Ecphrasis and reading practices in Elizabethan narrative verse

SEL - Studies in English Literature

Volumn 44, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 19-35

  Quinn, Kelly A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949119914     PISSN: 00393657     EISSN: 15229270     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sel.2004.0010     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche Jr. (Harmondsworth UK: Penguin, 1978), p. 548, book 3, canto 11, stanza 50, lines 4-5
2. Modern uses of the term ekphrasis are not always consistent, and have been contested. In 1991, James A. W. Heffernan traced the history of ekphrasis in modern discourse, and noted with dissatisfaction the imprecision and range in its usage. He suggested fixing the meaning of ekphrasis as "the verbal representation of graphic representation" ("Ekphrasis and Representation," NLH 22, 2 [Spring 1991]: 297-316, 299)
3. Heffernan's definition has much to recommend it, but not, according to a recent article by Ruth Webb, historical accuracy ("Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre," W&I 15, 1 [January-March 1999]: 7-18). She argues that modern definitions of ekphrasis, including Heffernan's, ignore or devise strategies to dismiss the original sense of the term, which referred to description generally, without particular reference to works of visual art. The problem, Webb argues, is that critics commonly go on to assume a continuous tradition of ekphrasis, linking together classical and contemporary discussions of ekphrasis as if they refer to the same thing. In acknowledgement of Webb's work, but mindful that no term has yet been established to replace ekphrasis in referring to descriptions of visual art, I use the term ecphrasis guardedly in this paper, using an anglicized spelling to distance it from the Greek term (that is, "ecphrasis" not "ekphrasis"), while also striving not to contradict that original sense
4. George Gascoigne, The Posies (London, 1575; rprt. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; Norwood NJ: Walter J. Johnson, 1979), ¶ ij
5. I will discuss this passage in greater detail later, along with Spenser's similarly phrased comment on "how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed" ("A Letter of the Authors Expounding His Whole Intention in the Course of This Worke: Which for That It Giueth Great Light to the Reader, for the Better Vnderstanding Is Hereunto Annexed" [1589], in Roche, ed., pp. 15-8, 15)
6. Samuel Daniel, The Complaint of Rosamond (1592), in "Poems" and "A Defence of Ryme, " ed. Arthur Colby Sprague (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1930), pp. 37-63, 42, line 100; subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text by line number
7. 5See Diana O'Hara, "The Language of Tokens and the Making of Marriage" (Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England [Manchester UK and New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 2000], pp. 57-98). O'Hara cites the example of a 1598 court case trying a man's claim that a woman's having accepted several gifts from him during a courtship constituted a legally binding betrothal (pp. 57-60)
8. Daniel may have been familiar with this version of the story from Hyginus's fabulae, printed in Basel in 1535: "Amimone Danai filia, dum studiose in sylua uenatur, Satyrum iaculo percussit, earn Satyrus uoluit uiolare. Illa Neptuni fidé implorauit, quo Neptunus cum uenisset, Satyrum abegit, & ipse cum ea concubuit, ex quo conceptu nascitur, Nauplius. Id in quo loco factii est, Neptunus dicitur fuscina percussisse terram, & inde aquam profluxisse, qui Lerneus fons dictus est, & Amimonium flumen" (Hyginus, Fabularum Liber [Basel, 1535; rprt. New York and London: Garland, 1976], p. 47, no. 169)
9. Apollodorus's Greek version is the same in its details (Apollodorus, The Library, trans. Sir James George Frazer, 2 vols. [London: William Heinemann; New York: Putnam's, 1921], 1:138-9)
10. Robert Graves's attribution of not just consent but pleasure to Amymone seems his own addition to his sources: he writes that Amymone "was glad that she could carry out her father's instructions so pleasantly" (The Greek Myths, 2 vols. [Baltimore: Penguin, 1955], 1:201)
11. For Lucian's version, see The Works of Lucian, trans. M. D. Macleod, 8 vols. (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961), 7:204-11
12. This story is not included in the popular Latin translations by Sir Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus, but more than 250 editions of Lucian's works were printed before 1550 in western Europe, at least sixty of which were in Greek (Harry L. Levy, "Introduction," in Lucian, Lucian: Seventy Dialogues, ed. Levy [Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1976], pp. xiii-xxiii, xxii). If Daniel read Lucian's Amymone story, he likely did so in Greek, which he might have known from his studies at Oxford. Given that Lucian's version was apparently not readily available even in Latin, let alone English, it is unlikely that it was well known to Elizabethan readers generally
