du devenir-prose du monde. La

philosophie est l’invention de la prose. Le philosophe parle en prose. […] Avant l’écriture, le

vers serait en quelque sorte une gravure spontanée, une écriture avant la lettre. Intolérant à la

poésie, le philosophe aurait pris l’écriture à la lettre.

Jacques Derrida. De la Grammatologie, 406. Emphasis added.

455

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

As de Man approvingly defines it, such criticism is “a methodologically

motivated attack on the notion that a literary or poetic consciousness

[…] can pretend to escape, to some degree, from the duplicity, the

confusion, the untruth that we take for granted in the everyday use of

language”.

109

In the critic’s terms, the old claim of the English Puritan

William Prynne is revived: poetry is a lie, and a dangerous one at that.

Criticism dedicated to a “hermeneutics of suspicion” gives us no

exit, no recourse as it continually rewrites poetry as compliant with

authority (a move the critic couches in the guise of “unmasking” or

“revealing” poetry’s hidden ideological nature). In transforming or

rewriting such poetry as appears to offer even the slightest glimmer of

resistant possibility, the critic makes him or herself into an agent of the

oppressive structures of authority, part of a vicious circle of ideology in

which “the subject acts as it is acted by the system”.

110

He or she does

this through a criticism that is tinged with both compulsion and violence

in a project which seems to disdain the very poetry it works with:

witness the critic’s celebration of violence in her reading of Herrick: “an

interrogative reading [of Herrick’s poem] parries with its anti-textual

analytical violence the poem’s assertion of its own innocence, and of the

reader’s innocent desire to preserve inviolate the simplicity, integrity,

and obvious good sense of carpe diem”.

111

But a poem like “To the Virgins” is innocent, in the etymological

sense of harmless. No virgins are oppressed or subjugated by being

encouraged to live a little before they die; not even if the poem is

interpreted as a seduction lyric is its advice harmful to anyone except

to the extent to which they are locked within systems of control in a

society in which female sexuality is regarded as a valuable commodity

to be bought and sold by fathers and (father-chosen) husbands. A short,

epigrammatic poem like “To Live Freely”, condenses “To the Virgins”

into two lines which only a critic devoted to suspicion could read with

interrogative violence:

109 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, 9.

110 “le sujet agit en tant qu’il est agi par le système” (Louis Althusser. “Idéologie et

Appareils Idéologiques d’État” [1970]. Les Classiques des Sciences Sociales [Quebec:

Université du Québec à Chicoutimi], 44, http://classiques.uqac.ca/contemporains/

althusser_louis/ideologie_et_AIE/ideologie_et_AIE.pdf).

111 Gilead, 150.

456 Love and its Critics

Let’s live in hast; use pleasures while we may:

Co’d life return, ‘twod never lose a day.

112

“Let’s” (let us) is directed toward all, male and female, young and old

alike. “Pleasures” may, of course, be sexual pleasures, but they needn’t

be limited thereto (unless a critic has a particular ideological point to

hammer home). A considerable effort will have to be invested in this

short lyric to ensure that it “disintegrates into a tangle of conflicting

concepts, images, and tropes” or becomes intelligible primarily as “a

form of indirect suicide”. Here, perhaps, the reading method of Rashi is

what best serves: the plain meaning of this text is an exhortation to enjoy

each day, each moment, because we are all running out of time. And

could “life return”, were we given, after the diagnosis of a fatal illness, a

short reprieve, an extra week or month, or even year of life, how many

of us would waste even a day on drudgery, obedience, and ascetic self-

denial?

113

Perhaps those who read the poetry of life and love as being

actually about a desire for death, but not many others.

In similar fashion, a poem like “To Daffadills” expresses grief at the

shortness of life, and the fading of beauty, not to hide anything from the

reader by disintegrating into “a tangle”, not to seduce anyone, nor even

to persuade, but merely to commiserate across time and distance, one

mortal writer with countless equally mortal readers:

Faire Daffadills, we weep to see

You haste away so soone:

112 ll. 1–2, Herrick, Vol. 2, 115, https://books.google.com/books?id=C21DAQAAMAAJ

&pg=PA115

113 These are the same kinds of questions that Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot (Идиот)

poses as Prince Myshkin tells the story (based on Dostoevsky’s own experience of

a narrowly-averted execution) of a man who faced what he believed would be the

last moments of his life, and suddenly thought of how precious time would be to

him, if only he were spared:

What if I did not die! What if I came back to life-what infinity! And all this would be mine! I

would then treat every minute as a century, not losing anything, calculate every minute, so as

to spend none of them in vain!

Что,еслибынеумирать!Что,еслибыворотитьжизнь,-какаябесконечность!Ивсёэто

былобы мое! Я бы тогдакаждую минутув целый век обратил, ничегобы непотерял,

каждуюбыминутусчетомотсчитывал,ужничегобыдаромнеистратил!’

Fyodor Dostoevsky. Идиот [The Idiot] (St. Petersburg: A. Suvorin, 1884), 62.

457

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

As yet the early-rising Sun

Has not attain’d his Noone.

Stay, stay,

Untill the hasting day

Has run

But to the Even-song;

And, having pray’d together, we

Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,

We have as short a Spring;

As quick a growth to meet Decay,

As you, or any thing.

We die,

As your hours doe, and drie

Away, Like to the Summers raine;

Or as the pearles of Mornings dew

Ne’r to be found againe.

114

In the face of such awful and meaningless ephemerality, in a world

where beauty is born seemingly for the purpose of decaying and dying

and disappearing forever, how can anyone take seriously the idea that

the carpe diem motif needs to be subjected to an “interrogative reading

[that] parries with […] analytical violence the poem’s assertion of its

own innocence”? The carpe diem poem is itself what interrogates the real

(not merely interpretive) violence of a world in which life exists only to

be snuffed out. The carpe diem motif in English poetry is a response to a

world which seemed to many to be falling apart:

[T]he instability of the political climate leading up to and during the

English Civil War created more incentives for seizing immediate and

temporary pleasures; the idea that the world was coming to its end had

a sufficiently wide reach […]. Many responded to this threat by devoting

themselves to repentance and prayer, but others translated this anxiety

into a kind of seductive energy, urging the pleasures of the day before

the day was no more.

115

114 ll. 1–19, Herrick, Vol. 2, 35, https://books.google.com/books?id=C21DAQAAMAAJ

&pg=PA35

115 Targoff, 176.

458 Love and its Critics

With death lurking seemingly around every corner, and with the

Christian promises of heaven seeming ever more remote to many,

116

who, like Hamlet, regarded death as the “undiscovered country from

whose bourn / No traveller returns”,

117

carpe diem made sense to many

contemporary readers in an urgent, visceral way that transcends

the cool detachments of our own frames of reference in reading and

criticism. The daffodils of Herrick’s poem are not merely a metaphor,

they are a frailly beautiful but relentless reminder of death. From the

speaker’s point of view, the demise of daffodils is senseless, too hasty,

and without any redemptive point or purpose, just like human death,

for which there is no remedy, and to which there is no point. Humanity,

in Shakespeare’s terms, is “noble in reason, […] infinite in faculty!” But

we are also merely a “quintessence of dust”.

118

Herrick captures this

tragic and perplexing quality by showing the aspiration and uselessness

of prayer to a god for whom the deaths of human beings and daffodils

appear to be matters of equally depraved indifference: “And, having

pray’d together, we / Will go with you along”.

From the daffodil to the man, death is the end of all lives and all

joys, and while the Neoplatonized and Christianized poetic tradition

of Dante and Petrarch assumed an afterlife in which greater joys (or

greater torments) would be had by all, the carpe diem tradition is rather

closer to the metaphysics on offer in King Lear, where “nothing”, and

“never” sum up the hopes for life and love after death. Thus, a poem

like “To Youth” offers what is, from this perspective, the best possible

advice. What point is there in sacrifice and prayer, when heaven seems

indifferent to all living things below? Far better to

Drink Wine, and live here blithefull, while ye may:

The morrowes life to late is, Live to-day.

119

116 This is the period in which the first stirrings of what we consider the modern form

of Atheism are developing. For further discussion, see Michael Bryson, The Atheist

Milton (London: Routledge, 2012).

117 Hamlet 3.1.81–82.

118 Ibid., 2.2.273, 278.

119 ll. 1–2, Herrick, Vol. 2, 209, https://books.google.com/books?id=C21DAQAAMAAJ

&pg=PA209

459

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

Herrick’s poetry often displays a disregard for social and literary

convention, exercising an imaginative freedom that allows him to

portray the “imaginary mistresses” of his poems in ways that flout the

expectations of his time and place:

The subversive quality of Herrick’s imaginary mistresses derives from

their existence in a space imaginatively removed from the conventional

restraints that limited women’s freedom […]. This device of creating

imaginary women who exist outside social reality enables Herrick [to] be

innovative, disruptive, even subversive in his depictions of gender roles.

120

This freedom is created by the carpe diem theme itself. In a world in

which “nothing” and “never” are our defining expectations of the

afterlife, what does it matter if people disobey the conventions set by

their societies and peers? Donne serves as an excellent example of the

consequences that can ensue from flouting the customs of one’s time and

place, but in terms of the eternal death waiting for all of us, how much

did it really matter that John Donne and Anne More married without

something so temporal as the permission of a father who would soon

be, and is now, dead forever? In Herrick’s hands, the carpe diem motif

begins to seem like the only rational response to a temporary existence

for men and women who would not live as slaves to geographically and

temporally fixed authority, and recognised that the “customs of [their]

island and tribe are [not] the laws of nature”.

121

Neither Herrick nor the

carpe diem tradition can be fully understood without recognizing this

subversive element:

Trying to understand Herrick’s poetry dealing with women without

recognizing this subversive, parodic element only leads one into a

pathless quagmire as far as interpretation goes. Herrick defies the limits

of standard interpretation […] using text and language, using poetic

liturgy, as a means by which accepted injustices might be mollified and

eventually perhaps even corrected.

122

Rather than regarding Herrick through a more jaundiced lens as “the

voyeuristic, effeminate pervert that many critics have suggested”,

123

120 David Landrum. “Robert Herrick and the Ambiguities of Gender”. Texas Studies in

Literature and Language, 49: 2 (2007), 195, https://doi.org/10.1353/tsl.2007.0012

121 Shaw, 119.

122 Landrum, 205–06.

123 Ibid., 187.

460 Love and its Critics

or as the old man who inflicts his “geriatric gaze” on the “bouncing

mistress” whom he expects to increase “the effort she must make to

rouse his manhood”

124

when he can no longer “stand to” so quickly as he

once did in his youth, seeing Herrick as both parodic and disrespectful

of convention helps us understand the urgency of what is perhaps his

second most famous poem, “Corinna’s going a Maying”.

In “Corinna” (whose titular mistress is a reference to the Corrina

of Ovid’s Amores), we have the entire carpe diem theme and all of its

implications put together in a powerful and beautiful whole. In

encouraging Corrina to “goe a Maying”, Herrick’s poem stands up for

the joys of the May Day festival, a celebration of spring, fertility, and life,

against the increasingly powerful efforts of Puritan authority figures to

shut it down. On a day such as this, the poem suggests it would be a sin

to refrain:

When all the Birds have Mattens seyd,

And sung their thankfull Hymnes: ‘tis sin,

Nay, profanation to keep in,

Whenas a thousand Virgins on this day,

Spring, sooner than the Lark, to fetch in May.

125

For the Puritans, however, the “sin” was in the keeping of the celebration

itself, given the dancing, sexual play, and occasional gender-bending

that would go on:

May Day was condemned by Puritan writers for the sexual license it

encouraged; the phallic symbolism of the maypole was noted by many.

[…] These processions contained a strong element of role reversal, for

in some the [chimney] sweeps dressed as females [,] but music and

collecting contributions from bystanders were common to all.

126

By Herrick’s day, the authorities had been trying, with limited success,

to shut down the May Day celebrations for decades. Elizabethan

124 Ceri Sullivan. “The carpe diem topos and the ‘geriatric gaze’ in early modern verse”.

Early Modern Literary Studies, 14: 3 (January 2009), 8.1–21 http://extra.shu.ac.uk/

emls/14–3/Sullcarp.html

125 Lines 10–14, Herrick, Vol. 1, 116, https://books.google.com/books?id=n14JAAAA

QAAJ&pg=PA116

126 Joan Lane. Apprenticeship in England, 1600–1914 (London: University College

London Press, 1996), 95.

461

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

constables gave orders on several occasions for the maypoles to be

pulled down, the festivals themselves to be prohibited, and any resisters

to be arrested:

In Shrewsbury in 1588, the maypole was banned and members of the

shearmen’s guild were jailed for opposing the order. At Banbury, Oxon,

a Puritan center whose M. P. was Anthony Cope, the high constable

ordered the parish constables to take down all maypoles and prohibit

festivities in May 1589.

127

By the 1630s, the political mood in England had grown dark and

contentious, with many of the Puritan faction condemning nearly

all entertainments as the works of the Devil. The year 1633 saw the

publication of William Prynne’s Histriomastix, a broadside against

everything the author thought sinful in an England rapidly moving

toward revolution and civil war. Prynne censures “prophane, and

poysonous” plays as “the common Idole, and prevailing evill of our

dissolute and degenerous Age”,

128

describing them as “the Workes,

and Pompes of the very Devill”

129

which deal with “nothing else but

the Adulteries, Fornications, Rapes, Love-passions, Meritricious,

Unchast, and Amorous practices of Lacivious Wicked men”,

130

and have

“the Divell himselfe for their author”.

131

Prynne condemns dancing as

“unavoydably sinfull and abominable”,

132

and further denounces all

“obscene, lacivious, lust-provoking Songs and Poems”,

133

“effeminate,

amorous, wanton Musicke”,

134

and “May-games, Revels, dancing, and

other unlawfull pastimes on the Lords day”.

135

In this environment, “Corinna’s going a Maying” is hardly a light,

conventional piece which can be dismissed as being about merely “the

deceptive capacity of language to contain experience”, or as a piece in

which “textuality replaces sexuality” but all too soon “disintegrates into

127 Richard L. Greaves. Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 426.

128 William Prynne. Histriomastix (London: Printed by E. A. and W. I. for Michael

Sparke, 1633), Sig. B1v, https://archive.org/stream/maspla00pryn#page/2

129 Ibid., Sig. G2r, https://archive.org/stream/maspla00pryn#page/43

130 Ibid., Sig. K3v, https://archive.org/stream/maspla00pryn#page/70

131 Ibid., Sig. S1v, https://archive.org/stream/maspla00pryn#page/130

132 Ibid., Sig. Ii1r, https://archive.org/stream/maspla00pryn#page/241

133 Ibid., Sig. Ll3r, https://archive.org/stream/maspla00pryn#page/261

134 Ibid., Sig. Nn4r, https://archive.org/stream/maspla00pryn#page/279

135 Ibid., Sig. Kkkkk4r, https://archive.org/stream/maspla00pryn#page/n922

462 Love and its Critics

a tangle of conflicting concepts, images, and tropes”. In the dark and

dangerous mood of an increasingly agitated and Puritan-influenced

England, “Corinna’s going a Maying” is a radical affirmation of the

simple, flesh-bound, sensual delights of being alive. Celebrating life

against death—especially in an environment in which life is denigrated

as sinful, while death is lauded as a final release from human

wickedness—is in itself a revolutionary act. Herrick’s point of view,

far from being the conventional tangle of predictable, if contradictory

tropes to which Gilead would reduce it, is far-reaching enough that

it anticipates the radical freedom asserted by the twentieth-century

existentialist Albert Camus, for whom the only sin was the sin against

life itself, committed by refusing to live now because of promises or

hopes of another life to come: “For if there is a sin against life, it is

perhaps not so much in despair, as in hoping to have another life, and

evading the implacable grandeur of this one”.

136

For Camus, just as for

Herrick, we are physical creatures whose loves, lives, and pleasures

are neither beastly nor angelic, but fundamentally human; and the only

truth worthy of the name lies in the acknowledgement of the ephemeral,

and therefore precious, quality of human life:

I realize that there is no superhuman happiness, no eternity outside of

the arc of time. These trivial and basic necessities, these relative truths

are the only things that move me. The others, the “ideals”, I don’t have

soul enough to understand them. Not that we should be like beasts, but

the happiness of angels is meaningless to me.

137

For Herrick, the life here and now is perhaps the only truly sacred thing,

and the only “sin” is found in refusing the joys of the sacredness of each

never-to-be-repeated moment:

Can such delights be in the street,

And open fields, and we not see’t?

136 Car s’il y a un péché contre la vie, ce n’est peut-être pas tant d’en désespérer que d’espérer une

autre vie, et se dérober à l’implacable grandeur de celle-ci.

Albert Camus. “L’été à Alger”. In his Noces suivi de L’été (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 49.

137 J’apprends qu’il n’est pas de bonheur surhumain, pas d’éternité hors de la courbe des journées.

Ces biens dérisoires et essentiels, ces vérités relatives sont les seules qui m’émeuvent. Les

autres, les “idéales”, je n’ai pas assez d’âme pour les comprendre. Non qu’il faille faire la bête,

mais je ne trouve pas de sens au bonheur des anges.

Ibid., 47–48.

463

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

Come, we’ll abroad; and let’s obey

The Proclamation made for May:

And sin no more, as we have done, by staying;

But my Corinna, come, let’s goe a Maying.

138

Should they delay, or miss their chance, they will be showing

themselves unworthy of the precious and rare gifts that this all too

brief existence “rounded with a sleep”,

139

offers to those reverent

enough to appreciate them:

Come, let us goe, while we are in our prime;

And take the harmlesse follie of the time.

We shall grow old apace, and die

Before we know our liberty.

