Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal

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Romantic Medievalism History and the Romantic Literary Ideal

Elizabeth Fay

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Romantic Medievalism

10.1057/9781403913616 - Romantic Medievalism, Elizabeth Fay

Also by Elizabeth Fay A FEMINIST INTRODUCTION TO ROMANTICISM

EMINENT RHETORIC: Language, Gender and Cultural Tropes



BECOMING WORDSWORTHIAN: A Performative Aesthetics

Romantic Medievalism


History and the Romantic Literary Ideal Elizabeth Fay


Q Elizabeth Fay 2002

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIT 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0±333±97007±1 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fay, Elizabeth A., 1957Romantic medievalism: history and the Romantic literary ideal / Elizabeth Fay. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0±333±97007±1

1. English literature Ð19th centuryÐHistory and criticism. 2. Middle Ages in literature. 3. Literature and historyÐGreat BritainÐHistoryÐ19th century. 4. Arthurian romancesÐAdaptationsÐHistory and criticism. 5. MedievalismÐGreat BritainÐHistoryÐ19th century. 6. RomanticismÐ Great Britain. I. Title. PR468.M53 F39 2002 2001036989 820.90 3240 0902Ðdc21 10 9 8 7 6 11 10 09 08 07

5 4 3 2 1 06 05 04 03 02

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All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

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Romantic Medievalism: The Ideal of History The medieval historical mind Romantic anachronism The problem of the lady Troubadourian affect

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Cultivating Medievalism: Feeling History Classes of affect Bowers: Seward, Darwin and Coleridge Resting places: Gray, Smith and Keats The female troubadour: Mary Robinson and LEL

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The Legacy of Arthur: Scott, Wordsworth and Byron The legacy of Arthur Scott and antiquarianism Wordsworth, knight of feeling Lancelot Byron

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Keats and the Time of Romance Dispensing with Spenserianism Chatterton, Bannerman and `La Belle Dame' Keats and romance: history, memory and felt time Dramatic action: King Stephen

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The Shelleys on Love Courtly love Renaissance love: The Cenci Valperga, or love's lessons Free love: Epipsychidion The female knight and Emilia Surviving love

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Notes

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Index

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Contents

Romantic Medievalism: The Ideal of History

The past is by its nature removed utterly from all empirical instruments, and history can be no more than conceptions recorded in an immense palimpsest of historical texts: literary inventions, reinterpretations, attempted erasures. The past cannot exist as an object apart from the consciousness of it; changes in the consciousness of historical time are the work of literary inventions and critical interpretations of the preexistent tradition. Anthony Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past1 In posing the relation of the terms medievalism and Romanticism, the estranged or violently obscured past of the first is balanced by the second's implication of Jacobin hopes for a utopian future. But `Romanticism' is a Janus-faced movement, always looking back even as it looks forward, anachronistically replaying and revising history even as it proleptically installs a modernity we now recognize. And the look back, always in order to look forward, can stem from conservative impulses as well as radical ones. Tory authors and historians looked to the medieval period for feudal paternalism and an interdependent community as a solution to economic crisis and class unrest; Whigs located a primitive democracy in the medieval village, and more particularly in pre-Norman medievalism, while the feudal system at large provided a contractual system that ensured individual liberties. Yet Whiggish and radical uses of the past, like Enlightenment antiquarian ones, located the discontinuities of the past through a scientific and theoretic lens, while Tory and nationalist ones insisted emotionally on the historical and cultural continuities that must not be erased or forgotten. For this reason radical utopian uses of the past were in conflict with nationalist 1



1

recuperations intended to fend off ìmprovement': progressivist improvements were finally only forceful revisions of past power structures mapped on to a new social and economic terrain. In putting these two terms together as `Romantic medievalism', then, we have a revisionism that can be used for opposing and conflicting political ends. But the term itself intuitively appears conservationist, and the work that might be most likely to be called to mind in this sense is Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. The spectacular tournament, the familiar faces of Robin Hood, Richard Coeur-de-Lion and the hale Saxons posed against the decadent Normans are all part of our received imaginings of the medieval past. As with all of Scott's work, Ivanhoe is not just a reconstruction of the past but a re-visioning of the past that attempts to install a more desirable future. History is no longer irrelevant to present times; it begins to provide an imaginative field of potential solutions to the crises of the now. Yet Scott's revision of the medieval, although powerfully influential, was only one of several possible recuperations of history at play in the larger cultural current. It is impossible to separate out non-reductively the complex negotiations of conservative, progressivist, nationalist and radical manoeuvres and visions during the Romantic period. However, largely due to Scott and his lasting mark on Victorian period literature, much of the work already done on medievalism has focused on its conservative, progressivist and nationalist manifestation. I will instead focus as much as possible on the more radical uses of the medieval. By the time Scott writes his novel of English beginnings, the conception of medievalism has been integrally woven into the fabric of Romantic culture and thought, adopted from the Spenserianism and Petrarchism of the late eighteenth century and more fully developed into a complex metaphor for historical consciousness and for a face to put on pastness. The past is a reservoir of possibilities for the future, from Catherine Macaulay's idealized account of Anglo-Saxon social and political structures in her History of England (1763±83) and Gilbert Stuart's View of Society in Europe (1782), to Sharon Turner's conservative History of the Anglo-Saxons (1828). Even Scott forgoes the nostalgic paternalism for a more democratic focus on personal and national independence in some of his final novels, especially Anne of Geierstein. Subsequently, `medievalism' during the Victorian period comes to denote the sentimentalized imagining of the paternalistic medieval that developed in popular culture from the Romantic comprehension of the past. It is the Victorian medievalism of the gentleman's code of honour and the Gothic Revival in art and architecture that was differen-



2 Romantic Medievalism

tiated from the historical real, which was sealed off from the living present as an object of study, the dead past.2 It is important to note here that another signal difference in Romantic and Victorian medievalism is time itself. Romantic medievalism, impelled by Enlightenment antiquarianism, focused on the early medieval period and especially on the twelfth-century period in which the troubadours flourished. Despite the Arthurianism of early Victorians such as Kenhelm Digby, Victorian medievalism was rather more concerned to contrast feudalism with commercial society and, from Carlyle and Marx to William Morris, began to focus on the later fourteenth century and that period's struggle to adjust codes of honour to economic change. Scholars have devoted much attention to Victorian forms of the medieval, but this study seeks to refocus interest on how the Romantics responded to the challenge of historical crisis through creative and revitalizing filiations with the past. Conservative medievalism tends, both in the Romantic period and now, to be associated with knighthood, chivalry and honour. It is largely located in the romance tradition, and therefore is most widely associated with novels, particularly the historical novel as it is initiated by Clara Reeve in The Old English Baron (1777) and developed under the genius of Scott and others. Whiggish medievalism looked to the earlier structures of the past before political systems were corrupted by commercialism in order to locate more primitive or `natural' models.3 For Whigs and radicals, the medieval represents an ideal past, a temporal space in which medieval literary achievements outweigh factual events, so that poetry can create a world of words that supplants place and that is its own event-transforming reality. This poetic power, a kind of textual virility, is decipherable through the medieval poet's pretence of disenfranchised supplicant, and represents an enormously potent form of linguistic performance for the Romantics. It is a vision of the past as a dreamwork, a romance space in which words overcome or beget events, as such both an idealized history and a productive appropriation of the past for innovations in the present tense. For this reason, radical medievalism tends to be located in poetry rather than novels, and tends to be associated with the troubadour or bard rather than the chivalric knight.4 On the surface, the troubadour as the product of twelfth-century culture was the lyric poet who sang of his secret and illicit love for a lady for a court's entertainment. But his songs, which were formulaic so as to allow for wordplay and wit, were also coded in order to suggest and imply names and reveal secrets even as they seemed to adhere to the terms of honour and true love. The semantic and political playfulness of



Romantic Medievalism: The Ideal of History 3

the courtly love lyric, which toys with scandal at the expense of the lady, was aimed at the poet's patron lord or other knights of the court, or directed as poetic competition to other poets. In either case, the troubadour sets himself against his audience as a unique man whose distinction lies not in his ability to embody a tradition or ideal, as with the knight, but in his individualism. The troubadour figures the individual's resistance through a linguistic politics that seems appropriate to the current times, while the knight figures a traditional paternalism that emphasizes aristocratic honour. What distinguishes radical Romantic medievalism specifically from that of chivalry is that Romantic poets found in the troubadour a figure for the combined pursuit of artistic mastery and political resistance that perfectly answered the contingencies of a historically turbulent moment. This figure proves a disruptive agent, a seductive force, and a masterful performer of the lyric art whose personal longing for a beloved screens political critique: a critique often aimed at the vestigial remains of medieval feudalism in contemporary life as representative of the conservative forces seeking to prevent social change. Even in chivalric medievalism, however, the figure of the troubadour is a significant presence. In Ivanhoe, the troubadour is the Norman (yet fully English) Coeur-de-Lion, both naturalized and nationalized. The troubadour, too, had become associated with both French and English culture alike through constant cross-cultural traffic, and was also affiliated with the Celtic bard, the Breton poet, and the court minstrel.5 Sedimented into medieval culture, Scott individuates him again for a particular purpose. Richard's ability to produce artful songs is aligned with both his Frenchness and his Englishness, with his individualism and his political being. Moreover, Richard's ability to play the troubadour is portrayed as sincere, a significantly serious aspect of his personality that is irreverent in the face of warfare, and unpretentious in the face of statecraft. Scott's depiction here is important: although the troubadour had through the centuries developed the patina of artifice and deceit as the deceiver of ladies' husbands, Scott takes him on his own merits as sincere, artful and cultivated; as a Romantic poet, in fact. Furthermore, he gives him the heroic stature of one of England's bravest kings, making clear Richard's incipient Englishness, overtly in his acceptance of his role as king of the English at the novel's end, but nearly as openly in his troubadourian singing. This singing is performed not to convert a lady but as a political act to win over Little John, Robin Hood's renegade priest and the very soul of English yeomanry. In centrally placing Richard's singing, giving it more textual space than Ivanhoe's




expressions of sexual longing, Scott is portraying the troubadour as the Romantics have come to understand him: as the essence of medieval poethood, as the figure of historicized desire, and that as a desire which is politically indexed. At the other end of the historico-cultural spectrum from Scott's late Romantic novel is George III's politically motivated revival of the Order of the Garter. George's use of this medieval Order is a strong illustration of the more general cultural and political uses of medievalism during the period against which the Romantic poets were in general reacting with the figure of the troubadour poet. In May 1842 Victoria and Albert held their first costumed ball, and chose the court of Edward III and Queen Philippa for the ball's theme and for their own costumes. Interest in historical costume became important for innovations in producing historical dramas in the theatre, and young ladies began to keep scrap books on the dress of different periods.6 The choice of Edward of Windsor was no accident: the most obvious attraction of the fourteenth-century king was his connection to chivalry, already celebrated by George III who had commissioned Benjamin West to paint a series based on Edward III for Windsor Castle (1787±9). In a re-instantiation of Edward III's invention of the prestigious and chivalric Order of the Garter, and Elizabeth I's Renaissance revival of the medieval Order, George III ceremoniously reinstated it at Windsor with plans for a chapter house at Kew. George's reincarnation of Edward, with reference to St George and his protective ardour, was both sentimentally nostalgic and politically significant, if not historically accurate. His interest was influenced by eighteenth-century reconstructions of the medieval, such as the rise of the gentleman, the rage for Gothic castles, and literary sensibility with its penchant for Petrarchan lyrics and romances, as well as the need for inspiring a renewed patriotic fervour. As both Marc Girouard and David Duff note, even more fascinating than George III's attempt to revitalize Elizabethan and medieval concepts of honour for his own purposes was his son's use of chivalric pageantry for his coronation in 1821, with a mock-medieval banquet in Westminster where the King's Champion reenacted the ceremony of the Challenge dressed in knight's armour. `Here, then, was the official version of the chivalric revival ± patriotic, hierarchical, counter-revolutionary' (Duff, Romance and Revolution 120). It is in this sense of `the chivalric' that the present study veers away from Romantic chivalry and instead focuses on the revolutionary impulses of the troubadour poet.7 More related to the generalized medievalism behind the Order of the Garter are the recent critical explorations of chivalry and the status of




gentlemen. This scholarly interest, grounded in Harold Bloom's theory of the internalized quest and extending outwards into the transformation of knight to gentleman, has gained momentum from Marc Girouard's study of anachronistic chivalry, The Return to Camelot.8 This development represents the continuum upheld by the rising middle classes eager to invent genealogies for themselves. There are two other ways in which scholars have recently interrogated the relation of Romanticism to medievalism: through the traces of feudalism in Romantic period institutions, an approach that participates generally in the Marxist historicist analysis of form;9 and through analyses of the Gothic, an approach centred in popular culture and gender that focuses on the fantastic rather than the historical medieval. Fredric Jameson's reading of Marx has been important to the first approach, motivating (for instance) Antony Easthope's discussion of `cultural phantasy', and his use of courtly love as a prime example of this phenomenon in Poetry as Discourse.10 In a more historicizing vein is R. J. Smith's enormously useful study, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688±1863. Studies in the Gothic tend to focus on the genre as it reflects Romantic innovation rather than medievalism; nevertheless, studies such as Anne William's The Art of Darkness have proved important to understanding the Romantic reassessment of gender through received medievalisms.11 This new critical interest in medievalism signals a return of its own to research in British Romantic medievalism conducted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concurrently with the increased emphasis scholars were placing on medieval studies in general.12 Early twentieth-century scholars, as much as they looked forwards and rejected their Victorian and Romantic forebears, were also fascinated by the medieval culture that was slowly coming to light through the efforts of historians such as Frederic Maitland, C. S. Lewis and H. J. Chaytor, and through poets such as Ezra Pound, who was highly influenced by the culture of Provence in his poetic composition.13 A member of the Bloomsbury circle, Maitland perhaps best exemplifies the new medievalists: medieval scholarship influenced (and was influenced by) the avantgarde theories of the modernists, and the modernist scholars whose work on both medieval and Romantic literature and culture bear the mark of this exchange.14 Recent work that has renewed interest in Romantic medievalism includes Alice Chandler's A Dream of Order (1970), Kevin Morris's The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic Victorian Literature (1984), Jerome Mitchell's Scott, Chaucer and Medieval Romance (1987), and Clare Simmons, Reversing the Conquest (1990).15 Influential




to my thinking has been research on the troubadours such as Linda Paterson's Troubadours and Eloquence (1975), Simon Gaunt's Troubadours and Irony (1989) and Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (1995), as has been the research by Sarah Kay, Marianne Shapiro and others on women troubadours (or trobairitz) which has been particularly stimulating in this area, as well as the essays in William Paden's The Voice of the Trobairitz (1989).16 What underlies the range of interests explored in these works is an increasing interest in the relevance of medieval French and British culture to modernity. Romanticism, sitting at the edges of modernity, is in a unique position to illuminate this relevance, and much work remains to be done in uncovering the causes and nature of historical desire expressed in Romantic medievalism. Occitan studies as we know it today is the product of the Romantic interest in the past. More than the Enlightenment literary antiquarianism of the Warton brothers, which touched only superficially on the troubadour tradition and was more invested in a literary heritage than an engagement with history itself, the quest for the historical troubadours begins from the Romantic enthusiasm for the troubadour figure. Medieval Occitan studies gained importance in France in the nineteenth century under the leadership of Gaston Paris, who coined the term `courtly love', beginning with his first efforts in the 1860s to revise the older scholarship that distrusted manuscript sources.17 Paris proceeded according to a new philological and editing programme that culminated in his La poeÂsie du moyen aÃge: LecËons et lectures (1885), which continues to inform how troubadour lyrics are studied today.18 Similarly, medieval English studies as the discipline we recognize today arose from the Victorian professionalization of the Romantic-period enthusiasm for medievalism. Alice Chandler provides the most thorough historical examination of nineteenth-century medievalism, but focuses on the Victorian period, and views medievalism as a conservative and conserving movement, and as one most fully expressed in nineteenth-century prose and novels. I settle my lens on the Romantic period and its extended boundaries, and have focused as much as possible on Romantic period poetry rather than fiction. Chandler's study of the conservatism of the medievalists provides an important backdrop to my own study of Romantic radicalism and critique; it is this conservation that I associate with chivalry and the knight figure, particularly as explored by Scott and Wordsworth. Against chivalric conservatism I pose radical troubadourism, most fully played out in the poetry of Coleridge, Keats and Shelley. It is this poetic posture that associates itself with the radical posture of the medieval




troubadour who pits himself against the lord-knight figure in an essentially political act by assailing, both emotionally and sexually, the lordpatron's lady. In distinguishing between knight as lord and troubadour as poet, I assert a category by which to read Romantic period poetry rather than medieval poetry. Medieval romances abound in knightlovers who sing to their ladies just as Scott's King Richard is able to perform as a troubadour, but troubadour lyrics distinguish the poet as the true lover from the knight-lord who is to be resisted and fooled; and it is this distinction that Romantic poets drew on for their speakers' postures. Wordsworth's speakers, whom I analyse as exemplifying the knightly or chivalric position, associate themselves emotionally with the conservative knight-poet of the romance, whereas Keats's speakers associate themselves emotionally with the radical poet-lover of the canso. These are specifically political postures, the first identifying itself with radical themes that screen a retrospect nostalgia for better times, whereas the second is apparently retrospected and thus apparently also conservative, but screens a radicalism that critics found deeply threatening. As for the twelfth-century troubadours, it is often how women writers respond to these postures that reveals the real intentions behind `true love'. Before turning to specific aspects of British Romantic medievalism which will focus the chapters that follow, it is important to summarize the reality of the medieval itself, and to situate within it medieval poetry. I am specifically interested here in the cansos of the troubadour, as it is this highly charged and politically coded poetry to which, I argue, Romantic poetry is largely indebted.

The medieval historical mind What does remain of the architecture from the period of the troubadours was largely revised during the nineteenth century to be more àuthentic', to be more twelfth century than the original monument.19 The revisionist historical frame of mind that viewed medieval architecture as an imprecise representation of the medieval is a continuation of the medievalism that held sway during the Romantic period. The chapter epigraph above explains why past histories are either viewed through revisionist screens or fetishized for their original traces. To understand that the past cannot be known except through the various screens that have been invented for thinking about history helps make sense of Romantic medievalism. The Romantics found it particularly useful to view history as a pastness that orients the future, thus situating the




French Revolution within the context of a medievalism that both had to be extirpated and held on to. The tension between tradition as grounding and the past as decay is located in the collapse of the past into the medieval per se. This collapse, which sometimes contains and sometimes excludes the Renaissance, creates an immediate ground for the modern, and it is in the modern that Romanticism situates itself as an initiating moment. The Romantics understood themselves to be at the start of a new era, a modernity that was foreshadowed by the Renaissance, and signalled by the Enlightenment, but that was only truly beginning with the socio-political experimentation of the French Revolution and the intellectual experimentation of German philosophy. The historical consciousness of Romanticism is, as writers such as Alan Liu and James Chandler have recently noted, a new development consonant with modernity. The present, and implicitly the future, can only be comprehended against the past as a generalized `pastness', a historical òtherness' in which to see mirrored the character of the present tense.20 The Romantics saw the tension between the past as beneficial and the past as contagious as one that could be generally sited in the myth of courtly love: ennobling love versus adulterous desire. More formally, this tension can be found in the troubadour love lyric itself as a part of its very structure. Although the Romantics did not write many imitations of the courtly love lyric, they did experiment with Spenserianism and Petrarchism, and in the irregular ode they found a modern-day version of the courtly love lyric. It is important to see how they translated what they understood through Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Tasso, Ariosto and Petrarch about courtly love and about the troubadour love lyric into contemporary poetics and poetic form. But in order to arrive at that extension of the argument, I need to first trace the medieval frame of mind that provided the òther' for the Romantic sense of history as a present happening. Two historians whose accounts of the medieval mind frame have proved useful to this study are Jacques Le Goff, whose work The Medieval Imagination sets many of the terms in place for the present chapter, and Anthony Kemp, whose Estrangement of the Past charts the development of the medieval historical model.21 Both Kemp's medieval historicity and Le Goff's medieval imagination help show exactly why the medieval past is so foreign, so òther' to subsequent ages. The medieval syncretic historical frame is radically different from that of the dynamic progressivism of Enlightenment historiography, which is further revised then in the fantasied history, a pulsation of ideal and material history, that is part of a larger progressive-retrograde dynamic




of Romantic historicism.22 This difference between a temporal unity with the past and a motivated direction to all events contains the fascination the medieval held for the Romantics. Within the fundamental differentness of medieval culture lay the visible roots of the present, with the remnants of feudalism still part of current social structures and institutions. Rather than denying a continuity with this difference, as the Enlightenment thinkers had done, the Romantics sought to assert this continuity in the face of radical difference as a reclaiming of the past for political and imaginative purposes. Certainly a conservative thinker such as Edmund Burke found a non-differentiated continuity with the past when he called on tradition to assert the priority of monarchical and aristocratic privilege as a part and parcel of English liberty in Ref lections on the Revolution in France (1790). But even a conservative writer such as Scott uses the past for both asserting tradition and imagining a new past from which a desired present and future could spring. And nearly every radical thinker also called on the past, from Godwin to Shelley, not in the sense of a tradition that needed to be rejected or restyled, but in the sense of a mythical re-vision of that past which could justify present schemes for change. Only women writers concerned to contradict this historical imperative wrote against such a construct. Perhaps most important in this respect are the novels of Mary Shelley, particularly The Last Man (1826), which rewrites Scott by posing a time warp of past, present and future that disrupts the notion of a continuous past. The development of medieval historical consciousness begins with Eusebius's church history; his structuring of time significantly eliminates mutability. Eusebius's purpose is to write into being the radical continuation with Christ, to rid the historical text of temporal separation from Christ. Augustine provides the expansion of church history to universal history by dividing time into six millennia from the Creation to the end of the world. But in doing so he textualizes history, making it impossible to consider history as existing beyond the boundaries of the written word.23 History can be text because time is unified; the world and time of Christ is still the temporal world of the now. Augustine entrusted the completion of his universal history to Paulus Orosius, preventing the possibility of future innovation. Until the end of time, the present will continue to be as it has been under the Roman Empire: historical narrative becomes an index of anachronistic thought and a valuing of the credible. This radical historical syncretism, weighted with religious symbolism, was as politically meaningful for the Romantics as it was spiritually politicized for the medieval mind. As




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Katie Trumpener notes, the antiquarian term `relique' to refer to medieval poetry was laden with the Christian sense of sacrificial, and reliques in general obtained the status of cultural synecdoches standing in for the ruin and fragmentation of national cultures: the martyred culture is synecdochally present in `the crucified object', and `[t]he attributes of Christ's tortured body are here transposed onto the fragments of the past' (Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism 28). By the twelfth century, the century of the troubadours, there are disruptive challenges to this model, within the Church most particularly from Peter Abelard. Innovation is perversion, the same heresy that leads to the extermination of the Cathar Gnostics and troubadourian culture.24 What the troubadours contribute heretically is the disruption of time, their lyric moment installing a split-self that is simultaneously sincerely present in its love for the lady, and inauthentic in its covert glance out at sexual, political and poetic competitors. The ironized self doubles back on history, refuting syncretism for contradictory presents. This is the great appeal for the Romantics; indeed, the instituted order that Cathar and troubadourian culture disrupts, discernible through the essential non-mutability that finds its universals in institutional forms, is the very tradition that Romantics found strangling and decayed, like the walls of the Bastille prison cells described by Helen Maria Williams. What Le Goff helps us understand in relation to this model of ordering is that imaginatively the medieval mindset created a nexus of temporal spaces for itself that were mythic, symbolic and narrative. Both space and time were imagined by a series of organizing images and symbols: forests, gardens, cities, kingdoms, the time of the fields, the time of the Church, the time of generations, the time of kings' reigns, the time of God. Both time and space were ultimately organized by the final figuration, the Last Judgment. `Thus, the structures of space and time were fragile and vulnerable. The men of the Middle Ages not only cleared new land in this world, they created a new space and time in the next' (Le Goff, Medieval Imagination 13). The medieval reliance on a mentality that was not continuous, but threaded through a network of kinds of space and kinds of time, creates a very different structure from postEnlightenment positivism. The Romantic emphasis on imagination seeks to create anew a dialectical spatio-temporal scheme through the sublime and imaginative transcendence, but not a return to medieval historicity. Yet that historical imagination, as understood through Augustine, prose and verse romances, and writers such as Chaucer and Dante, still retains a compelling otherness to which the Romantics had to respond. They did so by creating out of the medieval imagination





Romantic anachronism Kathleen Biddick argues in The Shock of Medievalism that when the discipline of medieval studies was formed in the Victorian period, `medievalism' as a sentimentalization of the medieval was purposefully opposed to the positivism of medieval studies. The discipline was separated off from history, objectified and distanced from those remnants of medieval culture still effecting a presence in contemporary life. This division of history into the not-present, which is our Victorian heritage, is precisely why the Romantic inhabiting of the medieval is so important to understand. The Romantics comprehended the importance of medieval schematic continuity, and the potential of its signal anachronisms. They saw the medieval subject as undergoing historical crises in ways analogically applicable; the past was not an otherness or alterity, not an antiquarian fossil, but a not-here or a not-now, a fantasy space with real lines of connection to the human spirit and imagination (as was the Classical past). In this context we can see how important a role medieval anachronism played as a trope for the Romantic historical imagination. It authorizes the presentation of the past as the present for a particular purpose, and therefore situates the present as the threshold of the future. The past can be projectively viewed as an ego-ideal of historical consciousness, the idealized space of a past that is connectively present and available. The difference between the medieval and the post-Enlightenment model of temporality is that for the medieval mind the now is past, present and future all at once; for the Romantics the present is a new history, for the first time thus conceived as history. By contrast, both French and British Enlightenment antiquarians viewed medieval documents, including literary manuscripts, as questionably authentic and most probably ìmproved upon' more than once, including by medieval scribes. The medieval as artefact is radically unavailable, discontinuous, open to construal. Eighteenth-century antiquarians, unlike those of Scott's generation, valued manuscripts for their aesthetic rather than historical value, but felt the aesthetics to be lacking and in need of stylistic revision (Kendrick, `The Science of Imposture' 101). Thomas Percy performs just such emendations in his Reliques of Ancient English



a mirror text of their own making, medievalism. It is an enormously productive construct for the artist, allowing the essential medieval trope of anachronism to stand in as a pervasive metaphor for the medieval past itself.

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Poetry (1765), the ballad collection that was largely responsible for the new interest in romance and balladic poetry. Thomas Chatterton effectively bridges the Enlightenment loss of history, in which artefacts lie, and Romantic filiations with history, in which documents need to be imaginatively resuscitated, made to live again as medieval. Chatterton's new medievalism, decried by antiquarians concerned with detecting the faulty text, was embraced by Romantics such as Keats who sought a textually living past. Chatterton's anachronism produces history. Medievalism as an anachronism ± as a vaguely past state that encompasses everything up to the Enlightenment initiation into modernity ± seats the historicity of the presently active and imaginatively sensitive consciousness of the individual, allowing the `now' to be. The conflict between anachronism ± the disruption of temporal sequence ± and antiquarianism ± its preservation ± can be seen in the difference between Horace Walpole's antiquarianism, which leads to the creation of the Gothic, and Walter Scott's antiquarianism, which leads to the creation of the historical novel. The Gothic is an Enlightenment revision of medieval superstition and fantasy; the historical novel is a Romantic revision of antiquarian collection that makes use of history to create a temporal identity rather than fabricating it for mere escapism. This also holds true architecturally: Walpole's Strawberry Hill and William Beckford's Fonthill Abbey are monuments to a Gothic medievalism (a false one in which the past is the real lack) rather than, as in Scott's Abbotsford, a realized one. Strawberry Hill is an intentionally medievalized but paper house that produces Gothicity instead of denying it, just as Fonthill Abbey is an extravagant daydream. But Abbotsford reinstates medievalism, collecting artefacts with such intensity that they cannot summon a misappropriation of the past; they can only realize it. Yet this is also a misrecognition, a mirror for the present. Scott's antiquarian mirror suggests that mirroring ± viewing the past as an idealized other to the present moment ± is a component of the desire to structure an anatomic past as authorizing, as it is at Abbotsford. Expressly, this is history imagined as the naive, flowering culture of the early Middle Ages, combined with a contemporary rereading of this culture as an emergent Romanticism. The medieval offers a prior culture in which it was possible to live with honour: this is the Arthurian draw. And importantly, the medieval is a space imbued with the intense possibilities of love, love that can contract into the personal and, tensed to a modern age, extend to the universal; it engages its own metaphorical space and transfigures it. Its translator is the poet, its agency language. But to be politically relevant this love subsumes itself to the




expressive form most associated with the medieval: not romance, but the love lyric. It is the love song as an artefact of troubadour sentiment and directly addressed to the love object (a woman who, in her modern translation, is extendable to Nature), which epitomizes the medieval as a usable version of the past. Such a reading must take into account the Renaissance revisitings of the medieval as foreshadowing such a discovery, and viewed by the Romantics as such. Renaissance fascination with figurations of medieval culture and of cultural memory ± the antiquary is a figure of the Renaissance ± points forwards to a similar appropriation of the past by the Romantics that involves a re-collection as a purposeful rather than nostalgic approach to history. Renaissance chivalry provided the Elizabethans with what Johan Huizinga has called a `historical ideal of life', a use of the idealized past to create a heightened sense of presence.25 This recollection was of the spirit of the past, accessible to the new permutations of sentiment, and a buffer against present times. Scott's artefacts ± the arms and armour with which he decorated his walls ± similarly present a buffer in their anachronistic syncretism, the anachronism being what James Chandler calls à measurable form of dislocation'. I locate the period's most pervasive poetic anachronism in courtly love, distilled into that of the troubadour with his metonymously related figures of knight and lady. Anachronism, with its ability to bring into view a useful comparative between past and present, and its transfiguring of archaism into a more self-conscious form, has become a major trope in the Romantic historiographical debate that has focused on Scott. But its importance here is less as an extension of Hegel's historicism and more as an indicator of the fantasy element inherent in a seemingly objective enterprise such as antiquarian research.26 Surely one way to understand anachronism is antiquarian, as the reconstruction of past manners, costume, and speech for historical narratives. But the more such a reconstruction reflects the past, the more it screens the fantasy that propels it. Romantic medievalism offers a way to evade the fantasy of fact and to imagine a spiritually truer past. Moreover, it imagines co-equal and co-temporal moments (rather than medieval temporal unity), a comparative historical consciousness that Jerome McGann calls `double perspectivism' and James Chandler calls `comparative contemporaneities' (England in 1819 107), which makes the past a living presence, and which differentiates the reconstruction (Keats's La Belle Dame sans Merci) from the literally medieval text (Chartier's La Belle Dame Sans Mercy).27 What distinguishes the anachronized text from the strange time of medieval texts is that the former is more




15

self-conscious about its subjective and objective correspondences than the antiquarian artefact, meaning to learn from its conflations the new possibilities of the present. Impressively, the troubadour love lyric creates a lyrical presentness that is not the medieval anachronism of temporal unity but already the Romantic anachronism of a presently available, disruptive or contradictory past and therefore a similarly split now. The troubadour's new time expresses a new individualism. The Romantics were also intrigued by the resurgence of individual political will in the Renaissance that, initiated in classical Athens, was also foreshadowed by the resistant and self-conscious poetics of the twelfthcentury troubadour. Stimulated by American and French struggles for individual freedoms, the Romantics became deeply interested in the poetic contest medieval literature sets up between the Celtic bards, whose lays travelled between Wales and Brittany, and the Occitanic troubadours, whose lays travelled to England with Eleanor of Aquitaine's court. It is the Occitan troubadour, with his self-promoting songs of desperate love for the wife of his patron, who ignores war and nation to disguise a revolutionary individualist intent (whether as illicit desire or as social gain) behind the spiritual quality of true love. He is a figure who is from our perspective recognizably Keatsian, certainly Romantic, and therefore perceptively modern and out of his time, unlike the epic poet of the chanson de geste. The Romantics, too, saw in the troubadour a spirit of modernity and secularization that could anticipate their own struggle with audience, politics and historical self-realization. The canso's coded character at once replicates the worldly interactions of the court and the intimacy of secret love, always double-valenced in its addressee and intention. This complex subjectivity, disguised as a singularity that speaks sincerely of true love, requires a multiple and relative world-view, politically astute and always playing addressee off against audience. Generally this `playing off' is made literal through a homosocial relation between the poet and another man, who may be the knight or another poet, but is in any case both friend and opponent in a contest whose arena is the poem itself, and whose contestation is screened by the lady-love scenario.28 As Gaunt notes, `[t]he homosocial economy of cansos and their inscription in the masculine hierarchy of feudalism indicate they do not empower women as much as their speakers . . . The troubadour demonstrates his control over language and thereby his superiority over other poets' (Gender and Genre 148). The singer, whose song is more often about the song itself than about his lady, is himself empowered through prestige and a sense of control




over others, a control accomplished through `competitive linguistic performance' (Gender and Genre 148), and through the placement of male and female others in the song relative to their placement in the reality of the court. The canso is à symbol of virility', that Gaunt reads as being `brandished at other men much as chanson de geste heroes brandish swords . . . [as] signs of masculine prowess' (Gender and Genre 149). Similarly, Sarah Kay demonstrates that the troubadour develops his subjectivity and masculine identity through this competitive performance in relation to the tradition it takes part in rather than in relation to the lady (Subjectivity 4±6). This use of poetic form for masculine subjectivity is precisely the formulation of Keats's odes, developed through the earlier Spenserian poems that focus obsessively on the poem itself and on the competitive mastery over language. Keats critics have repeatedly referred to this phenomenon in his oeuvre as Keats's inability, particularly in his immature poetry, to develop an important enough subject on which to write, and to his educational deficiencies. But here we can see that Keats comprehended the troubadourian project as an important and effective procedural way to respond to social and political challenges to masculine subjectivity. Coleridge, deficient in neither subject matter nor education, also sees the importance of the love lyric tradition for defending against challenges to poetic identity and gender identity. His innovative conversation poem develops from the courtly love canso, meditating on the poetic and moving from the poetic landscape (the naturalized lady) to the process of creative thought in such a way that the inspiration and genius are appropriated to the poet even in the act of attributing them to the beloved, Nature. It is for this reason that `The Nightingale, a Conversational Poem' invokes a series of beloveds, beginning with the traditional figure for the beloved, the nightingale, moving to a present female, Dorothy Wordsworth, as a realistic and modernized version of the courtly lady, but then returning resolutely to a lady-love associated with a grove or bower, À most gentle maid/ . . . (Even like a Lady vow'd and dedicate/To something more than nature in the grove)'. The fact that `The Nightingale' replaced the troubadour lyric `Lewti: Or, The Circassian Love Chant' in the Lyrical Ballads is highly significant, as is the fact that `Lewti' reworks an earlier Wordsworth poem, and that Wordsworth takes the conversation poem form and makes it his own. `Tintern Abbey', for instance, is in fierce linguistic and poetic competition with Coleridge and other poets, and is an intense meditation on masculine poetic subjectivity. The troubadour lyric, then, sets up an Ì' whose relation to the audience is a useful precedent for the Romantic




17

speaker, who separates out the historical and the temporal self, the composing poet and the hero-I, on several levels even as he appears, like the troubadour, to collapse such distinctions. In speaking about his own experience he can speak about his times. When the poem is not of the present but of the past, this split-self often modulates into a narrator and hero, as in Don Juan, or a commentator and narrator (with hero as object), as in `The Ancient Mariner'. The past is a space on to which selfhood can be projected while maintaining a temporal hold on the present. It is this identity slippage that is contained within the medieval present moment of the troubadour (rather than the historical self-identity of medieval historicism): an always present multiple vision, a doubled historical awareness that requires continuous play with what the subject can/must know, with how heroic the poet/hero can be. And it is this slippage that appealed to the Romantics' sense of momentous historicity. Even the Romantic understanding of the troubadour was subject to history, however, being transmitted unreliably through literary successors. Sismondi's De la Litterature du Midi de L'Europe, reviewed by Hazlitt for the Edinburgh Review and used by Mary Shelley for Valperga, occurs too late to be of use to the first-generation Romantics, while Pope's Eloisa to Abelard, an important medievalizing text for writers as diverse as Hazlitt and Anna Seward, is so implicated in its sensibility that it does not provide the necessary historical accuracy. Yet we can see even in the Romantic uses made of Chaucer as a forefather that the importance of the troubadourian posture was its virility rather than its selfhumiliation. After the exodus of the troubadours from Occitania to northern Italy and elsewhere, the courtly love lyric extended its ideological reach beyond its formal boundaries. The distinctions that hold for medieval chansons de geste, romance and troubadour lyric begin to be less formally bound, and more rigidly ideologically bound into a typology of kinds of love: allegorical, courtly, philosophic and Christian. By the time Chaucer is writing, love is a dominant theme in all its types, and Norman Eliason argues that Chaucer is predominantly a love poet, dealing with the four major kinds of love as well as what Eliason terms òrdinary love', or non-generic love, throughout his poetry.29 Romantic readers were sensitive to the typology of love, and possibly to the suprageneric kind Eliason denotes. Wordsworth's efforts to modernize Chaucer's tales, for instance, stem as much from an awareness of generic distinctions demanded by the typology as from a sense that something more is explored in the tales that has resonance with Wordsworth's own poetic experimentation with affect and love of nature.





In Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature, Simon Gaunt analyses the formal ways in which the three major verse genres of medieval courtly literature ± the epic chansons de geste, the romance, and the troubadour lyric ± arbitrate relations between the sexes. His formulation is useful because the distinctions are retained in the Romantics' reception of medieval literature. Chansons de geste construct a monologic sexuality of male-to-male, whereas romances plot the self-discovery of the individual male self through its negotiations with male others over the possession of a woman. Although the romance heroine is a product of the male discursive formation of the romance, and although she is an object of exchange between two men, Gaunt argues that she still codes a dialectical sexuality. This is because the woman's response to sexual negotiations cannot be completely controlled since she is not a pure object; moreover, the complication of the sex object within the exchange dynamic sets up a tension between the knight's martial prowess (can he protect his dependents as he ought?) and his sexual prowess (can he please the woman?). If sexual prowess is essentially her judgment, to extend Gaunt's argument, how can he equate martial with sexual abilities, even though this is the essential metaphor for physical achievement? To not please the lady is to not be a man, yet to bend to her will is to not be a man. Therefore, even if she is the exchange object between her father and the knight, or between two knights, whose exchange determines his masculine construction against the sexual identity of the other man, her sexual judgment can unman him. Romance situates the hero in a fundamental ambiguity of identity and sexuality. This generic ambiguation of sexual identity is, of course, what makes the romance the ideal form for late-eighteenth century and Romantic period women writers eager to manipulate this tension in the heroine's favour. It would also seem, at first glance, to be what seats the troubadour's love song, with its humiliation of the poet to the lady and potential for effeminization. Through this ambiguity of place and through the formal instalment of the courtly love code, the troubadour love lyric combines the two poles of the chansons de geste and the romance. It is on the one hand a construction of masculine identity in relation to other men via a female sexual object (as is the romance), and on the other, a purely masculine utterance like the chansons, through silencing and absenting the purportedly present lady. A fourth genre Gaunt does not discuss, the lai, bridges the romance and love lyric as a shorter narrative form that specifically



The problem of the lady

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engages questions of love, but usually from a misogynistic standpoint that supports the necessary silencing of women for sexual reasons.30 In Medieval Misogyny R. Howard Bloch pays careful attention to the interplay of misogyny and sexuality in the lai as it formalizes the silencing and absenting of women. The canso's lady, exalted yet silenced, diminished because loved, is sung of because the poet is self-conscious about his sexual and poetic competition with other men. Bloch's interpretation provides the necessary foundation for the canso's inversion of misogynistic silencing for homosocial silencing, and the lady's exalted-disregarded status in the canso as well as the troubadour's self-effeminizing gestures. Bloch situates courtly love against the medieval topos of the talkative or verbally riotous woman, and the impossible paradox of the virtuous virgin. He finds the double axis of courtly love to be the presence and absence of sight and of sound. Both of these, Bloch proves, are based on a cognitive paradox that renders woman's position a double bind in the medieval imagination. Men should not marry because the wife is insanely garrulous; virginity requires not being seen by men (Medieval Misogyny 100). The woman who remains unseen and silent cannot be said to exist, yet only she emblematizes the ungendered soul. The lady is a `problem of overdetermination in terms of subjective vision' (Medieval Misogyny 19). In a lai by Jean de Meun, Bloch finds that the crafty jongleur ± in anticipation of the fool of Renaissance drama ± seeks to teach the king a lesson about language in general . . . There is, the [poet] asserts, no possibility of an objective regard upon the opposite sex and, therefore, no innocent place of speech. The mere fact of speaking to women makes one a pimp; a refusal to speak or even to look is the sign of a eunuch. (Bloch, Medieval Misogyny 18±19) These are the conditions of masculine poetic identity, while out of the impossible paradox of a loving misogyny, woman becomes the condition of her own dismissal, both gossip and cruel rejector: `[b]ecause of the inadequacies of language that she is imagined to embody, she is in some fundamental sense always already placed in the role of a deceiver, trickster, jongleur' (Medieval Misogyny 20). The medieval mind construes woman both as literal and as metaphor. As a representation impossibly embodied, she provides the basis of poetic composition and an expression of the loss of the literal, or of the loss of the literal to the feminine (a gendering which divests the literal of any figural affiliation).




In a lai by Renaut de Beaujeu, `Le Lai d'IgnaureÂ ou lai du prisonnier', the knight IgnaureÂ seduces all the court ladies but each thinks she is his only love until each tells her secret in a literal `court of love'. By revelation they ensure his death, and his genitals and heart are served as stew to the ladies. The women as a group refuse nourishment and die, a recurrent plot device in the lai. The husbands' revenge is less a reclamation of spousal property than of class and rank; their greatest concern is whether the theft of their wives' desire is by an appropriate figure: Ìs he a bourgeois or knight?' IgnaureÂ is the figure of the poet, ordaining the embodied paradox of secret and discovery, and of the poet's threatened and divided self. This same dynamic is at play in the canso's focus on the lover±beloved relation. As in the lai, love for the lady is displaced by another male matter, here desire itself. The love contest rests on a male positioning: je loves the lady as objet, but despises himself because he is also the passive victim of her denial, and blames her for self-pride.31 The primal scene is enacted between she who will not be addressed, and he who then seeks redress; there are two additional roles of helper and liar or meÂdisant, the liar representing verbal honour. The lady's refusals are compared to the liar's abuse of speech, and both compared to the poet's verbal sincerity. Herein is coded the medieval belief in narrative as lie, the literary word's problematic relation to truth, and the òverwhelming desire to desire' which as a condition of the poet's song produces the analogy lady is to lover as meÂdisant is to poet, (Bloch, Medieval Misogny 101). The meÂdisant, or verbally destructive rival, is as necessary to the poet's self-construction as the rejecting lady. The role of the intruder unveils the whole problem of public privacy, of intrigue and manipulation, of sincerity and truth. The poet's gendering oscillates between his humiliation to the lady, his destructive rivalry with the liar, his cuckolding of the knight-lord, and his virile competition with other poets. The emphasis on masculine identity formation in all four genres reveals how central to the period this aspect of subjectivity is, and how threatening to society are any destabilizing shifts in masculine construction, since these literary genres had to arise as a means of negotiating and resolving such instabilities. Chivalry presents just such a shift because it changes the emphasis laid on the earlier epic warrior's relation to his companions to an emphasis on the chivalric code of protection. Courtly love, introduced after chivalry is already in place, is another such shift. Its focus on the lady as the object of desire insists that the individual male subjectivity be formulated and circulated in relation to this object as a self-consciously divided subject. The cultural field that




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gave rise to troubadour poetry also invested chivalry, originally referring to the cavalier or warrior class, with its own idealized motifs: loyalty, truthfulness, courtesy, hardiness, humility and generosity. Troubadour poetry adjudicates the new code of chivalry, in itself an ideological template to replace the knight's reality: bawdy or military manners, and a confirmed habit of bashing his lady's nose to teach her humility and subservience. While romance transfigures the martial lord into the knight-errant, the figure by which history remembers him (Ferguson, The Chivalric Tradition 17), the troubadour poem encodes a refined love practice that can be interpreted within the chivalric code that references it. Furthermore, if courtly love arises, Gaunt suspects, as a response to the Church's marriage reforms which targeted aristocratic marriage contracts, and gave women for the first time the right of refusal, a misogynistic and parodic inversion of courtly love could help adjudicate tensions surrounding women's new expressive power while being beheld as a speculative object in courtly love.32 Although the troubadour's signal achievement is the creation of `true' love, this is a fantastic relation that politicizes love and desire by making sight and sound absent presences. Accompanying this virtual love is the tensed homosocial and politicized competition that accountably intrigues later poets, particularly the Romantics; the textual relation between poet and lady encodes a challenge to male authority that can stand in for any act of political resistance to patriarchal authority. At the same time, the absent presence provides a powerful vehicle for resisting the too verbally and visually present women writers encroaching on the literary marketplace of the 1790s and after.33 Romantic women writers were equally aware of this problematic relation of gender to genre, and increasingly wrote from the troubadourian beloved's place in order to envoice her, and to engage in literary battle. To do so as a woman, however, is to be entangled in the problem of genre, a problem twelfth-century women poets, the trobairitz, had already encountered. Whereas the troubadours use vassalage to express desire, the trobairitz make explicit this reversal of power hierarchy as political obligation that seeks to contract the lady with or against her will. If the trobairitz emphasize the mutuality of love, it is against their complaints of the lover's indiscreet behaviour, disregard for the lady's reputation, and cowardly or unpleasant behaviour. Their conventional depiction of themselves as abandoned women, ladies who have become conquests, reveals how unobtainable (like the men's transcendent love) mutual love was considered to be (Bruckner, Shepard and White, Songs of the Women Troubadours xxi, xxiii). Indeed, in the troubadour model, the




lady's power is limited to the terms of his subjection (she can either reject him, or submit to his love and inspire him), for which she did not ask. As Linda Paterson has shown, Occitan knights preferred contracts to the rituals and reality of paying homage, so that for the male poet to do homage to the normally subordinate lady is both highly ironic, and a weighted gesture towards the poet's male audience.34 Despite the subsequent spiritualization of lady love best known to the Romantics in the poetry of Dante and Petrarch, the undertone of irony persisted. And if romance suppresses and erases the woman despite her visibility as the object of exchange, and the lyric ironically undercuts her supposed elevation to a superior position and visibility, both forms essentially reinscribe her social subordination to the more important cultural task of placing and reinforcing masculine identity. As Erich È hler demonstrates, lesser nobles lost access to land ownership, giving Ko them a junior status to the seignorial status of the lords, and making them figuratively jovens or young in relation to the adult lord. Their lyrics reflect the frustrations of economic deprivation leading to a social immaturity figured as the squire and centred on possession of the lady: these are the `struggle[s] for the social advancement of a group that designates itself by the name of ``joven'' and that includes impoverished knights, warriors of servile ancestry, mercenary soldiers, and finally the È hler, 553). The poet, in his new spokesmen for them all, the poets' (Ko class association, having moved downwards from nobility to jovens, encodes a desire for upward mobility through the lady, as well as an amalgam identity as knight-poet-squire that is transmitted through the lyrics. It is this condensed figuration that acts as a kind of dreamwork condensation filtered through the lyrics whose interpretive demands work on the Romantic poet. As condensation or metaphor, the troubadour's discontent offers a parallel to the difficulty of the Romantic poet in the changing literary marketplace, prefiguring present conflict as history itself. The Jacobin revolt against the old regime in France symbolized a destruction of the social order that dispossessed some in order to consolidate power in others: as Coleridge writes in 1800, `We . . . in our rage against a phantom of Jacobinism, have shamefully neglected to calculate the blessings from the destruction of Feudalism.'35 For the Romantics, reinterpreting chivalric and courtly textual practices in stricter form than popular romances and Gothics meant reverting to both inscriptions of women's subordination. The homage of poet to lady, no longer ironically or sincerely plausible in radical literature, could best be applied to a spiritually plausible object such as Nature, rather than a mortal woman.36 Compared to the epic and




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romance, the love lyric is in a sense the perfect medieval art form, combining the all-important masculine identity formation with an emphasis on the priority of art. As Gaunt notes, the troubadourian lyric presents, in the guise of paying tribute to the lady, a meditation on the nature and achievement of poetic art (Gender and Genre 148). This priority, which is the key to the lyric's new male-to-male relation taking place in the name of the lady, transforms the ambiguities threatening male identity into an artifice: she can no longer represent desire but only taste. Moreover, as she does not speak but only represents, she is only a figure for the larger force of art itself. The poet's love, rather than his love object, is in poem after poem the motivator and expression of his art, and it is his art on which he is to be judged. After the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars, exiled troubadours had to make their songs more congenial to Church teachings by transforming the courtly lady into versions of the Virgin Mary (a transformation Keats resists and reverses in his comparison of Madeline with St Agnes in The Eve of St. Agnes). The spiritualized lady remains silenced (dead and beatified), and is recognizably the ancestress of Romantic Nature, Wordsworth's spirit in the woods. This is the most important way in which the troubadour love lyric makes itself known as the quintessential Romantic poetic appropriation and transformation of the medieval. Romance, by contrast, is appropriated most specifically to the novel, although the Spenserianism of Hunt and Keats is indebted to it.37 The courtly beloved engenders Nature, and the courtly love lyric engenders the `lines' poems and conversation poems of Coleridge and Wordsworth. These early `revolutionary' achievements are then, in the aftermath of reactionaryism, assimilated to the more romance-influenced medievalism represented by Scott's poems, Keats's romances, and his redirection of the irregular ode away from transcendent Nature and back to the troubadourian use of the love lyric to write about art itself. The troubadour is thus compelling for the political purposes to which his ideology can be put, but also in the all important terms of history: in creating a politicized lyrical present tense, the troubadour is the temporal anachronism so formative for the Romantic appropriation of pastness to present purposes. Eventually this figure will lose out, however, to that of the knight for the Victorians through the larger and more reactionary conservative appeal of chivalry and the Arthurian romance. Romantic medievalism is, through the figuration of the troubadour and the medieval anachronism of his lyrical presence, a more timely identity of the politicized and radicalized poet. As a figuration of history, the troubadour's striking attitudes in his representation of self offer




something new for Romantic consumption. Against the southern troubadour, the Celtic and the French court poets of the twelfth century sang of times past and forgotten glory, using nostalgia to compel their audiences into desiring history; in contrast, the troubadours sang in and of the moment, creating a present that both resists and embodies history. The poetic contest between national bard and courtly troubadour, revived in Gray's, Scott's and Macpherson's renderings of bardic heroism and in the resurgent interest in the courtly love of Petrarchan lyricism and the sonnet tradition, appears to the Romantics not as a contest of poetic style or gender politics, but of history and of the poet as time keeper. The troubadour offers a viable model for Romantic thought not just in his self-conscious and politicized attitude towards art, but also in his resistance to nostalgia, a sentimentalizing of history appropriate to romance whose process disrupts the otherwise productive misrecognition inherent in the medievalizing process.

Troubadourian affect Four fields of cultural affect arose in the late eighteenth century that prepared the ground for a troubadourian revival: Spenserianism, Petrarchism, Sapphism and Della Cruscanism. Spenserianism will be discussed in Chapter 4, and the other three movements in Chapter 2, but what needs to be assessed here is the link between their rise, that of medievalism, and that of Romantic troubadourism. This is the Cult of Sensibility, which not only empowers the affects but restores the lady-love schema to the cultural imaginary. Sensibility provides a bodily aesthetic for imagining her experience; women were thus encouraged not only to be conscious of the sensual, but to express it. Petrarchism is the formal imagining of being the beloved, Spenserianism the stylistic imagining of it, and Sapphism the projection of a female erotic: all are female centred, providing Della Cruscanism with a ready base for its instantaneous popularity and its production of `Laura' poets or self-voiced beloveds. Yet it is Della Crusca himself, Robert Merry, who dominated the movement; his troubadour posture offers a useful vehicle for Romantic repositioning of the male poet in relation to these scribbling, emoting women. Due to his unreflective, apolitical use of the posture, Romantic poetry in general becomes a refiguring of the anachronized love poet as a regendering of affect back to male concerns. Structurally the troubadour lyric provides the sexual politics for this achievement, its screen refigured as the Romantics' concern with posture, sincerity, desire, and the poetic word as truth as much as art. To




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displace political aggression and desire on the erotics of the (already possessed) female body is a metaphoric act, as is the displacement of political anomie on to the emptiness of melancholy or excessive sentiment. These two metaphors structure the medieval as well as Renaissance artefacts that the Romantics lifted from their cultural heritage and made new again. Metaphor is literally sublime fusion, a transfer of meta proportions: troubadour desire is not enough; passion must, can only, enter the text through metaphor. The canso structure is replicated at the most essential level of Romantic period poetry, and its assumptions determine specific Romantic responses as carried out by several of the major male Romantic poets. Consider Coleridge's `Letter to Sara Hutchinson', whose addressee, Sara, is transfigured into Edmund in the subsequent Morning Post version of 1802, and more overtly into Wordsworth in the 1803 letter version to William Sotheby and Sir George Beaumont, and finally re-figured as `Lady' in the 1817 version of the Sibylline Leaves. The metaphoric translations of the addressee follow the poem's revision into poetic mastery as the ode draws closer to the Dejection Ode we know today. The more Coleridge acknowledges his dance with truth to William, his competitor and judge, the more the poem becomes itself until finally it can reclaim the screen of the lady as its object of desire. At that point its exploration of melancholy, rejection, and the demands of truth so brilliantly display genius that the poem can afford to reject itself in advance of the lady, who is simply not present except as the giftee of the poem/prophecy: instead of Edmund's `simple spirit, guided from above;/Oh lofty poet, full of light and love' (1802), the Lady is only Òh simple spirit, guided from above;/Dear Lady' (1817), which is a revision of a revision of the original line, Òh dear! Oh innocent! Oh full of love!' (`Letter to Sara Hutchinson'). Troubadour poets had defined the relation between the male poetic self and the female object as one of absent presence; the beloved's presence at any performative level is entirely unnecessary because the focus is on the self's desire and woe. The Romantic substitution of nature or responsive natural entities for women beloveds is a poetic recognition that female energies in nature and in the text have become functionally entwined. Like the troubadours, poets of sensibility were also concerned with exploiting the present moment and bodily desires. Working from Jerome McGann's and G. J. Barker-Benfield's recent studies of sensibility, I have pursued a thread suggested in both works that sensibility's relation to Romantic literature depends on a new conception of history.38 Renewed interest in the medieval must be viewed as a response to the




new ascendancy of sensibility and, in the hands of the Romantics, as a challenge to the immediacy of experience with a pastness that is still viable. The feminization of culture that sensibility represents becomes a site of turbulence for the Romantics, one that in interesting ways corresponds to the effeminating and violent effects of troubadour culture. The troubadour model of a poet lover singing to his rejecting or absent lady sets up a static and stabilizing force through the strong conventions necessary to the genre, and recognizable in mere allusions to courtly love. But the elements of that model produce tensions that dynamically open it up. The troubadour poets themselves were aware of this inherent drama, using the conventions of their lyric templates to disguise or generalize their particular loves and desires. For the Romantics, the oppositional force between stasis and chaos enables a revised sensibility and the female as static. By setting aside sensibility in this way, the inherent tensions of troubadour poetry can be used to exploit it as a supporting but controllable force. This use of the desire contained and liberated in troubadour poetry to supplant sensibility is more influenced by the original model of courtly love than by Petrarchan appropriations, because the troubadours so much more dramatically deploy sexual tension. Aware of the productive nature of fraught relations, the Romantics were drawn to troubadourian poetics for their self-historicizing process. Such choices are invariably class-inflected. The aristocracy symbolically and politically identifies itself by body-word-truth; through the political power of mercantilism the middle classes distinguish themselves from tradesmen, artisans and craftsmen. They do so by professing something more material than the symbolic nobility and yet less unselfconscious than the artisan: individualism. Between these two world views, the artist will insert himself by way of a third and most seductive equation: sensuality-interiority-genius. Like the Enlightenment philosophe, the poet who is drawn to the troubadour posture has access to the third class beyond upper and middle classes; if Byron refuses to let go of aristocratic privilege, Keats sees a distinct advantage in going beyond class. As a matter of figuration, the troubadour asserts his sensual interiority as `true love' against the knightly class, appearing de-politicized, de-classed and artful. By borrowing this masking of values, Romantic troubadourism works out its own distinctions between the politically powerful knight and the rebellious poet, defined against the saliency of the lady, her desires and desirability a key issue in a reclamation of history that can absorb the lady's divine association into a natural and naturalizing process. Women poets seemed aware that, however much it glorifies the female, troubadourism asserts a male priority, existing




27

between and for men even though its object is female and its most recognizable association undying passion. Finally, Sapphism, whose revival in Britain stemmed as much from the Cult of Sensibility as from French romance literature, uses the ancient model of Sappho to define a female perspective that is primarily and recognizably poetic, and poetic through female-identified passions and experience. Sapphism explores a female-to-female aesthetic that troubadourism must appropriate and colonize if it is to dominate the affective field. It does so by exploiting the seductive appeal of being beloved; like Merry's `Lauras', women poets found it irresistible to project themselves into that position in order to play the dominant game. However, just as the medieval trobairitz were confined to the linguistic and formal restraints of the troubadour code, so too were women Romantic poets working within the troubadour framework that could allow them a voice. Simply inverting positionality in the troubadour love poem exposes women to a doubled indenture: they retain the place or emotional site of absented female beloved as well as the rejected status of the male troubadour poet. As Sarah Kay notes, when the trobairitz writes, she risks a double indemnity since in writing she places herself ùnder the authority of the male arbiters', while her declared freedom to love is undermined by her need to use the established rhyme schemes and patterns that give her no choice and `that grounds values ultimately in men'.39 Women Romantic poets experimented both with the enabling-disabling aspects of troubadourism and the selfauthorization of Sapphism, producing a vibrant brand of Romantic expression as in the poetry of Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson and LEL, and reflected in its Victorian renditions in Christina Rossetti's Monna Innominata and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's early lays and Sapphically impassioned Sonnets from the Portuguese.




