Abstract
This chapter explores the tensions between Renaissance literary theories that downplay the appeal of evil and the widespread exploitation of that appeal in literary practice. It analyzes the literary philosophy and epic poetry of Philip Sidney, Torquato Tasso, and Edmund Spenser in the context of the religious writings of Saint Augustine. Drawing on Augustine’s aestheticization of evil as analogous to the shadows in a chiaroscuro painting, writers like Tasso find a pleasurable “dreadful harmony” in representations of the monstrous and infernal. Lastly, the chapter analyzes Spenser’s aesthetics of filth in The Faerie Queene book 1 and of cruelty and deception in book 2. In the process, it explores the powers and limits of sinister aesthetics to encourage engagement with things that ought to be repugnant.
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Notes
- 1.
Italian Renaissance literary theorists other than Tasso lie outside the chapter’s primary focus; therefore, my discussion of them relies on excerpts and paraphrases from Bernard Weinberg’s magisterial two-volume work, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (1961).
- 2.
Horace uses a few terms for this dichotomy: “Poets aim either to benefit [prodesse], or to amuse [delectare], or to utter words at once both pleasing and helpful [iucunda et idonea] to life.… He has won every vote who has blended profit and pleasure [miscuit utile dulci], at once delighting and instructing the reader” (pages 478–479, lines 333–334, 343–344).
- 3.
Translating Gioseppe Malatesta, Della nuova poesia (1589), page 189.
- 4.
Translating Scipione Ammirato, Il Dedalione overo del poeta dialogo (1560), published in Opuscoli (1642) volume 3, page 377. This Christian didactic imperative found classical support in Plato’s Republic, which emphasizes the moral power—and dangers—of poetry (see esp. book 3, Stephanus number 398a-b, as well as 2.377b-c and 3.392a-b).
- 5.
Lodovico Ricchieri (1516), for example, sees the beauty of poetry as a poison and taking pleasure in it as a “sacrifice to the demons.” The only “antidote” is allegorical moralizing by “those who are skilled in philosophy” (Weinberg 259).
- 6.
Sidney here adapts Lucretius’s comparison of poetry to a honeyed glass of medicine (De Rerum Naturae book 4, lines 11–22).
- 7.
See Diotima’s description of love in Plato’s Symposium (esp. Stephanus numbers 210a-212a). However, book 10 of the Republic suggests a disjunction between poetry and truth (e.g., 600e). In the Renaissance, Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (1528), translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby as The Courtyer (1561), was one of the most influential articulations of the idea that beauty is a natural emanation of goodness:
beawtie commeth of God, and is like a circle, the goodnesse wherof is the Centre. And therefore, as there can be no circle without a centre, no more can beawty be without goodnesse. Wherupon doeth verie sildome an ill soule dwell in a beawtifull bodye. And therefore is the outwarde beawtie a true signe of the inwarde goodnes, and in bodies thys comelynesse is imprynted more and lesse (as it were) for a marke of the soule, whereby she is outwardlye knowen. (book 4, signature Tt.4v, Early English Books Online image 180)
Castiglione’s argument in this section imitates Diotima’s (see Gordon Braden’s Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance [1999], 99). His comments about comely bodies reflect attitudes explored in Shakespeare’s Richard III.
- 8.
For example, Italian critic Lucio Olimpio Giraldi’s formulation verges on tautology: “Terence’s intention was to show the ugliness [brutezza] of foul [sozze] things so that men would abstain from them” (Weinberg 289, translating Ragionamento in difesa di Terentio [1566], 65).
- 9.
Quotations from Gosson are cited by signature and page numbers from Arthur F. Kinney’s Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson (1974).
- 10.
Although Protestantism intensified this pessimism, Italian critics made similar arguments. See, for example, Weinberg 327–328, translating Jacopo Mazzoni, Della difesa della Comedia di Dante (1587), 22.
- 11.
Citations of the Poetics are by Bekker number and the page numbers of Stephen Halliwell’s facing-page translation (Loeb Classical Library, 1995).
- 12.
The anxiety and ambivalence generated by the conflicts between Platonic, Aristotelian, and Christian theories of aesthetic pleasure are evident in Benedetto Grasso’s Oratione contra gli Terentiani (1566), which says that when a painting depicts “lascivious acts, obscene objects, dirty and ugly actions, it moves in us an honest blushing and arouses an unwillingness to look at them. And even if we do look at them, it is rather because we are moved by the artifice of the painter than by the beauty or the novelty of the painting” (Weinberg 287–288, translating Grasso 31). Grasso makes the Platonic claim that representations of evil are naturally repulsive, but he immediately revises it (almost as if caught in the act of voyeurism) with the Aristotelian acknowledgment that we can appreciate them aesthetically. The habitual slippage between moral judgments (“lascivious acts”) and aesthetic ones (“ugly actions”) is also quite clear.
