Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance, The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia (first published in 1590, but which had been circulating in manuscript form for a few years) gave rise to multiple imitations ...and continuations in seventeenth-century Britain, because of its popularity and of the author’s untimely death, which left the narrative incomplete, ending as it does on an unfinished sentence. Three of these continuations (by Sir William Alexander in 1616, Richard Bellings in 1621, and James Jouhnstoun in 1638) were published in new editions of Arcadia. These three texts prove how much the material specificities of Sidney’s romance, namely its episodic structure, fragmented composition, and double mode of publication, both in manuscript and in print, generated these imitations and determined their form. They also illustrate the complex genesis of authorship in early modern England, as these authors were trapped between modesty and self-affirmation.
In The Taming of the Shrew, Katherina, the “shrew” of the title, is immediately and unsurprisingly described as choleric. Her suitor and later, husband, Petruccio accordingly attempts to subdue the ...excessive humour in her body by mitigating it with the complementary humour of melancholy. He thus tries to reach a hypothetical balance of humours which, by restoring Katherina’s good health, would also make her return within the bounds of society as an obedient wife. The taming techniques Petruccio implements are not only inspired by falconry manuals, but also resemble some of the treatments suggested in the medical treatises of the time, such as the favouring or avoiding of certain types of food, which were thought to have either beneficial or detrimental effects on the humours. In IV. 3, Petruccio repeatedly offers and withdraws food and clothes from Katherina, using the most physical and immediate of the five senses, i.e. taste and touch, to manipulate her humours and force her into submission. Yet Katherina’s final speech, which extols the virtues of the submissive housewife, calls the efficacy of such methods into question while revealing the circulation of the humours within the play.
Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621) represents curiosity in various forms. First, the characters manifest a curiosity which appears as a desire for knowledge that can never ...be fully satisfied. Curiosities also appear in the form of elaborate monuments which Wroth takes pains to describe. It is actually the characters’ curiosity which leads them to discover the monumental curiosities they so admire. Curiosity seems to be valued in the romance via these edifices which display architectural sophistication and a definite taste for artistry. However, these monuments are soon revealed to be enchantments in which the characters are trapped against their will and must suffer hallucinations and other psychological tortures. The protagonists’ imprisonment and torments can be seen as a form of punishment, as if their curiosity had to be chastised or even expiated through the violent melancholy they feel once inside. Melancholy thus manifests a moral condemnation of curiosity, which is associated with vanity in the Christian tradition. The characters wonder at beautiful architectural curiosities which work as temptations likely to lead them towards sin, through the nefarious ambition and « lust for the eyes » denounced by Augustine in his Confessions. The characters, however, always manage to free themselves from the enchantments. Is curiosity ultimately rehabilitated in the romance ? On the one hand, Urania adopts the moralist vision of curiosity which derives from medieval philosophy, but on the other hand, it also reveals a certain fascination with curiosity in the aesthetic sense, which anticipates the gradual rehabilitation of the notion in the second half of the seventeenth century.
Mary Wroth’s sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) evokes the persona’s love melancholy as she is faced with her lover’s inconstancy. Pamphilia writes to herself rather than to her lover, ...trying to find some poetic measure that would contain her melancholy – a disease which was defined by excess. With its fixed boundaries and specific aesthetic codes, the choice of the Neopetrarchan sonnet can be viewed as an attempt to oppose poetic measure and melancholic excess. The tension between measure and excess appears in the very structure of Wroth’s work, especially in the corona, which might appear as a triumph of measure as opposed to excess, since the last line repeats the first – except that it repeats the persona’s predicament. Wavering between measure and excess, Mary Wroth’s sonnet sequence illustrates her aporetic vision of melancholy, which appears as the source of poetic creation, but cannot be relieved by writing.
Le roman pastoral de Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia (publié pour la première fois en 1590, mais qui avait déjà circulé sous forme manuscrite quelques années auparavant) a donné ...lieu à de nombreuses imitations et suites en Grande-Bretagne au dix-septième siècle, en raison à la fois de sa popularité et de la mort précoce de l’auteur, qui laisse le récit inachevé, se terminant sur une phrase tronquée. Trois de ces suites ont été publiées dans des rééditions de l’Arcadie, par Sir William Alexander (1616), Richard Bellings (1621) et James Jouhnstoun (1638). Ces trois textes montrent à quel point les spécificités matérielles du roman de Sidney, à savoir sa structure épisodique, sa composition par fragments, et son double mode de diffusion, manuscrite et imprimée, ont généré ces imitations et en ont déterminé la forme. Ils illustrent aussi la genèse complexe de la figure auctoriale dans l’Angleterre de la première modernité, tous pris qu’ils sont entre modestie et affirmation de soi.
Ce numéro anniversaire propose, pour célébrer les vingt ans de la revue Études Épistémè, de revisiter la pastorale en s’intéressant à ses diverses inscriptions matérielles qui, du théâtre à la ...poésie, du roman à la musique et à la peinture, irrigue les productions culturelles européennes de la Renaissance au dix-huitième siècle et au-delà. C’est en effet au seizième siècle que la pastorale revient en force, tout d’abord en Italie, avec des œuvres telles que le prosimètre de Giacopo Sannazaro,...
PDF