Our life is short; and our dayes run

As fast away as do’s the Sunne:

And as a vapour, or a drop of raine

Once lost, can ne’r be found againe:

So when or you or I are made

A fable, song, or fleeting shade;

All love, all liking, all delight

Lies drown’d with us in endlesse night.

Then while time serves, and we are but decaying;

Come, my Corinna, come, let’s goe a Maying.

140

The passion for life, for love, for the sheer joy of sensation and experience

overflows from this poem like a floodtide overwhelming the shore. Or

so it does, at least, from the point of view of a Peshat style of reading,

based on the “plain sense” hermeneutic of Rashi. However, from the

point of view of Rabbi Akiba, or the early Church father Origen, or the

theological readers devoted to the allegorical reading of texts, or the

countless academic critics who practise a hermeneutics of suspicion,

the poem is a blank canvas, to be written over in ways that suit the

ideological demands of the particular and present moment. Such was

138 Lines 37–42, Herrick, Vol. 1, 118, https://books.google.com/books?id=n14JAAAA

QAAJ&pg=PA118

139 The Tempest 4.1.158.

140 Lines 57–70, Herrick, Vol. 1, 119, https://books.google.com/books?id=n14JAAAAQ

AAJ&pg=PA119

464 Love and its Critics

the interpretive method approved by William Prynne, a man for whom

no expressions of moral condemnation could go too far:

[T]he obscenity, ribaldry, amorousnesse, heathenishnesse, and

prophanesse of most Play-bookes, Arcadiaes, and fained Histories that

are now so much in admiration, is such, that it is not lawfull for any

(especially for Children, Youthes, or those of the female sex, who take

most pleasure in them) so much as once to read them, for feare they

should inflame their lusts, and draw them on to actuall lewdnesse,

and prophanesse. Hence Origen, Hierom and others informe us that in

ancient times Children and Youthes among the Jews were not permitted

to read the Booke of Canticles [the Song of Songs] before they came to the

age of 30 years, for feare they should draw those spirituall love passages

to a carnall sence, and make them instruments to inflame their lusts.

141

If the old saying is true that you can know someone by the company he

or she keeps, then what are we to make of literary critics (and schools of

criticism) whose working methods and assumptions are so compatible

with those of William Prynne, a man who would shut down theaters,

eliminate dancing, and deny even the reading of poetry to anyone who

is not a male of thirty or older? William Kerrigan once observed that

such ideologically-driven criticism had “disdain for the personal sphere

of existence”, and told an interesting story of a conversation between

academics to illustrate his point:

In the days when New Historicism was first in the air a prominent scholar

explained to me over a beer that Herrick’s lyrics on silks and petticoats

were really about the vestment controversies. I must have chuckled.

“What do you think they’re about?” the scholar demanded. I shrugged.

“Women’s clothes?” Her icy expression let me know in no uncertain

terms that great lyrics could not be attached to such unworthy objects.

142

The “icy expression” of the humorless critic is the telling detail. We

need, as Kerrigan notes, to find a way of writing about poems that

“allows them to be what they seem to be”,

143

because too many critics

no longer read poetry so much as pillage it, occupy it, and force it to

submit. When we end up looking and sounding like William Prynne,

141 Prynne, Sig. Aaaaaa2r-Aaaaaa2v, https://archive.org/stream/maspla00pryn#page/912

142 William Kerrigan. “Kiss Fancies in Robert Herrick”. George Herbert Journal, 14: 1–2

(Fall 1990), 157, https://doi.org/10.1353/ghj.1990.0014

143 Ibid.

465

9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

a humorless Puritan fanatic and ideologue, perhaps it really is time to

pull back from gazing into the abyss.

Carpe diem poetry poses a simple choice. Will you live now, as

you would if there were no laws—either human or divine, secular or

theological—against the joys of life, the joys of love, the joys of living

uninhibitedly in the fullest and most human and embodied sense? Or

will you obey, do as you are told, refrain from the physical and passionate

side of a life that you have been taught is sinful and shameful, spending

your only years on Earth apologizing for being alive, apologizing for

wanting the things you want but are convinced that you should not

want? Will you take off the mind forg’d manacles? Or will you wear

them, for the rest of your life, as you patiently and obediently wait for

death?

Choose.

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and

the Critics who Obey

To choose is not so easy as it sounds. “All choice is frightening, when

one thinks about it: a terrifying liberty, unguided by a greater duty”.

Choices open some doors, while closing others. New lives, new

possibilities, often come at the expense of other lives now foreclosed or

lost. The wages of choice are death, as every life leads, eventually, to that

ending that may be the only true universal of the human experience—

not the understanding or the experience of the end, but the physical

cessation itself, the transition from animate to inert, from you to it.

Authority figures—the imperious gods and kings, the angry Egeuses

and Capulets of the world—insist that choice must be circumscribed,

that only certain choices are allowable or legitimate, even when, as

in the case of the Father in Paradise Lost, they insist that choice itself

must remain free:

Not free, what proof could they have giv’n sincere

Of true allegiance, constant Faith, or Love,

Where only what they needs must do appear’d,

Not what they would? What praise could they receive?

What pleasure I, from such obedience paid,

When Will and Reason (Reason also is choice)

Useless and vain, of freedom both despoil’d,

1 “Tout choix est effrayant, quand on y songe: effrayante une liberté que ne guide

plus un devoir” (André Gide. Les Nourritures terrestres [Paris: Gallimard, 1921], 14).

468 Love and its Critics

Made passive both, had serv’d necessity,

Not mee.

From this perspective, however, the key function of choice is to elicit

praise—praise for one’s obedience, delivered by the authority figure

who takes pleasure in being obeyed. Choice in the ruled, which includes

by design the possibility of choosing not to obey, enhances the pleasures

of power for the ruler. Subjects without choice, without free will, or with

wills so broken as to be no longer functional, offer this kind of sublimely

sadistic ruler no satisfaction: what pleasure I, from such obedience paid? The

pleasure is precisely in the sensation of an active and functioning will

submitting to your own. In the case of those who choose incorrectly,

those who disobey, the necessary and enjoyable response for the ruler is

to inflict punishment, up to and including death:

He, with his whole posterity must die,

Die hee or justice must;

At first glance, Paradise Lost might seem an odd choice with which to

illustrate the primacy of human love and choice, over the imperious

demands of authority that even the most arbitrary of dictates be

unquestioningly obeyed. After all, does not Milton’s epic poem relate

the “tragic” consequences of disobedience to God, representing

Adam’s choice to eat the forbidden fruit along with Eve as foolish, and

uxorious—the result of an excessive and misguided love for Eve over

God? Such is the impression given by much of the criticism of Milton’s

poem, which the English historian Christopher Hill describes as a self-

confirming enterprise “whose vast output appears to be concerned less

with what Milton wrote […] than with the views of Professor Blank on

the views of Professor Schrank on the views of Professor Rank on what

Milton may or may not have written”.

William Empson compares such

criticism to the kinds of groupthink that insist “a man ought to concur

with any herd in which he happens to find himself”.

2 John Milton. Paradise Lost 3.103–11.

3 Ibid., 3.209–10.

4 Christopher Hill. Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), 3.

5 William Empson. Milton’s God (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1961), 231.

469

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey

In this case, the “herd” has spent decades of scholarly and interpretive

energy convincing itself that Adam’s choice in Paradise Lost, Book 9, is

the “fallen” choice of a disobedient sinner and an effeminate fool. As so

often in the criticism we have encountered, the voice of authority can

be heard loudly and clearly as it pronounces for obedience and against

love. Milton criticism, which Will Stockton calls “a hell of ideological

conservatives”

is a near perfect example: with a few important

exceptions, the “Milton industry”

has lined up on the side of God,

obedience, and submission where the question of Adam’s choice is

concerned, many even suggesting that Adam should have been written

differently, so as to make the choice the critic confidently declares the

only possible “correct” decision.

As Milton writes the scene, Adam is suddenly confronted with an Eve

who has disobeyed the primary injunction given to the first human pair,

not to eat of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

His reaction, at first, is to silently bemoan her decision to disobey God:

Speechless he stood and pale, till thus at length

First to himself he inward silence broke.

O fairest of Creation, last and best

Of all God’s Works, Creature in whom excell’d

Whatever can to sight or thought be form’d,

6 Will Stockton. “An Introduction Justifying Queer Ways”. Early Modern Culture: An

Electronic Seminar. Issue 10. Queer Milton, ed. by Will Stockton and David L. Orvis,

http://emc.eserver.org/1-10/stockton.html

7 Hill, 3.

8 Peter Herman notes that the trend of critics rewriting Milton goes all the way back to

the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Cambridge professor and classical scholar

Richard Bentley. “Bentley decided that Milton could not possibly have meant

what got published as Paradise Lost, and so he offered (in the notes) suggestions

for what Milton really meant to write” (Destabilizing Milton: “Paradise Lost” and the

Poetics of Incertitude [New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005], 12). Herman further

remarks that though “a distance of 300 years separates […] Bentley from twentieth-

and early-twenty-first-century Milton criticism, the fundamental assumptions

governing the reading of Paradise Lost have remained largely the same” (14). For

Empson, Bentley’s now-infamous 1732 edition of Paradise Lost “makes one feel that

Bentley is trying to write his own poetry” (Some Versions of Pastoral [London: Chatto

& Windus, 1935], 150). And as Gilbert Highet notes, “This was not the last time that

an arrogant professor was to spoil great poetry in the belief that, while the poet had

been blind, he himself could see perfectly” (The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman

Influences on Western Literature [New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1949], 285).

470 Love and its Critics

Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet!

How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost,

Defac’t, deflow’r’d, and now to Death devote?

Rather how hast thou yielded to transgress

The strict forbiddance, how to violate

The sacred Fruit forbidd’n!

It should be noted that Adam thinks this inwardly, relating none of this to

Eve herself. Until this point, he is with the critics whose orthodox frames

of reference lead them to perceive disobedience as the great original sin

that led, once upon a time, to the mixed human condition of joy and

pain, life and loss, hope and despair that is the definition of “fallen”.

William Blake, The Temptation and Fall of Eve.

Illustration to Milton’s Paradise Lost (1808).

Adam’s love and admiration for Eve come through clearly in these lines,

even as he decries her decision: she is the “fairest of Creation”, the “last

and best / Of all God’s works”, even though she is—so far as Adam

can tell—“lost” and now “to Death devote”. He believes this latter, of

course, because as he twice relates, the poem’s God has told him that the

penalty for eating the forbidden fruit is death. He speaks of this early

9 Paradise Lost 9.894–904.

10 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Blake_-_The_Temptation_and_

Fall_of_Eve_(Illustration_to_Milton’s_”Paradise_Lost”)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

471

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey

on with Eve: “God hath pronounc’t it death to taste that Tree”,

and then

later with the angel Raphael, where he tells the story of what God told him:

[…] of the Tree whose operation brings

Knowledge of good and ill, which I have set

The Pledge of thy Obedience and thy Faith,

Amid the Garden by the Tree of Life,

Remember what I warn thee, shun to taste,

And shun the bitter consequence: for know,

The day thou eat’st thereof, my sole command

Transgrest, inevitably thou shalt dye.

Adam, in this crisis moment, has nothing more than these words to fall

back on, and is thus certain that Eve will die. And as A. J. A. Waldock

notes, “it seems hardly fair to blame [Adam] for taking God at his word”.

As Adam stands before Eve, still processing the gravity of her choice,

and the consequences that have been threatened for doing precisely

what Eve has now done, he decides, in the space of perhaps only the

shortest of awkward pauses, to face with her whatever will ensue, up to

and including death:

[…] some cursed fraud

Of Enemy hath beguil’d thee, yet unknown,

And mee with thee hath ruin’d, for with thee

Certain my resolution is to Die;

How can I live without thee, how forgo

Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly join’d,

To live again in these wild Woods forlorn?

Should God create another Eve, and I

Another Rib afford, yet loss of thee

Would never from my heart; no no, I feel

The Link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,

Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State

Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.

11 Paradise Lost 4.427.

12 Ibid., 8.323–30.

13 A. J. A Waldock. Paradise Lost and its Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1947), 56.

14 Paradise Lost 9.904–16.

472 Love and its Critics

Adam thinks all this in silence before he speaks to Eve. And though

the narrative voice of the poem insists that Adam is “fondly overcome

with Female charm”,

this is the same narrative voice that throughout

the poem demands that readers deny the evidence of what they have

just read, or spin the words in favor of heaven (and thus obedience).

This narrative voice is so eager to redirect readers (rather like some

modern critics) that it sometimes simply gets its facts wrong in its rush

to impose the desired spin. For example, at the beginning of Book 4, the

archangel Uriel is able to see through Satan’s disguise because of the

latter’s cloudy and tempestuous emotions: Satan’s “borrow’d visage”

was “marr’d” by “pale, ire, envy, and despair”. The narrative voice

then insists that readers understand that “heav’nly minds from such

distempers foul / Are ever clear”,

but this turns out to be not quite true:

“ire” lurks in a variety of “heav’nly minds” throughout the poem. The

“ire” of the Son is referred to by Raphael at 6.843. The “just avenging

ire” of God is celebrated by the angels at 7.184. Michael speaks of how

“willingly God doth remit his Ire” at 9.885. The “ire” of the Father is also

spoken of repeatedly by Satan and his followers, and this, perhaps, is

one time when they just might be trusted after all.

Against the insistence of the narrator, John Peter notes that there

is an ambiguity in “fondly” that can be read positively: “Adam falls

‘fondly’—foolishly, lovingly. And we fall with him, sharing his generous

improvidence, trusting his love”.

Waldock concurs, arguing that “[if]

Adam’s words are permitted to have the meanings that words usually

have in English, these lines mean love”.

But C. S. Lewis begs to differ.

For the great orthodox critic, whose stated ambition about Paradise Lost is

to “prevent the reader from ever raising certain questions”,

love is not

the correct term. In Lewis’ description, “Adam fell by uxoriousness”,

and failed the test of absolute value:

If conjugal love were the highest value in Adam’s world, then of course

his resolve would have been the correct one. But if there are things that

15 Ibid., 9.999.

16 Ibid., 4.115–19.

17 John Peter. A Critique of Paradise Lost (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 133.

18 Waldock, 46.

19 C. S. Lewis. A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), 69.

20 Ibid., 122.

473

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey

have an even higher claim on a man, if the universe is imagined to be

such that, when the pinch comes, a man ought to reject wife and mother

and his own life also, then the case is altered, and then Adam can do no

good to Eve (as, in fact, he does no good) by becoming her accomplice.

What is interesting and ironic about Lewis’ stance is how high a bar he sets

for Adam. In dismissing Adam’s love for Eve as “uxoriousness”, Lewis is

working the same mines in which Stephen Greenblatt will later dig when

he characterizes Othello as being too much in love with his wife:

Omnis amator feruentior est adulter, goes the Stoic epigram, and Saint

Jerome does not hesitate to draw the inevitable inference: “An adulterer

is he who is too ardent a lover of his wife”. Jerome quotes Seneca: “All

love of another’s wife is shameful; so too, too much love of your own.

A wise man ought to love his wife with judgment, not affection. Let

him control his impulses and not be borne headlong into copulation.

Nothing is fouler than to love a wife like an adulteress… Let them show

themselves to their wives not as lovers, but as husbands”.

Jerome’s Latin

becomes a commonplace of anti-erotic Christian

polemic in the early modern era. This reflects a long-term attempt by

the Church, which gained momentum among the Gregorian reformers

of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, “to outlaw sexual pleasure for

all Christians”, insisting that sexual pleasure was sinful, and that

even pleasureless sexual encounters in a marriage were enough to

“permanently taint both soul and body”.

It reappears, in slightly altered

form, in the fifteenth-century Flemish monk Dionysius the Carthusian:

“Therefore, a wise dictum is, that every too-fervent lover is an adulterer,

such that, all things being equal, his [love of his wife] is no marriage,

but like an adulterous passion in its continual approaches, and the same

is the case if the wife is a too-fervent lover of her husband”.

Calvin

21 Ibid., 123.

22 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 247–48.

23 Adulter est inquit in sua uxore amator ardentior. In aliena quippe uxore ois amor turpis est,

in sua nimius. Sapies uir iudicio debet amare coiugem, no affectu. Reget impetus uoluptatis,

nec praeceps feretur in coitu, nihil est foedius q uxore amare quasi adulteram… nec amatores

uxoribus se exhibeat, sed maritos.

Jerome. Contra Jovinianum (Vienna: Joannes Singrenius, 1516), 43, https://books.

google.com/books?id=SUZRAAAAcAAJ&dq=Contra Jovinianum&pg=PA43

24 Reddy, 3–4.

25 “Vnde a sapientib dictum est, q, omnis amator feruentior est adulter, videlicet

cpnomaritali, sedadulterinoaffectucōiugēsuāaccedit,& idēestsiconiunxsit

474 Love and its Critics

expresses the same idea in the sixteenth century: “a marriage contracted

in the Lord, should not overflow into extremes of wantonness. Ambrose

gravely, but not unworthily noted his opinion, that when a man has no

modesty or dignity in conjugal relations, he is an adulterer with his wife”.

One might wonder at the continual repetition of this idea by clerics

whose sexuality is ostensibly sublimated into “spiritual” pursuits, and

wonder again at the attractiveness of this idea for presumably “secular”

academic critics, but that would be a book in itself. In the present case,

this seems an unfair standard to apply to Adam’s love for Eve, especially

since in his conversations with Raphael, his mentions of passion are few,

while his mentions of his admiration for Eve’s wisdom and intelligence

are many, indicating a relative standard of values that hardly qualifies

as uxorious. What relation Lewis’ own attraction to what he calls “the

sensuality of cruelty” (expressed in the form of whipping)

plays in

his enthusiasm for condemning Adam’s relatively milder passions is

unclear, though perhaps Adorno’s observation is illuminating: “[t]he

individual who has been forced to give up basic pleasures and to live

under a system of rigid restraints, […] is likely not only to seek an object

upon which he can ‘take it out’ but also to be particularly annoyed at the

idea that another person is ‘getting away with something’”.

