Jane
Abray, "Imaging the Masculine: Christine de Pisan's Hector, Prince
of Troy"
The polyvalent
figure of Prince Hector provided Christine de Pisan with a focal point
for reflections on chivalric ideals of manhood, as well as an occasion
to brood over the rearing of sons. Christine's Hector appears sometimes
as a self-destructive fool driven by greed and by bravado, the type
of the son who will not listen, will not learn, will not mature, and
will not survive. In other texts, Christine gives readers a
Hector who better epitomizes the masculine ideal of chivalry, yet
nevertheless is still the son who rends the heart, the darling destroyed.
While the doomed prince evokes the perils of a chivalry incompletely
mastered, the female figures Christine deploys around her Hectors
speak for -- and even act out -- a better chivalry, in which maturation
brings escape from childish and adolescent values.The paper draws
on the Epistre Othéa, the Mutacion de Fortune,
and the Cité des Dames.
John
H. Astington, "'Like a painted tyrant': Images of Troy in Graphic
Art and on the Stage"
One particular
moment from the Virgilian story of Troy took on the status of a Renaissance
emblem: that of Aeneas bearing his father and leading his son away
from the burning city, anthologised by Alciato, and Whitney after
him, as a type of filial devotion. Shakespeare made conscious reference
to it early in his writing (2 Henry VI) and reworked it implicitly
into the stage language of, for example, both As You Like It
and King Lear. My general exploration in the paper will be
of how pictured versions of, principally, Virgil's Aeneid may
have influenced the imagination of English Renaissance playwrights
and players, and, in terms of reception, that of their audiences.
I will be examining illustrated editions of Virgil from the sixteenth
century, prints, and scenes from a variety of English plays.
Stéphanie
Bélanger, "La Troade de Garnier: Destins malhereux et
exemples héroïques"
Pendant les
guerres de religion en France, les dramaturges ne cessent de raconter
le récit des célèbres guerres; ils louent les
honorables exploits d’anciens combattants. Plutôt que de raconter
le récit de leurs contemporains qui se sont démarqués
sur le champ de bataille ou au cœur de Paris, ils s’inscrivent, par
le choix de leurs pièces, dans une tradition qui remonte à
l’Antiquité. Parmi ces auteurs, il en est un qui m’intéresse
d’avantage pour la manière dont il traite les récits
des Anciens, et tout particulièrement la guerre de Troie:
il ne semble s’intéresser qu’à ses funestes conséquences
et adopte, en ce sens, le point de vue des perdants. Plus precisément,
j’analyse, dans cette communication, la manière (discours,
exemples, images, figures de style, mises en scène) dont Robert
Garnier, dans sa tragédie La Troade (1579), représente
les malheurs liés au fait guerrer chez les Troyens. Cette pièce
peut être perçue comme le tableau tragique de tous les
malheurs qui ont suivi la guerre de Troie: enlèvement et mort
de Cassandre, d’Astyanax et de Polyxène, meurtre de Polydore,
châtiment de Polymestor. Ces personnages, et c’est là
ce que je veux démontrer par une analyse rhétorique
de cette pièce, font figure d’héroïsme lorsqu’ils
se soumettent à leur destinée avec honneur, sans s’en
remetre à aucune volonté de vengeance, ni sans implorer
aucune pitié. Il semble qu’en dépit de leur triste destiné
– ils sont tous voués à la mort et le plus souvent de
manière très cruelle –, ils parviennent à avoir
un comportement digne d’être imité: ils accèdent
ainsi au rang de héros. L’analyse de cette pièce m’amène
au constat que ce qui attirait davantage Garnier, c’était peut-être
moins le malheur que la réaction des victimes dans le malheur;
ce qui reste, après analyse, c’est le fait que certains personnages
sont parvenus à éviter, par leur attitude, de verser
davantage de sang dans les flots de haine et de ressentiment qui noyaient
déjà, à l’aube du XVIIe siècle, l’humanité
dans la barbarie.