- 13.
Similarly, several Italian critics reproduce Aristotle’s claim without fully explicating or assimilating it. Lodovico Ricchieri endorses an Aristotelian pleasure in ugliness (see Weinberg 368, translating Lectionum antiquarum libri XXX [1516], 160), despite his overall suspicion of even conventional pleasures (Weinberg 259). Francesco Robortello’s In librum Aristotelis de arte poetica explicationes (1548) argues for the pleasure of terrible things while also arguing that vice is naturally repellent (Weinberg 388–390).
- 14.
English quotations from the Confessions are from Henry Chadwick’s translation (Oxford, 1991). Latin quotations are from James J. O’Donnell’s edition (Oxford, 1992). Both are cited by book, chapter, and paragraph numbers.
- 15.
See also The City of God book 12, chapter 8.
- 16.
For Renaissance concerns about the potential masochism of the tragic audience, see Weinberg 164 (translating Tractatus de Tragoedia [c. 1561], Perugia, Bibl. com., MS 985 [M.8], fol. 96v) and Stephen Gosson’s condemnation of tragedy, quoted above (Playes Confuted C5v-C6, Kinney 161).
- 17.
A bit later, Augustine revises this evaluation, but not his own motivations: “The fruit was beautiful, but it was not that which my miserable soul coveted” (2.6.12).
- 18.
This fascination with filth recurs in Spenser, and the metaphor of spices recurs in Tasso. Here, Augustine specifically compares sin to the spicy flavor of cinnamon.
- 19.
The word Chadwick translates as “season” is “condit,” from condio, the verb form of condimentum. This echo of book 2’s language suggests the importance of the evil-as-spice metaphor to Augustine.
- 20.
The City of God is cited by book, chapter, and page number. English translations (and, unless noted otherwise, page numbers) are from R. W. Dyson’s edition, The City of God against the Pagans (Cambridge University Press, 1998). For the Latin text, see De Civitate Dei, edited by B. Dombart (B. G. Teubner, 1877), in which this passage occurs on page 493. I want to credit Henry Chadwick’s note to Confessions 5.2.2 for highlighting this image and describing it as a “chiaroscuro,” a term that is central to the argument of this book. Chiaroscuro and related techniques for highlighting the light and dark elements in a picture were important features of Italian Renaissance painting, but the first English usage cited in the OED is post-Miltonic: William Aglionby’s Painting illustrated in three Diallogues (1686), where it refers either to paintings that only use black and white (OED 1a) or, more relevantly, to “the disposing of the Lights and Shadows Skilfully” (OED 2a). I use the term to refer to an aesthetic that relies on the contrast between light and dark, and by implication good and evil.
- 21.
See also Augustine’s On Order [De Ordine], which asserts that the “perennial disorder” of a misspent life is “inserted into the order of things by divine providence” (book 2, chapter 4, paragraph 11). This beautiful order can encompass “a savage and terrible public executioner,” prostitutes, gory cockfights, and “the shape of some animal organs” (2.4.12; see also 1.8.25). The treatise repeatedly links evil to literary aesthetics: “This clashing of contraries, which we love so much in rhetoric, gives body to the overall beauty of the universe” (1.7.18). Like “grammatical errors and foreign words” (“Soloecismos et barbarismos”), sin and ugliness taste bitter, fetid, and rancid (“acre, putidum, rancidum”), but employed in the proper context they are as desirable as the sweetest spices (“suavissima condimenta,” 2.4.13). Tasso also discusses the possibility of “barbaric” words becoming appealing; see below.
- 22.
Judith Kates’s Tasso and Milton: The Problem of Christian Epic (1983) calls Tasso “both a creator of original poetry in the epic form and a theorist equal to anyone else writing in the century” (31). She notes that Milton’s The Reason of Church-Government unequivocally “ranks Tasso with Virgil and Homer” as a model for epic (125).
- 23.
Tasso revised both his epic (as Gerusalemme conquistata, 1593) and his Discorsi (as Discorsi del poema eroico, 1594). Critics such as Kates have generally seen these revisions as more aesthetically and morally orthodox (21). I focus on the earlier versions for a few reasons. As Ralph Nash observes in his introduction to Jerusalem Delivered, the Liberata proved more successful and influential than the Conquistata (ix), and Lawrence F. Rhu defends the earlier Discorsi as more relevant to an analysis of Gerusalemme liberata, based on their probable dates of composition (8). Lastly, I am concerned with the range of ideas and practices available to Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and their contemporaries; therefore, Tasso’s demonstration of the potential of the sinister is more important than his later attempts to limit or condemn this potential.