Empson disagrees with Lewis’ entire line of thought, arguing, as

John Leonard notes, that “Adam makes the right moral choice when he

chooses to die for love”.

John Peter agrees, claiming that “the highest

viri sui amatrix feruetior” (Dionysius the Carthusian. Epistolarum ac Euangeliorum

[Cologne: Petrus Quentell, 1537], fol. LVII, https://books.google.com/books?id=CqP

4kICSulwC&dq=Epistolarum ac Euangeliorum&pg=PT114).

26 “coniugium in Domino contractum, non in extremam quanque lasciuiam exundare.

Ambrosius graui quidem, sed non indigna sententia notauit, quum vxoris

adulterum vocauit qui in coniugali nullam verecundiae vel honestatis curam habet”

(Jean Calvin. Institutio Christianae Religionis [Geneva: Oliua Roberti Stephani, 1559],

2.8.44, 139, https://books.google.com/books?id=6ysy-UX89f4C&pg=PA139).

27 Alister McGrath. C. S. Lewis A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet (Carol Stream,

IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2013), 61–62.

28 Adorno, Theodore. “Studies in the Authoritarian Personality”. In T. W.

Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The

Authoritarian Personality, Vol. I of Studies in Prejudice, ed. by Max Horkheimer

and Samuel H. Flowerman (Social Studies Series: Publication No. III) (New

York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 199, https://www.scribd.com/doc/35738019/

Adorno-Theodor-W-Studies-in-the-Authoritarian-Personality).

29 John Leonard. Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667–1970, Vol.

2. Interpretive Issues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 633.

475

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey

degree of human love as we know it, is now the focus of attention, and

Adam and Eve’s speeches emphasize its power. […] Adam’s devotion

to his wife can fairly be called magnificent, and we should be less than

human if we did not admire and honor him for it”.

And yet, many critics

not only do not “admire and honor him for it”, they actively condemn

Adam for the choice he makes (the choice his poetic creator, following

scripture and existing literary tradition, has him make). As Leonard has

demonstrated, the attitude among modern critics has often been one of

condemnation of Adam’s action along with speculation about what he

should have done, which implicitly is a criticism of Milton for writing

the scene as he did. For these critics, “[t]he question inevitably arises:

‘What else could Adam have done?’ Lewis is the first critic to raise

this question, but he declines to engage with it”.

In Lewis’ treatment,

the matter is uncertain, but he takes Adam to task for what Waldock

describes as “taking God at his word”:

For all Adam knew, God might have had other cards in His hand; but

Adam never raised the question, and now nobody will ever know. […]

Perhaps God would have killed Eve and left Adam “in those wilde

Woods forlorn” […]. But then again, perhaps not. You can find out only

by trying it. The only thing Adam knows is that he must hold the fort,

and he does not hold it.

Later critics like Irene Samuel, Dennis Burden, and Stanley Fish will, as

Leonard observes, “speculate about missed opportunities and possible

remedies”.

Samuel argues that Adam should “have risked himself to

redeem Eve”,

going on to argue that he should have maintained “faith

that the benevolence he had always known would remain benevolent”,

a pious observation that Empson wryly counters with his own remark

that Paradise Lost’s “God is […] peculiarly unfitted to inspire trust”.

Burden asserts that Adam should have divorced Eve, an astounding

rewriting of a poem in which such a concept does not even exist: “the

30 Peter, 132.

31 Leonard, 617.

32 Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, 123.

33 Leonard, 624.

34 Irene Samuel. “The Dialogue in Heaven: A Reconsideration of Paradise Lost, III.

1–417”. PMLA, 72: 4 (Sep., 1957), 611.

35 Ibid.

36 Empson, Milton’s God, 189.

476 Love and its Critics

important thing is that Adam has a remedy and Milton of all people

must know it,

and “[w]hat he should do is leave her. He would have

good grounds for divorce”.

Yes, by all means, divorce her and leave her to

die. A better summation of the “less than human” responses of all too

many critics to this scene is quite nearly impossible to find.

At this point, it is necessary to ask on what basis critics ground

their contentions about what Adam should have done, rather than

what he does. For example, consider Samuel’s insistence—as Leonard

describes it—that “Adam could have (and should have) saved Eve by

dying in her place”.

What indication do readers have that God would

have accepted such an arrangement, and what is more, kept his word

about it? His rhetoric is absolute—“Die hee or Justice must”

—and the

Son even has difficulty in corralling God into an agreement to show

mankind “Mercy”

in exchange for his own torture and execution. This

does not sound like the kind of character likely to show anything like

understanding or lenience for Eve, despite the arguments of what must

finally be called the Obedience Chorus in Milton studies. Rather than a

ruler that would offer mercy, Paradise Lost’s God seems rather more like

Angelo from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, a character who would

accept Adam’s sacrifice, then kill Eve anyway.

But not to be outdone in his enthusiasm for obedience, Stanley Fish takes

the argument for what Adam should have done even further than Samuel

or Burden. Fish “takes it as axiomatic that a freely chosen Fall cannot be

understood”,

and then spends hundreds of pages explaining it:

If the Fall is explained or “understood” it is no longer free, but the result

of some analysable “process” which attracts to itself a part of the guilt.

Thus freedom of will is denied, the obloquy of the action returns to God

37 This is a reference to Milton’s own writings (Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, among

other works) in an England where Burden’s “remedy” was all but impossible for

most people to obtain.

38 Dennis Burden. The Logical Epic: A Study of the Argument of “Paradise Lost’

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 169–170; also quoted in

Leonard, 643.

39 Leonard, 637.

40 Paradise Lost 3.210.

41 Ibid., 3.134.

42 Leonard, 637.

477

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey

(who set the process in motion), and again reason—the reader’s reason—

has given law to God.

According to Fish, we can’t have readers giving law to God, even

though that “God” is merely a literary character.

For Fish, Adam’s

choice of Eve is selfish—he makes her, in fact, a victim: “for by choosing

her he implicates her in his idolatry, absorbing her into a love that is

self-love”.

Here, once again, is the what-seems-to-be-X-is-actually-Y

move, as Fish claims that Adam’s romantic outburst is really love of self.

Asking “What, then, ought Adam to have done?” Fish acknowledges

that anything other than what Paradise Lost actually gives us “would

seem forced and ‘unnatural’ in comparison to what he does do”.

Not

to be daunted by a little thing like that, however, Fish goes on to develop

further Samuel’s suggestion that Adam should have interceded with

God on Eve’s behalf:

He might have said to Eve, “what you say is persuasive (impregn’d with

reason to my seeming), but I would rather not make such a momentous

decision without further reflection’. Or, as Lewis suggested, he might

have ‘chastised Eve and then interceded with God on her behalf. [Or as

Irene Samuel suggests,] he ‘might, like the Son, have risked himself to

redeem Eve”.

Fish’s first suggestion demonstrates the wide gap that too often exists

between poet and critic. There is no music in Fish’s would-be emendation,

and one almost gets the sense that Fish is ridiculing his own suggestion

by the time the word “impregn’d” lumbers along. His second and third

suggestions follow other critics with whom Fish shares a desire to

rewrite the scene, and thus the suggestions are simply pointless, unless

the object is to raise the critic above the poetry and to tell readers more

about the critic’s desires, commitments, and complexes than about the

ideas and structures of the poem.

More recent criticism has continued along the lines of Lewis, Samuel,

Burden, and Fish. As Leonard points out, “The question of what Adam

43 Stanley Fish. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost”. 2nd ed. (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, 256–57.

44 As John Peter rather dryly notes: “this is a character in a poem” (9).

45 Fish, Surprised by Sin, 263.

46 Ibid., 269.

47 Ibid., 269–70.

478 Love and its Critics

should have done is still an issue in Milton criticism”,

which, if

anything, indicates the tenuous connection much literary criticism has

to reality. Waldock’s observation that Lewis “declines to acknowledge

the facts of the poem”,

could be applied much more broadly now than

in 1947. Dennis Danielson pursues the question in this way:

Given Eve’s fall, does Adam face a dilemma: either to disobey God or

else to break the bond of human love, whose goodness we perceive as

fundamental? And if Adam has no choice but to reject the sinner with the

sin, or else to accept the sin with the sinner, then will most of us applaud

Adam’s choosing the latter?

Danielson answers his own questions by saying that Adam “could

have [offered] to take the punishment of fallen humanity on himself, to

fulfill exactly “The law of God”, as Michael puts it in Book 12”.

And

here, at last, we have a key to understanding the mentality of those

who would rewrite Milton’s scene: obedience and “love” go hand-in-

hand in a way that for Danielson is illustrated by “the analogy between

Adam-and-Eve and Christ-and-the-church”, which according to a

Christianizing critic like Danielson “breaks down precisely at the point

where Adam chooses to sin with Eve rather than sinlessly face death for

her”.

Danielson manages to turn a scene of intense human emotion,

of love and Adam’s all-too-human realization of how utterly bereft he

would be in a world without Eve, into a scene advertising the obedient

virtues of human sacrifice, dying in supplication rather than defiance.

Danielson claims, with all seriousness, that Adam’s love for Eve should

be given its highest form of expression through the same mechanism by

which human beings in the pre-scientific ages of our species have tried

to propitiate the implacable gods for millennia.

As Ludwig Feuerbach, the great nineteenth-century critic of Christianity,

puts it, human sacrifice is at the heart of the religious worldview:

Bloody human sacrifices are, in fact, the most rawly sensual expressions

of the mysteries of religion. Where bloody human sacrifices are offered

48 Leonard, 624.

49 Waldock, 30.

50 Dennis Danielson. “Through the Telescope of Typology: What Adam Should Have

Done”. Milton Quarterly, 23: 3 (1989), 121.

51 Ibid., 124.

52 Ibid.

479

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey

to God, they are offered as the highest form of life for the highest good.

That’s why one sacrifices life to God, in exceptional circumstances. It is

believed therefore to give him the greatest honor.

In Feuerbach’s analysis, “only human blood makes God merciful, and

stills his wrath”.

Such a god, as Empson argues, is not worthy of worship:

Men always try to imitate their gods, so that to worship a wicked one

is sure to make them behave badly. But no god before had ever known

before how to be so eerily and profoundly wicked. […] The Christian

God, the Father, the God of Tertullian, Augustine and Aquinas, is the

wickedest thing yet invented by the black heart of man.

Nor is a literary representation of such a God—the Father of Paradise

Lost—worthy of the sacrifice of one of the poem’s human characters,

or the strangely submissive admiration of literary critics. In Empson’s

closing phrase, “If you praise it as the neo-Christians do, what you are

getting from it is evil”.

More recent critics have persisted in arguing that the poem should

be other than it is, and that Adam should choose differently than he

does. Gerald Richman argues that Adam should have remonstrated

with Eve in the way that Abdiel does with Satan in Book 5 of Paradise

Lost. Richman claims that “if Eve had repented and Adam had refused

to join her in sin, Eve would have found pardon”.

Gordon Teskey

argues that “Adam should trust God to find a better solution than his

own. He forgot to trust, and might have remembered to if he had taken

more time”,

as if Milton’s Adam is standing there with Eve muttering,

“wait, I’m forgetting something…Eve, can you give me a minute?…I’ve

53 Das blutiger Menschenopfer sind in der Tat nur roh-sinnliche Ausdrücke von dem Geheimnissen

der Religion. Wo blutige Menschenopfer Gott dargebracht werden, da gelten diese Opfer für

die höchsten, das sinnliche Leben für das höchste Gut. Deswegen opfert man das Leben Gott

auf, und zwar in außerordentlichen Fällen; man glaubt, damit ihm die größte Ehre zu erweisen.

Ludwig Feuerbach. Das Wesen des Christentums, ed. by Werner Schuffenhauer

(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006), 446.

54 “nur sein menschliches Blut macht Gott barmherzig, stillt seinen Zorn” (ibid., 101).

55 Empson, Milton’s God, 247, 251.

56 Ibid., 277.

57 Gerald Richman. “A Third Choice: Adam, Eve, and Abdiel”. Early Modern Literary

Studies, 9: 2 (September 2003), 6.1–5, https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/09-2/richthir.html

58 Gordon Teskey. The Poetry of John Milton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

2015), 462. The Milton Society of America recently gave Teskey its highest award for

the book containing this argument.

480 Love and its Critics

got it! I should trust God!” The continuing insistence that the literary

character called God in Paradise Lost is in what Richard of Gloucester

might call the “[for]giving vein”

is astounding, and while Teskey

claims that he finds himself “a little bored by […] discussions of the

frigidity, or the wickedness, or the goodness of Milton’s God”,

here

he lays his cards on the table: Adam should have remembered to trust

what Teskey (following along with Lewis, Samuel, Burden, Fish, and

Danielson) simply assumes is a good and merciful “God”.

And so the

Hippias of Thasos-styled rewriting of the poem in the image of its more

pious critics

goes on and on (Teskey even refers back to C. S. Lewis as

he delivers his judgment).

David Quint argues a more humane case, writing that Adam’s is

“an act that combines marital love, human solidarity, and Adam’s fear

of repeating his earlier loneliness before Eve’s creation”,

thus taking

at least a brief break from the decades-long trend of moralizing over,

and rewriting, Milton’s scene. Quint emphasizes that it is “the force

of his love [that] causes Adam to stay by [Eve’s] side”, and describes

the narrative voice that accuses Adam of being “fondly overcome”

as “censorious”.

But despite Quint’s more sympathetic reading, the

Obedience Chorus has not left the stage, and perhaps never will; for

as long as there are those among us who are more comfortable when

subordinate to another—or who benefit from such subordination —

there will be those who argue for necessary and natural subordination.

Such ideas go back as far as Aristotle, thus it is no surprise to see Stanley

59 Richard III, 4.2.114.

60 Teskey, xiii.

61 Teskey seems to try having it both ways, however. Not long after arguing that

Adam “forgot to trust”, he goes on to claim that “Adam’s decision to remain with

Eve is moving, and surely right”. He then maintains that “[t]he place of criticism

is not to take sides at such moments” (464), a high-minded and disingenuous

statement coming from someone who just took sides two pages earlier by arguing

(very much in the tradition of Lewis, Samuels, Fish, and Danielson) that Adam

should have chosen otherwise than he did. That’s exactly what “tak[ing] sides at

such moments” looks like.

62 The (probably misnamed) critic described by Aristotle (Poetics, 1461a, 22–23) as

tryingtosaveZeus’honestybysuggestingthat“δίδομεν”shouldbechangedto

“διδόμεν”inthespeechinwhichZeussendsadreamtoAgammenoninBook2

of the Illiad.

63 David Quint. Inside Paradise Lost: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2014), 153.

64 Ibid., 178.

481

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey

Fish, as recently as in 2001’s How Milton Works, arguing that obedience

is Milton’s single overarching idea:

In Milton’s world, however, there are no moral ambiguities, because

there are no equally compelling values. There is only one value—the

value of obedience—and not only is it a mistake to grant independence

to values other than the value of obedience, it is a temptation. Indeed,

it is the temptation—the temptation to seek a separate, self-sustaining

existence—that Milton obsessively explores.

A poet who sees the world as a simple matter of obedience and

disobedience has done something rather odd in writing an epic poem

in which he does nearly everything possible to convince readers that

such things are not so simple as moralists like Fish claim (Fish will say,

of course, that the idea that things are not simple is “a temptation”). A

poet for whom “there are no equally compelling values” (at least when

compared to the delights of obedience and submission) has done an

even odder thing by writing a long work in which compelling values are

put into nearly constant conflict and competition.

But those who see the poetry of Donne as “sick” will go on doing so,

just as those who see the poetry of a revolutionary as a nearly endless

hymn singing the praises and glories of obedience will go on doing so.

In fact, the entire trend of critics insisting that Milton’s Adam should

have chosen otherwise than he does, resembles nothing so much as

fundamentalist Christian thinking. Consider this passage on the same

subject from The Watchtower, the publication arm of the Jehovah’s

Witnesses:

Adam decided to accede to the wishes of his wife, who had already

chosen to eat from the forbidden tree. His desire to please her was greater

than his desire to obey his Creator. Surely, upon being presented with

the forbidden fruit, Adam should have paused to reflect on the effect that

disobedience would have on his relationship with God. Without a deep,

unbreakable love of God, Adam was vulnerable to pressure, including

that from his wife.

65 Stanley Fish. How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, 2001), 53.

66 “If Adam was Perfect, How Was It Possible for Him to Sin?” The Watchtower, 129: 19

(1 October 2008), 27, https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2008733

482 Love and its Critics

Given the difficulty of telling the difference between evangelists and

academics on this topic, it is tempting to conclude that there has

been little or no progress in the treatment of poetry over the last two

millennia. Critics who make an interpretive principle out of faith in an

authoritarian deity are not to be reasoned with, any more than they

aim to reason about the faith they seek to impose on poetry. As David

Hawkes argues, “the habits of thought developed by slavery are easily

formed and hard to break”.

That we seem to have forgotten, or deliberately elided, Milton’s

status as a revolutionary—not a stiff-collared Puritan or a humorless

William Prynne-style ideologue who never met a human joy he did

not condemn—is an ironic testament to the increasingly authoritarian

political character of our own time. It was not always so, as Hawkes

reminds us:

The Romantic poets worshipped him; Byron, Keats and Shelley were

restrained from making him a god only by his own stern injunctions against

idolotry. Wordsworth called for a Miltonic response to the industrial age

[…]. The founding fathers of America saw themselves as completing the

Miltonic reforms that had been thwarted in England. Karl Marx cited

him as the ultimate exemplar of unalienated human activity.