Elizabeth
Jane Bellamy, "Slander and/as the Eroticizing of Troy"
In my paper,
I will focus on selected representations of a "cynical Troy" throughout
epic literary history as a crucial backdrop for a fuller understanding
of Paridell's seduction of Hellenore in Britomart's presence at Malbecco's
banquet table in Book III of Spenser's The Faerie Queene. I
will begin by explicating a passage from Lucan's Pharsalia
where Caesar, in pursuit of Pompey following the battle of Pharsalia,
happens upon the plain of a barely recognizable Troy (IX.9654-99).
Caesar sees the nearly dried-up Xanthus, the overgrown grave of Hector,
and the ruined palace of Assaracus nearly obliterated by barren woods
and rotting tree trunks. Although Caesar notes that "a legend
clings to every stone," he views his sojourn as a Trojan "tourist"
as little more than a delay in his pursuit of Pompey -- a cynical
indifference to Troy's venerable history. From here I will turn to
Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, where a skeptical St. John, Astolfo's
guide to the moon, offers an alternative "truth" to the traditional
versions of the Troy story. He argues, "Aeneas not so pious,
nor of arm / So strong Achilles, Hector not so bold / Was as 'tis
famed." And although Homer depicted the Greeks as victorious, St.
John contends that from "the Trojan bands the Grecians ran."
In his effort to convince Astolfo that poets (like Ariosto) often
play with the truth to satisfy the needs of their patrons, St. John
is stubbornly insistent: there were no heroes in the Trojan war; Troy
should not be the subject matter for poignant legends about its destruction;
and Virgil erred in making Aeneas "pius." I offer these and other
examples from dynastic epic literary history as a backdrop for Paridell's
slanderous, pseudo-Trojan counter-genealogy to Britomart. I
will tease out the eroticism of Paridell's slander of Troy, i.e.,
how, in FQ's Book III, a slandered Troy becomes the carefully crafted
strategy for Paridell's
seduction of Hellenore.
Paul
Cohen, "In Search of the Trojan Origins of French: The Uses of History
in the Elevation of the Vernacular in the Early Modern Period"
The French
men of letters who worked to elevate the French tongue during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made the search for the historical
origins of French a central component of their effort. Historians
untangling the Celtic heritage of the Gauls, the influx of Greek through
the Phocean colony in Marseille, the impact of Latin after the Roman
conquest, and the Germanic influence of the Franks searched for signs
of the French language’s future greatness in its past. Scholars invoked
the notion of translatio studii to demonstrate that the learning of
the great civilizations of Antiquity had passed into France long ago.
While most scholars conceded the French tongue’s debt to Latin, many
instead argued that French descended from Greek. As evidence, they
invoked the medieval myth that after the sack of Troy the Trojans
had fled to France, bequeathing both the monarchy and their tongue
to France. Humanists like Henri Estienne and Jean Lemaire de
Belges composed lengthy treatises juxtaposing analyses of French’s
linguistic filiation with the Hellenic tongue and reconstructions
of the Trojans’ peregrinations in France. This Trojan myth of French
linguistic origins illustrates important features of the early-modern
elevation of French. It demonstrates how linguistic history was mobilized
for specific ideological purposes. Humanists explicitly declared
that the verity of their claims was subordinate to their utility in
shoring up the cultural foundations of the monarchy and of French
letters. In this case, associating French with Troy and the Greek
tongue provided a means to associate France with the glory of Antiquity
while freeing it from dependence on the rival Italian cultural heritage,
whether that of Roman Antiquity or of contemporary Italian humanism.
Sheila
Das, "Defeated Trojans as Venetian Heroes: The Trojan foundation of
Venice"
In this paper
I will examine the legend of the Trojan settlement of the Venetian
lagoon as a primary element of the "Myth of Venice," which was given
its full articulation in the chronicles and histories of the city
of Venice by the sixteenth century. My method will be to examine
various formulations of the Trojan legend in the standard histories
so as to identify the consistent evaluations made of the Trojans and
the associations then culled by the Venetians. I will begin
my study with an account of the earliest mentions of this connection
(eg. Martin da Canal), which were essentially elaborations from the
Aeneid, that appeared in the Middle Ages in the first histories
of the city. From this base, I will demonstrate that the legendary
Trojan foundation of Venice was used exclusively to identify Venice
with positive Trojan characteristics, attributed even to the defeated
warriors who had fled Troy. I will discuss how the qualities
of nobility and liberty, in particular, were underscored and thus
were able to be claimed as values inherited by the Republic.