Cultivating Medievalism: Feeling History

Sara Hutchinson [was] . . . both a symbol of possible renewal in Coleridge's emotional life, and also a fantasy-figure ± an alternative to domestic duties, an escape from professional pressures, a temptingly unattached woman . . . Coleridge gave [her] . . . a Christmas present of Anna Seward's Original Sonnets, which he inscribed light-heartedly `to Asahara, the Moorish Maid'.1 This chapter surveys how both men and women influenced the gradual recovery of the medieval spirit for cultural consumption. The gendering of Romantic medievalism encodes the ambivalence of troubadourian masculinity from two directions: the first stems from the fact that women began to discuss publicly their interpretation of medievalism particularly in terms of their expectations of courtly love and the chivalric ethos; the second from the viewing of medievalism through the screen of courtly literature which emphasizes the troubadour's love for a lady, while viewing it through the screen of metrical and prose romances emphasizes knightly endeavour. The first focuses on loss and the unattainable lady, bound up as she is with unattainable property, nature, and desire; this is a system that can only exclude the woman poet. The second focuses on male honour and quest, a value system that pushes women to the background. Grounded either way, she is at the same time supposed to be the locus of the ideal on earth. Temporally (at the same time) she is both present and eternal; spatially (grounded either way) she is both background and centre. Presumably what a real woman wants from this ideological double bind is romantically plausible but realistically impossible: to be the beloved, to be pre-eminent by combining the best of both options in returning the lover's love (experiencing true love herself) and having that lover protect her chivalrously. 28



2

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But what real women Romantic poets wrote about was not this compliance with the ideological bonds; rather, they attempted to redesign temporal and spatial ground rules in order to break the subject±object dividing line that, in medievalism, keeps them in their place. In order to examine how medievalism developed from the cultural and artistic concerns that dominated late eighteenth-century thought, I propose to work through a trajectory of Romantic medievalism by following the development of discursive schools of thought and practice. These strains are highly influenced by the development of sensibility, and the new relation of mind to body through the affective disposition that sensibility entails. One of the most important of the late eighteenth century's dominant concerns, nature, is intimately coupled with sensibility and questions of subjective experience. But nature is also affiliated with troubadour poetry because the lady, as an object of natural beauty, is best pursued in a space devoted to lovemaking, the garden or bower. How Romantic thought yokes these different attitudes to produce a historical self-consciousness will govern the following pages. The bower invokes a medieval setting, a lady's space of privacy and beauty less regulated than the interiors of the castle. The bower inverts the usual designation of women's space as domestic, interior and internal, and men's space as external.2 This is, of course, the irony of Coleridge's bower poem, `This Lime-tree Bower My Prison'.3 The medieval bower was external to or closeted from the male-defined and maleregulated court. For the eighteenth-century middle class, struggling to define itself against and yet within courtly terms, the bower represented the paradigm female space, an exterior version of the lady's closet, an enclosure that is both safe and liberating, female nature contained. The grand passion for gardens, lawns and landscaping develops the bower's femininity on a larger scale. As the middle-class man found himself more and more at home with the domestic improvements and increasingly affordable comforts brought about by the mid-eighteenth century, the home was increasingly dominated by the male presence (99±103). Similarly, the garden bower was ìmproved', its extension, planting and regulation viewed as a male endeavour, as the weight given to Henry Crawford's opinion in Mansfield Park makes clear. The professionalization of landscaping (conducted by Capability Brown and Humphry Repton, to say nothing of Pope himself), coincides with the sentimentalizing of nature (especially by William Collins and Erasmus Darwin), the dissemination of the picturesque aesthetic (by West, Gilpin, Knight, Price and Mason), and thus with tourism as a consumerism




based on a regulation of nature. The fine line between these (Collins's father was a landscape painter, for instance, while Repton was a sentimental poet) obscures their tendency to naturalize a male takeover of female space, and to spread their dominion from bower to garden to nature, and finally to Nature. Thus the relation between the landscape garden, or the equally regulated botanic garden, and the bower is a fully politicized one. The spread of male authority, organic as it may seem, from bower to Nature is also poetic. The characteristic use of the term èxtend' or èxtension' to describe the landowner's property emphasizes this spread in Romantic conceptions of both history and nature as an ongoing metonymous process. By contrast, the lady's bower of medieval literature is the space of troubadourian invasion, a metaphoric place where the poet can intrude to appeal to the lady beyond the hearing of her lord in the hope of displacing him. One of the main strands of argument in this chapter holds that it is from such a tradition that the Romantic poet finds Nature as an ideal feminine form to be appealed to and to encroach upon. The disjunction between Romantic extension and troubadourian invasion resolves itself into the male Romantic poet's framing his address to Nature as that of a troubadour to his lady, asking for her recognition of him, her devotion, and her `gift' (with the conceptual shift of the don from sexual favour to artistic inspiration that coincides with Renaissance appropriations of the courtly love model). History dissolves into Nature; Nature embalms and records history. The invasion of the bower by the troubadour also locates the garden's desirability. His wooing of the lady fixes the bower as the site of domestic disharmony, a dislocation of the bower's purported harmonizing principle. Necessarily, the bower, and by extension nature itself, must be governed back into a proper relation to he who òwns' the lady. This is one of the driving forces behind High Romantic uses of medievalism, and specifically of the troubadour's uses of the bower. The hiring of men such as Capability Brown extends the bower's potential for both containment and the liberation of desire to large vistas, to the sense of the whole estate as possessable nature. Brown's full name, Lancelot Brown, signals the heroism of this modern recuperation of the bower from class and sexual warfare, a knightly labour Darwin takes up in his conceptual `capabilities' as displayed in The Botanic Garden. Rather than the landscaper's re-distribution of nature being directed at the poet's disruptive practices, the poet is accommodated within homosocial relations: perfecting nature is yet another form of placing the lady, through her association with nature and the bower, in the grounded scape. The




31

target of male governance becomes the lady herself: as the lady of the house, as feminized nature, and as a possessable past. This chapter begins with Anna Seward because she is the poet during this period most concerned to combat the male domination of nature, particularly in relation to female-identified bower. As her poetic celebration of the Ladies of Llangollen and their embowered home makes clear, she advocates returning the governance of nature to female hands through a Sapphic aesthetic. She is also the poet most concerned with those aspects of late eighteenth-century culture that together will produce Romantic medievalism. In some ways her concern is antithetical: she does not want to return to a fantastic past so much as to borrow the terms of the past to redefine the present. But this stratagem, which reverses the direction taken by those who adopt courtly attitudes (thus imposing the past on the present), such as Erasmus Darwin, depends on another aspect of her poetry that makes it especially interesting in light of the Romantics' gendered appropriation of history. This is her idiomatic mix of sensibility and sentiment, which disguises a Sapphic (indeed, a lesbian) poetics. For female-identified art and passion necessarily defy the basic premises of troubadourian endeavour, as well as those of medieval patriarchy itself, by reconfiguring the subject±object relations with which the Romantics will also experiment. Seward's poetry can best be understood as a resuscitation of the trobairitz, the medieval female troubadours whose poems have barely survived but whose literary history nearly every woman poet of consequence has guessed at. The trobairitz used troubadourian lyric conventions in order to sing of their own passions, contrasting them with the rejecting lady who, as the contrast makes clear, is a figment of the male imagination. And the trobairitz were explicitly compared to Sappho because of their frankness about female desire. Seward would not have known the specifics of Sappho's classical tradition, which antiquarians were beginning to study;4 but, drawing inspiration from what Joan DeJean has shown to be a culturally prevalent revival of interest in Sappho and the `Sapphic tradition', Seward's verse, composed of the identifiably troubadour elements of bower, melancholy, memory and loss, uses these elements to subvert the reader's subjective expectation, particularly as it is raised by sentiment and chivalry.5 It is the subversion, as much as the medievalist attitude towards the past, which places Seward literally before the Romantics. Her use of (and simultaneous perturbation of) the troubadour model, and her frequent publication in The Gentleman's Magazine, raises gender tensions to a compelling height. Coleridge's `This Lime-tree Bower My




Prison' puts into dialogue all the elements of Romantic medievalism, but it is also a dialogic response to prior poems of sensibility and sentiment that create the conditions for its sophisticated play with tradition and history.6 Seward represents an important prior. Coleridge's gift of Seward's Original Poems to Sara Hutchinson is inscribed (perhaps less lightly than Holmes thinks) `to Asahara, the Moorish Maid', àn early version of the romantic code-name of his Notebooks and poems, `Àsra'' ' (Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions 295). His inscription reveals his association of both Seward and his beloved with troubadour tradition. Coleridge's association of Sara with Orientalism, with its link back to the Abyssinian maid of `Kubla Khan', has explicit connections to his opium use and his hallucinations and nightmares rooted in his childhood reading of The Arabian Tales (Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions 292± 3). His dreams were bedevilled with monstrous women while his waking days were soothed by Sara the beloved and new muse (`Could I revive within me/Her symphony and song': Kubla Khan 42±3). Sara Hutchinson, the Derridean supplement to his wife Sara, represented the intellectual and emotional femininity Sara Coleridge had begun to withhold and deny him. As Holmes notes, Sara was allowed to take notes for Coleridge in his notebooks, a privilege his wife was never granted (295). Although Coleridge is married, he follows the troubadourian pattern in pursuing an inaccessible lady (albeit there is a reversal in that her inaccessibility is due to his own marriage bonds), assigning to her the fantasy role of rescuer and deliverer. She will inspire in Coleridge the Asra poems that finally end in his powerful response to poetic blockage (or unattainable poetic property), the Dejection Ode. The troubadour role in this sense intentionally inverts and subverts the knight's chivalric code, allowing the man to play the hapless and needy.7 This reversal of power relations, with its implied reversal of the subject±object status, is both seductive to women and provocatively opens up, here intimated in the gift of Seward's volume, the possibility of the female poet and male beloved scenario. This Romantic play on the troubadour poetic code has not yet been formulated in Coleridge's early troubadour poem to his new wife, `The Eolian Harp', where Sara is already a resistant object with her `more serious eye a mild reproof'. However, in the decades prior to Coleridge's troubadourian attachment to Sara Hutchinson, there were two determinate lines of historical imagination simultaneously taking place: the spatial and temporal version figured as the medieval bower, and exemplified by a line traceable through a resistant relationship between Seward and Darwin, to Coler-




33

idge; and a sense of historical weightedness, a temporally collapsed and elegiac version of the past, discernible in Gray and the Graveyard School, and carried through from Smith to Keats. Although the bower sets up the obvious medieval reference and clearly leads to Romantic medievalism, Gray's interpolation of pastness and loss is also compelling for the Romantics, particularly those imaginatively engaged with the melancholy associated with the love-lorn troubadour figure. Both of these lines commingle in different ways for those poets actively constructing a Romantic medievalism. This chapter will investigate both lineages, from the Sapphics of Seward to the Petrarchism of Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson, which somewhat differently appropriate the past, to the male configuration of this kind of temporally identified sensibility, as in the garden poetry of Erasmus Darwin, and the graveyard poetry of Gray. It will also look briefly at how troubadourian Romantics such as Coleridge and Keats experimented with these prior histories; if Coleridge used them to determine a poetic place, Keats resolved and reconfigured some of these prior lines of thought into a way of de-historicizing the self. But for Coleridge, a troubadourian poetics is only one pathway through which to pursue imaginative brilliance; for Keats, as we will see in Chapter 4, it becomes the major pathway. Finally, I will look at how a late Romantic, such as Letitia Elizabeth Landon, used prior histories as reconceived by Mary Robinson to resolutely historicize the self.

Classes of affect We must first begin by noting that although women poets of the period, and Charlotte Smith in particular, tended to gravitate towards Petrarchism, Seward intensely disliked it, especially as it was reformulated by the Della Cruscans.8 (Coleridge was of a similar opinion: `But supposing my defence not tenable, yet how a blunder in metre stamps a man, Italian or Della Cruscan.'9) What she objected to was its effeminacy of tone and music, an artificial Italianism when the masculine latinate verse of Milton fitted the English language better. While Seward admires the courtly love model, and often imagines herself situated within the lover±beloved relation of the troubadour model that it also uses, she is disenchanted by `the platonic trifling of Petrarch'.10 Of one proteÂgeÂ she wrote, `Nothing vitiates the poetic taste of young men more than a fondness for the Italian poets' (Letters III 133); `[h]is ear has been debauched by the luscious smoothness of Italian tones, till it delights no longer in the bolder and more majestic sounds




of the English language' (Letters III 113±14). Because of her intense interest in literary criticism, Seward's objections are worthy of attention. She is defining a difference between acceptable and unacceptable uses of affect as they intrude on poetic language. To follow her thinking, it will be helpful to establish distinctions between the most relevant affects for this study. Troubadour culture is the most affective locus in historical relations: it is about refined love as true love, love for others as a transcendence of the present and thus of history, and a displacement of war with warring emotions. Distinguishing affect will also help us understand how troubadourism attracts the Romantic imagination so powerfully. Certainly the conditions were ripe for this attraction. The eighteenthcentury Cult of Sensibility, as Barker-Benfield asserts, replicates the feminization of culture of the medieval period. The reappearance of the troubadour was an almost necessary occurrence after the ascent of sensibility, and sentimentalism's oppositional and appropriative response to it. However, this affective field is insufficiently understood because most scholars of sensibility, including Barker-Benfield, follow the traditional treatment of the subject in viewing sentimentalism and sensibility as equivalent terms for the larger acculturation of nerve science into the popular imagination. As such, their relationship cannot be adequately disentangled; although both sensibility and sentimentalism are early responses to nerve science, it is clear that sentimentalism fears, distances and fetishizes the potential power of affect, whereas sensibility views it as liberating. Sensibility is a reactive escape from the self-consciousness of sentimentalism, and from its interpretation of essential affect as naive rather than powerfully present.11 What attracts women writers to sensibility is its ability to experience in full what women are denied in society: bodily awareness and self-expression as positive and enriching experiences. Jerome McGann recently has posited a taxonomy of literary sensibility, distinguishing broadly between the poetry of sensibility as naive and experiential, and sentimental poetry as self-conscious and performative. Within these classes, McGann differentiates a kind of primary sensibility, as practised by Frances Greville and Ann Yearsley, from a secondorder sensibility, almost exclusively the domain of the Della Cruscan school, that replaces sensory experience with rhetorical play, and that experiments with performance but resists the performative. Sentimental poetry is more complex, but its categories are fundamentally different from poetry such as that of the Della Cruscans which we would ordinarily term `sentimental', because true sentimental poetry does not engage




35

sensibility as a practice; it is instead a trope that situates a particular naiveteÂ within the larger scope of the poetic project. This project, selfconscious and artful, takes a variety of shapes, each of which determines a specific sentimental class. McGann selects the dominant types of sentimental poetry as that of Wordsworth (in which `the category ``naõÈve'' is a function of the category ``sentimental'' ': Poetics 120); that of Sir William Jones and Darwin (in which sensibility is transformed into à self-sustaining process of [Creative] energy' and sentimentalism is the eroticized practice of that process: 133±4); that of Byron (based on a mythic apprehension of woman); and that of LEL (whose version of sentimental loss broadly contains the somewhat different sentimentalisms of Smith, Hemans and Ann Batten Crystall). The way in which sensibility essentially encompasses sentimentalism, while sentimentalism appropriates and transforms sensibility, combined with each practitioner's individual treatment of sensibility and/or sentiment, makes it difficult to distinguish at all times which is the dominant category at work. It may seem odd, then, that the Romantics were at once invested in the rich promise of sensibility's profusion, and the conventionmoulded poetry of the troubadours, which allows for little idiosyncratic deviation. However, here (as elsewhere) it is the embrace and overthrow of form that is the Romantic hallmark. Such an anatomy of sensibility provides us with a more precise articulation of Romantic response. However, Anna Seward's sensibility is a third class that must be inserted in McGann's account, one that expressly associates sensibility with female-identified sexuality, presenting a magnet for Romantic troubadourian interest (sexual conquest through the poetic field) and a target for chivalric honour. Seward practises sensibility within the context of a sentimentalism whose self-consciousness is directed towards protective disguise. The moments of pure sensibility contain a liberation from self-consciousness that is the homosexual's escape from the closet. As such, Seward crosses sensibility with sentimentalism, mixing forms in a manner that is unselfconscious and thus dominated by sensibility, with a very different result from the appropriation of sensibility to sentimentalism obtained by Wordsworth or Darwin. (For greater ease of discussion, I will refer to Seward's Sapphic mode as `sensibility' here, but with the understanding that this is a reduction to the term.) Seward thus composes a true Sapphics, which in its female-identified space and sense of history (history as the loss and recapture of the female beloved and thus of the female self) is opposed to the Petrarchism of Smith and mixed form of Robinson. Seward's complaints against both these poets, particularly in their use of sonnets as




`legitimate' or ìllegitimate' ± their appropriations of past poetic forms ± can be viewed in this light. McGann notes that Wordsworth, following Schiller, viewed the naive as recuperable in contemporary culture, co-existent with sentimentalism, but that as such sensibility is a sentimental construct. Furthermore, `Wordsworth's fear of losing touch with [the naive] ideal was so great that he constructed a (sentimental) myth that would redeem the foregone conclusion of its loss' (Poetics 123). The High Romantics exhibit their anxiety about the potentially destructive relation of the future to the past by inventing ways to embalm pastness in the present, turning their conception of the past into relics that can be grounded in the aestheticized landscape. This fear of loss is a reflection of the poetic use of melancholy to situate the past as idealized ego; ego loss translates into fear of further loss, especially the future's denial of affect (already at work in France's revolutionary de-familial-izing/defamiliarizing practice). It also translates into Coleridge's lost-in-thought-ness, which Keats will further abstract into a thoughtful lostness. But Seward's relation to loss and to melancholy has a different basis: one that yokes the materiality of her sensible poetics to a more personal past. Seward turns herself into the medieval lady, the desired beloved who holds court, at the same time displacing the negating aspect of this lady ± her disembodied state as exemplified by Dante's Beatrice and Petrarch's Laura ± on to the lost Honora, her foster sister who married and then died. This allows her to be the poetic presence and voice. Importantly, Seward does not replicate the mistake of the medieval trobairitz by singing of loss as a heterosexual rejection or desertion. That kind of ego-loss, the very model of troubadourian dejection, compounds the struggle with female subordination in which women poets must engage; Seward's solution is to follow Sappho's lead, not in singing of lesbian love and rejection, but in positing the poet-to-history relation as a female-to-female one: Anna to Honora.12 In representing Seward's past, Honora steps in for history in a reversal of the medieval poet's use of the beloved; she thus obviates the distinction between a medievalized past and a romanced present. This is different from Wordsworth's treatment of the beloved in his `Lucy' poems, where the beloved, like that of the medieval poet, is used to put off and still history rather than, as for Seward, to make it a living presence. Seward's present tense romance distils loss as a founding sentiment that induces rather than impedes sensibility. By not distancing history, Seward does not suffer from the distancing of self that plagues the conceptual poetics of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats.





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Like the Romantics after her, Seward also finds the èxtension' of landscape aesthetics poetically useful. While landscapers such as her friend Repton use extension as a mode of expansion correlating to the expansive power of the sublime, she retools it for her experiential sensibility by extending temporal boundaries. In Mansfield Park, Maria Bertram tells her fianceÂ that in redesigning his estate, ` ``Your best friend on such an occasion . . . would be Mr Repton I imagine'' ' (ch. 6). Repton's reputation for improvement began with an expansion of his own interests, applauded by Seward: Ì should suppose nobody has ever been so well qualified as yourself for the profession you purpose to assume, that of landscape gardener; I mean who has ever taken it up, skilled, as you have long been, in all its scientific branches, and possessing, as you do, the poet's feeling and the painter's eye' (To H. Repton, 14 October 1788; II, 172). But Seward, whose poetry is deeply invested in the garden or bower motif, directs her extension outward, something like what Fanny Price means when she responds to Mary Crawford's unfeeling ` `Òne does not think of extent here . . . I had not imagined a country parson ever aspired to a shrubbery or anything of the kind'' ': ` `Ì am so glad to see the evergreens thrive!'' said Fanny in reply. . . ``When one thinks of it, how astonishing a variety of nature!'' ' (ch. 22). This is Seward's perspective, but without the astonishment because she is concerned with a variety that can always come down the same engagement with loss and discovery. It is difficult at first to differentiate Seward's approach to nature, temporality, loss and extension from that of sentimental poetry. But aside from the sentimental marker of self-consciousness that Seward assiduously avoids, the other distinguishing marker ± that of a superfluent textuality ± is also missing from her verse. McGann notes that sentimental poetry can best be understood as a field of energy that `generates textual residues as part of its vital process' (Poetics 142). It functions by transfiguring words rather than creating levels of metaphoric and symbolic meaning and, in the process, it loses the specific referents of these words through emotional structures that replace referent and the logic of the trope with affect and affect's mystery. While Seward sentimentalizes her life ± particularly her love affairs, sedimenting them into deferments, absences and longings ± in her poetry she accesses sensibility more directly than the sentimental template allows. If some aspects of her verse are effectively sentimental, as a whole her work is operatively that of sensibility. In part, sensibility functions for



Bowers: Seward, Darwin and Coleridge

Seward as a path back to Sappho herself; poems sung by a woman in a garden are all hymns to Aphrodite. Yet this, like the woman's relation to the bower, can be mistaken and used against her. Seward discovered that her best defence was to be candid about lost love, but to disguise her Sapphic approach within a sensible intensity. In this way, she revises the troubadourian posture as it is usually reconstrued by women poets ± the trobairitz's plaint of desertion ± into a powerful self-enactment. And she finds the most effective revisionary strategy is to give voice to both the female and the male poet, to place herself in the lover position regardless of gender, even as she sympathetically extends herself into the beloved position. Thus the relations between subject and object, whose temporal characterization by the troubadours she had reversed, are spatially changed by her as well. Rather than a terrible divide separating lover/poet and beloved/muse, Seward institutes a reciprocity between two subjectively charged states. The idea that both the self and the other are habitable states is an idea that we see most complexly worked out by Keats, particularly in his theory of negative capability. Seward has already developed a way to locate herself in each part of the poetic relation whether as subject or object: lover, beloved, second self. In doing so, Seward turns the troubadour model to her own purposes; while she retains its basic elements, the model's static spatial and temporal matrix has become liberated through the interchangeability of its positions. The beloved can no longer be caught in the garden, while the lover no longer views the lady as a rejecting object. Her use of the troubadour tradition, then, subsumes the sentimental uses of the beloved to the female poetry of sensibility under the libidinally uncertain, and thus freeing, Sapphic tradition to which she claims allegiance.13 Seward has discovered a way to avoid the trap into which the trobairitz fell, of merely reversing gender roles without considering the social implications of so overt an expression of female desire. In Seward's formulation, a spatial imagination is one construed by pastoral conventions and Arcadian narratives but not bound by them, or by the divisive subject±object categories that usually sustain them. It is not a literal, historically present space, as in Coleridge's `This Lime-tree Bower My Prison', being closer to Wordsworth's evocation of essence in his brief nature lyrics. But it does not dwell on essence either; the point of the natural objects is to orchestrate space so that the emotions that arise from its habitation are communicable, reader-oriented rather than (the sentimental or Romantic) writer-oriented. We find this creation of a private space most particularly in her poems to Honora and to female




39

friends such as the Ladies of Llangollen. Certainly the pastoral love and emotive sensuality that she claims to have first experienced in Darwin's botanical garden becomes the naturalizing metaphor for her own emotional conflicts and solitudes. This is most especially true in the very personal poems, the speaker losing herself in a botany haunted by Honora's loss, while her search for a different register ± the satiation that can never be ± is fruitfully positioned via the reader. These idylls on imaginary space and fantastic emotion (bisexual and double voiced) become her characteristic idiom. They are deeply elegiac, not in the Virgilian sense, but in the melancholic mode of a courtly lover who cannot locate himself without his lady's approbation. They are at once poems of exile and of beckoning. As the lover herself, Seward wanders in a landscape devoid of subjectivity and the agon that marks the poetic Ì'. This inviting void draws the reader into its emptiness to experience the poetic moment along with the speaker, through an identifying aesthetic template marked most strongly by mood. Using a focus on women's sensations to de-objectify them, Seward's Sapphic approach reverses the dominant literary expectation of the homosocial over the heterosocial. In keeping her eye on the woman, Seward moves the female subject away from an attention to male desire (the key trait of Charlotte Smith's characteristic lyric, for instance). The heterosocial can then be from the woman's perspective, an imaginative recuperation of her own experience. Her intervention in the poetic extension Darwin represents reaches its culmination and its crisis in Coleridge's remarkable `Christabel'. Coleridge's other bower poems, particularly Èolian Harp' and `This Lime-tree Bower My Prison', create the characteristic tension he adapts from troubadour conventions in order to undermine them even as they structure a High Romanticism. Here we see that model Vance delineates for the highly codified troubadour canso in full play. An outright troubadour lyric, Èolian Harp' sexually teases the beloved while blaming her for rejecting these advances. The wind harp is `Like some coy maid halfyielding to her lover,/It pours such sweet upbraidings as must needs/ Tempt to repeat the wrong.' The poet wills Sara to become this maid as well, while her correct resistance is that of the troubadour's rejecting lady. The harp, analogically the poet's art and his sexual longing, finds its `strings/Boldlier swept' with `delicious surges', revealing the speaker's desire even as the beloved's `more serious eye' stops him: `But thy more serious eye a mild reproof/Darts, O beloved woman!' (49±50). This kind of formal and textual punning is typical of the love lyric tradition, and the poem showcases Coleridge's mastery of it. But the poem also demonstrates that Coleridge is already interested in experimenting




with the spatial and temporal imaginary we see developing through Seward's approach to this tradition.14 What is typical of this poem and much of Coleridge's work leading up to `Christabel' is that it uses the space-time configurations of Seward's innovations and Darwin's courtly resistance to it in order to develop a lyric moment wherein liberation is at once imagined and confined. But here the confining agent is the lady herself, the aggressiveness of her rule doing violence to the poet's imagination. In return, as the speaker engages the beloved's rejecting presence, he also erases her from the picture, leaving in the end a record of his own virtuoso brilliance as an effusion of the inspiring wind, rather than her brilliant image. More coded, `This Lime-tree Bower My Prison' is also more fully and strategically troubadourian in its use of structuring elements. An early marriage poem, it explicitly invokes the bower tradition in its title, but asserts an inverse formula: the `garden-bower' is occupied by a male rather than female presence, its circumference imprisoning rather than protective, belonging to a cottage rather than castle, and the site of poetic production rather than love-making. Furthermore, Coleridge is rewriting the walk/seat dynamic of Book I of Cowper's The Task (1785). Charged to `sing the Sofa', the speaker imagines its antithesis instead: Ànd witness, dear companion of my walks,/Whose arm . . . /Fast lock'd in mine, with pleasure such as love . . . could alone inspire ± / . . . Thou know'st my praise of nature most sincere' (144±50).15 Later Leigh Hunt was to accomplish a similar transformation of enclosed space to the love bower when imprisoned for libel, an inversion of affect, temporality and politicized space that began Hunt's and Hazlitt's combined efforts on the Arthurian Round Table essays (Duff, Romance and Revolution 128± 31). In both instances, the bower becomes the site of the poet's selfliberating competition with other poets. Finally, Coleridge's poem is not about marriage or the beloved, but is Àddressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London', and therefore a man at large, rather than embowered.16 The oddity of the title reveals Coleridge's decision to emphasize the homosocial function of troubadourian poetics over its received conventions. By calling attention to the male-to-male relation, the female body can be translated into a feminized nature whose detail in the bower can extend to a transcendent imaginative flight that invents detail from memory. Coleridge memorializes nature as he sentimentalizes it and commits it to history through a nostalgia that both pre-empts the present moment and predicts the moment as historically chronicled. His flight from the prison is enacted through his linguistic performance, a liberation from his `beloved' that allows him to join the




41

friends of his imagined audience, and more specifically, his intellectual and poetic peers. In both `The Eolian Harp' and `This Lime-tree Bower', the poet's art is directed towards the disastrous or liberating effects of being effeminated. In both poems this willingness to suggest that the lover±beloved genderings need not adhere to the traditional roles promoted by Darwin but might, indeed, explore territory opened up by Seward reveals that Coleridge is already preparing for the fulmination that `Christabel' represents. With `Christabel' we see a willingness to entertain rather than regulate the textual energies which Seward's verse establishes. It is here in this poem that Coleridge moves beyond the norm-making troubadourian posture to discover the liberating potential within it. `Christabel' also extends Coleridge's signature posture of a lost-in-thought-ness clearly exhibited in both the bower poems, and transfigured as the prophetic mode in `Dejection: An Ode' (written in the same year that part 2 of `Christabel' is completed) into a suspension of knowing. It is this suspension, echoed in the dis-tempo of the poem as a metrical scheme that refashions time and space, which Coleridge uses most persuasively in producing a medievalism of Romantic proportions. In `Christabel', Coleridge places on to the female body a focus and a force not typical of medieval romance. Both Christabel and Geraldine sustain the narrative gaze as it watches them perform and interact within the imprisoning/empowering tensions of their world with its many binary oppositions held in a magnetic field: real/romance, medieval history/superstition, human sexuality/demonic power, heterosexuality/ lesbianism, identity quest/family romance. These issues, which structure the problematic of Christabel's story, refract the issues of contemporary Britain, its stresses and instabilities, its radical and reactionary responses to France's demolition of medieval feudalism. Nevertheless, Coleridge's refusal to publish `Christabel' in finished form, despite repeated appeals and proposals from friends is significant: his `lovely Lady', as he called the poem, represents the vulnerability of troubadourism that he similarly locates in his idealized love for Asra.17 While Èolian Harp' and `This Lime-tree Bower', like medieval troubadour lyrics, appear the work of the present moment, `Christabel' remarks on the history of its own labour and birth with a lengthy prefatory note; that it took so long to write indicates something of its value, as well as its irresolution, for Coleridge. That irresolution is important because it stands against the purposeful and self-historicizing openness of the Dejection Ode, proposing an alternative route to the visionary High Romanticism of that poem. Coleridge follows both




strands in his career, choosing the visionary track when (ironically perhaps) sure of his course, and the medievalizing track when he wants to open something up to tensions he has not yet resolved for himself. It is in this sense that the Biographia Literaria must be read as a medievalizing document, a replacement of the self in history, but a history and a self who are both potently unresolved and sustained within a system of fraught tensions. This is further suggested by the extraordinary effort Coleridge exerted in composing part 2 of `Christabel' for the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, both mental and physical, as he laboured to perfect the new accentual system he had devised for the poem, and tramping over the fells surrounding Greta Hall for months to find the inspiration to do so. This sustained effort reflected the tension between his philosophical and critical coaches, Thomas Poole, Josiah Wedgwood and Daniel Stuart, who were supporting him in one way or another, and his poetic coach and competitor, Wordsworth. The divisions in Coleridge's mental and imaginative life, which medievalism's time/space fracture seemed perfectly to mirror for him, played out in yet another way in the composition history of `Christabel'. Coleridge comments in his 1816 preface that the poem is original, and he makes this claim to stave off accusations of plagiarism. The anxiety is about a reversal: the late publication date may lead readers to suspect Coleridge has imitated the enormously popular historical romances of Scott and Byron, but the transmission is the other way around. The Lay of the Last Minstrel was directly influenced by `Christabel' in manuscript, and Byron refers to having heard `Christabel' in manuscript in The Siege of Corinth. Like a medieval text, `Christabel' was circulated in manuscript; indeed, it had already been famous through circulation and word of mouth long before its 1816 publication. Its originality cannot be gainsaid, not just metrically but in its brilliant translation of contemporary angst into a falsified and re-gendered pastness that reflexively implicates the future in its conclusion. However, Coleridge's publishing deferral forces another reversal on the poem. As Josiah Conder, writing for the Eclectic Review in 1816, comments, `Christabel' is itself a spell working its magic on the poet: We had frequently heard of Mr. Coleridge's manuscript of Christabel, as a singularly wild and romantic poem . . . [but] it comes forth, ± a fragment still . . . His poetic powers have, it seems, been, `till very lately, in a state of suspended animation.' We should rejoice indeed to find, that the spell which has so long locked up Mr. Coleridge's powers, not only is dissolved, but has left them unimpaired, in all the





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Not only is Coleridge a Merlin, put to sleep by female magic and wakened unaged by it too, but he is himself the ènchanted virgin', the quest object. Conder's elucidation of part 2 of the poem is also helpful. Unlike the Critical Review, which described both Christabel and Geraldine as èxquisite', the revelation of Geraldine's real nature as `gradual and beautiful', and Christabel's sight of Geraldine's body as hidden `by a poetical and most judicious abruption' (Hayden, Romantic Bards 140), Conder's description of Geraldine is confined to her magical powers which are `hideous' and `false'. Moreover, her `hideous spell' is implicitly compared to Coleridge's own act of imagination in the poem: It appears to consist in the strange and terrible power of so working on the sympathy, as to make its victim passively conform itself to the impression made on the external senses, and by this means the framer of the spell is represented as exchanging both feeling and expression with the unhappy subject of her perfidious and refined sorcery . . . One cannot conceive of a more terrible engine of supernatural malice. But are not the spells of vicious example in real life almost a counter-part to this fiction? (Hayden, Romantic Bards 143) If Coleridge is Christabel, he is also the fashioner of a poem that spells its own magic; he is Geraldine as well. Coleridge absorbs into himself the gender, temporal and metaphysical displacements circulating in 1798 and 1800 to parlay troubadourian sexual/textual politics into a new poetic mytheme that speculates on the origins, originality and the creative force of the poet. Furthermore, as Conder's analysis makes clear, readers were sensitive to the temporal and imaginative parallels with which Coleridge was experimenting. The emphasis on time in the poem's opening, from the guard dog's age, to time being told by her barks at the clock, to the owl hoots, are associated from the beginning with the loss of the mother (`Some say she [the dog] sees my lady's shroud': 13). So, too, is space emphasized here: Christabel is à furlong from the castle gate' (26) praying for her absent lover (`her own betrothed knight': 28). The losses of both mother and lover combine to create a feeling of confused orientation, opening up the space for misrecognition into which comes the `white' form of



freshness of youth, as, according to romantic fable, the enchanted virgin wakes from her age-long slumber, untouched by time.18

Geraldine that Christabel discovers in the wood. The problem with Geraldine's whiteness, the sign of her status as damsel in distress, is enough to make the speaker interrupt, and in such a way as to raise questions about Geraldine's ontological status: Ì guess, 'twas frightful there to see/A lady so richly clad as she' (66±7). The interruption calls attention to two difficulties: that Christabel, rather than a knight, rescues Geraldine signals the disruption of normal knightly endeavour in the poem; and that as the usurper of the mother/lover place, Geraldine must constitute the very opposite of Seward's Sapphic poet.19 All representatives of medieval power are displaced: the knight-lover or poet-lover of the troubadour scenario is signally missing; the poet, Bard Bracy, is ineffectual; and the only knight present, Sir Leoline, protects neither the lady in his charge nor his daughter, and does not distinguish between apparent and real virtue. All of these lacks coalesce in the powerful presence of Geraldine, who steps into the role of lover ± made potently clear in the bed scene with Christabel ± and also in the role of poet, since her serpentine vitality marks her as a lamia, the figure Romantics favoured for representing a fearful female creativity. The lamia figure represents the anti-Sappho, a fearful vision of woman identifying her own experience as beyond the male, and as art.20 She is the serpent whose seductive beauty hides her bestiality or, as possibly for Geraldine, her maternal/used sexuality. The female body's decrepitude signifies time's perversion of the bower, the blossom's decay. Geraldine's body makes the mother a disgusting lover.21 She also contains within her the most dangerous elements of femaleness, the lamia's seductiveness combined with its bestiality, and so is both allied with Christabel and a threat to the knight's valour and courage. Sir Leoline is the target of Geraldine's attack as she attempts to supplant his dead wife and to control him. But Christabel is also vulnerable to Geraldine's powerful female allure; with her betrothed missing, Christabel may well be seduced to Geraldine's Sapphic ways (Ànd Christabel awoke . . . ``Sure I have sinn'd!'' ': 381).22 Geraldine's difference, her embodiment of the time-space disturbance, is signalled when she is dramatically affected by thresholds.23 These liminal sites displace the bower in this poem, shifting the troubadourian tensions delicately played in the two prior bower poems so that here they destabilize both space and time. The effect is to open up the potential of a medievalized imaginary, to taste the power of a female poetry even while it is corrupted by the male poetry of Bracy's negating `strange' vision. At the same time that vision leaves open the doubt whether the male poet can correctly interpret female-to-female experi-




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ence: it is unclear whether Christabel will suffer or benefit from knowing Geraldine intimately, or whether the speaker (unlike the courtly poet Bracy) will find this intimacy imaginatively productive. Coleridge's wait between 1798 and 1800 to finish the poem may well have to do with the Romantic manifesto of the Dejection Ode. Once its vision is pronounced, the liberating but fearful potential of `Christabel' could be entertained. The lesbian sorority of `Christabel' provides an important misrecognition of the homosocial idealization and aggression of the paranoiac's extension of the ego-ideal to the same-sex other. The paranoiac, which Coleridge increasingly develops into, and which is the quintessential troubadour lover, is he who identifies the same-sex loved other ± Wordsworth ± as both his rejector and persecutor. Wordsworth's eventual rejection of Coleridge must be dated back to the incompletion of `Christabel', a poem that Coleridge bitterly acknowledged as providing the creative ground for Wordsworth's own powerful composition.24 Christabel's absorbed relation to Geraldine accurately mirrors the aggressive-submissive idealizing love Coleridge gives Wordsworth, which for the two poets is raised to the dynamic between troubadour and knight. Coleridge is the troubadour who hostilely projects the knight Wordsworth as his ideal ego, addressing his `Letter to Sara Hutchinson' to Wordsworth himself. Wordsworth is the knight-poet who accuses Coleridge of a troubadourian lack of steady purpose, and worse, `his collusion in his own distintegration by rationalizing it through analysis and explanation' (Gill, Life 200). Coleridge counters by being convinced that Wordsworth abused him to mutual friends such as Basil Montagu as a form of persecution (Wordsworth is his `bitterest Calumniator'), and much worse, turned Sara Hutchinson away from him. The beloved Sara becomes the focus of their homosocial attraction/repulsion, with Coleridge increasingly jealous of what he believed was Wordsworth's and Sara's mutual love.25 `Christabel' both depicts the paranoid universe of the two poets' relationship, and mythologizes its medievalist impulse, making it available to current fantasy. Part of this availability lies in its oral nature; the circulation of the unfinished `Christabel' as a piece of Romantic mythology, a `lay' such as Scott's Last Minstrel might sing, but one that incorporates the intensity of the early dynamic between Coleridge and Wordsworth, and the aggressive seed of its later unravelling. If the unfinished `Christabel' was a powerful influence on Byron, Shelley and Keats, equally important to his medievalizing vision were the companion ballads, `Love' (1799) and `The Ballad of the Dark LadieÂ' (c.1798; published 1834). `Love' is unapologetically troubadourian:





She leant against the armeÂd man, The statue of the armeÂd knight; She stood and listened to my lay, Amid the lingering light.

The sexually and effectively dead knight is played off against the living and creating poet, Ì'; the power of love is transformative, both of corporeal thresholds (as for Geraldine), and of social incommensurabilities (the knight versus the minstrel). But this knight has died in his battle with a `wyverne', a dragon Coleridge transforms into a female fiend, whose opposition to, and yet strange likeness to, the beloved Genevieve is similar to Christabel's sorority with Geraldine.26 The evolving troubadourian mytheme that Coleridge gradually constructs in `Love' and `Christabel', with the dual identity of the beloved/female poet-lamia, and the oppositional dynamic of knight and troubadour, provides a potent answer to the Sapphics of Seward. By bringing the nightmare sexuality of the German Gothic together with the Petrarchan love tradition, Coleridge codifies what will become for the Victorians the angel/whore myth of womanhood. This ideologically imprisoning Victorian phenomenon has been well researched, although responsibility has not been put specifically at Coleridge's door. What has not been equally assiduously researched is the connection between this fantastic bifurcation of female sexuality and the related bifurcation of manliness into chivalrous knight and creative poet; neither has the development of this mytheme been fully examined as a response to Sapphism and the female poet as a lamia figure. `The Ballad of the Dark LadieÂ' eventually became the better known of Coleridge's three lamia poems, inspiring Keats's `La Belle Dame sans Merci', but also providing a historical parallel to Wordsworth's `The Thorn'. Indeed, both `Christabel' and `Dark LadieÂ' were begun during the Lyrical Ballad period, while `Love' began as part of `Dark LadieÂ' but then developed separately with different characters and an anticipation of the kind of courtly love seduction whose consequences are treated in `Dark LadieÂ'. Clearly all three poems are responses to the same originating impulse, with `Christabel' and `Love' dramatizing the poetic power struggles inherent in a troubadourian aesthetic (its losses in the first case and gains in the second), while `Dark LadieÂ' realizes the power struggle underlying troubadourian seduction.27 Significantly the lover is a knight and not a troubadour.



(13±16)

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Here, the lady has been seduced, and we begin the poem with the possibility of the trobairitz's song of desertion and lost love. She hides herself in the woods, her friends having scorned her for her failure to resist the lover. He does not come to her until dusk, and promises her a secret existence as his mistress; she counters with a demand for marriage ìn the eye of noon', the same time of day he seduced her. Unlike `The Thorn', wherein Martha Ray not only has her baby but lives in the woods as a supernatural figure herself, this `dark' lady refuses shadows and secrecy just as she refuses the possibility of such a future as Martha's latter day existence, and her demand for light and day throw off the possibility of supernatural agency. Instead of the trobairitz song of desertion, the lady's concluding stanzas sing of a positivizing resolution. Significantly, all three troubadourian poems were metrical experiments, `Christabel' famously playing with the accentual element for counting beats; similarly, it was Coleridge's excitement over the experimental metre of `Love' that determined him to separate it from `Dark LadieÂ' and send it to the Morning Post for immediate publication (Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions 252). The late ballad, Àlice du Clos; Or The Forked Tongue, A Ballad', needs to be read against these earlier ballads, its ballad metre is in irregular stanzas that appear to domesticate the metre, yet finally ironize it rather than romanticizing as the inventive metre of Christabel does. The metrical approach of this ballad and its ironic undertone identify with the story's villain, the bearer of the `forked tongue' of the subtitle. Coleridge shows here that he understands the troubadourian structure he set up in `Christabel'. As we saw briefly in Chapter 1, several critics interpret the structure of the troubadour lyric to fall into two sets of interrelated binaries, of which one of the agents is the `liar' or intriguer. In `Christabel' this figure is complicated, enlarged and feminized as Geraldine; in Àlice du Clos' it is Sir Julian's right-hand man, `Sir Hugh the vassal knight'. Out of an innocent set of relations ± Alice and her coyly independent spirit, her intention despite Sir Julian's arbitrary arrogance to wed him, and her young Spanish page ± Sir Hugh, without apparent reason, spins a sexual betrayal of the knight by the lady and her page. Coleridge shows that he understands the deadly structure of the troubadour lyric, the threat Geraldine bears and that the lady always confronts: patriarchal jealousy and fatal rage. The ballad ends with Sir Julian's Othello-like murder of Alice after Sir Hugh relates untruthfully, `The Lady's message that I bear,/I guess would scantly please your ear,/And less deserves your heed.' The problem of pleasing the ear resounds with the poem's own easy tonality and simplicity; it is a problem of what




pleases, since the narrative is closely aligned with Sir Hugh, and the listener with Sir Julian. What is odd about the ballad is its lack of ambiguity; yet in its depiction of the knight as vengeful, wrongheaded and blind, the poem is only more openly condemnatory of chivalry than the depiction of Sir Leoline in `Christabel'. The place of Alice, who falls into Sir Hugh's trap because she is `conning' Ovid ± preferring classical love to medieval love, and preferring reading in her bower to the knight's wooing ± is one we are distanced from. Unlike Christabel or the dark ladieÂ, Alice is objectified for us, an object of our pity and the vehicle for our hostility to Julian. Unlike Coleridge's other ladies, she is singled out for death. The only reader and scholar among them, she figuratively takes the place of the female poet, the maker of female space and time, a relative of Coleridge's nightingale.28 In rejecting Sir Julian's demand that she attend his wooing of her, she places a female imaginary over male carnality: Ò! Alice could read passing well,/And she was conning then/Dan Ovid's mazy tale of loves . . . / `Ì follow here a stronger lure,/And chase a gentler prey'' ' (35±7,50±1). But unlike Keats's treatment of Madeline's romancing in The Eve of St. Agnes, Coleridge's narrative ± despite its association with Sir Hugh ± does not condemn Alice, but rather respects her independence of mind and artistic imagination. Like the respect of the troubadour poet, this does not save her; like the troubadour's beloved, she is marked for death, a final frontal attack on female poetic capacity. Coleridge's treatment of the lady in this poem is inconsistent with his previous ambivalence towards the female other, his holding in tension of the virgin and demon avatars of feminine mystery. Here she is demystified and wronged, being allowed none of Christabel's potential or the dark ladieÂ's assertiveness. But she also provides the realistic ending of the other ladies' narratives; Alice is how, in the real world of patriarchal privilege, Christabel, the dark ladieÂ and all the other ladies would surely end.

Resting places: Gray, Smith and Keats If Romantic medievalism is spatially and temporally construed when imagined as a renewed troubadourism and a present history, an alternative historical imagining was also at work, producing a collapsed or alienated history. This second order of historical imagination kills or absents history. It does so in order to memorialize rather than remember it, and to refigure history as elegy. The containment of elegiac history is




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in opposition to the extension of Romantic troubadourism. Closing down on time and space stabilizes the very tensions that the troubadour model propagates in order to invigorate itself, thus changing a potentially vivifying and extending tendency into a quiescent one. (The difference between the two forms of medievalism can be seen in Coleridge's dislike of Gray, and his emphatic embrace of destabilizing situations.) A similar shift occurred when Renaissance poets revised the troubadour model for their own purposes: the rejecting lady became the receptive but `stilled' beloved. Always already lost, she is dead except in memory, where she lives according to the poet's imagining of her. Petrarch's elegiac uses of Laura, in particular, were influential in the eighteenth century because they presaged how the landscape began to be memorialized in order to ènd-stop' time, making history a particle of the present in order to mourn that present. This relation to the past is related to antiquarianism in that it locates objects in which to embalm history, as the beloved is embalmed in Petrarchism. An illustration of this relation is Coleridge's discovery of the name `Christabelle' in the border ballad `Sir Cauline', collected in Bishop Percy's Reliques. For Coleridge, the name is preserved as a disjunct; rather than revising the ballad, he sees his task as bringing the name to life, not as a body resurrected from the dead, but given an entirely new version of a life, and a new origin. Necessary to this construction of history is the idea of loss, a concept peculiarly suited to the sentimental. McGann discovers two kinds of loss operative in sentimental poetry: the first is an economy of death in which elegy (`the logic of redemption') and the sublime (the logic of sacrifice) are the recompenses (Poetics 150); the second is the loss of poetry's cultural strength. In the first, Romantic redemption as loss equals `complete expenditure' that determines a poetry of self-enactment, one that responds to death with à basis of present and immediate life' rather than a memorial (Poetics 151, 153). The second kind is a textual one, as in the poetry of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (LEL), based on an aesthetic rather than material loss. Seward's inclination is towards the first kind of sentimental loss, but for her both the elegy and the sublime are inadequate expressions, literary postures that are in the end never compensatory. The elegiac is for her, and for Romantics after her, a living memorial, a way of re-membering that constitutes the lost one as living. The present tense that Honora's death provides cancels loss as lost-ness. Charlotte Smith, one of the foremost practitioners of Petrarchism, contrasts with Seward by finding both loss and elegy to be ends in themselves, their stillness an enabling gain.29




While Smith views history as her present habitat, particularly in her Elegiac Sonnets, Seward's approach, as I have suggested above, requires the mediation of a subjective field that she locates in the garden. She is directed to the garden's analogic presentness (or its potential, at least, for what Wordsworth will find in nature: the externalization of mind) by a number of landscape poets whose work identifies the garden with the temporal/atemporal dynamic that Seward finds so productive. She was particularly impressed by William Mason, a friend of Thomas Gray's and Walpole's. His long blank-verse poem is The English Garden (4 books, 1771±81), but as early as his 1753 tragedy Elfrida, he is concerned with the topic of history as time and timelessness: The race of man is one vast marshalled army,

Summoned to pass the spacious realms of Time,

Their leader the Almighty. In that march

Ah! Who may quit his post!30

Elfrida precedes Macpherson's bardic play with native antiquity; Mason was, like Gray and Walpole, interested in the possibility for recovering the past that antiquarianism presents. But unlike Mason, Gray, Wapole and other poet-antiquarians such as Percy and Scott, poets such as Seward were attracted to the relation between the landscape as suggestive of history and the land as productive of it. As Mason says of the temporal dialectic in his English Garden, `Gradual touch/Has mouldered into beauty many a tower/Which, when it frowned with all its battlements,/Was only terrible' (Chambers, Cyclopedia 58). Through time's loss, war translates into sentiment, history into affection. Nerve theory elevates sight and sound, but in antiquarianism it is the material object that determines an imaginative connection with the past. Moreover, the embalming of objects in the landscape as an appropriation of history disconnects the historical object both from its temporal context and from its prior appearance, leaving it estranged, and thus free to enter the poetic imaginary in alternative ways. But these ways are always marked by the strange, because history in this case is irreparably marked by death. For this reason, the object most associated with human timeliness and human loss, the funeral urn, becomes the ideal figuration of history. The urn reifies history; as an embodiment dislocated from context and even emptied of content, it invites speculation, particularly when in a garden or museum collection. It is a material encasing of a concept (historical memory/memorialized history) yet an estrangement from such conception. It is at once itself and outside itself;




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at once a materialization of time and outside time. But if we consider it as a sign pointing to a signified, we do not yearn to touch the urn; instead, it touches us, which is its only potency, for as Gray says in Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), `Can storied urn . . . /Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?' The history is immaterial here, `to dumb Forgetfulness a prey'. Within the new sensibility, space and time become the key dimensions that determine sensation. But when history is being collapsed, then space becomes an overdetermined logic; space, rather than time, as Marshall Brown argues, is the dominating dimension in Gray's Elegy.31 Freed from time, the poem can present itself as àn eternal, timeless moment' (Brown, PreRomanticism 44), a reification much like the Grecian urn of Keats's ode. The result of a spatial rather than temporal orientation is that in the end, `death mysteriously consumes passion: one day the youth is lovelorn, the next he has vanished' (PreRomanticism 47). Furthermore, his story, according to the Epitaph, is unnecessary, a thing of romance only, a `lay' rather than annals. He is passion itself, both its intensity and its consumption, and with him, Gray lays the possibility of a troubadour solution to rest. McGann argues that the Elegy is not so much about space or time as about touch, by which he means sympathy, as opposed to the distancing a visual emphasis (which characterizes courtly love) would cause (Poetics 28). But this sympathy, except through the figure of the passionate youth, is difficult to understand in terms of the poem's distancing meditation. Further, the youth's story is not touching until it is transformed into a `lay', a medieval romance form that, as the Èpitaph', abstracts passion into morality. This negation of passion modernizes the troubadour's melancholia and abstracts it into the elegiac posture; here, history is mourned through the figure of loss that is also the figure of a great love. Elegy becomes a way to contain emotion in order to contain history. That containment marks off space from the landscape as measures of what has gone.32 If Gray's Elegy is spatial in the sense that it `begins with deficient modes of space ± particular spaces, statuses, and stations ± that it succeeds in purging' (Brown, PreRomanticism 49), Seward's poetry resists such a negative definition, embracing a fecund space that extends itself wherever the self needs it most. Charlotte Smith, like Gray, finds the negative or melancholic appeal of the troubadourian posture a productive entry into historical consciousness.33 The first sonnet in her Elegiac Sonnets hints at her future as already stopped, a doomed poetic destiny (`the rugged path I'm doom'd to tread'). Similarly, the couplet ending the poem conjoins her




not with the foremost poet of the previous generation, Pope, but with his Eloisa, the medieval beloved as victimized and suppressed. Against Seward's Sapphics, Smith poses a Petrarchism that creates a tightly contained space in which to turn; and in turning, she changes the youth to the beloved, displaying herself as that object of the troubadour's desire. Actively constructing a male audience in order to ensure a readership, Smith does not contest the subject±object divide as Seward does. She nevertheless discovers that Petrarchism's appeal to the woman reader is that, by identifying with the beloved object, she can also imagine herself to be the object of the lover's desire. For both men and women readers, then, Smith contains herself both within the limits of her loss and as an object of preserved history. The singer of melancholy, she is melancholy itself: the ìndulgent Public must accept all I am able to achieve ± ``Toujours des Chansons tristes!'' ' (Preface to the 6th edition). She is both Laura and the mourner of Laura; she embodies Laura's desirability and expounds it. In Smith's sonnets to melancholy and her `translations' from Petrarch, she creates an authorization for the posture already explicit in the first sonnet by supplanting her voice with the prior poet's. Sonnet XVI is particularly interesting for its lamentations: While busy Memory still delights to swell On all the charms these bitter tears deplore, And with a trembling hand describes too well The angel form I shall behold no more! To heaven she's fled! And nought to me remains But the pale ashes which her urn contains. (9±14) This sestet associates the beloved's bodily remains with the urn, collapsing woman into container, and reifying memory as that container. This revises the antiquarian's urn that Gray meditates and the past that he demarcates. For Smith, history and woman are analogues that enable the female poet a place in literary history, but without re-placing woman in history. The woman remains stereotypical in her treatment, a troubadourian beloved rather than the subjectively present female of Seward's verse. It is just this analogy that provides High Romanticism with a distillation of historical consciousness distinctly useful for the prophetic mode. Like Smith, Keats's relation to history can also be ènd-stopped', although he tends to reserve this for his classically articulated poems. Like




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Coleridge, this tendency appears in what we think of as Keats's High Romantic texts (particularly the odes), and is distinguished from another (and more liberating) tendency that reveals itself in his medieval poems. Keats's response to medievalism is complex, and although the troubadourian posture predominates in his work, especially the romances I will discuss in Chapter 4, he also entertains and explores the elegiac medieval line extensively. Here I will look at the poem that most specifically responds to Gray's containment of history and to the question of the memorial and the elegy as adequate responses to such a stoppage. In Òde on a Grecian Urn', Keats responds to Gray's textual invitation, becoming not the youth but the pensive visitor who reads in the `deathful scenes' something about `Beauty, Youth, and Love'.34 This elegiac tag becomes a way of not saying something about Beauty and Truth. Keats's urn proffers its round of stories frozen in time to pull us back from experience into sympathetic speculation. His urn distils space by reifying time; it is about the impossibility of a romance time and romance space, its narratives impaled on their allotted zone. It denies the passionate youth his life or his death; he is mythic, an antique, a lover whose violent desires are all deferred. The circle of tales reveals that all is sacrifice.35 By contrast, in Seward's poem on funerary urns, Ìnscription For an Urn in a Gentleman's Garden' (I, 24), the urn is a `living grave', and history is the embodied present. But Keats is distinctly drawn to Gray's sentimentalism rather than Seward's sensibility, and is clearly thinking through Petrarchan poets such as Smith when he feminizes the urn, and makes both it and the act of historical narrative ± the `Sylvan historian' ± female. This feminization of the historicizing act sets up the necessary conditions for prophecy because it alienates history from knowledge, making knowledge (the concluding couplet that the urn `speaks') elusive and therefore desirable. And because history is contained as the container itself, rather than the ashes it is irreparably separated from or the story of the passionate youth, the bodily passions that make up historical actions are also alienated. Each scene on the urn is of passion or impassioned violence (love, lust, sacrifice), but as frozen quests unknowable except as artifice, as imaginative rather than literal scenes. `Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought/As doth eternity' (44±5). The `brede' operates as a sculptural frieze, a freezing of the temporal march into a disjointed history like that of the Elgin marbles.36 But unlike the Elgin marbles, it is one that queries rather than reifies the uses of time; Keats scrutinizes the urn in order to provoke a distinction between remembering and memorializing that questions both acts. The usual elegiac tone of the graveyard aesthetic




of loss is refuted by the `happy, happy boughs' and `happy, happy love' of the urn's narrative, but this is an unstable interpretation of the urn's intentions, and the happiness rings hollow against the mourning the urn necessarily represents. Keats makes it clear that the history the urn tells is lost history (as opposed to that of the romances); it must be re-imagined yet cannot be. It is the urn who is the poet, not the speaker, whose interpretive and prophetic incompetence makes him an observer rather than an intercessor. Unlike `Christabel', where Geraldine's poethood creates liberating tensions for the speaker, here the tensions are frozen and silencing. The urn is alienated from her poetry, and her words cannot be understood except as a sibyl's riddle. Nevertheless, the riddle is prophecy, divine guidance to the Romantic frame of mind delineated by the poem. Keats builds up to this guidance through his medieval poems, poems that are counter-poised to his classical odes and epics. He sustains both forms of historicizing in order to ground his brand of Romanticism, and like Coleridge, Keats uses a reconstructed history to productively disturb the assumptions that structure High Romanticism. But in the classical poems at least, Keats's relation to antiquity so problematizes the poet's role that he succeeds in exempting the self from both time and space, which are cryptically fixed on and as the urn. One late Romantic's response to this de-historicizing gesture was to determine herself within the troubadourian timeframe. Letitia Elizabeth Landon uses her poetry to become the historian who speaks and is heard. Her accomplishment rewrites Smith's self-containment and Keats's alienation because Landon is freed by her conscious enactment to recast history as not-female, and to refigure Romanticism's use of the medieval, whether paternalistic or troubadourian. But she cannot do so without the prior reconstructive work done by Seward on the space± time construct privileged by poetic tradition, and the new historicism of Mary Robinson.