- 24.
Tasso mentions moral instruction as an afterthought and does not make it a responsibility of the poet qua poet (see Rhu 104–105), although his priorities change significantly in the revised Discorsi (see Kates 21). For the Italian text of the Discorsi, see Angelo Solerti’s 1901 edition.
- 25.
English quotations of Gerusalemme liberata are from Nash’s 1987 prose translation, Jerusalem Delivered. Italian quotations are from Bortolo Tommaso Sozzi’s 1964 edition. Both are cited by canto and stanza.
- 26.
Elsewhere, the Liberata expresses concern about the deceitfulness of “ornamented fabling” (5.7) and the dangers of “shadowing the truth with evil art” (5.24).
- 27.
For example, Tasso’s Discorsi, following Aristotle’s Poetics, emphasize the distinction between the effects produced by epic and tragedy, arguing that terror and pity are fundamental to tragedy but “decorative” in epic (Rhu 107–108).
- 28.
The word Rhu translates as “spices” is sapori, which Solerti’s Italian edition of the Discorsi glosses as “salse; condimenti” (9). Elsewhere, the Discorsi explicitly include representations of evil in the category of the marvelous. This conception of marvels (including demonic ones) as a seasoning recalls Augustine’s view of sin as a condimentum.
- 29.
Although distinctly Christian, the infernal aesthetic has its roots in classical literature, as does the anxiety about its poetic uses. For example, Plato’s Republic warns against poems that encourage “belief in the underworld and its horrors” (3.386b). He quotes several Homeric passages that exemplify the horrors of Hades, culminating in a spooky simile from the Odyssey, book 24, lines 6–9: “As in dark corners of mysterious caves/The squeaking bats take flight…So, shrilly crying, did these souls depart” (Republic 3.387a). Socrates explicitly admits that these passages are engaging: “Not that they lack poetic merit, or that they don’t give pleasure to most people. They do” (3.387b). In fact, they are so engaging that they may have dangerous effects on those being trained to defend the republic: “So we must discard all the weird and terrifying language used about the underworld. No more wailing Cocytus, or hateful Styx, or food for worms, or mouldering corpses, or any other language of the kind which makes all who hear it shudder. It may be fine in some other context, but when it comes to our guardians, we are worried that this shuddering may make them too soft and impressionable for our needs” (3.387b-c). This unusually extensive and vivid list of examples in effect promulgates the very sinister representations that it rejects.
- 30.
Renaissance critics often cited Plato’s Republic, which famously banishes poets; it links variety to sickness, evil, and distance from the divine unity, but also to the most exalted, praiseworthy, and pleasurable kind of poetry (3.397a-398b, 3.404d-e). Weinberg lists numerous praises of variety by Italian critics (see his index entry for “Variety,” 1183), but also some concerns, particularly about its capacity to encompass evil (see Weinberg 644 and also 222, 718). Desiderius Erasmus’s De Copia (“On Copia of Words and Ideas,” 1512) is one of the more influential Renaissance texts promoting variety. George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy (1589) makes variety central to poetic excellence (222, 333).
- 31.
Tasso’s arguments are part of a larger debate about “structural unity” versus “variety, multiplicity, diversity, discontinuity” in the structure of epic plots (Weinberg 447). While Tasso’s own epic was the preeminent Renaissance example of a neoclassical, unified plot, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso was the model of a romance epic with multiple plots (Weinberg 651–652). By this standard, Spenser’s Faerie Queene is structured more like Ariosto’s epic, and Milton’s Paradise Lost more closely resembles Tasso’s.
- 32.
The original Chimera of Greek mythology was a fire-breathing, three-headed combination of lion, goat, and serpent, killed by the hero Bellerophon riding the winged horse Pegasus. This study uses “chimera” to mean any creature, but especially “A grotesque monster,” that is “formed of the parts of various animals”—an extension of OED sense 2. The vast majority of chimeras are sinister; Pegasus is one notable exception.
- 33.
For the Latin and English (translated by H. Rushton Fairclough), see Horace’s Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica (Loeb Classical Library, 1978).
- 34.
The original Italian verse emphasizes the passage’s musicality: “la pioggia a i gridi, a i venti, a i tuon s’accorda/d’orribile armonia che ’l mondo assorda.” The phrase “orribile armonia” is not unique to Tasso. Albert Ascoli discusses Ariosto’s use of it and the related concept of concordia discors in his 1987 study, Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony (e.g., 6). Ascoli also connects the chimera to concordia discors, seeing Pegasus and the Chimera as good and evil versions of the poetic imagination, discordant opposites that are “yoked together” in Ariosto’s hippogryph (251).