And yet somehow, today, Milton has been transformed into a prophet

of obedience, a preacher of original sin, and a poet whose work inspires

the crushing authoritarianism reflected in numerous critics’ assertions

that Adam should choose obedience over love. In Hawkes’s view, this

transformation began with “a critical campaign waged in the early

twentieth century by T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis”, who were “nostalgic

for the world [Milton] helped to destroy”.

Eliot, a poet and critic whose

“solution”, is “an extreme right-wing authoritarianism” in which “men

and women must sacrifice their petty ‘personalities’ and opinions to

an impersonal order”,

provides a template for the history of Milton

criticism in the twentieth century and until very recently in the twenty-

first. This history has been dominated (with notable exceptions like

67 David Hawkes. John Milton, A Hero of Our Time (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press,

2009), 10.

68 Hawkes, 12.

69 Ibid., 12, 13.

70 Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 34.

483

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey

Empson, Waldock, and a small number of other outliers) by a sustained

effort to put the revolutionary back into the box of conformity. Is it any

wonder that “Milton is now read mostly by reluctant undergraduates”,

and “retains a precarious position on university curriculums”, while “the

popular audience he enjoyed for centuries has largely evaporated”?

Such critics argue in a style Bob Altermeyer describes as High Right-

Wing Authoritarianism, which demonstrates a “tendency to disengage

critical thinking when considering religion”, and rewards “placing faith

over reason”.

Fish’s argument that “affirming God is not something

you do on the basis of evidence”, but is instead “something you do

against the evidence”,

is a perfect example. It is an argument for

the suspension of reason in favor of unreason. According to this line

of unreason, God—for whom there is no evidence that is not always

already trapped within a circular argument—must be taken as the

foundational principle of a world for which there is evidence. At best,

this is merely begging the question, taking the desired conclusion as

part of the evidence for the desired conclusion, a maneuver that would

not pass muster in an undergraduate essay, much less the magnum

opus of a half-century-long career of critical writing about literature and

culture. But at worst, it is classic authoritarian thinking, an insistence that

evidence does not matter because the truth has already been provided

by authority.

A style of thinking more different from Milton’s own is

inconceivable: “A man may be a heretick in the truth; and if he beleeve

things only because his Pastor sayes so, or the Assembly so determins,

without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very

truth he holds, becomes his heresie”.

Insisting that the man who stood

up for reason must be understood as advocating for unreason, and

that the revolutionary argues for submission at any price (even to God)

simply makes no sense.

71 Hawkes, 12.

72 Altermeyer, 104.

73 Fish, How Milton Works, 10.

74 Authoritarians do not spend a great deal of effort “examining evidence, thinking

critically, reaching independent conclusions […]. Instead, they have largely

accepted what they were told by the authorities in their lives” (Altermeyer 93).

75 John Milton. Areopagitica. London, 1644, Sig.D2v, 26, https://books.google.com/

books?id=tvhAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA26

484 Love and its Critics

But, as we have now seen again and again, the argument does not

need to make sense; it merely needs to be asserted with enough eloquent

force that the poetry can be bent to the critic’s will. Obedience is the

principle through which Fish and numerous other critics will work

to tame Milton’s poetry, taking the scene in which Adam chooses Eve

over God, and turning it into something that celebrates the virtues of

obedience through the absence of obedience in the scene. Such manifest illogic

dovetails nicely with Altermeyer’s findings that authoritarian thinkers

“contradict themselves more often than [others], and apparently do not

notice it”.

As an example, he relates an experience with his psychology

students at the University of Manitoba:

I asked students what they thought of Jesus’ admonition […], “Do

not judge, that you may not be judged. For with what judgment you

judge, you shall be judged” (Matthew 7:1). I also asked about Jesus’

resolution […]: “Let he who is without sin among you be the first to

cast a stone at her”. Twenty […] said we should take the teachings

literally. Twenty-seven [others] said we should judge and punish others,

but none of them explained how they reconciled this view with Jesus’

teachings. Apparently, they “believed” both (contradictory) things. But

the kicker came when I looked at various measures of authoritarian

aggression I had gathered from these students. No matter what they said

they believed, both these groups […] were quick with the stones on the

Attitudes towards Homosexuals Scale, [and] the Ethnocentrism Scale.

What Altermeyer’s anecdote illustrates is the attractiveness, for

authoritarian thinkers, of judgment and punishment of perceived

offenders, a tendency that “extends beyond religion and has deeper

roots, namely, authoritarian submission”.

The deeply authoritarian

strain in Milton criticism comes nowhere more sharply into focus than

in the long-sustained argument that Adam should have submitted,

and chosen Authority (God) over Love (Eve). Why has the rhetorical

window of Milton criticism shifted so far, and for so long, to the right,

into authoritarian reverence for submission and power? Why has the

work of a regicide and revolutionary been so thoroughly co-opted by

a reactionary insistence that Milton is not “a man who embraces the

Hierarchical principle with reluctance, but rather [is] a man enchanted

76 Altermeyer, 99.

77 Ibid., 96.

78 Ibid., 104.

485

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey

by it”?

The lovers of authority, it seems, see that love in others wherever

and whenever possible.

It is by such principles, and in such hands, that poems about love

between human beings become poems of love for God. It is by such

principles, and in such hands that Romeo and Juliet comes to be described

as part of a system of hegemony and oppression. And it is by such

principles, and in such hands, that an epic poem defining disobedience

as its hero’s most noteworthy trait

comes to be twisted into an ornate

tract that genuflects to the glories of obedience. But as Oscar Wilde

remarks, it is “[d]isobedience” that “in the eyes of anyone who has read

history, is man’s original virtue”. Not only that, but “[i]t is through

disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and

through rebellion”.

And so it is with Milton’s Adam. The attentive

reader of the poem who has not yet been overmuch addled by criticism

is by no means surprised by Adam’s choice. In writing this scene,

Milton is more Ovid than Virgil, despite the critics for whom obedience,

sovereignty, and the glory of a heavenly Augustus are the prime virtues

of life and poetry. In fact, the poem has prepared the reader for this

choice, not just by following the bare outlines of the story as presented

in Genesis 3, but through the characterization of Adam and his

tempestuous emotions—feelings he seeks advice about from precisely

the wrong person, but also the only available person: the angel Raphael.

In Book 8, Adam tries to explain to the alien creature (who hasn’t

the slightest clue what it is like to be human) what and how he feels

about Eve, and admits that he does not always know how to handle

those feelings, while at the same time telling the angel that the lessons

God has taught him do not always seem to match the facts of his

experience. With Eve:

[…] passion first I felt,

Commotion strange, in all enjoyments else

Superior and unmov’d, here only weak

Against the charm of Beauty’s powerful glance.

79 Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, 78.

80 See Bryson, The Atheist Milton, 75–76.

81 Oscar Wilde. The Soul of Man under Socialism (Portland: Thomas B. Mosher, 1905),

11.

82 Paradise Lost 8.530–33.

486 Love and its Critics

This sensation of weakness—which any human being who has lived

through adolescence will recognize as among the signs of passionate

love and desire—is one Adam has insufficient experience to handle. He

is a boy who often pretends to a knowledge and confidence he does

not possess, in the mold of Shakespeare’s Valentine or Romeo, despite

Lewis’ claim that both he and Eve “were never young, never immature

or undeveloped”, but were “created full-grown and perfect”.

This

bright but unseasoned boy admits that he is not at all sure that what he

has been taught by God—another wholly alien life form—makes sense

when compared to the experience of being a human male. And as, in the

logic of the poem, Adam is the only one of these creatures who has ever

existed, he is the only one who can speak with anything other than the

hollow insistences of the ideologue about what is as opposed to what

should be. As Adam explains it, he has been told one thing by God:

For well I understand in the prime end

Of Nature her th’ inferior, in the mind

And inward Faculties, which most excel,

In outward also her resembling less

His Image who made both, and less expressing

The character of that Dominion giv’n

O’er other Creatures;

But his own experience tells him quite another thing, throwing the

accuracy of his school-lesson in doubt:

yet when I approach

Her loveliness, so absolute she seems

And in herself complete, so well to know

Her own, that what she wills to do or say,

Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best;

All higher knowledge in her presence falls

Degraded, Wisdom in discourse with her

Looses discount’nanc’t, and like folly shewes;

Authority and Reason on her waite,

As one intended first, not after made

83 Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, 112.

84 Paradise Lost 8.540–46.

487

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey

Occasionally; and to consummate all,

Greatness of mind and nobleness thir seat

Build in her loveliest, and create an awe

About her, as a guard Angelic plac’t.

What Adam is asking for, begging for, is some practical help with how

to deal with his feelings and what to make of the fact that his experience

of Eve does not match the lessons he has been given.

The theory is not

matching the practice, and there is nothing in the textbook, so to speak,

to help him deal with his confusion. What Adam desperately needs at

this point is a human father—not a self-aggrandizing alien a being calling

itself “the Father” who insists on being obeyed and worshipped without

demonstrating either the slightest understanding of, or concern with,

the actual experiences of its creations. In the absence of that, at least

Adam could use a big brother—again, a human figure who has been

through what Adam is going through. But Adam gets nothing besides

lectures delivered by bloodless aliens who have experienced none of

his confusions, and regard his questions as disturbing deviations from

the approved curriculum. Certainly, Raphael demonstrates neither

understanding nor sympathy:

Accuse not Nature, she hath done her part;

Do thou but thine, and be not diffident

Of Wisdom, she deserts thee not, if thou

85 Ibid., 8.546–59.

86 At this point, Milton is giving his Adam a set of observations about Eve’s possible

superiority to him that has long been part of Renaissance thought by the time of

Paradise Lost. Juan Rodríguez de la Cámara expresses similar ideas in 1438, in Triumph

of Women (Triunfo de las Donas). Speaking of the creation story of Genesis 2, in which

woman is created after man, Rodríguez writes that “The less noble creatures were

created first and foremost in the world, and the most noble later, so that the more

noble could be served by the hordes of the less noble” (“las criaturas menos nobles

ayan seydo primeramente en el mundo criadas, e las mas nobles vltimamente, por

que las menos nobles pudiesen por horden alas mas nobles seruir”) (Juan Rodríguez

de la Cámara. Triunfo de las Donas. In Obras de Juan Rodríguez de la Cámara: (ó del

Padrón), ed. by Antonio Paz y Meliá [Madrid: La Sociodad de Bibliofilos Españoles,

1884], 88, https://archive.org/stream/ObrasJuanRodriguezCamara/Obras_de_Juan_

Rodriguez_de_la_Camara#page/n133). Cornelius Agrippa argued that “Woman is

the ultimate end of creation, the most perfect accomplishment of all God’s works”

(“muliersitultimacreaturarŭ,acfinis,&cŏplementŭoĭmoperŭDeiperfectisimŭ”)

(De Nobilitate et Praecellentia Foeminei Sexus. Antwerp: Michael Hillenius, 1529, Sig.

A6r, https://books.google.com/books?id=ZoQNUzFZ5UEC&pg=PT12).

488 Love and its Critics

Dismiss not her, when most thou needst her nigh,

By attributing overmuch to things

Less excellent, as thou thy self perceiv’st.

For what admir’st thou, what transports thee so,

An outside?…

[…]

But if the sense of touch whereby mankind

Is propagated seem such dear delight

Beyond all other, think the same voutsaf’t

To Cattle and each Beast; which would not be

To them made common and divulg’d, if aught

Therein enjoy’d were worthy to subdue

The Soule of Man, or passion in him move.

Raphael simply ignores “everything in what Adam has said that is at

all inconvenient”;

in fact, Raphael appears neither to understand, nor

care to understand, Adam’s point. Adam is saying that Eve seems better

and wiser than he has constantly been told she is, and that “what she

wills” generally seems to be the right, best, and smartest thing to do. He

says nothing about sex in his conversation with Raphael, and yet that is

immediately what the alien leaps to: not just sex, but cow sex. Raphael’s

response to Adam’s urgent emotional confusion is to compare him to a

cow (or a bull, though it is by no means certain the alien really knows the

difference). Raphael’s rhetoric is outlandish, and he “willfully misses

the point”.

The shame is that all too many critics are akin to Raphael;

perhaps if they were not, Milton’s failure to have written the scene of

Adam’s choice in the way that meets with their approval would not be

so continually disappointing to them.

But a reader who is not a determined rewriter of the poem knows

what to expect from Adam at the critical juncture. Adam will make

the choice he was designed to make—the decision he was intended

to make by his poet. Adam will choose Eve over God, love over

obedience. After his shock at Eve’s action, his pause for thought, and

his silent decision for humanity over alien demands for obedience,

87 Paradise Lost, 8.561–68, 579–85.

88 Waldock, 44.

89 Ibid.

489

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey

Adam delivers a speech that none of Milton’s impassively virtuous

critics could have written, or even conceived. He confirms that he will

not be parted from her, despite God, despite Death, because he values

his love for her above all other considerations:

I with thee have fixt my Lot,

Certain to undergo like doom, if Death

Consort with thee, Death is to mee as Life;

So forcible within my heart I feel

The Bond of Nature draw me to my owne,

My own in thee, for what thou art is mine;

Our State cannot be sever’d, we are one,

One Flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.

And so the choice is made, and human life as we know it is begun. What

humankind has joined together, no God will put asunder. Adam will

have his weak and petulant moments after making this choice; most of

Book 10 is dedicated to Adam’s doubts and recriminations. But the fact

remains that Adam made the truly human choice; not just the only one

the source story allows for, but the only one that shows humanity—

in all its weaknesses and shortcomings—as a noble enterprise worth

rooting for.

No reader should be surprised by this choice. It is the choice that

much of the literature we have dealt with here illustrates, and it is the

choice made in other treatments of the Edenic scene written before

Milton’s poem. The path of Christian in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress,

running away from his wife and children, sticking his fingers in his ears

so as not to able to hear their cries, while crying out Life! Life! Eternal

Life! is not Milton’s way, though it seems to be the way of many of his

critics. Milton’s choices are more akin to those of Hugo Grotius, who

in his Latin drama Adamus Exul (Adam in Exile) of 1601, portrays the

scene of Adam’s choice in terms similar to those that will later feature

prominently in Paradise Lost. After a long debate with Eve, and with his

own doubts, Grotius’ Adam chooses Eve over God:

90 Paradise Lost 9.952–59.

490 Love and its Critics

Quid est agendum? lubricas agitant duo

Curas amores: hinc Dei, atque hinc conjugis:

[…]

Quid huîc negandum? vilis unius tibi

Iactura pomi est. Ut ne contemnam boni

Legem parentis? Fallor? an voluit Deus

Conjugis amores anteserri caeteris

Etiam parentum? Voluit: huc Pommum mihi.

What should I do? A dangerous provocation in two

Cares and loves: for God and for my wife:

[…]

Which shall I deny? Worthless to you is the loss

Of one apple. Should I condemn the good

Parental law? Am I mistaken? Is it not God’s will

That marital love shall be preferred over all others,

Even of parents? It is his will: give me the apple.

Later, Adam, amidst his doubts about whether or not he has done the

right thing, decides that he will continue to choose Eve no matter the

consequences: “What can I deny to you, my wife? / At your bidding, I

will condemn the justice of God; / At your bidding, I will go on living”.

The consequences follow immediately, of course, so those who not only

insist on, but seem to revel in the punishments inflicted on humanity for

daring to chart its own course needn’t worry overmuch.

But the point has

been the choice—far more elaborate than the one found in Genesis 3.6:

                                      

          

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it

was pleasant to the eyes, a tree desirable to look at and gain insight from,

91 Hugo Grotius. Hugonis Groth Sacra in quibus Adamus exul tragoedia (Hague:

Alberti Henrici, 1601), Act IV, 54–55, https://books.google.com/books?id=pR

Y_AAAAcAAJ&pg=PP72

92 “…quid tibi, cunjux, negen? / Iubente te vel jussa contemnam Dei, / Iubente

te vel sustinebo vivere” (ibid. Act V, 68, https://books.google.com/books?id=

pRY_AAAAcAAJ&pg=PP86).

93 Authoritarians “want a God to exist as the absolute authority to which they can

bow, [and the] concept of God underlying this way of thinking is that of the

absolute essence of punitiveness” (T. Adorno. “Studies in the Authoritarian

Personality”, 444, https://www.scribd.com/doc/35738019/Adorno-Theodor-W-

Studies-in-the-Authoritarian-Personality).

491

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey

she took from its fruit and ate, and gave it also to the man who was with

her, and he ate.

Genesis makes little of Adam’s choice, and makes comparatively little

of Eve’s. There is no tortured questioning, deep soul-searching, or

weighing of comparative values. There is desire for the fruit, for the

wisdom the fruit was thought to offer, and a quick decision to eat. Eve

eats, then gives the fruit to Adam, “who was with her”, and he eats as

well. But for Grotius, the scene is one of agonizing choices. Similarly,

in L’Adamo, an Italian play of 1613, Adam’s decision to eat the fruit is

passionate, agonizing, and lengthy:

Ahi, mi si spezza il core;

Che far deggia non so; s’io miro il Cielo

Sento vagarmi un gelo

Per l’ossa che mi strugge,

Vago sol d’ osservar precetti eterni;

Se la compagna miro.

Piango al suo pianto, a’ suoi sospir sospiro,

E mi struggo, e m’ accoro,

S’ ubbidirla rifiuto; il cor amante

Fa eh’ al Pomo veloce apra la mano,

L’ alma nel sen dubbiante

La respinge, e la chiude;

Misero Adamo, o quanti

Accampano il tuo i or vari desire!

Qui per r un tu sospiri,

Per r altro godi, né saper t’ è dato

Se tu sarà’ piegato

Da sospiri o da gioia,

Da la Donna o da Dio.

[…]

Dammi il frutto rapito,

Rapitrice cortese,

Dammi ill frutto gradito;

S’ubidisca a chi tanto,

Per farmi un Dio.