The female troubadour: Mary Robinson and LEL Mary Robinson's participation in the Della Cruscan enterprise as poetic correspondent `Laura Maria', with her contributions such as Òde to Melancholy' and Òde to the Nightingale', might appear enough to enlist her as part of the medieval revival, but these early works function only as her entreÂe into the current Petrarchism that she specifically associated with Charlotte Smith, whose Elegiac Sonnets had appeared only a few years before.37 Likewise, the medievalizing poems of her




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final volume, Lyrical Tales (1800), resonate more to the same antiquarian influences motivating Coleridge and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. The Bishop Percy-inspired `Poor Marguerite', with its love-victim, the `nutbrown girl', is especially of this vein of medievalism, as are Òld Barnard, a Monkish Tale', `The Poor, Singing Dame', `The Hermit of Mont-Blanc', `The Trumpeter, an Old English Tale', `Golfre, a Gothic Swiss Tale', and others. But it is with Sappho and Phaon (1796) that Robinson focuses on the problem of medievalism as troubadourism, and decides to take on the problem of courtly love. In this sonnet sequence, Robinson accomplishes the two goals literary tradition has associated with the courtly love lyric and its development in Petrarch's sonnets to Laura: to make the matter of one's own love into an allegorical narrative, thereby influencing courtly or public opinion concerning that love; and to assert poetic mastery over this matter. Much of Mary Robinson's adult life had been played out before the public, from her acting career to her brief position as the Prince of Wales's mistress, to her 15-year long affair with Colonel Banastre Tarleton and the crippling results of her pursuit of him to the Continent. Her need to take control over common knowledge of her life by reforming it into a self-sustaining fiction is not restricted to Sappho and Phaon; she engages in such revisioning throughout her life, much as does Coleridge, beginning with her accommodation to the `Perdita' role of unacknowledged royalty that being the Prince's mistress casts her into, and ending with her unfinished Memoirs which function as an apologia. Each instance is a defence against her defamers, whom she specifically targets in her introduction to Sappho and Phaon in terms very similar to the losengier (the destructive gossip or rival in love whose interference will betray the lady's reputation and the poet's audacity) and the meÂdisant, the abuser of language or fame of courtly love lyric. The specifically troubadourian gesture of accusing the meÂdisant for the poet's love predicament aligns Robinson with the male poet rather than the silenced and absent female beloved, or the frustrated and restricted trobairitz, the female beloved who is also a poet. Yet the audacity of this gesture could only reinforce the audacity of Robinson's pursuit of the rejecting Tarleton; therefore she revises that pursuit into the supposed love relation between the legendary Sappho and her rejecting male beloved Phaon. Sappho's pursuit of her love will be specifically recast as the battle between heroic passion and heroic poethood. Robinson's ability to masterfully depict this agon will demonstrate that her own experience similarly followed the tortured path of genius. Robinson's love, recast as grand passion and translated into Sappho's legendary and




therefore authorizing passion, will become acceptable through the very genius of her poem. To form the reader into a receptive rather than judgmental one ± that is, to revise the reader from a critical public to a sympathetic private ideal ± Robinson prefaces Sappho and Phaon with an essay that performs several important functions (Pascoe, Selected Poems 144±54). First, she opposes the `legitimate' sonnet (exemplified by a sonnet by Milton to the nightingale, a standard troubadourian emblem of rejected love) to the ìllegitimate' sonnet as practised in modern Petrarchism, and specifically by Charlotte Smith whom Robinson attacks in a footnote by quoting Smith's own Preface to Elegiac Sonnets. Smith's claim that `the legitimate sonnet is ill calculated for our language' is appended to the opinion of Samuel Johnson, that the sonnet `has not been used by any man of eminence since MILTON', whose Petrarchan sonnet Robinson has just quoted. Milton's concluding troubadourian sentiment, `Whether the Muse, or Love call thee [the nightingale] his mate,/Both them I serve, and of their train am I', provides an apt motto for Robinson's enterprise, and an apposite sentiment to Smith's own melancholic but aformal and thus rule-less posturing that has aided in the spread of èvery romantic scribbler, think[ing] a sonnet a task of little difficulty' due to ìgnorance in some, and vanity in others'. Robinson thus begins her own imperative task of shifting attention away from any charge against her of infamy, ignorance and vanity to her present knowledge and humility, and her claim to fame. Next is this claim: Ì confess myself such an enthusiastic votary of the Muse, that any innovation which seems to threaten even the least of her established rights, makes me tremble.' Such a statement both sets up the charge she will make against meÂdisants (`But the Poet's life is one perpetual scene of warfare: he is assailed by envy, stung by malice, and wounded by the fastidious comments of concealed assassins'), and defensively protects against the reader finding that she is violating poetic tradition in her subject matter and its treatment. She then notes in a section specifically directed `To the Reader' that Sappho's love for Phaon is similar to that of Heloise and Abelard and Petrarch and Laura, and in her Àccount of Sappho' she informs the reader that Sappho's passion is due as much to her own high genius as to the èxtreme sensibility of the Greeks'. Indeed, it is not just her love for Phaon but her lesbian passion that Robinson must explain as a necessary component of female genius, for to do so will translate Robinson's own passion into genius, but also reframe her popular and slightly derogatory nickname, the Ènglish Sappho', as legitimate.




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Robinson's reference to Sapphic lesbianism (`She loved them [her female disciples] to excess, because it was impossible for her to love otherwise; and she expressed her tenderness in all the violence of passion: your surprize at this will cease, when you are acquainted with the extreme sensibility of the Greeks, and discover, that amongst them the most innocent connections often borrow the impassioned language of love') directly targets the reader (`your surprize'), dismisses any surprise as misreading, and insinuates that all such misreading is due to ignorance (which she had earlier specifically associated with her poetcompetitor, Smith, and with meÂdisants).38 Poetically, such a move also associates her with the sensibility of Seward, whose Sapphics returns nature and the spatial boundaries that govern it to female authority. Robinson plays this association out in her depiction of Sappho's `Bower of Pleasure', and her meditation on passion which follows (sonnets III± IV). Like Seward, this allows Robinson to reconfigure normative subject± object relations so that the female can be active, desiring, and in pursuit. Yet in refusing to play her story in the lyric present employed by Seward, or in a medieval past associated with the courtly love lyric, Robinson opts ± through the natural scenery of ancient Greece ± for a historical frame that violates both the practice of Petrarchism and of medievalism. Hers is not an anachronistic time±space schema, but the retelling of a legend. Taking hold of legend is an appropriative move that LEL adopts as necessary to her self-historicizing poetry. Robinson uses legendary time differently, however. The relation of Robinson's Sappho to history is determined by her inability to write in the face of rejected love, unlike the dejected troubadour, and her resultant death. Her voice stilled, the fame she has already achieved cannot be hushed and will continue beyond time. Robinson's ability to write on past the ending of her own tale of passion, her speaking out so as to transform the rejection of love into art as a troubadourian act, writes herself into the ground of history by escaping the imprisoning love bower. In this sense she positions herself as a female troubadour (competing with male poets rather than accepting her place as a female beloved, as would a trobairitz), as a poet capable of translating passion into art, and in competition with fellow troubadours such as Coleridge, to whom she wrote poems.39 She thus sets the ground for LEL by resisting the alignment of the speaking Ì' with the authorial self as the essential troubadourian act, and displacing the self-story with a heroic allegory: not a humiliative act to the beloved, but a self-heroicizing act that transcends the linear time of history by locating the self in a legendary poethood. Sappho's poetic




fame is legendary because it has survived so very long; but also because her heterosexual passion is at odds with her expressed love for women available in her extant poems, and in that oddity is the cryptic figure for Robinson's own inexplicabilities and passions; and finally because those poems and what is known of Sappho's poethood had to be pieced together from the few fragments remaining of her work. Finally however, Robinson's solution ± the authority of legend and the resolve against misreading through eternal fame as both of these are held up to human passion ± can only be related through Sappho's leap to death. Her voiced stilled by the rejecting lover, her art unable to regain its inspiration, Sappho as poet has dissolved into Sappho as woman. Thus vulnerable, she can only live on as poetic voice, her legend finally only a trope for loving brilliantly, as something akin to the nightingale whose address by Milton began the work's prefatory essay. Although Robinson lives past this particular ending, she allows Sappho's suicide to preside over the poem, a haunting of women's art that resonates in any attempt to reclaim love as authorizing. This is a theme that LEL both explores and disputes. A woman writing a book of poetry called The Troubadour (1825), and another entitled The Golden Violet, with its Tales of Romance and Chivalry (1827), Landon represents an alternative to the medievalist solution of Seward and the Petrachism of Smith through the ground charted by Robinson.40 As a late Romantic, Landon is in a position to reflect back on naive uses of troubadourism and to recalculate the troubadour model more cynically in order to clear a space for female composition. Landon's self-consciousness about gender play aligns her work both with Byron's and with Mary Shelley's, but its cynicism acknowledges the failure of medieval recuperation to be anything but anachronistic, a warping of time. Landon uses medievalism to capture poetry's lost potency for cultural formations and to contain it, not as a graveyard memorial, but in order to salvage it. She refuses Robinson's solution of classical legend with its predetermined death leap, preferring the `real' time of the medieval even in its anachronistic mode. Her strength lies in displacing loss from herself as the beloved to poetry as the beloved. In doing so, she answers the provocation raised by Keats's urn poem. Apparently following Smith's Petrarchan lead rather than Seward's or Robinson's Sapphic one, Landon constructs herself as a troubadour in the Romantic sense ± as a poet actively engaging the potentiality of history ± rather than as Seward's trobairitz (a poet actively discovering the desirability of her own bodily experience), or Robinson's female troubadour (a poet transforming passion into art). At the same time,




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she is aware of the futility of Romantic medievalism, its inability to resuscitate the past as present in order to designate a particular kind of future. Her use of the troubadour figure, and her adoption of it (rather than of the lady) through the containment of the elegiac use of history, tamps down both the joy and the instability of the troubadourian style of Romantic historicizing, yet refutes the distilled passions of containment. This kind of prevarication leads to a posturing that her readers found provocative, seductive and yet eerily threatening.41 The Troubadour offers an early but well-researched engagement with the troubadour myth. The story of the troubadour Raymond and his beloved Eva is that of a knight-poet and his lady, involving a quest and tournament. Landon weaves together a narrative tale told in cantos with interpolated songs, including the story of a Moorish Maiden that brings into the quest plot a historically sensitive association of the troubadour tradition with Moorish literary and cultural influence, as well as the better known association of troubadours with crusades. Landon's troubadour's songs, however, are modelled ± like those provided by Scott in Ivanhoe for King Richard to sing ± on the medieval ballads provided in Percy's Reliques rather than on the available models in Dante or Petrach. But what is more important than her clear plot and structural borrowings from Scott's Ivanhoe and Anne of Geierstein, and Byron's Childe Harold, is the voice shifts from narrative third person to the varying first-person Ì's of Raymond's songs. Sung in his male voice, the songs are to or about women, yet never women who could be re-associated back to Landon in the way that Robinson insisted Sappho be associated with her. This strategy gives Landon authorial power and a strong narrative and lyric voice that never crosses the line between her female subjects and her own experience. This provides her with a posture of assertion rather than negation, of historical richness rather than loss, of celebration rather than elegy. Raymond's serenades, love songs and ballads ± like the relics of Bishop Percy's collection ± all seem recovered, authorized, part of a larger historical real. In that her hero can transgress his boundaries, explore his ground, encounter and experience relationships with various women, this is a male posture. The very title of Landon's The Troubadour is a posture, putting the figurative above the literal and, in opposition to Robinson's Sapphics, showing she understands the true nature of troubadourian love: that it is about putting the idea over the thing, about finding the conception of love more erotic than is the beloved. Unlike Seward and much like the Della Cruscans, Landon's beloveds are all fantastic, projections of an ideal ego that displace self with object, history with romance time and




space. Unlike Robinson, Landon will not associate her own love experience with her poetic tales, allowing her to challenge the woman's role both as subject and object that Robinson's Sapphics has posited. Thus, as McGann argues, Landon's sentimentalism is based on an aesthetic (because fantastic) rather than material loss. But importantly, the displacement caused by such projection is the reversal of that achieved by Keats. Keats presents himself as mythic victim, the passionate youth drained of his vitality as in Òde on Melancholy'. There melancholy is personified as the female troubadour, while Keats's persona is that of her beloved, sacrificed in reparation for her suffering at the hands of (male) troubadour conventions. Keeping the focus on himself as subject, he atemporalizes his position as poet-sufferer, elevating the troubadour's agon over his love as the sublime moment. Such a focus, however, comes dangerously close to being in love with oneself, a possibility from which Landon is careful to distance herself. Landon is not in love with herself, as both the Della Cruscans and Keats were accused of being; she does not present herself as an object of desire as Smith does, or as the voice of desire as Robinson does; instead, she presents the abstract case for romance by taking it outside the bounds of Romanticism. She takes Seward's solution to the problem of present-ness one step further: Seward occupies both subject-lover and object-beloved positions; Landon occupies neither but sings of both, thus treating the troubadour as fictional, while she herself takes his place. She does the same with knights: the title of her Vow of the Peacock (1835) refers to a chivalric contest, exploiting the thrill of jousting for readers already familiar with the fantasy of a public display of knightly courage and valour for the sake of honour and love. The combined implication of her volume titles is that chivalry is dead rather than alive, and that history can be dreamed and lived only in the dreaming. By thus rejecting the possibility of present-day chivalry while promoting medieval figurations as a kind of self-display and consumer commodity, Landon also rejects the Romantic recuperation of the past. Keeping the focus on the troubadour figure and his beloved, she uses them to rediscover a history worth dreaming. However, in her mature poetry she can delve deeper. In `Memory', actually a section of the 1837 `Three Extracts from the Diary of a Week', she illustrates how her use of the elegiac history that we saw in Gray and Smith allows her to upset the gender politics established by the Coleridgean style of troubadourism. Ì do not say bequeath unto my soul/Thy memory, ± I rather ask forgetting', she begins, setting on its head the expectations of troubadour lyric.42 At the same time she establishes a




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resistance to elegiac history by refusing the memorial, a move that overtly sets the troubadourian against the elegiac. But rather than illuminate this difference, the speaker draws attention to herself as the historicizing agent: Òh! Give me back the past that took no part/In the existence it was but surveying' (21±2). After describing her own creativity in a way that, uncharacteristically, appears to derive from the trobairitz rather than troubadour tradition (`Mine is a world of feelings and of fancies,/ . . . . Feelings that realize their own romances': 10,12), she shows the inadequacy of this form of artistry by reverting to memory as the ònly task' left even when the loved one is `nothing' to her. Despite the lover's lack of real value (Ànd what are thou to me . . . ?/ Nothing . . . .': 37,39), and therefore the needlessness of elegy, memory is all that is left: `Life had one hour . . . /And now its only task is to remember' (43±4). But here, memory will not make history present to itself. Having rejected each historicizing form available to her ± that of the trobairitz, the troubadour, and the elegiac poet ± there is only the past as past, a thing unable to revise or restore the present. And her relation to it becomes a mere posture in the end. Landon's posturing, however, is not simply as a feminized troubadour. She also locates a way to use the revival of the trobairitz that we saw in Seward in the figure of the improvisatrice. Corinne, de StaeÈl's famous improvisatrice, is an improviser completely dependent on inspiration and vision who speaks both epically as the voice of the nation, and lyrically as the voice of classicism, erupting (as does Keats's Grecian urn) into present day space. Her poem, `Corinne at the Cape of Misena' (1832), gives voice to the improvisatrice without artificiality, the poem greatly improving on de StaeÈl's ability to portray the mind of such an artist. Landon associates herself to such a degree with historical figures for the woman poet that her contribution of the poems for Isabel Hill's 1833 translation of Corinne, by which she wrote herself into the heroinepoet's voice, should not surprise. Not only was her first volume entitled The Improvisatrice (1824), but in À History of the Lyre' (1828) she continues to explore this figure for the woman poet that combines the Sapphic with the troubadourian. Again Corinne is clearly the inspiration for the poem, but Landon's speaker is divided from the woman poet, Eulalia, whom she observes. The poem begins from the graveyard perspective; its elegiac tone and contemplative setting arises from the opening line, `Tis strange how much is mark'd on memory.' And from the ruins arises Eulalia, gathering material for her song and unaware of being watched. Throughout the narrative, her versifying is associated with solitude and melancholy, the affective characteristics of the




troubadour. But Landon specifies these qualities as Eulalia's through the change of one letter: the `loneliness/Which is her inspiration' becomes a `perfect loveliness' (117, ll.65, 68). The melancholy is the woman; the troubadour's desire has become the object of that desire, and she and her poetry cannot be separated. As the speaker notes, Ìt was both sad and strange,/To see that fine mind waste itself away' (126±7). It is for this reason that Landon associates herself with the speaker rather than the poet in this `history': it is not she who is the woman/verse object, the historical fate of the woman poet, but her poetic subject Eulalia. Coleridge similarly associates himself with speaker rather than poet in `Christabel' to liberate his imagination, and Keats does so in Òde on a Grecian Urn' to step outside Romantic history, but Landon is concerned to avoid being contained by the negative history of female poethood, the `Sapphic tradition' which reads women poets as necessarily disappointed in heterosexual love. Although she herself dressed in Grecian garb aÁ la Lady Hamilton to attend social events, that kind of posturing is distinctly different ± or at least should be ± from allowing a textual conflation of woman and thing such as Smith seeks. The memory that the poem represents becomes the history of the lyre. It paves the way for the later poem, `Memory', to consider the woman poet's relation to history in a safer and less binding context. By stating earlier that Landon resolutely historicizes herself, I meant that, rather than using troubadourian conventions subtly and covertly as the High Romantics do (as in Coleridge's `This Lime-tree Bower', for instance), she calls attention to herself through the use of those conventions, overtly and as a woman. At the same time, she freely adopts both male and female personae, and does not sustain a stable Ì' identity in troubadour fashion. Unlike Coleridge, who struggles with the very real problem of losing his individualism in the convention of poetic identification with the Ì', Landon dissociates her identity from the beloved role. Unlike Seward, who responds to the troubadour tradition by inhabiting both the lover and beloved roles, Landon refuses, in various ways, to inhabit either. In his lime-tree bower, Coleridge's imprisonment is as much one of convention as circumstance; and, where the convention doubles up on the figure of the troubadour as nightingale (a conventional association of troubadour song with bird song), he is limned in his tree (the conventional way to catch the bird/songster). But, textually at least, Landon never risks getting caught either as the sexual pawn in the invaded bower, or as the limned bird-poet. Instead, Landon frees troubadour practice from its historical base, liberating it from a sense of history. In this way she follows the programme set out by Seward's




63

sensibility without losing herself in Smith's elegiac containment. The dissociation of poet from poetry, of subjectivity from subject, deromanticizes her work and divests it of the troubadourian conditions for loss that so constrained women lyric poets before her. Ironically, even as her poetry disrupts the female poet±female speaker identity that binds women to the object role and constrains their voice, she encouraged this identity in her public character. Signing her verse `LEL', she teased readers' curiosity much as Robert Merry had done with his `Della Crusca' signature (the young Shelley was just one of many in love with the mysterious poetess). Whereas Merry's poems asked readers to identify the speaker-Ì' with his pen name, Landon's readers had to invent a poetic identity for her in order to name the authorial presence behind her dissociated Ì's. The enigma she posed was seductive to readers wanting to know how this poet could write in such different voices, a problem opposite to that of the troubadour's seductive selfidentification as a lyric Ì'. Dressing in simple white Grecian-style robes for parties and dinners, she specifically associated herself with the Corinne or improvisatrice character clearly available in the title of her very first volume. This costume intimated a priestess or oracle poethood and a spiritual inheritance meant to single her out from lay poethood and the meanness of her biographical lineage, but it also brought with it the associations of Emma Hamilton's famous Grecian dress and more famous seductions, as well as that of Sappho's Grecian sexuality. In the end, despite Landon's strategic textual remove from history, and the playfulness of her public persona (which was clearly at odds with her textual one), she and her poetry with her are caught in the web of women's historic roles. McGann notes `the tendency to mythologize ``L.E.L.'' ' even during her lifetime, and that `[w]riting a poem to L.E.L. became a rite of passage . . . [t]he poems to Landon written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti are among their best' (McGann and Riess, Selected Writings 16). The rumours of an adulterous affair with the editor of Fraser's Magazine, William Maginn, haunted her poetic reputation as much as Robinson's love affairs did hers. Nevertheless, her efforts set the conditions for Elizabeth Barrett Browning's own epic narrative of liberated female poethood, Aurora Leigh, and the impassioned yet authoritative expression of female desire in Sonnets from the Portuguese, while producing the context for Christina Rossetti's revoicing of the desiring, albeit deserted, medieval trobairitz in her sonnet cycle, Monna Innominata.




The Legacy of Arthur: Scott, Wordsworth and Byron

What place is there within the bounds of the empire of Christendom to which the winged praise of Arthur the Briton has not extended? Who is there, I ask, who does not speak of Arthur the Briton, since he is but little less known to the peoples of Asia than to the Bretons, as we are informed by pilgrims who return from Eastern lands? The peoples of the East speak of him as do those of the West . . . Egypt speaks of him, nor is the Bosphorus silent. Rome, queen of cities, sings his deeds, and his wars are known to her former rival, Carthage. Antioch, Armenia and Palestine celebrate his feats. 12th century, Alanus de Insulis1 Although my argument in this book is that the Romantics developed their conception of pastness through the lens of troubadourian individualism, we are far more likely to think of Keats and Shelley in terms of the troubadour or courtly lover than we are of Wordsworth or Byron, and rightly so. Similarly Scott, the lawyer and historian who even more clearly identifies with the knight, problematizes Romantic medievalism as a troubadourian project. All three poets are ambivalent towards the knight identity, embracing yet questioning or mocking. For all three the ambivalence results from a distress between personal and class identification, and political identification. David Duff notes that, during this period, chivalry was embraced by both radicals and conservatives. But for the conservative Scott and older Wordsworth, and for the radical young Wordsworth and Byron, their chivalry is not a product of party ideology, different for each side; rather, each poet experiences a radical and a conservative knight-ness that is troubled and undercut by a 64



3

troubadourian understanding of the knight's obliquities and blindnesses. Byron and Scott make this kind of double self-consciousness a mainstay of their authorial personae, while Wordsworth attempts to suppress such unruliness of personality. Scott, Wordsworth and Byron provide a way of understanding the difference between the various forces impacting the first generation Romantics, particularly if we position Byron as problematizing the divide between them, and Coleridge as anticipating or fathering the divide, and the second generation. For each of these poets, medievalism is structured principally by the Arthurian romance tradition from Malory's Morte D'Arthur as well as Percy's Reliques, other heroic romances such as Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, and Renaissance representations of the medieval such as Spenser's The Faerie Queene.2 For someone who lived their poethood as Byron did, Tasso's own maddened poet's life offered an impressive and sobering version of the troubadour caught in the web of courtly intrigue; for someone who constructed the historical present out of the historical past as Wordsworth did, Spenser offered a more genuine model of poethood. For Scott, medievalism was best represented by the folk ballads and romances of Percy's antiquarian collection, although Scott viewed the ideal poet of the past as antedating the making of ballads, namely the heroic bard whose verse was politically charged.3 But for all three poets, the personal politics of their poetic identifications conflicts in varying ways with their appropriations of history, their constructions of Romantic medievalism, and their use of the troubadour perspective to make historicizing claims on the past as present. Both Byron and Scott played out different aspects of the Arthurian legend, while Wordsworth's own form of role playing allied more closely with Spenser's Redcrosse Knight. As a model of proper romance ± a viable wedding of Arthuriana and creative historicism ± The Faerie Queene in particular offered the Romantics a rich resource for their backward glances at `pastness'. It is worth thinking about the influence of romance not for narrative in general as narratological theory has persuasively proven, or for the premising of the novel proper as Frederic Jameson argues but for its gravitation towards an achievable fantastic.4 Normal men can be knights; evil can be confronted and honour determined. Spenser's achievement in these terms is his epic-izing treatment of romance as a model for achievable heroism. For Wordsworth in particular, Spenser's predication of the quest for self on the ground of morality and passion is redemptive. Spenser transforms a genre coming to be thought of as female fantasy into what the Romantics could interpret as male fantasy: Scott's strong



The Legacy of Arthur: Scott, Wordsworth and Byron 65

men fighting for right, the manly heroism of Wordsworth's everyman. Even Byron's heroes, for all that they live an anti-Redcrosse existence, define their being against the Knight's virtue and fortitude. But certainly Byron is a different case: perhaps because he himself portrays a more libertine kind of heroics (as his grand, yet often cynical, gestures might be designated), his heroes face a world that denies them their manly expression of knightly virtue, that forces them into a negative heroic position. His chivalrous knight is a Lancelot, the French knight with a mysterious past whose adultery with Guinevere is a treasonous act against king and kingdom, a man already condemned to fall for his sexual and political sins. For Scott and Wordsworth this is a plausible extension of Spenserian heroism (Scott's Ravenswood in The Bride of Lammermoor is of the Byronic cast, as is Wordsworth's Rivers in The Borderers), but not its necessary outcome. Part of Spenser's impact on the Romantics derives from the Spenserian revival of the eighteenth century, and that movement's appropriation and transformation of stylistic and thematic properties that began to equate with a vague medievalism: syntactic languor, troubadourian posturings, sonneteering as a sentimental mode rather than a formal practice.5 This was a use of Spenser that began to be associated with women's writing and a too-superficial medievalism that would evolve into the Gothic, romance as wish fulfilment. But prior to this, seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century poetic and critical treatments of Spenser's poetics had severely criticized The Faerie Queene for its conflicting tendencies towards both the poetic pleasure of sensuous language and the didactic purpose of its themes. Joseph Warton's Essay on . . . Pope (1756), Thomas Warton's Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser (2 volumes, 1754, 1762) and Richard Hurd's tutorial Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), coming after the earlier responses, restored Spenser as a literary model of high purpose, and carried greater weight with the first generation Romantics than did the imitative Spenserianism. For the High Romantics, Joseph Warton's promotion of Spenser in particular would have been ideologically compelling, and it is worth trying to recover, particularly in the discussion of Wordsworth below, what relevance his system of chivalric aptitudes had for these later writers.6 The Faerie Queene is, more than a romance, a courtesy book, each section illustrating one of the qualities necessary to the perfect man: Christian faith, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice and courtesy. Variants on the medieval chivalric code, these qualities are very close to those Wordsworth embraces as necessary to the sincere poet in his `Preface' to the Lyrical Ballads. And if Scott was more enthralled with the actual




medieval knightly qualities of largesse, honour, courtesy, loyalty and valour, as much in his own life as in his art, Spenser certainly offered him a useful literary model (useful because Spenser's poem is a Renaissance version of a medieval romance, and therefore already a retrospective on medievalism). In contrast to both Scott and Wordsworth, Byron was decidedly drawn, both in life and in art, not to Spenser but to the Renaissance courtier's stance as embodied in Sidney. As a valiant knight, courtier and the melancholic poet of Astrophel and Stella, Sidney can be viewed as an ideal type for Byron, a man whose talents and propensities were more aligned with Lancelot than with Arthur. Lancelot's French origin, his knightly manliness crossed with his erotic manhood, presents a hero of brilliance whose oath of loyalty does not make him subservient. A knight-lover, Lancelot's intrusion into the lord±lady relation also makes him a troubadour figure, a heroic poet. Lancelot's brilliance lies in his self-presentation; coming from somewhere else, he presents himself and is accepted as he appears to be, yet he is always other than this. In this he foreshadows the Renaissance courtier's sprezzatura, the grace that is unlearned because inherent,7 while his melancholic lover's pose offers an inverted coupling of Rochester's Restoration libertinism. Together Sidney and Rochester represent a more politicized and contemporized troubadour figure, offering Byron a pastness that makes more of the troubadour's self-ironizing stance. Byron's medievalism, because of his identification with the courtier's display of accomplishment (as in Sidney) and disdain (as in the libertine Rochester), has a Renaissance taste to it, a compression of pastness that allows a multivalent selfhistoricizing perspective that is more self-aware than the sincerity of Scott's and Wordsworth's knightliness. Byron's is the least medieval but the most obviously troubadourian strategy of the three writers treated in this chapter, yet it has interesting similarities to the strategies employed by Scott and Wordsworth.

The legacy of Arthur A modernized chivalry as a response to Restoration libertinism arose in eighteenth-century Britain, both behavioural modes being understood as aristocratic privilege. Byron is an interesting example of the aristocratic confusion over the changing expectations and responsibilities of the titled, combining both rakish and chivalric qualities in his person, and then exploiting this confusing blend through its fantastic heroism in the Byronic hero. The Prince of Wales adopted such a blend less




successfully, while men of letters such as Thomas Warton, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and Bishop Hurd, tutor to the Prince of Wales and his brother, were strong promoters of chivalry. Both Warton and Hurd àdvocated the study of chivalry and the courtly tradition', which it was thought would revive a paternalistic culture in which the classes were `bound by necessity, by faith, by oath, and by blood'.8 Warton's The History of English Poetry (3 volumes, 1774±81) and Hurd's Letters on Chivalry emphasize the ability of history to correct current misperceptions about class relations and the uses of authority, an insistence that Marilyn Gaull points out is quite distinct from the achievement of the Gothic revival, especially as instantiated by Horace Walpole. Gothic literature seeks to recast the ancien reÂgime in the strictly decadent terms made politically abominable by French Revolutionary rhetoric. It places the history of the heroine at the heart of a reimagined landscape in which ruins of the past haunt the possibilities of the present. It is romance in the strongest sense, but the hero's chivalrous attempts to rescue the heroine are invariably outweighed by her heroic resistance to the tyranny of the past. Like the Gothic, Romantic period chivalry is fundamentally a matter of gender, but while the Gothic focuses on the need to exterminate a corrupt past, and so depicts chivalry as modernizing force, I want to pursue a reverse focus, that of chivalry's rivalry with the troubadour tradition for the recuperation of history. As this chapter treats writers whose knightly attitudes towards literature conflict with their troubadourian strategies, and who based aspects of their lives on Arthuriana, I want to recapitulate certain elements of the Arthurian legend as the Romantics would have known it. Beyond Spenser's interpolations, Malory's half-British, half-French version or Percy's uncertainly dated ballads were widely available but were not the only sources; certainly throughout the nineteenth century, Geoffrey of Monmouth's twelfth-century Historia Regum Britanniae did continue to be a major source for Arthur's life.9 Unlike Malory's professed romance, Geoffrey's account interestingly confounds the boundary between history and romance. Believed to be historiography for centuries, Geoffrey canonizes the translation of romance into history (the term `romance' was used for chronicles as well as verse narratives until the fourteenth century10). In creating a heroic romance that serves to authorize through prediction contemporary political culture, Spenser revisits this troublesome distinction, distinguishing in his `Dedication' between historiography and his adaptation of history writing. Wordsworth updates the problem in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads by aligning historian with the man of science and opposing both to the poet. But




like Spenser, Wordsworth sees the poet's vision as more historically accurate than mere facts allow. The problem of whether one follows Geoffrey or Malory is largely one of how Lancelot and Guinevere are viewed, since in Geoffrey's version Guinevere survives Arthur's battle with Mordred to retire to a nunnery. ChreÂtien de Troyes's version is the one that depicts the relation between the two as more than a lady and her champion; theirs is a courtly love gone too far, and Guinevere's adultery is interpreted as high treason against Arthur. Here is the basic plot, ignoring most deviances from Geoffrey and Malory, even though eighteenth-century antiquarian research was quickly assembling ballad and romance variants: Arthur is conceived through a tryst that is at once adulterous and innocent because of Merlin's magical intercession, and Uther marries Igerna (Igraine) on her husband's death; on Uther's death his son Arthur succeeds to the throne; his first battle is against the Saxons, who caused Uther's death, and his allies here and throughout are the Bretons; he marries the Cornish Guanhumara (Guinevere), and conquers or receives homage from Ireland, Iceland, Gothland, the Orkneys, Norway, Denmark, Aquitaine and Gaul; on his return to celebrate Whitsuntide, he learns that the Roman emperor demands tribute; entrusting the kingdom to his son Mordred, he marches to Rome, encountering and defeating the emperor near Paris; hearing that Mordred is traitorous, he returns to Britain; Mordred retires with his forces to Cornwall, and Arthur engages him there; Mordred is killed and Arthur, mortally wounded, is taken to Avalon to be healed; Guinevere retires to a convent and the kingdom passes to Constantine. In this version Arthur is a proto-Napoleon, although much of his campaign history resembles those of Canute and William the Conqueror; he is, in other words, not a local hero of the Welsh, but an emperor-hero for all Britain (Barber, Arthur 38). In Malory's version, Arthur comes to resemble Henry V at Agincourt in his march through France to meet the Roman emperor; the kingdom is entrusted to two regents rather than Mordred; the French knight Lancelot11 replaces Gawain12 in importance, first becoming the foremost knight of the Round Table and then Guinevere's lover (a reversal of the order in ChreÂtien's version and the Vulgate Cycle), while Merlin and Morgan le Faye are also reduced to give Arthur more prominence. The entire Tristram story is inserted, as well as that of Percival,13 Galahad14, and the Grail Quest. Throughout Malory's version he has replaced courtly love with chivalry as a valued attribute; courtly love repeatedly comes under attack and finally justifies Guinevere's trial by fire. Furthermore, the Grail Quest is reduced from a mystical undertaking




in the French to a chivalric one, in which the relative success of Lancelot is emphasized in preparation for `The Great Tournament', which is Malory's own invention (Barber, Arthur 129). Malory's achievement was to wrest the Arthurian legend away from medieval symbolism and allusory meaning-making towards a believable psychology and realism of manner. His emphasis on chivalry and the chivalric code, and the negative role of courtly love, meant that the Arthurian romance would always be associated with them, and history itself measured in terms of knightly virtues.15 If the problem of romanced history is already implicit in Arthuriana, making it immediately palatable to Romantic taste regardless of the version preferred, a further historical issue exists from the beginning of the Arthur canon. Because Wace, Geoffrey, Layamon, Marie de France and ChreÂtien de Troyes were writing in the twelfth century, the age of the troubadour, courtly love and the codification of chivalry, the depictions of the historical sixth-century Arthur as a model of chivalry are necessarily anachronistic. Arthurian lais and metrical and prose romances dress Camelot and knights in twelfth-century concepts of chivalry, courtly love and weaponry, and reflect the Christian and crusader ethos of the time. Although by the end of the eighteenth century the Arthurian past acts as a metonymy for England's history (supplanting the real historical Alfred the Great with a fantastic memory), it is, because reimagined, already de-temporalized, a floating referent. In addition, it offers a past where authority is uncertain because still in formation (Camelot can and does fall apart), so that history itself, mixed with myth and legend as it is, is ungrounded. It is in this sense of a romanced history that Arthurian medievalism can function as the historic imaginary of Romantic culture, and as the ego ideal of Romantic historicism. However, the problem remains as to how the Romantics constructed the Arthurian tales as a model for the past, and how this construct helped produce a medievalism that was as much an Arthurian fantasy as an argument for present action.16 My discussion here supposes that while Scott, Wordsworth and Byron saw themselves as modern day knights through their Arthurian medievalism, Wordsworth's and Byron's poetic acts necessarily took a troubadourian form because it was only through such an identity that the Romantic period poet could be efficacious, while Scott rejected the troubadour for the role of bard or court wizard. Scott undercut his knightly identity with that of wizard reluctantly; Wordsworth was both aware and unconscious of his development from knight to troubadour (and ambivalent about preferring one mode above the other); and Byron played ironically with the




difference between the two states. All three were troubled by their multifaceted identities as poets. The troubadour is he who hides his political intent under a show of true love; in this position, words are purposeful but can be multiply so, and they can also focus attention elsewhere in order to distract the reader's or public's eye from the poet's object, which is always already rebellious. The knight, and the bard or wizard as well, is he whose inner and outer selves must meet in a sincerity of person and purpose; the man is his word, and if there are alternative objects to pursue they must be refigured, even mystifyingly allegorized, in order that the poet seems even to himself to be in pursuit of the stated object. Perhaps because of the attacks on courtly love in Malory, and thus on troubadourian pursuits, the knight that Scott and Wordsworth appear to identify with in their public personae as poets is not Lancelot but Arthur himself. Lancelot's lack of appeal (although just the opposite holds for Byron) lies not just in his treasonous passion, with its too-close affinities to the French Revolution gone awry, but also in his identity as a courtly lover whose knighthood is jeopardized by his desire. But even more than Arthur, Scott finds a particular affinity with Arthur's alter-ego, Merlin.

Scott and antiquarianism The age's interest in Arthur was suddenly serious again after the Enlightenment's debunking of chivalry and heroic romance (as in Fielding's Tragedy of Tragedies), and after the Whiggish emblematic use of Alfred the Great was supplanted by that of Arthur after the loss of the American colonies.17 It is apparent both in the cultural context (for instance, `Capability' Brown, whose first name was Lancelot; but there was also the renewed interest in courtly manners, and the quite serious searches for Arthur's grave), and in literature, particularly in works such as Gray's The Bard.18 Although The Bard (1757) immortalizes the Celtic poet who represents a simpler, tribal culture being wiped out by the barbaric medievalism of Edward I, the bard has a recognizably Merlin-type character, utters prophecies (Merlin's special province),19 and calls on Arthur as the `long-lost' hero whose second coming can no longer be hoped for. Two aspects of Gray's poem are important for Scott: first, Gray gets the chronology right, correctly placing Arthur in the early Middle Ages prior to Edward's expansion of English rule and thus lessening Arthur's appeal as an accessibly medieval figure; and second, the association between the Bard and Merlin, an association that becomes stronger with a more intimate antiquarian knowledge of the Arthur texts. Scott was familiar enough with Arthuriana to recognize the independent character of the




Merlin romances and their historico-cultural roots, not only from the Merlin ballads in Percy's Reliques. Merlin's prophecies compose the larger part of these stories, thus solidifying the relation between prophet and poet, but this is a relation already available in Spenser's Faerie Queene Merlin, and in some sense available in the Welsh bard, who was not a poet so much as a `remembrancer'.20 Scott's epithet, `The Wizard of the North', accurately captures his own identification with the Bard-Wizard of Gray's ode, and his understanding that it is not the knight or courtly lover who sings in the Arthur romances, but the crafter of magic, the maker of prophecies. Furthermore, as much as Scott admires and imitates knightly behaviour, Merlin is the scholar and antiquarian of the Arthurian legend, the reader of books and the keeper of histories, past and future. Scott's particular brand of prophecy, like the Merlin of the Faerie Queene, involves revisiting history and understanding the import of genealogical strain on the present time.21 Scott provides the basis for this Merlin identification in Lay of the Last Minstrel through the historically available magician who was more accurately of Arthur's (or at least the medieval) time, Sir Michael Scott.22 Yet despite this identification, Scott's relation to the medieval is more generally the knightly one we most readily associate with Ivanhoe and his home, Abbotsford. There, like Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, Scott embodied a chivalry constituted out of his understanding of the medieval knightly virtues, a chivalry reflected by his home's design so that the complement of master and domain presented a complete picture of honour. But this is a later Scott; the Scott that concerns us here is not the populizer of historical novels, but the `Wizard of the North' who created the place and time for the knight, a Merlin figure who makes history out of romance. Like Walpole, Scott was a self-medievalized writer, absorbing into his personality aspects of the ideal medieval persona. In some sense we could say he is thus the product of his own ego-ideal processes in a way that Wordsworth and Byron do not succumb to, although they do revise themselves in relation to an appropriated medievalism. And although Scott is the writer we associate with medievalism because of Ivanhoe, most of his novelistic production actually focuses on the latent feudalism of modern society; it is his earlier poetry ± despite its typically sixteenth-century setting ± that established Scott's connection to the Middle Ages for his contemporaries. However, his scholarship did so as well, his two-volume Border Antiquities of England and Scotland appearing in 1814. He had prepared himself for this work years before, joining a debating society at seventeen and researching Anglo-Saxon, Norse and




early Scottish literature, as well as the feudal system; later he joined the Bannatyne and Roxburghe societies.23 In the Border Antiquities, Scott provides a scholarly essay on local ruins that runs half the length of the first volume, with the remainder a collection of engravings and descriptive essays that provide any romantically inclined reader with a clear topography for medieval imaginings.24 Its appearance a year after The Bridal of Triermain (1813), and well after he had begun his career with Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (3 volumes, 1802±3), and established his reputation with The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), assures the reader that Scott's knightly concerns do not make his wizardry any less available. It is Scott the poet, as antiquarian, ballad collector and bard, who is the constructor of a historic mythos. Scott's imaginative relation to the past takes its bearings from a locution, an invented historicized speaking that, cued by the Ossian texts, politicizes the poet as inspirer of warriors. The poet, rather than the knight, becomes ± or re-becomes ± the identifiable site of honour, courage and political spirit. In this instance, the poet cannot be transgressive or emotionally vulnerable. The troubadourian posture is no model for Scott's heroic bard because Scott, working from Macpherson and Chatterton, and reinventing Merlin, imaginatively reconstructs a `real' history that provides his own Ossianic textual ground. He effectively produces a new poetic relation to history by creating a role ± the bard ± and historicizing it through scholarship rather than invented artefacts. His Merlin is both a legitimating function and a conserving one (it is Merlin who creates and preserves history, it is Merlin who stops and starts time by substituting sleep for death). Scott's conservative politics, ambivalent fascination with feudalism and notorious chivalry are all manifestations of his role as national bard. But he creates his poetic history and the bardic role before he associates himself with this role. Once the public reads him as bard, Scott can then realize himself as such. A `Border' poet, he defines this role as marginal yet enacting because straddling two realms, two orders, like Merlin himself. His `last minstrel', a figure for himself before the fact, cries out from the Scottish border but, in recalling Gray's Welsh bard, he figures the connection between Scottish history and Arthurian pseudohistory (with mythic origins that point either to Wales or Scotland) that becomes Scott's special brand of wizardry. Like Gray's The Bard, Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel necessitated numerous antiquarian footnotes to articulate the entwining genealogies of the characters, in part because Scott's determination to show `the customs and manners which anciently prevailed' and a `rude spirit of




chivalry' meant delving into facts and historical curiosities rather than creating a pseudo-historical world more typical of modern romance.25 To be more historically accurate, Scott chose to write his `lay' not in the style of Gray's `Pindaric Ode', but as a metrical romance, emulating the medieval genre familiarly revived in Percy's Reliques (the lais of Marie de France being less widely known).26 And unlike Gray's thirteenthcentury tale, Scott chooses a sixteenth-century one, thus allowing him to straddle another border, that between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The `Border chivalry' he describes, then, is a fully developed representation of medieval culture, yet retaining the air of an earlier time through the `partly pastoral and partly warlike' structure of this particular representation of the culture, as he notes in the headnote to his Lay. The `last' minstrel himself embodies ancient times through his corporeal age; he is ìnfirm and old', with `wither'd cheek, and tresses gray'. He is the last to sing of Border chivalry, and when he dies, so too dies the memory of such deeds but also, the poem implies, such loves. This is the memory that equates with antiquarian curiosities, the internment of ancient objects in a romanced history. Scott's border history, which preserves the minstrel's loss, is romanced, a field of antiquated signs that permits a magical relation to exist between ego and ego ideal, the narrative that replaces history itself. The Lay is Scott's version of Malory, an extension of the Arthur romance into real time and place, yet fantastically reinvented. Merlin is replaced with the wizard Michael Scott, Lord Walter's knights replace the knights of Camelot. But significantly, the narrative centre is emptied: Lord Walter is dead and, unlike Arthur, he is not magically waiting to be revived. Even the Lancelot figure, Henry of Cranstoun, however chivalrous a warrior he proves himself, does not possess the capacity to reprieve the text's decentred, indeed, feminized nature. The Ladye of Branksome dominates the story, which is a battle over the control of a daughter's heart via border war and trial by champions. Scott acknowledges that historical narrative is in this sense feminized (as is the romance genre generally), occupying the place of the displaced ego ideal, or courtly lady as true love; he sends the last minstrel to sing of the battle of Branksome to a lady's court because now there are no kings in Holyrood to invigorate with battle songs. It is likewise no accident that the minstrel's lay begins with the Ladye going `to her secret bower;/Her bower that was guarded by word and by spell,/Deadly to hear, and deadly to tell' (Canto I. 2±4). The courtly lady may be historically and lyrically silenced, but she is therefore the residual marker of repressed energy, the sign of darkness and the unruly.




Through the magical knowledge transmitted by her father, she sets about avenging the death of her husband, Lord Walter. Her dark but well-intentioned deeds supplant the evils of Morgan le Faye, and she simultaneously embodies and revises both Arthur's fairy sister and his treasonous wife Guinevere. Scott's Lay changes the nature of Romantic medievalism through its insistence on the decentred, feminized romance as the undermining of chivalry, transmitted by the bard figure who both represents and memorializes the chivalric culture and its failure. Importantly, Scott presents this poet as one who resists the subject of love, loving rather to sing of war, and yet sings to ladies of love's effects. He is no troubadour (one who must be able to be the lover while being the poet), yet he cannot tell of battle without also telling of love. Through him, the war story is undermined by love just as romance undermines chivalry; the inability for genre to effectively operate in modern times (to work as other than anachronism) replicates the inability of the subject to work affectively in a new context. The life work of Scott becomes, in response to this realization (played out as it is by the minstrel's last days being softened by the `real' Lady's audience and patronage), the need for chivalry to be made to matter (especially in his own life and behaviour) and romance must be revised for modern use (accomplished most fully in his novels). After the success of the Lay Scott attempts through literary culture to resuscitate chivalry for the new age, developing an ethic in which love would not undo either the knight's deeds or his narrative. Marmion, more popular than the Lay and inspiring a rush of imitations, goes further in applying a chivalric ethos to the war against Napoleon and infusing a chivalric patriotism with a call to all levels of society. This in itself shades his political understanding of the knight position and, as Francis Jeffrey makes clear in his review of Marmion, this is a politically worrisome ambivalence to hold.27 In the poem Scott has redefined chivalry away from a purely aristocratic code to one more associated with the clannish nobility of arms that can encompass a range of society because it harkens back to society's noble beginnings. At the same time, Scott has politicized himself by taking on the minstrel role dramatized in the Lay as his own in Marmion and Lady of the Lake (Curran, Poetic Form 138). Although his more conservative novels will begin to query how chivalry can be an operative principle, they nevertheless continue to depict an interwoven social fabric that contains the possibility of a nobility of soul at all social levels. Yet this does not extend to women: important to Marmion's plot is the `wily' Lady Heron. Her own song of




love and betrayal is seductively dangerous to the monarch and his court because it replaces loyalty with disloyalty, true love with adultery. Lady Heron represents the danger of the troubadour by taking into herself all the treacherously erotic energy of the troubadour±lady relation, and stands in stark contrast to the poem's minstrel Scott. The novels too work tirelessly to disenfranchise strong female characters from both thematic and narrative emplotments and patriotic efforts in order to retain the passivity and inefficacy of the medievalized lady according to a conservative Burkean reading of chivalry. The Bride of Lammermoor is particularly interesting as a reinterpretation of the Lay, revisiting the problem of the politically dominant mother, the treasonous love affair of the daughter, and the efficacy of chivalry in a late age. There the daughter pays with her life for the mother's power, and the narrative figuratively tries and burns the mother as a stand-in for the beloved as Lady and witch, the `belle dame sans merci', whose power must be effaced before the poet can repossess his place in history and in modern times.28 Scott's chivalry could also get him into poetic trouble, however. Like Scott's response to Gray with the Lay, Bishop Percy was moved by Macpherson's Ossian poems, supposedly translated from Gaelic, to translate five Runic poems from Icelandic, and a year later to publish `Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards translated into English' (Hales, II.xix). But Scott the antiquarian did not view Percy's work in the Reliques favourably. Despite the homosocial community of antiquarians Scott so relished even when depicting it ironically in The Antiquarian, as if to acknowledge the Renaissance deprecation of antiquarians as hack historians out of touch with the present, Scott attacked Percy's scholarship.29 Perhaps in part a response to Percy's role in unmasking Macpherson's literary fraud with the Ossian texts, but more likely to his editorial tampering with the poems he included in the Reliques volume as well as his often inaccurate textual notes, Scott considered Percy's scholarship unchivalrous. The problem can be seen as one of Percy's sense of history as mediated, a confusion of past and present in order to palliate an unlearned audience, and Scott acting as valiant rescuer of the past and of facticity, and of the past's signifying importance for present meaning. Oddly, in Scott's own imitation of one of the Arthurian ballads, Sir Tristrem, his knowledge comes chiefly from the French, and `he seems to have been ill acquainted with the English contemporaries of Thomas [of Ercildoune]', on whose poem he bases his own Tristrem (Barber, Arthur 143). Nevertheless, like Southey in his Malory, Scott followed Joseph Ritson's Ancient English Metrical Romances (1802) for his Sir Tristrem, not




wanting to rely on Percy's scholarship or authority for his source. In another act of distrust, Scott's one original Arthurian narrative, The Bridal of Triermain, appeared anonymously in the Edinburgh Annual Register in 1809. But this time he himself was practising deception on his audience, as his Ìntroduction' to the poem indicates. Yet it was this poem that stimulated Scott to begin defining `Romantic Poetry', or the romance, a genre he defines only as it differs from the epic of Homer. Romance, the feminized genre in need of rescue, is thus to be reantiqued, resituated in the contextualist field that is itself one of flawed scholarship. Scott acknowledges the troubadourian twist of his literary battle through the playful self-marginalizing narrator of his later novels. His imaginative play with narratorial reflexivity, while it signals the selfconsciousness of the troubadourian posture, is carefully posed against and distanced from the sincerity of the central figures and narratives. Scott the knight is aware of his play with history, but in acknowledging that play he by no means intends to be undone by it. Yet the play itself, the multiple framings of novels within series of novels, narratives within framing stories that position the reader to understand both the relative nature of narrative and the sincerity of the story told, creates a space for others to work through the implications of these slits in the textual seeming.30 Peacock's medieval satires open up room in the knightly sincerity Scott professes for a troubadourian laughter that could unbalance the un-Romantic assuredness of knighthood as an artistic stance. Peacock's satire on Arthurian romances, The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), is especially helpful in producing such relativistic laughter.31 It is a late enough text that Peacock is aware of Arthur's sixth-century existence and of the Welsh origins of the tales (his reading in the original Welsh is extensive), but he finds the anachronistic quality of Arthuriana too delicious to resist, and not only uses the full panoply of chivalric elements, but mixes medieval and nineteenth-century elements to produce a confusion of anachronisms, and a comparative palette of contemporary versus romance passions. But Peacock's novels increasingly reveal a conversion to sincere medievalism that accords with Scott's own more serious moments. Although Peacock is finally won over to medievalism's pervasive themes and allegorical uses, particularly as the `Merry England' of myth, his satires provide necessary correctives to the revisionism of Tory chivalry. Yet even in his second novel, Melincourt, he already has begun to idealize the medieval period, locating in chivalry the necessary self-sacrifice and devotion to honour that contemporary times has to revalidate if society is to recover itself. Nevertheless, he recognizes that




in the medieval period leaders had to deal with the corruptions of a real society, and that the reductive fantasies about the medieval are misleading. In Maid Marian (1822), based on the antiquarian republication of the Robin Hood romances and lays, Peacock is nearly without satire in his idealizing of the medieval. And by Crotchet Castle (1834), his main character is an idealizing medievalist, an able panegyrist for the new feudalism that pervades Victorian thought and politics.32 Although in The Misfortunes of Elphin it is the antiquarians and medievalists who are at fault in their misreading of the medieval, importantly the plot depends heavily on a travelling troubadour who brings Arthur news of his queen after her abduction by King Melvas. The troubadour here represents court intrigue, espionage, sexuality gone awry: the materiality of information without any of its poetic justification. Peacock recognizes not just the idealizing mistranslation of medievalism, but also the distortions of the past imposed by radicals using the troubadour figure as their emblem. In the novel, the troubadour, no inciter to noble action or nationalizing endeavours, is only a negation of art, culture, language and faith. Peacock situates the distress at the heart of Romantic medievalism ± the divide between faithful and faithless interrogations of truth and history ± in the figure of the troubadour in a way that reverberates in Scott's own novelistic laughter at the incongruity of a poetic knight, an unpoliticized sincerity. It is Scott's poetry and antiquarian pursuits that best reveal his medievalisms of literature and history, while his explorations of the uses of modern chivalry as a historicizing force in his novels force him to relinquish a covertly political stratagem for the unified front of sincerity of the chivalrous knight. This deradicalization of the self-medievalized writer forces Scott into an increasingly conservative position from which the troubadourian ethic appears dangerously radical. At the same time, it is this ethos that allows Scott to laugh at the queerness of men distorted by their enthusiastic pursuit of the past without adequate personal adaptations of its real (that is, chivalric) significations. The older Scott faces the dilemma of recognizing his own earlier medievalism as deficient in the relativizing potential of troubadourian tendencies, a recognition highlighted and parodied in his depiction of antiquaries as homosocial, homosexual and impotent in The Antiquarian.