Lastly, as the "Myth of Venice" continued to be exploited in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, I will show how the legacy of the Trojan
myth continued in a new though almost invisible form. This occurred,
as I will argue, by way of historiographical metastasis, which moved
the set of original characteristics that were grounded in the history
of the foundation of Venice out of their legendary context to a political
field where they became a set of principles that were to guide the
policies of the Republic in Renaissance Europe (eg. Gasparo Contarini)
and later to respond to the direct challenge to the authority of the
Venetian state of the Interdict of 1605-7 (eg. Paolo Sarpi).
Marie-José
Govers, " 'Woe betide the one who causes great dispute': The Abduction
of Helen in Jehan Baptista Houwaert's Pegasides Pleyn, often den
Lusthof der Maechden (The Plain of the Muses, or the Delightful
Garden of Young Women)"
In the years
1582-1583 the Antwerp printer Christoffel Plantijn published the Pegasides
Pleyn, ofte den Lusthof der Maechden (The plain of Pegasus, or
the delightful garden of young women) written by the humanist rhetorician
Jehan Baptista Houwaert (Brussels 1533-1599). The work consists of
sixteen books. It is conceived as an allegorical didactic poem in
which especially young women, but also married women, widows and men,
may learn how they have to love and avoid deceit. My proposal concerns
a passage of about 650 verses of the fifth book: Den onschaeck
van die triumphante maeghden (The abduction of the conquered young
women). In the first stanza of this book Houwaert explains the meaning:
"Now we shall tell you how you have to beware of deceitful men (young
and old) who wish to abduce and rape you. We shall tell you several
stories in which you may learn how to defend yourselves." One of these
stories is the story of the abduction of Helena and the fall of Troy.
I want to demonstrate a) how this legend has been applied by the author
to teach the young women and b) which literary sources (classical
and contemporary) have been made use of.
Julia
B. Griffin, "Ashes from Troy"
This talk is
centred on Book III canto ix of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the
canto where Britomart, Knight of Chastity and hero(ine) of the book,
spends a night in a castle and encounters some shady characters: a
hot-headed knight named Paridell, and a giddy wife named Hellenore.
The next morning, Britomart continues on her destined journey towards
marriage and dynasty. Paridell remains behind to complete his
seduction of Hellenore. They do not meet again. This brief episode
is a nodal point in the poem. For Britomart and Paridell discover
during their brief meeting that they are linked, and the link is Troy:
he is the descendant of Paris, the seducer and city-loser; she is
the descendant of “Trojan Brute”, the mythical Trojan founder of Britain.
Britomart and Paridell have been said to represent two sides of the
legacy of Troy. But, considered more closely, their stories and situations
can be seen to overlap, raising some questions that Britomart will
have to face later in the poem.
Stephen
Guy-Bray, "Embracing Troy: Surrey’s Aeneid"
In 1554, the
English publisher John Day brought out the Earl of Surrey’s translations
of books two and four of the Aeneid. This translation
was the first English poem to be written in blank verse. Apprehensive
that the public would not appreciate this novel form, Day described
it as ‘a strange metre, worthy to be embraced.’ Surrey’s introduction
of blank verse and his adaptation of the sonnet form have given him
an honourable place in English literary history as an innovator and
it is as an innovator that he has usually been studied. Here,
however, I want to consider the extent to which Surrey can be described
as a traditional poet. In histories of poetry, Surrey is usually
said to have been influenced by the blank verse of early sixteenth-century
Italian poets such as Luigi Alemanni and is thus positioned as one
of the new men of the Renaissance; I shall argue that his blank verse
is an Englishing of classical prosody rather than a sign of pan-European
Renaissance developments in prosody. Furthermore, Surrey’s return
to the classics has implications beyond the formal ones. The
Aeneid is already centrally concerned with memory–for Virgil,
with what Romans remember of their own past. Surrey’s translation
should be considered as part of a larger project of presenting England’s
sixteenth-century creation of itself as a re-creation of the imperial
splendours of the Trojan and Roman past: memory, it turns out, is
active rather than passive and extends from the past into the future.