94 Giambattisti Andreini. L’Adamo, ed. by Ettore Allodoli (Lanciano: Carabba, 1913),

3.1.1839–57, 1907–11, https://archive.org/stream/ladamoand00andruoft#page/78,

https://archive.org/stream/ladamoand00andruoft#page/80

492 Love and its Critics

Alas, it breaks my heart;

I do not know what to do; if I think of Heaven

Then I feel a cold tremor

Oppressing me even in my bones,

And I want only to obey the eternal precepts;

If I think of my companion,

I share her tears and sigh with her sighs;

I am tortured and distracted,

To refuse her would wound her, and my loving heart

Would teach me to sieze the apple with open hands,

But my breast is doubtful

Rejects, and closes;

Miserable Adam, how many

And various are the desires that assail your heart!

One makes you sigh,

Another gives you joy, nor can you know

Which will most win you,

The sighs or the joy.

The woman or God.

[…]

Give me the stolen fruit,

Courteous thief,

Give me the pleasing fruit;

It is right to obey

The one who works to make me a God.

Again, we have an Adam who agonizes over the choice of Eve or

God, and whose passion and love for his wife leads him to choose

love for another human being over love for a figure who is wholly

other, a figure whose benevolence always seems to be insisted on by

the very same people who take delight in recounting his punishments

of disobedience. Here, as in Grotius, the pious reader need not wait

long for the penalties to ensue—but again, the passionate, human

choice has already been made, and will not be unmade, no matter

the lethal intent of God. Even in the 1647 Italian play Adamo Caduto,

Adam’s choice is agonizing, but human. At first Adam resists, even

remonstrating with Eve the way Gerald Richman would have Adam

do in Paradise Lost:

493

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey

Noon si deue piu tosto, ch’una volta

Offender Dio, morir ben volte mille?

Saprò vestir di rigidezza il volto,

Saprò armar il cor’anco di idegno,

Donna, nel tuo mal fare.

[…]

Iniquio è quel che pecca;

Ma di gran lunga è biasimevol quello;

Ch’à le viste ruine altrui conduce.

Should you not, rather, but once avoid

Offending God, than die a thousand times?

I’ll know how to clothe myself severely,

I’ll know how to arm my heart with shame,

Lady, against your evil machinations.

[…]

Wicked is the sinner;

But far more blameworthy are those

That with clear sight lead others to their ruin.

But eventually, Adam begins to realize that he cannot resist his wife:

“She weighs on me, in part, making my heart tender; / But the love of

Heaven still prevails”.

Finally, here, as in the other versions of the

Edenic story, Adam chooses Eve over God:

Dolce ben mio,

Cessa dal pianto, non stracciar più l’crine,

Che ti prometto di mangiar’ il Pomo.

[…]

Ecco delitía mia, che’l mangio anch’io.

My sweetest,

Stop your tears, no more tearing your hair,

95 Serafino della Salandra. Adamo Caduto (Cosenza: Giovanni Battista Moio and Francesco

Rodella, 1647), 2.10., 92, https://archive.org/stream/bub_gb_fbI8kobTkMQC#page/n110

96 “M’hàmasso in parte, il cor m’hà in tenerito; / Ma pìu di quel l’amor del Ciel

prevale” (ibid., 93, https://archive.org/stream/bub_gb_fbI8kobTkMQC#page/n111).

97 Ibid., 95, https://archive.org/stream/bub_gb_fbI8kobTkMQC#page/n113

494 Love and its Critics

I promise to eat the apple.

[…]

Behold, my delight, as I eat it too.

An astute reader will have noticed a difference, however, between the

three versions just dealt with and Milton’s rendering in Paradise Lost.

Where the other seventeenth-century Adams agonize over their choices,

Milton’s Adam knows quietly, inwardly, immediately what he is going

to do. For him the choice is obvious: he will love Eve, and he will choose

Eve, despite the God who threatens him with pain and death, despite

the willful mishearers and misconstruers like Raphael, and despite the

long line of literary critics who would rewrite him into the image of

their dry and pious imaginations.

Many of Milton’s modern critics appear to read his treatment of

Adam’s choice, not in light of the seventeenth-century context outlined

above, but as if Milton were following the much harsher example of

Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, the sixth-century Bishop of Vienne. Avitus’

treatment of the scene, far from being sympathetic to the human

emotions involved, is an exercise in condemnation:

Accipit infelix malesuadi verba susurri,

Inflexosque retro deiecit ad ultima sensus.

Non illum trepidi concussit cura pavoris,

Nec quantum gustu cunctata est femina primo;

Sed sequitur velox, miseraeque ex coniugis ore

Constanter rapit inconstans dotale venenum.

Faucibus et patulis inimicas porrigit escas.

Unhappily, he accepts the seductive, whispered words,

Bent back, hurled down finally from his proper senses.

Nor does fear strike him with pain and trembling,

Not so much as when the woman first hesitated to taste;

But he follows quickly, from his wretched wife’s mouth

Firmly the unsteady man seizes the poisonous dowry,

Stretches wide his mouth, and fills it with the hostile dish.

98 De Mosaice Historiae Gestis. 2.254–60. In S. Aviti, Archiepiscopi Viennensis Opera

(Paris, 1643), 233, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=dul1.ark:/13960/t1hh95n3b;

view=1up;seq=253

495

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey

However, that is not the way Milton treats the scene. His Adam

chooses Eve, not because he has been seduced by “whispered words”,

and not because he is inconstans (weak, unsteady, infirm of purpose),

but because he is faced with the choice between human love and

nonhuman (or inhuman) power, and he—like any truly decent man

would—chooses the former.

To choose the ruler over one’s own wife—that is the kind of choice

that authoritarian regimes try to convince their subjects is good, right,

and honorable. A primary feature of such regimes is that they have

“forced individuals to renounce their private life, and especially to

sacrifice their family life”.

This phenomenon can be seen through an

analysis of the literature of one such regime—North Korea:

Love in North Korean literature is always achieved via the lovers’

devotion for the suryeong [the Leader]. They recognize each other’s human

worth by measuring and examining the depth, breadth, and, above all,

authenticity of the loyalty shown to the sovereign Leader. Without this

quality, no one in North Korea is worthy of love or even deserves to live.

[…] They love each other because the other loves the suryeong.

100

A love filtered through adoration of the ruler, what Sonia Ryang calls

“sovereign love”,

101

is the opposite of human love between two lovers

who choose each other for each other—the love treated by the Song of

Songs, Ovid, the troubadours, and Shakespeare. Such “sovereign love”

is designed, in fact, to prevent the possibility of the human love so many

of our literary critics seem curiously determined to dismiss or explain

away: “romance should only develop if it is between two individuals,

both of whom are equally loyal toward the Leader. No private feelings

must be prioritized over […] endless reverence, adoration, and longing

for, and loyalty toward, the Leader”,

102

who is portrayed as “all-sagacious

and all-loving” while great emphasis is laid on his “kindness, holiness

99 Gabriel A. Barhaim. Public-Private Relations in Totalitarian States (London:

Transaction Publishers, 2012), 15.

100 Sonia Ryang. “Biopolitics or the Logic of Sovereign Love—Love’s Wherabouts

in North Korea”. In Sonia Ryang, ed. North Korea: Toward a Better Understanding

(Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 61, 62.

101 Ibid., 74.

102 Ibid., 65.

496 Love and its Critics

[and] wisdom”.

103

Even one’s worth as an individual is related solely

to the extent of one’s loyalty to the sovereign: “[t]he worth of another

individual is recognized only when the other person is shown to be as

loyal toward the Leader as oneself”.

104

By this latter criterion, a North

Korean literary critic (in an environment in which Kim Jong-il is reputed

to have said, “I rule through music and literature”

105

) would argue that

a man whose wife has been disloyal to the Leader must abandon her

to demonstrate his loyalty: “judgment is made as to whether the self is

good or evil based on this criterion: how deeply and how truthfully one

loves the Leader”.

106

Such is the way so many Milton critics would have Adam choose.

The obvious objection (often resorted to in Milton scholarship) is that

it is one thing for a human sovereign to demand one’s total love and

loyalty, and quite another for a “divine” sovereign to do the same. In

this line of thought, what is left implicit is the assumption that the same

techniques that are evil and oppressive when used by a human being

are good and just (even loving) when used by a god. Such arguments

regard not principle but degree, and those who accept them provide

fertile soil in which, with only a minimum of careful tending, tyranny

will rarely fail to thrive.

Milton writes his Adam otherwise. Milton’s Adam—despite his

later doubts and accusations—makes the choice (in what Lewis

calls “the pinch [in which] a man ought to reject his wife”

107

) not to

103 Ibid., 70.

104 Ibid., 65.

105 Jang Jin-sung. Dear Leader: My Escape from North Korea. Trans. by Shirley Lee (New

York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 3.

106 Ryang, 74.

107 Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, 123. Hannah Arendt notes that such “pinches” were

a feature of Nazi purges that even affected privileged party organizations like the

SS: “a Fuehrer decree dated May 19, 1943, ordered that all men who were bound

to foreigners by family ties, marriage or friendship were to be eliminated from

state, party, Wehrmacht and economy; this affected 1,200 SS leaders” (The Origins of

Totalitarianism [San Diego: Harcourt, 1968], 391, n. 7). Here, the decree of Ezra 10:3

also comes to mind:

                    

Now, let us carve out an agreement with our God, to send away our foreign wives, and such

children as they have borne.

When the “pinch” Lewis refers to comes, are we after all to believe that the moral

thing, the humane thing is to abandon anyone our gods and dictators demand we

497

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey

reject his wife; he makes the choice to face death with Eve, rather

than abandon her, rather than lose her, and rather than indulge any

hopes about the mercy of a God who is not going to forgive an Eve

whom he has already condemned in advance of her choice to eat

the fruit. In the eyes of the God so many critics would have Adam

approach, it is always already too late:

Man disobeying,

Disloyal breaks his fealty, and sins

Against the high Supremacy of Heav’n,

Affecting God-head, and so losing all,

To expiate his Treason hath naught left,

But to destruction sacred and devote,

He with his whole posteritie must dye,

Dye hee or Justice must;

108

This is a serious and deadly speech. There is no mercy to be found

therein, nor is there any indication that the speaker is inclined to listen

to Adam’s (wholly imaginary) intercession. In fact, the speaker has

already decided that the only remedy for a crime that has not yet been

committed is a human sacrifice:

unless for him

Som other able, and as willing, pay

The rigid satisfaction, death for death.

Say Heav’nly Powers, where shall we find such love,

Which of ye will be mortal to redeem

Man’s mortal crime, and just th’ unjust to save,

Dwells in all Heaven charity so deare?

109

All of this sets the stage for the drama of the incarnation and crucifixion

of the Son, a death by torture and slow exposure to the elements, a

abandon? What kind of ruler, what kind of god, would demand such a thing, and

what kind of coward would submit to it? What Lewis, et al., have been advocating

for the last several decades is precisely the kind of submission and loyalty to the

powerful leader that characterizes the worst tyrannies of human history.

108 Paradise Lost 3.203–10.

109 Ibid., 3.210–16.

498 Love and its Critics

practice that Martin Hengel describes as an expression of obscene

cruelty and sadism toward its victim:

for the men of antiquity, Greeks, Romans, and Jews, the cross was not

an indifferent or arbitrary matter, but an absolutely offensive thing,

even “obscene” in the original sense of the word. […] Even in the

Roman empire, where the process of executions might be seen as having

a standard or “normal” form—it included an initial flogging, and the

criminal often carried the crossbar to the place of execution, where his

arms were outstretched as he was nailed to the bar—the form of execution

was quite variable: crucifixion was a punishment in which the capriciousness

and sadism of the executioner could run wild.

110

And here, we come to the darkest truth, and the greatest heroism of the

choice Milton creates his Adam to make: it is in the face of a God who

demands grotesque torture and death for the crime of disobedience

(and the disobedience of relative children, at that), that Milton’s Adam

makes his decision for Eve, and for love. Critics like Lewis, Samuel, Fish,

Danielson, Teskey, and those who follow them, will never, as Waldock

observes, “acknowledge the facts of the poem”, because for them, the

power and passion of Adam’s choice pales next to the “should” and

“should not” of a prescriptive and obedience-driven rewriting of the

poem. The facts are there, however, easily perceived as long as one

does not make, as Raphael does, a willful attempt to misunderstand by

letting one of the greatest Liebestod

111

scenes in all of world literature fall

“on ears which have been deliberately deafened”.

112

110 für die antiken Menschen, Griechen, Römer und Juden, keine gleichgültige, beliebige, sondern

eine durchaus anstößige, ja im ursprünglichen Sinne des Worte “obzöne” Sache bedeute. […]

Selbst in römischen Machtbereich, wo der Ablauf der Exekution in gewisser Weise als “genormt”

erscheinen konnte—er schloß die vorausgehende Geißelung und häufig auch das Tragen des

Balkens zur Richtstätte ein, wo der Delinquent emporgehoben und mit ausgestreckten Händen

angenagelt wurde—, blieb die Form der Hinrichtung recht variabel: Die Kreuzigung are eine

Strafe, bei der sich die Willkür und der Sadismus der Henker austoben konnten.

Martin Hengel. “Mors Turpissima Crucis: Die Kreuzigung in der Antiken Welt und

die ‘Toheit’ des Wortes vom Kreuz”. In Johannes Friederich, Wolfgang Pöhlmann,

and Peter Stuhlmacher, eds. Rechtfertigung: Festschrift für Ernst Käsemann zum 70

Geburtstag (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1976), 137, 139).

111 The term translates literally as Love-Death, but what it refers to in the realm of art

is a duet between lovers—whether in song, poetry, dramatic performance, or some

combination—in which they affirm their love in the face of death.

112 Waldock, 44.

499

10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey

For Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet and critic whose ears were

definitely not deliberately deafened, the mutual love between Adam

and Eve was perhaps the noblest part of Paradise Lost:

The love of Adam and Eve in Paradise is of the highest merit—not

phantomatic, and yet removed from everything degrading. It is the

sentiment of a rational being towards another made tender by a specific

difference in that which is essentially the same in both; it is a union of

opposites, a giving and receiving mutually of the permanent in either, a

completion of each in the other.

113

In choosing death with Eve, Adam chooses a human life, a life of love

rather than an existence of obedience, a mortal life faced with a courage

Heidegger describes as “authentic being-toward-death”;

114

thus

Adam makes the only possible human choice, which the poet knows,

even if his critics do not. In a sense, Adam makes the same choice

that Odysseus makes, who when offered immortality by Calypso,

can think only of return to Penelope, whom the goddess describes as

“your wife, she that you ever long for daily, in every way”.

115

Perhaps,

in the spirit of Lewis, Samuel, Fish, Danielson, Teskey, and countless

others, Odysseus should have chosen otherwise. But think how much

poetry we would have lost if he had.

Somehow, all too many modern critics of Milton can no longer see

or hear, so deliberately blind and deaf have they become to the love

the poet tried to portray. Such critics, in Maurice Kelley’s terms, are

“proof-proof”,

116

and will forever insist on their “homemade brand of

orthodoxy”

117

in rewriting Milton’s epic. But we needn’t follow them

into “wand’ring mazes lost”,

118

wondering what might have been if only

Milton had written his poem to conform to the expectations of his more

obedience-focused readers. Despite the critics, in Paradise Lost, love

113 Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 1, ed.

by Henry Nelson Coleridge (London: William Pickering, 1836), 177, https://archive.

org/stream/literaryremainso01coleuoft#page/177

114 “eigentlichen Seins zum Tode” (Sein und Zeit. 266).

115 “σὴνἄλοχον,τῆςτ᾽αἰὲνἐέλδεαιἤματαπάντα”(Homer. Odyssey, 5.210. Vol. I,

Books 1–12, ed. by A. T. Murray [Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1919]).

116 Maurice Kelley. “The Provenance of John Milton’s Christian Doctrine: A Reply to

William B. Hunter”. SEL, 34 (1994), 159, https://doi.org/10.2307/450791

117 Ibid.

118 Paradise Lost, 2.561.

500 Love and its Critics

becomes most fully human. Mortal, and therefore even more precious

in the face of death, love is the defining feature of a truly human life,

chosen, as it seems it must ever be, in disobedience.

Epilogue

Belonging to Poetry: A Reparative Reading

Over fifty years ago, Susan Sontag described “the project of

interpretation” as “largely reactionary, stifling”, and placed it in

the context of “a culture whose […] dilemma is the hypertrophy of

the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capacity”, before

concluding that “interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art”.

The situation does not seem to have improved in the intervening half-

century. As Martin Paul Eve has very recently observed, “traditional

literary criticism always coerces texts into new narrative forms”, as “its

practitioners [read] to seek case studies suited for exegetic purpose”.

To come back to the observation with which this book began, one of

the great shocks caused by reading love poetry alongside the work

of its critics, is just how often the critics seem hostile to poetry, while

aligning themselves with the very systems of power and authority

poetry has tried to resist. Literary critics immersed in what Rita Felski

calls the “institutionally mandated attitude” of an “institutionalized

suspicion” are part of a system of authoritative and authoritarian

cultural practices that are “diffused throughout society via the legal

and executive branches of the modern state”.

Inspiring “surveillance,

investigation, interrogation, and prosecution”,

such criticism is the

1 Sontag, 7.

2 Martin Paul Eve. Literature Against Criticism (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers,

2016), 26, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0102. Emphasis added.

3 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 47.

4 Ibid., 47.

502 Love and its Critics

ethos of a prestige-driven elite claiming it “terrorizes received ideas”,

while too often identifying with (or at least cooperating with) the

systems of privilege and power it pretends to expose.