Wordsworth, knight of feeling If Scott can find absurdity at the edges of his knightly sincerity, Wordsworth's ambivalent attitude towards the knight/troubadour distinction




is without laughter. For Wordsworth, the knight carries high purpose, yet the troubadour has a transcendent, even liminal potentiality that must not be undervalued. Both are deeply serious aspects of true poethood, both must be pursued and cherished as vehicles for the heartfelt, for the spirit. Politically, Wordsworth cherishes the knight's steadiness of purpose above all, although his figure for this is the knight errant (most spectacularly as Michel Beaupuy) rather than Scott's lordly knight of the manner, yet the troubadour's radicalism also has a high appeal. But Wordsworth's approach to each role is always made ambiguous by the residual, by the residues of history that impede and elevate daily existence. Part of this residue had to do with discovering a newly politicized role for the poet in the temper of the times. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge began as writers of protest poetry; Coleridge's frequent publication of poetry in the Morning Post was often an alternative to submitting a prose piece to Daniel Stuart, who depended on Coleridge for politically polemical material for his paper; Wordsworth's initial attempts at poetry were tentative and highly sentimental until he began to sort out his own political stance.33 Nicholas Roe shows that the year after his acquaintance with Michel Beaupuy, Wordsworth transformed his art from protest poetry to the `poet[ry] of human suffering'.34 Returning to a reactionary London, Wordsworth's recent conversion to republicanism in France both alienated him from current sentiment, and made him peculiarly receptive to what Roe calls àn alteration in the structure of feeling for the poor and disenfranchised among articulate liberals, radicals, and dissenters' in the 1790s, an alteration from patronizing sympathy to an èmotional identification' with the poor (Wordsworth and Coleridge 129). This psychological treatment of social victims, enabled by the normalization of sensibility as a social affect, proved the key to Wordsworth's developing art, in which political protest increasingly began to take a backseat to the psychology of the individual in desperate circumstances. Although Roe's formulation of this part of Wordsworth's artistic development is convincing, it is also important to see what else Wordsworth's application of sensibility to the non-elite suffering subject leads to. By representing this psychologizing of the individual as a confrontation between the poet's present sanity and the victim's disease, lines of similarity can be traced, and these resemblances not only show the commonality of man, but show particularities as well.35 The poet has a past from which certain confusions of thought and emotion can be recalled and re-examined in the light of the victim's circumstances




and emotions. This recognition of resemblance appears to generalize the victim's suffering, but in fact particularizes the speaker's past in such a way that victim and speaker create their own hermeneutic circle. Contained by this mutual effect, the speaker's past is brought into the present moment and the hermeneutic circle is repeated, but this time between past and present selves. The first interaction resonates with the second, creating a lyric moment which recalls that of the troubadour, not least because its intensity arises from the relation between self and other that Wordsworth, too, names `love'. Wordsworth's implication of the past in the present, contained by the love relation, is fully troubadourian in that it personalizes politics and makes both the `levelling' subject of human suffering and his political past appear to recede in the face of the present emotion and revelation. Yet the very choice of subject ± that of human victims in need of protection from political systems that would dehumanize them, rather than ladies of equal or higher social stature ± as well as the use of history to revise the past as present is what determines Wordsworth as a knightly poet. By this I mean that whereas Romantic medievalism generally allows a poet to revise the past in order to reread the present, Wordsworth tends to conflate past and present so that an ongoing re-processing of the past (with the exception of the stabilized spots of time) is always in effect. This is what lies behind the obsessive revision of his collected works, ending only with the edition of 1845, so that with each edition poems were continually reworked. While Wordsworth was delineating the psychology of feeling, Coleridge was developing his inquiry into a related field; Humphrey Davy would later call him the `historian of the philosophy of feeling' (Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions 360).36 Their joint focus on feeling as the basis for comprehending humanitarianism in a revolutionary and post-revolutionary world is significant. Wordsworth and Coleridge were also responding in different ways to the challenge that Cowper set forth in poems such as Table Talk (1782) that manliness was lacking in the post-Augustine age. Here, Nature `rears her fav'rite man of all mankind./His form . . . masculine of course': His manly forehead to the fiercest foe;

Glorious in war, but for the sake of peace,

His spirits rising as his toils increase,

Guards well what arts and industry have won,

And freedom claims him for her first-born son.

(217, 220, 286±90)




Cowper contrasts the virtues of the past, Òur ancestry, a gallant christian [sic] race', with the present, `that effeminancy, folly, lust,/[which] Enervate and enfeeble . . . a nation shamefully debas'd' (394±6). The manhood of the coffeehouse, where table talk occurs, provides the incentive to reacquire the gallantry of the past. Moreover, Cowper charges the poet with this task: `Now from the dust of ancient days bring forth/Their sober zeal, integrity, and worth;/Courage, ungrac'd by these, affronts the skies' (376±8). Coleridge and Wordsworth were each responding to the general call for manhood that Cowper incorporates in his poem, and doing so in a way that responded to the drama of the French Revolution and to the new London fashion for historical plays.37 Each man, struggling to take control of his poetic career and transform himself into a poet, chose to do so by writing a historical drama set in the Middle Ages. Wordsworth's play The Borderers (begun 1796 and completed June 1797) is set in 1265 in the reign of Henry III, and anticipates Scott's historicist interest in the border territory as a place, like Palestine and other oriental landscapes, where outlaw themes can be explored. It thematically works through Wordsworth's critique and rejection of Godwinian philosophy as an answer to the dilemma posed by the French Revolution's escalation, rather than resolution, of human suffering. Speculative theory cannot simply imagine a solution to human ills; life is not a mathematical equation, and judging a man's moral action is not always clearcut. As Stephen Gill notes, drama allowed Wordsworth to create àn embodiment of many conflicting attitudes to life'.38 David Bromwich offers a darker version of this conflict, reading into the play a self-dramatization that works through secret guilt. This may well be the implication of Rivers's mysterious past, the crusades offering an anterior context for the relativized guilt and innocence (Wallace asks, Ì have heard/Of some dark deed . . . You knew his bearing/In Palestine?' to which Lacy responds, `Where he despised alike/Mohammedan and Christian'). In the context of the medieval crusades, the Orient provides an anteriorized analogue to the French Revolution, and Rivers a plausible Robespierre or, as Bromwich argues, a plausible Wordsworth.39 Coleridge's Osorio is also set within the conflict between Christians and Moors. Osorio, begun March 1797, the same month as Wordsworth's visit to Nether Stowey and the real start of their friendship, was completed by mid-September. It is set in Spain during the reign of Philip II, `just at the close of the civil wars against the Moors, and during the heat of the persecution which raged against them, shortly after the edict which forbad the wearing of Moresco apparel under pain of death'




(Coleridge, Works II.519). Both plays were artistically important in each man's poetic development, and both plays failed: The Borderers was rejected from Covent Garden in December 1797, and Osorio was commissioned by Sheridan for Drury Lane and rejected in October 1797.40 Holmes notes that Coleridge does not hear of the rejection until December (Coleridge: Early Visions 174); the rejection of both poets' medieval dramas coinciding in the same month is striking as the prelude to their annus mirabilis. Clearly the plays provided a cross-fertilizing medium for the two poets: dramatically grounded medievalism draws them together and continues to influence their poetic discussions. For both, medievalism figures not a nostalgic relation to the past (an ego-ideal), but a guilty one (the present ego not measuring up to the ideal object). The past is an èlsewhere' of dramatic action in which the troubadourian scene may be played out, or in which troubadourism can stage-manage historicized passion. The Romantics' use of drama, an increasingly significant genre for them, does not displace the courtly love lyric or medieval romance; it clarifies the issues involved in staging the past as presence. Yet for Wordsworth, the past in its romance and lyric forms also holds the possibility for an introjected ideal in the figure of the knight. Knightly valour held a compelling historical residue in which manliness and gallantry were combined with a focus on courtly love and the modernseeming emotions of the knight or poet and his lady. On a larger scale, and at a more particular level for Coleridge, such a subjective, introspective and ennobling experience as transcendent love was newly appealing through the popularized theories of sensibility, and the new knowledge of how emotions could affect the bodily and mental state of the individual. This is an important aspect of Coleridge's significance for Shelley.41 Similarly, the poetry of sensibility investigates subjectivity itself; its practitioners verbalize feeling as a state of being, pushing past reason to the mind's and body's other paths to knowledge. Recognizing the concordance, Wordsworth, unlike Coleridge, translates sensibility into chivalry, reabsorbing the sentimentalism that usually attends Romantic chivalry into a bodily comprehension of the sensible. The same holds for the relation between abstract thought and particular instance. As Roe notes, for Wordsworth, Coleridge's Òne Life' `permitted the internalization of . . . [Paine's system of] principles as functions of individual thought and feeling' (Radical Years, 35). At the same time, this absorption in the particular allows Wordsworth to disallow the feminine object its subjectivity, so that, against all Anna Seward's precautions to the contrary, he is able to turn sensibility against the feminine.




Wordsworth's use of the female subject appears very early, drawn from contemporary protest poetry that typically portrays the sentimentalized social victim as female. Certainly his own abandonment of the pregnant Annette Vallon must have increased his reliance on this figuration in his poetry, as well as shaping the distance he always sustains from the victim. Margaret's alienation and madness, for instance, in The Ruined Cottage, displace her distress and poverty; we identify instead with both the Peddlar, who owns her story, and the speaker-poet. Because objects with their own subjectivity place the self in a state of anxiety, Wordsworth is careful to suppress the female object's desire. Reducing her to the status of victim allows him to reformulate the troubadourian model: the troubadour sings of his destabilizing love for a stable and idealized object, whereas Wordsworth meditates on destabilized objects whose movement or vagrancy stabilizes him (Bromwich's approach would read this as a function of guilt, transferred from the French landscape). Moreover, this regard for female objects places them in the landscape as pieces of the fragmented world that is the necessary accompaniment to perceived self-unity. His containment of his desire through the sublimation of hers makes him whole. But he is always on the move as well, an ambulating knight rather than a seated troubadour, when the specular object stops him, making him recognize in her some fragmented aspect of himself. Indeed, the self is always somewhere between the possibility of fragmentation and wholeness, providing, as Lacan says, a `dramatic subjacency' that in poetry provides a fundamental tension and ambiguity.42 Wordsworth recognizes this drama as underlying his political, philosophical, and moral speculations. In `Tintern Abbey', for instance, his conflation of Nature and memory with Dorothy (a figure who is both subject and object, self and other, memory and rememberer, yet somehow held off and effaced even from the first two-thirds of the poem) prompts his discovery of a new, circumambulating poetic path. Stephen Gill remarks of this poem that it is an àccount of his own life, which took as its starting-point a profound gratitude that somehow, despite all loss, pain, and discontinuity, he had survived, not just as a whole and joyful man, but as a creative being' (Life 162). It is the knight's constant movement, which Wordsworth construes as back and forth movement in historicized time, literally between spots of time, that contains human fragmentation in a creative wholeness. As Roe shows, Wordsworth found the destitute victim congenial for his developing interest in victim psychology (Radical Years 127±8). This may well be due to his realization while in France that chivalry, and its ethos of the protection of women, combined with the idealization of




women in courtly love and romance, are at odds with the reality principle. Real life treats its most vulnerable objects very harshly, and women are especially susceptible to unsought-for suffering. If Wordsworth is careful not to sentimentalize the female victim, setting his writing apart from most protest poetry, his focus on her is nearly obsessive and always to a particular purpose. The object, which is for Wordsworth carefully the knightly object of protection and not the beloved (even in the Lucy poems), must be distanced so that its fragility and fragmentation do not affect the knight's carefully maintained wholeness.43 This wholeness, derived from the hermeneutic circle between speaker and other, can be troubled by the initial confrontation between poet and object but is quickly restored, except in cases where the troubling is itself restorative (as in Ànecdote for Fathers'). Although troubadourism has its political uses, Wordsworth chooses knighthood to deal with the human passions as they affect sincerity of purpose. Such love is in danger of being equated with effeminizing romance, through the problematic of courtly love. Wordsworth's is a knightly ardour, in effect a crusade against the misuses of sensibility, yet it is in his moments of troubadourian consciousness that Wordsworth confronts the feminine as sensible matter, understanding it as matrix and threshold, as in the Lucy poems, the site for real discovery. Indeed, Bromwich insists on the identity of Lucy with Annette Vallon (and not Dorothy, as Coleridge and most biographers have assumed) in lyrics that are Wordsworth's only real troubadour poems, for Annette is the deserted beloved, and this, Bromwich implies, is one large source of his French guilt.44 Translating Annette's sensible body into a political body ± leaving her near her due date for a lengthy stay in Paris at the height of political turmoil ± provokes a guilty lack in Wordsworth that provokes his turn to knightly chivalry as a mainstay (something Coleridge resented).45 This conceptual dilemma, between the troubadour's play and the knight's guilt-hiding valour, both promoted by emotional vulnerability, lies at the crux of Wordsworth's poetic identity. It is significant that one of the Chaucer poems he chooses to translate in 1801±2 is Troilus and Cressida, a poem in which true love and knightly valour are mixed with pandering, deceit and failure. Although for Wordsworth knighthood is the preferred valence because of its overriding sincerity and strength which can defeat prior failings of the self, it is the troubadour who holds the key to transcendence. The meta-positionality available in the troubadour's mediated consciousness ± those moments of Wordsworthian ambivalence and double vision, as in `Nutting' ± pro-




vides access to the liminal. Yet it is the knight who, for Wordsworth, best confronts the feminine and the sensible. Since it is one thing for a poet to work this out for himself, and another for him to feel mocked by outrageous applications of its possibilities, Wordsworth is disgusted, particularly in the Preface by the Della Cruscan phenomenon. Ì cannot . . . be insensible of the present outcry against the triviality and meanness both of thought and language, which some of my contemporaries have occasionally introduced into their metrical compositions', he comments there (Gill, Wordsworth, 597). Della Cruscanism dallies with a self-absorbency that makes a mockery of the sufferings of the impoverished and dispossessed. This meanness is not a mere lexical paucity, but a disregard for the `real' language that belongs to poetry. Even so, it is `far less pernicious in the sum of its consequences' than the `defect' of `false refinement or arbitrary innovation'. What seems to him a duplicitous unmanning of poethood by those who exploit the unnatural aspects of troubadourism ± its false attachments between poet and beloved, its mockery of meaning-making ± threatens the sincerity of his own uses of troubadourian poetics. McGann differentiates between poetry that enacts, as in the sensibility of a poet such as Frances Greville, and the self-consciousness of a poem such as Hannah More's sentimentalization of sensibility. It is that self-consciousness, the mindfulness of emotions felt on the body, which distinguishes poetry of sensibility. More's Sensibility: An Epistle to the Honourable Mrs. Boscawen (1782) is a poem of analysis, a celebration of the sincerely sensible, and a critique of those whose sensibility is put on for effect. More's poem worries that `[a]ffect is haunted by the demon of affectation, virtue by virtuosity, the language of the heart [by artifice]'.46 This distinction between sincere and insincere sensibility shows that the latter's self-consciousness practises deception on those who believe in sensibility's promise. It is a far greater and dangerous distancing of the subject from his subjectivity than what prevails in the sentimental awareness of self. The sincerity necessary to sensibility ensures that thought bonds to feeling, producing an unmindful immediacy which compacts time so that the felt present of the speaker is also the textual present moment, the moment of enactment. Insincerity endangers the compact between speaker and reader that such an experiential moment is real. In the case of the Della Cruscan school of sentimental poetry, the distancing of subject from an immediate experience of environment and emotions led some readers to interpret the poetry as insincerity rather than sentiment. When Hester Thrale Piozzi recommended Della Cruscan poems to




Seward, Seward thought they were all written by the same (male) poet who was dramatizing a faked love affair for sensational effect. The disturbing difference between sensation and sensational also grated on Wordsworth's nerves, and was the basis of his strong dislike of Della Cruscan poetry. Wordsworth does not object to sensibility, but to a corruptive praxis that, like Gothic drama and novels, preys on readerly belief by manipulating emotions. The danger for Wordsworth is that such literature will destroy the compact between poet and reader, a contract in which the reader can be assured that the poet's heartfelt effort is always the ground of his art. The Della Cruscans' self-conscious use of language and nature as artifice to represent the `natural' images of the mind acted as a poor precedent to Wordsworth's desire for a more intense relation to the `natural', such that its representations are indistinguishable from those of the mind. This apparent fusion draws on the bonding of thought and emotion crucial to sensibility, but is distinguished by a self-consciousness drawn from sentimentalism. In bringing the two approaches together, Wordsworth politicizes sincerity as the elemental trait of Nature inheritable by man. It, rather than bodily nerves, is the poet's only true path to vision and poetic knowledge. Della Cruscan artifice derives, in fact, from their loyalty to troubadourian posturing, the public display of private emotion. Paradoxically, what Wordsworth sees as an artifice of style resulting from an artificiality of spirit is, at least conceptually, derived from the method of the medieval troubadours, who wrought their poetic style out of a new naturalness of both emotion (`true love') and language (use of the vernacular). However, Wordsworth interprets Della Cruscan troubadourism as effeminacy, an unmanly (and thus a deeply insincere) relation to Nature. A gentleman's or knight's manners reveal a deeply ingrained chivalry, a nobility of soul in which an openness to sincerity of affect is a virtue to be harboured; the superficial manneredness of the troubadour as displayed by Merry exposes the distance between act and spirit. Effeminacy is a double play on the relation between supposed passion and true (natural) feeling, and thus a manipulation of all that poetry should engage. McGann argues that Wordsworth's ` ``Preface'' . . . is a conscious critique of the Della Cruscans and the kind of writing inspired by their work . . . Feeling is the central issue because the Della Cruscans had launched their own writing fifteen years earlier under the same sign' (Poetics 75±6). Certainly the Preface challenges false feeling, using the distinction to focus his identification of real poetry (what `distinguishes these Poems from the popular Poetry of the day. . . [is] that the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation') and of




true poethood (a poet is à man pleased with his own passions . . . [who is] habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them': Gill, Wordsworth 599, 603). Furthermore, this poet's `more lively sensibility' (603) must be protected by a knightly valour: ìf . . . it shall appear to some that my labour is unnecessary, and that I am like a man fighting a battle without enemies, I would remind such persons that, a practical faith in the opinions which I am wishing to establish is almost unknown' (603; emphasis mine). If Wordsworth is explicitly disgusted by what he views as a misapplication of sensibility to poetics and history, he finds in medievalized, knightly history a way to trope his rescue of contemporary poetics. But he is also less overtly compelled by an Arthurian drama than Scott. `The Egyptian Maid' is Wordsworth's only fully Arthurian poem, but it is heavily reliant on Malory and poorly researched.47 And yet the Arthurian ideal itself began to strongly influence his works at least by 1800. His 1798 contributions to the Lyrical Ballads articulate the posture of the radical, if at times sentimental, poet with little deviation, but with the second volume added in 1800 and the new Preface written to justify both the original selections and the new additions, Wordsworth has begun to move away from a radicalizing position for which the present moment and the future are the keys to the past, to a knightly position from which to preserve the past as something it never actually was. Volume two of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads includes several `romances' and poems about knights that seem more congruent with Percy's Reliques than with his own 1798 ballads. And later poems, such as `Character of the Happy Warrior' (1807), or the much later `The Armenian Lady's Love' (1835) appear even more conservative, adherents of the knightly strain to his poetic identity. Indeed, by the time Wordsworth writes `The Armenian Lady's Love', he is friends with Kenelm Digby, to whom he inscribes the poem and from whom he takes its subject. Digby, author of The Broad Stone of Honour (1822) and medieval enthusiast for the nation, guided the Victorian Age into a pursuit of internalized chivalrous selfhood, the purity of which resoundingly cohered to a feudal vision of a unified (that is, anti-reform, pro-monarch and Church) state.48 Unlike era-influencing medievalists such as Richard Hurd and Walter Scott, Digby wanted to revive the social force of religion as well as of feudalism. As Wordsworth's prefatory note indicates, the poem is meant to reconstitute, in earnest Digby fashion, `the piety and chivalry of the olden time', a direction that, in its lack of critical reflection, is so far removed from even the `Hart-leap Well' of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads that it is clear




Wordsworth's resolve is here entirely towards the knightly and away from the too radical troubadourian strain. Digby has become a resolute response to the Della Cruscan threat of a false or effeminated poetics. What happens in between Wordsworth's radical youth and this later, more staid (or in the terms of the Preface, more `honourable') persona may not, however, be as clear cut a turncoat political transformation as Byron believed in his prefatory verses to Don Juan. Wordsworth continues to be troubled by the unresolvable tensions between the knight and the troubadour, unhappy with the conservative politics of the one and the radicalism of the other. If Digby offers a contestatory truth to the Della Cruscans' relativism, he also upholds as the very strength of the knight the vulnerability his vows force on him. But this trajectory is better fleshed out once the ground for Wordsworth's tendency towards knightly virtue is laid. As early as 1792 Wordsworth seems to feel that heroic men fighting for their ideals are in truth present-day knights. In The Prelude, Book IX, he represents this association as beginning with his decision to support the Revolution, and to align himself with the patriot volunteers for the new revolutionary army. This patriotism becomes personified in MichelArnaud Bacharetie de Beaupuy who, privileged himself, began the Revolution fighting for constitutional reform and then turned republican. Wordsworth's sense of personal knighthood, influenced certainly by his near engagement in battle in the French Revolution under Beaupuy, but developing steadily towards the externalized ethic that he comes to represent for the subsequent era, was as clearly his inheritance from Spenser's national history, The Faerie Queene (1590). As he notes in The Prelude, `Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven/With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace,/I called him Brother, Englishman, and Friend!' (III. 280±2). Although Beaupuy is the most real knight Wordsworth meets, the Redcrosse Knight is perhaps the most imaginatively influential for him, and a detour through Spenser at this point will be necessary to understand Beaupuy's place in Wordsworth's medieval landscape. In Spenser's story of nation, `Prince Arthur' quests for Gloriana (Elizabeth I, the head of the new dynasty, more clearly represented bifocally as Mercilla as Elizabeth's body politic and Belphoebe as Elizabeth herself: Broaddus, Spenser's Allegory 18) in Faerie Land. The story predates Arthuriana by beginning before Camelot and the Round Table and setting the ground for a new history to be written. It thus lays out a utopian possibility tantalizingly like that of Revolutionary France. In the vaults of Memory, Arthur reads the chronicles of the Britons, which




stops with his father, Uther; his own story is yet to be told, but under the new terms it will involve being wedded to the Faerie Queene to establish a new line of native strength that will revise the medieval despair in the failure of Camelot. Founding and remembering, the doubling movements of history, provide the basis of the allegory Spenser establishes, while valiant deeds symbolize the restitution and re-creation of a national character. This is the essence of Wordsworth's Spenserian borrowing for The Prelude. Wordsworth's speaker-poet will play Prince Arthur, whose part in Spenser's story is insistently that of reading histories: in the vaults of Memory (Canto X), in Book II with the reading of a manuscript of British histories, and so on. By combining the heroic romance of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516) with the religious and political allegory of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (1575), Spenser elevates Arthurian romance and re-establishes its historical authority in the construction of nation. Book III is particularly important, perhaps not least because the muse of history, Clio, is invoked in this chapter rather than Calliope (for epic poetry), but also in its antiquarian borrowings from Geoffrey of Monmouth's twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain and Merlin's prophecy to Britomart of the historical chronicle of Britain to come from her union with Prince Arthur's half-brother and ending in the reign of the Tudors and Elizabeth.49 Here, history, Arthurian legend, Renaissance revisionism and the romancer's prophecy all come together. Book III is also significant for its hero. Britomart, the female knight of Book III, and the counter-part of the real-life female `prince', Elizabeth (rather than her pacified fictional self, Gloriana), provides the model of female heroism for women writers to adopt as a counter to the specifically feminine activity a heroine was expected to observe.50 Britomart as the invention of an English author was more available to women readers as a preferred and self-sacrificing version of the Amazon. But as she is posed against the sexually corrupt Lady of Castle Joyeous, Britomart provides not just the contrast between chastity and lasciviousness Spenser intends (the Lady is like a `Persian Quee[n]' in her oriental luxury), but between different forms of female activity. The Lady (along with the seducer of Merlin later in the book, the Lady of the Lake, whose mention clearly reinforces the treachery of female desire) represents the traduction of true love. This is best represented by the Lady's policy of having her knights force any stranger knight to surrender his love for another in preference to her: she thus absorbs courtly love into herself and ruins it as an individualizing concept. This false Lady cannot be a clearer indictment of romance's indulgence of female fantasy, as well as the lady's false power in troubadourian love, while Britomart, whose name joins




nation with war through historico-mythic connections, ('Brito' from Virgil, where it signified chastity but here also `Briton', and `mart' from Mars), signals the communal strength available from the nation's adoption of a chaste spirit (I am using `nation' here anachronistically to refer to a Romantic reading of Spenser). Without Britomart, Spenser's Faerie Land would have still been a largely female province, ruled by the vision of the Faerie Queene, charted by the oppositional powers of Una and Duessa, and filled with female monsters such as Error, witches and liege ladies. Moreover, Merlin reveals to Britomart that she will marry Arthur's brother and found the future line of British kings; thus Britain itself is reconstructed as a matriarchy. In this differently gendered world, male chivalry is virtually impotent, for knowledge and power now have to be gained on different terms. Sight is untrustworthy (Redcrosse mistakes Duessa for Una the first time he is so challenged), and the old chivalric values are no match for female duplicity. But the creation of an allegorically intended yet realistically portrayed female knight provides an active female principle in the romance; Britomart can both challenge Duessa's activity and link female chivalry to Elizabeth as her progenitor. Spenser can subject medieval attitudes to attack through all the representations of false chivalry and untrue love, particularly the archaic remnants of medieval chivalry that characterized the court of Henry VII, by providing a heroic female chivalry whose truth is more productive and productively available. Spenser both justifies Elizabeth's reign and reverses the traumatic wound of the Arthurian landscape, Guinevere's execution and disappearance that (if we take Mallory to its logical extreme) causes the collapse of Camelot. Britomart and Gloriana (in combination with Mercilla and Belphoebe) replace her both through overt and visionary presence, suggesting that there is no longer a place for the courtly lady when what is needed are women who can protect and rule. Wordsworth responds in suggestive ways to Spenser's female ground. Reverting to Guinevere's disappearance in the form of distressed, maddened or absent female figures, he rejects Spenser's feminine rule. Faerie Land, after all, is also a place where extreme cruelty to women is in constant evidence, and where their bodies are made to absorb both carnal sin and its redemption. Furthermore, Faerie Land is a dreamscape where Nature's rules are not viable. Wordsworth's natural landscape replaces Arthurian for Elizabethan rule, returning the female figure to the role of victim and redemptive vessel (in the sense of the sympathetic object). If there is some relation between Wordsworthian Nature and Gloriana, we are not encouraged to seek it. A medievalizing poem that




significantly contrasts with both `The Armenian Lady's Love' and `The Egyptian Maid' is the manly `Character of the Happy Warrior' (1807). Wordsworth could not be clearer in his description of chivalry: the Warrior is `the generous Spirit', whose `high endeavours', `natural instinct to discern', `Controls . . . [pain and fear] and subdues, transmutes, bereaves/Of their bad influence, and their good receives', and he is `[m]ore skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure/As tempted more; more able to endure' (3±24). Here èvery man in arms' should be such a knight, the general made particular by following a template for idealization that erases individual defect. However, the character of the chivalrous warrior had already been fully fleshed out and politicized in The Prelude. In Book I Wordsworth lists the historic themes he might have written about, including the heroic exploits of King Arthur.51 But Wordsworth rejects the national past in favour of the personal present: he has understood from the troubadours the ability to write nation through self by writing the self into history. Indeed, he begins this process in `Tintern Abbey' where, as Bromwich notes, the word again recurs `with a variety of cadence and implication', such that ìts power is always there in the invention of a grammatical tense that seems to cover both present and past' (Disowned by Memory 86). The differential Wordsworth applies to the personal past/ national present uses the contract of the Lyrical Ballads Preface to interface reader, poet, and `real' people, who together make up nation. Of import is not the plot-driven story and heroic protagonist of epic, but reflection on others' stories and on the workings of memory. While the dream vision of chivalric questing and quixotic knowledge of Book V opens epic up to the problematic of medievalism in the Prelude, it is Wordsworth's memories of Michel Beaupuy in Book XI that reveals his shifting relation to medievalism. Remembering how he immersed himself in revolutionary activity during his first visit to France, Wordsworth recounts Ì gradually withdrew/Into a noisier world; and thus did soon/Become a Patriot' (122±4). The verb `withdrew' prescribes how this act of fervour ± an epic act ± will be received by the poem. What the hero withdraws from is himself, specifically the meditative activity emblematized by sitting ìn the open sun' by the ruined Bastille just a few lines earlier, in order to walk in the shadowed woods with a true patriot, Beaupuy. In appearing to contrast himself with Beaupuy, the speaker in fact draws their parallel to show how he might similarly have been a true epic hero. Beaupuy is the mark of chivalry, and the idolizing I, enthralled that such a man should select him for èarnest dialogues' (IX.445),




nevertheless mentally wanders during these inspiring walking discussions, for the shadowy woods function for him as Spenserian woods of error. He is drawn by them into daydreams of chivalry, away from either political philosophy with the heroic Beaupuy or productive meditation with himself; spurred by visions of the ego-ideal and fleeing the ideal ego of the aggressive I, he imagines the nobly-born Beaupuy as Redcrosse Knight: `He through the events/Of that great change wandered in perfect faith,/As through a book, an old romance, or tale/Of Fairy' (1805, IX.305±8). This description by association draws the poet-composer as much as the speaker-I into daydream, so that it is unclear in this compounded effect how closely romance follows on the heels of contemporary politics. Not only is Beaupuy a figure of Fairy (Roe comments on his `literary idealization', noting `Wordsworth has Chaucer's Knight in mind . . . a paragon of ``chivalrie'' ': Radical Years 57), but his `courtesy . . . did rather seem/A passion and a gallantry, like that/Which he, a soldier, in his idler day/Had payed to woman' (316, 317±19). Certainly Wordsworth as the older composer-poet sees the connection of youthful political enthusiasm and romance as integral: Òften in such place/From earnest dialogues I slipped in thought', and the hooves of travellers' horses became Àngelica thundering through the woods/Upon her palfrey, or that gentler maid/Erminia, fugitive as fair as she' (IX.445±6,454± 5). The presence here of Tasso's Erminia and Ariosto's Angelica, heroines in need of rescue, are connected not just to fervour ± maddened Orlando and love-mad Tasso ± but to aristocratic ladies needing rescue by chivalrous gentlemen. Because this is too close to Burke's rhetorical rescue of Marie Antoinette, the daydream romance dangerously links Beaupuy and Wordsworth himself to the ancien reÂgime and to Burke's organic continuity of history; and, like Arthur, Ariosto and Tasso, it must be given over. The speaker-I is reminded of this by the convent ruins, À roofless Pile' resonant with implications from the Bastille ruins so lately quitted.52 Even so, the compulsion of medievalism is so strong that Ìn spite of those heart-bracing colloquies . . . /I could not but bewail a wrong so harsh' as a convent's destruction (IX.473±6), and the speaker-I's passion for elsewhereness betrays his so-called `Patriot' identity.53 If the composing self feels romance unproductive of history, it is productive of the gallantry Beaupuy shows to be at the heart of revolution. Real female distress enters just 30 lines later with the `hunger-bitten Girl'. Her physical and emotional poverty offer a shocking contrast to the fantasies of Angelica and Erminia as she leads a cow rather than riding a palfrey. The speaker-I is at once brought to his senses and brought to a true rather than romance chivalry in his sympathy for her. Yet his




comment is rhetorically empty compared to the delicious daydreams to which the `Child of Toil' offers such sharp remonstrance. The blandness of Wordsworth's declaration against poverty in the lines following her appearance ± compared to those responding to the vision of medieval damsels, Freudian romancings similar to Burke's ± reveals that the composing poet is likewise ambivalent about the value for poethood in taking part in political and military action.54 Like the dream vision of Book V, the romance fantasy of Book IX calls attention to the self's relation to an ego-ideal as a dynamic the poet must struggle with in order to understand his own historicity, however unromantic that historical presence actually is. Beaupuy is in this sense as imaginatively productive of history as the historical Tasso and the fictive Redcrosse Knight, while the impoverished girl grounds these historicisms in a reproductive and experiential knowledge. The girl's unredemptive appearance strikes out the fairy vision of fleeing damsels. Roe places great emphasis on the girl's specular intervention in Wordsworth's political development. It was she who transformed Wordsworth's intellectual politics by èngag[ing] his emotions', offering a crystallizing personal response, whereas Beaupuy merely pointed her out `to objectify his political aims', which are those of the crusader (Radical Years 58±9, 62). Although she deflects vision and thought, pulling herself inward and objectifying herself through a self-subjection to the cow's movement (absenting herself from the picture), in doing so she creates a binary opposition to the ideal lady, and so critiques that lady's unreality. Out of this un-ideal version of the ego-ideal, Wordsworth creates what Roe calls a `perplexed spot of time', one as powerful as the discharged soldier and the Alps crossing in its evocation of the imagination's mediating capacity (61). Through her body-ness, unlike that of the soldier's, Wordsworth also creates a figuration of human distress that he repeatedly calls on to extend the merely sentimental female sufferer of protest poetry into a visionary emblem of suffering. This in itself is a chivalric response to the reality principle, but the singling out of the female sufferer has a disturbing resemblance to the troubadourian beloved, especially if, for Wordsworth, they are conflated in the figuring of revolutionary passions as Annette Vallon. For Annette (and their child) could have been reduced to the girl's status, depending on the chance forces of history: she and her family were not of Beaupuy's party, and even as a monarchist Annette could not claim company with Erminia and Angelica.55 It is striking that, unlike the heroines of the lyrical ballads or the Lucy poems, this girl does not inspire the poet but rather strikes him dumb.




There is nothing enriching about her; she is no damsel in distress; nothing particular set off from the general. Instead, as a representative of the general, she foregrounds the impossibility of romance in a time of political turmoil and embarrasses the spirit of gallantry, which operates at the level of the unique, that of insulted queens and single knightserrant. Marie Antoinette is a Guinevere in need of her Lancelot to save her, but this girl can hope for no such heroics. What the girl does provide Wordsworth is more than a perplexing spot of time; she represents a revolution in love. Her contiguity for the poet with romance heroines reveals her role in the redistribution of love that the Prelude essentializes as being between transcendent Nature and human nature; Book IX clearly extends this redistribution in nature to that between Lady and abject girl. If the Lady is a symbol of the transcendent, the girl is a metonymy that provokes a loving response which annuls the idealization of romance heroine and queen. It is a provoking love, however, demanding thoughtful compassion and rejecting erotic and spiritual passion. This is Wordsworth's chivalric response, impelled by Beaupuy's idealism but informed by a troubadourian rebellion against such martial and self-romancing responses: `T'is against that/That we are fighting.' As Bromwich argues, Wordsworth will revolve this image of the girl away from Beaupuy's republican response to a compassion for the mendicant and his proper place in the social scheme (Disowned by Memory 15). But the image of her is more than an agent for his new social theory; as an abject victim, she also perplexes the issue of sensibility in a time of revolutionary sympathies because she stymies such affect, and yet through her ruined romance she provides a continuity with the convent ruins. Like Lucy, she is both romance and anti-romance, past and present. She is the key to the transition from radicalism to what Gill has distilled as `love', and Chandler as `second nature', which as I argued above is the aspect of Wordsworth's poetry that is most troubadourian, with its sublimation of politics into love. Troubadourian love stipulates an ideal lady as focus for a love figured as erotic and platonic at once. Wordsworth's love is more generalized, its object the `local attachment'. His `love for man' can be read as translating an offensive against political wrong into love for the wronged, expressly figured as vulnerable women (unloved ladies). But closest of all is his revision of the courtly love relation in his female circle, a domestic arrangement that contains the real closeness that the troubadour can only long for and depict to himself (as does Coleridge). Coleridge is instinctively envious of Wordsworth's trumping of the troubadourian ideal, recognizing that it is the




knightly Wordsworth who has, ironically, successfully developed a modernized troubadourian model, infusing elements of the political, social and sexual into a sustained critique of contemporary hegemony. However, the lived critique, for Wordsworth, depends on a sincerity of purpose, the poet as knight-errant. The epic of self must return from Beaupuy's version of romance as from a digression in the woods of error. As in The White Doe of Rylstone, the masculine matter of war is displaced by the feminine matter of romance, only to be disrupted by the real: in White Doe the real is signified by the antiquarian notes and Abbey ruins, in the Prelude by the hungry girl. It is the real that the epic poet must reconcile to history, which is manifestly unreal, romanced, reconstructed through memory and ideal projection. Although the Happy Warrior is supposed to use his chivalric code in order to engage the real (Ìt is the generous Spirit, who, when brought/Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought', 3±4), that poem elides the reality of the hungry girl by dressing its warrior like à Lover. . . attired/With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired', 51±2). Arthurianism offers a significant model for historical thinking so long as it throws the poet, as it does Spenser, back into the present time; barring this, it can only remind the poet of what it fails to confront, which is a reminder that the poet is only in a position to act if that position is a troubadourian one. For the true, the meditatively productive poet must understand the relation of code (whether chivalric or courtly) to matter (the universal through the particular, and not the generalizing to produce the unique) in order to make meaning. The hungry girl and the ruined convent are the real, the historical facts with which the troubadour challenges the WarriorLover's complacent romance. But what is important about Wordsworth's poetry is that the chivalry allows him to make it a contemporary use of the past (a recuperation of history, rather than a modernization of chivalry to exterminate a corrupt past), transforming his art from protest poetry to the suffusion of local suffering with a humanitarian imagination. It is this structuring of sincerity and passion through a medievalized present that is clearly realized in Wordsworth's mid-career plan for his poems, announced in The Excursion's Preface as a `gothic Church', with its Ànti-chapel', `little Cells, Oratories, and sepulchral Recesses'. The White Doe of Rylstone (c.1807±8) is Wordsworth's most explicit response to medievalism. In the poem's prefatory stanzas, which echo those of The Faerie Queene, Wordsworth speaks not as a poet alone (as does Spenser) but as husband in the company of his wife. The female element is thus domesticated as William and Mary contemplate in the comfort of





In trellised shed with clustering roses gay,

And, Mary! Oft beside our blazing fire,

When years of wedded life were as a day

Whose current answers to the heart's desire,

Did we together read in Spenser's Lay

How Una, sad of soul ± in sad attire,

The gentle Una, of celestial birth,

To seek her Knight went wandering o'er the earth.

(Hutchinson 1±8) Yet Spenser's poem opens very differently, with Una riding alongside Redcrosse as he accompanies her to free her parents from imprisonment. This revisionism continues in the plot of White Doe, where Wordsworth has displaced the tale of Charles Neville and his part in the failed marriage plot to Mary Queen of Scots with the story of a female hart (with its Petrarchan heart association), and Emily, the woman who has been emotionally harmed by such a plot. Daughter rather than beloved, Emily and her sorrow represent a domestic femininity that makes sense of the deer's strangely symbolic behaviour while leaving the men's behaviour estranging and nonsensical. The story is told in three ballads in Percy's collection,56 and Wordsworth's reference to the most popular, `The Rising of the North', in line 786 and in his notes to the poem show his use of this source as well as others.57 Just as the plot rewrites the ballad versions, so do Wordsworth's extensive notes to the poem revise Percy's editorial appendages to his texts. Wordsworth's scholarly notes take the antiquarian tack, but focus on every interesting and digressive fact except the Neville story, from the legend of the doe to a description of the picturesque ruins of Bolton and the Abbey to the history of `Lord Clifford, the Shepherd' (Hutchinson, Poetical Works 718±21). They act as a defence against romance, a reality testing that undoes the allegorical nature of the doe. For Wordsworth, the Renaissance history of the failed marriage plot (the men plotting to marry one queen off to foil another), carries a medievalizing appeal in its reversal of Spenser's marriage plot (Prince Arthur's marriage to Gloriana). But more importantly, Una has effaced Britomart as a possible model for the heroine, Emily. Furthermore, the



their hearth the traumatized vision of Una wandering the earth in search of her knight. The lady belongs to romance, but she recalls the hunger-bitten girl with her cow because here too is a landscape in which not only the female suffers, but the chivalric has disappeared:

foregrounding of the White Doe legend fleshes out the missing feminine in the male confrontation between hart and weapon in `Hart-leap Well'. The undeniably medieval tale of that poem is confounded by the feminine ground of this one, while the Renaissance history of White Doe is anachronized by the resonances in it to `Hart-leap Well'. This confusion of what is medieval can be laid to some extent at Spenser's door, since his use of the Arthurian matter to allegorize the Renaissance present produces a compound of medieval/Renaissance, past/present that to his Romantic readers seems entirely plausible as a depiction of `pastness', and the specific allusions both in White Doe's prefatory stanzas and in the Elizabeth-marriage plot to Spenser's poem also serve to create a medievalizing mood.58 But Wordsworth's creation of a feminine ground in White Doe, as against the ironized male ground of `Hart-leap Well', undoes Spenser's matriarchal new worldview, for it is as pacified as the female-negating world of Lucy. Unavoidably we are left dissatisfied, the text offering conflicting hints in its versions of domesticity (Mary's hearth vision; Emily's daughterly sorrow) as an alternative interpretation of female ground, and in its possibilities for productive male activity (political plots, knights in arms, antiquarian commentary).59 But in attempting to duplicate Scott's success in Lay of the Last Minstrel with this historical romance, Wordsworth has discovered that the absolute sincerity of a Scott-like knightliness is incompatible with his own poetic path. Another poem on Bolton Priory, `The Force of Prayer' (c.1807; published 1815), calls attention to its medievalism by repeating the words of the Falconer to the Lady, `What is good for a bootless bene?' in Gothic script. This odd textualism both forces a connection with Gothic narratives ('With these dark words begins my Tale'), and forces a rupture through the poet's exception of himself from the poem's medievalism, as well as from the Gothic genre when the poem's meaning comes clear: the landscape itself is the source of supernatural agency to which man responds through the only mystery he can claim comfort in, faith. This poem brings us back to the equally idiosyncratic `The Armenian Lady's Love', in which Wordsworth tells a tale of the perils of crusade. Here the speaker enters fully into the medievalizing atmosphere, but with a focus on the female affections, both of the rescuing Armenian Princess and the knight's loyal wife, the Venetian Countess who welcomes back both husband and foreign lady, Wordsworth recreates for the knightly aristocrat a domestic happiness and female circle that clearly resembles his own. The past becomes a troublingly sweet allegory for the present tense and a knightly selfcomplacency.




At the same time, the fact that the rescuer is neither Western nor male is important, and opposes the poem against more normative crusader plots. For instance, Richard the Lion-Heart's famous rescue by his troubadour offers a medieval narrative of mythic status whose emblematic maleness and knight/poet centre capture what Digby resuscitates in his concept of chivalry and honour. In his interest in the female orientation of this plot, however, Wordsworth comes far closer to both Byron's Corsair and Bride of Abydos, and to Keats's Eve of St. Agnes (particularly in the flight of the crusader and princess: `Less impassioned words might tell/How the pair escaped together/ . . . And from her narrow world, she passed for evermore': Hutchinson, Poetical Works 74±5, 78). Here he undercuts the emphatic maleness of Digby's Victorian medievalism by inserting a troubadourian edge, floating the gendering heroics of medievalism between male and female subjects through the valorizing power of true love. Although Keats's `La Belle Dame sans Merci' is a more vigorous attack on gendered heroism, there Keats is concerned with the conceptual difficulties of an absolute gendering within the (normatively) male subject. Wordsworth raises the issue more concretely, both because his poem is taken from Digby's own Òrlandus' (Wordsworth thus authorizes it through a historicizing lineage), and because he portrays the princess as comprehensible in Western terms rather than other (and therefore dangerous, as both Byron's heroines and Keats's Belle Dame are). Although Wordsworth strains ever closer to a complete knightly stance untainted by troubadourian radicalism in his late work, he can never give its flexibility up. Its potential is perhaps most unguardedly explored in the early `Nutting', a lyric that constitutes a safe haven for confronting the feminine and the sensible, and is in some ways Wordsworth's most troubadourian poem aside from the Lucy poems. `Nutting' reads personal history as medievalism, boyhood as knight's quest, and then rereads it as the transformation of such a quest into the Romantic child's encounter with nature, and the inversion of the wood of error into Romantic nature and the wronged-against woods.60 The poem exposes the inherent violence of knightly quest and preaches against it. It poses an extreme opposition to the much later `The Armenian Lady's Love', in which the lady's help in escaping captivity evades the heavy question of the knight's marital state by repeatedly asserting the purity of the lady's motives and body. This raises the kind of ambivalence that resists the claim of the poem's prefatory note that the poem is ìllustrative of the piety and chivalry of the olden times', and leads us directly to Byronic troubadourian play in a way Byron himself would not have liked.