For Surrey, innovation–in poetry or in politics–is also renovation
and to remember the classical past is to recapture its greatness without
succumbing to its fate.
James
Harper, "Rome versus Istanbul: Competing Claims and the Moral Value
of Trojan Heritage"
When Ottoman
Empire began to emerge as a Mediterranean power, renaissance Europeans
struggled to explain the origins and successes of the Ottomans. According
to one popular theory, the Turks took their name from Turcus, leader
of a band of Trojans who fled into the interior of Asia after the
fall of Troy. Having lived in obscurity for millennia, Turcus'
descendents were reemerging to claim their destiny and revive the
"glory of Ilium". This, and similar theories that connected the Turks
and the Trojans, excited vigorous opposition: the debates over the
origins of the Turks demonstrate the importance and moral value that
Trojan heritage held in the Renaissance imagination. Through "Pius
Aeneas", the legendary founder of the Roman people, both the pope
(as Pontifex Maximus) and the Holy Roman Emperor claimed a Trojan
heritage. Sharing these claims with anyone, especially a non-christian
people, would dilute the symbolic power that identification with Troy
generated. As Catholic Europe began to feel more directly threatened
by the territorial expansion and cultural "otherness" of the Ottoman
Empire, arguments against the Trojan origins of the Turks took on
a greater urgency. A dignity and moral value were implicit
to Trojan heritage, and the increasing enmity between Istanbul and
Rome dictated that these very qualities be denied to an enemy people.
Scholars, including Pope Pius II himself, dedicated their energies
to refuting the association of the Turks and the Trojans. At
the same time, there was a proliferation of visual imagery that celebrated
the Trojan heritage of the west. Though this iconographic trend
is often attributed to a generic Renaissance interest in classical
antiquity, this paper will argue that images of the Flight of Aeneas
from Troy spring from the same causes and belong to the same discourse
as written works like Nicolaus Sagunido's De Turcarum Origine.
Rebeca
Helfer, "Spenser's Anti-Virgilian Translatio"
My essay examines
how Spenser critiques and reinterprets Virgilian expressions of translatio
imperii and translatio studii. Spenser's poetry challenges
the incredibly influential model of cultural ruin and repair established
in Virgil's Aeneid - the mythical transfer of empire and learning
from Troy to Rome - by portraying it as an authorial and imperial
fantasy of inheritance and permanence. Specifically, I argue that
Spenser conceives of remembering the past as an art of memory: a continual
process of adapting ruins for new memorial edifices, both literary
and cultural. Drawing examples from various works, I suggest
that Spenser looks to figures such as Plato, Cicero, and Augustine
for alternative, even anti-Virgilian models and patterns of translatio.
By symbolically associating ruins with the architectural mnemonic,
Spenser's poetry negotiates the hopes and fears catalyzed by an increased
awareness of ruination, moving beyond the pathos of a fallen "eternal
Rome" and toward a more complex notion of cultural transmission than
critics have yet to acknowledge.
Andrew
Hiscock, "'What’s Hecuba to him...': Memory, Text and Myths of Belonging
in Shakespeare’s Hamlet"
This paper
will focus upon the deployment of Trojan narrative in Shakespeare’s
tragedy as a strategic point of entry into how this text engages with
Early Modern discourses of cultural belonging. Particular attention
will be paid to the ways in which heroism, violence and familial identities
are established in this text as crucial elements of dramatic debate
in part through the theatrical re-membering of Trojan defeat. I wish
to explore the ways in which the textual referencing of Troy in this
text may be a lens through which to reflect upon Early Modern understandings
of personal and collective memory: e.g. as an Aristotelian engagement
with the material world; a Platonic response of spiritual longing,
a Roman rhetorical bid for political status, and a medieval promotion
of moral discipline. Moreover, I intend to expose how textual liaisons
forged with the Trojan past, for example, may constitute important
cultural/textual power relations, formulate significant markers for
identity-construction and underpin pervasive myths of cultural origanization.