- 35.
See Horace, Epistles book 1, epistle 12, line 19, which associates “concordia discors” with the Greek philosopher Empedocles. Modern scholars also use discordia concors, following the formulation in Samuel Johnson’s life of Cowley (Lives of the English Poets [1783] volume 1, page 20). For Johnson and others, discordia concors is not necessarily harmonious. See also Melissa Wanamaker’s Discordia Concors: The Wit of Metaphysical Poetry (1975) and James Biester’s Lyric Wonder: Rhetoric and Wit in Renaissance English Poetry (1997).
- 36.
Kates also notes Tasso’s “distinction between ‘simple’ and ‘composite’ unity” (33). Tasso himself takes pains to distinguish between “a great variety of incidents in many separate actions,” which he condemns, from “similar variety in one single action,” which represents the apex of the poet’s art (Rhu 131).
- 37.
Tasso also refers to variety uneasily as a spice, recalling his earlier treatment of the marvelous and Augustine’s metaphor for sin: “Perhaps this variety was not so necessary in Virgil’s and Homer’s time, since the tastes of men of that epoch were not so jaded.… In our times, it is especially necessary; and Trissino, therefore, needed to season his poem with the spice of this variety so that delicate tastes would not shun it” (Rhu 130).
- 38.
Maren-Sofie Røstvig’s Configurations: A Topomorphical Approach to Renaissance Poetry (1994) also links Augustine, Tasso, Spenser, and Milton and argues that “To the Renaissance, cosmic and poetic unity were of the same kind” (4). For Tasso’s Augustinian views on the aesthetic of unity and the analogy between poetic and divine creation, see Røstvig 204.
- 39.
Faced with this contradiction, modern Spenser criticism has given more weight to Sidney’s aversion therapy than his delightful monsters. A. C. Hamilton’s general introduction to The Faerie Queene (Longman, 2001) endorses Ben Jonson’s observation that Spenser’s method was to render vice hateful (5). In Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (1983), Maureen Quilligan makes a similar point about Errour, but her language exploits the very attraction to the monstrous that her discursive argument rejects, describing with compelling vividness the “moiling, sucking creatures” that Errour vomits and devours (82). This rhetorical practice undermines her claim that “It is easy (because more comfortable) to forget the peculiarly slimy details of Errour’s portrait” (80).
- 40.
Passages from The Faerie Queene proper are cited by book, canto, and stanza number.
- 41.
For example, Sharon Achinstein’s Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (1994) examines how “writers like Milton composed their audiences” (4).
- 42.
This poetics of excess is one point where the sinister overlaps with Bakhtin’s grotesque (see Bakhtin 303). Spenser personifies a kind of “Excesse” as a wicked but beautiful woman with a cup of wine (2.12.55–57).
- 43.
Spenser explicitly links amazement and wonder as responses to the witch Duessa’s true, monstrous form (1.8.49), and he alludes to the delight that typically accompanies wonder in Guyon’s attempts to resist it (2.12.53). Biester’s Lyric Wonder provides an in-depth study of the significance of wonder, astonishment, amazement, and the marvelous. Andrew Wadoski’s 2014 article, “Spenser, Tasso, and the Ethics of Allegory,” applies Biester’s views on wonder to the Bower of Bliss (379).
- 44.
This description of Duessa imitates Orlando furioso canto 7, stanzas 72–73, where the seemingly beautiful witch Alcina is revealed to be an ugly old woman. Spenser’s version places more vivid emphasis on the unclean exhalations and bodily fluids that Duessa exudes and makes her a chimera, adorned with various animal parts.
- 45.
See also Susan Carter’s “Duessa, Spenser’s Loathly Lady” (2005), which argues that “Spenser’s Faerie Queene is instantly pleasurable because of its extremes of imagery” and praises the “colourful, titillating” potential of diseased hags but then describes Duessa as “surprisingly repulsive” (9, 10).
- 46.
The anti-blazon occupies an interesting liminal space between poetic engagement and disgust. An anti-blazon can be sinister insofar as it embodies poetic conventions for representing something we are not supposed to like. On the other hand, the anti-blazon’s tight oppositional relationship to the normative blazon could potentially disrupt this alternative aesthetic. To the extent that a given anti-blazon insists on its inversion and violation of erotic imagery rather than fostering a connoisseurship of feminine ugliness, it would tend to be repugnant and/or comical. However, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”), arguably the most famous anti-blazon, is not primarily disgusting, comical, or sinister. An example that may perhaps generate true aversion is John Donne’s Elegy 8, “The Comparison,” because it systematically alternates between the beauty of the speaker’s mistress and the hideousness of the addressee’s beloved. Readers wishing to enjoy both descriptions would have to rapidly and repeatedly switch between mutually incompatible aesthetic frameworks.