If in the hands of Scott and Wordsworth the sincere knight (however undercut by the possibilities and seductions of troubadour posturing) provides the front for powerful poetry making, Byron takes a different stand. His relation to the vocation of poethood is made problematic both by the tarnishing of symbolic capital in the marketplace of real capital, and his distrust of his own ancestral knighthood and its efficacy in an unchivalric world. `Symbolic capital' is Pierre Bourdieu's term for the non-literal value given to intellectual and artistic property that attains a caste-like status in post-medieval societies.61 For aristocrats such as Byron, the Renaissance disgust at the bourgeois profession of money-making is still in place, and making money by selling art is an illegitimate and unchivalric practice. Furthermore, Byron is eager to embody and enact aristocratic privilege as emblematic of honour, when honour is understood as a caste rather than individual quality, yet like most late eighteenth-century lords, he wants to separate that privilege from knightly codes of responsibility and rescue. In his scorn for the middle classes' appropriation of knightly social responsibility, Byron highlights the transformation that is slowly working through the social register, making questions of care and provision ± for the medieval, a knightly and aristocratic concern ± a liberal middle class obsession. At the same time, Byron is ambivalent about his feudal ancestry, unsure of his birthright and always in some sense in opposition to it.62 For these reasons, neither the knight as poet nor the (middle-class or lower) troubadour offer appropriate positions from which to speak. Spenser, Shakespeare, Chaucer: none is high-born, none offers appropriate models. But in Sidney, Byron finds a like-minded poet and forefather. Sidney was the exemplary Renaissance courtier; his display of accomplishment and his libertine-like disdain provides Byron with both a pastness and a multivalency that effectively invites self-othering, a distancing of the self that vaccinates him against disgustingly middle-class spaces and relationships, values and labours.63 Sidney was the perfect courtier, establishing in his person and writing the sprezzatura, or easy grace of manner in all matters, that Castiglione so praised. Sidney's early death, due to his decision to volunteer as a knight errant in the battles between the Low Countries and Spain, eerily foreshadows Byron's own extravagant chivalry in the Greek War for Independence, and his own early death. And Sidney, in his writing and public persona, displays the courtier as provocateur; his accomplishments in writing, politics, and war provide the legendary qualities of his life story. It is the provocateur



Lancelot Byron

that Byron finds most congenial to the image he decides to adopt and promote. In this he is also inspired by Rochester, whose sexually deviant libertinism shows the hypocrisy of knightly codes, while showing how such overturnings produce brilliant art. The Byronic hero, as Byron creates and develops him in Childe Harold, becomes the vehicle for a provocative and libertine seduction of the audience that operates on a spectacular level.64 Byron himself noted the discrepancy between Lancelot's chivalry and his adultery, and felt his knight-hero to be just as `gallant' as Lancelot or Tristrem, in both senses of the term.65 Childe Harold is the medievally inspired autobiographical epic of a childe or knight engaged in a romance quest for self-knowledge and historicity, which is how the Romantics come to understand what `fame' is. Byron's ability to distance the childe hero's affects and historical embodiedness via Oriental culture and landscape comes from the courtier's and the libertine's code of uncare. Psychologically, the distance pulls the audience ± particularly a female audience ± towards the hero, demanding the reader's care in order to ameliorate the hero's uncare. Byron demands that the reader gaze at him, in her intensifying desire to make him look at her. The Byronic hero always looks away, most particularly in relation to female characters, and those, such as female readers, who spend time gazing at him. The best example is Gulnare gazing at Conrad, and the best exception is HaideÂe ± the troubadourian beloved ± gazing at Don Juan. In looking away the Byronic hero, replaying the uncare of the Renaissance courtier, embodies the relation of the West's gazing at the East, and the East always being absorbed (in this scenario) in its own otherness, its own distancing. Juan, of course, raises the alternative positionality for the Byronic hero; rather than an adulterous and mysterious Lancelot, Juan is the libertine (Don Juan of legend) turned naif, directionless not because of some past sin but by his own unself-consciousness. Juan is the troubadourian lover undone throughout most of the epic except for the quite serious `true love' with HaideÂe. His uncaring is consistently undercut by intense female care for him (consecrated by HaideÂe's maternal care: Ànd she bent o'er him, and he lay beneath,/Hush'd as the babe upon its mother's breast': II.cxlviii), an attention that destroys his troubadourian power by reflecting back to him the fragmenting valence of the object's desire. If Don Juan is Byron's most troubadourian work, it is so only as inversion, a mocking of troubadourian poetic claims and a revelation of their inherent insincerity. Byron's prefatory stanzas, which so violently attack the Lake School as political turncoats, can be read as aggression against the ideal ego: these poets, posing with knightly sincerity and




troubadourian love as `levelling', have abused the radical and critical potential of the troubadour to support the status quo. Don Juan is traditionally read autobiographically as a self-mocking narrative of Byron's love life, but it also reads as a critique of the unavailing ideology of troubadourism and an unveiling of the hypocritical uses of courtly love. However, it is the Byronic hero by which Byron was known, and Childe Harold provides the index by which his hero is transformed from the medieval knight to the Restoration libertine to the Romantic poet. Byron's sense of the ontological genealogy of the Byronic poethero identifies that hero as his response to medievalism as a translative medium for current affairs. In Childe Harold IV the pilgrim-knight is finally collapsed into the poet's own voice, and it is significant that this voice is directed towards a meditation on time and history, and on poets whose medievalist associations, especially those of Petrarch and Tasso, depend on courtly love in its most distressing expressions. Because of the Byronic hero's relation to the knight-lover, Byron's most medieval poems, at least in spirit, are not his self-epic, but his Turkish Tales. For Byron, Orientalism (through its medieval association with the crusades) provides a fantastically historicized realm that can draw in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso to Byron's self-production. Byron was, of course, responding not just to Ariosto, but to Collins's Orientalism in the Persian Eclogues (1742) which he published while still at Oxford. Byron's undergraduate publication represents a revision of Collins's luxury, a sensibility filtered through an Oriental screen that allows for a retemporalized medievalism, one that seems also present, co-eval with travellers' tales of the East and its cultural differences.66 The Tales contrast interestingly with a `sincere' trial of medieval pastness that is regularly given canonical status, Manfred. All of the Turkish Tales are framed as romances, centring on chivalric quests. The Tales spell out the legacy of Amadis of Gaul (an abridged version of which Southey published in 1803); they also inscribe the translation of Persian courtly love literature into mirror texts for crusade literature, retranslated by Byron into tales of self-reflexivity. The Byronic hero is in some way always the intrusive crusader, a retributive Knight Templar whose presence in the landscape is a violent and almost supernatural one. In The Giaour Byron begins the turn from sincerity to irony in the multiple narrators of the poem. The medieval knight, turned hermit at the end in a rewriting of Lancelot, reviews his life and his deeds in saving (in this case avenging) his mistress, wife of the king. But the terms are all reversed: Lancelot was a French knight in England, the




Giaour is European in the Middle East; Arthur is Christ-like, the sultan is a tyrant; Camelot's law is good, Eastern law is barbarous. The perspectival shift on the Giaour's errant knight figure signals the multiple ways in which chivalry can be read. It is in this sense that Conrad, pirate chief, can be the hero of The Corsair (1814). As hero, he invades the Pacha's camp in order to forestall and disable the Pacha's intended invasion of Conrad's pirate island. Conrad leaves his beloved, Medora, on the island, and in saying goodbye to her signals the end of the domestic; the rest of the poem will be ruled by an anti-domestic paradigm in which husbands enslave wives (Gulnare is the Pacha's chief wife); wives kill husbands (Gulnare achieves the execution of the tyrant that Conrad does not); women who love cannot be beloved (Conrad turns away from Gulnare); the home is displaced by hostile and imprisoning spaces (mostly those of the Pacha's camp and harem). In creating an anti-domestic narrative, Byron is only rehashing the romance: in leaving home, Conrad begins his quest, encounters woods of error and magicians of dark power (the Turkish Pacha, exemplifying oriental luxury, grandeur and grand resources provides the contemporary version of this), encounters temptresses, and must behave chivalrically both in knightly combat and in rescuing distressed women. Byron's distinctive contribution to Romantic medievalism is, of course, the orientalizing of romance as well as his self-heroizing posture. But for women writers, there is another contribution that is not as obvious. When Conrad is transformed as Lara in the romance of that name, he is attended by Kaled, finally revealed as Gulnare in disguise.67 Conrad the pirate, in returning to his ancestral home, becomes Lara the aristocrat and knight. He becomes involved in a feud and dies in Kaled's arms. It is the rejected Gulnare, and not the beloved Medora, who survives Lara on the battlefield. Moreover, the rejected woman is disguised as a knight, one of the magical transformations that Sir Michael Scott's magic book permits in Lay of the Last Minstrel. Famously, Lord Byron was known to be visited by young men believed to be young women disguised as pages (and now believed to be young men in fact). Byron's play with sexual identity is at work both in the Byronic hero, especially the seemingly effeminate rebellious son of The Bride of Abydos, and in the woman disguised as page or knight. Gulnare as Kaled is the beginning of the female knight figure who becomes increasingly important to women writers, appearing in works by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and others. This figure is no Amazon; instead, and specifically because of Byron's rejected and heroic Gulnare, she is a




sacrificial figure, a true chivalrous knight. Neither is she Britomart: her literary heritage extends back to Tasso's Clorinda, from his crusader epic Jerusalem Delivered, and Ariosto's Bradamante, from his Orlando Furioso, both poems from the Charlemagne cycle. The impassioned female knight comes to signify precisely what Byron is rejecting of the chivalric code, and to take it onto herself. This knight figure allows women writers to undo the damage of the women warriors of classical tradition, the Amazons who more recently appeared to such negative historical regard in the Vendome, as well as the feminist French revolutionaries, whose heroism did such damage to women's reputation as loyal mates.68 It is interesting, then, that one of Byron's contributions to Romantic medievalism appears to contradict libertine impulses (that is, rape, perverse practice, and outrageous disregard for chivalric protection of women) by making the woman the truly chivalric knight. Like Byron himself, his Byronic heroes may live by a code of honour, but manage to make women miserable, deserted or dead. The woman knight provides a salient solution to the problem of contemporary manhood: how to remain valorous when so many challenges to manhood hamper the self-absorbed hero. The unabsorbed heroine becomes a floating anodyne, an anti-historical agency that can restore the validity of heroic action. By contrast, in a canonical work such as Manfred, the most important observation one can make about gendered heroism is that the women in Byron's masterpiece are dead. Dead women, women as victims, are important devices in medieval romance, especially the Arthurian quest tales. Byron was not unacquainted with the Arthurian dimension of Romantic medievalism: his relationship with his half-sister Augusta replicates Arthur's amorous relations with Morgan le Fay. And while Arthur's incestuous union provides the realm-splitting agency of Mordred, Byron's incestuous relations divide his own realm into the motherland and exile. But Byron's notion of ideal love remains at the level of the brother/sister love: it is at this moment of union that history stops (Arthur and Morgan le Fay, a fairy tale romance, becomes Byron and Augusta, with Augusta as the beloved, the courted one, Lancelot's Guinevere). His poem, The Lament of Tasso (1817), is typical, telling of Tasso's tragic courtly love for Leonora d'Este. By contrast, marital relations produce hatred, his own wife Annabella becoming the dreaded Morgan le Fay of revengeful acts, just as Morgan learns to hate Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot. It is in this love/hate relation that HaideÂe in Don Juan reincarnates the sister-lover, the loving incestuousness (in which the idealized object's




return of love and desire is not threatening because it is, essentially, selfsame) displaced on to an island that is outside time and space, a fantasy of troubadourian dimensions where the object's desire regards the self in safety. Here history ends, time is abated and lyricized in a troubadourian dynamic, until the pirate chief ± an obdurate and fully rejecting Conrad turned paternal ± returns. There is a dialectical relation for Byron between his ideal love as an impossible impasse with history (the lyric moment of troubadourian poetry), and the quest for his ego-ideal in/ through history. That ego-ideal ± the ideal love that stops time ± is available only in romance, and only against the sprezzatura borrowed from Sidney and Rochester. Thus Byron as the libertine and bisexual lover, in coming closer to idealizing love than any of the other Romantics, comes closer to Freud and Lacan's understanding of the paranoiac's ego-ideal. The ego-ideal, particularly formulated as part of the paranoid universe, becomes the quest object in the poem of greatest sincerity, Manfred.69 This poem, Byron's attempt to assimilate the Faust myth to the Byronic hero, conflates time (medieval/Renaissance, biographical life/immortal life, history/myth) and romance (epic action as stage action, heroic quest as closet drama). The result is an exploration of ideal love as unassimilated sexuality (the closet as the closet). In Manfred, no heroines are possible.70 This is Lacan's `dramatic subjacency' in full. The drama takes place in the narcissistic dreamstate, which Manfred explores as a realm of incalculable power and selfvaluing, his conquests carried on as a `passionate quest', as Lacan describes Freud's own explorations. But Freud's Gothic dream of Irma's injection, with its large hall, numerous guests, and a quest for power over others, contains a significantly resistant other: the `recalcitrant' Irma. Her complaint, that Freud has not cured her, comes from the fact that she is dramatically changed: pale, puffy, infected, perhaps cancerous, vampiric. Perhaps already dead, she is so due to his failure to act on her behalf. For Manfred, too, the dead woman, whose mysterious death was due to his own failure, represents a resistant other, one who cannot be reclaimed despite the hero's will to power. Her decease, which defines his own extended quest and deferral of death, is subjacent to it, and like Freud's Irma, provides the ground for his sense of lack and guilt. I am using Freud's dream here only for the terms of Lacan's reading of it: When the dream reaches its first peak . . . [t]he relations of the subject change completely. He becomes something totally different, there's no Freud any longer, there is no longer anyone who can say I . . . [we're




dealing with] a spectral decomposition of the function of the ego. We can see the series of egos appear. Because the ego is made up of the series of identifications which represented an essential landmark for the subject, at each historical moment in his life, in a manner dependent on circumstances. (Seminar 164±5) Manfred's medievalism, narcissism, ego-ideal, Byronism, libertinism and troubadourism likewise rehash `the series of identifications which represented an essential landmark for the subject', and which historicize the subject or poet. The subjacent object of desire, the woman who is dead to him, grounds all of these identifications as `the spectral decomposition of the function of the ego'. In Lacan's discussion, it is Irma's dream that propels his theory of the ideal ego, the transformation of ego-ideal into a homosocial target of aggression.71 Certainly Manfred has construed all other men as ideal egos to be aggressed against, but what is significant is how they do not respond in kind, instead returning a caring regard that idealizes him and his achievements. Medievalized, he has become a historicized self whose fragmented subjectivity, created through the dead beloved, both destroys him and causes his veneration. Again, this is a troubadourian move, although not in the sense of what Byron considers to be the Lakers' false troubadourism, but in its use of the past and of loss to redistribute the prospective present. Manfred operates for Byron as `Christabel' does for Coleridge, providing a textual ego projection through which his oeuvre can be comprehensively analysed. Parisina, Mazeppa, The Prophecy of Dante, Morgante Maggiore, Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari reveal a profoundly historicized imagination. This is more than can be accommodated by a reference to Byron's Newstead Abbey, or his monk-costumed drinking parties held there as a young man. Byron claims in his prefatory note to Werner; Or, The Inheritance (1822) that he was influenced early on by Harriet and Sophia Lee's edition of The Canterbury Tales (5 volumes, 1797±1805), which is not Chaucer but twelve stories told in the Boccacio manner by travellers. Inspired by one of the tales, `Kruitzner' by Harriet Lee (Byron mistakenly attributes it to Sophia), when he read it at fourteen, he notes that it `made a deep impression upon me; and may, indeed, be said to contain the germ of much that I have since written' (Jump, Byron 560). But both sisters have a Gothic imagination rather than a medievalizing one (Sophia's novel, The Recess, posits twin daughters of Mary Queen of Scots from a secret marriage, for instance), and when Byron works out




the nature of their influence on him in Werner, it results in a Gothic drama that seems almost regressively melodramatic. Despite his claim, his other works are not Gothic but far more seriously medievalizing. More than Coleridge and Wordsworth, closer to Scott on the one hand, and Shelley on the other, Byron finds the past a habitable world, and one whose violence, impossible loves, and usurped power Manfred vividly captures. Mazeppa is instructive: an old warrior recounts the traumatic drama of his youthful troubadourian love for a married lady above his station. As a page in his king's castle, he is discovered in the treason of his love: `We met ± we gazed ± I saw, and sigh'd', `We met in secret, and the hour/Which led me to that lady's bower/Was fiery Expectation's dower' (232, 298±300). They are discovered by court intriguers, the necessary third party to the troubadour's illicit love, and punished; he terribly and violently, and just narrowly escaping death. This close adherence to the courtly love scenario, with its vengeful knight-lord, beloved in the bower, intrusive spies and punishment, reveals how closely Byron identifies with this aspect of Renaissance medievalism. Whereas Scott's imagination is caught by the details of knightly culture, and Coleridge's by the emotional impasse and dialectical potential of the courtly love moment, Byron's imagination is firmly lodged in guilty love and revenge. Mazeppa hints that he later returns to avenge himself, punishing his tormentors. Punishment is the important emphasis of the Renaissance's version of medievalism, and it encodes both Byron's and Shelley's Romantic medievalism. But if Shelley is concerned with the issues of justice that punishment brings out, Byron focuses on an individual's ability to avenge himself regardless of his guilty deeds. His medievalism becomes a way to translate contemporary restlessness ± from Napoleonic aggressions to labour uprisings in Britain ± into a past where muscular effort redeems chaotic emotion. In some of Byron's works, however, the question of revenged honour attains a different register. In Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice (1821) romance becomes `historical tragedy', with a careful adherence to historical fact (`surely truth belongs to the dead', he notes in his Preface).72 This drama, written in direct response to Shelley's The Cenci, was initially to centre on Falieri's jealousy, but `perceiving no foundation for this in historical truth, and aware that jealousy is an exhausted passion in the drama, I have given it a more historical form'. That is, honour: the `gross affront' of what Steno wrote on Faliero's ducal chair, and what Faliero deemed to be an inadequate sentence by the Forty for the affront.73 What is interesting about Byron's dramatic decisions is that it would have been easy to follow the historian's lead in assigning Faliero's




real motive as the jealous belief that Steno was seducing his wife. This would have provided Byron with a courtly love relation seen from the lord-knight's perspective, but he is not interested in a troubadourian plot. Neither does he want to recapitulate the troubadourian affinities of his romances; instead, he focuses on the question of knightly honour, asserting that this is the only way in which Faliero's wife was involved: `The attentions of Steno himself appear to have been directed towards one of her damsels, and not to the ``Dogaressa'' herself, against whose fame not the slightest insinuation appears', while the Doge `was actuated [not] by jealousy of his wife; but rather by respect for her, and for his own honour, warranted by his past services and present dignity' ( Jump, Byron 407).74 However, the drama is not about the revenge, but its consequences; punishment has been shifted from the wronged hero to the state's refusal to sanction the dictates of honour.75 As with Shelley's The Cenci, Byron is concerned with the failure of knighthood and its values. And as in Manfred, he focuses on the unwarranted overreach of a noble character: `The black veil which is painted over the place of Marino Faliero amongst the Doges, and the Giants' Staircase where he was crowned, and discrowned, and decapitated, struck forcibly upon my imagination; as did his fiery character, and strange story' ( Jump, Byron 408). The violence of the past, in which one man overreaches his power for personal revenge, says much about the violence of the present, in which one man ± Louis ± is symbolically `discrowned and decapitated' not as a consequence of overreaching but in order to rid the nation of its past. The past must be preserved, honoured as a revelatory medium and not used injudiciously (as Moore does in his View of Italy) to be mined for fantastic fictions; even Byron's deviations from historical fact for dramatic effect have been supplemented by a corrective appendix. This is not antiquarianism on the order of Scott, or the alternative notes that exchange present history for the past which Wordsworth appends to The White Doe of Rylstone, but a preservation of history that corrects a wronging of fact which is a dishonouring of the dead. Perhaps because punishment and judicious fact displace troubadourian relativism, Byron's use of the troubadour model in his medieval plots does not implicate him in the same predicaments of the paranoiac that Coleridge's troubadourism does. This is ironic, since Freud predicates paranoia on homosexuality, and Byron would seem to be the perfect match for the paranoid trap that Coleridge can never seem to escape. But Byronic punishment as the avenging of tyrannical wrong both rights French Revolutionary excesses (making it possible for the




Revolution never to fully secede from Byron's optimistic political horizon, in contrast to Coleridge and Wordsworth), and rights the disease of the troubadour's projected ideal ego. Byron does not see the knight as the paranoiac's potential persecutor, any more than he sees himself as troubadour. He does see himself as self-punishing and self-fragmented, a deployment of his multiplied ego projections, a historicization of his various selves. This is a writing of the self not as history (not in the sense of Landon's self-projection), but as histories, as possible narratives whose function is to correct the past. Byron's approach is not masochism, which requires self-mutilation, just as it is not paranoia, a repudiation of homosexual tendencies; it is a libertinism gone straight, an honourable and self-sacrificial Sidney. Byron's attitude towards troubadourian poethood is highly conflicted; while he admires it in himself for what it allows him to do, he also clearly condemns it in others. In particular, Byron deplores Wordsworth's unconfessed and even repressed troubadour strategies, and laughs at even the possibility of a contemporary troubadourism in Don Juan, yet ignoring his own sincere participation in a similar selfpositioning. At the same time, he admires the knightliness of Scott's overt chivalry and sincerity as an authorial strategy, but sees that his own nature is too libertine, or at least Sidney-like, in constitution. He is not an Arthur but a Lancelot, yet he also sees his own historical selfpositionings as sincerely identified, as real self-productions that are not undermined by the essential hypocrisy he reads into the poetic positions of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. In a sense the Lake Poets bring this assessment on themselves through a troubadourism that makes too much use of the radical flexibility of the troubadour posture, with its capacity for changeable principles from which to critique. But what Byron identifies as hypocrisy in the troubadour posture, seeing its true love as simply self-love, Keats will locate in the knight, seeing the knight's sincerity in the protection of others as simply self-protection. What is interesting about this sort of poetic politics is how much sincerity of purpose ± Wordsworth's calling card ± is at stake, and how important the conception of the medieval is to any analysis of its successful deployment, and equally to any recognition of self-deception.




4

Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and ProvencËal song, and sunburnt mirth! Òde to a Nightingale' The three versions of Romantic medievalism analysed in the previous chapter ± Scott's manly knighthood, the chastity of Wordsworth's Spenserian knighthood, and Byron's lordly play with masculine tropes ± emphasize the Arthurian aspect of Romantic medievalism: that is, the ethos of the virile knight.1 It is this strain, predicated on antiquarian recuperation and validation of what we might call a chivalric epistemology, that becomes the mainstay of the Victorian medieval revival, most particularly in the aspects of knighthood modernized and promoted by Kenelm Digby. But what Keats comprehends, not just from Byron's artful dalliance as it problematizes virility, but also from Spenser's semantic fecundity (rather than his passionately moral quest) and Chatterton's experimentation with authenticity, is that the more aggressive and powerful strain of Romantic medievalism is the troubadourian or effeminizing one: the `ProvencËal song' of the epigraph. The sly sneakiness of Porphyro in Eve of St. Agnes aptly characterizes the troubadour seducing his beloved with love songs that suggest female power and male helplessness (Porphyro sings àn ancient ditty, long since mute/In Provence called, ``La belle dame sans mercy'' ': 291±2) while her lord or father is unaware and off-guard. Such an interpretation of medievalism ± as something originating prior to Renaissance nostalgia, long since mute, and powerfully engendering precisely because it recruits a differently gendered and placed time ± necessarily begins with the productions of the eighteenth109



Keats and the Time of Romance

century Spenserian revival. Keats's indebtedness to Spenserianism first, and then to Spenser, is well-covered ground.2 But while critics usually note Keats's Spenserianism in formal terms or, like Greg Kucich, analyse his use of Spenser's internal dichotomies and self-contradictions to produce a definably Romantic gesture (specifically, the underwriting of Spenser's morality with his poetic sensuality), Keats's connection of Spenser with the present and therefore un-nostalgic medievalism of the troubadour, and with the problem of love song and affect in general ± as opposed to its distancing, as in the odes and epics, and its betrayal, as in Lamia ± remains to be worked out. Indeed, what Keats chooses to take from the great romancer differs greatly from Wordsworth's borrowings: significantly, Wordsworth is most concerned with the masculine aspect of allegorical virtue, beginning with the Redcrosse Knight, while Keats is more largely swayed by the feeling of being an Èlfin Knight' or, more aptly (to use the phrase Keats uses for Spenser himself) an Èlfin Poet'. Wordsworth wants to translate Spenser's allegorical method and its consequent morality into a modern tempo; Keats wants to escape the present, as least in the early poems such as `Calidore', by returning to a medievalized space: a space that is fantastically imaginable but that is limited by its own phantasm, one in which gender is the imaginative dress one puts on, and virility is a poetic rather than human feature. Where Wordsworth sees allegory as a propositional tool, a means for suggesting a future, Keats sees allegory as a recuperative strategy, a way of viewing the present through the lens of a pastness that is all-encompassing. The difference herein is decisive: pastness cannot be completed in such a vision because its grasp is a fragmenting one. Being present in art is the best that can be done. And that act of presentation is best accomplished through a species of allegory which, as Marjorie Levinson argues, runs throughout Keats's poetic and figurative activity.3 Moreover, it inflects his thinking, colours his poetic characters, and makes of ontology a romance. `Calidore' imagines what Spenser's knight Calidore experienced as a young squire by extending and dilating the fertile vision suggested by Spenser's lush description. But as a poem it cannot finish itself, dying out even before we learn what Sir Gondibert's fabulous deeds are. Lamia, Keats's return to this problem of fantastic space, ends by the phantasm's vanishing, and it becomes possible to read Lamia as in some way, despite her classical dress and precisely because of her lover's (her reader's) inefficacy in saving her, the fantastic vision made available in Romantic medievalism. The move from the Spenserianism of `Calidore' to the troubadourian ethos of the romances and odes spells out Keats's realization of nostal-




gia's dangers: The Faerie Queene, as a Renaissance dreamscape of what medievalism might have been like, is a work that uses history fantastically and nostalgically in order to resist poetic desire. If Spenserian medievalism distinguishes itself from classical and Renaissance history through its imaginative capacity, how much more telling might real medievalism be? The classical is mythic, associated with museum space and friable thought; for the Romantics, the Renaissance is always already a modern construct, a readily available allegory of the contemporary world. But the medieval begins with romance as a mode that invades the imaginative realm and ìnvites the warm air in'. It romances allegory, putting it in relation to narrative and history; the medieval is the magic casement. There are further dangers as well. Sensibility has undergone a distinct change since it was dallied with by the youthful Wordsworth and Coleridge; by the time Keats is writing, poetic sensibility of the 1790s had become a threateningly democratic and levelling principle: `The AntiJacobin argued repeatedly that the cult of sensibility had been exploited by Rousseau and Paine to enlist sympathetic and tender feeling as motives for a democratic revolution . . . because its franchise extended beyond the social and political distinctions of class or status, to hitherto marginal, vulnerable, and inarticulate sections of the community.'4 What I am arguing Keats adopted from Byronism, albeit sieved through Spenserianism, stems from this aspect of the Hunt-associated `Cockney' sensibility; Byron's playful positioning in his poems, the facility for satire always undergirded by an affective level of socially interpolated sensibility. Both these threats, that of nostalgia and that of affective radicalism, are directly linked to Romantic medievalism and courtly love. They force the issue of the self (a remembering, feeling subject) in relation to history (as a space of fantasy, loss and pastness). Keats uses history ± and specifically medievalism ± to de-historicize the self, to take it out of the realm of the àncients versus the moderns' battle that so engaged historical thought during the Enlightenment, and to work out a different ± and differentiated ± landscape for itself, one not fixated by nostalgia, but more internally motivated and self-conscious. His object is to intervene in the historical process of the self being weighted with the past's heaviness, but in a way which allows one to understand that sheer presentness, sheer presence, is meaningless without history's realizable context. The troubadour's problem is that his song has been muted, while medievalism is only a groundless cultural fantasy. A self that is aware of its own historical relations can never be isolated out of time,



Keats and the Time of Romance 111

silenced or made cold. Keats's project reframes the act of imaginative escape, changing it from the use of the past so clearly exemplified in Spenserianism (an appropriation that involves no real sense of historical difference), to an understanding of history as something to collapse the self's differences into: a history composed of local stoppages, lyric moments that, as in Eve of St. Agnes, consume the narrative and alter its ending. Such a collapse ensures the continuation of poetic voice precisely because the ending is alterable, thus rewriting troubadourian lyric by shattering its hard code. This is possible only when the Byronic realization of the poetic posturing that makes the troubadour so dangerous is made to confront the seemingly safe code of the love lyric. What Keats discovers is that such a confrontation makes poetic temporality durable rather than fragile, and fulfils the troubadourian project by making poetic drive rather than the lady the object of desire. The displacement of the lady from the field of desire, or at least from its centre, reveals Keats's problematic gendering of poethood.5 If Wordsworth's use of Spenser is virile and manly, Keats's escapism, which establishes itself early but does not develop its full theoretical distinctness until the final great poems, earns him in the reviews of his first volume the critical epithets that associate him with effeminacy and weakness.6 He begins to see that his affinity for Spenserianism needs to be remodelled in terms appropriate to poetic strength. He sees this strength not as Wordsworthian morality but as a troubadourian strategy gained from Byron's politicizing play, and sieved through his understanding of Chatterton's linguistic application of the same poetic strategy Byron exemplifies. What Keats gleans from both Byron and Chatterton is how to refine his poetics in terms of temporality, understanding the otherness of history as the Romantic project. Moreover, history as such is an affective relation: love and its betrayal is the matrix that yokes the individual to the repetitive cycle of human drama that is history. Yet man's emotive facility is finally double-edged, leading heroically to a passionate manliness (a chivalry that is self-consuming), but also to a critical effeminacy (a love of the other that de-centres and unmans the self ). The first leads to valour and death, the second to seduction and betrayal: these are the options that define the Byronic hero. For the poet, the power of the second option for creating and producing a critical consciousness threatens to overwhelm the received ideology of the first. Therefore, the affective solution, with its love that de-centres the self, cannot serve the drive to heroic or historical action. As Keats comes to realize through his early Spenserian poems, love's narrative must be staved off, the beloved's power evoked but then




parried, and the time of that narrative wrapped into a greater temporality that makes sense of a world without stable centres. This understanding led Keats to exploit the tensions of romance, most complexly in The Eve of St. Agnes, but finally to consider discarding it in favour of the Shakespearean tragedy as a form that most ably comes to terms with the effects of history on the generative self. Its terms of strength are a deliberate answer to the cynicism provoked by troubadourian dexterity. Although this chapter focuses specifically on Keats's medieval poems (avoiding the complicating factors of the Renaissance poems such as Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, which Keats quite clearly distinguished as a separate problem from poems such as Eve of St. Agnes and Eve of St. Mark), the following discussion will move towards the solution Keats proposed himself with the tragic form as applied to medieval history in Otho the Great, and King Stephen.

Dispensing with Spenserianism As W. Jackson Bate points out, it is important to study the entire Keats oeuvre in order to see what project Keats was undertaking with each major poem. Significantly, few of his poems are placed in contemporary settings. Instead, his problem-solving tasks target specific historical frames: classical for problems of form (as in Endymion, Òde to Psyche' and Òde on a Grecian Urn') or of allegory (Lamia); Renaissance for problems of cultural critique (Isabella); medieval for problems of emotional critique (St. Agnes, St. Mark, La Belle Dame, `Calidore'). This last category allows Keats the greatest range for exploring affective play, the aesthetic problem most specifically locatable in the troubadour tradition. But rather than sink into the pathos that this tradition enables by its set lyric code, as Charlotte Smith does in her Petrarchan sonnets in Elegiac Sonnets, for instance, Keats sets up a resistant affect, carefully distancing the emotional pull and then bringing it close, toying with its demands and its effects. This allows the lyric moment to overhaul historical momentum. Narrative, as we will see shortly, provides him with a strategic tool for accomplishing this play; the romance form is crucially balanced between lyric stoppage and narrative drive, between subjectivity and temporality, between being and telling. For this reason, romance ± much more than the troubadour love lyric ± provides the crucial mode for interrogating the fundamental problem of the self in history, and the medieval poems provide the place for romance. Romance must, for Keats, begin with Spenser, however. Although eventually Keats throws him off, Spenser provides us with an important




insight into how Keats viewed both fantasy and romance. Himself a Renaissance poet, Spenser's own anachronizing use of the medieval provides Keats with a divided or overlaid lens for seeing how history can be playfully reimagined through the cultural fantasy of what medievalism might be and might mean. `Spenser! a jealous honourer of thine' calls Spenser Èlfin Poet', a playful epithet that emphasizes neither the allegorical weight nor the moral tone that Wordsworth takes from The Faerie Queene, but rather its fantastic and escapist qualities. Keats is interested in play as a particular use of the imagination, a use that explores the same kind of careful slippage as troubadour poetry exemplifies. The Spenser sonnet is to John H. Reynolds, the forester a reference to Reynolds's `Robin Hood' sonnets. What is significant about the lyric is its direct application, unlike the fragmentary `Calidore', to the tactics of play. The poet's honour for and jealousy of Spenser commingle with Reynolds's attentions to him, Spenser's time and the present are confused and overwritten through the request to recover the older poetic language, and Spenser's Arthur metonymously associates with the folk-hero Robin Hood. Written the day after the troubadourian sonnet `To ±' (`Time's sea hath been five year at its slow ebb', a poem written to À lady whom he saw for some few moments at Vauxhall', who also appears in two other poems, including `When I have fears') and two days after the Elizabethan musing in `Lines on the Mermaid Tavern', this focus on the sonnet and rondeau, both earlier forms, allows Keats to interchange temporal schemes ± medieval, Renaissance, contemporary ± and to `visit' those temporalities provisionally in a way which the romances do not as easily allow. But, as Bate points out, this play (which Keats refers to as à ``Spirit of Outlawry'' against modern poetry' ± for the Petrarchan sonnet has become modern poetry through Spenserianism itself ) has more serious implications.7 `[W]ith the exception of the loose heroic couplet . . . no form was so closely associated with his previous poetry as the Petrarchan sonnet. And the associational drag of the Petrarchan form was even less pleasant than that of the couplet' (Bate, Keats 297). Keats turns from the Petrarchan to the Shakespearean sonnet, from a modernized pastness that simplifies such play into frippery to be ashamed of, to an intellectualized and realizable past: the Renaissance. The romance that Keats turns to at this point in his conceptual development is, almost by necessity, the Renaissance critique of such Spenserian sentimentalism: Isabella, or the Pot of Basil. With its attack on bourgeois commerce, fantastic affect and antiintellectualism, Isabella sets the very qualities of a representative past ± of what the Elizabethan age means to Keats ± against the unreal historicity,




emotions and poetry of the Spenserianists' present. Having `smoked' all this out, he is free to delve further into the past and into the critical possibilities of romance. To think about this move as a troubadourian one, it is helpful to view this development on a different level, and to take McGann's point that even after Keats leaves off his Spenserianism, he `sentimentalizes sentimentalism', thus recovering sensibility as the naive within the mazes of sentimental self-consciousness (Poetics 121). This form of lostness compounds the melancholic's loss either as ego loss as in his Òde on Melancholy', or as Coleridge's lost-in-thought-ness in the Dejection Ode, which Keats then abstracts even more into a thoughtful lostness. Keats thus allows the sensible mind to lose itself, but within the abstraction of thought rather than the particularity of the material. Keats's sensibility is thus a romancing of affect, making love to its ideality just as the troubadour poet (specifically Dante and Petrarch) makes love to the lady as an ideal rather than an embodied individual. In effect, Keats produces thought as a medieval romance. On this more abstract level, we can see how the Romantic poet could employ the category of troubadour poet to effect a salient critique of contemporary and highly politicized affective fashions. These fashions imply a class privilege that goes back to the medieval courtly code of refined love, its diminution in the medieval ladies' court, and its further aestheticization in the neo-Platonist philosophy favoured in courtly culture that followed. To emulate these fashions is to show one's own crass aspirations; to critique them is to pinpoint bourgeois aspiration in them. That Keats was tampering with the limitations of such fashions is clear from John Lockhart's vicious attacks on him and the low-class Hunt.8 What is interesting is how Lockhart viewed both Hunt's poetry and Keats's early Spenserian productions as the effete and highly suspicious ploys of a troubadourian-style politics, earlier associated with the effeminacy of the Della Cruscans. Hunt's sonnet `To John Keats' (1816) indicates both a sensuousness, and the use of a female object (`The human look, and harmonious form/Containing woman') over which to engage a competitor poet (`Young Keats, a flowering laurel on your brow'). Lockhart singles Hunt out in a representative fashion: `For him there is no charm in simple seduction; and he glories over it only when accompanied with adultery and incest' (quoted in Bate, Keats 225n.). The attack on poetic manhood ± a specifically troubadourian association, with its problem of pretence, lust coined as true love, betrayal coined as poetry ± becomes a serious issue for Keats, who focuses his next romances on the question of gender (Madeline in St. Agnes, the knight in the




romance ballad `La Belle Dame sans Merci', Lamia in her eponymous narrative). Although he is partly concerned to re-gender his audience, to stop writing for the ladies, he is also clearly interested in the idea of the poet's gendering as a self-fashioning that is ongoing, responsively chameleon in its quality, but also evasive.9 St. Agnes watches Madeline, `La Belle Dame' effeminates the knight, Lamia comprehends Lamia's femininity and her desire. The breakthrough with Lamia has already begun to play out with the distinctly masculine odes but its real target is the historical tragedies that Keats hopes will make him famous. Scholars have usually seen this shift as coming much earlier, as being attached to a genre other than romance, and they have continued to agree with Bate that the shift from Petrarchan to Shakespearean sonnets was transformative for Keats.10 The attempt to understand this shift as a girding up of the intellect, a manning of the self in the move from Spenserian effeminacy to Shakespearean manliness, does not account, however, for the earliness of the first Shakespearean sonnets or the continued interest in romance, and neither does it account for the historical lineage of the two forms (Petrarchan as older than Shakespearean). It does not explain why the sonnet most associated with Keats's spectacular development, Òn first looking into Chapman's Homer', is Petrarchan. And although the Shakespearean sonnet to Spenser (`Spenser, a jealous honorer of thine') suggests a farewell to the Petrarchan mindset that Spenser represents, the distinction Keats makes between the two forms must be viewed as historicizing as well as gendered. The Spenser sonnet itself suggests this historical awareness: the Renaissance form contains the medieval Petrarchism that has, through modernization, got out of hand. It is the same awareness at work in the Chapman sonnet: Petrarchan form mediates the imaginative play with translated classical imagery. That multiplication of the historical dimension, that insistence on seeing things in all their temporal complexity despite the seeming insistence on the lyric moment, is the hallmark of the troubadour's multiple awareness. But for Keats it is a play that clears ground so much more readily in the romances. `La Belle Dame sans Merci', particularly in its ironized Indicator version, for instance, perfectly captures this form of awareness and complexity.11 Keats's continued attentiveness to romance should not be dismissed as a transitional vehicle for getting from the fashionable and effeminating Spenserianism of Petrarchan sonnets and Hunt's rhymes to the harder tones of the odes, but as a purposefully pursued and revisionary project. Before addressing Keats's serious attempt to rewrite romance through the ironized distancing provided by an allegorical limning of character,




transforming the Spenserianism of `Calidore'-like attempts into the serious play with medievalism of St. Agnes, St. Mark and `La Belle Dame', we need to investigate the problem of anachronism that Spenser raises. This problem is especially revealing for Keats's poetry when put in relation to Chatterton as a predecessor poet, and especially interesting when put in relation to a much lesser known user of anachronism and medievalism, Anne Bannerman.

Chatterton, Bannerman and `La Belle Dame' The rage for Ossian or for Bishop Percy's Reliques was over by the time Keats was interested in historical remnants. Both of these represent a kind of anachronism that takes prior times as different and yet knowable because simpler: noble but naive, passionate but rude. It is a colonizing perspective that views the past for what it can affirm about the present's superior time without a highly motivated need to really know that past. Although both Macpherson and Percy composed or collected òld' verse, what appealed to readers was their accessibility. What Chatterton produced was so accessible that Coleridge is awed by the fact that his marriage is held in St. Mary Redcliffe, the Bristol church in which Chatterton dreamed his ornately medieval romances and `found' his anachronistic manuscripts.12 Chatterton introduces a new kind of anachronism, one that strives to know the past from within itself, to recreate the past in such a way that it is not easily viewed as not itself. Putting a barrier up to readerly access signals that the past may be resistant, and that the resistance hides something of worth.13 For Keats, Chatterton's efforts remain noteworthy. The fact that the large controversy is over authenticity, beginning with Horace Walpole's allegations of fraud, indicates to what extent Chatterton's project, his entirely new kind of anachronism, succeeds.14 Indeed, what Chatterton achieved imaginatively with his neo-medieval thoroughly displaced attention to scholarly study of earlier English tongues, such as the little known publications of Elizabeth Elstob (Homily on St. Gregor and EnglishSaxon Grammar); Elstob had to stop the publication of Saxon Homilys due to debt.15 Keats's interest in Chatterton continues throughout, for even his last real effort, King Stephen, may have begun with Chatterton's Rowley `Brief Account of William Cannings', which harkens back to the `troublesomme Raygne of Kynge Stephen' (I.52).16 It is Chatterton's grand failure and subsequent suicide that overshadow the troubadourian ethos as a historicizing and thus Romantic one. What draws Romantics such as Keats to the Chatterton myth is not that he is an English




Werther, suffering for art and love as the contemporary myth of him suggests,17 but that he deploys temporal frames, making the historical and the present into narratives that can be overlaid. It is perhaps for this reason that Endymion is dedicated to him. Such a multiple vision in Chatterton's work (the `Life of Thomas Rowlie Preeste' is suggestive of this) is specifically troubadourian. Where Chatterton is more meaningful to Keats is in the way this historical overlay can be used for a critical perspective on present times. Certainly what Chatterton could provide was an eye into past forms and sounds. Benjamin Bailey commented that Keats loved Chatterton's poetry: `Methinks I now hear him recite, or chant, in his peculiar manner, the following stanza of the ``Roundelay sung by the minstrels of Ella'': Come with acorn cup & thorn, Drain my hertys blood away; Life & all its goods I scorn; Dance by night or feast by day. The first line to his ear possessed the great charm' (quoted in Bate, Keats 216). That line is in its imagery a line of `fairy', the diminutive implements `charming' away the terrible pain of the story. The line comes towards the end of a `Mynstrelles Songe' in Chatterton's romance `álla', when the heroine, Birtha, is just about to be abducted by a lover who has promised to take her to her dying lord, álla. The acorn cup and thorn image has a darker meaning in this context, since it emphasizes the slow emotional death she has been suffering through her husband's desertion of her to go fight the Danes. `álla: A Tragycal Enterlude',18 pretends to be a true medieval romance but its appeal for Keats may have been its imaginative blending of classical tragedy, ballad tradition and romance plot, together with the use of court minstrels as a kind of chorus to produce narration within the larger narrative. The mixing of form is a heady kind of historical playfulness that anticipates Keats's own experimentation with the ode form. But more immediately compelling, Bailey's anecdote suggests, is Chatterton's attempt to produce medieval sound. Through inventive spelling, Chatterton recreates a medieval ear, one whose sonorousness reproduces in the reader a bodily sense of being medieval. The `Mystrelles Songe' begins: O! synge untoe mie roundelaie,

O! droppe the brynie teare wythe mee,





(844±50) The `roundelaie', or more properly, love ballad, performs the troubadourian task of entertaining the lady. Its refrain captures the sadness of the larger poem's tragic quest and seems to foreshadow its hero's death. In fact, it is álla's rival in love, Celmonde, who will precipitate the death of both the hero and his faithful wife. Yet the ballad interval, in stopping the narrative at a crucial moment ± between the hero's decision to return home and the lover's decision to abduct Birtha ± allows us to pause with Birtha and feel her suspension. As she and her sorrow are strung across these crossed plot points (álla's return and Celmonde's departure with Birtha), we feel neither man's desire for her, but rather her moment of affective focus. It is the internalized moment that Keats will try to dramatize in St. Agnes, but as a production of Madeline's desire (or, rather, the viewing of that production); here Chatterton is only portraying Birtha's desolation and desertion, emotions that recall her earlier lines, Ò mie agroted harte, braste, braste ynn twaie. /álla, for honnoure, flyes awaie from mee' (383±4). Chatterton's linguistic anachronism ± his recreated Middle English ± as much as his play with form and subjective experience are strong influences on Eve of St. Agnes, `La Belle Dame sans Merci', Eve of St. Mark and `Gif ye wil stonden', Keats's most clearly medieval poems, and in the next section I will return to this line of thought. But I want to briefly explore another relevant text that poses an interesting opposition to both Chatterton's and Keats's form of medievalizing: Anne Bannerman's Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802).19 Although I am attempting to avoid the Gothic as a medievalizing mode in this study, Bannerman so imaginatively entwines the dark magic of the Arthurian tales with the Gothic's recreative medievalism (particularly that of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto), and with the chivalric narrative, that her poems helpfully position Keats's project. She is also interesting because few women poets wrote about medievalism, unlike the male Romantics; the prevailing subjects for women's poetry were Petrarchan, as for Charlotte Smith, or classical, as in Mary Robinson's Sappho to Phaon and Mary Tighe's Psyche. And, in fact, Bannerman presents a different kind of anachronism from either Chatterton's or Walpole's,



Daunce ne moe atte hallie daie, Lycke a reynynge ryver bee; Mie love ys dedde, Gon to hys death-bedde, Al under the wyllowe tree.

charting a course that reveals the different, and not determinate, uses of medievalist paths available to Keats. Her Prologue warns that uses of pastness such as chivalric tales must only be for warding off the past: `Turn from the path, if search of gay delight,/Lead thy vain footsteps back to ages past!', she begins, for it is dangerous to court `The charmed minstrelsy of mystic sound,/That rous'd, embodied, to the eye of Fear/ The unearthly habitants of faery ground' (1±2, 12±14). In her Prophecy of Merlin, a poem that revisits the Merlin tradition, which played such an important role in Spenser's Faerie Queene and in Percy's Reliques, Bannerman acknowledges the continued ascendency of Merlin's prophecy of Arthur's death over the story of Arthur's reign. That is, the bardic role continues, for her, to supersede the knight's. Drawing heavily on Drayton's The Poly-Olbion (1598±1622), as well as Spenser, Bannerman constructs a re-nationalized version of Arthur's death in the battle against Mordred that suspends Arthur's death over the promise of the future. It is a promise held hostage by a weird, even evil, fairy woman whose magic potion and supernatural gaze condemn Arthur to a state of hibernation until it is time for him to return to the living. Her obliquely vampiric qualities align her with Keats's later `La Belle Dame': His lips have drain'd that sparkling cup,

And he turn'd on her his raptur'd eyes!

When something, like a demon-smile,

Betray'd the smooth disguise!

He started up! . . . he call'd aloud!

And, wild, survey'd her as she stood:

When she rais'd aloof the other arm,

And he knew the hand of blood!

(153±60) Although he has saved his kingdom from the divisive threat of Mordred, his chivalry is no salve against the fairy power of the `Queen of the Yellow Isle'. She is sinister, unlike the three queens of the standard version who protectively conduct Arthur to his resting place, and it is clear she is imprisoning rather than protecting Arthur here. Moreover, his journey to her isle follows the path of Coleridge's Àncient Mariner', and takes up an inordinate amount of the narrative, focusing our attention on the harrowing quality of the supernatural in comparison to the less fearful quality of battle. Far from constructing a desirable return to the past, Bannerman problematizes such desire. The Queen represents medievalism and fends off




our desire with her hostile and powerful gaze. Like Keats's Belle Dame, and in contrast to Spenser's Elizabeth, her embrace is fatal, and if what she has to offer is seductive, it is also pacifying, disabling, withering. Her hold on national enthusiasm is also problematizing; the final note to the volume comments that, Ìt will not perhaps be very consonant to popular feeling, that legendary tradition has been violated in the fate and disposal of this great, national hero. But it is all fairy-ground, and a poetical community of right to its appropriation has never been disputed' (144). Arthur, who is now the national hero without parallel, is interred in fairy ground. Although the sources for the story ± Drayton, Spenser and Percy ± would cause any reader to presume a nationalist reading of the ballad, his death is portrayed as a defeat that disheartens his men, and his return to a united nation is indefinitely withheld by a woman of fairy, rather than nationalist, ground. Chivalry cannot hold a nation together, at least not in the terms Chatterton proposed. Revisiting it can, however, fend off a return of the past as presentness, and provide a way to answer Burke's famously anachronistic response to Marie Antoinette's plight in Reflections of the Revolution in France (1790). Keats's examination of medievalism also holds chivalry in question, replacing its office with troubadourian love as a more enduring subject for study across time. In `La Belle Dame sans Merci', Keats's ballad taken from Alain Chartier's medieval poem, he offers a different view of the balladic past from Bannerman's, and one that directly confronts the problem of love in time. This poem began as a play with the power of song in Song V from Èxtracts from an Opera', and continued in Eve of St. Agnes.20 A diversion from the romances, it is clearly an attempt to think about what Porphyro's/Chartier's song would be like modernized and made present. What if the lady is the troubadour, the one who plays with and seduces the other? Or at least, what if her song is a powerful counter to the poet's? And what if the troubadour is truly displaced and discarded? That Keats is experimenting with the elements of medievalism that most fascinate him ± the role of the poet, the use of otherness, the expediency of gender, the escape from history, the power of fantasy ± is evident from the comparison of both versions of the poem. It is the humour in the version he chose to publish in the Indicator, versus the sincerity of the version Brown cherished, that shows how provocative Keats found the medieval medium to be. The `knight' of one version becomes the `wight' of the other, and the nostalgia of Spenserian romance is mocked rather than embraced. What appears a commentary on escapist fantasy (that nevertheless approves the romance in the




Brown version) becomes a devastating commentary on gender relations, modern day quests, and the inefficacy of desire in the Indicator version. The poem's subtext, regardless of version, is a serious critique of romance. Despite the characters' gendering, the poem depicts the very real enthralment in which romance holds women. The effeminated knight stands in for the woman reader, while the belle dame is romance itself. Yet the knight is also the male reader, he who is taken in by romance's promises, its fantastic time. Situated in false (or fictive) time, unreliable genderings and enthralment, the poem calls into question the problem of true love, fantasy and escape, and the workings of the imagination, the very conditions of romance. Indeed, an alternative thesis for this chapter could be that Keats uses the troubadour posture he develops from his understanding of Byron's and Chatterton's poetics as almost an inversion (or coming out) of Spenser. If the morally sincere knightliness of The Faerie Queene is underwritten by the seduction of its linguistic pleasure, then to invert this hierarchy to reveal the power of song is to show Spenser as both the knightly moralizer who has lost his way, and as the powerful feminized poet. It is a both/and equation which shows that for Keats when the poet does not comprehend, and therefore buries, his multiple vision, he denies, perverts, undoes his art.

Keats and romance: history, memory and felt time Like the Romantic reading of Spenser, and probably because of it, Keats's poetry is also typically characterized as the subsuming of the conceptual by linguistic sensuality. The tension produced by such a poetics means that readers, drawn to the densely evocative nature of this language, resist engaging at the level of concept. Necessary to this tension are the jarringly forceful intensities that produce what Andrew Bennett calls the Keatsian `solecism': the generation of form from àn intense conjoining' of difference.21 Bennett's identification of this characteristic move in Keats reveals the subtle play of Keatsian irony against his troubadourian sincerity. His solecisms provide Keats with a way to question his own distinctive blend of politics, history, sincerity and passion. Through ironic gestures he can rupture the smooth continuities of past and present that his poetry presents, politicizing against the grain of romance time. Unexpectedly, Bennett sees this instability most particularly located not in the odes, but in Keats's use of narrative. And this siting is Keats's response to the more general Romantic obsession with the relation between text and reception: `Narrative may be said to produce the fundamental uncertainty of Romantic poetry, the uncer-




tainty of audience' (1±2). Audience, poetry's public dimension, prevents the Romantic poet from producing the ideal form: texts without readers, lyric poetry without audience. It is the Romantic solecism of the impossible text that Bennett finds so particular to the Keatsian imagination. To take Bennett a step further, it is romance, rather than the lyric, that offers the Romantic poet the richest ground for resisting the violence done to his conceptual paradigm by hostile or sympathetic readers through their essential otherness. Wordsworth's experimental `lyrical' ballads respond to the tension between lyrical desire and story imperative by revealing the ballad form as a registration of the romancing of lyric. The lyric Ì' of that volume fights valiantly with the need to accommodate his reveries to both story and audience. Of Coleridge's contributions to the Lyrical Ballads, none of which fit this definition of `lyrical ballad', the cancelled `Lewti: Or, The Circassian Love Chant' is the most clearly medieval and might have provided (particularly in its rewriting of an earlier Wordsworth poem) the clearest key to the other poems' romancing of history through its use of the courtly love lyric. Keats's use of romance, as it evolves out of the earliest grapplings with an imitative Spenserianism to the complexly tortuous textures of The Eve of St. Agnes, forces the relation between narrative structure, reading and lyrical time that Bennett sees as the driving impulse behind Keats's oeuvre. His entire project, for Bennett, is based on solecism articulated àlmost as a structuring device in his poetry. . . Solecism, in other words, is reading' (Keats 2±3).22 We might rather say, solecism is reading in (or of) time, and in (or against) history. Each misuse (or èmbarrassment', to use Christopher Ricks's term), in other words, is a construction of Keats's own time in terms of the past, or a resistance to the present in relation to, or as a form of, history.23 In the following discussion I want to examine Keats's uses of historical consciousness as an exploration of being in time, specifically in Keats's movement away from romance as the paradoxical site of presence and consciousness (history as solecism), to a keener situating of temporality in the narratives of historical drama. Once the problem of narrative is complicated not just by narratological concerns over the paradoxes inherent in the relation between subjectivity, language, plot and reception, but also by temporality, then, at least for the Romantics, that problem necessarily returns to romance and medievalism. The past, not as history but as the historicizing narrative, necessitates a past form. Romantic medievalism is thus always a question of romancing the past. The medieval as romance provides a sentimental version of history, a taste of the past that occludes history's real composition of human struggle and death. Keats's romances point




towards a literary medievalism that is already strongly in place, from the faked history of Chatterton to the popularized Renaissance version of the medieval as represented by Shakespeare through Kean's acting and Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery.24 In his 21 December 1817 review of Kean's Richard III for The Champion, Keats comments that `There is an indescribably gusto in his [Kean's] voice, by which we feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and future while speaking of the instant.'25 His comment makes clear that Kean's interpretation increasingly comes to bear on, and results in, Keats's late use of Shakespeare to reconceive history. Until the last two years of his life, Keats's own use of the medieval is tinctured with a Spenserian sensibility that aestheticizes and distances the past while opening the impossibility of quest or heroism in the present tense. Coleridge, for instance, characterizes his own restless questing in 1803 in this way: `for the last five months of my Life I seem to have annihilated the present Tense with regard to place ± you can never say, where is he? ± but only ± where was he? where will he be?' (Gittings, Letters II.918). Yet Keats's romances increasingly offer an immediacy ± a presence ± that goes beyond aestheticizing desire to problematizing loss. Loss ± the allegorizing figure for history ± is the only real historical context for presence; presence is defined and demarcated by the possibilities for absence (death, forgetting, alienation, rejection). As Shakespeare comments of the abandoned infant Perdita in The Winter's Tale, a romance made popular by Garrick's revision, Florizel and Perdita and Mary Robinson's stage portrayal of Perdita, the Prince of Wales's infatuation with her in the role and his immediate adoption of Florizel as his pet name, àll is loss'. To aestheticize something, as Burke makes clear in his analysis of the sublime, is to lift it out of the temporal sphere, but in doing so the real is displaced by the ideal such that something crucial ± something crucible-like, such as memory ± is lost. The replacement of desire with loss is a re-evaluation of what history is about. It is also a re-establishment of a troubadourian ethos over an Enlightenment one: desire as the first principle, loss as its grounding condition, presence in the face of absence as the solution to and recognition of poetic voice. I propose to read Eve of St. Agnes as pitting presence against loss in order to narrate the struggle of desire in and against history. The epistemological problem Keats sets up is how to understand desire in the context of history/loss; the allegorical figure he chooses to resolve it is the troubadour himself. The success of the St Agnes solution, in fact, colours our reception of Keats. In Bate's influential biographical eulogy of Keats, he effectively




presents and treats Keats as the medieval poet figure, a love-lorn troubadour inspired by the unattainable or lost object (whether fame, art or desire). Andrew Motion similarly reads all of Keats's mature poet labours as anxiety over keeping Fanny Brawne's heart as well as her person.26 Keats contributes to this interpretation through his epistolary descriptions of himself as Fanny Brawne's `vassal . . . on my knees', as `look[ing] upon fine Phrases like a Lover', and his responses to Isabella Jones' ènigma' (Gittings, Letters, 271, 277, 169). Here Keats becomes a recapitulation of Chatterton as the real, spiritually medievalized Chatterton (rather than the faking Chatterton). The Pre-Raphaelites initiate this association, rescuing Keats from the condemnatory censoriousness of Lockhart's resistance to yet another faker with his relics. In both these critical veins, the attacking and the rescuing, Keats becomes a poet out of keeping with his own time because he is so in tune with a prior era, and one that is for the Romantics an a priori era. He is his own solecism. In `Calidore' (1816), Endymion, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and the attempt at Chatterton-style poetics in The Eve of St. Mark and in the fragment `Gif ye wol stonden hardie wight' usually printed as following it, we have a map of Keats's uses of the narratological paradoxes romance can provide. His poems dedicated or addressed to Chatterton acknowledge that what Chatterton does is, quite literarily, to make a romance out of historiography.27 In fragments such as St. Mark and `Gif ye wol stonden', Keats pursues the Chattertonian experiment, recreating past language in order to reconstitute pastness itself. St. Mark begins by turning from a visual space ± an aquatint come alive ± to the page Bertha is reading, turning us from contemporary to past language (ànd thus the rhyme/Was parcelled out from time to time/``± Als writith he of swevenis . . . .'' '). Like the visual space, the language becomes fictitiously `medieval', inventing a past language that seems more evocatively real because of its false historicism and falsely historical language. The poem is conventionally read as the juxtaposition of opposites, with Bertha cloistered and dreaming inside while the real world of activity goes on outside. She is thus the predecessor to Tennyson's Lady of Shalott, and her dreaming functions as her defining activity and art. Walter Houghton has argued that Bertha is dreaming of sainthood and martyrdom as heroic, and of her own heroism.28 She is the `poor cheated soul' who sits in silence and gloom to read of the inward light and vision of religious romance. Stillinger disagrees, arguing that Bertha is not cheated of heroic possibility so much as of reality through her own closeting and daydreaming.29 Keats hated the word `martyrdom', Stillinger notes: `The most bigotted word ever met with' is his note on




Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. The poem, far from being incomplete because Keats did not know where to go with it, as Houghton argues, is incomplete-able because Bertha romances martyrdom. Her choice of gloomy surroundings and gloomy subjects over real life is a feminization of romance: `her shadow still/Glower'd about as it would fill/The room with wildest forms and shades' (83±5). Stillinger views the `pseudo-Chaucerian Middle English' ending to the poem as `further ridicule' of Bertha's dreaming: `from [Keats's] point of view, she is as foolish as all the other dreamers so wrapped up in an impossible ideal that they turn away from life itself' (Hoodwinking, 98). But the language, particularly its `pseudo' status, is not just ridicule; it is Bertha's entry into the romance world. The `pious poesies' that subtend the legend of St Mark, and that she has to engage with as an active reader in order to make sense of them, become the saint's love poems to her. But the older language, like the legend and poems themselves, is made up, the stuff of dreams. Bertha is forfeiting real life and real love for that which does not even have enough life force to go on, to finish its own narrative. It is the poem's fragmentation that ridicules Bertha even more than the Chattertonian language, the fake that may be, or seem, more real than reality itself. `Gif ye wol stonden' goes further, entering into pastness through the immediacy of language without the aid of emblematic visuals. In this sense Keats has returned here, although in a more sophisticated manner, to his earlier experimentation in `Calidore', where the Spenserianism is available in the language as much as in the initiating plot. In `Calidore' Keats shows that he can deliver romance elements within a framework of incompletion that will best satisfy readerly expectations of vivid scenery, lush language, gallant knights, worship of female beauty, and the subordination of plot to idealized subjective experience. But Sir Calidore, the Knight of Courtesy from the Faerie Queene, so exquisite in his adoration of the female, is emasculated by his own courtliness and incapable of plot. So, too, are St. Mark and `Gif ye wol stonden' unable to go on, a victim of their linguistic seduction. Both Spenser and Chatterton provide inadequately historicizing models for the lover Porphyro, who adores in order to possess, and who possesses in order to instil desire into the loss that is history, thereby bringing romance towards remembrance.30 It is Porphyro who embodies the translation of semantic and rhetorical sensuality into conceptual strength.31 It often comes as a surprise to readers in love with Keatsian language that, at the conceptual level, Keats was consumed by the historical. Recent Keats scholarship has been concerned with proving that he was




indeed interested in history, in the political uses of history, and in the poet's relation to that politicized history, but it has not determined how Keats differentiated kinds of history in his art.32 In this sense The Eve of St. Agnes is a turning point in Keats's career, allowing him to take the medieval as a romance form in order to re-configure pastness, which I take to be the prime task in his last trial of history, King Stephen.33 This turning point authorizes Keats's reconception of the literary ideal from romance to a vision of historical tragedy.34 The question of chivalry and sainthood, their possibility, is transformed into the tragic but real possibility of heroism. Most interesting in this transformation is how Keats uses the medieval as an aspect of readerly subjectivity at the level of narrative in order to separate pastness from history proper. History can then be designated as a state of awareness in which politics, and therefore tragedy as the essential state of man, can occur. Pastness, by contrast, romances history by providing the imaginative space of sentiment. Romance, with its false sense of time, makes an imaginative entity possible while history places a poetic historical one. If Keats began the work of poetry through romance, The Eve of St. Agnes is an important poem in his self-consciously produced canon because it is the work in which he uses medievalism to overturn rather than enable romance.35 His dislike of Scott's novel, The Antiquary, makes clear how he is distinguishing history as dynamic from the romancing of history as entropy (Gittings, Letters 46±7). From this perspective, romance stands in the way, rather than enables, the Romantic's recovery of the past. Keats sees that before he can master history, before he can dramatize its master narratives, romance must be made to contain memory, or be made a container for memories, as a kind of urn burial. Browne's proto-archaeological meditations on urn burial provide an anteriorizing intellectual ground for subsequent poetic ruminations on the same subject for Gray and the Graveyard School, powerfully enabling Keats's refracted and mediated attempt at this genre in Òde to a Grecian Urn'. What I am further suggesting is that he is already thinking through antiquarian ground before then, changing its dynamic of disenfranchising loss to a desiring energy discoverable through narrative. The ode will then take over the role of romance in his work as he edges his way nearer the historical drama he finally realizes as his poetic quest object. What such drama does, in contrast to the entropy of old romance and the fractious tensions of the ode's emblematic containment, is to explode such circumscription. Julia Kristeva notes that when the arch rememberer, Proust, comes to think about time, he makes a novel move by creating a new form of




temporality, `the felt time of our subjective memories', a form marked by the hero's `return journey from the past to the present and back again'.36 Proust uses memory to come authorially from the past; romance, in contrast, typically performs the opposite pilgrimage on the reader, moving from the present to the past as a sentimental journey. As a consequence, the past of romance is usually less authentic or remembered, more fantastic, and less convincingly `there' than Proust's temporalities. Keats exploits this aspect of romance structure explicitly in St. Agnes by using it to perform a temporal comparative that situates us both within and without romance. Against romance norms, he specifically uses memory to recreate the immediacy of `felt time' but, unlike Proust, in an imagined past. He then frames it with the present tense hard reality of a graveyard meditation on prior lives. This cold, grey frame that is the `real' (stanzas 1±2 and 41±2) becomes unreal (and memorably larger in relation to the `real' narrative picture, an aquatint melodrama worthy of Boydell's Gallery) when we realize we are unsure of our ontological place in it. At the same time that the stone effigies present to us the dangers of allegory ± distanced and limed characters to a deadly degree ± we are seduced by lovers allegorically deployed to play out a tale of passion and poetry.37 Our suspension comes from the frame being of and not of our time, the present tense of the frame remaining unrealized until the end. We enter/entertain aporia because of how the frame does and does not enclose, separate off or romance the story.38 Our place is also destabilized when the liminal move of walking through the door from the chapel makes of that past an imaginatively more real presence. In dividing the poem into three temporally distinct sections of beginning frame, central scene and end frame, I read the frozen frame of the speaker's present as distinguished from the backward projected vision of the romance, but only as a backward vision itself. That is, what seems to be the present ± the chapel's greyness ± takes us imaginatively into the past, but we realize in the final present-tense lines of the poem that the chapel tour with which we began was also past, and only in a weakly allegorical way standing in for the present. Presentness in the poem is problematized in the same terms as pastness.39 Standing at the crux of an ambiguous temporality, we realize that the standard act of romance is the act of looking back, a nostalgic regard that opposes presentness. We also realize that it is the moment of romance, of projected memory, which is more felt and more real than the freezing quality of the frame's `now'. Although I have described the opening frame as a problematic past, we experience the walk through the chapel as a `now' that is contemporaneous, a recognizably modern




perspective on the ruins of history, realizable through its cold, stony greyness, and its evocation of death in the here and now. We know this chapel. Yet such history is uninteresting, as grey as its shadows. What holds the centre for us is the ahistorical nature of what lies beyond the chapel. It is in the central fiction projected as memory that Keats's move is like Proust's memory projected as fiction: the moment that is achieved as a presentness is the moment of life, of colour, of sensation (Ò for a life of sensation'), and this presentness takes place in the imagined past. Keats's past becomes a space imbued with the synaesthesia of real memories projected on to a past that never existed, a romance space. It is this space, which is out of time, that is presented to us as living and real. But it is also this romance space that, so presented, can then be undermined so that the reader experiences the need for the poet's cultural priority to be asserted. If the romance is allowed to stand, it will be, like Isabella and the Pot of Basil, `smokeable'. It must contest the pastness represented by romance so that another historical narrative order can be introduced.40 The fiction's `felt time' must be questioned, its priority doubted, its romance betrayed so that the reader will begin to desire the higher seriousness of a historical code that replaces sentiment with fact. We begin in the cold, monochromatic, silent chapel where breath is `frosted', and human figures are either freezing, like the numb Beadsman, or stone effigies (`The sculptured dead, on each side, seem to freeze/ . . . Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries': 14,16). A museum guide through the Gothic chapel, we cannot identify with the Beadsman; rather, we examine the effigies as othered versions of ourselves in a move that introduces us to the feeling of being already past. Like the Beadsman, the reader has only to open a small door to find himself on the threshold of another world of `Music's golden tongue', colour, and its associated warmth. As the music increases from the soft prelude to the `snarling trumpets', we move from the cold grey of the `carveÁd angels' to the silver of the àrgent revelry, with plume, [and] tiara', and the colour suggested by ànd all rich array'. This sliding chromatic scale begins at the zero of death, the numb world of statuary which is the past's presentation of itself to us; but as it moves forward into light and warmth it brings us not to life but to shadows which are the remembrance of life. The revelry is `Numerous as shadows haunting faerily/The brain, new-stuffed, in youth, with . . . old romance.' Having made explicit the poem's romance and, in the equation of romance with an aged and shadowy existence, putting into doubt the reality and the ageing of our own present, the narrator ushers us into fictional life's youth: `These let us wish away,/And turn, sole-thoughted, to one Lady there'. She is




Madeline, who has been concentrating on a different, earlier kind of romance: the superstitions surrounding love (`Whose heart had brooded, all that wintry day,/On love, and winged St Agnes' saintly care'). She bodily dominates the narrative from now on, and the narrator's obsession with her associates her subjectivity with romance time.41 But Madeline is thoroughly allegorical: we see her as the beloved, and we enter into her consciousness only in order to know her as the ideal beloved that she is. She is thoroughly coloured and realized because she must not seem ideal, but rather selected; she must not be distanced but present, desired and accessible. We must see her through Porphyro's eyes; we must see her as the troubadour does. Through Madeline, Keats's romance becomes feminized, female time: sensuously felt, erotically desired, but without facticity (there is no `real' beyond the frame of Madeline's seduction), and without consequence (war is avoided, generation does not affect the narrative). Before following the text's romancing of Madeline, however, we should consider the synedochal significance of the Beadsman as a failed historian. Allegorically he should function as visionary or moral guide. His job is to `tell' his rosary beads; to tell is to calibrate time, to tell history. As Stuart Sherman shows, any counting activity becomes synchronized with the marking of time.42 Enlightenment historiographers were consumed with producing universal histories, histories of the past (Gibbon) as much as of the universe (Goldsmith), and with seeing these increasingly as narratives.43 But to tell history as one would `tell' one's beads is to tell a representative kind of history made up of discrete and representative events, rather than to tell a personal or contentious history such as Porphryo introduces into the narrative frame. The Beadsman's lack of warmth is disenchanting and flawed (his fire goes out, he notes little of the life within) compared to the sensuous detail of Madeline's romance. The telling of representative historical events ± the Glorious Revolution, the Civil War, the Stuart Uprising, the French Revolution ± mimics cosmic systems, stringing events along as if they were a multiplication of Herschel's new planet. Such an approach follows Addison's advice in the Spectator that the historian `be able to draw up his armies and fight his battles in proper expressions, to set before our eyes the divisions, cabals, and jealousies of great men, and to lead us into the several actions and events of his history' (no. 420, 2 July 1712). As such they narrate history as a discrete number of military events, necessarily leaving out or subordinating other events (the loss of the American colonies, the importation of yellow fever, the Peterloo Massacre). Keats's romance forces the question of whether such a history




is worth telling. His treatment of the Beadsman as separated from the life of the poem, his association with cold shadows and ashes, reveals that the Beadsman is no romancer, incapable of `fashioning such an important discourse of truth'. Keats reveals a disinclination as regards the Beadsman's kind of historicism; the telling of great events along a nationalist rosary is the telling of dead stories, stone knights and ladies of stone in their chapels for òratory' or recitation. This is only more church history. If the Beadsman as historian stands in opposition to the romance of the central story by keeping vigil over a dead past, he does not define proper historicism. His history is that of a `thousand aves told', after which he is `For aye unsought for', and so falls asleep àmong his ashes cold', hardly discernible from the dead-as-ashes Angela. Yet he does show us the way towards a history worth telling through his transformation of what appears to be the present ± the pilgrimage through the chapel which begins the poem ± into the `real' present at the end of the poem. Here is the realization of telling as an activating behaviour (Ànd they were gone ± ay, ages long ago'). The narrator's present-tense ày' conflates with the Beadsman's historical àye', producing a rift in the narrative that resettles our own ontology: pastness to presence, past tense to present tense; superstition to romance, universal history to the `real' of history. In thinking about real history, James Chandler constructs the notion of `days'44 and of a `hot chronology' to structure his analysis of the events of 1819 as an intense period of political and creative activity. His analysis of how artists, intellectuals, critics and activists responded to the temper of the times is instructive, but it depends on the literary historian's usual reading of participants' `sensitivity' or responsiveness to this energy and to the exigency of the times. I want to suggest that Keats was more than usually responsive to the heat of this intense period; before the 1820s' cooling-off of the heat generated by increasing political agitation for reform, events and creative responses to them demand a present frame of mind that is nevertheless intense and generative, especially for a poet like Keats who senses in his own poetic career a corollary to the times in its compression, presentness and duration.45 The idea of momentous days was something he incorporated into his most intense works of 1819. But he saw these `days', these stopped moments of high matter, not just as high drama, but as stopped time: a present tense that is a presentation. And such time stoppages are most importantly worked out in those poems most resistant to the present tense, such as the medieval St. Agnes. But as such, stopped time does not correlate to the historical chain of the Beadsman's rosary;




rather it is the urn's `slow time' of low drama: religious ceremonies, superstitious rites, love play, sexual union. We have moved from the universal, those cold carved angels and winged saints, to the `real', here tangibly and textually the human àngels' as figured by Madeline. But however real she seems to us, she is clearly fictive. Her èyes divine', and the `good angels' of her dreams, make her an angel of human desire (`She seemed a splendid angel, newly dressed/Save wings, for Heaven': 223±4). She is an anti-angel, an angel through the courtly analogy of fleshly desire with spiritual desire. As such, she is deeply aligned with the irresolvable paradox of St Agnes herself, whose hagiography reveals that she is `patronness of bodily purity'; that her martyrdom under Diocletian was caused by her resistance to men's sexual desire; and that part of her corporal punishment was, despite her thirteen years, to be placed in a whorehouse `with liberty to all to abuse her person at pleasure'.46 Madeline's prayers to the saint situate her between Agnes's protection and her torment, and it was surely superstition's perversion of the child virgin's history, making the sex martyr into divine matchmaker, that is part of the story's interest. Madeline will pay for her childish insistence on superstition with the eroticism not of a brothel but of a love bower, and not with a vision but with the man himself. In a similar correspondence, St Agnes, through Madeline, is immediately linked with the other extreme of female ontology, òld dames', like the `beldame' Angela. The effect is to make romance a female superstition, and a disgusting one at that. Angela is presumably one of the gossips who have told Madeline tales of St Agnes' prophecies; she becomes the good angel (or fairy) of Porphyro's quest through enemy territory, but as a `beldame' she also makes visible the exigencies of the body. She is no Àngelica',47 and her death at the end of the poem, `palsy-twitched, with meagre face deform' (376), divests romance of its charm, circling us back to the carved stone angel and the cold effigies in the chapel, and reminding us that because the narrative takes place in the past, Madeline is already dead, already grey and frozen in place.48 But already dead, she is at the same time present to us as the romance heroine. In fact, Madeline is ripe for Porphyro's plucking and our own because of her faith in òld romance' (41). The plucking which is her undoing is Porphyro's performance on her lute of the àncient ditty, long since mute/In Provence called, ``La belle dame sans mercy'' ' (291± 2). By co-opting the fairy queen's sexual power and song, Porphyro reverses the knight/lady relation, and so wakens Madeline from her romance sleep rather than sinking her into it: `There was a painful




change, that nigh expelled/The blisses of her dream so pure and deep' (300±1). Madeline wakes into history. Although it is tempting to see the poem either as an allegory of poetic identity, comprehensible through Porphyro's quest,49 or as a `tapestry empyrean' to use Keats's own phrase (Gittings, Letters 66), in fact the plot hesitates between shadow and light, cold and warmth, plot and meditation. It is neither the straightforward structuring of Porphyro's or Madeline's desire, nor a dramatization of poetry-making, but the plotting of the poem's own embrace of the temporal scene. Despite the seemingly clear tripartite structure,50 the narrative moves us back and forth between the grey realm of cold stone and darkness (Porphyro's first hiding place, the closet in her bedroom, and the characters' own occasional `pallid, chill, and drear' conditions: 311), which demonstrates remoteness and lack of access, and the chromatic world (Madeline's bedroom, her stained glass window), signifying a fully realized temporality, a `thereness'. The first place Angela hides Porphyro in is instructive: `He found him in a little moonlight room,/Pale, latticed, chill, and silent as a tomb' (112±13). The death prefigured by this small, tomb-like chamber, itself foreshadowed in the cold, grey chapel through which we enter into the poem, is the death of time, and the telling or marking of time as performed by the Beadsman and symbolized by his cold ashes.51 The story's colour, in this context, is borrowed from the stained glass windows in Madeline's chamber, which is what tinctures her as she kneels in the moonlight, a living stone angel in an acquatint portrait (what Keats refers to as `the colouring of St Agnes eve', which is `such drapery': Gittings, Letters 340). Aquatint was a recognizably allegorical medium, but the innovation Keats wrought was to make the medieval warmly coloured, not just drapery and costume but a felt sense, at the same time that his allegorical limning characterizes the problematic he is `smoking' out. In distancing he brings into presence, but only to understand historicized desire as poetic strength, not to feel desire itself. Porphyro's quest is not for identity but for the drive to passion, to collapse the melodramatic chromatic scale of aquatint into real colour and its real shadows by resexing romance, so as to seduce not Madeline but the narrative itself. Lacan says that the ego-ideal's relation to objects is necessarily spatial, and we see this in the spatializing of the secreted ideal lady, placed in her private bower and viewed with desire, in courtly love. But objects can be drawn from space into time through the act of naming: naming allows the object to have à certain appearance of permanence over time': `The name is the time of the object'.52 Time has the appearance of subjectivity,




or of reality, whereas the spatial belongs to fantasy and romance. Keats calls attention to the difference by stopping romance narrative to centre a troubadourian present moment, the seduction of Madeline, in the poem. This appears natural, but seductively the romance is drawn away. Yet Keats is going against troubadourian convention when he provides a detailing of props and surroundings that names objects, bringing them more into time than the troubadourian present (with its adumbration of a closed list of recognizable elements) allows. The troubadourian moment can stop romance by undercutting it, but it is not enough: the naming in the poem through the arrangement of detail provokes an absorbably real medievalism that leads to a necessary reality. For Madeline, reality or the reality principle involves sexual awakening. Sex as true love codes troubadourian poetry; sex as conquest encodes romance. In St. Agnes the sex has always been a matter of contention, but even in the more innocent published version of the poem, Keats is focusing on the sex of medieval romance, the phallic conditions that make romance a ritual of manhood, of man-making.53 Porphyro exits the fairy castle and the narrative a husband, a man who figures his own life. How does Porphyro's self-art get into history? In part it has to do with the stoppage of time that results from his seduction of the narrative. This seduction ± a redirection of desire ± makes colouration personal, a sensual event; aquatint becomes dreamtext. And it makes sense of the troubadour's poetic code for Romantic sensibility. Levinson interprets the sensory categories of St. Agnes as not real in the narrative sense, but kept at the surface level, a reading that provokes us to see the poem as an illustration of something else.54 That something else is the fictive `real'. If we take the elements of Porphyro's seduction ± the texture, taste, and smell of the delicacies he brings from the closet, or the lyric he sings ± as known quantities that appeal to our sensory experience, at the same time deliciously orientalized and infantilizing, as images evoked through the surface lusciousness of the language, then they make up the categories of our felt time, those experiences we can projectively assimilate and thus `recall'. We are stopped in our own reminiscence, our own desire for the sensual moment of the beloved's/ our seduction. It is important to read the deliciousness, made subjectively real by the reader's interpolated experience, as plotted by the poem.55 These categories, when applied to the daydream of romance, also become visual and visually stimulating ones for which the reader supplies the bodily evidence; this is a necessary aspect of romance that is deeply implicated in the troubadour's love for the unattainable but viewable lady. Such visuality provokes our desiring gaze, which moves




associatively between food and Madeline as objects of our love and remembrance. This knowing use of felt sense structures a readerly pastness, a historical context, for Porphyro's seduction. To this end, taste is also a matter of loving vision: `Lucent' makes the syrups visual, while cinnamon `tincts' or tinctures them. But the emphasis on the visual also frustrates our sense of felt time, problematizing the story by making a picture of it, and so distancing the embrace of Madeline from our own innocence in a knowing way. The felt time is conflated with the knowledge that what can be seen is different from what might be seen; that memory is a pastime and not a source of real knowing. While comprehending the poem's visuality, we must also acknowledge its narrative facts; its plot, its denouement, its placement in the concluding stanza in a prior time (Ànd they are gone ± aye, ages long ago/These lovers fled away into the storm'). Keats's effectually antiromance narrative, one compelled by the troubadourian stoppage that centres the Beadsman's frame, implicitly sets up a readerly regard for the poem as something other. This is a troubadourian move, yet Keats is not merely replicating a medieval poetic aesthetic; unlike Chatterton, Keats is assaying the medieval as a sleeping dragon, the representation of the hierarchical, patriarchal world the troubadour is always critiquing, othering, subverting. Romance as the daydream that gets lost in this sensuality (the female experience) is woven into the medieval romance narrative of quest and conquest, with its motifs of storming the castle, surviving the dragons (here figured as sleeping human enemies: `For there were sleeping dragons all around'), and the very real dangers of àn elfin-storm from fairy land'.56 By stopping time he surrenders us to it and loses us in it as an importantly vital loss; the generative nonremembrance of normal lives. Keats's romances, most particularly `La Belle Dame sans Merci', associate the power of fairy with that of the unconscious, or, more particularly, a cultural unconscious that fears the repressed force of ancient agencies. St. Agnes plays the fear of pastness off against textual pleasure in a way that elevates narrative voice and presence over the seduction of the past. The lovers' escape out of the enchanted castle and into a history that is not based on warfare, or that memorializes individuals with cold sculptured effigies, provides a way to see history differently. The poem ends by pushing Madeline out into history, temporalizing and realizing her. To do so, she must be named past the moment of troubadourian seduction, which she is in the end through the dead Angela, who is more a bodily potential for Madeline than the unnamed stone figures in the chapel. Time is what her troubadour has seduced her into: luring her away from fantasy into a




`true' love or marital relationship, he allows her to escape the idealized position. That we do not see her new subjectivity, except in her willingness to elope with her lover, that she disappears from view, is the proof of her new historical reality. Importantly, the anteriority of romance, its `felt time', its sense of coherence that directly contrasts to the ode's assembly of parts, must not be understood to remember things as they were. Felt time is seductive, but it is not the reality of sexed time; in its enchantment of what has been it bears a closer relation to those universal histories that string together great events than to the history lived by real men with real passions. `Memory should not be called knowledge', Keats writes to Reynolds (Gittings, Letters 66). To remember is to be `led away by Custom', while to imagine well is to know: `Now it appears to me that almost any Man may like the Spider spin from his own inwards his own airy Citadel', an experience that produces an intellectual journey not through time but through mental space, and one the reader should follow along on. This journey will arrive at knowledge independent of the path it takes, and not busily but through stillness. It is the busyness of romance, with its reconstructed memory of a past that never was, which must be revised into the stillness of history, that thing which is to be written in the sure knowledge of coming death, a celebration of life's tragedy as the immortalizing thing itself. Writing to Reynolds of his progress on Lamia a year later, just as he is beginning Otho the Great, Keats says Ì have great hopes of success, because I make use of my Judgment more deliberately than I yet have done' (Gittings, Letters 268), while to Bailey he writes Òne of my Ambitions is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting ± another to upset the drawling of the blue stocking literary world ± if in the course of a few years I do these two things I ought to die content' (Gittings, Letters 276). Keats's conflation of history writing with overturning women critics, those representatives, according to Bate, of `the abuse and trivialization of literature and art for the purposes of disdain or vanity', and who misappropriate the affective problem of the beloved without understanding that her potentially disruptive (critical?) energy is precisely what must be reconfigured, is significant. The `hateful literary chitchat' indulged in by the `young Lockharts of the world', as Bate phrases it (Keats 429), but for Keats associated with the Reynolds sisters' sentimental posturing, begins to stand in for all misreading, particularly the incompetence of romance reading.57 Keats will write the next year to Charles Brown:




The sale of my book [Lamia] is very slow, though it has been very highly rated. One of the causes, I understand from different quarters, of the unpopularity of this new book, and the others also, is the offence the ladies take at me. On thinking that matter over, I am certain that I have said nothing in a spirit to displease any woman I would care to please: but still there is a tendency to class women in my books with roses and sweetmeats, ± they never see themselves dominant. (Gittings, Letters 391) Keats's comment flies in the face of his earlier contention to Woodhouse that St. Agnes was not written for the ladies, or, rather, it accepts the fact that his revisions of the poem, which would have taken it out of the romance mode by replacing sensual felt time with sexual historical time, were not published. His revision of the ending, in which Angela's palsied death is made distasteful, cancels out the tasting of closeted delicacies that constitute the body of felt sense and felt time in the poem. The beldame is a crone or hag whose aged body is mocked by the literal rendering of the term, `belle dame'. Unlike `La Belle Dame sans Merci', or Coleridge's Geraldine (whose agency in `Christabel' is here, in the person of Angela, re-natured and, because made real, shattered), Angela is vulnerable, fragile and without power; she is also the antithesis of the desirable and desiring object, Madeline, and yet foreshadows what Madeline will be one day. Keats's historicizing of Madeline, his reminder of her corporeality, also reminds us of her unimportance and of the unimportance of romance in the production of knowledge. St Agnes as a firm register against Madeline's willing selfromance, and Angela's participation as a go-between for these cold/ warm, saint/beloved representative women, produce in the end a rosary of possible female positions that is delusory in the same way that universal history is; `telling' turns both event-history and romance into misrememberings. Madeline's willingness to elope into a more personal history with her lover signals a proper relation to that history; Madeline becomes a good reader of Porphyro's new time. Troubadourian stoppage, that which overhauls momentum and telling (tales/time/history) in the interests of the moment and the localizing word, and which is naturalized in the lyric, denatured and thus a `stopping' in romance, can also translate to drama, especially in the sense of tableau, soliloquy and irony. But the tableau was a dramatic convention on its way out, particularly in the face of Kean's deeply impassioned and mobile Shakespearean interpretations.58 Irony finds




its way into Otho the Great, in Keats's own self-mocking descriptions of his composing process and, as Charles Rzepka argues, in his use of dramatic irony to make the stage's fiction a self-referential centre for the historical drama.59 Just as the irony of `La Belle Dame' cleared the medieval space of the romance for a more self-reflexive posture, the dramatic irony of Otho clears a space for Keatsian drama, but becomes counter-productive to the heroism of King Stephen. Soliloquy appears a most Keatsian format, but also finds little room in King Stephen. In his progress through the first play to the second, Keats appears to have abandoned the troubadourian apparatus in favour of a mobility unprecedented in his work. King Stephen offers a form completely opposed to that of the early `Calidore'. Furthermore, the troubadour's careful representation of voices and perspectives is anti-dramatic. What is wrong with event-histories, and what is wrong with Porphyro's troubadourian history in which he silences Madeline and Angela, is that multiple perspectives are suppressed. In the histories this is so that a dominant vision can be put in a centralizing place, and in St. Agnes so that the troubadour's social and textual critique is foregrounded and emphasized. Plays, however, allow for multiple perspectives to be structured into the plot, and for the levelling nature of Keats's art to focus itself as a heroic figure. The shift is from the inaction of the odes' speakers, the stoppage of the romances, even the ponderous movement of the Hyperions to a man acting against all odds.

Dramatic action: King Stephen Keats's rethinking of how to be in time in the 1819 poems allows him to redirect his strategy in the odes towards a more specific engagement with the issues of pastness. The odes, in contrast to the romances, perform as containers of narrative resistance, and work most specifically in the historical terms of life/presence and death/unknowable-pastness set forth in Browne's Urne Buriall (1690).60 The ongoing resonance of this work for those considering their mortality is apparent in Coleridge's gift of a copy to Sara Hutchinson just before setting sail for Malta in 1804 (Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions 359). Keats's poems that use classical myth rather than medievalism refer to this sense of containment (most specifically in the Grecian urn ode and Lamia), and represent a distanced past that is something already abstracted and unknowable. Temporality there becomes mythic, its distance allowing a mediation of the more conditional medieval, which we see emphatically in Lamia where the romance is transformed from medieval fantasy




into classical allegory. Such a text facilitates the move from romance to medieval history. So Keats's response to reading the `Paolo and Francesca' episode in Dante becomes an occasion for a dream of Hermes, Argus and the poet playing on a Delphic reed. Although he overturns romance in poems such as Lamia, St. Mark and `La Belle Dame Sans Merci', St. Agnes initiates Keats's independence from the romance genre that established his audience and marketability. In a similar gesture, Keats's derogation of romance in his remark to Brown (Ì am certain that I have said nothing in a spirit to displease any woman I would care to please') acknowledges the dominance of female readership and then dismisses it, effectively classifying it both with and against Madeline (as romance and as female readership) herself.61 Romance is displaced by `real' history, which opposes feminine delicacies associated with felt time and replaces it with the real knowledge of life and death. In the historical dramas he hopes to write, Keats projects a complete overturning of the demands of romance and its feltness by the historical code of a knowingness. But romance is not dismissed so easily, and the writing of Otho the Great begins as a quest, a trial in the literary battlefield: Keats and Brown will make their fame from Kean's by matching their wits to his. Writing under Brown's direction, Keats begins to see that romance, even as that of poetic endeavour, frustrates history: `Brown and I are pretty well harnessed again to our dog-cart. I mean the Tragedy which goes on sinkingly' (Gittings, Letters 273). The turn to tragedy represents, amid the events of 1819, the need for heroic men to pit not just their honour, but their very essence, against overwhelming forces. Whether Otho's son Ludolph, the champion fighting against his father's corrupt reign, can do this is a dramatic problem the play sets up, but it is one we know (from the history books, from the genre of tragedy, from the recent labour agitation that will soon lead to Peterloo) will end in failure. Like Henry Hunt and the other organizers of Peterloo and other labour events of that year, Otho and King Stephen are men of heroic stature from the medieval past. But it is Ludolph, not Otho, who holds our eye. Otho is Keats's own deposed Napoleon, a slightly ridiculous figure (J. Chandler, England in 1819 434); Ludolph is the rebel who is caught in the tension between his feelings for his father and his rejection of the system that his father rules and that rules him. It is Ludolph who, in disguise as a Byronic Àrab', fights for his father against the attacking Hungarians; this aid is both necessary against the powerful foe, and troubling, for Ludolph's revolt against his father raises the very question of whether Otho deserves to be saved. This is a manipulative and self-serving tyrant: Otho's reign is characterized by a combination




of extreme violence, a subsequent humiliation of the defeated, and then extreme mercy for those for whom mercy only strengthens Otho's political control. Through Otho the myth of the benevolent tyrant is exploded; through Ludolph, who ends the play not in a rectification of Otho's corrupt system but in a madness that symbolizes the system's irreducible conflicts (violence/ mercy, corruption/valour, deceit/love), the correspondence of chivalry (Ludolph) to politics (Otho) is revealed as devastatingly impossible. To make the case more strikingly, Keats centres the play on the story of Ludolph's entangled love, his marriage to a deceitful intriguer, and the impossibility of chivalry in the face of love's lack.62 Otho, through his son's self-mystifying revelation (like the knight/wight of La Belle Dame), is exposed by the play as another solecism: the patriarch who is controlled by his own power. Otho was Brown's and not Keats's idea, however, and he had to interrupt his work on Lamia to write it. With King Stephen, however, Keats begins to see how the Renaissance form of the historical drama plots out a plausibly critical heroism. In this he is working within the current vogue for historical drama, but doing so in a way that can materialize the present tense of the odes while dematerializing the fantasy space of the romances. King Stephen is, purposefully, his own project, a masculinizing of felt time into knowable time. It is a translation of pastness into history, of romance into real time, but always as a recuperation of what had been nearly lost to memory. In asserting a troubadourian posture for Keats's poetic play, I am not contesting the Shakespearean reading generally given to Keats's theory of the `camelion Poet' (to Richard Woodhouse, 27.10.1818).63 This reading of a poet who can delight as much in Iago as in Imogen is perhaps best thought through in Rzepka's reading of Keats's `theatrum mundi': `his sense, often expressed in the letters, that the social self is a ``theatrical'' phenomenon and life, at times, an `àcted play,'' a ``sentimental farce'' ' (Rzepka, `Theatrum Mundi' 35). The letters are, of course, also poetic masks, but Rzepka's dramatic reading, in which he argues that Otho the Great is Keats's attempt to ùnmask the `àcted play'' of society' (Rzepka, `Theatrum Mundi' 350) does not essentially undermine a reading of Keats's larger focus on the double meaning of `play' and its derivatives: act, action, enact. Indeed, Rzepka's hedge, `Keats's theatrical sense, however, can at times degenerate into a sceptical disengagement' (`Theatrum Mundi' 36), only confirms a troubadourian aesthetic still at work in Otho.64 If Keats has not yet forsworn his allegiance to Romantic medievalism with King Stephen, writing troubadour-style poems such as Ì cry your mercy, pity, love ± ay love!' just weeks after the heroic opening bid of




Stephen, that opening nevertheless bodes well: Ìf shame can on a soldier's vein-swollen front/spread deeper crimson than the battle's toil'. This will not be a drama of troubadourian wiliness, despite Keats's choice of a twelfth-century, troubadour-era subject. Evoking the war scenes of Shakespeare's history plays, Keats leaps into the fray with his first scene and first line given to the embattled protagonist. Stephen's manhood is highlighted by the first noun of that first line, which elicits all the knightly virtues embodied in the concept of honour. Stephen, grandson of William the Conqueror and nephew of Henry I, was the English king renowned for both usurpation and chivalry. He contested the crown of Matilda (Keats's Maud), daughter of Henry, yet when her half brother, the Earl of Gloucester, helped her invade England to retake the crown, Stephen famously provided her escort to Bristol to continue her campaign. A year and a half later, her forces captured Stephen at Lincoln, providing the setting for Keats's first act. As the chivalrous king, Maud's knights are dismayed at Stephen's tremendous valour (`He shames our victory'). Yet his honour is at once compelling and distressing: the drama focuses our sympathetic attention on his already fallen state (`Yonder my chivalry' evokes both Stephen's knights and comments on his own morality, with the same semantic play apparent in Òf honour forfeit'), while we become aware of the contradictions of an honour geared towards the usurpation of a woman's throne (Stephen had pledged, while Henry was still alive, to support Matilda as his successor). We are drawn to the paradox of his Lear-like embodiment of the patriarchal imperative as Stephen accepts his defeat at the synecdochal hands of Queen Maud. Keats's Gloucester is, like Shakespeare's Gloucester, the crucible for our comprehension of how a time may be òut of joint', a dislocation that unseats our present understanding rather than buttressing it. Indeed, King Stephen brings to a fine point the problem Keats has been struggling with through the romances and odes: the problem of a politicized temporality. His discovery of the intensity of presence in the lyrical moment of the odes ± a pressing of the troubadourian moment of high emotion into something that compares that affectively sublime possibility with times past and future, such as we find in Òde to a Nightingale' or Òde on a Grecian Urn' ± hides politics behind lyricism.65 The trodden generations of `Nightingale', a reference to his brother Tom that foretells the trodden masses at Peterloo just three months later, are part of the intensity of presence (past and future as the present moment) the odes evoke and invoke. This presence and its present tense ± both a tension and intensity ± provocatively fight against loss (embodied in Ruth, the nightingale,




the urn, the transitoriness of Psyche, and Autumn herself) even while it provokes a tradition altogether different from the medieval present tense of the love-lorn troubadour, one that contextualizes the conditions of loss within a socio-economic system that views loss itself as an elite privilege encoded in a transcendence of the here and now. Michael Halliday offers a clue to this alternative presence/presentness in his theory of functional grammar.66 Halliday proposes three `metafunctions' distinguishable at the sentence level: ideational (producing a mental picture of reality), interpersonal and textual. Within the ideational function, a system of `transitivity' composed of different `processes' between participants and circumstances is at work: material (the external world), mental (inner experience and consciousness), and relational (relating, classifying, and identifying) processes (Introduction 107). The mental process is what constitutes the awareness of the present experience, the here and now. Research using this and similar theories of mental processes has focused on the predilection of the twentiethcentury British working class for the `here and now' in their spoken language; linguists have found that the routines of labour for the working class, which rely on speech rather than literacy, force workers to think about time in terms of the present and its continuation as a present moment.67 We have seen Coleridge use the ode to transcend the present, to draw his localized and minutely felt experience into a universal scheme that escapes minutes and hours; Keats uses past and future in his odes to dramatize the inescapability of presentness and presentation, to be unable to fly with the nightingale. The implication of this resistance to troubadour tradition, in its idealization of the lady as synecdoche for class privilege, is a levelling one. Although Keats's new ode evokes the troubadour tradition through its use of the sonnet as a formal unit, the imbrication of sonnets, one laced upon the other, produces a form that uses constraint to tie the temporal frame down, to declare it. There is no lady in the odes, but there are generations trodden down, lost and yet held by the ode's very form, by the power of the poetic voice's self-invocation. Memory is at once distanced and brought to yield; presence is both allegorized and implicated in fact. King Stephen uses the dramatic genre to revisit this temporal problem in terms of a historical event made material through facts and chronology rather than fiction and allegory. Nothing in this play allows for the subjective memories or felt time of St. Agnes, Isabella or Lamia. Yet the dramatic passion resists distancing and compels presence and presentness. Stephen's and Maud's stature would seem a step back from the achievement of the odes with their levelling impulse. But Stephen




himself represents an alternative history, one whose line did not generate, either through his chivalry or his son Eustace. What we cannot know is how Keats envisioned the troubadour's conflict with chivalry in terms of Stephen's story, yet we have a sense of the temporal and critical dynamic at work from Otho. The reader's immediate reference is a literary and historical knowledge of medieval chivalry, not as a vehicle for romance but as past spirit, a way of being in the past. This is a time out of joint, however, since chivalry already seems antiquated in the play, and is in this case disingenuous. Anticipating incompetent reading, Keats forestalls the reader's impulse to romanticize Stephen's act by pointing out the impropriety of such an interpretation through Gloucester's admiration for Stephen. Chester notes that Gloucester: Full soldier as he is, and without peer In counsel, dreams too much among his books. It may read well, but sure 'tis out of date To play the Alexander with Darius. (31±4, emphasis mine) The warning is to the reader as much as to Gloucester; anachronistic emotion, especially when it is textually inspired, is a dangerous temptation. Yet it is Stephen whose chivalry provides his downfall through his inability to realize Maud as a synecdoche of patriarchal power, as not herself a `lady'. Maud makes us realize that Burke's famous rhetorical rescue of Marie Antoinette is also out of joint, for she is, like Maud, a representative of power and not an individual for the mob who attacks her. But when Maud reacts indignantly to this same warning, the play breaks off. Her response ± that of another kind of incompetent reading ± is too unlike Madeline's ability to be touched by Porphyro's revealingly resistant strategies. That is to say, his sexual transgression is the same as her father's protection of her in that both assert patriarchal priorities over her self-determination. The dramatic possibility of multiple perspectives is itself a danger, and Maud is disturbingly uncontainable. Historically, Matilda was arrogant, causing the citizens of London to rebel against her at her coronation; Maud's hauteur makes her an inaccessible and rejecting troubadourian beloved, but for Keats such arrogance makes her, like the bluestocking (and too much like Marie Antoinette), unworthy of that adoration. Indeed, Maud is proleptic where Gloucester is anachronistic: he interprets the world as classically heroic (heroism before the ascendance of a self-contradictory chivalry),




while she interprets it through contemporary female self-importance (Maud as an ill-read bluestocking). She cannot be history's true love: a Mary, Queen of Scots, or even an Elizabeth. And if Stephen is a historical solecism ± chivalry as the simultaneous attack on and protection of women ± then the paradox (that chivalry is both attitudes as one) is as revealing of cultural foundations as Keats's other revelations: the mercantilism of Isabella, the sexuality of St. Agnes, the tyranny of patriarchy in Otho.68 As a heroic figure, his actions signify the very problem with old forms of power, from chivalry to usurpation. As a usurper, Stephen is at once Napoleon captive and silenced, and Henry Hunt ineffectively attempting a call to action on the hustings at Peterloo. The patriarchal abuse of protection that inheres in chivalry (women needed to be protected because of patriarchy's structural necessity for attacks on them), is implicated in women's demerit as deserving of protection; both realizations are as fundamental to Keats's England as are the other cultural ironies in need of `smoking'. King Stephen shows us that for Keats, the displacement of romance by history, and of female readership by male, or at least by knowing readers, is necessary to the end goal of a literary vision. Although critical opinion has consistently evaluated the dramas as failures, and as clear efforts to make literature pay, I want to take seriously Keats's dramatic efforts.69 Romance lovers must be abandoned for historically real men of stature, Otto and Stephen, who are (unlike Porphyro) of real consequence. Their resurrected histories, viewed as a grand style in which their failures are too large compared to the little acts of everyday life, make them useful critiques of the grand style of event-histories, or a corollary to historical painting. There, political success encodes a historical narrative; here, political failure makes the deaths of men still signifying and memorable against the treading down of sentimental remembrance.70 If in the romances Keats attempts to out-do Spenser through a questing for quest (an inability to locate a problem worth solving, a questing worth questing for), in the history plays his trial is to not out-do Shakespeare but to become him as a revealer of time's flaws, an embracer of time's ironies, a resister of the saccharine memories of felt time. The point is to render drama from melodrama, real blood from aquatint, real history from felt time, in order to produce the possibility of action. Even so, Keats's tragedy is that of grand actions, turning from levelling to the problem of being weighted with a past where grand action could lead to forgetting rather than to history, and chivalry from a manly ethos to a self-deceiving one. To intervene in the present moment is, for the troubadour, to provide the critical angle necessary to destabilize histor-






ical ideologies. Even so, Keats's tragic vision does not answer the women poets' critique of Romantic medievalism, that its romance hurts present time by refuting the past's human woes, its damages to bodies and families, its ravagement in the name of courtesy.71


5

The battle of the books had gradually narrowed the focus in the old quarrel between the ancients and the moderns to one commanding issue . . . the controversy was above all about history, about how to read and understand past authors, and about how to recapture and represent past customs, institutions, and events. Joseph M. Levine, Battle of the Books1 If Keats was the most troubadourian of the Romantics, Percy Bysshe Shelley was the most excessive. This excess can be seen in Shelley's philosophy of love as well as in his knightly offensives in political poetry and manifestos, his half-serious Spenserian nickname, Èlfin Knight', and self-mocking signature, `the knight of the shield of shadow and the lance of gossamere'.2 What Shelley understood about the current state of poetry was its investment in history, although he did not locate this investment in medievalism alone, but developed his own genealogy from Plato to neo-Platonism and Dante to Romantic thought. The historicism of this thought develops in response to Godwin's critique of Shelley's early writings as anti-historicist: `What excellent effects do we reap, even at this day, from the feudal system and from chivalry!'3 As David Duff notes, Godwin's point is that Shelley needs to overcome his `dismissive, impatient attitude to the past: an attitude typical of ``fervent and impetuous reformers'' ' (Romance and Revolution 137). Shelley responds by thoroughly rethinking his attitude to the past, particularly in his philosophy of expansive love. His is a genealogy of love that represents a troubadourian perspective resonant with the problem of political hypocrisy and casuistry disguised as chivalry. 146



The Shelleys on Love

Shelley was deeply interested in how to re-present past thought, past emotion, past cultures. It is part of his theory of translation that to learn a language requires a whole-language approach rather than a dictionary; so, too, with foreign cultures.4 In The Cenci, he attempts not to translate past events into present terms, but to represent the past within its own terms and its own morality. The translation consists in being able to see how the past is the past, but still living as a past: that is, to translate the viewing self in relation to the past.5 Translation is important to Shelley's theory of love for several reasons: he develops his theory out of texts such as Plato's which he translates in order to make them his own; his understanding of universal love is that it derives from a translation of individual or true love; he uses translation as a creative and productive resource, as a generative process related to the processes of love; he understands that translation always produces a different textual and subjective vision. Translation becomes a metaphor for poetry, courtly love and sublimation in both its troubadourian and Romantic sublime manifestations (that is, as a dissolution into the beloved, and as a transcendence). His genealogy of love, which he develops from his translation of Plato's Symposium through Dante's troubadourian poetry to contemporary theories of sensibility and morality, also produces a self-translation, specifically into the visionary of Òde to the West Wind'. But it is what else his love system allows him to do that provokes Mary Shelley and leads her to contest troubadourism in her fiction. What the curve of Shelley's thinking about translation and love aim towards is the incredible momentum of 1819's annus mirabilis, with the rapid-fire production of Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Peter Bell the Third and Òde to the West Wind'. As for the miraculous years of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and Keats, Shelley's annus mirabilis is largely coloured by medievalist works, and as for the others, these works are clear responses to the temper of the times. But if the rapid momentum of 1819's events spurred on Keats's poetic momentum, his drive towards poetic forms that could contain his vision matching in developmental speed the developing assemblies of demonstrators, Shelley had always been a highly self-conscious artist, both politically and artistically. He did not need the troubadour figure to work through historical and critical parallels; rather, he enacted that figure. The radicalized Èlfin Knight' had little need of medievalism to aid in embracing the newly historical self-consciousness, yet the troubadour posture enabled him to develop a strategy of continuous play. However, the distinction between the pre- and post-Waterloo years, and the distinguishing of Peterloo as a watershed event, are not such



The Shelleys on Love 147

clear-cut indicators of a new historical self-consciousness if we see the Romantics as using medievalism throughout the period to historicize themselves. The important difference of the late 1810s is that they had begun using the recent past to historicize the present. Whereas, up to the death of Napoleon, medievalism was useful as a fantasy of what had been in order to act out the present tense, after 1815 epochal events from the recent past could provide a model against which to measure posterior events, present events and anticipated future events (Shelley's Revolt of Islam and Mary Shelley's The Last Man both use the French Revolution for their models, for instance, but the lateness of the novel produces a claim against action, effectively aestheticizing Shelley's political poem). Because anticipation lacks the active energy of envisioning, the period initiated by 1820 loses its drive and, ironically, becomes a taming and aestheticizing one. This momentum from the active to the passive, from the event to its aestheticization, is ironic because it works against the drive of Romantic medievalism which, from the beginning, used the medieval past figuratively and aesthetically in order to produce and/or reflect vital change in the present. But after 1819, aestheticization works differently: Shelley's The Cenci and Mary Shelley's Valperga both castigate the past rather than romanticize it. This chapter focuses on two very different but integrally related visions of medievalism: Shelley's personal troubadourism, both politically and in his embrace of free love, as held off against the death of chivalry in Renaissance culture; and Mary Shelley's late medieval fictions of female chivalry which hold off the claims of patriarchy on true love, and provide a model of individual responsibility for her vision of the future.6 In both cases Renaissance culture is deliberately contrasted with a prior medievalism; the difference is clarified as one between love and unlove, showing how the chivalric order cannot be sustained as a present day remedy. Through courtly love medievalism provides a historically valid setting for this love/unlove opposition; through the past/ present relation medievalism also offers both Shelleys a way to reflect on love/unlove in personal and political ways. Although Mary Shelley wrote several poems, her medievalist writings are too important to leave out of this study because they specifically take part in the medievalist poetics that grounds the poetry of the Byron± Shelley circle. To develop this train of thought, I draw on Tilottama Rajan's distinction of a Romantic prose intergenre which she terms àutonarration', in which a writer's characters and plot developments are assembled from recognizable aspects of people and events in her own life: Àutonarration allowed her [Mary Shelley] to think through




the cultural and emotional configurations in which she was inscribed by transposing them onto the mirror-stage of a virtual reality.'7 Frankenstein begins this process by projecting not her own ego (as in Freudian theory) but recognizable aspects of P. B. Shelley's ego on to the fictional landscape as Victor, Clerval, Walton and Felix, which are then critiqued as destructively self-engrossed. In The Cenci and Epipsychidion, P. B. Shelley similarly critiques Mary, first through Beatrice Cenci's turn from forgiving love to parricide, then through the portrayal of Mary as a secondary love object to the primacy of Emilia.8 Both of these focal critiques, Mary Shelley's of her troubadourian husband and P. B. Shelley's of his wife's rejection of him, centre on the problem of courtly love. The fiction of courtly love is an early influence on Shelley's thought. Even in his first marriage he translated free love as courtly love's triangulation of poet, knight and lady into a relationship between Harriet, Hogg and himself. He then attempted to establish it between Mary, Hogg and himself; both triangles were formed in order to complete the bond between the two men which resembles the `calculus of power' ReneÂ Girard has traced through the erotic triangles that structure Western literature.9 Mary's depressive rejection of him for his liaisons and the deaths of their children allowed Shelley to position Mary variously. The record of Mary Shelley's response to her husband's troubadourism is more ambiguous, ranging from deep private frustrations to public promotion of his genius, to a fictional adoption of the female knight character. Her public comment on his attitude towards poetic love appended to `Rosalind and Helen' is clear and useful, however: `When he spoke of it [love] as the law of life, which inasmuch as we rebel against we err and injure ourselves and others, he promulgated that which he considered an irrefragable truth' (M Shelley, Complete Poetical Works 209). Love is a `law', a first principle; when it is embraced a poetic vision is put in place. Reflecting the centrality of love to Spenser's Faerie Queene, P. B. Shelley's conception likewise views love as a paradigmatic vehicle that, when off-course, can disrupt larger harmonies.10 Epipsychidion was Shelley's final great expression of personal love, Prometheus Unbound his final great expression of political love, and The Cenci his great exploration of private unlove that generates political unlove. The Cenci literally comes between the other two works: P. B. Shelley began fragments that led to the Epipsychidion in the same year that he began Prometheus, which was interrupted to write The Cenci. The Epipsychidion, written as a triangulation between the poet, the sunEmilia and the moon-Mary, is also P. B. Shelley's most fully troubadourian poem in that it associates the courtly beloved with his long-held




belief in the dual nature of woman, and does so in order to compete with another male poet (in this case, one of the medieval greats, Dante). But The Cenci also participates in this project: it is the opposite case, with Beatrice Cenci proving the dark or negative position for the ideal Beatrice Portinari, their duality asserted in order to compete with another poet on the subjects of love and politics (in this case, one of the modern greats, Byron).

Courtly love Shelleyan love, especially through the influence of Dante's love poetry, borrows much from courtly love.11 Foremost is what Mary Shelley does not include in her description, the relation between love and language, and a more political account of motive. Troubadour posturing values intensity over morality while directing its tensions at the homosocial relations between poet and male members of the audience; and it is summarily masculine. The troubadour song is simply love bound by war. The lady grounds the triangulations of power that are encoded into our very base of a cultural and imaginative symbolic, and thus into our most fundamental narrative structures.12 Curiously, these lines of sympathy and absence ± lines which markedly contrast with the feminine sympathy and presence of the later literature of sensibility ± are the product of a rediscovery of Platonic texts and doctrine which highly influenced the elite fashion of courtly entertainment. Dante had already achieved a blend of courtly and Christian love as idealized love, but a more Humanist version was needed. Neo-Platonism achieved its full development in fifteenthcentury Italy due to the scholarly work of Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and the German mystic, Nicolas de Cuse, which included translations of Plato's Dialogues and a commentary on the Symposium.13 Importantly, Mirandola belonged to Ficino's Accademia Platonica, which produced the concept of Platonic love; their achievements were continued by the sixteenth-century Florentine Academy and the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists, whose project to combat Hobbesian selfishness with a view of human sympathy as the key to virtuous action, and the passions as its motivational force, is clearly continued in Shelley's theory of love. But the Platonic lineage can also be determined from a different genealogy: that of Arabic scholarship, Persian courtly poetry, and Moorish transmission of Eastern aristocratic culture through southern Europe, particularly Provence. This genealogical transmission, to which P. B. Shelley was sensitive, occurred much earlier, its influence




felt in the Languedoc region in the twelfth century, and its prior Platonism heavily spiced with an òriental luxury' not replicated in the fifteenth-century revival of Platonic thought.14 The Shelley who passionately argued for free love had early on read deeply in classical and medieval texts in order to situate his own claims about the nature of love in the modern world. There is a concurrence between the classical and medieval that can be seen in Shelley's thinking about them: The Symposium was translated in 1818, the same year in which he wrote `Scene from Tasso', and `Song from Tasso', and his most troubadourian poem, Epipsychidion, bears a classically derived title. But between 1818 and 1819 something occurred that changed how Shelley thought about love, and the way he expressed it by 1821. That something has been variously interpreted, from the political events in England and Italy, to the deaths of his children and emotional estrangement from Mary Shelley, to increasing disappointment at his literary reception. However we construct this overdetermination, it is at this point that he conjoined what he learned from Tasso with Dante's idealized true love, and held it up against the light of current history. The personal love of Epipsychidion (1821) glosses the political agitation of 1819; and the political abuses of 1819 can be viewed as patriarchal ones, comprehensible through the patriarchal abuses of medieval, and more specifically, Renaissance culture. Plato's Symposium proved indispensable to Shelley's thinking on love and the love object. In translating it he felt he was uncovering a gap in literary and scholarly endeavour: why should there be a prohibition against translating this text simply because of its easy talk about sexual and homosexual matters?15 Plato was influential for Romantics such as Wieland, Rousseau and Godwin.16 The Symposium, entitled The Banquet by Shelley in a curious interlay of taste, sex and philosophy, concerns a philosophical discussion of love that is to set the tone for the later debates of the medieval courts of love. Although the courts of love were ladies' courts, convened by the lady of the house for the entertainment of both sexes through intricate word games about heterosexual love and erotic warfare, these women were influenced by Platonic texts stimulated by Boethius' philosophy, and so the format for their discussions of love were arranged similarly to that of Plato, as Castiglione's description of such a court bears out. In Agathon's house where Plato's banquet takes place, the `father of the discussion', who is the desseminator rather than master, is chosen to establish the rules of the debate which more powerful members will challenge. In Castiglione's account, Emilia Pia is chosen by the duchess




to be `mother' of the discussion, and powerful male courtiers are free to attempt to revise her rules which she can only maintain through her own wit and political strategy.17 Wit is likewise necessary in the Socratic circle, for Pausanias' dismissal of Phaedrus as father of the debate revises Phraedrus' rules. Rhetoric is the ground of the battle being fought, but sex is what is at stake.18 Pausanias' dismissal makes it clear that there is here not only a question of ease of manners (for Castiglione, sprezzatura, or the courtier's affectation of natural ease) but of the manner of discrimination, the matter of taste. In putting down Phaedrus and his effeminate imprecision, Pausanias dismisses all femininity, including that which produces a male beloved. This tautology is overcome by defeminizing love itself: for Pausanias love is inseparable from Aphrodite, but Aphrodite as primordial and untainted, displacing Phaedrus's primordial male element. Pausanias' sexual gaming reveals the significance of the Symposium as, according to Michel Foucault, a central cultural text for `the use of pleasure'. It grounds and distributes cosmic sexuality according to a pleasing hegemony in which the relation between paiderasts and philerasts (loving boys and the men who love them) becomes `true love'.19 But for Shelley, women are necessary agencies for the enlargement of the soul, and so he responds to Plato in his `Discourse on Manners' by writing about why Greek women were kept out of this love relation. The games played with T. J. Hogg and Edward Williams over Elizabeth Shelley, Mary Godwin and Jane Williams, or the game played in subverting Timothy Shelley's control through marriage to Harriet Westerbrook, and William Godwin's control through eloping with Mary even while married to Harriet, are all versions of Shelley's need to work out homosocial aggressions within troubadour triangles of relation and patronage. But they do so by virtue of the woman, not in her absence, and thus establish Shelley as a special case within a troubadourian poetics. Indeed, Notopoulos insists that Shelley was translating The Symposium for Mary: `Shelley's immediate object was the conversion of Mary' to a love of Athenian culture;20 for her to love a culture that misogynated women would mean a successful translation of the Platonic form to contemporary manners. That is, to love the lady means to make homosexuality an appreciable discourse; talking to the lady is essentially the process of working out a metadiscourse of homosociality addressed to the lord or circle of men. As translator, then, Shelley acts out the figure of the metadiscourse as a self-translation, poet into process, homosex from heterosex, manly love as true love. To do this is to recognize the translation inherent in medieval women's courts that turned Plato into




a heterosexual neo-Platonism that ironically elevates women. The lineage of love requires a strong intervention between classical and medieval postures, narratives and ideologies to bridge the gap between Platonic love and true love, and Shelley's feverish reading and writing from 1819 to 1822 signal how intent he was on coming to terms with a troubadourian neo-Platonism within a Romantic idealism. When Shelley wrote his `Discourse'21 as a companion piece to the Platonic translation, he noted that àll the inventive arts maintain, as it were, a sympathetic connection between each other, being no more than various expressions of one internal power, modified by different circumstances, either of an individual, or of society'. Sympathy becomes the agency by which a discourse on love would translate drive into accomplishment: Shelley wrote the `Discourse' during a period of poetic blockage, and his manner of thinking the intercourse through as a cultural difference becomes a translative vehicle that heals.22 Furthermore, this essay is an intermediate step in Shelley's thought on the dimension of sexual energy and its hetero/homo sociology. The genealogy of this thought combines the seemingly opposed schools of thought of the Scottish Enlightenment, Godwinian necessitarianism, Greek and Eastern mythologies. He does not amalgamate whole systems of theory, but takes what correlates between systems to produce a way of making sense of his own ambivalences and incongruities. Love is ineffable rather than physical, affective rather than explicitly sexual, as his translation of the following makes clear: `[Love is] the love of that which is not within its reach . . . [love is] that which it wants' (Ingpen and Peck, The Complete Works 195). As Shelley comments in his essay on this text, the act of sexual love means nothing compared to the mystical aesthetics that elevate passion to a universal good. Yet the universal must be discoverable in the particular: `the person selected as the subject of this gratification should be as perfect and beautiful as possible . . . the perfection of intercourse consisting, not perhaps in a total annihilation of the instinctive sense'. This is the Dantean beloved, and his intercourse with her is a mystical `gratification' that elevates the spirit beyond self. Shelley's and Byron's Genevan conversations about ideal love and the complementary soul mate, and their poetic incorporations of such soul mates as Alastor's Veiled Maid, and the incestuous beloveds of Revolt of Islam and Manfred, reveal just how homosocial and narcissistic this conception is. Ideal love must be recalled to the originary nature of voice and the genius of composition. To this end Shelley's translation takes on a kind of synaesthesia, a melding of emotive and sympathetic experience, as




necessary to the verbal expression of love. Metaphor is in itself a form of synaesthesia or displacement of sensation, making love into fusion through sheer language, the dissolution of otherness. For Shelley, translation is the same as true love, functioning as the metaphor for poetic creativity. In Òn Life' he argues for an arbitrary distinction between objects and our perceptions of them by noting that for children: [t]he words I, you, they are not signs of any actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind . . . We are on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of how little we know.23 His transcendent vertigo is apparent in poems such as Òde to the West Wind', but also in other works and, as Harold Bloom insists, this vertigo or I-you-they is really a differentiation between the I-Thou and I-It as defined by Martin Buber. `The I of the `Òde'' is the I of the primary work I-Thou, and is therefore a different I from that of the primary I-It. Since many critics insist on this second I when they evaluate . . . poems by Shelley, they are simply misreading when they think they are condemning.'24 The intensity of rapture combined with identificatory dissolution is here birth (the imaginative child) rather than death (the poet who is swept like dead leaves by the wind). It is this dissolution which is intensely troubadourian. Shelley saw the possibility inherent in playing the troubadour to one woman (say, Emilia), while philosophizing what he is doing to Mary Shelley, while re-enacting Dante's intellectual passion for Beatrice as Dante. There is endless play at work in his vertiginous configurations, but the self is salved. He can fragment the beloved into possibilities that allow him to retain an essential and grounded unity of self despite his dance between subject positions (the first and the second Ì', the I-you-they, Shelley to Mary, Shelley to Byron, Shelley as Dante). Troubadour poetry provides the essential structure for this play. As Webb notes, Ìt was as a poet of love that Dante exerted perhaps his greatest influence over Shelley. . . Epipsychidion is perhaps the most perfect instance of how Shelley's translations interlock with his original work' (Violet in the Crucible 291). Shelley's poem develops from his translations of the Vita Nuova, the Convito, and Dante's commentary in order to fit his theory of love to his recent infatuation with Èmilia', Teresa Viviani, imprisoned by her father in her convent and in need of a




`chivalrous deliverer' (Violet in the Crucible 296). But his intention, expressed to John Gisborne, was that the poem would lead to a larger project: `But I intend to write a Symposium of my own to set all this right' (Jones, Letters II, 263). Whether the new Symposium would be the manifesto on poetry, or a dialogue on love (premised not on Plato but Dante's `Symposium') cannot be known, and Shelley's subsequent rejection of his poem suggests that he had realized the Dantean version of courtly love as inadequate before being able to write this particular defence. In a close analysis of Shelley's declaration of poetic status as that of `the unacknowledged legislator' in the Defence he did write, Paul Dawson lays out the terms of Shelley's worldview. The sympathetic imagination is not merely the communicative faculty of the sensitive, elite mind, but a constitutive power of the imagination in which the self is created.25 Shelley thus synthesizes eighteenth-century theories concerning the social force of sympathy and sensibility, allowing him to assert the poet's special gifts over those of his readers. They also enable him to utilize the gift Dante offers his fellow poets in La Vita Nuova of a new vision: that the sympathy of lovers and the sensitivity of troubadour poets can forge a more cosmic communicative network by which the transformed beloved is a pathway to God's divine word. But importantly for Shelley's understanding of love, Dante takes the troubadourian beloved and further silences and absents her through her death. Dante's `new life' reassesses the role of the lady from that of love, to a vehicle of the inner psychodrama of the poet's imaginative soul. One important aspect of Dante's late medieval vision was to show how corrupt that society was, and how in need it was of the moral vision Beatrice provides. For Shelley, Renaissance Italy is an even more telling illustration of political and social corruption, and more poignant for its utter disregard for love and love's moral power.