Michael
Keefer, "'Fairer than the evening air': Marlowe's Gnostic Helen of
Troy and the Tropes of Belatedness and Historical Mediation"
Faustus's speech
to Helen of Troy, a midrashic reinscription of verses from the apocryphal
Wisdom of Solomon, conflates Helen with divine Wisdom in a way that
suggests familiarity with patristic accounts of the Gnostic heresiarch
Simon Magus. The central redemptive pathos of Simon's gnosis
is provided by the passage through history of Helen, the 'ennoia'
or First Thought from whose rape the world was perversely engendered.
Marlowe's parodic deployment of Solomonic and Simonian motifs will
provide the basis in this paper for a meditation on the ways in which
Helen serves, for Simon and Marlowe alike, as a trope of historical
mediation and belatedness.
Christoper
D. Johnson, "The Trojan Ekphrasis in Shakespeare's The Rape of
Lucrece"
My paper focuses
on the ekphrasis (lines 1359-1582) in Shakespeare's epyllion, The
Rape of Lucrece. Here Shakespeare not only refigures the agony
of Troy, the duplicity of Sinon, and Lucrece's shame and grief but
he also gives significant insight into his views on visual art, poetry,
and the role of the spectator-reader. Reading the ekphrasis against
the models offered by Virgil's Aeneid (1.441-93) and Spenser's
Fairie Queene (3.11-12), I show how Shakespeare manneristically,
self-consciously, overloads the process of seeing with the rhetoric
of hyperbole, admiratio, and chiasmus. At once a superb exercise in
imitatio, a subversive commentary on Horace's ut pictura poiesis,
and a complex representation of gender, Shakespeare's ekphrasis, I
argue, dominates the poem and challenges the Elizabethan mythologization
of the Trojans as the imperial ancestors of the English.
Tim
Markey, "Classical Epic and English Pastoral: Virgil's (and Homer's)
Andromache in Spenser's 'Maye'"
This paper
shows (what E.K., the first commentator on the subject, apparently
knew and pointedly suggested, in 1579) the influence of Virgil's Aeneid,
and through that epic, Homer's Iliad, on Spenser's "Maye,"
a topical satire on the Church of England. Though E.K.'s familiar
gloss to this pastoral should have alerted scholarly attention and
excited critical action long ago, modern scholars and critics increasingly
have wanted to view in the poem the poetics of Protestantism, at the
exclusion or in the absence of those of Humanism. In part, I have
written this paper to overthrow such a view, but as well to demolish
the even older argument that Spenser's classicism was one perforce
chaperoned by the Pléiade. Returning to the contect of Renaissance
Humanism, I have attempted to reconstruct Spenser's understanding
of the story of Andromache by a careful examination of editions of
Homer and Virgil from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries. To
compensate so far as possible for our crass ignorance of Spenser's
library, I have read over sixty editions with commentary (at Harvard,
Princeton, and Phillips Academy, Andover: institutions with the greatest
Renaissance Virgil collections anywhere), not to speak of other Renaissance
books. Overall, I demonstrate and explain Spenser's direct reliance
on the commentary tradition, in Latin or Neo-Latin: Quintilian and
Macrobius, among the classics, Landino, Erythraeus, Melanchthon, and
Germanus, among others in Renaissance Humanism. In their light, I
analyze Spenser's imitation of Virgil, which, to the smallest detail,
is formal as well as ideological. Spenser, even in ecclesiastical
satire, shows himself to be the staunchest Virgilian pastoralist England
had ever seen.
Brent
Miles, "Togail Troí: The Irish Destruction of Troy on
the Cusp of the Renaissance"
Togail Troí,
‘The Destruction of Troy’, was among the most widely-read prose texts
of medieval Ireland. Originally undertaken as a translation
of Dares Phrygius’s Late Antique account of the Trojan War, Togail
Troí was written originally in tenth-century Ireland, but
was reworked by numerous authors in the succeeding centuries and often
recopied. Togail Troí was the most popular of
a body of Classical texts translated and adapted into Irish from the
tenth to the thirteenth centuries. Irish enthusiam for these
works appears to wane in the later Middle Ages, and the literary legacy
of the Irish ‘Golden Age’ shows virtually no interest in the tales
of Troy. The present paper examines the late fifteenth century
as the transition phase between the Medieval and so-called ‘Renaissance’
periods in Ireland, and considers how the latest recorded interest
in the vernacular translations anticipates the developments of a new
literary culture in Gaelic Ireland. A collection of classical
tales made by Maoílechlainn Ó Cianáin in 1492
especially marks a new attitude in native scholarship towards the
classical tales. Continuity of native tradition is suggested
by Uilliam Mac an Lega’s translation of Caxton’s The Recuyell of
the Histoyes of Troye, where Mac an Lega adapts into Irish only
portions of Caxton’s text which supplement and complete the earlier
Togail Troí.