- 47.
Sidney’s Defence describes “the abominable tyrant Alexander Pheraeus…who without all pity had murdered infinite numbers” but who wept an “abundance of tears” while watching a tragedy (230).
- 48.
As Carter observes, “To some extent, all womankind is implicated in this portrait,” which she describes as “a moment of misogynist indulgence” (10). Duessa and the vast menagerie of monstrous females in Spenser certainly reflect a variety of misogynist preoccupations that have important implications for Spenserian and early modern views of gender. However, the Duessa episode also potentially allows an uncomfortable empathy with these signs of human mortality and vulnerability.
- 49.
This perverse use of “dight” has its own entry in the OED (verb, III.10.d), although its earliest exemplar is from 1632. Definition 10 is “To clothe, dress, array, deck, adorn” and sub-definition d is “ironically. To dirty, befoul.” This usage once again suggests the aestheticization of filth.
- 50.
Much of The Faerie Queene 2.12, which details Guyon’s voyage to the Bower and his defeat of Acrasia, is inspired by Gerusalemme liberata cantos 15–16, where the seductive witch is named Armida.
- 51.
In Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt rightly debunks the notion of the Bower’s deceptiveness: “I believe that one easily perceives that danger from the beginning and that much of the power of the episode derives precisely from the fact that his perception has little or no effect on the Bower’s continued sensual power.” Although Greenblatt conceives of this sensual power largely in terms of normative beauty, he does note the way Spenser insinuates words such as “sin” and “crime” into descriptions of the Bower’s beauties without reducing their attractiveness (172).
- 52.
Harry Berger makes a similar claim in The Allegorical Temper (1957): “the narrator, absorbed in esthetics, forgets about ethics” (223).
- 53.
Evil also enables (and thereby potentially flavors) the episode’s more conventional erotic appeals. Ogling a chaste female is not only a sinful indulgence in the viewer, it is also potentially damaging to the woman’s honor (see 3.1.65). In contrast, the women of the Bower encourage voyeurism and, having no virtue to lose, cannot be injured by it.
- 54.
Paul Alpers’s discussion of the Bower of Bliss in The Spenser Encyclopedia (1990) addresses the critical history of the “felt disparity or conflict between moral purpose in The Faerie Queene and whatever most fills and pleases the imagination.” While opposing “the readiness of nineteenth-century writers to detach Spenser’s visions and representations from the moral realm,” Alpers insists that “Early imitations and citations show that for Spenser’s contemporaries, too, details of the Bower could provide aesthetic pleasure unqualified by moral reservation” (105).
- 55.
See Paul Zajac’s “Reading through the Fog: Perception, the Passions, and Poetry in Spenser’s Bower of Bliss” (2013), which argues that “While the epic poet strives to differentiate his own art from Acrasia’s,…the two artistic methods lie uncomfortably close to each other” (237).
- 56.
In “Boy Toys and Liquid Joys: Pleasure and Power in the Bower of Bliss” (2009), Joseph Campana argues that the violence of Guyon’s action represents a critique of temperance (467). Zajac 231–232 summarizes much of the critical debate as of 2013, including the perceived contrast between poetry and morality in the episode. Wadoski sees the unpleasantness of the Bower’s destruction as a rebuke to Tasso’s conception of moral allegory (366).
- 57.
There is some evidence that Guyon’s reaction is actually intemperate, and therefore subject to criticism even in the strictest moral terms that book 2 lays out. Phrases like “rigour pittilesse” and “the tempest of his wrathfulnesse” (2.12.83) imply an excessively cold unwillingness to compromise or an excessively hot outburst of emotion. But even if Guyon acted in a temperate manner, the results of his action would still be troubling.
- 58.
Spenser aestheticizes the cruelty of erotic desire not only in the Bower of Bliss but also in the Masque of Cupid (3.12.1–26), where the violence inherent in Petrarchan love rhetoric is brutally literalized and presented as a theatrical spectacle.
- 59.
A. J. A. Waldock’s Paradise Lost and Its Critics (1947) is one of the seminal works to claim that the corrective voice of Milton’s narrator does not do justice to the demonic speeches on which it comments (77–81). For more, see Chapter 5.
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Slotkin, J.E. (2017). “Dreadful Harmony”: The Poetics of Evil in Sidney, Tasso, and Spenser. In: Sinister Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52797-0_2
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