13. Shakespeare, Lucrèce (1594), in The Poems, ed. F. T. Prince (London: Methuen; Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 63-149, 132, line 1444; subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text by line number
14. Michael Drayton, Mortimeriados (1596), in The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel, 5 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), 1:305-92, 381, lines 2523-4, 2526-7; subsequent references will appear in the text by line number
15. Jean H. Hagstrum compares this aspect of Lucrèce to earlier descriptions of art: "Shakespeare's aim was not merely to describe (as in much ancient iconic poetry) or to draw a moral (as in much medieval iconic poetry) but dramatically to relate the paintings to the human being who confronts them" (The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dry den to Gray [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958], p. 79)
16. The expression ut pictura poesis (as painting, so poetry) originates with Horace and refers to the rivalry between painting and poetry, whereby each strives to be more lifelike. For a discussion of ut pictura poesis in the English Renaissance, see John B. Bender, Spenser and Literary Pictorialism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 4-22
17. For a discussion of this contrast, see Eugene R. Kintgen, Reading in Tudor England (Pittsburgh PA: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), pp. 40-3
18. Erasmus, De ratione studii ac legendi interpretandique auctores, trans. Brian McGregor, in The Collected Works of Erasmus, projected 86 vols. (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1974-), 24:661-91, 670
19. Gabriel Harvey, Ciceronianus (1577), trans. Clarence A. Forbes, ed. Harold S. Wilson (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1945), p. 97
20. Kintgen suggests that since Harvey repeats Erasmus's prescriptions sixty years after their first publication, Erasmus's advice had not been fully adopted by teachers (p. 49). Harvey may, however, have been reinforcing rather than re-introducing Erasmus's theories. For the argument that humanist thinking was slow to penetrate the educational system, see Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran, The Growth of English Schooling, 1340-1548 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985). Her period of study closes about fifteen years before the births of Daniel (1562), Shakespeare (1564), and Drayton (1563)
21. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986), p. 20
22. Philip Melanchthon sounds a cautionary note, though, warning readers against dividing texts "piecemeal into separate bits for self-contradictory interpretations" (qtd. in Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace: Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996], p. 125)
23. Ironically, the English rhetoric manuals most influenced by Melanchthon are the least likely to concentrate on large structures (John Webster, "Rhetoric," in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton [Toronto and Buffalo: Univ. of Toronto Press; London: Routledge, 1990], pp. 598-9)
24. Erasmus, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo, trans. Betty I. Knott, in Erasmus, pp. 279-659, 639
25. Sir John Harington, "A Preface, or rather a Briefe Apologie of Poetrie" (1591), in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), 2:194-222, 202. Examples of Erasmus's profound impact on Elizabethan thinking generally are far too numerous to list; in this respect Harington is typical of his age
26. The remaining quotations in this paragraph are from Erasmus, De duplici copia, p. 611
27. Maureen Quilligan, Milton's Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983), p. 25
28. Spenser, "A Letter of the Authors," p. 15
29. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1936), p. 154
30. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (1570) (Menston UK: Scolar Press, 1967), sig. 2Ov
31. John Lyly, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), in An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, ed. Paul Salzman (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 83-150
32. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie (1595), in Smith, ed., 1:148207, 183, 186
33. Spenser, Faerie Queene, p. 506, book 3, canto 9, stanza 2, lines 1-4
34. Daniel, "The Apology," in The Tragedy of Philotas, ed. Laurence Michel (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1949), pp. 155-7, 155
35. I use Jane P. Tompkins's criteria for identifying reader-response critics, a disparate group who bring widely varying approaches and theoretical perspectives to their work ("An Introduction to Reader-Response Criticism," in Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Tompkins [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980], pp. ix-xxvi, ix-x)
36. For the myth of Lucrèce as moral exemplum, see Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 25-8