At a time when we are facing “the near-death of the university

as a democratic public sphere”, while caught in a situation in which

“cynicism, accommodation, and a retreat into a sterile form of

professionalism”

have become the coins of the realm, our poetry cannot

be left to what Empson once called the “habitual mean-mindedness

of modern academic criticism”.

As Felski maintains, “[l]iterary

studies sorely needs alternatives” to a style of criticism that traces

“textual meaning back to an opaque and all-determining power, while

presuming the critic’s immunity from the weight of this ubiquitous

domination”.

We need a criticism that practices what Eve Sedgwick

refers to as reparative reading, which teaches “the many ways in which

selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the

objects of a culture—even a culture whose avowed desire has often been

not to sustain them”.

This is especially true now, in a Western world

where so much of modern life is structured around obedience, a world

in which, as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argue, the governing

model is to “manufacture consent” in the various populations whose

compliance is being demanded. In describing the “propaganda model”

of the mass media, Herman and Chomsky outline “the rewards that

5 Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. Criticism and Culture: The Role of Critique in

Modern Literary Theory (New York: Longman, 1991), 2.

6 Henry Giroux. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Chicago: Haymarket Books,

2014), 16–17.

7 Empson. “Rescuing Donne”, 159.

8 Ibid., 152.

9 Sedgewick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, 150–51. Sedgwick’s

discussion has elicited a great deal of commentary, an interesting amount of which

seems dedicated to using a suspicion-based style of reading to claim that her

argument means something other than it might otherwise appear. Heather Love’s

article, “Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”

(Criticism, 52: 2 [Spring 2010], 235–41) is an excellent recent example of that trend.

Love describes Sedgwick’s article as “an act of aggression […] that endlessly

produces its own bad objects”, readers who feel “personally” accused of being the

type of critic “who picks up paranoid habits of mind as critical tools or weapons but

is detached from the living contexts in which these frameworks were articulated”

(236). Love deftly manages both to praise and bury Caesar all at once, arguing for

the utility of a non-reparative reading of Sedgwick’s call for a reparative reading

practice. The long tradition of suspicion-based criticism will not, it seems, go down

without a fight.

503

Epilogue. Belonging to Poetry: A Reparative Reading

accrue to conformity and the costs of honest dissidence” as well as the

“considerations that tend to induce obedience”

at all levels of our

society.

This includes academia,

where what Chomsky refers to as

“the self-selection for obedience that is […] part of elite education”

influences the discourse and defines its possibilities and limits, “strictly

limit[ing] the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow[ing] very lively

debate within that spectrum”.

The reparative reading Sedgwick called for might, if put into

practice, be able to give us a new relation to poetry, provide us a chance

to hear the voices of the poets again, bring their music to the fore, and

unearth it from beneath a century-long avalanche of modern criticism,

much of which has insisted on its primacy over poetry. Those of us who

teach, study, and write about poetry are enmeshed within a more than

10 Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political

Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2011), 305.

11 The findings of the infamous Milgram and Zimbardo experiments of the 1960s

and 1970s have been updated by Halsam and Reicher in 2012. Where Milgram

and Zimbardo portray their subjects as cooperating passively with authority, even

when given instructions that seem malevolent in nature, Halsam and Reicher

conclude that subjects will obey eagerly and actively, no matter the instruction, as

long as they “actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous” (S.

A. Haslam and S. D. Reicher (2012) “Contesting the ‘Nature’ Of Conformity: What

Milgram and Zimbardo’s Studies Really Show”, PLoS Biol 10[11]: e1001426, https://

doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001426).

12 Eric Anthony Grollman recently addressed this problem from the perspective

of gender norms in the American academy, arguing that “academic training is

about beating graduate students into submission and conformity”, especially over

the issue of self-presentation: “professional (re)socialization of graduate school

is centrally a task of eliminating passion, love, creativity and originality from

would-be scholars’ lives—or at least presenting ourselves as detached, subdued,

conforming” (Eric Anthony Grollman. “Gender Policing in Academe”. Inside

Higher Education, https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2016/07/29/academy-

polices-gender-presentation-scholars-essay). Joseph Katz noted some forty years

ago that the academy “give[s] lip service to the value of originality, while in fact

expecting products that conform rather strictly to specific canons of inquiry,

schools of thought, and the personalities of the people on examining committees”

(“Development of Mind”. In Scholars in the Making: The Development of Graduate and

Professional Students [Cambridge, MA, Ballinger, 1976], 124). And as A. W. Strouse

poignantly notes, “[t]he profession is a closet that shuts up doctoral students and

makes [them] write in prose rather than in poetry” (“Getting Medieval on Graduate

Education: Queering Academic Professionalism”. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to

Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 15: 1 [2014], 124, https://doi.

org/10.1215/15314200-2799260).

13 Chomsky, 13 Nov 1995.

14 Noam Chomsky. The Common Good (Berkeley: Odonian Press, 1998), 43.

504 Love and its Critics

two-thousand-year-old tradition of suspicion-based stances toward

literature, and since the rise of theories that posit the non-referentiality

of language, the irrelevance of the artist, and the primacy of the critic,

that tradition has been contributing to poetry’s demise in a world that

may need poetry now more than it ever has. But in an age in which

criticism has long been enamoured of the idea that texts are deceptive,

what potential for resistance does poetry have? What power can it have

when so many of its critics seem dedicated to the idea that poetry must

be approached through what Fish calls “the pleasures of diagnosis”

and what Kiernan Ryan decries as “the diagnostic attitude”

that has

swept through literary studies? In such an environment, what is left of

passion and desire, not only in poetry, but in its interpretation?

We might begin to address that question by taking our cue from a

writer of both poetry and criticism. In an August 16, 1890 letter to the

editor of The Scots Observer, Oscar Wilde noted that while “the critic

has to educate the public”, the responsibility of the artist is different,

for “the artist has to educate the critic”.

In that observation there is

something crucial that contemporary academic criticism sometimes

seems to have forgotten: artists respond to art differently than do critics

(especially of the university-trained and theoretically-inclined variety).

Wilde, who made a point in his work of exploring both sides of that

dynamic (especially in such essays as The Decay of Lying and The Critic as

Artist), is not favoring one over the other, but recommending a synthesis

of approaches to experiencing, understanding, and commenting upon

art. The ideas this approach leads to in his writing are not often of

the sort likely to be welcome in modern criticism, as for example, his

connection between life and art and his emphasis on the individual

artist behind the work: “[t]he longer one studies life and literature, the

more strongly one feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands

the individual”.

Reparative reading might well give us an opportunity

to reincorporate both aspects of Wilde’s statement into our critical

practices—the reconnection of literature to life (not regarding literature

15 Fish, “Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power”, 223.

16 Kiernan Ryan, “King Lear”, 377.

17 The Scots Observer, 4: 91, 332, https://books.google.com/books?id=94oeAQ

AAMAAJ&pg=PA332

18 Oscar Wilde. “The Critic as Artist”. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York:

Barnes & Noble, 1994), 1021.

505

Epilogue. Belonging to Poetry: A Reparative Reading

as purely self-referential after the fashion of Blanchot and others), and the

reconnection of that literature to the individual writer and reader. This

reparative reading, as imagined here, does not advocate a prescriptive

method of reading, or lay down rules for what one must or must not

see, hear, and feel in poetry and other forms of literature. But in the twin

spirit of Sontag and Wilde, it suggests a defense of poetry, and in Sontag’s

terms, a less revenge-driven relation between the intellect and art, less

driven by the hermeneutics of suspicion which often seems to triumph

over texts rather than explore them or explain them. Such a reading

practice suggests that now and then critics might do well to be educated

by the artist, rather than the theorist—and that works of criticism, this one

included, might do well to recover a sense of the passions of poetry, and

what Sontag refers to as the “energy and sensual capacity” of art and life.

That sensual energy is still with us, and is amply represented in a

wide variety of modern literature, across multiple genres and languages.

It appears in places like the poetry of Aleksandr Pushkin, who, though

most famous for his long-form works such as Evgeny Onegin (Евгений

Онегин) and Boris Godunov (Борис Годунов), also wrote a number of

powerful shorter poems. “When inMyEmbrace” (“Когдав объятия

мои”), from 1830, is filled with the frustrated eros often found in the

troubadour albas, where the lovers are threatened with separation by a

jealous husband and the coming of the dawn. But in Pushkin’s poem,

something even more forbidding separates the lovers: their own doubts.

The poem shows us the painful regrets experienced by a lover who is

abashed before his beloved, filled with a sense of his own guiltiness and

unworthiness before a woman whom he imagines as recalling previous

betrayals by men such as himself:

Когдавобъятиямои

Твойстройныйстанязаключаю

Иречинежныелюбви

Тебесвосторгомрасточаю,

Безмолвна,отстесненныхрук

Освобождаястансвойгибкой,

Тыотвечаешь,милыйдруг,

Мненедоверчивойулыбкой;

Прилежновпамятихраня

Изменпечальныепреданья,

506 Love and its Critics

Тыбезучастьяивниманья

Унылослушаешьменя…

Клянуковарныестаранья

Преступнойюностимоей

Ивстречусловныхожиданья

Всадах,вбезмолвииночей.

Клянуречейлюбовныйшепот,

Стиховтаинственныйнапев,

Иласкилегковерныхдев,

Ислезыих,ипозднийропот.

When in my embrace,

I enclose your shapely form,

And in a gentle voice of love

I delightfully praise you,

Silently, from my shy arms

By skillfully disentangling your figure,

You answer, sweet friend,

Smiling at me distrustfully;

Keenly kept in your memory,

The betrayal of sad devotion,

You, without sympathy and attention,

Are sadly listening to me…

I curse my subtle schemes,

My youthful crimes,

And my arranged meetings, waiting

In gardens, in the silence of night.

I curse the speech of love’s whispers,

Poems with mysterious melodies,

And the caresses of credulous maidens,

And their tears, and their murmurs.

Though there is a note here of the unachievable beloved found in Dante

and Petrarch, the lady is all-too-human, unachievable not because of

her demi-divine status, but because of her distrust, and the self-doubts

of a lover keenly aware of his own past and potential dishonesty. No

authority, divine or otherwise keeps the lovers apart, except for the

19 Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin.“Когдавобъятиямои”.InSobranie sochinenii, Vol.

2, 294, http://rvb.ru/pushkin/01text/01versus/0423_36/1830/0532.htm

507

Epilogue. Belonging to Poetry: A Reparative Reading

promptings and warnings of their own hearts. Pushkin’s poem speaks

to an older tradition of poetry, and is informed by it, while transforming

and internalizing its themes of separation and loss. Here, we have an

initial clue as to what at least one kind of reparative reading practice

might look like: reading those older poets can help us understand

Pushkin, and reading Pushkin can help us understand them in turn.

We can see a further indication of what such a reading practice might

look like by turning to Pablo Neruda’s “I Can Write the Saddest Verses

Tonight” (“Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche”), poem 20

from his 1924 collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair (Veinte

Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada). Neruda’s verse laments a

loss of love so affecting and so powerful that it feels like the tearing

away of one’s own soul:

Mi corazón la busca, y ella no está conmigo.

La misma noche que hace blanquear los mismos árboles.

Nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos.

[…]

Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

Porque en noches como esta la tuve entre mis brazos,

mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Aunque éste sea el último dolor que ella me causa,

y éstos sean los últimos versos que yo le escribo.

My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitens the same trees,

But we, who were then, are no longer the same.

[…]

Love is so short, and forgetting is so long.

Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,

My soul has no peace, having lost her.

Although this be the last pain that she causes me,

and these the last verses that I write.

20 Pablo Neruda. “Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche”. In Veinte Poemas

de Amor y una Canción Desesperada (Bogotá and Barcelona: Editorial Norma, 2002),

45–6, ll. 20–22, 28–32.

508 Love and its Critics

The voice in Neruda’s poem—a lover who cannot seem to let go of the

memories and regrets that revolve around the loss of love, the loss of a

woman, and the peace of soul that came with her presence—can help

us understand the Adam that Milton’s critics would have choose God

over Eve. Despite the vast differences between the poems in terms of

their language, their time of authorship, and their place of origin, these

poems speak to each other, and each speaks to us about the other. But

they are not poems that speak only of other poetry. The key is, that they

are poems that speak to us. They speak to and about poetry, yes; but

more importantly, they speak about life, about human beings and our

loves, losses, passions, and desires. That such a point has to be made at

all, is a testament to how long it has been since we have truly been able

to hear poetry over the urgent clamor of a suspicion-based criticism.

In learning to hear the poets again, one of the most important things

we might begin to recover now is a practice of reading poetry, not

through academic criticism, but through other poetry. Reading Milton

through Neruda gives us an entirely different perspective on Adam’s

choice. As Adam expresses it to Eve, “to lose thee were to lose myself”,

and as Neruda writes “love is so short, and forgetting is so long”—such

poetry teaches us to imagine the weight and sadness of what happens

after choosing God over Eve, after losing the love one once held in

one’s arms, finding her impossible to forget, and living with the regrets

and loneliness across the seemingly-endless years. That empathy, that

creative sympathy, is where the “energy and sensual capacity” of poetry,

and the courage to commit to a reparative reading practice, might yet

be found.

It can also be found in serious tales of fantasy, as in Mikhail

Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita (Мастер и Маргарита). A story

of black magic, love, and the triumph of art, written between 1928

and 1940 as a gesture of defiance against the Stalinist norms of Soviet

Socialist Realism (a form of literary criticism raised to the level of state

power),

Bulgakov’s novel stands up powerfully against the forces

21 Paradise Lost 9.959.

22 In Stalinist Russia, only one form of literature was allowed to be written and published: socialist

realism. The Soviet government required complete acceptance of sanctioned forms of Marxist

ideology […]. Early Soviet policies regarding literature were shaped by the ideas of Andrei

Zhdanov, who believed that literature had a powerful influence over readers, claiming at the

first Soviet Writers’ Congress that socialists were writing “a literature which has organized the

509

Epilogue. Belonging to Poetry: A Reparative Reading

hostile to poetry. In a scene at once comic and profound, the value of life

and all its passions is voiced by the Devil, as he speaks to the severed

head of a disdainful literary critic named Berlioz who is about to find

out that his options were not quite so narrow as he had believed:

You have always been an ardent preacher of the theory that cutting off

a man’s head ends his life, and then he turns into ashes and goes into

non-being. […] Each will be given according to his faith. Yes, it comes

true! You will go into non-being, and happily, from the cup of your

transformation, I will drink to being.

And in a scene more wistful than comic, Bulgakov gives us the reflections

of a man who once had the chance to choose love and passion, but chose

as Milton’s critics would have his Adam choose, and passed them by

from fear of disobedience: “Oh, I am a fool! Why, why didn’t I fly away

with her? What was I afraid of, old ass! […] Suffer it now, old cretin!”

This twentieth-century Russian novel, and that seventeenth-century

English epic poem also speak to one another, and to us, and the fire that

burns in them both is the energy and sensuality of an art that is very

much connected to life.

But the spirit of poetry as resistance, of literature as the medium

through which love is expressed and received in defiance of the critical,

theological, and political authorities who would (and still do) censor

it,isevenmorememorablycapturedbyNizārQābbanī, the twentieth-

century Syrian poet whose entire body of work served as an act of

defiance against those who would channel, reformulate, and control

toilers and oppressed for the struggle to abolish once and for all every kind of exploitation”. As

a consequence, Zhdanov was wary of literature that might encourage dissenting views.

Ilona Urquhart. “Diabolical Evasion of the Censor in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master

and Margarita”. In Nicole Moore, ed. Censorship and the Limits of the Literary: A Global

View (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 133.

23 Вывсегдабылигорячимпроповедникомтойтеории,чтопоотрезанииголовыжизньв

человекепрекращается,онпревращаетсявзолуиуходитвнебытие.[…]каждомубудет

данопоеговере.Дасбудетсяжеэто!Выуходитевнебытие,амнерадостнобудетизчаши,

вкоторуювыпревращаетесь,выпитьзабытие.

Mikhail Bulgakov. Мастер и Маргарита [Master and Margarita] (Moscow: Olma

Media Group, 2005), 352.

24 “Эхя,дурак!Зачем,зачемянеулетелснею?Чегояиспугался,старыйосел!

[…]Эх,терпитеперь,старыйкретин!”(ibid., 507).

510 Love and its Critics

poetry, passion, and human desire,

from the governments that banned

his work, to the academic and theological critics who still regard his

poetry with disdain and disapproval.

 For Qābbanī, poetry and love

were the only laws of life:









 



 







  



  



  











 

 ..







  



  









   ..





  _  _











  







 











 



 













   ..

  



 ..

   ..



 







 



  ..













25 As Amila Buturovic notes, Qābbanī’s poetry was immediately regarded as

blasphemous by the clerical powers-that-be in Syria, while revered by younger

readers:

His pointed criticism of the social milieu was directed at the relationship between the

sexes in particular. His […] rejection of the blunt misogynist attitudes which left the Arab

woman under the constant scrutiny of patriarchal canons [informed his call] to liberate the

body from sexual repression and more specifically, to allow the Arab woman to cherish

hereroticecstasyopenlyandfreely.Controversyeruptedinstantly:Sheikhal-Tantāwī

characterized the poems as “blasphemous and stupid”, while young Syrian readers

treated the collection as a kind of manifesto of their culturally suppressed sexuality.

“‘Only Women and Writing Can Save Us From Death’: Erotic Empowering in

thePoetryofNizārQābbanī”.InTradition, Modernity, and Postmodernity in Arabic

Literature: Essays in Honor of Professor Issa J. Boullata, ed. by Kamal Abdel-Malek and

Wael Hallaq (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 141. And in a a trenchant observation that might

remind us that the theoretical stances of the West are not necessarily those of the

rest of the world, Buturovic argues that “while much of the postmodern world

speaksofthe‘deathoftheauthor’,wearereminded,quitelucidly,ofQābbanī’s

engaged presence every time we revisit his poetic corpus”. (142).

