Abstract
In the third of Pierre de Ronsard’s Sonnets pour Hélène (1578), the poet muses on the name of his beloved, Hélène de Surgères:
Nom, malheur des Troyens, sujet de mon souci,
Ma sage Penelope et mon Helene aussi,
Qui d’un soin amoureux tout le cœur m’envelope:
Nom, qui m’a jusqu’au ciel de la terre enlevé,
Qui eust jamais pensé que j’eusse retrouvé En une mesme Helene une autre Penelope?
(Name, bane of the Trojans, cause of my anguish, my wise Penelope and at the same time my Helen, who envelops my whole heart in an agony of love;
name that has swept me up from earth to heaven, who would ever have thought that I would have encountered in one and the same Helen, a second Penelope?)1
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Notes
Pierre de Ronsard, Oeuvres Complètes, edited by J. Céard et al., 2 vols (Paris, 1993), Vol. I, p. 386 (ll. 9–14);
translation adapted from Pierre de Ronsard, Selected Poems, edited and translated by Malcolm Quainton and Elizabeth Vinestock (Harmondsworth, 2002), p. 41. Where not otherwise indicated translations in this chapter are by the present author.
All references are to Homer, Odyssea, edited by P. Von der Mühll (Berlin, 2010).
Compare Od. 11.436–9, the one other juxtaposition. See Homer, Quae extant omnia, edited by Jean de Sponde, 2 vols (Basle, 1583), Vol. II, p. 327; henceforth, Sponde. For an important analysis of the Helen paradigm in the epic, see Marilyn A. Katz, Penelope’s Renown: Meaning and Indeterminacy in the ‘Odyssey’ (Princeton, NJ, 1991), pp. 183–91 and passim.
Recent readings include Hanna M. Roisman, ‘Penelope’s Indignation’, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 117 (1987), 59–68,
Patricia Marquardt, ‘Penelope ΠΟΛΥΤΡΟΠΟΣ’, American Journal of Philology, 106 (1985), 32–48 (pp. 42–6),
and H. C. Fredricksmeyer, ‘Penelope Polutropos: The Crux at Odyssey 23.218–24’, American Journal of Philology, 118 (1997), 487–97.
As emphasized in Kathleen Morgan, ‘Odyssey 23.218–24: Adultery, Shame, and Marriage’, American Journal of Philology, 112 (1991), 1–3.
G. Chapman, The Odyssey, edited by Allardyce Nicoli (Princeton, NJ, 2000).
On Penelope’s choices, see Sheila Murnaghan, Disguise and Recognition in the ‘Odyssey’ (Princeton, NJ, 1987), pp. 118–47;
Katz, Nancy Felson-Rubin, Regarding Penelope: From Character to Poetics (Princeton, NJ, 1994);
Helene P. Foley, ‘Penelope as Moral Agent’, in The Distaff Side: Representing the Female in Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, edited by Beth Cohen (Oxford, 1995), pp. 93–115;
and Richard Heitman, Taking Her Seriously: Penelope and the Plot of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005). Notably, Murnaghan sees in Penelope ‘the difference between a character’s actions when they are seen as part of a coherent and finished plot and as experienced by that character as events unfold’ (p. 128). For Katz, who positions herself between neoanalysis and the unitarians, ‘the interpretive issue in the poem is constituted by the disjunction between the two conflicting directions of narrative action, and … this discordance should be regarded as meaningful.’ (p. 10).
On Penelope and cunning or mētis, see Ioanna Papadopoulou-Belmehdi, Le Chant de Pénélope (Paris, 1994)
and Barbara Clayton, A Penelopean Poetics: Reweaving the Feminine in Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ (Lanham, MD, 2004), pp. 21–52.
Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae, edited by Colin Austin and S. Douglas Olson (Oxford, 2004), ll. 548–49 and pp. 214–15. On sōphrōn here,
see Helen North, Sophrosyne: Self-Knowledge and Self-Restraint in Greek Literature (Ithaca, NY, 1966), p. 99. The fact that sōphrōn can mean both ‘chaste’ and ‘wise’ (though always the latter in Homer, as noted in ibid. pp. 1–9), may have contributed to the lexicographical phenomenon described below.
See Marie-Madeleine Mactoux, Pénélope: légende et mythe (Paris, 1975), esp. pp. 127–40.
Propertius, Elegiae, edited and translated by G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA, 1990).
See H. Jacobson, Ovid’s ‘Heroides’ (Princeton, NJ, 1974).
Ovid, Heroides, Amores, edited by G. P. Goold and translated by G. Showerman (Cambridge, MA, 1977).
Ovid et al., Amatoria: Heroidum Epistolae. Auli Sabini, epistolae tres [etc.] (Basle, 1541), p. 169; G. Turberville, The Heroycall Epistles of the Learned Poet Publius Ouidius Naso with A. Sabinus Aunsweres ([London], [1567]), p. 149v. On Angelus Sabinus and the Ulysses reply, see P. White, Renaissance Postscripts: Responding to Ovid’s ‘Heroides’ in Sixteenth-Century France (Columbus, OH, 2009), pp. 191–9, 223–9.
Giovanni Boccaccio, ‘De Penelope Ulixis coniuge’, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, Vol. 10: De mulieribus claris, edited and translated by Vittorio Zaccaria (Milan, 1967), pp. 160–5 (p. 160).
Marianne Pade, ‘The Fortuna oí Leontius Pilatus’s Homer. With an Edition of Pier Candido Decembrio’s “Why Homer’s Greek Verses are Rendered in Latin Prose”’, in Classica et Beneventana: Essays Presented to Virginia Brown on the Occasion of her 65th Birthday, edited by F. T. Coulson and A. Cretans (Turnhout, 2008), pp. 149–72 (pp. 149–52).