Renaissance love: The Cenci If Coleridge and Wordsworth began the post-Thermidorian stage of their careers by writing medieval historical tragedies, a similar coalescence occurs for the second generation Romantics in the post-Waterloo period as a way of ending their careers, with medievally set dramas by Byron, Keats, Shelley and, slightly later, Hemans (Mary Shelley's only dramas, published in gift annuals, use classical myth rather than medieval history for their vehicle). Certainly the later writers are influenced by the historical direction in which Joanna Baillie's plays, staged and unstaged,




took contemporary theatre. The revenge plot she sets forth in De Montfort becomes a standard by which Byron, Shelley and Hemans chose their dramatic subjects of emotional crux, while Keats's choices in Otho and King Stephen adhere more to the Scott-like choice of historical crux. At the same time, the rage for melodrama, with its starkly Gothic settings and high emotions, provided an impetus of another kind. As an emotional palette, melodrama could be incorporated into the setting and plot, but its sheer visuality had to be resisted with a return to a more factual history, and to the foregrounding of language and its possibilities. Baillie's Shakespearean language and theoretic approach to pathos provides a base, melodrama provides the hues, Scott provides the audience appetite for historical settings, but it is the drama of the times that focuses poetic talent on the past as a way to see through the present. The Cenci is Shelley's answer to both current politics and audience appetite. But unlike much of his work, this play does not show the power of redemptive love, but rather condemns the beloved for her unsustained love. His choice of Beatrice Cenci was inspired by the prison portrait supposed to be by Guido, supposedly of her, showing a woman both sorrowful and peaceful, and radiating sympathetic love like that of Prometheus and Laon. But Shelley writes against this portrait by showing what the choice of revenge over love produces. In doing so, he works through the failure of chivalric mores in the Renaissance culture of casuistry for both men and women. Chandler points to De Quincey's important reflection on casuistry in `Casuistry and Duelling', where he argues that everyday morality needs to be supplemented by casuistry because ordinary occurrences cannot be reduced to a grammar of decidable options; life is too variegated for the black and white of an absolute decidability. Drama, as Shelley recognizes, allows the shades of grey to be posed and judged. What the Spa Fields riot, the suspension of Habeas Corpus and the Seditious Meetings Act, prosecutions for seditious libel, the Peterloo Massacre, the Cato Street Conspiracy and Queen Caroline's divorce trial made all too clear was that events which transcend the everyday, yet are not the grand events of full scale war, can also pose problems of moral decidability. Baillie's dramatic theory, produced in the post-Thermidorian period, still has applicability for that of post-Waterloo. Her plan is to draw up a grammar of passions in order that we comprehend better our sympathetic response to dramatic situations in life, providing the supplemental court De Quincey requires. Baillie's first volume of plays is the most useful, not just for the Ìntroductory Discourse', but because it contains two of her most successful plays, Count Basil and De Montfort (the play




Byron praises in his Preface to Marino Faliero). As Baillie explains in the `Discourse', her plan was to pair plays in order to elucidate the passions: De Montfort, a play delineating hate, is countered with Count Basil, a play about love.26 Indeed, it is a medieval play about true love, professed by a valiant warrior for a lady above his station; the plot revolves around Basil's participation in the war against Francis I. De Montfort complements Basil's story of true love with a story of implacable hatred with Renaissance and Gothic tonalities.27 Together they provide the affective arena and historical setting for Shelley's Renaissance drama. As for character, Baillie's interest in passion as the focal point is also important for Shelley's project: ìt is the passion and not the man which is held up to our execration'; moreover, the passion must revolve in the breast of a good character to hold our interest, because `[a] decidedly wicked character can never be interesting' (Introductory Discourse 65). Baillie's theory rests on the belief that people enjoy satisfying the `sympathetick propensity of our minds' regarding the visible and psychological aspects of other people's responses to extraordinary situations (specifically the `calamity' of impending execution) and extremes of emotion. This sympathy can be extended only when the viewer is safely distanced from the danger or emotion, and in `no wise concerned with [a man's] fury or the objects of it' (4, 10). Baillie's theory, that the viewer is fascinated by what does not touch him, puts a different light on the uses of drama. Rather than making spectacle, it should work more like poetry, drawing the viewer into the sympathetic and feeling engagement with the encountered individual. Nevertheless, a distance does exist that allows the spectator to view the stage as if viewing the scaffold, watching with sympathy, as if it were possible to know what the condemned experiences without getting close enough to actually know (wanting èvery circumstance connected with [the execution], except the very act itself of inflicting death': 6). This distance, she asserts, allows us to regard much more highly charged scenes, a thesis that would mark the drama as preferable for those scenarios where different perspectives, belief systems and positions of power clash under the aegis of heightened emotion, and where under such conditions (as in duelling) it becomes difficult to know absolute right from absolute wrong. The proper response for Baillie is not to `know', but to follow the heart in responding to a moral problem. Knowing, however, has everything to do with believing the person on trial is like us in some way. Baillie is clear that the criminal she is interested in is the essentially good individual who has struggled with




passion (`bad passion does more strongly evince its pernicious and dangerous nature, when we see it . . . destroying the good gifts of heaven': 65). This is the individual whom we both know and do not know. The reciprocity of the heimlich and unheimlich that Freud explores in his Das Unheimliche (1919) is especially relevant to understanding the relation between love, sympathy and the strange passions of criminality: the doppleganger is both self and a dying into the other, the other as one's own unconscious. For Freud, the only proper agent available to deemphasize the frightfulness inherent in either category of the past or the unconscious is scientific reason: a clear cognizance. But for Baillie the only proper agent is the passions, through which we connect our own experience with that of the criminal mind: It cannot be any pleasure we receive from the sufferings of a fellowcreature which attracts such multitudes of people to a publick execution . . . To see a human being bearing himself up under such circumstances, or struggling with the terrible apprehensions which such a situation impresses, must be the powerful incentive, which makes us press forward to behold what we shrink from, and wait with trembling expectation for what we dread. (Introductory Discourse 5) Baillie's theory of sentimental understanding as applied to violent emotions gives us a way to understand Shelley's complex remediation of Plato, Dante and the historical nature of current affairs (what George Henry Lewes will later call Shelley's `poetry of the passions'28). Unlike hate, which is a use of affect against an alienated object, love is a synthesis of idealization and affect: the ideal object has to be desired with passion. But desire extends beyond the lady's body to the political, to her lord, and involves hate. Courtly love is the uncanny canonized ± the translation of the love object into always just beyond knowledge ± as a metaphoric displacement of what is cannily/politically known. It is highly stylized precisely because it has nothing to do with love as a passionate experience, and everything to do with uncanny desire, which is always politically refracted. When desire becomes a violating condition, true love is cancelled, but its corollary is the unreal love of fin amors. Without real love, the stylized affect of fin amors means that passion must enter language through metaphor, for metaphor as displacement in the Freudian sense approximates the nature of love. Figure not only represents passion, both dramatically and poetically, but represents the violation of passion as well.




For Shelley, metaphor and its absence become the mode for moving from love to unlove. Furthermore, when love is violated by hate, with what passions does the love object struggle in her breast? As intrinsic as this question is to Beatrice Cenci's character, it is excluded from consideration in Èpipsychidion'. These two works function as mirrors of each other, revolving around the love object and producing Shelley's own much more historically layered theory of passion. In The Cenci it is the voice of conscience that becomes contested (Cenci says, `Concience! Oh, thou most insolent of lies!'), that serves up the instability of the times as a problem of medieval casuistry, an inability to follow the heart which Baillie points to.29 Instead of providing dramatic catharsis, Shelley's play problematizes tragedy by making its historicity uncanny even as it strikes our sympathy. We maintain our distance from Beatrice in order to have a supplementary way to comprehend, even to judge, her translation from the ideal object (however treated) to the casuist (who treats things however). In this she contrasts with the self-deluded Victoria of Baillie's Count Basil, who mistakes Basil's true love for her, and in doing so plays with his honour. Basil's suicide follows the realization that he has evaded battle for the sake of mere love. Beatrice rewrites Victoria: she is not beloved but hated, and her self-delusion consists not in doing what she believes to be in the service of another (as Victoria's is), but in believing that bringing on another's death is a righteous act. Victoria comprehends her part in Basil's destruction at the end; Beatrice insists on her innocence even though it means that three others will suffer torture in her place. (Importantly, Shelley has revised history here; the real Beatrice Cenci did undergo excruciating torture, and did withstand it successfully.30) Beatrice's `righteous' murder could be seen as a figure before the fact for the state's rationalization for sending armed soldiers against peaceful demonstrators at the Peterloo Massacre. But for Shelley, it is Beatrice's revenge that is the issue; she should have met evil with love, returning `the most enormous injuries' with `kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the injurer from his dark passions by peace and love. Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes' (preface to The Cenci). As a woman, Beatrice is an apt figure for the working-class agitators; both are disallowed from knightly deeds, both are highly suspect when acting out of place.31 Unlike Beatrice's revenge, which implicates her in the same transgression she is revolting against, Shelley hopes the `men of England' will be able to make passive resistance. The distance Shelley travels from neo-Platonism to The Cenci, from love to unlove, has much to do with national unrest, oppressive governments,




and a new anxiety about historical progress. It will necessitate a return trip to love and idealism in Èpipsychidion'. Shelley's philosophical questing was for a mediation between Godwinian necessitarianism, Bentham's theory of motivation32 and a defensible sensibility. The position he constructed suffers a set-back in the face of an event such as Peterloo and the belief shared by many that a British revolution was imminent:33 as Shelley writes to Leigh Hunt in December 1819, Ì suppose we shall soon have to fight in England' ( J. Chandler, England in 1819 21). His response was to intensify his troubadour position, through the excessive casuistry of Cenci's Rome, a philosophical relativism that both compels his own play and by comparison normalizes his uncanny morality. James Chandler reads Adam Smith's theory of sentiment, which informs Baillie's dramatic theory, as a rejection of casuistry: emotional decisions on how to act and respond should supplant cognitive ones based on a moral system.34 In The Cenci, Shelley dramatizes the need for a moral ground between sentiment and reason. Pure casuistry is a problem exactly because it can lead to sophistry ± taking contingency for determination ± and to revenge. But pure sentiment can lead to abuse, inviting vengeful passions. What is needed is a poetic morality, but one that cannot be comprehended until the problem with sentiment and casuistry is dramatically identified.35 What Peterloo raises is probabilism: a violent option is permissible because sanctioned by an authoritative need to avoid a domestic French Revolution, even though a more correct option is also available. What courtly love raises is the opposite spectre: a seemingly absolute order, where choices are constrained by predetermined options: not the laws of necessity but an imaginative confinement. What Shelley illustrates in The Cenci is balance between these two: to reveal how, from the available options, people can come to believe in one alone. A probabilistic culture kills ideality, for probabilism diseases reason just as abuse diseases sentiment. In posing a pathological universe Shelley hopes to actuate in the audience a recognition of the obverse possibility. Ì have endeavoured as nearly as possible to represent the characters as they probably were', Shelley claims in his preface to the drama, but instead of probability he has dramatized the probabilism of the Cencis' culture, one that appears to vanquish contingency and contributes to Beatrice's mistranslation from a courtly beloved to a casuist. Renaissance Rome, as Shelley points out in his preface, is heavily tainted by jesuitical casuistry, and its weight is more destructive than Cenci's incest. `Beatrice's acquired capacity for self-justification is what makes her homicidal scheme both possible and ``necessary,'' [so that] one could say that the gradual immersion of her




conscience in the murky medium of casuistry amounts to nothing less than the play's primary line of development' ( J. Chandler, England in 1819 504, 505). Beatrice drowns in the `murkiness' of Renaissance hypocritical patriarchy, in her self-deceiving turn to casuistry's cloaking of revenge as something else, and not in the torment of her abusive home in this reading. In Shelley's representation of Renaissance culture, he not only produces a sophisticated reply to Baillie's grammar of affect; he also finds a way to stage the current tolerance for political abuses. What Chandler is claiming for The Cenci is that its drama is presented not to reveal a righteous interpretation to the audience, but to stage the spectator's own deliberative process, `the moral spectacle of [casuistic] deliberation itself', and `the institutional means by which they [such deliberations] are conducted' (England in 1819 507). Similarly, Andrew Bennett claims that Shelley's poetry generally achieves a self-translation in the reader such that the act of reading takes over the mental experience: the poem's structure `not only inhabits the ``mind'' of the reader but in fact becomes, or impersonates, the reader. . . [who is then] translated into the flesh of language'.36 What is interesting is how this translative `figur[ing]' of the reader works in Beatrice's response to motive, for despite Shelley's claim to represent people as they probably were, it is Beatrice who is caught in the tropes with which he surrounds her. The reader must become not the poem but Beatrice. Shelley claims that what his play accomplishes is not `what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose', but the `highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama . . . the teaching [of] the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself'. That part of Beatrice's character we sympathize with and want to recognize in ourselves ± her strength, her endurance, her protection of others, her bravery ± are the qualities of a knight, and Shelley has purposely constructed her so: her brother and mother-in-law comment on how they have drawn on her strength and protection, the qualities that have at the same time attracted Cenci's particular hatred. That part we antipathize ± her forcefulness about the murder and her casuistry about the price her coconspirators must pay in fear and suffering under torture ± should be part of the moral lesson we learn from the play, but in fact forcefulness and the belief in right are also qualities of the knightly hero, including her willingness to commit the deed herself (a willingness for which her brother Giacomo is not criticized). Repeatedly Shelley finds the female knight a failed beloved, using her strength to withhold love rather than supply and return it. It is here that the workings of the play begin to dissemble, for if we identify with the female knight we are on the one




hand also identifying with the working-class agitators in England which is politically good, and on the other hand constructing ourselves as resistant readers which is poetically bad. Beatrice's execution restores order on multiply pertinent levels. In Chandler's discussion of the play, he takes seriously Shelley's claim in The Cenci's preface that he `sought to avoid the error of making them actuated by my own conceptions of right or wrong', using this assertion to analyse Shelley's use of historical anachronism in the play. The achievement of the play is its discovery of casuistry as the transcendent modifier, the thing that is not anachronism because it is in its time and in its place in both Renaissance and present cultures, and can therefore figuratively link both temporalities through the spectator's experience of the play. Shelley's case against casuistry is revealed in Beatrice's development as a casuistic thinker, becoming more like Orsino in her rationalizations as the play progresses. But although the male characters ± Cenci, the Pope, Orsino, Giacomo ± are rendered without any assessment of right or wrong just as Shelley claims to do, he cannot resist judging Beatrice as every troubadour judges his beloved, distorting the plot of her history to do so. She is both the agent of his moral analytic and its target. What Chandler's criticism ignores is the accumulating pressure of motive on Beatrice that drives her to parricide. Between the time she stands up to Cenci after his announcement of her brothers' deaths, and Marzio's murder, Cenci has (among other crimes) raped Beatrice, threatened repeated rape and worse tortures than previously experienced, and taken Lucretia and Beatrice to a secluded castle whose dungeon cells will quell their screams. With her petition to the Pope unread, her pleas to Cenci's guests to save her unanswered, and the escape of suicide ruled out, she has no recourse for her youngest brother and mother-in-law or for herself but to put a stop to his insanity before she can no longer act. Forgiving love can only lead to painful death for herself and those she protects, yet Shelley portrays her as weakened by historical conditions, giving in to casuistic thinking instead of steadfastly clinging to the power of sympathetic love. Because the rape leads Beatrice to temporary madness, it would be easy to portray her as less strong than Shelley does, but the strength of mind he attributes to her needs casuistic thinking in order not to fall into full madness, or to cling to a self-martyring religious purity: `Who dares talk of guilt? My Lord,/I am more innocent of parricide/Than is a child born fatherless' (IV.iv.111±13). She is refuting his paternity, because the only claim he makes for his seed is to use her abusively (we discover he had previously




dragged her through the halls by the hair, imprisoned her `naked in damp cells' (the plural is chilling), and starved her until she ate the insects there; in his curse he promises to `drag her, step by step,/Thro' infamies unheard of among men': III.i.44±8, IV.i.80±1). It is very hard to equate the victim psychology of her casuistry, driven as she is to extremity, with the hard-hearted and malicious casuistry of Orsino or the Pope. (Orsino is particularly repulsive as an inversion of the courtly lover whose casuistry does not blind him to this aspect of himself.37) Shelley needs to depict her as a female knight in order to make his case against casuistry, but he does so at the expense of human truth.38 One aspect of this truth lies in incest itself, which is usually the product of the father's lie, `She won't remember this when she grows up.' In Cenci's case, incest is produced in order that the already adult Beatrice remember. Her history is not that of loss but of a terrible remembering; she is the counter to the melancholic's need for the beloved as memory vessel in that she is the past as terror. Shelley's idealism betrays her by romancing terror.39 Notably, Shelley himself will later adapt Beatrice's logic when in collusion with Byron he turns retributive against Southey in a modern day `battle of the books', and ceases to believe in the unbinding force of love (Robinson, Shelley and Byron 194±5). Beatrice is no coward (unlike every other character in the play except Cenci), and neither does she take decisive action unless she is convinced of its rightness and protective merits. Where the case goes against her is in Shelley's portrayal of her hardness of intent just before the murder, and the hardness of her casuistry afterwards: that is, to her loss of heart. It is just prior to the murder that she has been translated from a strong heroine and love object into an object who desires, whose strength will shatter the self, bringing her stern gaze and disordered hair close to the Medusa figure of Òn the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci' and to the Medusa head that Stuart Curran notes was hung on the Palazzo Cenci.40 At this point Shelley begins to view her as both Cenci and the Pope do: as a resistant and destructive machine. For the Pope, her parricide not only robs him of anticipated goods given in exchange for his pardons of Cenci's crimes; what makes her crime worse than any of her father's is that it is parricide, and as such is repeatable at the highest level, murder of the Pope himself as father of the Church (II.ii.54±6, V.ii.71±7). This is the problem the female knight presents: out of order, she disrupts order and threatens the patriarchal regime. Shelley, too, seems to view Beatrice as the errant beloved who draws poetic strength after her translation. There is a palpable change in her character, represented by her increasing use of poetic language, the very figuration




Shelley claims to disavow in the preface except for moments of high passion, with the exception of her chasm speech.41 They express her one experience of freedom: she has lived in continual imprisonment and torture and while further prison and torture hold no fears for her, language is her only real tool, and finally her only real medium for liberation. But Beatrice's rhetorical flights are highly reasoned, detached, casuistic. They are in stark contrast to the play's many references to how the incestuous rape has rendered her speechless, is an unmentionable act, and so denies her the ability to tell what has happened to her. The rape returns her to the silent state most like the beloved's (`She is as pure as speechless infancy!' Camillo tells the judge at her trial), while the murder gives her back language. Since it was Cenci's intention to tame and silence her through the rape, it becomes clear that Cenci's vision of female servility and Shelley's vision of the beloved (as Dante's silent and absent Beatrice) are uncomfortably similar. If the most striking description of Beatrice is a simile comparing her to `speechless infancy', the most important figural treatment in the drama is Shelley's configuration of love and unlove. As Curran comments, this is given schematic form through the use of a structural chiasmus. `The first two scenes are mirror scenes, constructed as a theatrical chiasmus in which first strong evil contrasts with weak good, then weak evil with strong good' (Shelley's Cenci 263). There is another, more forceful chiasmus in Cenci's plan for punishing Beatrice, which would be to conceive a son with her through incest who would look like both her and him, but who would develop out of her mother's love into a figure of absolute hate `So he may hunt her thro' the clamorous scoffs/Of the loud world to a dishonoured grave' (IV.i.141±57). This `hideous likeness of herself . . . a distorting mirror' would be the inverse of Beatrice's planned parricide: he will plant in her the seed from which she has already disinherited herself. The chiasmus tropes Shelley's ambivalent treatment of Beatrice as both strongly self-sacrificing and attractive, versus weakly selfish and corrupted, as both the beloved who attracts the gaze and the Medusa whose terrible gaze threatens.42 It is a trope that literally entraps Beatrice just as it contests the liberating possibilities of the triangle. By contrast, the most striking use of metaphor in Epipsychidion is that of the epipsyche as an idol, a unified and unifying figure. Importantly, this metaphor is not structural but internalized: it represents Shelley's belief in the independence of the mind's agency. Even so, it too entraps the beloved. Against philosophies such as Hume's that refute any independent mental faculties, Shelley particularly asserts the poet's mental




agency. He develops the belief by 1815 that we can discern differences between individuals, and that this facility ± in itself moral ± is clear proof of the mind's active powers. Shelley terms the particularities of an individual's mental identity and powers ìdols': that is, `the forces constituting personal identity [which] express a power strongly opposed to determination by the environment'.43 Although the ability to perceive personal identity is in Shelley a peculiarly poetic genius, the psychology he is struggling towards is constantly frustrated by real life: the failure of his chivalrous marriage (twice) to Harriet to secure her legal and financial security, his inability to gain a clear audience, his own financial and social difficulties, the deaths of his children and his emotional estrangement from Mary. All these undercut the identity Shelley strove to create for himself, and push him to further develop his troubadourian aesthetic, and further deny the discrepancies between inner and outer realities. This is nowhere more apparent than in Shelley's determination of the ideal love as a `miniature . . . of our entire self' that we incorporate within our version of individual identity: à soul within our soul', `the ideal prototype of every thing excellent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man' (Òn Love', Ingpen and Peck, The Complete Works VI. 202). Although Shelley recognizes that the love object is but a mirroring back of the self, its mirroring suffuses the self with something eternal (à mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness'). His definition differs from Freud's concept of the ego-ideal by combining it with the idealized love object, and by internalizing the love object. In this sense the beloved is but a recombination of the self, àn assemblage of the minutest particles of which our nature is composed'. Yet his footnote to this idealizing process expresses and suppresses an awareness of figural limits: `These words are ineffectual and metaphorical. Most words are so ± No help!' (The Complete Works 202n.). When Mary Shelley turns away from the idealized love object, the turn that produces the Shelley's collaborative work on The Cenci44 as a way to continue to dialogue despite domestic friction, P. B. Shelley finds a political metaphor in the incest±casuistry problematic of the Cenci history for critiquing her blame of him.45 In Epipsychidion, he will relegate her to secondary status in order to show her the depths of her error: Emilia will be the idol within, Mary the dark moon orbiting the Shelley planet. These metaphoric displacements ± Beatrice the Medusa, Mary the moon, Emilia the internalized soul ± are all at a remove from the divine Beatrice of Dante, the soul mate who can never be achieved as a fusion or internalization. But the lover's quest for the beloved is never




simply a glorification or critique of her; it is always something else. Let us return for a moment to the importance of Dante's Beatrice as a metaphoric antecedent to Beatrice Cenci. Together the two Beatrices create a binary opposition, the centre which it presupposes being the possibility of a visionary love. As The Cenci and Count Basil reveal, the centre cannot hold: visionary love is an ideal, not a real condition. Dante's La Vita Nuova represents the translation of a courtly lover into a sensitive questor who is driven by an inner guide supplying introspective strength and insight.46 Unlike the melancholic, desolate through loss of his beloved object as well as the object of his career aspiration, Dante is inwardly full, guided by the love object he has incorporated into himself as spiritual mentor. This is not the historical Beatrice Portinari, for his New Life is written after eight years of marriage; rather, Dante uses the courtly love tradition to address another man via an idealized beloved. Dante dedicates La Vita Nuova to his best friend, Guido Cavalcanti, because it was this poet's response to what was to be Dante's first sonnet of the Vita, and their subsequent intellectual debates ± especially over the merits of composing in the vernacular ± that prepared Dante to write his first sustained work. Cavalcanti's inability to find Beatrice as impressive or as great a guide as Dante found her may partially account for the non-troubadourian tone and reduction of style of the Vita; but it is also a necessary part of his translation into something new. The weight given to poetic analysis and discussion of intent belies the supposed trust in the lady as spiritual and disembodied guide. Similarly, the appeal of Beatrice Cenci is that of the dead woman, the untouchable absent presence, as she mediates the poetic arguments between Shelley and Byron. Beatrice Cenci should occupy this position, but by the end of the play she is dead to us in another way; tortured by her defilement (à perpetual contamination both of mind and body', as Shelley calls it in the preface), she becomes a criminal, an untouchable in a different sense. Although she is driven to murder by self-protection and the protection of loved ones, Shelley's play forces us to consider her deed and motives only in terms of justice, revenge or retribution (the various terms in which critics such as Curran and Chandler determinedly argue her case). Charles Robinson's explication of Beatrice's casuistry for Shelley helps show how he has denied her subjectivity in order to promote these responses: neither her body nor her mind had been ravaged to the extent she mistakenly considered them to be. Shelley makes this important dis-




tinction in his Preface by observing that `this daughter . . . after long and vain attempts to escape from what she considered a perpetual contamination,' . . . Shelley believed that Beatrice had both the obligation and the ability to escape these conditions which causes her to `consider' that she was perpetually contaminated. (Shelley and Byron 153) As such, both love and unlove, she moves us to our own casuistry, both that Shelley intends, and that he does not. Unlike Baillie's Victoria, with whom we sympathize and whom we forgive because of her misjudgment, we deliberate Beatrice's story and seek to come to terms with it in order to judge her despite Shelley's portrayal of her determined resistance to such judgment. A similar problematic is constructed for us in The Borderers: Wordsworth presents a character who may or may not have committed a crime, and we are asked to view his act and self-condemnation casuistically. In the play, Wordsworth is thinking through and rejecting Godwinism, using as his vehicle the casuistic thinking of Rivers to reveal the defects of Godwin's understanding of motive. As David Bromwich points out, Wordsworth's purpose is to show how the casuistry of good motives produces wrongful acts. Furthermore, `[h]e shows how difficult it is, once good motives are seen to produce wicked effects, to distinguish a culpable crime from a pardonable error'.47 In this Wordsworth also comes close to casuistry himself, believing our ability to judge an act stemming from a benevolent purpose is further hindered by the difference between what he calls our `moral sentiments' and the criminal's moral system (58). This tendency is reflected in his later use of casuistry to reject the possibility of revolutionary activity in England even though he continues to believe the earlier radicalism on French soil had been a positive good. Shelley illustrates Godwinism in The Cenci in order to show how necessitarianism does work and how it should be, once revealed in its processes, resisted by the independent mind. For him, casuistry is what produces a Wordsworth: the practice that allows one to shift moral ground in a way that reproduces a larger resistance to social progress. Importantly, the character who most fully resembles Rivers in The Cenci is the invented priest Orsino (both Wordsworth and Shelley are responding to Godwin's Caleb Williams, which accounts for the similarities in the two plays). Like Rivers, Orsino manipulates and betrays another: the difference is that Mortimer may not have caused the old man's death even though he blames himself for it, while Beatrice does cause her father's death and does not blame herself




for it. Wordsworth's illustration of moral good as that which in the end refuses to equivocate where blame is possible is undercut by Shelley's illustration of the impossibility of such a clear morality in any time frame. Shelley's point is made all the sharper by Wordsworth's and Coleridge's political apostasy, a reversion which no clear morality can justify. In this comparison we can see that Shelley is not using casuistry as Wordsworth is, as moral relativism (or as De Quincey is, as a supplemental system to jurisprudence), something that allows for the areas of moral grey in life's situations. For Shelley, it is probabilism, the `jesuitical casuistry' or sophistry that he refers to in his preface. He uses it in the context of violated love, again a theme on which The Borderers' plot is premised (Mortimer is convinced to murder Herbert because Rivers says he is an impostor intending to betray the real Herbert's daughter Matilda into sexual ruin). Yet if Wordsworth's dramatization of the errors of Godwinism through casuistry reveals his own casuistry, so too does Shelley's dramatization of the correctness of Godwinism through casuistry reveal the casuistry of his own life. This ranges from his translation of Beatrice's character, which treats her as the corrupted courtly beloved whose historical body is absented from the picture, to his various love triangles, to his sending for Mary to see Byron in 1818, the resulting hurried trip causing the infant Clara's illness and death. Mary Shelley at least would have seen biographical acts such as this last as casuistry, but for Shelley his life choices were not casuistry but enthusiasm, not moral laxity but a different moral order; in short, troubadourism. Byron's response to Shelley's troubadourism was an alternating attraction to triangulation and reaction against it. He responded to The Cenci with Marino Faliero, a play which puts into practice a different conception of the dramatic principle: for Byron, drama should be classical spectacle rather than The Cenci's Shakespearean struggle, and an expressive interpretation not a dramatic rendering that leads viewers to an interpretation.48 But strong resemblance between the plays exists: like Shelley's Cenci, Byron's play is psycho-drama, the slowly developing revelation of human players caught in an unyielding and corrupt social system and premised on the betrayal of the love principle. Both poets understood the necessity of recreating the psychology of a particular historical and cultural context in order to present the psycho-ethical dilemma they wanted to problematize. And in both plays, the revelation is that the consciousness of heroic figures such as Beatrice and Faliero cannot save them from the machinations of a corrupt system or from their own vulnerability to this corruption. But Shelley feared that




Byron's dramatic fatalism ± Faliero's knowing wrong in the face of an inescapable fateful action (conspiracy and guerilla tactics in the face of necessary revolution) ± meant that Byron was actually condoning Faliero's crime. If both plays explore the way in which an individual's reaction to corruption within the terms of that corruption necessarily involve the individual in its taint ± the terrible lesson of the French Revolution ± Shelley at least convicts Beatrice's deed as immoral, whereas Byron's emphasis on Faliero's self-consciousness and lack of self-blindness seems to exonerate his hero from the higher offence, and lift him above the taint of his times. But from a larger perspective, Shelley's is a fine point since his judgment of Beatrice is a blaming of the beloved, always the mark of the troubadour, just as Byron's demonstration of moral irresponsibility (as Shelley read Faliero) is the mark of the libertine. The difference in the plays, beyond the problem of dramatic action, lies in the problem of history and language. Byron decided not to make Marino Faliero a drama of jealousy (which would have taken a medieval courtly love configuration, Faliero conspiring against Steno as his wife's lover) but, out of adherence to historical fact (rather than Shelley's adherence to historical spirit), a drama of honour (Steno sexually slanders Angiolina, who is chaste, and Faliero revenges himself on both Steno and the Forty who showed their corruption in so lightly sentencing him, thus doubly dishonouring Faliero and alienating him from the privilege of honour to which he was born). Byron participates in a poetic discussion similar to Dante's with Cavalcanti in deciding to answer Shelley's use of the historical vernacular with his own fidelity to historical fact.49 Shelley uses history in his play as a parallel in which the audience, by seeing how Beatrice's casuistry is conditioned by her historical conditions, could understand how they are acting by their own historical conditions ( J. Chandler, England in 1819 509±10). Byron insists in his preface that the passions of the Renaissance are unknowable now; despite his historical reconstruction, we can sympathize with them but they retain their uncanny character within our canny connection to them. It perhaps satisfies the conditions of troubadourian poetry that Byron's decision to dramatize Faliero's crime as one of honour rather than jealousy drops his wife from the centre: she is the ideal beloved, à character, not a person' who `lives only in the mind' as `Life in Death', and in contrast to the `Death in Life of Venice' (McGann, Fiery Dust 214). She is a direct riposte to Shelley's decision to centre a beloved whose passions fracture and destroy, finally representing social corruption. Byron's corrective poetic (rather than thematic) troubadourism




is further played out at the level of language: although factually historical, his drama is textured by what McGann calls a `metaphoric thickness', the metaphoric play that is the impassioning of language. Shelley's drama, truer to its historical spirit, is metaphorically lean, pared down to a more realistically historicized language. Ironically, Byron's correction is to that part of The Cenci Shelley had attempted to make more Byronic, à sermo pedestris way of treating human nature quite opposed to the idealism' of his other work (quoted in Robinson, Shelley and Byron 140). This interchange was part of Byron's and Shelley's ongoing poetic dialogue, their version of Dante's dialogue with Cavalcanti. It had been dramatized the previous year in Julian and Maddalo, but Shelley was still thinking about this poem in 1819, giving it a final revision in May 1819 (Ingpen and Peck, The Complete Works III 332n.). There the Byronic character, Count Maddalo, is Venetian, like Faliero. He is proud, reclusive, and unwilling to exert himself on behalf of his countrymen: his are `concentered and impatient feelings', which in Spenserian terms is the self-love that is pride. Such love is particularly examined in Spenser's interpolated stories of friends, where the social virtue of friendship is contrasted to the socially disruptive, because unsubordinated, vice of self-love. Maddalo's self-love is `concentred' in this sense, as well as in Byron's own sense of fatalism and alienation deriving from the incommensurability of consciousness' centre to the circumference of its desires.50 Julian (Shelley), by contrast is `passionately attached to those philosophical notions which assert the power of man over his own mind, and the immense improvements of which, by the extinction of certain moral superstitions, human society may be yet susceptible' (177± 8). Robinson labels Julian a meliorist; certainly he is one whose optimism provides the social glue, the man who in Spenserian terms correctly subordinates self-love to harmonizing love. Scholars have tended to use Shelley's self-dramatization as biographical, ignoring the lack of Byron's literal inscription in the poem, and to construe the `conversation' between Byron and Shelley as antagonistic. In Robinson's influential account each of Byron's and Shelley's poems (with the exceptions of influence, such as Childe Harold III), are contestations with the other poet and his opposing philosophy, and the poems of 1819 are headed `Differing More Than Ever'. Julian and Maddalo in particular so incorporates their mutually antagonistic theories that it does not conclude; rather it offers a judgment on Byron through Maddalo's interest in the Maniac: `Shelley apparently judged that the irony of Maddalo's introduction of a Byronic hero as a madman offered




sufficient public commentary on the `ìnsanity'' of Byron's poetry and ideas . . . Furthermore, the conclusion in which relatively little is concluded is consistent with Shelley's view of his two-year debate with Byron's obdurate spirit' (Shelley and Byron 103). William Brewer argues instead that the Byron±Shelley relationship is much more complex than Robinson suggests and more collaborative. The conversational style of Julian and Maddalo is due to Byron's influence, for instance, and as Bloom, Wasserman and others have noted, reproduces the urbane witty talk that was Byron's mark. In other words, the poem's `conversation' or, in Robinson's term, `debate', appears to chronicle elite discourse centred on a figure ruined by courtly love. The appearance, both of the poem's shape and of the Maniac's narrative which occupies its centre, is no mistake despite critics' reservations about both, and bears a marked resemblance to Mary Shelley's autonarration as well. The poem is generally considered only partly successful in its form, its inconclusive ending a sign of its unsuccess, and the Maniac is considered to confuse the issue, à character who has never been definitvely explained but who seems to represent a kind of tragic everyman'.51 Yet the Maniac is clearly suffering from the stifling convention of courtly love in which the woman must reject and the lover must suffer. This is not everyman but the exceptional case belonging to courtly culture, a culture with which the two urbane gentlemen also identify. Furthermore, the conversation that centres around the problem of love identified in the Maniac's tale is a modern-day equivalent of Plato's Symposium and Castiglione's court of love. The game is to engage in verbal contest on the subject of love, the winner proving his philosophical interpretation the correct one.52 In Julian and Maddalo Shelley shows that he understands the importance of the act of contest itself, that it is a contest with particular discursive rules which supersede the importance of the outcome, that it is an urbane game between men which replicates the dynamic of the courtly love relation itself as a homosocial exchange over the body of the absented woman. Byron, who enjoyed such conversation and was discomfited by philosophical debate, is skewered on the horns of the Maniac's dilemma. In this sense Shelley `wins', but at the same time he critiques the love court debate genre by refusing a win to either contestant in the poem's conclusion, endlessly deferring the gaming as a more realistic representation of the homosocial calculus. What is indeed interesting about this poem is that Byron and Shelley's relationship is not kept to the prefatory margins, but dramatized as a relationship revolving around the Maniac's drawn-out discourse. He is a man who `seems by his own account to have been disappointed in love',




a literally concentred and disruptive presence in the text, his discourse taking up and overwhelming the narrative frame. Because his own madness seems a disproportionate response to the abuses of love when compared to Beatrice's only temporary madness after incestuous rape, the Maniac's disease may be more comprehensible as a literary one; it is his narrative that has run amok. But his tale is not an amplification of Maddalo's concentricity; it represents a far more disastrous version of unbalanced love. Showing how a woman's unlove (the manipulative play with a man's affection) can destroy the lover, the Maniac's tale represents a lesser degree of The Cenci's power abuse, with the privacy of the suffering making it a parable rather than the contamination of Beatrice's fall. The Maniac is generally understood to be Tasso, drawn from Shelley's `Scene from Tasso' and `Song from Tasso', and the subject of Byron's `Lament of Tasso', a troubadourian figure who interested Byron deeply (see Hobhouse's account of his visit with Byron to Tasso's cell53). In Shelley's choice of Tasso, we have a direct confrontation with the uses and abuses of troubadourian love: Tasso was supposed to have been imprisoned for his illicit courtly love, which Byron read as a metaphor for the confinement of the human spirit against the prometheanism of man's divine inheritance. Shelley read Tasso as misguided: ìt is our will/ That thus enchains us to permitted ill' ( Julian and Maddalo 170±1). But in his dramatization of poetic friends confronting the example of a maddened lover, we have a complementary plan to that of The Cenci's historical project, a direct critique of courtly love in modern times. The Maniac, in giving in to his suffering from `some deadly change in love' by a lady who does not take her role as beloved seriously, has not protected himself from an abuse that damages the imaginative gift of poetry through its damage of sympathy itself. To be abused by his ideal object, not merely rejected by her ± which only stimulates desire ± can destroy the poet. This illustrates the dangers Baillie was exploring in Count Basil, but does so in order to facilitate the philosophical problem between the two men. Julian maintains `Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek/But in our mind?', but Maddalo responds that this is just what the Maniac had said before going mad: the centrality of self cannot be imaginatively unified if love ± Shelley's universal glue ± produces madness. Here Shelley points to himself as a troubadour via Byron's dissent, but then defends his system by claiming that if the madhouse is a metaphor for the human condition as Byron would have it, man has created that metaphor and can then liberate himself from it through the power of the imagination. In claiming this, he accuses Byron (`That the




Maniac . . . is an extension of Byron should be self-evident from the logic of the poem': Robinson, Shelley and Byron 92), but does so to win his point. Byron's withdrawal from life verges on another, more serious troubadourian madness: the melancholy that rejects hope. It is in this sense that Shelley `wins' the game of the poem, for by this he shows that the point is not the case of love, but the case between men: to prove that Byron's is the wrong kind of troubadourism. Julian and Maddalo reverses the issue at stake in The Cenci: the poem of 1818 asks how mental resources combat circumstances, while the play of 1819 asks how circumstances combat mental resources. If the Byronic fatalism of the play shows that the arguments of Julian and Maddalo were themselves open to the force of circumstances, the two works' explorations of unlove do not cancel Shelley's supreme interest in the force of love itself. The path leading from the Symposium to Dante's courtly love poetry to Renaissance Rome to Julian and Maddalo is the development of Shelley's theory of this force and imaginative resources. This is not a troubadourian theory on the face of it: the troubadour bemoans his loss of object, focusing on his lack of inner strength in the face of an irresolvable desire. But what Shelley understands about troubadourian poetics is precisely that it contains its own strength through a self-creating dynamic and style; moreover, it is a poetics that transforms the world. As a theory about love predicated on the systems of love and debated heatedly with a fellow poet, Byron, his genealogy of love is meliorative and redemptive. But it also recapitulates the lesson of Plato's text: the dialogue on love is always a contest between men.

Valperga, or love's lessons Mary Shelley thought The Cenci's final act contained P. B. Shelley's best writing, and her esteem for the play in general was due to its treatment of the human heart: `Mary's admiration was based on the human interest of the tragedy, to her an unfortunately rare occurrence in Shelley's works' (Curan, Shelley's Cenci 15). But her edition of his poetry offers no comment on Epipsychidion. Recognizing the strain on the human inherent in an idealizing vision, she also understands that the ground of Shelley's vision of love is itself casuistic. Connected to this is the realization of the impossibility of Sapphism, of the beloved writing back as a poet, in P. B. Shelley's version of the world. Èmilia', like Mary, writes in prose and in non-Sapphic terms; female lyricism premised on female desires and associations has no place here, and at the same time the courtly beloved is also an effaced position.




Mary Shelley's insight, which grounds her experiment with the past in Valperga, is that the beloved is the historical condition of the visionary, troubadourian poet. (This is signally different from her next novel, The Last Man, which locates the historical condition in the unknowability of the transmission of knowledge. Here, the narrative originates from a future text of the twenty-first century that is known only through its ancient reception by the Cumñan Sibyl, as it has survived serendipitously but in a fragmented condition through to the present moment of 1818. This timewarp of future to past to present disrupts the normative historical and narrative linearity in a way that signally recalls the medieval historical schema of a syncretic, anachronistic time. Valperga, however, sets up the conditions for the medievalism of The Last Man.) In Valperga, although the rejection of the beloved occasions the poet's melancholy (the loss that expresses his lack of wholeness), her essential love ± his love which will be returned to him ± will come. A woman may be constrained by history, as is Beatrice Cenci, but the troubadour beloved is the historical condition herself, as is (the dead) Beatrice Portinari. She provides the necessity of his vision, determining the upward path of its achievement. In Valperga; or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, begun 1819, Mary Shelley contests the beloved's condition by crafting a heroine with a mind of her own. Euthanasia represents her own interests and vision, and consistently ± and radically ± attempts to reform Castruccio to this vision. She refuses to be a historical condition. Euthanasia is central to understanding the novel's historical project to contest necessity. This text represents her version of The Cenci's historicist project, and offers a different interpretation of the fit between the Italian Renaissance's moral corruption and the present. The novel begins just during Dante's lifetime in 1301 during the civil war that provides the background for his Inferno between the Guelphs and Ghibellines. The medieval setting is significant, since it allows Mary Shelley to set her story prior to the corruptive socio-political arena of the Renaissance that predetermines the Cenci plot. Rajan compares the treatment of history in the novel to Godwin's theory of fiction in his essay Òf History and Romance', showing that Mary Shelley participated in and extended her father's concept of fiction as a `counterfactual history', in which the necessity of historical condition is interwoven with the entirely plausible possibility of an alternative history (Rajan, `Between Romance and History' 91±6). Castruccio's fact is counterpointed with Euthanasia's possibility, and the `history' of their relation is obtained from her `private chronicles', the fiction of which does not




negate their possibility given another historical configuration. She is as much a product of her time as Beatrice Cenci is of hers. Moreover, her possible vision and the plausible independence of her thought54 provide a sound rejoinder to the necessity of Beatrice Cenci's casuistry; there is always more than one possibility. By contrast, Castruccio illustrates the patriarchal resistance to this contingent thinking, and is the character closer to P. B. Shelley's heroine in what Rajan calls the `necessary subjection to the logic of his career', and through a historical necessity produced by contingency, à product of rank, circumstances, and historical period rather than of anything innate' (`Between Romance and History' 96, 97). Although Euthanasia fails in her vision, this failure only aligns her fate with Castruccio's like failure; the vision itself is not, unlike Beatrice Cenci's, flawed. Guinigi, the farmer aristocrat whose pastoral idealism offers the young Castruccio an alternative to his own father's martial history and to Euthanasia's republicanism, is an important manifestation of P. B. Shelley in the novel. He mentors the boy for a year, hoping to ìmpress on his pupil a love of peace' in specific contrast to the `knights [who] prick their steeds forward', and their horses who `seemed to exult in their destination' which was in fact simply the `cruel work' of devastation.55 But `[t]his man, his imaginative flights, his glowing benevolence and his humble occupations, were an enigma that Castruccio could never solve', and he leaves Guinigi for the life of his father, `who in exile never forgot that he was a soldier and a knight' (Valpenga 33, 31). Castruccio's incomprehension will prove his downfall: in choosing the knight position, he can play lover to Euthanasia but he cannot understand or enter the imaginative realm both Guinigi and she represent. Without this he cannot be a true legislator; he can only follow the traces of his own desire. Valperga's historical setting is as important as The Cenci's: instead of a historical condition of rampant casuistry, Valperga's characters are on the cusp between an old martial order (symbolized by the knight Castruccio) and a new rebirth of learning and humanistic values (symbolized by the beloved Euthanasia). Representing two orders whose convergence could spell the start of a true renaissance, a newly reformed world of republican states, Castruccio and Euthanasia's love for each other holds out the promise of this socio-political rebirth.56 Their inability to conjoin, however, illustrates the regressive nature of patriarchy, and the corruptive forces of a power structure that rewards revenge, intrigue and conquest. Mary Shelley's contrast of the two main characters' irreconcilable ideologies serves to refute both the fatedness of




Marino Faliero's conspiracy to murder in Byron's drama, and the necessitarian casuistry of Beatrice's decision to murder in Shelley's drama. Castruccio could decide against aggression; having achieved large gains he could turn these gains towards social harmony between Ghibellines and Guelphs, a just political structure, and a loving personal union with Euthanasia. Instead, he necessarily chooses to pursue the dark side of his character and aggress further by destroying Valperga, Euthanasia's symbolic refuge of learning and culture, in revenge for the conspiracy against him. He does so by betraying the `Fairy's Fountain', the medieval garden Euthanasia and Castruccio recognized as their bower of bliss and where they had played together as children, using it as a back entrance when he takes the castle. His decision highlights Mary Shelley's belief that right action within historical necessity is a matter of free will guided by a mind and heart educated towards effecting moral good. Castruccio has been educated in martial terms, and he freely chooses ± despite being offered an alternative set of values by Euthanasia ± to continue to apply the principles of political warfare. In contrast to him, Euthanasia is the female knight: although she is unwillingly drawn into a conspiracy against Castruccio, she takes responsibility for the consequences, rallies her people to withstand Castruccio's siege, and prepares to stand or die with the taking of the castle. Her physical stand, her refusal to capitulate to the multiple pressures working against her, is a symbol of her moral steadfastness. Her sacrifice (taken prisoner, she is exiled and dies en route to Sicily) is politically motivated at personal expense, as opposed to the personally motivated sacrifice of the significantly named false mystic Beatrice.57 Beatrice of Ferrara's own subplot ± her affair with Castruccio and his desertion, her capture by a voluptuary who imprisons and sexually abuses her and her subsequent imprisonment by the Inquisition, her resulting madness and Euthanasia's care for her in her last days ± is Mary Shelley's version of Beatrice Cenci's story. It is the story of a woman who, raised without parental care or instruction, has not the resources to hold firmly to a moral vision, and therefore suffers without any protective resource the bodily sexual torture to which women are peculiarly vulnerable, and which they can experience even at the hands of their own fathers and husbands in a patriarchal system. She is the opposite of Shelley's Maniac: she is the beloved gone mad. By contrast, Euthanasia is a believable representation of Dante's Beatrice had she lived to become the transformative agent in real life that she was in her visionary state. Mary Shelley's heroine embodies love, constancy, virtuous strength, boldness of mind and leadership. Engaged




to be married to Castruccio, she breaks her engagement when she realizes that her belief in universal love must supersede her personal love for him. This is a strong revision of Shelley's belief in a universal love sought through personal love that is forever transitory because always seeking its highest expression. In Mary Shelley's universe, constancy in love is necessary both to personal love and to universal love, but the latter must have precedence over the former. This is not a romance ideology. But Beatrice of Ferrara, despite the facticity of her mother, Wilhelmina of Bohemia, is a figure straight from romance. Together Dante, whom Euthanasia reveres, and Wilhelmina, founder of a mystical cult in Milan, provide the real-life personages that, like Shelley's Cenci family, root her story in a realized history where men and women can anchor a worldview. Dante represents the correctly moral vision: Wilhelmina, believed to be the Holy Ghost incarnate, the misguided and falsifying vision. Educated to a self-centred and self-glorifying idealism, Beatrice opposes both Dante's Beatrice and Euthanasia to illustrate the literally mortifying effects of being beloved. Yet this not the main point, and neither is Castruccio's destruction of domestic peace and love. Finally, it is Euthanasia's agreeing to a conspiracy against Castruccio that is the heart of the matter, for it appears to vitiate her constancy of love. In strong reply to The Cenci, Euthanasia's conspiracy is a fact of this historical period but not a necessary condition. She engages in it as a protective vehicle, not a predetermined deed. And unlike Beatrice Cenci she understands the retributive nature of conspiracy and is not blind to its impetus or its labour, and she is deeply suspicious of its epistemological currency. Although she is right, in that Castruccio's response to conspiracy is immediate and terrible revenge, nevertheless her recourse to conspiracy intertextually reads Beatrice Cenci's conspiracy as protective as well, and not the matter of vengeance that The Cenci's preface depicts it, a `pernicious mistak[e]'. Euthanasia will be constant on her own terms, which are to elevate her political responsibility and protection over her personal love. Although The Last Man is set in the future, it deserves a word here as well, for its treatment of Shelley's troubadourism, for its medievalist rhetoric, and as Mary Shelley's version of Julian and Maddalo. In this novel it is the male narrator who is a version of the female knight, an effeminated, chivalrous man, who notably has peasant origins. His ability to hold fast and to withstand singles him out against the inconstancy of his companions, particularly the troubadourian Adrian, based on Shelley, and the imperious Lord Raymond, based on Byron. His chronicle of the last days of man on earth is a projected history arising




from facts as-they-are to the possibility such facts elicit. Just as Valperga rewrites the historicism of The Cenci, The Last Man rewrites the problem of causes that Valperga meditates by casting it into the future tense. In the sense that Valperga and The Last Man as tensed narratives revise the interplay between history and fiction, they create a discursive space in which the historical can be opened up against itself to reveal not history's determination but the possibility out of which inscription arises. Valperga's possible history refers back to The Cenci, to Shelley's troubadourism, to the problem of casuistry and courtly love. In seeing the past as a space of contingent possibility, Mary Shelley alters her father's sentiment (`What excellent effects do we reap . . . from chivalry!') along with the rest of Romantic medievalism. The past is not an elsewhereness out of which the present can be analogically compared, interpreted and potentiated; neither is it a frame for the make-believe of historical romance. It is a memory whose profound complexity is accessible only through imaginative intervention. In developing the theory of this intervention in Valperga, and placing female heroism at the heart of the medieval, Mary Shelley radicalizes the impulses of Romantic medievalism.

