Abstract
The ancient Greeks and Romans did not rhyme; early modern Europeans did. The sources of rhyme were non- European, Asian, or African, and this caused early modern writers, such as Thomas Campion and Gian Giorgio Trissino, to either try to write without rhyme to recapture classical purities, or, such as Samuel Daniel, try to vindicate barbarism in arguing for rhyme. This chapter argues that, though Trissino sought to go back to the classics as a way of outflanking medieval barbarism, Davnenat and Corneille sought to use rhyme in chronicling an intermediate temporality which valued barbarian memory. Though their works on the subject were not successful in their own times, these writers still valiantly strove to reveal the pertinence of barbarian material to modern European manners.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th edn, ed. Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Roazer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 856.
Dag Norberg, An Introduction to the Study of Medieval Latin Versification, tr. Grant C. Roti and J. Shubly (Washington; Catholic University of America Press, 2004), p. 32.
Charlotte Sussman, Eighteenth Century English Literature (London: Polity, 2011), p. 214.
Nadia Altschul, Geographies of Philological Knowledge: Postcoloniality and the Transatlantic National Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 191. Sarmiento indeed explicitly linked the gaucho culture he feared with the Arab.
See Anna Hiller, “National Narrative as Wilderness: An Ecocritical Interpretation of Civilizacion y barbarie in Modern Argentine Literature,” Ords for a Small Planet, ed. Nanette Norris (Lanham: Lexington Books), p. 163.
Hyun Jun Kim, The Huns, Rome, and the Birth of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Despite Kaiser Wilhelm II’s bombastic and bellicose assertion of their ties with Germany, scholars always knew the Huns’s Asian aspects, but Kim emphasizes them as a challenge to Eurocentric accounts of history.
Neil Rhodes, Shakespeare and the Origins of English (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 138, speaks of Daniel knowing “the Gothic origins of rhyme” which is misleading as, though we know rhyme came from (among other places; not, as Altschul warns, to preclude Arab or African origins) the steppe cultures of Eastern Europe and west Central Asia, we cannot pinpoint its ethnicity; Daniel did not, and no scholarship in the time since his treatise has done so authoritatively.
See Henry Lanz, The Physical Basis of Rime. An Essay on the Aesthetics of Sound (Stanford University Press; London: Humphrey Milford, 1931). Lanz was a Russian émigré—a Russian formalist with a small f, although not part of the Formalist school—whose background opened him to non-Latin influences on European rhyme without tracing them to the Germanic.
The text of Daniel’s Defence is available at Risa S. Bear’s Renascence Editions’ website, http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/ryme.html, accessed August 9, 2013. A print version can be found here
Samuel Daniel, Selected Poetry and a Defence of Rhyme, ed. Geoffrey G. Hiller and Peter J. Groves (Glendale Heights: Pegasus Press, 1998).
Mary Floyd Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 96.
James D. Ryan, “Toleration Denied: Armenia between East and West in the Era of the Crusades,” Tolerance and Intolerance: Social Conflict in the Age of the Crusades, ed. Michael Gervers and James M. Powell (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), p. 58.
Samuel Daniel, http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/ryme.html, accessed 9 August 2013.
Further to this point, see Alessandro Corrieri, Rivisitazioni cavalleresche ne “L’Italia liberata da’ Gothi” di Giangiorgio Trissino (Schifanoia), pp. 34–35, 183–192.
Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 141.
Peter Marinelli, “Narrative Poetry,” The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed. Peter Brand and Lino Pertile (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 242.
Ibid.
Giuseppe Faggin, “Giangiorgio Trissino e l’impero,” in L’Italia del Trissino, in Convegno di studi su Giangiorgio Trissino, Vicenza 31 marzo—1 aprile 1979 (Odeo del Teatro Olimpico, a c. di Neri Pozza, Vicenza, Accademia olimpica, 1980), pp. 23–38, argues that Trissino at times assumed a sycophantic attitude to the Hapsburg-ruled Holy Roman Empire which belied his claims to Italian patriotism.
Joaquín Martínez Pizarro, Writing Ravenna: The Liber Pontificalis of Andreas Agnellus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 15.
J. B. Hainsworth, The Idea of Epic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 142.
Some have said the architect took his adopted name from the epic; but since the first books were published in 1547, it is likelier Trissino bestowed the nickname on the man born Andrea di Piero in a personal sense earlier and then applied it to the epic.
Christopher Thacker, The History of Gardens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 81.
On Venantius Fortunatus see Michael Roberts, The Humblest Sparrow: The Poetry of Venantius Fortunatus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009).
David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 34.
G. Carducci, Odi Barbare (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1959).
T. Gwynfor Griffith, “Theory and Practice in the Writings of Giangiorgio Trissino,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 69:9 (1986), p. 165.
Anthony Powell, Some Poets, Painters, and a Reference for Mellors (London: Timewell, 2005), p. 30.
Paul Salzman, “Royalist Epic and Romance,” The Cambridge Companion to the Writing of the English Revolution, ed. N. H. Keeble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 318.
Carel de Sainte-Garde’s 1666 Charle Martel, ou les Sarrasins Chassez de France: Poème Heroïque;, based on the deeds of Charles Martel in stopping the Arab invasion of France in the eighth century, was an exception in pertaining to a historical figure; however, it was roundly chastised, including by Boileau
David F. Gladish, ed. Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 202.