Joelle
Rollo-Koster, "Avignon and Troy: Trojan Metaphors during the Great
Western Schism"
In April 1400
Avignon's craftsmen organized a re-enactment of the Trojan War in
the city's streets. Although this event may be associated with traditional
medieval display of "urbanity" and may sound inconspicuous to a medieval
historian, this presentation will show that it was at the time a subliminal
release for a city in trouble. 1400 Avignon was disarticulated. Its
natural leader, the pope, was under literal and symbolic attack, and
the city oscillated between various politics in order to survive while
its traditional head, the pope's palace, was besieged. This paper
will focus on evidence of the association of the metaphorical Troy
with Avignon, another city besieged --from within and without.
Avignon mustered animosity and rivalry and counted as many factions
as there are heroes in the Iliad. While the King of France was sinking
deeply into dementia, his brother, the Duke of Orleans, his uncles,
the Dukes of Berry and Burgundy, his wife, Isabeau, and Benedict's
disgruntled cardinals disagreed on French politics and chose Avignon
as their battleground (this time period is labeled the 'subtraction
of obedience' and is a key moment of the Great Western Schism). Thus
Avignon could only hope that the reenactment of the famous siege would
serendipitously bring coherence back to their city, or at least anchor
the extraordinary times they were living through to the "pseudo" reality
of the Trojan myth. Background: The double papal election of
1378 launched Western Christendom into the Great Western Schism that
lasted until 1417, and triggered the division of the papacy between
Roman and Avignon, pope and anti-pope, lines of succession. In 1394,
Benedict XIII, Pedro de Luna of Aragon, succeeded to Robert of Geneva,
Clement VII, who in 1378 had brought the schismatic papacy back to
Avignon. Since Pedro de Luna lived in Paris when he was not
traveling on behalf of Clement, he was well-aware of the French-led
proposals to solve the Schism, which by the early 1390's were three:
voluntary abdication of both popes (cessio); creation of a commission
selected by both popes (compromissio); and appeal to a general council
(concilium pacis). Thus upon his election in 1394, Benedict
agreed to work toward the reunion of the Church and assured his main
supporters, King Charles VI (mentally incapacitated since 1392) and
the University of Paris, of his good intentions to accommodate them.
By then, however, the "way of cession" had become the French crown's
official position and both popes were advised to abdicate in order
to facilitate the election of a new pope who would be recognized by
all. Benedict agreed in principle but not in fact. Rather
than submit to secular pressures he chose "discussion" between the
two popes (via discussionis or compromissio). Delicate negotiations
took place between 1395 and 1398 to convince Benedict of the validity
of the French insistence on cessation, yet Benedict, like his Roman
counterpart refused to abdicate. On 7 July 1398, France formally
proclaimed to Avignon its subtraction of obedience. Benedict's
cardinals quickly abandoned him and relocated from Avignon to Villeneuve
(a short ride over the Rhone River separating both cities).
In September, the citizens of Avignon, after meeting with the cardinals
in Villeneuve, officially sided with France and the "rebellious" cardinals
against Benedict. Meanwhile, fearful and isolated, Benedict
entrenched himself in the papal palace in Avignon with his staff.
The palace was besieged for several months and Pope Benedict spent
five turbulent years virtually a prisoner in his own palace.