26 For a fascinating example of this stance toward Qābbanī’s work, see Bacem A.

Essam. “Nizarre Qabbani’s Original Versus Translated Pornographic Ideology:

A Corpus-Based Study”. Sexuality and Culture, 20 (2016), 965–86, https://doi.

org/10.1007/s12119-016-9369-7

27 NizārQābbanī.“LoveLetter71”.ArabictextpublishedinBassamK.Frangiehand

Clementia R. Brown, eds. Arabian Love Poems (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers,

1999), 134.

511

Epilogue. Belonging to Poetry: A Reparative Reading

The day you find a man

Who can transform your every atom

Into Poetry,

And who turns each strand of your hair into a poem,

The day you find a man

Who can — as I did —

Make you bathe in Poetry,

Line your eyes with Poetry,

Comb your hair with Poetry,

Then I will beg you

To follow him without hesitation.

It doesn’t matter that you belong to me,

And it doesn’t matter that you belong to him.

What matters… is that you belong to Poetry.

The poet’s final words are the key: belonging to poetry is feeling it

inside oneself, feeling its music flowing through and over and around

oneself. It is knowing eros as desire and joy. It is seeing life through

art, and art through life. It is the passion in the Song of Songs, the

troubadours, and Donne, the humor in Chaucer, the carpe diem ethos in

Herrick, the empathy in Shakespeare, Milton, and Pushkin, the sadness

in Neruda, and the irreverent joy in Ovid and Bulgakov. Those feelings

are the very core of the human spirit that we might still hope poetry,

and all forms of literature, can help us recover and defend. But whether

that spirit of belonging to poetry will survive, in this era of renewed

and intensified demands for obedience to the dictates of political and

cultural authority, is up to all of us, not our theologians, philosophers,

politicians, or literary critics. It is up to ordinary readers, everyday men

and women who will act in the spirit hoped for by Benjamin Franklin.

After the Constitutional Convention of 1787, “an anxious lady named

Mrs. Powel” asked, “What type of government […] have you delegates

given us?” Franklin replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it”.

What the poets have given us is Love.

If only we can keep it.

28 Translated by Modje Taavon.

29 Walter Isaacson. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster,

2003), 459.

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Abelard, Peter 10, 195, 196, 197, 198,

199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205,

206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212,

213, 270

Abels, Richard and Ellen Harrison

221

Adorno, Theodore 474, 490

Agrippa, Cornelius

De Nobilitate et Praecellentia Foeminei

Sexus 487

Aist, Dietmar von

“Slâfest du, friedel ziere” 183, 184

Akiba (Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph) 47,

51, 53, 63, 106, 120, 158, 172, 453,

463

Alcuin 108, 109, 110

Al-Ghāzalī407

Allen, Peter 62, 63, 64

Allestree, Richard 373, 381, 384

Altermeyer, Bob 483, 484

Althusser, Louis 11, 12, 455

Amaury, Arnaud 224, 226, 227

Ames, Christine Caldwell 197

Anderson, W.S. 95

Andreasen, Nancy Jo Coover 433, 435

Andreini, Giambattisti 491

L’Adamo 491

Anonymous

Arden of Faversham 369, 370

Anonymous

Aucassin et Nicolette 215, 303

Anonymous

“Coindeta sui” 136, 180

Anonymous

Concilium Romarici Montis 126

Anonymous

“En un vergier sotz fuella

d’albespi” 185, 190

Anonymous

Flamenca 221

Anonymous

“Havelok the Dane” 275, 277, 278,

279

Anonymous

King Horn 275, 278, 279

Anonymous

“Soufrés maris, et si ne vous anuit”

191

Anonymous

St. Austyn 276

Anthemius 101, 102, 103

Aquinas, Thomas 4, 130, 479

Arabi, Ibn

“Gentle Now, Doves of the

Thornberry and Moringa Thicket”

166, 167, 177

Arden, Heather M. 240, 243

Arendt, Hannah 496

Ariès, Philippe 372

Aristotle 3, 17, 38, 165, 372, 407, 412,

454, 480

Astell, Ann W. 42

Aubrey, John 375

Auerbach, Erich 121

Augustine of Hippo 3, 4, 9, 149, 150,

151, 279, 372, 479

Index

554 Love and its Critics

Augustus Caesar 65, 84, 89, 102

Lex Papia Poppaea (law penalizing

married couples with no children)

Ausonius 106, 107, 108

Austin, R.G. 89

Auweele, Bart Vanden 56

Avitus, Alcimus Ecdicius

De Mosaice Historiae Gestis 494

Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin

51, 52

Bagot, Richard 413

Baker, Richard 425

Barthes, Roland 19, 28, 29, 30, 32

Bell, Ilona 423, 429, 430, 431

Belsey, Catherine 424, 425

Bembo, Pietro 106, 330, 331, 332, 333,

334, 349, 351, 355, 356, 359, 426,

440, 441

Bene, Carmelo 408

Benton, John 210, 211

Ben-Ze’ev, Aharon, and Ruhama

Goussinsky 1

Bernays, Edward 8

Berry, Ralph 403, 405

Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus 34

Blair, Peter Hunter 278

Blake, William 161, 167, 442

Blanchot, Maurice 23, 24, 26, 27

Blanc, Pierre 302

Blank, Hanne 395

Bloch, Ariel and Chana 41

Bloch, R. Howard, and Stephen G.

Nichols 154

Bloom, Harold 372, 449

Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate 267

Boase, Roger 135

Boétie, Étienne de La 5, 6, 7, 8, 10

Bogin, Meg 140, 146

Boleyn, Anne 343, 344

Booth, Stephen 362

Born, Bertran de 137, 138, 139, 189,

190, 191, 261

“Be·m platz lo gais temps de

pascor” 137, 189

Borneilh, Giraut de 378, 401

Boswell, John 108, 109, 143

Boyd, Barbara Weiden 65, 71, 90

Boyle, David 220, 222, 227, 231

Brady, Bernard V. 248

Branagh, Kenneth 403

Briffault, Robert S. 165, 215, 217, 222,

231, 232, 237, 342, 353

Brogan, Walter A. 18

Brown, Peter 102, 276

Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn 129, 141,

180, 187, 190

Brundage, James A. 191

Bryson, Michael 153, 429, 458, 485,

518

Bulgakov, Mikhail 508, 509

Мастер и Маргарита (Master and

Margarita) 508, 509, 511

Bunyan, John

Pilgrim’s Progress 489

Burckhardt, Jacob 159, 160

Burden, Dennis 475, 476, 477, 480

Burgwinkle, William 146, 147, 193

Burns, E. Jane 156, 157

Buturovic, Amila 510

Byrne, Marie José 108

Cabestanh, Guilhem de 178, 179

Callaghan, Dympna 360, 362, 363,

365, 407, 408, 419

Calvin, John 4, 5, 9, 473, 474

Cameron, Alan 103

Campbell, Joseph 141, 147, 148, 152

Camproux, Charles 173, 221

Camus, Albert 462

Capellanus, Andreas 123, 124, 126,

133, 134, 135

Cary, Elizabeth 375

Casali, Sergio 71, 76, 97

Castiglione, Baldassarre 330, 331,

334, 351, 440

Il Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the

Courtier) 330

Castor, Helen 168

Catherine of Aragon 395

Cato the Younger 87, 97, 98

555

Index

Catullus 64, 93, 108, 338, 339, 411, 424

Cavalcanti, Guido 106, 192

Charles II 434

Chaucer, Geoffrey 135, 176, 271, 280,

281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 288,

289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295,

523

The Canterbury Tales 176, 240, 280,

281, 282, 283, 285, 286, 290

“The Knight’s Tale” 280, 281, 282,

283, 284, 285

“The Miller’s Tale” 280, 282, 283,

284, 285

Cheyettee, Frederic L. 220, 221

Chomsky, Noam 11, 22, 33, 502, 503

Chrétien de Troyes 123, 125, 126, 127,

128, 129, 131, 132, 219, 240, 241

Le Chevalier de la Charrette 127

Cicero 239, 257

Clark, David 109

Claudian 97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 108

Clements, Ronald E. 44

Cohen, Gerson 38, 42, 46, 47

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 499

Colonne, Guido delle 313, 314, 317,

319, 326

“Amor, che lungiamente m’hai

menato” 313, 314

Coltman, Rod 27

Coulet, Jules 233

courtly love

as an artificial construct 121, 122,

123, 124, 125, 129, 130, 131, 133,

136, 162, 212, 235, 240, 247, 248,

249, 252, 256, 262, 263, 269, 274,

282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 289, 293

Cox, Catherine S. 289

Crane, Susan 281, 290

Crawford, Charles 369

Culler, Jonathan 162

Cusset, François 20

Daniel, Arnaut 248, 322, 323

“Lo ferm voler qu’el cor m’intra”

248

Danielson, Dennis 478, 480, 498, 499

Dante Alighieri 2, 3, 55, 106, 138, 158,

161, 164, 192, 293, 300, 306, 307,

309, 311, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319,

320, 321, 322, 323, 326, 330, 345,

350, 359, 367, 372, 422, 426, 458,

506

“Di donne io vidi una gentile

schiera” 317

Inferno 138, 320, 322

“Io mi sentii svegliar dentro a lo

core” 316

“Negli occhi porta la mia donna

Amore” 315

Purgatorio 323

d’Aurenga, Raimbaut 186, 188

“Non chant per auzel ni per flor”

186

Davis, P.J. 69

Day, Linda 46

de Graef, Ortwin 33

Deleuze, Gilles 408

de Man, Paul 18, 21, 31, 33, 163, 446,

447, 452, 454

de Meun, Jean 254, 291, 293, 531

Derrida, Jacques 18, 24, 26, 447, 454

Dia, Comtessa de 129, 186, 188, 235

“Estat ai en greu cossirier” 186

Dillon, Martin C. 447

Dilthey, Wilhelm 153, 154

Dinshaw, Carolyn 266, 291

Dionysius the Carthusian 473, 474

Dodd, William George 280

Doggett, Frank A. 157, 441

dolce stil novo

Italian poetry, love as worship 3,

55, 121, 192, 302, 306, 307, 323, 342

Donne, John 3, 31, 32, 108, 110, 174,

197, 335, 338, 371, 375, 421, 422,

423, 425, 426, 427, 428, 429, 430,

431, 432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437,

438, 439, 440, 441, 442, 443, 444,

445, 453, 459, 481, 502, 504

“On His Mistress Going to Bed”

425, 426, 427, 428, 429

“The Canonization” 433, 435, 436

“The Extasie” 437, 440, 441, 442, 444

556 Love and its Critics

“The Sun Rising” 443, 444

Doss-Quinby, Elgal 137

Dostoevsky, Fyodor 411, 415, 456

Бесы (Demons, aka The Possessed, or

The Devils) 411

Идиот (The Idiot) 415, 456

Drayton, Michael 348

Dreher, Diane 368, 374, 375

Dronke, Peter 111, 169

Duffell, Martin J. 302

Dümmler, Nicola Nina 117

Dunstan, William E. 101

Dutton, Richard 406

Eagleton, Terry 482

Easthope, Anthony 424

Eckhart, Meister 300

Edwards, Catherine 87

Edwards, David 432

Egan, Gabriel 371

Eleanor of Aquitaine 123, 158, 176,

220, 301, 343

Eliot, T.S. 32, 449, 482

Elizabeth I 427

Ellis, Frederick Startridge 262

Empson, William 424, 468, 469, 474,

475, 479, 483, 502

Eratosthenes 12

Ermengard of Narbonne 220

Ermengaud, Matfré 248

Le Breviari d’Amor 233, 234, 235,

236, 237

Eschenbach, Wolfram von 181, 182,

183, 184

“Den morgenblic bî wahtaeres

sange erkôs” 181, 185

Essam, Bacem A. 510

Eusebius of Caesarea 39, 40

Eve, Martin Paul 501

Everson, Jane E. 314

Falck, Colin 415

Fay, Elizabeth 152

Febvre, Lucien 153

Felski, Rita 14, 15, 19, 20, 21, 142, 154,

267, 268, 454, 501, 502

Fernie, Ewan 411

Ferrari, G.R.F. 33

Fessler, Ignas 210

Feuerbach, Ludwig 478, 479

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 33, 34

Fields, Weston 51

fin’amor 3, 34, 62, 113, 116, 122, 130,

135, 136, 164, 169, 172, 174, 175,

195, 203, 207, 212, 217, 226, 232,

233, 234, 235, 238, 239, 240, 242,

243, 247, 248, 249, 250, 256, 260,

274, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 286,

290, 292, 300, 322, 330, 336, 371,

381, 390, 401, 420, 436

definition of 2, 173

Findlay, John Niemeyer 17

Firenzuola, Agnolo 335

Fish, Stanley Eugene 423, 475, 476,

477, 480, 481, 483, 484, 498, 499,

504

Fleming, Bruce 14, 21

Fortunatus, Venantius 104, 105, 106

Foucault, Michel 9, 18, 20, 26, 28, 29,

30, 154, 219, 373, 374, 428

Francesca da Rimini (Paulo and

Francesca) 319, 321, 322

Franklin, Benjamin 511

Frantzen, Allen 109, 110

Frederick I (Barbarossa) 10

Frederick II 132, 300, 301, 302

Freeburn, Ryan P. 198

Frelick, Nancy 131

Freud, Sigmund 13

Gábor, Katona 350

Gajowski, Evelyn 416

Gamel, Mary-Kay 321, 322

Ganze, Alison 146

Gascoigne, George 151

Gaunt, Simon 2, 154, 155, 156, 163,

376, 410

George Chapman 116

Gerson, Jean 266

Gide, André

Les Nourritures Terrestres 467

Gigot, Francis E. 288

557

Index

Gilead, Sarah 22, 446, 447, 448, 449,

450, 452, 453, 455, 462

Giles of Rome 55

Gillis, John 372

Giroux, Henry 37, 502

Glancy, Ruth F. 421

Goebbels, Joseph 8

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 35,

356

Golb, Norman 221

Golden, Mark 43

Goldin, Frederick 157

Goldstien, Neal L. 324

Goold, G.P. 57

Gramsci Antonio 419

Gratian

Decretum Magistri Gratiani 185

Greaves, Richard L. 461

Greenblatt, Stephen 18, 160, 370, 406,

442, 473

Greenstein, Edward L. 53

Grégoire, Henri 193

Greville, Fulke 149

Grollman, Eric Anthony 503

Grotius, Hugo

Adamus Exul 489, 490, 491, 492

Guibbory, Achsah 424, 425, 427, 428,

436

Guilhem IX 129, 130, 158, 167, 168,

169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 233, 235,

237, 250, 261, 286, 306, 340

“Ab la dolchor del temps novel”

168, 170

author of the first fabliau 282

“Companho faray un vers...

convinen” 169

“Farai chansoneta nueva” 168

“Mout jauzens me prenc en amar”

170

“Pus vezem de novel florir” 171

Guinizelli, Guido 192, 306, 307, 308,

309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 317,

319, 323, 326

“Al cor gentil” 307

“Chi vedesse a Lucia un var

cappuzzo” 306

“Io vogl’ del ver la mia donna

laudare” 310

“Tegno di folle ‘mpres’, a lo ver

dire” 311

Guynn, Noah 254, 267

Hagstrum, Jean H. 79, 116, 195, 205,

292, 317, 330, 373, 413

Hallissy, Margaret 281, 282, 285, 290

Hardin, Richard F. 113, 115

Hartman, Geoffrey 31

Haskins, Charles Homer 175

Hawkes, David 482, 483

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 26,

Heidegger, Martin 7, 16, 17, 18, 447,

499

Heisterbacences, Caesarii 224

Heller, Joseph 162

Heller-Roazen, Daniel 159, 160, 405

Heloise d’Argenteuil 195, 196, 197,

199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206,

208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 270

Hengel, Martin 498

Henry VII 394, 395

Henry VIII 343, 344

Heraclitus 16, 295, 453

Herman, Edward S. 502, 503

Herman, Peter C. 469

hermeneutics of suspicion

style of interpretation 10, 12, 13,

14, 20, 22, 33, 34, 40, 42, 49, 146,

296, 320, 440, 447, 450, 451, 455,

463, 501

Herrick, Robert 3, 11, 421, 445, 446,

447, 448, 449, 450, 452, 453, 455,

456, 457, 458, 459, 460, 462, 463,

464

“Corinna’s going a Maying” 460,

461, 462

“To Daffadills” 456

“To the Virgins to Make Much of

Time” 11, 445, 449, 450, 452, 453,

455

558 Love and its Critics

Hesiod 12, 13

Highet, Gilbert 469

Hilarius (Hilary the Englishman) 144

Hill, Christopher 468

Hippias of Thasos 38, 480

Hjelmslev, Louis 28

Hobbes, Thomas 150

Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry 9

Holmes, Nigel 98

Holmes, Olivia 155

Homer 12, 13, 79, 80, 93, 175, 301,

372, 499

Honorius 100, 101, 103

Honor killing 398

relation to Romeo and Juliet 398

Horace 8, 13, 358, 421

Horváth, I.K. 96

Houlbrooke, Ralph A. 376

Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey 346,

347, 348

“Each beast can choose his fere

according to his mind” 346

“I never saw my lady lay apart”

347

Hughes, Merritt Y. 390, 440

Hult, David F. 131, 136, 266, 268

Hume, David 7, 8

Huppé, Bernard F. 283

Innocent III 197, 221, 223, 227, 228,

246, 259, 260, 336

Isaacson, Walter 511

Jackson, MacDonald P. 370

Jacobson, Howard 56, 94, 96

Jameson, Frederic 11

Jang Jin-sung 496

Janko, Richard 38

Japhet, Sara 52, 54

Jeanjean, Henri 221

Jerome (Eusebius Sophronius

Hieronymus) 291, 473

Jewell, Helen M. 286

Jones, Michael K., and Malcolm G.