George Bouloukas, “How the Novel Became Middle Class: A History of Histories of the Novel,” Novel, 42:2 (2009), pp. 245–252.
3Killis Campbell, “The Source of Davenant’s Albovine,” Journal of Germanic Philology, 4 (1902), pp. 20–24. Campbell—Texan, and Democrat—shows, in apposition to the Indiana Republican Foulke, the wide, though not majority, appeal of this material in the early 1900s.
Gerard Langbaine, http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/BiographyRecord. php?action=GET&bioid=33269, accessed 12 August 2013.
Gladish, Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert, p. xii
John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Richard Barber (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1962), p. 91.
Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), p. 158.
Thomas Rymer, Critical Works, ed. Curt Amo Zimansky (Westport: Greenwood, 1971), p. 6.
Gladish, Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert, p. 234.
Ibid., p. 10.
Aubrey, Brief Lives, p. 92.
Mary Edmond, O Rare Sir William Davenant: Poet Laureate, Playwright Civil War General, Restoration Theatre Manager (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), pp. 129, 173.
W. H. Lewis, The Splendid Century: France in the Age of Louis XIV (Garden City: Doubleday, 1957), p. 274.
Charles Edwin Vaughan sees some chance of Albovine being mentioned by Corneille’s mode of heroic drama, but makes no link between Gondibert and Corneille’s later play drawing on the same source.See Vaughan, English Literary Criticism (London: Blaickie, 1906), p. xxxvii.
Gladish, Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert, p. xii.
Arthur C. Kirsch, “Dryden, Corneille, and the Heroic Play,” Modern Philology, 59:4 (May, 1962), pp. 248–264.
http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/BiographyRecord, accessed 17 July 2013. php?action=GET&bioid=33274.
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, tr. Judie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 137.
The Franks—as is pointed out in the Pharamond section of Shakespeare’s Henry V—had the Merovingians; the Ostrogoth had the Amals, the Visigoths had—for a time—the Balths, and then Reccared’s descendants; the Lombards had mostly whoever was in a position to prevail, one of the reasons Charlemagne was accepted so readily as their king.
Michael J. C. Echuero, “Tanistry, the ‘Due of Birth’ and Macbeth’s Sin,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 23:4 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 444–450.
Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, tr. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 170.
Gladish, Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert, p. 60.
Ibid
Anthony Welch, The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 129.
E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 175.
Ibid., p. 17.
Ibid., p. 132.
Nicolas Boileau, L’Art Poétique (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), p. 23.
See Edmond, O Rare Sir William Davenant, p. 104.
Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism 1628–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 318.
59 Gladish, Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert, p. 68.
Chris Wickham, Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society, 400-1000, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981, p. 146.
Barbara M. Kreutz, Before the Normans: Southern Italy in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
Edmond, O Rare Sir William Davenant, p. 127.
Welch, The Renaissance Epic, p. 131
Kristoffer Neville, “Gothicism and Early Modern Historical Ethnography,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 70:2 (April, 2009), p. 218.
T. S. Eliot, “Andrew Marvell,” Web. http://www.usask.ca/english/prufrock/ marv.htm, accessed 10 August 2013.
Ted Miller, “The Two Deaths of Lady Macduff: Antimetaphysics, Violence, and William Davenant’s Restoration Revision of Macbeth,” Political Theory, 36:6 (December 2008), pp. 856–882.
Kenneth Robert Orwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), p. 54.
In the opera the son is called simply Flavio.
Pierre Corneille, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Fermin Didot, 1843), p. 677.
Kevin Hart, Blanchot and the Dark Gaze (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 62.
Corneille, Oeuvres Complètes, p. 696.
Roland Barthes, On Racine, tr. Richard Howard (New York: PAJ Press, 1983), p. 161.
Bernard S. Bachrach, Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 42.
Barthes, On Racine.
Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 59.
Susan Read Baker, Dissonant Harmonies: Drama and Ideology in Five Neglected Plays by Pierre Corneille (Tubingen: Günter Narr, 1990), p. 80. Haym’s libretto for Handel’s opera solved this issue by using the more sonorous “Bertarido.”
Steven Craig, “Shakespeare among the Goths,” Gothic Shakespeare, ed. John Drakakis and Dale Townshend (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 42–59.
A. Donald Sellstrom, Corneille, Tasso, and Modern Poetics (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1986), p. 63.
Georges Poulet, Études sur le temps humain (Paris: Plon, 1949).
See Sean Gaston, Derrida and Disinterest (New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 98.
Alison Finch, French Literature: A Cultural History (Malden: Wiley, 2013), p. 29.
See Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, tr. Philip Thody (London: Routledge, 1964), pp. 315, 336.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 166.
Corneille, Oeuvres Complètes, p. 701. The Handel aria for Garibaldo, “Tirannia gli diede il regno,” is roughly equivalent to the Corneille monologue.
Edward W. Said, “Secular Criticism,” Critical Theory Since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 1986), pp. 605–622
Pierre Corneille, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Fermin Didot, 1843), p. 702.
It could be said that Davenant was trying to fulfill this unrealized potential in Albovine.
Copyright information
© 2013 Nicholas Birns
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Birns, N. (2013). Rhyme, Barbarism, and Manners from Trissino to Corneille. In: Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364562_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364562_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47338-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-36456-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)