Scott
Schofield, "Antony Munday’s Politicization of England’s Mythical Trojan
Origins"
Anthony Munday’s
London Lord Mayor’s Show “The Triumphes of a Re-united Britannia”
(1605) recites the history of England’s early Trojan origins in relation
to James I’s official conception of a united Britain. The mythical
legend, dating back to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century account
recorded in the Historia regum Britanniae, purports that Brute, a
direct descendant of Aeneas, headed westward in response to a prophetic
vision. After he landed at Albion (England), Brute and his Trojan
descendants conquered what was a corrupted land ravaged by giants,
united and renamed the adjoining territories Britain, and built the
great city Troynovant (London) by the river Thames. This union
was short-lived, however, as civil war broke out soon after Brute
divided the land amongst his three sons, in turn forming England,
Scotland and Wales. In this paper I will consider how this popular
story takes on new significance in light of James I’s earliest appeals
for union during the years 1603-1605 by looking at Munday’s narrative-dramatic
account in relation to similar imaginative accounts by contemporaries
such as Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker. Munday’s account offers one
of the clearest articulations of an ideological investment in an English
Trojan past.
Paolo
Sanvito, "The Symbolic Use of the Trojan Myth in Roman Painting Cycles
of the Renaissance"
From the first
decades of the 16th cent. up to ca. 1560 the frequency of decorations
inspired by the Trojan myth in Roman art substantially grew, and consequently
the extant cycles are worth special deep analysis. The increasing
interest in the subject in Rome seems to relate to the symbolic use
made of this myth by the generation of humanists of the time of Raphael,
which focused on the venerability of Rome as a source of civilization
and as a supposedly `eternal' centre of arts and culture. None of
Raphael's larger works concerns the myth of Troy (with the singular
exception of the Vatican Fire in the Borgo, meant as a metaphor for
the Fire of Troy), but other monuments of the city contain numerous
complex secular decorations representing the Homeric-Virgilian tales.
I shall argue that it is in the circle of Raphael, e.g. Giovanni da
Udine and Giulio Romano in decorations such as that at the Villa Madama,
that the importance of the Trojan theme is rediscovered. This fact
seems to be symbolically alluded in the Stanza della Segnatura. In
discussing this decoration it is worthwhile addressing the question
of the meaning of the monochromes with "Alexander the Great putting
the Works of Homer into Achilles's Tomb" and "Augustus forbidding
the Aeneis to be burnt". They are in any case indicative of the fundamental
importance entrusted to this literary heritage at the Roman court
of Julius II. Indeed the cycles analysed (which I take from at least
four patrician palaces, Palazzo Massimo, Rondanini, Capodiferro, Sacchetti,
decorated by -among others- Giulio Mazzoni, Matteo da Faenza, Raffaellino
del Colle, Sermoneta, and the French Jacquio Ponsio in the period
1545-1560) interpret the mythological past in each case in different
symbolic or historicising ways. The analysis and comparison of these
interpretive nuances illuminate the purpose of the employment of such
a rich mythological material in Rome. The immediate followers of Raphael's
school, just before or during the decades after his death, focus on
the Aegean-Roman origins of the modern city as at an episode from
the Age of Heroes, and the tone is consequently heroic, solemn, celebratory
and therefore static in its forms. This "heroic" tone creates an indissoluble
tie between classic heroic or tragic, aristotelian or horacian (among
the known sources) concepts and the genre of historical painting,
a tie which indeed will definitively become obsolete only after the
dawn of Romanticism. But in some further examples (from the mid-16th
cent.) a prevalence of mannerist characteristics leads to an interpretation
of the historical narrative and of the causal sequence of events which
is dynamic and determined by antinomy and disorder: therefore formally
convulsive and tense, a character for which the fall of Troy functions
as a marvellous visual translation. This is evident in Giulio Romano's
later career in Northern Italy (Mantua, fresco of the Fall of Troy),
which will allow Roman formal ideas to spread internationally and
gain further followers and a long lasting development especially in
the work of Emilian artists.
Pamela
Troyer, "Was it all a Dream? Poetic License in the 14th-century Romance
The Seege or Batayle of Troye"
Organized around
three dream visions, the early 14th-century poem called The Seege
or Battayle of Troye has as its centerpiece a fascinating recaptiulation
of the Judgement of Paris which includes, among other oddities, the
temptation of Paris by "ffour elven goddesses" named Jubiter, Saturnus,
Mercurius, and Venus. While we could simply reject The Seege
as a ludicrous presentation of a barely understood Trojan myth, I
argue that the composer quite purposefully changed the classical story
in order to appeal to his audience's expectations; specifically, he
presented it as pagan magic in the familiar form of a dream vision.