Giambattista della Porta, La Penelope, tragicomedia (Naples, 1591). On the date of the play, see Louise George Clubb, Giambattista della Porta: Dramatist (Princeton, NJ, 1965), p. 88.
My references are to act and line numbers in Giambattista della Porta, Teatro, Vol. 1: Tragedie, edited by Raffaele Sirri (Naples, 1978), ‘Prologo’ 52–3, 56–7.
The only critical edition of the play is William Gager, The Complete Works, Vol. 2: The Shrovetide Plays, edited and translated by Dana F. Sutton (New York, 1994). References are to line numbers in this edition and translations adapted from those of Sutton. Critical accounts of the play are scarce.
See (the still indispensable) Frederic S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford, 1914), pp. 201–19;
James W. Binns, ‘William Gager’s Meleager and Ulysses Redux’ in The Drama of the Renaissance: Essays for Leicester Bradner, edited by Elmer M. Blistein (Providence, RI, 1970), pp. 27–41;
and Howard B. Norland, Neoclassical Tragedy in Elizabethan England (Newark, DE, 2009), esp. pp. 180–92.
The entries in Liddell, Scott and Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon (LSJ) and Georg Autenrieth, A Homeric Dictionary (New York, 1891) have: ‘περίφρων’ ‘very thoughtful or prudent’; ‘ἐχέφρων’: ‘thoughtful, prudent’ (Autenrieth), ‘sensible, prudent’ (LSJ); ‘πινυτὴ’ ‘prudent, discreet’; ‘κεδνὰ ἰδυῖα’: ‘careful-minded’ (Autenrieth), ‘true-minded’ (LSJ). Many translations have captured the feel or aspects of these words more acutely than these, but this seems not the place to discuss them.
Giovanni Crastoni, ed. [Lexicon graeco-latinum] ([Milan], [before 1478]), sigs Siiv, CC viiv. It persists in further dictionaries based on Crastoni: e.g. Dictionarium grecum copiosissimum (Venice, 1498), sigs i iir, E iiv; and Lexicon Graecolatinum (Paris, 1512), pp. 171, 330. On Greek lexicography in this period, see Paul Botley, Learning Greek in Western Europe, 1396–1529: Grammars, Lexica, and Classroom Texts (Philadelphia, PA, 2010), pp. 61–70, 155–62
and Pascale Hummel, De lingua Graeca: histoire de l’histoire de la langue grecque (Bern, 2007), pp. 526–40, though the latter is not free of errors.
On Penelope’s appearance before the wooers, see, e.g., Katz, pp. 78–93 (including an account of the episode’s critical reception); Murnaghan, pp. 130–3; Felson-Rubin, pp. 28–9; Foley, p. 103; Froma I. Zeitlin, ‘Figuring Fidelity in Homer’s Odyssey’, in The Distaff Side, pp. 117–52, (pp. 138–41); Irene J. F. de Jong, A Narratological Commentary on the ‘Odyssey’ (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 444–51; and Heitman, pp. 43–9.
Zeitlin, p. 122. Other analyses include Chris Emlyn-Jones, ‘The Renunion of Penelope and Odysseus’, Greece and Rome, 31 (1984), 1–18;
Murnaghan, pp. 139–44; Katz, pp. 154–91; Felson-Rubin, pp. 38–9; Heitman, pp. 85–100; and Michelle Zerba, ‘What Penelope Knew: Doubt and Scepticism in the Odyssey’, Classical Quarterly, 59 (2009), 296–316, (pp. 313–16).
The attribute is only used by Homer of Penelope and Euryclea, Odysseus’ old nurse and another pillar of loyalty and right sense in his oikos. Significantly, the narrator also describes Penelope thus as she issues the test (Od. 23.182). It is sometimes somewhat cloudily rendered as ‘careful-minded’ (as in my note above). Of its constituent parts, iduia (‘knowing’) can have a moral rather than simply intellectual quality, and the adjective kednos (whence ‘things that are kedna‘) means ‘originally “careful”, but extends to “good” in general’. (Alfred Heubeck et al., A Commentary on Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, Vol.1: Introduction and Books I-VIII (Oxford, 1988), p. 126;
Euripides, Alcestis, edited by L. P. E. Parker (Oxford, 2007), p. 176.) Translators differ widely in their renditions, with reason.
Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio, Discorsi … intorno al comporre de i romanzi, delle comedie, e delle tragedie (Venice, 1554), p. 225. See Sarah Dewar-Watson, ‘Aristotle and Tragicomedy’, in Early Modem Tragicomedy, edited by Subha Mukherji and Raphael Lyne (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 15–27 and Tanya Pollard, ‘Tragicomedy’, in the forthcoming Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Vol. 2, edited by Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie.
Gager, p. 22. Della Porta added the ‘Prologo’ in 1591, thus inserting La Penelope into the current debate on tragicomedy sparked by the publication of Battista Guarini’s Il pastor fido in December 1589. In 1591, Thomas Wolfe printed Guarini’s play for Giacopo Castelvetro, thereby bringing the debate to England. In the same year, the same pair brought out a book on cryptography by della Porta; this makes them the likeliest conduit to England for the latter’s ‘tragicomedia’ as well. See Clubb, pp. 88–101 and Soko Tornita, A Bibliographical Catalogue of Italian Books Printed in England, 1558–1603 (Farnham, 2009), pp. 334–6 (Items 195, 196).
For a discussion of Gager’s tragicomic theory without any reference to della Porta, see Marvin T. Herrick, Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France, and England (Urbana, IL, 1962), pp. 221–4.
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Demetriou, T. (2015). Periphrōn Penelope and her Early Modern Translations. In: Demetriou, T., Tomlinson, R. (eds) The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500–1660. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401496_6
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