Spenser and Milton's Continental Sources. Gordon Teskey. Spring 2006The purpose of this course is to read the major continental works, chiefly in the Italian epic tradition, that helped to shape Spenser and Milton's ideas of what a modern heroic poem might be like and what it might achieve--and perhaps also what it should not achieve. The very concept of a modern heroic poem was a subject of intense critical debate in the 16th century, and of all the questions raised the most central, after the question of language, is that of the relation of the heroic poem to the traditions and techniques of medieval romance.
The traditions of medieval romance fall into two groups. The first is Carolingian romance, which descends from the Old French Chanson de Roland, includes stories about Charlemagne and his peers, is characterized by Christian (and anti-saracen) idealism, and comes to its fullest development in Italy, in the serio-comic epics of Boiardo and Ariosto. Tasso's epic represents a return in this tradition to Christian idealism, although on a new, non-Carolingian basis: that of the first crusade, under Godfroi de Bouillon.
The second tradition of medieval romance is Arthurian romance, which descends (to go back no farther) from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, and which comes to fruition in the romances of Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, the Middle English Breton lays, and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur. Spenser's Faerie Queene is an effort, not unlike Tasso's, to raise the tone of this tradition from what a contemporary called "open manslaughter and bold bawdry." Milton's early plans for an epic poem, for an Arthuriad, represent a similar, improving response to this tradition. Despite their situating themselves thematically in the Arthurian tradition, Spenser and Milton both studied with care the major works in the Italo-Carolingian tradition: Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato "Orlando in Love," Ariosto's Orlando Furioso "Orlando Gone Erotically Insane," and Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata "Jerusalem Delivered."
Spenser and Milton were interested in these works in large part because Ariosto and Tasso were the objects of intense critical debate over the assimilability of the techniques of medieval romance to the modern heroic poem: rapid and intensely digressive variation of episodes (Ital. varieta), and the introduction of supernatural, improbable, and non-mimetic agencies, such as flying hippogriffs, magic trumpets, enchanted castles and woods, and rings that make the wearer invisible (Ital. maraviglie "marvels").
A secondary aim of the course is to gain some familiarity with the vital cultural phenomenon in the English Renaissance of the translation of continental sources: Sidney, Shakespeare, Spenser, and even Milton, all relied on translations into English that were of such high quality as to be considered literature in their own right. With the exception of Byron, who was saturated in Ariosto and Tasso, the romantics read their Italian epics in English Renaissance translations.
The works to be read are Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, in the excellent, although modern, translation of Charles Ross, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, in the Elizabethan translation of Sir John Harington, Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, in the early Jacobean translation of Edward Fairfax, and, to add one heroic poem on a modern theme--that of the circumnavigation of Africa by Vasco da Gama--Luis de Camoens' Os Lusiadas, "The Lusiads," in Sir Richard Fanshawe's 17th-century translation. If there is time we will read Arthur Yong's translation of Jorge de Montemajor's La Diana.
Texts will be a problem: none of these works, except Orlando Innamorato, is readily available in print at this time. Charles Ross, the translator of Boiardo, has graciously agreed to make his forthcoming edition of Harington available to the class in downloadable form. Harington, Fairfax, and Fanshawe can be accessed and downloaded from online sources, eebo and lion, and can of course be read in the original texts in Houghton. Texts in Widener will be made available on reserve in Child. But the best solution is to search out these books on bookfinder.com and other online sources for used texts. Warning: there are old, paperback editions of Fairfax's Tasso and of Harington's Ariosto, but neither of these is complete. By all means obtain them, but remember that you will have to make up the missing passages elsewhere. An old Penguin paperback translation of Camoes, by Atkinson, is complete and excellent. Get it if you can. But the poem should still be read in Fanshawe's translation.