Ovid's Heroides, The Consolation of Philosophy, Piers
Plowman, and Merlin play a part in my discussion.
Deanne Williams, Dido, Queen of England
The question of Queen Elizabeth I's marriage fascinated and perplexed
her observers. Performed for Elizabeth by the Children of Her Majesty's
Chapel, Dido Queen of Carthage (1584-5) is Christopher Marlowe's
contribution to the discussion. This paper shows how Marlowe reworks
his Virgilian source material into a negative example of the ruinous
effects of love and the desire for marriage upon an otherwise competent
(and glamorous) queen. According to Marlowe, Dido's troubles begin
when she becomes the unwitting victim of a spell which compels her
to replace her string of adoring suitors with a husband. The masterful
(and masculine) sangfroid she maintains with her minions topples
into the kind of intense, desperate (and feminine) desire that seeks
marriage, and procreative sexuality, as its ultimate goal. Marlowe's
treatment of the Carthaginian queen's seduction and abandonment
by a feckless suitor calls attention to the extent to which Dido,
by wishing to marry Aeneas, opens herself and her country up for
exploitation by a foreign prince. Drawing upon the identification
of Elizabeth's name with Virgil¹s "Elissa," Dido
Queen of Carthage by implication praises Elizabeth, who, by
avoiding marriage, preserved the liberty and prosperity of her people.
Of course, it is Aeneas's account of the fall of Troy that makes
Dido fall in love with him in the first place. In this paper I focus
upon the revisions that Marlowe made to Virgil's famous passage,
revealing how they facilitated his message about marriage, but also
influenced the way in which Marlowe's contemporaries and successors
read, and handled, the Aeneid. I conclude with some examples
from Shakespeare that demonstrate how Marlowe's characterization
of Aeneas complicated subsequent attempts to situate English imperial
identity through the Trojan legacy.
Richardine
Woodall, "The Place of Women in the Fall of Troy"
The fall of Troy in
the Shakespearean imagination is a radical intervention in a seminal
moment in western culture. In Virgil, Aeneas escapes from the destruction
of Troy to found Rome. Furthermore, acting under the aegis
of the gods, Aeneas’s mission to found Rome is a divine project.
Thus, the fall of Troy is inseparable from the idea of Rome in the
Renaissance imagination. The relationship between the destruction
of Troy and the advancement of Rome will be analyzed in this paper
through Shakespeare’s treatment of Lucrece and Lavinia in the “Rape
of Lucrece” and Titus Andronicus, respectively. The lives
and more importantly deaths of these women are constitutive to the
unravelling of Roman patriarchal history. In their struggle
for a voice and subjectivity, Lucrece and Lavinia find parallels
between the fall of Troy and their own victimization, which undermines
Rome’s position as the moral and ethical heir of Troy.
Paul
Yachnin, "'The perfection of ten': Artisanal Value and Elite Culture
in Troilus and Cressida"
They say all lovers
swear more performance than they are able, and yet reserve an
ability that they never perform; vowing more than the perfection
of ten, and discharging less than the tenth part of one.
--Cressida in Troilus
and Cressida, 3.2.84-87
In this paper, I read
Cressida's phrase against the grain in order to introduce a discussion
of Shakespeare's engagement with the linked issues of value, social
rank, and artistic creation and artisanal work. My basic argument
is that Shakespeare's views on value in the play (variously interpreted
by a host of critics) need to be understood in relation to the real
situation of Shakespeare's ten-shareholder playing company in the
context of what I have called elsewhere "the populuxe theatre,"
that is, a theatre that produced popular versions of deluxe cultural
goods. My microhistorical approach doesn't lead me to a view of
Shakespeare as an exponent of popular, artisanal artistic forms
over elite forms. Rather, I am interested in how the play Troilus
and Cressida, which is certainly Shakespeare's most successful
emulation of contemporary high-brow literature (including Chapman's
translation of the Iliad), nevertheless is able to keep in
circulation a powerful representation of the collective work of
cultural production.
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