Underwood 394

Julius Caesar 97, 98, 422

Kafka, Franz 162

Kahn, Coppélia 370

Kates, Joshua 18

Katz, Joseph 503

Kauffman, Linda 95

Kay, Sarah 2, 107, 129, 154, 155, 156,

163, 234, 321

Kelley, Maurice 499

Kemp, Theresa D. 279

Kennedy, Elspeth 321

Kennedy, William J. 309

Kerrigan, John 361

Kerrigan, William 464

Kim Jong-il 496

King, Margaret L. 43

Kleinman, Scott 278

Klein, Richard 27

Knox, Peter E. 90

Köhler, Erich 155, 156

Krass, Andreas 219

Kristeva, Julia 408

Labé, Louise 336, 337, 338, 340

Sonnet 16 337

Sonnet 19 338

Lacan, Jacques 24, 25, 26, 28, 130, 131,

452

Lagerlund, Henrik 407

Landrum, David 459

Lane, Joan 460

Lanham, Richard A. 75

Larson, Deborah 31, 32, 433

Layton, Richard A. 40

Lazar, Moshe 123, 135, 164, 192

Lazda-Cazers, Rasma 179

Leggatt, Alexander 453

Léglu, Catherine, Rebecca Rist, and

Claire Taylor 224

Le Goff, Jacques 198

Leishman, J.B. 358

Lentini, Giacomo da 302, 303, 304,

305, 306, 364

“Diamante, né smeraldo, né

zaffino” 303

“Dolce cominciamento” 304

559

Index

“Io m’aggio posto in core a Dio

servire” 302

Leonard, John 475, 476, 477

Lévi-Strauss, Claude 28, 377

Lewis, C.S. 125, 126, 129, 130, 135,

162, 288, 472, 473, 474, 475, 477,

478, 480, 485, 486, 496, 497, 498,

499

Lille, Alain de 143

De Planctu Naturae 143

Lipmen-Blumen, Jean 377

Livy 73, 74

Longus 113, 114, 115

Daphnis and Chloe 113, 116

Longxi, Zhang 39, 47, 48, 51, 56, 57,

156, 158, 209, 210, 212, 265

Lorris, Guillaume and Jean de Meun

291

Lorris, Guillaume de 210, 238, 239,

240, 241, 246, 250, 252, 254

Lorris, Guillaume de, and Jean de

Meun 192, 210, 238, 239, 266, 268,

275, 328

Roman de la Rose 106, 135, 192, 226,

239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245,

247, 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 259,

260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 268,

274, 275, 453

Lucan 97, 98, 99, 120

Pharsalia 97, 98, 99

Lucretius 453

Luft, Joanna 263, 265

Luther, Martin 4, 9

Macdonald, Aileen Ann 412

MacFarlane, Alan 372

Macfie, Pamela Royston 120

Macrobius 85, 86, 239

Mallarmé, Stephan 28, 30

Mann, Jill 289

Marcabru 172, 173, 174, 291, 293, 307,

442

Marcus Junianus Justinus 87

Marenbon, John 198, 210

Mariaselvam, Abraham 39

Marlowe, Christopher 116, 120, 371

Marselha, Folquet de 229

Martin, Catherine Gimelli 441, 442

Martinez, Ronald 138

Martin, Philip 363

Marvell, Andrew 421

Marvin, Laurence W. 226

Marx, Karl 13, 371, 482

Masten, Jeffrey 382

May, Simon 9

McCloskey, Patrick, and Edward

Phinney, Jr. 97

McGlynn, Sean 222, 223, 226

McGowan, Kate 21

McGrath, Alister 474

McWebb, Christine 239, 252

Menocal, Maria Rosa 166, 167

Meschini, Marco 228

Meun, Jean de 149, 210, 238, 239, 241,

252, 253, 254, 259, 262, 263, 265,

267, 268, 271

Mews, Constant J. 198, 199, 202, 204

Miksch, Walter 369

Miller, J. Hillis 20, 21

Milton, John 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 89, 115, 151,

153, 240, 241, 362, 364, 389, 390,

397, 429, 443, 468, 469, 475, 476,

478, 479, 480, 481, 482, 483, 484,

485, 488, 489, 494, 495, 496, 498,

499, 508, 509

Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce 7, 9

Eikonoklastes 7

Of Education 151

Paradise Lost (or its characters) 2, 9,

22, 89, 148, 150, 288, 344, 362, 390,

397, 467, 468, 469, 470, 471, 472,

473, 474, 475, 476, 477, 478, 479,

480, 481, 482, 484, 485, 486, 487,

488, 489, 490, 491, 492, 493, 494,

495, 496, 497, 498, 499, 502, 508, 509

Tenure of Kings and Magistrates 7

Minnis, Alastair 208, 289

Mitchell, Charles 441

Monfasani, John 160

Montaigne, Michel 5, 453, 454

Montanhagol, Guilhem 232, 233, 305,

306

560 Love and its Critics

Montfort, Simon de 223, 227, 228, 260

Montmorency, James Edward

Geoffrey De 287

Morris, Colin 174, 175

Morrissey, Lee and Will Stockton 160

Musaeus 116, 117, 118, 120

Hero and Leander 116, 117, 118, 431

Musil, Robert

Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften (The

Man Without Qualities) 150, 404

Negotium pacis et fidei (The business of

peace and faith) 228, 246

Nelson, Lowry 309

Nero 97, 98, 99, 100

Neruda, Pablo

“Puedo escribir los versos más

tristes esta noche” 507

Nevo, Yehoshafat 53

Newman, Barbara 134, 143, 202, 206,

209, 210, 212, 213

Nietzsche, Friederich 13, 403, 404

obedience

demands for, opposition to love 3,

4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 33, 63, 77, 89, 94,

126, 129, 135, 186, 189, 197, 213,

219, 220, 229, 261, 265, 272, 368,

369, 374, 375, 376, 378, 380, 381,

383, 384, 385, 386, 390, 393, 395,

397, 398, 401, 408, 410, 420, 443,

444, 456, 467, 468, 469, 472, 476,

478, 481, 482, 484, 485, 488, 498,

499, 502, 503, 511

Obedience Chorus, The 476, 480

O’Hara, Diana 374, 376

Olmert, Michael 364

Olson, Roger E. 196

Oppenheimer, Paul 302, 306

Orff, Carl 112

Orgel, Stephen 49, 324, 354

Origen of Alexandria 39, 40, 41, 42,

47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 63, 106, 120, 158,

172, 453, 463, 464

O’Sullivan, Daniel E. 141, 145, 157

Outhwaite, R. B. 413

Ovid 9, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65,

66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77,

87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97,

100, 101, 104, 106, 113, 126, 160,

192, 364, 367, 460, 485, 495

Amores 57, 58, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 67,

69, 70, 76, 89, 90, 91, 460

Ars Amatoria 57, 61, 62, 64, 71, 72, 74

Heroides 9, 58, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96

Metamorphoses 89, 90, 92

Tristia 61

Paden, William D. 137, 142, 157, 176,

179, 184

Paris, Gaston 122, 124, 128, 130, 131,

132, 133, 135, 136, 235, 240

Parker, John 160

Parmenides 16, 27

Parry, John Jay 124

Paterson, Linda 149

Pater, Walter 21

Patri, Gabriel Díaz 106

Patterson, Lee 160, 161, 406

Pearsall, Derek 282, 283

Pecora, Vincent P. 20

Pegg, Simon 223, 232

Pelagius 148, 149, 150, 151, 198

Peter, John 472, 474, 477

Petrarch, Francesco 3, 121, 137, 164,

300, 301, 309, 312, 313, 323, 324,

325, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 336,

338, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347,

348, 349, 350, 359, 364, 367, 391,

422, 426, 458, 506

Sonnet 11 324

Sonnet 12 325

Sonnet 36 325

Sonnet 90 326

Sonnet 106 327

Sonnet 121 327

Sonnet 133 328

Sonnet 183 328

Sonnet 364 329

Pinker, Stephen 226

Pizan, Christine de 265, 266

561

Index

Plato 1, 12, 13, 17, 27, 32, 33, 38, 105,

163, 165, 222, 295, 296, 298, 299,

300, 306, 336, 372, 418, 440, 454

Cratylus 27

Symposium 296, 298, 300, 332, 356,

418, 440

Plotinus 298, 299, 300

Pollock, Linda A. 372

Pompey the Great 97, 99

Popper, Karl 16, 429

Princess Bride, The 114

Prudentius 104, 106

Prynne, William 1, 455, 461, 464, 482

Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich 9,

505, 506

“Когдавобъятиямои”(“Kogdav

ob”yatiya moi”) 505

Евгений Онегин (Evgeny Onegin) 9,

505

Борис Годунов (Boris Godunov) 505

Qābbanī,Nizār509–510

Quaglio, Antonio Enzo 321

Quchak, Nahaphet 340, 341

“Hayren 20” 340

“Hayren 65” 341

“Hayren 81” 342

Quinones, Richard J. 106

Quint, David 480

Rabelais, Francois 12

Raby, F.J.E. 101, 105

Radice, Betty 196, 206, 212

Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino)

165

Rashi (Rabbi Solomon the Izakhite)

52, 53, 54, 456, 463

Ray, Chris 48

Raymond VI of Toulouse 221, 223,

230

Raymond V of Toulouse 222

Reddy, William M. 122, 144, 171, 235,

282

Rees, Brinley Roderick 150

Reid, Charles J. 208

Reynolds, Barbara 321

Richard I 220

Richard II

rejection of 1391 petition to restrict

education to the nobility 287

Richard of St. Victor 55

Richman, Gerald 479, 492

Richtmeyer, Eric 24

Ricoeur, Paul 13, 14, 18, 42, 56

Rieger, Angelica 142, 143, 144, 145,

146

Roberts, John 423

Robertson, D.W. 133, 134, 135, 209,

212

Rodríguez de la Cámara, Juan

Triunfo de las Donas 487

Romans, Bietris de

“Na Maria” 139, 141, 142, 144, 145,

146

Rorty, Richard 19, 20

Roscelin of Compiègne 200, 201

Rosenberg, Harold

“The Herd of Independent Minds”

147

Rougemont, Denis de 199, 407, 410

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 6, 33, 151

Rubin, Gayle 377

Ryang, Sonia 495, 496

Ryan, Kiernan 405, 406, 409, 504

Saint Circ, Uc de 146, 176, 308

Salandra, Serafino della 493

Adamo Caduto 492

Salter, Elizabeth 165

Samuel, Irene 475, 477, 480, 498, 499

Sandys, John Edwin 12, 106

Sankovitch, Tilde 137, 155, 157

Santana, Carlos 404

Sappho 140, 141

Sartre, Jean-Paul 23

Saussure, Ferdinand de 25, 26, 28

arbitrary nature of the sign

challenged 27

Sayce, Olive 301, 302

Scève, Maurice 336

“Délie 439” 336

562 Love and its Critics

Schulman, Nicole M. 229

Schwartz, Regina 404

Schwoerer, Lois G. 372

Sedgwick, Eve 22, 377, 386, 502

Segal, M.H. 39

Seneca 293, 473

Sextus Empiricus 25

Shakespeare, William 2, 9, 49, 68, 79,

108, 115, 121, 137, 174, 192, 195,

240, 241, 253, 270, 271, 279, 313,

324, 342, 353, 354, 356, 357, 358,

359, 360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365,

367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 376,

377, 378, 379, 380, 382, 385, 394,

403, 406, 408, 409, 413, 414, 415,

416, 420, 422, 426, 443, 445, 446,

453, 458, 476, 486, 495

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 377,

384, 385, 386, 387, 388, 389, 390,

391, 392, 393, 395, 397, 398

As You Like It 178

Hamlet 80, 359, 372, 376, 443, 458

Henry V 370

King Lear 405, 406, 409, 458, 504

Macbeth 49, 446

Measure for Measure 399, 476

Much Ado About Nothing 403

Othello 369, 377, 416, 473

Richard III 480

Romeo and Juliet 253, 368, 369, 377,

378, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397, 398,

399, 400, 401, 402, 403, 404, 405,

406, 407, 408, 409, 410, 412, 413,

414, 415, 416, 417, 418, 419, 420,

422, 485, 486

Sonnet 1 353, 354, 355

Sonnet 3 355, 356

Sonnet 15 356, 357, 358

Sonnet 18 358, 359

Sonnet 116 359, 360, 361, 362

Sonnet 130 363, 364, 365

Sonnet 138 365, 366, 367

The Tempest 463

Two Gentlemen of Verona 369, 377,

379, 380, 381, 382, 383, 390, 416,

486

Shapiro, Marianne 311

Sharrock, Alison 64, 71, 75, 90

Shaw, George Bernard 377, 459

Shelley, Percy 20, 76, 482

Shotter, David 77

Sichel-Bazin, Rafëu, Carolin Buthke,

and Trudel Meisenburg 193

Sidney, Philip 3, 13, 312, 342, 348,

349, 350, 353, 356, 364, 391

Astrophil and Stella 348, 349, 350,

351, 356, 367, 391

The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia

348

The Defence of Poesie 13, 348

Sidonius 97, 101, 102, 103, 104, 108

Silvestre, Hubert 210

Silvestris, Bernardi 133, 134

De Mundi Universitate 134

Sklenár, Robert 108

Smythe, Barbara 179

Song of Songs 1, 11, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40,

41, 42, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 56, 57,

63, 77, 109, 111, 113, 141, 160, 164,

264, 285, 286, 367, 453, 464, 495

Sontag, Susan 37, 501

Spence, Sarah 170

Spiller, Michael R.G. 301

Spivak, Gayatri 34

Stehling, Thomas 143, 144

Sternberg, Robert 429, 548

Stilling, Roger 371

Stockton, Will 469

Stone, Gregory B. 158, 161, 190, 405

Stone, Lawrence 368, 369, 371, 372,

373, 374, 375, 380, 384, 398, 416

Strabo 13

Strayer, Joseph R. 197, 198, 282, 283

Strouse, A.W. 503

Stubbs, John 432, 435

Sullivan, Ceri 460

563

Index

Swabey, Ffiona 301

Symonds, John Addington 302, 306,

319

Taavon, Modje 398, 511

Tanner, J. Paul 56

Targoff, Ramie 345, 422, 457

Tarrant, Richard 90

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 404

Teskey, Gordon 479, 480, 498, 499

Thibault, John C. 61

Thomason, T. Katharine 441

Thomsett, Michael C. 226

Tillyard, E.M.W. 342

Timaeus of Tauromenium 86

Toews, John 150

Topsfield, L.T. 164, 170, 171, 172, 173,

192

Traub, Valerie 400

trobairitz 137, 139, 142, 160, 164, 186,

190, 242, 279, 402, 420, 426

troubadours 2, 9, 52, 54, 122, 125, 129,

131, 132, 133, 138, 139, 142, 143,

146, 147, 148, 149, 152, 155, 156,

157, 158, 161, 163, 165, 167, 169,

170, 174, 178, 179, 183, 184, 186,

189, 190, 192, 194, 217, 220, 229,

232, 233, 235, 240, 242, 246, 247,

248, 264, 280, 281, 282, 300, 302,

305, 306, 308, 310, 311, 314, 315,

322, 330, 336, 339, 340, 342, 350,

353, 355, 365, 371, 402, 410, 412,

420, 422, 426, 429, 442, 505

Tudela, Guilhem de 224, 225, 228, 230

Tullia d’Aragona

Dialogo della Infinità d’Amore 334

Tyerman, Christopher 227

Vaux-Cernay, Pierre de 225

Vendler, Helen 354, 362, 363, 364

Ventadorn, Bernart de 129, 169, 174,

175, 176, 177, 178, 192, 203, 208,

235, 237, 261, 286, 291, 293, 307,

343

“Can l’erba fresch’e·lh folha par”

175, 177, 178

“Chantars no pot gaire valer” 174

“Non es meravelha s’eu chan” 174

Vickers, Brian 370

Vidal, Peire 179

Virgil 70, 77, 78, 80, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90,

91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 101, 319, 485

The Aeneid 3, 77, 78, 81, 85, 86, 88,

89, 90, 97

Vleeschouwers-Van Melkebeek,

Monique 393

Vogelweide, Walther von der 217,

218, 402

“Under der linden” 217, 218, 219

Vyvyan, John 420

Waldock, A.J.A. 471, 472, 475, 478,

483, 488, 498

Walsingham, Francis 369

Walters, Lori J. 276

Watchtower, The 481

“If Adam was Perfect, How Was It

Possible for Him to Sin?” 481

Watson, Lynette 102

Watson, Robert 442

Weinrich, Lorenz 207

Wetherbee, Winthrop 285

White, Peter 71

Whitgift, John 369

Wilde, Oscar 485, 504

Wilhelm, James J. 192

Wilkinson, Lancelot Patrick 75, 76,

93, 94

Wilmott, John, Earl of Rochester 434

Wilson-Okamura, David Scott 95

Wimsatt, W.K., and M.C. Beardsley

Winkler, John J. 114

Wollock, Jennifer 135, 136

Woodbridge, Linda 380

Woods, Marjorie Curry 160

Wrathall, Mark A. 16

Wyatt, Thomas 343, 344, 345, 346, 348

“Because I have thee still kept from

lies and blame” 346

564 Love and its Critics

“Behold, Love, thy power how she

despiseth” 345

“Such vain thought as wonted to

mislead me” 344

“Whoso list to hunt” 343

Wycliffe, John 10, 287

Yeats, William Butler 161, 411, 412,

424

Zeno of Elea 17, 103

Ziolowski, Jan 199

Zumthor, Paul 152, 154, 155, 158, 159,

160, 161, 176, 190, 405

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