Free love: Epipsychidion The canzone Shelley refers to in his Preface to Epipsychidion, `Voi, ch' intendendo, il terzo ciel movete, etc.', is from Dante's Convivio. The Convivio, known to the Romantics more usually as the Convito, translates in English as `The Banquet', also Shelley's preferred title for Plato's Symposium. It resembles the Vita Nuova in being a combination of verse and prose, or prosimetrum, but whereas the Vita praises the beloved lady in the courtly style, the Convivio praises a much more abstract beloved, Lady Philosophy, and in a new, more severe or philosophical style. As Wasserman notes, `To surround his poem in this fashion', with both the first canzone and an envoi `partly imitative of the contents of Dante's sonnet to Cavalcanti', ìs to embrace it with a resonance that defines its central tension between the human and the divine'. Shelley draws on both of Dante's ladies, both the inspirational beloved, and the even more engrossing beloved, philosophy: `Were he only mortal . . . he could love the human Emily, but his soul . . . desires its own perfect and transcendent prototype.'58 It is perhaps for this reason that Shelley's poem presents love as not the particular, but allegorically the entire picture. If Cenci's monstrosity represents both the failure of chivalry in its abuse of power and the




failure of love, it also represents the necessary double bind of the beloved whose own interest is always absent from the picture. Epipsychidion shows how unimportant and unremembered the historical woman is to the lover's story (as Shelley comments, `[t]he present Poem, like the Vita Nuova of Dante, is sufficiently intelligible to a certain class of readers without a matter-of-fact history of the circumstances to which it relates'). Herself a trope, Emilia is imprisoned by the poem's figurations just as her father imprisoned her in the self-denying chastity of the convent. The poem responds to The Cenci by reasserting the dominance of love, but love abstracted from the beloved (who is the love object just as Teresa is already not), protected from the `cold chaste Moon' of Mary's withheld love, rescued from the confining binary opposition of the two Beatrices. Yet there is a third Beatrice, or rather two in one, for the subtitle of Epipsychidion makes it clear that the Lady Emilia is both a modern-day Beatrice Cenci and at the same time a Dantean beloved. Epipsychidion uses the amalgam Beatrice±Emilia to trace Shelley's own immortalization, for the union with a mortal beloved leads to transcendence: Shelley takes over the sublimation of Dante's beloved through a sublimation with his Beatrices. The multiple faces of the beloved represent the difference herein, because while Emilia is multiple Beatrices and not Teresa Viviani at all, surrounding her are prior beloveds ± most particularly Mary and Claire Clairmont ± and their opposite, the rejecting and vindictive Medusa. These beloveds constellate, producing the heaven of Dante's vision by exploding the vision of Beatrice into heavenly bodies. However, Shelley's interest in a Dantean vision predates his meeting with the èpipsyche' of the 1821 poem. The verses Mary Shelley and subsequent editors have collected as `Fragments' or `Studies' for Epipsychidion are to be found in Shelley's notebook for 1819.59 Already he was experimenting with the importance of creative and spiritual love as a human equivalence to the divinity of Prometheus Unbound, the play to whose Act IV this notebook is primarily devoted. In this notebook, Shelley is also already meditating on and advocating Platonic love, but in terms of what he also calls `true love'. Mary Shelley has translated Shelley's use of `true' for `free' in one of the main `Fragments' for Epipsychidion;60 she thus translates Shelley's interest away from neoPlatonism and towards a more comprehensive troubadourianism. Whatever Mary Shelley's no doubt political reasons for the later mistranslation, she has understood that Shelley's courtly `true love' simultaneously dismisses both her and the Platonic beloved in order to promote the male poetic voice.




Earlier, scholars like Bloom had felt compelled to discount Shelley's 1821 poem to the Beatrice-like Emilia as one of embarrassing (or troubadourian) intimacy that appeals to the lady of mercy, and who is in contrast to that other lady of 1819, `the Medusa of Leonardo'. This last, which Christine Gallant analyses as one of Shelley's moments of bad faith but which I believe is consistent with his troubadourism,61 is a largely ignored work that reads Leonardo's ideal of feminine beauty, La Giaconda, as its opposite, a lamia/vampire/siren such as the vengeful Beatrice Cenci. Yet Shelley's meditation on the devouring female type is so conflicted and fragmenting that it can only prove the soundness of the Lacanian description of the desiring love object as fracturing. Epipsychidion represents the opposite, woman's positive goodness as a healing agent of the self's production, albeit divided between multiple beloveds: Mary, Claire, Emilia, with Emilia herself at least two Beatrices. The fragmentation of the female, both in her light and dark aspects, will prove the singleness of the poetic self. Together these visions represent Shelley's troubadourian comprehension of woman, which denies women's relation to politics and history in order to ascend to the universal disposition. In The Cenci, Shelley attempts to represent history in necessitarian terms, not to show that Beatrice has no choice, but to show how she has been conditioned to choose. At the same time, the viewer's own choices are confronted through this revelation. But Shelley's judgment of Beatrice, which forces viewers to see their own casuistry in Beatrice's, exempts Shelley as visionary poet from this process. In spite of the political analytic on revenge and casuistry which determines The Cenci, its heroine seems imprisoned by its intentions, tried and judged by Shelley himself. In contrast to Beatrice Cenci, Dante's Beatrice is a stern moralist who preaches free will. In the historical Beatrice Portinari, Dante found a trouadourian beloved and transformed her into the ideality that could contain his metaphysical and religious vision. In this vision, man is given the requisite knowledge for conquering the appetites of the soul and the conditions of the times. Dante, led by his prior poet Virgil, proceeds up the level of purgatory until he reaches the highest point possible on earth, the Garden of Eden, meets Beatrice, and has his epiphany. Shelley's judgment of Beatrice Cenci is a judgment by Beatrice Portinari. The Epipsychidion is contaminated by the project of The Cenci, for Shelley's judgment of Beatrice Cenci reflects back on him in its writing. Just as he judges for us in his play, the poetic vision of Epipsychidion is meant to exempt him from the detrimental effect of his troubadourian




relationships with beloveds. But because even as Shelley writes about Emilia he already knows she is not the real soul mate after all, he puts himself in the position of self-translation, and realizes that he too is guilty of the casuistry for which he has blamed Beatrice Cenci. He has moved from one ìdeal' lady to another throughout his life, asking each to become all in all to him in the assumption that the poet's vision is driven by this necessary relation. His meditation on this process in Epipsychidion makes him realize the obsessive aspect of a quest he seems unable to stem. This is purgatory, not paradise. Epipsychidion begins from the premise that it is a new Purgatorio, translating and revising Dante's vision so that it leads not to Paradiso but to the earthly garden with which the Purgatorio ends, Eden as man's beginning and end point. Such a poem should lead to transcendence, but something is wrong with the vision. There is a `disporportion between his human condition and his spiritual aspirations' (Wasserman, Shelley 428), an imbalance that the lady ± unlike Dante's Beatrice ± cannot resolve. Shelley published the poem but then rejected it, commenting (as I noted above) that he needed to write a new Symposium to explain it. This remark can be taken biographically as a reference to Teresa Viviani, or as a reference to Plato's Symposium, but as Wasserman notes it is probably to Dante's Convivio (Shelley 427n.). A new Symposium would not only èxorcis[e] either the biographical bloodhounds or the scandalmongers' (Webb, Violet in the Concible 298), it would situate Shelley's new Purgatorio within his love philosophy proper to show how, as for Dante, the personal vision is the political vision. It would show the homosocial poetic triangulation that would redeem the heterosexual love triangle. But the reason Shelley needs such theoretic aid is because Epipsychidion is predicated on an error, for which he then rejects the poem, disgusted at having to equivocate casuistically on so central a component of his philosophy of love.62 Not a vita nuova, or a Convito, Epipsychidion is indeed a new Purgatorio, one that explains the problem of free will as a moral concept Shelley finally cannot adhere to and, through the writing of The Cenci and what Mary saw as his role in the deaths of his two children, recognizes as a pathological obsession in his attraction to Teresa, Jane, and all the prior beloveds. The poem divides into three sections that sketch out the relation of courtly love to the poet's past life in order to assert a vita nuova as the paradise on earth that ends Dante's Purgatorio. The poem divides into three sections, following Dante's symbolic numbering: an invocation to Emila, an idealized autobiography which assesses the prehistory of the relationship's necessity, and an imaginary voyage of lover and beloved




to an island paradise as a return to Eden. Applying Dante's approach in a modern age has its drawbacks, however. The motto of Shelley's Epipsychidion, for instance, which comes from Teresa Viviani's own essay on love as translated by Thomas Medwin, is declared by Bloom to be `sentimental and incoherent, and . . . a bad augury of some sentimentalities and incoherencies in the poem to come'. Whereas the Dante poems Shelley is imitating were written ìn terms of a [courtly love] convention . . . Shelley. . . wanted to have it both ways: to employ a convention but at the same time to disown it. The result is sometimes coterie verse' (Shelley's Mythmaking 208). Bloom's point, that troubadour poetry in the nineteenth century amounts to mere word games, is odd in the face of his analysis of the poem's `Thou' addresses, invocation being a notable characteristic of the Romantic sublime: `The first twenty lines . . . are all invocation, but so are the next fifty lines, and indeed, to a lesser degree, so is the remainder of the poem' (Shelley's Mythmaking 209). But the `Thou' of the Ì-Thou' relation is not meant to be a young convent girl, but a divine Thou, to which Dante's Beatrice is a prelude. In refusing to read Shelley's troubadourism into the poem, Bloom denies the redemptive power of love. However, Shelley had early come to believe that love's power is universalizing only when it begins with private acts. This may be the heroic unbinding of Prometheus through sympathetic love, or the heroic early forgiveness of Beatrice Cenci for her father, or it may be the poet's search for his soul mate. The first part of the poem is `suspended between private and public declaration . . . suggest[ing] frustrated intensity, as though the poem had already been in progress for some length' (Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking 209). As a troubadourian poem, of course it had been in progress, for the seduction cannot begin with the poem itself. In addition, Emilia's very name drags the poem down into It-ness: Às [G. Wilson] Knight protests, `Èmily ± the name is scarcely suitable.'' Beatrice, as a name, has public, in this case Christian, meaning; Emily, as a name, has not' (Shelley's Mythmaking 208). Bloom acknowledges halfheartedly the Emilia±Beatrice connection, but the identification with the games mistress, Emilia Pia of Castiglione's The Courtier, is equally important, and suggests that Shelley is fully aware of synthetic nature of the poem's project. However, the prefatory fragments to Epipsychidion establish a different original ground for the poem from the biographical one, and this is an important historiographical deviation. According to Kucich, the past is always literary for Shelley.63 In The Cenci the past is not just literary but textual, its revival that of a document illustrative of its historical




moment. The textual past is both monumental in that it is a reification of a moment that only it can truly know, and heuristic in that it is also open to the poet's analytic eye and thus available to an original impulse. But in Epipsychidion the textual must be fashioned into the poem's fictive preface, not as the past but as a posthumous future. The monumentalism of Dante's prior texts or even of Teresa Viviani's essay is sacrificed for an originary `history'. Here, an unknown editor will relate the story of a dead poet, whose vision elaborated truth so much that his opinions `built up to a Babel height; they fell by their own weight'. Idealism, in this account, is monumental but unstable. In Fragment II, the poem is found anonymously in the portfolio of a young Englishman accompanied `by a lady [who might have been] supposed to be his wife, & an effeminate looking youth, to whom he shewed . . . [so] excessive an attachment as to give rise to the suspicion, that she was a woman ± at his death this suspicion was confirmed'. The third fragment dates the unknown Englishman's death as occurring January 1820; it is also the first fragment to mention Dante, La Vita Nuova or particularized readers. In the shift of emphasis from the identity of the editor to the identity with Dante in the third and the final fourth versions, the unknown poet passes through that of the androgynous man/woman. Between the two men, that is, lies the alternative choice which is far from clear. First, he is accompanied by à lady . . . supposed to be his wife'. This positions the historical Mary in triangulation with the caged bird of the poem, Emilia, `my adored Nightingale'. Second, the dying poet is accompanied by a mysterious youth whose ambiguity has affinities with all three historical persons: Emilia in disguise, Mary identified as the female knight figure,64 and Shelley in a projection of the ego-ideal as a beloved. He/she is in danger from `the taunts of the brute multitude': the multitude will miscomprehend the triangulated relation as incestuous, adulterous or sodomous. Plausibly, within the terms of its androgyny and ineffablility, the relationship is all three, which is to say that Shelley understands perfectly what composes the troubadour posture, and how transgressive its precepts are. Ingpen and Peck position Shelley's `From the Arabic' before `To Emilia Viviani' and `Drafts of a Poem or Poems in Italian to Emilia Viviani', the draft poems for Epipsychidion (IV, 86±92). There are two important points here: that Shelley translates Arabic love poetry before beginning his great poem on love, and that the great poem was initially in Italian, the language (albeit modernized) of Dante. Both these translative experiments are a thinking through other languages, an imaginative translation. Medwin notes in his Life of Shelley (1847) that `From the Arabic' is




àlmost a translation from a translation' inspired by Terrick Hamilton's Antar: A Bedoueen Romance (1819±20). It is a second-order translation that imaginatively places him in the courtly lover position, redolent with Arabic love imagery of doves, moons and the hunt. Similarly, by beginning the poem to Emilia in Italian Shelley attempts to translate himself into a Dantean troubadour. The opening lines of the `Poem or Poems in Italian' are different from Epipsychidion, and reflect a much more medieval and courtly semantics: `Madonna, wherefore hast thou sent to me/Sweet-basil and mignonette?' This is a poem voiced by a melancholic, a poet who is not sure of his beloved: `The sighs I breathe, the tears I shed for thee.' These two lyrics are a costuming, a necessary historical act like the rendering of Renaissance manner and thought in The Cenci, a way of dramatically preparing for Epipsychidion's translation back into the present tense of courtly love and its ethos. In the complete poem, the lover is not doubtful, and does not tell Emilia to `Send the stars light, but send not love to me'; the very impetus of the full poem is to rend such power from her to make it his own. In Epipsychidion it is Emilia who weeps, and the poet's melancholia has been objectified as history: Ìn my heart's temple I suspend to thee/These votive wreaths of withered memory.' The withering of history, its drying up, is an inverse of the present tears which suspend Emilia ± the object of a `dead' courtly song with its faded petals ± as a star herself. Ì pray thee that thou blot from this sad song/All of its much mortality and wrong,/With those clear drops' (3±4, 35±7). The song's anachronism of form dislocates the affect, wrenching it (both affect and form) into new vehicle for a new love. Shelley's ideal beloved has distinct affinities with Dante's first depiction of Beatrice in La Vita Nuova. There she is an embodied soul fated to touch his own spirit from first sight: `Nine times the heaven of the light had revolved in its own movement since my birth and had almost returned to the same point when the woman whom my mind beholds in glory first appeared before my eyes.' Beatrice is more than a simple virgin on whom the young Dante happened to fix his eye; she is part of a determined sequence recorded in the Vita as a path revealed by signs. The middle section of Epipsychidion similarly `fix[es] her [Emily] within the enduring pattern of his life and feelings' (Sperry, Major Verse 160). Yet Dante understood the force inside himself not to be a Beatrice miniature of himself, but the ìdol' Love which is motivated by an image of Beatrice: `her image, which was always present in my mind, incited Love to dominate me'. It requires the necessary intervention of the beloved to transcend this fixation. By contrast, Shelley's understand-




ing of the soul mate as idol is closer to Freud's ego-ideal, which provides the voice of conscious and social obligation, and which is projected outwards in order not to see the person being idealized: the beloved is a projection of self. Unlike the Dante of the Vita, Shelley imagines his true love as already transcendently merged with Lady Philosophy, already ideal and unreal, and thus fit to lead him. When still deeply in love with Mary he had written to Hogg: The originality & loveliness of Mary's character was apparent to me from her very motions & tones of voice. The irresistible wildness & sublimity of her feelings shewed itself in her gestures & her looks . . . how deeply did I not feel my inferiority, how willingly confess myself far surpassed in originality, in genuine elevation & magnificence. (3 October 1814)65 Robinson notes that Shelley spends his life searching for the ideal beloved, finding and then discarding possible candidates. Mary remains more important to him than the others, but Robinson is wrong to think of Shelley as discarding images of woman: he hoards them, accumulating beloveds into a constellation of ideals that can mirror back to him an expansive yet constant sense of self. Unlike Wasserman's insistence on a courtly love reading ± the search for the soul mate reflects back to the lover only his own infirmity (Shelley 428) ± Sperry identifies this activity within unity as an alternating centrifugal and centripetal movement. `There are two major impulses that govern the work as a whole . . . the effort to externalize Emily. . . as an influence governing nature and humankind . . . The other is centripetal: the recognition that Emily and her power are constituents of the self' (Major Verse 162). The cosmic metaphor is important, identifying the compulsion at work in the poem as planetary and Promethean rather than sexual and pathological, and is closer to Shelley's pre-Epipsychidion philosophy.66 But Wasserman's reading is the more Freudian and closer to Mary Shelley's. In imagining Emilia, Shelley marries his philosophy of love to Dante's Lady Philosophy. In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley calls Dante `the first awakener of entranced Europe', a reference not just to artistic enlightenment but philosophical achievement. Dante's ideas about the relation of the individual soul to the cosmic constellation has been traced to a Platonic text well-known in the medieval period through Chalcidius' translation, the Timaeus. Plato's discussion of the movement of body and soul as operating on an analogous model provided medieval




thinkers and Dante in particular with the notion of the spiritual pilgrim, the organizing conceit of the Commedia. Dante's insight was to translate the sexual quest of the courtly lover into the spiritual quest of the Christian man. It is these aspects of Dantean thought, being as translation, that attract Shelley and not what John Freccero calls Dante's `poetics of conversion'.67 For the medieval thinker, conversion marks the start of a new, spiritual quest requiring that the rhetorical practice undergo an accompanying shift that represents the new self's new consciousness and thus new voice. But it is the self-translation itself that most excites Shelley's poetic and political imagination; it is a translation that necessitates love.

The female knight and Emilia Although this section is based on later short pieces, they have their beginnings in the annus mirabilis of 1819 as surely as does Valperga. Just as Shelley's 1819 productions are further developing his philosophy of expansive love, so too are Mary Shelley's productions written during or stemming from this year's further developments of her own political philosophy. Mary Shelley's socio-political thinking complements her husband's, with both systems relying on a Godwinian±Wollstonecraftian model of a recursively progressivist history that eventually will result in a reformed society. But Mary's moral vision supplants a troubadourian ethos with personal responsibility; the individual is charged with effecting reform through personal activism, an extension of Godwin's view that through reason man can effect continual improvement, and of Wollstonecraft's view that it is only through equal education (enabling men and women to think for themselves) that this improvement can take place. Furthermore, instead of producing poetic visions of an ideal society such as Shelley tends towards, Mary Shelley's fiction generally restrains its impulses, illustrating her philosophy critiquing present abuses of power in representations of past, present and future corruption or failed reform. As moral critic, she is in some ways a modern day Beatrice Portinari; indeed, her Frankenstein derives from and responds to her reading of Dante and Milton. Although The Cenci's pessimism is largely considered to be a gesture towards Byron's historical vision and an illustration of Godwin's necessitarianism, the play is also Shelley's work that most fully incorporates Mary Shelley's artistic approach of critique rather than (as in The Revolt of Islam) revolutionary vision. Mary Shelley's influence can be seen particularly in the emphasis on Beatrice Cenci's failure to stay resolutely




within the moral system that had (previous to the rape) directed her behaviour. Her own fiction during this period, Matilda and the beginnings of Valperga, extends the vision begun in Frankenstein of the sociopolitical effects of miseducation and corruptive power on the individual.68 Matilda scrutinizes the abuse of power that allows incest to occur, responding to The Cenci by asserting its central problem to be incest, and its cause the inability of the patriarch to sufficiently curb his taboo impulses (rather than the victim's casuistry). The shift in emphasis puts subtle pressure on what I have been reading as a troubadourian treatment of incestuous rape in Shelley's play. Interestingly, Mary chooses a Gothic, and therefore a symbolic dreamscape, rather than realistic medieval setting for her short novel. Similarly, her children's drama also dealing with rape of this same period, Prosperine, reflects a genre choice that resists putting her work into conflict with The Cenci, despite the implicit critiques over Shelley's treatment of incest and rape. In other words, just as Mary Shelley works out her socio-political vision in response to present corruption through the indirection of critique, so too does she respond to her husband's efforts critically but through indirection. Much of her fiction in particular responds to the troubling implications of the domestic triangulation of her husband's troubadourian imagination, and my discussion of her work here is premised on the claim that it is this response that spells out the development in her political thinking during this period and later. One story, written later but focused on the issues raised by The Cenci and Epipsychidion, explicitly critiques and revises the courtly love schema by taking up the themes of troubadourian ethics, ideal love and androgyny. Appropriately, the story is entitled `The False Rhyme': it is a title that perhaps finally speaks back to Shelley's title for Epipsychidion. It is a devastating critique of the fallacies of Shelley's poetic project in that poem of love because even there the woman is not herself, for herself, but still exists for the poet as the soul of his soul. Ì would fain be at peace with the soft Mutabilities' is a line from this tale, but its anachronism highlights how troubadourian Shelley's sentiments (recognizable in the phrase `soft Mutabilities') are. The queen has just corrected her brother's rhyme, in which he asserts that men are fools who trust in a woman's chastity (`Souvent femme varie,/Bien fou qui s'y fie!').69 In revising the false rhyme (`Souvent homme varie,/Bien folle qui s'y fie'), the Queen critiques the man she most idealizes, the man whose word becomes law: the King of France/the poet-legislator. Rewriting his word is an act of radical critique that realizes its own inefficacy. Mary Shelley's intent in most of her later fiction is to establish




the absolute constancy of her own heart; to do so, she struggles to regain Shelley's literal heart, which had been snatched from his funeral pyre and kept by Leigh Hunt, who claimed to better deserve its keeping.70 Her most fully articulated response to this is `The Choice ± A Poem on Shelley's Death': Ànd thus I pray to thee, my friend, my Heart!'71 The endearment is not unusual but it is a telling one to use for a man whose mutable heart refused to burn. Mary Shelley's critiques of Romantic troubadours ± beginning with Victor Frankenstein ± invariably centre on their lack of heart. This is an astute insight: troubadourian strategy is all about love, but it contains none. In calling Shelley her `Heart', she invokes him back into presence as the man she desired rather than the man she continued to critique. As such, he becomes the inverse of the troubadourian beloved: not the trobairitz's deserting lover but an idealized object projected on to the lover. Mary Shelley both replicates the troubadourian act, and makes herself into the fragmenting desiring beloved that Lacan posits as the trouble with love. Both moves put her in the always lacking position herself, but prove as freeing for her as the troubadourian posture proves for her husband.72 She can do so by valourizing through its chivalric constancy the disturbing position P. B. Shelley places her in as female knight. As for Beatrice Cenci, the only way to respond heroically is through female chivalry, even though this comes at the greatest cost to the self. But it is this very chivalry that Shelley has set up in order to strike down in The Cenci. In `The False Rhyme' Mary Shelley responds to the poetic argument, elevating the strict interpretive code of chivalry above courtly love, with its casuistic falsifying rhyme-making, in order to assert an absolute system of values.73 But she makes concessions: this system has become feminized with its self-sacrificing love, absolute loyalty, and the honour of the heart over the honour of the name. This is also her answer to Sapphism and to the maternal politics of Hemans; it is a placement of Byron's Kaled and not Shelley's Beatrice at the heart of the matter. Kaled is an important choice because she revises Spenser's Britomart, the maiden whose desire (awakened from seeing Artegall's image in a mirror, a sighting that revises the gaze-image gendering of courtly love) initiates her quest. Kaled is changed from Spenser's glorious female knight to a woman whose desire is just as strong, but which requires a necessary secrecy, subterfuge and disobedience to pursue her rejecting quest object. In parallel with the change, Britomart's quest ± which structures, integrates, and redeems the heart of The Faerie Queene in Books III, IV and V ± Kaled's quest provides the darkly erotic subtext for Byron's romance.74 Britomart's is a healthful and socially healing




sexual desire; Kaled's a masochistic and degenerative one, but in Mary Shelley's own historical conditions it is Kaled's self-sacrifice that is admired. Mary Shelley's heroically self-sacrificing female knight of `The False Rhyme' intensifies this masochistic aspect of the Byronic dark heroine; unlike Britomart or Kaled, she does not fight, but she withstands punishment. She is the uncorruptible version of Beatrice Cenci, able to withstand imprisonment, starvation, even torture for the protection of loved ones.75 This sacrifice is explicitly contrasted to the selfishness of men: in `The False Rhyme', Emilie de Lagny's husband allows her to take his place as her `penitence'. Based primarily on the portraits of Victor in Frankenstein and Adrian in The Last Man, Anne Mellor interprets Mary Shelley's response to her husband's affairs as selfish, and enmeshed in his crucial absences and demands, both of which had a determining role in their children's deaths (Mary Shelley 149±50). Significantly, `Percy Shelley consistently read Victor Frankenstein sympathetically' (Mary Shelley 63). Mary Shelley maintained a careful public face of idealizing her husband in her fiction, but her portraits reveal her criticism and bitterness of his anti-domestic, fracturing and finally irresponsible behaviour. Moreover, in spite of his pursuit of women beloveds, his attitude towards his two daughters ± both named Clara ± was profoundly uncaring (Mary Shelley 32). If this is shocking in a follower of Wollstonecraft, it is perfectly in accord with the psychological profile of the troubadour poet, for it is only the male that matters (P. B. Shelley was overfond of his son William, and devastated at his death) while the beloved is a necessary condition of the poet's wholeness. And the central way P. B. Shelley responded to William's death was through the necessity of The Cenci, its weight pressing unbearably on its heroine. In turning to historical fiction, Mary Shelley discovers that one way to respond to the fragmenting impulsion of her husband's troubadourism is to contest the opposite, straightening directive of his historical necessitarianism. Spenser's Brittomart, Kaled of Byron's Lara, as well as Southey's Joan of Arc, pave the way for Mary Shelley's heroine of `The False Rhyme', as do the antithetical lyrics of Thomas Moore. The excerpt she chooses for an epigraph, which is from one of Moore's poems, is troubadourian, but in the pastoral and atemporal vein: `Come, tell me where the maid is found/Whose heart can love without deceit,/And I will range the world round/To sigh one moment at her feet.' Moore's conceit, that the fantastic deed can be promised because such virtue does not exist, prompts Mary Shelley's narrative. Its form provokes from her a textual inversion in her own tale in which hermeneutic critique rewrites the




troubadourian compact. She takes the conventions of troubadourian melancholy and its accompanying pathological misogyny, and politicizes the courtly game of sexual intrigue by turning it into the deadly game of political intrigue. Chastity/inconstancy will be rewritten as treason/loyalty. The libel of women, and court rumours that a lady has disgracefully disappeared with her page, will be rewritten as the consummate trustworthiness of women, the disappeared lady being discovered to have taken the place of her politically `disappeared' and imprisoned husband. That husband can then, facelessly and namelessly, champion the King's cause in war and so rewrite the treasonous charge against him: that he gave up a castle under his protection to the enemy, and so failed either to win or to die himself in battle. His honour, won on the field of honour, is only possible through his wife's voluntary dishonour. The lady's dishonour begins with her having fled with her page and her jewels: that is, with both the sign of her adultery and the Freudian sign of her chastity. Francis, who is also the warring monarch of Baillie's Count Basil, inscribes the `false rhyme' on his window with a diamond, a regally authorizing jewel which, when used as a pen, turns marriage to inconstancy. His diamond refers to both the lost lady's jewellery and Moore's unfound maid, but in the end Francis will have to break the `falsely speaking window' and thus break his authorizing word. That is, Francis himself is not only the troubadour ± as his rejected love and melancholy suggest ± but the meÂdisant as well, the liar or false-speaker who misleads the lover as to his lady's intentions. Both at once, Francis authorizes and narrates this tale of his knight whom he himself has imprisoned because he is both poet and false-speaker, lover and liar. This is the medieval understanding of the storyteller's epistemological status, and Mary Shelley's fable implies that this is her analogic understanding of the Romantic troubadour. `The False Rhyme' is more than a simple answer to the proposition of Moore's verse: Mary Shelley also confronts the atemporal and pastoralized treatment of abstracted love by anchoring her tale in a specific historical frame and circumstance. Francis is the French king whose aggressively martial exploits in Renaissance Italy unintentionally resulted in his bringing Italian salon culture to France; his sister Marguerite became a famous salon hostess as a result.76 Indeed, her biography is even more interesting in conjunction with this tale. Marguerite of AngouleÃme (1492±1549) was the queen consort of Henry II of Navarre, and was one of the great figures during the French Renaissance, author and patron of artists, writers and scholars. Her own literary





be entirely satisfied with Italian Platonic works, and she hastened to demand of her followers original translations into French of Plato's Dialogues . . . the intellectual queen had the opportunity to read and meditate in the company of her literary retainers, and thus began the delightful evenings of literary and worldly conversations which are mirrored in the HeptameÂron. (Studies on the Literary Salon 15)77 Like Marguerite's, Mary Shelley's tales also specify an audience that can be a coterie in the sense that the readership of the keepsake annual was largely composed of young women. Even more interesting for Mary Shelley's tale, Marguerite played a courageous role in saving her brother's life when he was imprisoned at Madrid after his 1525 expedition into France. In addition, her influence on her brother extended to curbing his intolerance of religious reformers. Both of these facts inform the framing relation of Marguerite and the king in `The False Rhyme'. A `playful contest' between brother and sister, reminiscent of the courtly warfare of Castiglione's Duchess, ensues when `Margaret' wishes to contest the King's verse; he, in turn, provokes her on the subject of one of her own maids of honour. Through this lost maid, Emilie de Lagny, Mary Shelley revises her husband's troubadourism and his false love for Èmilia'. Although Shelley's desire for Emilia was acceptable to Mary as an expression of his universal love, her problem was Teresa's superficiality and inconstancy in love. By reversing biographical fact to make Emilie an expression of pure constancy, embracing prison rather than bewailing it, Mary Shelley neatly reverses Francis I's rhyme and her husband's false idealization of Emilia. In the tale, Emilie's husband has been condemned to `perpetual imprisonment' for his supposed traitorous behaviour, a treason called into question by the joke that begins the story: Margaret says, `What treason is this, my liege . . . which crimsons your cheek? I must see it'. Ìt is treason,' replied the king, ànd therefore, sweet sister, thou mayest not see it'. The game turns to an unchivalrous contest: `Taunted now by her brother', Margaret agrees to a wager to be settled by finding out the truth of Emilie's disappearance. At the last minute an unnamed and visored knight appears with news of conquest, the reward for which was Francis'



output includes a work based on the Decameron entitled the HeptameÂron, in which a series of tales about honour, virtue and wit are told by delayed travellers. L. Clark Keating sees her roles of salon hostess, author and patron as inextricably woven: she could not

agreeing to liberate de Lagny, whose `frame was attenuated by privation'. Kneeling, he ùncovered his head; a quantity of rich golden hair then escaping, fell over the sunken cheeks and pallid brow of the suppliant. `We have treason here!' cried the king . . . `Sire, blame him not,' said the soft faltering voice of Emilie; `wiser men than he have been deceived by woman'. The treason is, in fact, a woman's self-sacrifice for the one she loved (the champion who stands nearby), a sharp reply to Shelley's troubadour posture and to his judgment of Beatrice Cenci. The heroine of Beethoven's 1791 opera Fidelio, Leonora, also assumes the clothing of a man in order to release her imprisoned husband; like her, Emilie is justified in transgressing legitimizing codes of gendered difference because the legal sentence is no longer bound to the logos when the King speaks. Francis's passive-aggressive relation to women becomes understood through the troping of women's constancy as political service to the State at the expense of female identity. As king he positions himself in the pathology of conspiratorial paranoia so that every sexual game and state matter can be decoded by the word `treason', and every sexual intrigue is state intrigue. Mary Shelley literalizes this paranoid response in order to reveal the real problem with Francis as poet: his State/state lacks a heart because he takes woman/love as inconstant, treasonous. With a heart or core, the logos has no poetic truth and the `false speaking window', inscribed by the meÂdisant king, must be shattered. This is not casuistry but a corruption of language itself: it seems an effective answer to the Epipsychidion, in whose Preface the cross-dressed beloved is favoured over the legitimate wife, for in crossing the wife with honour, Mary Shelley reasserts herself in the centre of the logos as original ground. Emilie de Lagny's `penitence', the restitching of word to honour, is effected in the place of her dishonoured husband. Her re-seaming of gendered garments allows him to prove his truth in equal form to his endeavours, both in Francis's war and on the field of honour for the tournament christened the `Triumph of the Ladies'. Isolated from each other, this pair disproves each of Francis's claims of treason, revealing that this king dishonourably uses the greatest crime against the throne to describe acts of all kinds, and without semantic truth. No wonder that the `result of this bet was long sung by troubadour and minstrel' (284), but at what cost? Marguerite's historical experience with prisons and exploits consisted of traditional women's acts: she nursed Francis during a serious illness in the prison at Madrid. But Emilie has reduced herself to a `faded cheek' and èmaciated form', which is now beautiful only in the sacrifice it symbolizes. She thus proves that when the




woman is `disappeared', invisible to the eye and faceless once she is the literal prisoner, she is not only constant but forgone. To suppose that the window should speak, falsely or not, is to call into question the status of the Keatsian window opening on to an atemporal pastorality78 proposed by Moore's initiating stanza. `Come, tell me where the maid is found': for Mary Shelley, the maid is always waiting here, while the troubadour wanders and cannot recognize her face in any case. The question of facelessness, and the absent presence of the troubadourian beloved's face, was for Mary Shelley a particularly potent and irritating aspect of Shelley's attachment to Èmilia'. If in 1829 Mary has forgiven her to the extent that the beautiful sacrificial heroine of `The False Rhyme' bears her name, she was not as beneficent in her 1824 story, `The Bride of Modern Italy' (originally published in London Magazine, April 1824).79 In this contemporary account of the effects of medievalized life, the heroine, Clorinda, is virtually imprisoned by her family in a convent until an arranged marriage takes place, as was Viviani. The first paragraphs set the reader up for a tale of Gothic conspiracy (which is how Shelley considered the imprisoned girl): Catholicism, convents, failed gardens, perverted or withered passion, manipulation and absolute control, false guardians and forced marriages. But the tale is an antiGothic, revealing the heroine's active role in her fate, and her own brand of manipulation and control. As a result, this story is not about Emilia/Clorinda as a Gothic victim of an institutionalized Catholic paranoia, but about the hero who almost marries her: the artist Alleyn (that is, the poet Percy). In part, this emphasis on the male subjectivity is due to the readership Mary Shelley anticipates: not the young women readers of the Keepsake annuals, but the male readership of the London Magazine. In 1824 the Magazine was at the height of its brilliance as an opponent to Gentleman's Magazine, and a platform for younger writers and poets. In choosing this as her venue, a magazine known for its defence of the `Cockney School' and Keats in particular, Mary Shelley reveals her strategy in this tale: she will address those male readers who admire Keatsian troubadour poetry, and confront them with the reality of what such poetry encourages. To make her point, the story will be lengthy, the language leisurely and highly figurative; the narrative will seem a realistic travelogue too literal to ignore, and the trap it sets for the Keatsian artist/lover will be unbearably possible. If the Keepsake tale is brief, a medieval fable short enough to catch the most inattentive female eye yet emphatic enough to get its message across, this longer tale will convince through rhetorical power and contemporaneous plausibility.




In keeping with this audience, the story is clearly structured on the principles of troubadour courtliness, allowable because, despite the modern setting, both the convent and the marital arrangements are so medieval. Even the heroine's name, Clorinda, helps medievalize the tale, but ironically so and in clear support of the anti-Gothic theme. Clorinda was Tasso's valiant female warrior of Gerusalemme Liberata (1577), but the reader quickly realizes that despite her stratagems this Clorinda is no female knight, the present day Rome is no Jerusalem, and the convent garden is no sexually paradisiacal Eden. Ironically, only 25 years later it will be the fashion for bourgeois girls to enter Anglican convents in and near London, a phenomenon that Punch ridicules for its sentimentalism and insincerity.80 Mary Shelley is clear about the unromantic nature of convent reality: Ìf my reader has never seen a convent . . . He must figure it to himself as bounded by a long, low, straggling, white-washed, weather-stained building, with grated windows, the lower ones glassless'. The river of adjectives accretes, leading ever lower and ranker with disgust, not pity. The kitchen garden gives off `rank exhalations', and the walks are `neglected . . . strewn with broken earthen-ware, ashes, cabbage-stalks, orange-peel, bones' (263). This literally distasteful and all too real garden is where the heroine Clorinda takes her daily exercise at the convent of St. SÐÐ, a detail resonant with the subtitle of Percy Shelley's Epipsychidion: `Verses Addressed to the Noble and Unfortunate Lady. . . Now Imprisoned in the Convent ofÐÐ'. Here the passionflower decays, nuns wither and, like the acidic lemon plants, must be sheltered from the air. The only sweet plants, the orange trees, are nailed to the wall near where the dead nuns are buried. Mary Shelley goes further, however. It is not enough to wash Emilia with literalness: if `The False Rhyme' would teach young women that truth and having face are women's birthright, despite what troubadours claim, here she will teach men that the fantasy of courtly love is false, and playing the courtly troubadour can catch the lover in his own trap. In fact, three men have fallen in love with the imprisoned Clorinda, and she naively but successfully plays each off against the other until finally: `the door opened and Giacomo came out. Seeing Alleyn, he threw himself into his arms, shedding a torrent of tears. This exordium startled our Englishman; the conclusion was soon told: Clorinda had married Romani the day before, and on the same evening had quitted Rome for Spoleto' (273). If this tale is more literal-minded, contemporary, and realistic, not only mocking romance and courtly behaviours, but exposing institutional hypocrisies, it also contains a laughter of its own. Mary




Shelley first declaws Èmilia' and then exposes the folly of her amateur erudition in the Italian Platonics, a text whose very matter should have authorized her to engage in courtly games with troubadour poets such as P. B. Shelley. `The Bride of Modern Italy' ends with the English Alleyn throwing over his obsession with Clorinda and returning to his own work, a painting of the `Profession of Eloisa'. Eloisa was not only a convent-inhabitant, but an intellectual of renown, a faithful and sincere lover, an abbess in control of her convent. Alleyn's historical painting is of a truer woman than the contemporary one he has just been saved from.

Surviving love Mary Shelley's manuscript and Keepsake poems to Percy add a final critical response to his troubadourian ownership of the lyrical and epical dimensions of Platonic agency.81 Poems such as `The Choice' (privately printed in 1876) and `The Dirge' (published in The Keepsake of 1831) indicate the nature of these elegiac attempts to rhythmically and metaphorically recreate Percy's essence. They become through their prosody a sort of anti-Frankensteinian and reverse-Platonic endeavour to reconstrue without monstrosity and to re-constellate without reasserting the self in the place of the lost one. In `The Choice', Mary Shelley establishes her husband as her `heart', while the `The Dirge', whose name exemplifies the essence of all the rest, resonates with Shelley's own Hellenism.82 `The Dirge' immortalizes Shelley by distancing him, in a reversal of the Epipsychidion trajectory (not I-Thou, but an irreparable divide between I-alone and Thou-Love). Òh Listen While I Sing to Thee' also rejects troubadourism, this time by seeming to imitate it. The lyric compels the loved one to listen: Òh listen while I sing to thee,/My song is meant for thee alone.' And it succeeds in its task, not by composing a beloved in order to produce self-unity, but by calling a loved one into being in order to more fully love: Ànd now that thou art near to me/I pour a full impassioned tone.' The poem continues the constancy theme of À False Rhyme', at the same time reminding the loved one that it is his inconstancy that can still divide them: Ìf thou wert fake ± in agony/My heart would break, I could not sing.' Together the poems lament and long, restrained by a minimal lexicon and palette for their effect, but do not depict the other or reflect the self. They recall troubadour song but maintain a recomposing rather than distributive or fragmenting drive. If we return to the dreadful weeks of November 1814 after their return to England from their elopement to




the Continent, only to encounter Godwin's rejection of them and Shelley's creditors, the language Mary Shelley uses in letters and journal entries to describe daily events also captures this sense that language can never be the signified, but must always be at best a critique of the act of (troubadourian/political/sexist) signification. The entries resemble the language used by Christina Rossetti to represent the life of a medieval woman troubadour in her sonnet cycle, Monna Innominata, with the circulation of the same words, the feeling of isolation, the clash of men, and the uncertainty as to how it would all end. Mary Shelley already knew when she wrote her first real critique of the troubadour poet, Frankenstein, from what ground her critical terms sprang. Her literary production after the death of her troubadour husband variously recalls, critiques and corrects his ghost as it haunts her imaginary terrain. At the same time that she was so preoccupied with the past and its homosocial bonds, she was enjoying female friendships in Britain, attending vestigial salons in London and Paris, and using her influence to aid two lesbian friends in a fantastic scheme to live together as man and wife.83 In aiding this overthrow of patriarchal and homosocial expectations, as in her depiction of Euthanasia's female court (Valperga I, chs 13±14), Mary Shelley authorizes a disturbance within the troubadourian strategy that is theoretically more damaging than a mere critique. Yet as in Valperga, she finds no room for a Sapphic aesthetic here: in Valperga, Wilhelmina's secret sect was meant to save the female sex on earth by reconfiguring the crippling patriarchal structure of Catholicism with an alternative Christianity, but Beatrice's seduction and fall betray what a false vision this was. Similarly, art cannot be saved by a Sapphic orientation that is only the flip side of a masculinist one. What Mary Shelley seems to be working out in these poems is the impossibility of a Sapphic or trobairitz position. For her, the very conception is ungrounded because it does not rework the male model enough; it does not supplant that model's negating and particularizing vision with a universalizing and progressive one. Very much more to the point are the autonarrations that, through their reconstellation of familiar faces and psychologies, and their intertextual conversations, allow her to critique and resist Shelley's troubadourian fragmenting impulses, to follow her own vision of responsible love and constancy, and to rethink Romantic medievalism.




1


1 The Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of Modern Historical Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), iv. 2 Kathleen Biddick traces this development in historicized thinking in The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 1±8. Alice Chandler treats it in depth in A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), chs 5 and 6. 3 David Duff notes that the `rehabilitation of chivalry' began as a post-Enlightenment Whig inquiry into civics, then translated into Georgian mercantile culture: Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 118. 4 In Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997) Katie Trumpener analyses the figure of the bard as a political construct that could also represent conservative or radical impulses. Her concern is to explore the interrelation of internal and external colonialism, a concern which causes her to focus on nationalism rather than medievalism (and the national bard rather than the individualistic troubadour), and which restricts her discussion to the uses of the historical novel and related novel genres. 5 For a thorough treatment of the effects on the English court of this crosstrafficking, see William Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), Ènglish Court Poetry', 269±423. 6 In his biography of Keats, W. Jackson Bate notes that Fanny Brawne `pride[d] herself on her knowledge of historical costume . . . [and at eighteen] may already have started to put together her neat scrapbooks of dress compiled from French magazines and costume cards' (John Keats, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 428. 7 Marc Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), ch. 2, and David Duff, Romance and Revolution, 118±20. Underlying my discussion of chivalry is Duff's analysis of romance which he implicitly equates with Romantic period medievalism, and both with chivalry alone, as well as Maurice Keen's Chivalry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), David Castronovo's The English Gentleman (New York: Ungar, 1987), and Arthur B. Ferguson's The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1986). 8 `The Internalization of Quest Romance', in Harold Bloom (ed.), Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 3±24. 9 As A. Chandler notes, Marx (who was influenced by William Cobbett's medievalism) exemplifies the negative view Victorians held of feudalism, 197



Notes

10

11

12 13

14

while feudalism's positive attributes of paternalism and social hierarchy were well championed too. `Nowhere are the differences between a competitive and unorganized rather than a communal and regulated economic system shown more succinctly than in the works of Karl Marx, who traces the existence of a debased and deracinated proletariat to the ending of the feudal system': A Dream of Order, 4. See F. Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971), 103±6, 391±2; and his incorporation of feudalism into a historical analysis of the political unconscious in The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 118±19. Antony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983) and Poetry and Phantasy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). R. J., Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688± 1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Anne Williams, The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For background on the Gothic, see also my chapter on `Women and the Gothic' in E. Fay, A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998), 107±48; see also Ruth Perry, Ìncest as the Meaning of the Gothic Novel', Eighteenth Century 39 (1998), 261±78. For recent considerations of the Gothic as awareness of history, see Roland Bonnel, `Medieval Nostalgia in France, 1750±1789: The Gothic Imaginary at the End of the Old Regime', Studies in Medievalism (1993), 139±63; David H. Richter, The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1996); James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764±1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Michael Gamer, `Confounding Present with Past: Romanticism, Lyrical Ballads, and Gothic Romance', Poetica (1994), 111±38. See Norman Cantor's Inventing the Middle Ages (New York: William Morrow, 1991) for a history of the rise of medieval studies in Britain and the USA. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (London: Oxford UP, 1936, reprinted 1973); H. J. Chaytor's earlier The Troubadours and England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923). For Pound, see Stuart Y. McDongal, Ezra Pound and the Troubadour Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), and Peter Makin, Provence and Pound (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978). Of the scholarship on medievalism published between these two waves of interest, the most significant remains Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. by Willard R. Trask (1953; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). See also Robert Briffault's popularization from this period, The Troubadours (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1965), and Alexander J. Denomy's The Heresy of Courtly Love (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965). For a series of invigorating reflections on developments during the century in the field, see the essays in R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (eds), Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), but for essays especially relevant to this study, see John M. Graham's `National Identity and the Politics of Publishing the Troubadours' (57±94), Laura



198 Notes

15

16

17

18

Kendrick's `The Science of Imposture and the Professionalization of Medieval Occitan Literary Studies' (95±126), and David F. Hult's `Gaston Paris and the Invention of Courtly Love' (192±224). K. Morris, The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic Victorian Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1984); J. Mitchell, Scott, Chaucer and Medieval Romance (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1987); C. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). L. Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); S. Gaunt, Troubadours and Irony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and S. Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). In addition the following are important to my understanding of troubadour lyrics: Paul Zumthor, Toward a Medieval Poetics, trans. by Philip Bennett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Irving Singer, The Nature of Love: Courtly and Romantic (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984); R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991); John Simons (ed.), From Medieval to Medievalism (New York: St Martin's Press, 1992). For the trobairitz, see Matilda T. Bruckner, `Na Castelloza, Trobairitz, and Troubadour Lyric', Romance Notes 25 (1985), 239± 53; J. Ferrante, `Notes Towards a Study of a Female Rhetoric in the Trobairitz', in William D. Paden, Jr (ed.), The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Woman Troubadours (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 63±72; Sarah Kay, `Derivation, Derived Rhyme and the Trobairitz', in Paden, The Voice of the Trobairitz, 157±82, and Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); the overview by Bruckner on the trobairitz in F. R. P. Akehurst and Judith M. Davis (eds), Handbook of the Troubadours, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 201±36; and Bruckner, Laurie Shepard and Sarah White (eds and trans.), Songs of the Women Troubadours (New York: Garland, 1995). For example, the work in the eighteenth century of French antiquarians, who based their linguistic and historical scholarship on the troubadours from archival manuscripts. Further work was accomplished by the gentlemen antiquarians of de Sainte-Palaye's circle, who produced the 25-volume Histoire litteÂraire des troubadours. British antiquarians, beginning in the Renaissance, were similarly mounting the revival of medieval works beginning with álfric's prose texts in 1567 and continuing through to the publication of Beowulf for the first time in 1815. For an account of the Renaissance antiquarians, see Stuart Piggott's Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989). See Hult, `Gaston Paris and the Invention of Courtly Love'; R. Howard Bloch, `842: The First Document and the Birth of Medieval Studies', in Denis Hollier (ed.), A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 6±13. Laura Kendrick argues that `The crucial impetus for the turning serious of medieval studies in France was not so much, as in England, unwelcome changes brought on by industrialization . . . but rather a dramatic political event: the Revolution of 1789', which destroyed feudal institutions and dispossessed feudally installed aristocratic families. The Revolution, Kendrick shows, necessitated the need to `reinvent' the past, since medieval



Notes 199

19 20

21 22

23

24

25 26

27 28

manuscripts were already distrusted as authentic historical sources (`The Science of Imposture' 97, 101). See Linda Seidel, Songs of Glory: The Romanesque FacËades of Aquitaine (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1981), 4. Alan Liu refers to Romantic sense of history as èlsewhereness', while Chandler responds to David Lowenthal's definition of the past as à foreign country': A. Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 5, 39, 361; D. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); J. Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Greg Kucich analyses Romantic historicism as a dialectical movement that Kucich terms a `linear contrariety': Èternity and the Ruins of Time: Shelley and the Construction of Cultural History', in Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (eds), Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 24. Àugustine understands his history to be an act of mind, and imposition of structure on what is not . . . Augustine has no faith in some actuality that lies somehow beyond or behind the texts about the past' (Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past 25). Ìt was not in the old Gnosticism of the Cathars that the delicate medieval mental world would find its destruction, but in the new nominalism of Abelard, the connoisseurship of incoherence' (Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past 37). For more on the Cathars, see MicheÁle AueÂ, Le pays Cathare (Vic-en-Bigorre Cedex: MSM, 1992). Johan Huizinga, `Historical Ideals of Life', Men and Ideas (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 77±96. Current thinking about anachronism stems from the Marxist study of forms, specifically with Georg LukaÂcs's The Historical Novel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981). Hegel's necessary anachronism is the aestheticized use of past materials to bring present internal and subjective, and external and objective, cultural components into view. The fit is both between these correspondences and between past story and present engagement with that story. See Chandler's discussion of Hegel's use of anachronism in the Aesthetics, 501±2. J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 266. This analysis of the troubadour love relation is drawn from Eugene Vance's structuralist analysis of courtly love lyric, Chaviva HosÏek and Patricia Parker (eds), `Greimas, Freud, and the Story of TrouveÁre Lyric', in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theory of homosociality in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Sedgwick extends Girard's analysis to theorize the necessity of homosocial bonds between men over the body of the woman in Western literary culture beginning with Shakespeare. It may be the triangulation of erotic interest ± and not the idealization of erotic love ± that is the troubadour's real contribution to Western culture.



200 Notes

29 N. Eliason, `Chaucer the Love Poet', in Jerome Mitchell and William Provost (eds), Chaucer the Love Poet (Athens, CA: University of Georgia Press, 1973), 9±26. 30 The genre Gaunt focuses on instead of the lai, the fabliau, is not a bridge but a disrupter or deconstructive genre that works to unseat courtly convention with its ribald depictions of women in unseemly circumstances. 31 See Vance, `Greimas, Frend, and the Story of TrouveÁre Lyric', 98±9. Vance particularly emphasizes the importance of this poetry for the history of literature: `no poetic convention in European literature has been more stable than that of the vernacular courtly lyric, nor more central to other literary discourses, including that of the novel ± all of which suggests that the story of trouveÁre [troubadour] lyric is the hidden story of literature itself' (`Greimas, Freud', 105). 32 Gaunt, Gender and Genre 74, and Gaunt, `Marginal Men, Marcabru and Orthodoxy: The Early Troubadours and Adultery', Medium Aevum 59 (1990), 55±72. For a recent account of the lover as gazer, see A. C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love ± Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 33 See Stuart Curran, `Romantic Poetry: The `Ì'' Altered,' in Anne K. Mellor (ed.), Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana, University Press, 1988), 185±207. 34 See Gaunt's chapter on Ìrony: medieval and modern', in Troubadours and Irony, 5±38. 35 Quoted in Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), 269. 36 Politicized novels, particularly by women eager to dispel the silencing effects of chivalry, abounded in critiques of the chivalric and courtly elevation of women, critiques fully fleshed out in Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, but sounded even earlier in Godwin's Political Justice. Elizabeth Hamilton's novels insistently attack the harms of falsely elevating women, especially Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. 37 If Spenser was important to the dissemination of `sensibility' in the eighteenth century, his Italian counterparts ± Tasso and Ariosto ± were even longer lived and more influential. Certainly Thomas Warton believed that Spenser's adaptation of the ottava rima was `from the practice of Ariosto and Tasso, the most fashionable poets of his age'. In his Stories from the Italian Poets, Leigh Hunt comments that Àriosto's love for this lady I take to have been one of the causes of dissatisfaction between him and the cardinal', and the marriage `was never acknowledged': Leigh Hunt, Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers (London: Chapman & Hall, 1846), II, 127, 126. The importance of the Ariosto±Tasso connection is specifically discussed by Clara Reeve in her Progress of Romance, and Isaac Disraeli in his Literary Curiosities. 38 J. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 39 Sarah Kay, `Derivation, Derived Rhyme, and the Trobairitz', in Paden, The Voice of the Trobairitz 169. See also Marianne Shapiro, `The ProvencËal Trobairitz and



Notes 201

the Limits of Courtly Love', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3 (1978), 560±71. Both Kay and Shapiro are ultimately arguing for the difficulties registered in the lack of strongly female-oriented audiences, but neither critic argues for a female poetics that would inherently constitute itself as demeaned, or essentialize itself as abject (the usual argument advanced for nineteenth-century writers such as Dorothy Wordsworth, LEL, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Emily BronteÈ).

2 Cultivating Medievalism: Feeling History 1 Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), 295. 2 See Rachel Crawford's `Troping the Subject: Behn, Smith, Hemans and the Poetics of the Bower', Studies in Romanticism 38 (1999), 249±80. 3 All references to Coleridge's poems and letters will be to The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), and The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols, ed. by E. L. Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956±71). 4 Notably, Sappho's famous fragment 31 attempts to seduce the woman who is a man's beloved. This is the lyric that French poets obsessively rewrote. See Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 34. 5 DeJean's study, Fictions of Sappho, 1546±1937 (Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago Press, 1989), focuses on the importance of this revival in French culture and literature. 6 See ch. 1 and ch. 6 of George Dekker's Coleridge and the Literature of Sensibility (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1978). 7 This kind of relationship has also been read as a desire for the maternal. See Barbara Schapiro, The Romantic Mother: Narcissistic Patterns in Romantic Poetry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983). 8 Seward also dislikes troubadourism in general, calling it `Petrarchanism', and finding it particularly effeminate. The term, which Mary Robinson associates with the Italian sonnet and thus with poetic legitimacy in her preface to Sappho and Phaon (1796), incurs all the effete emotionalism for Seward that legitimates an insincerity of emotion and purpose. For biographical and contextual material for Seward, see Margaret Ashmun, The Singing Swan (New York: Greenwood, 1968); Ruth A. Hesselgrave, Lady Miller and the Batheaston Literary Circle (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1927); and John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago P., 1997), pp. 573±612. All references to Seward's poetry will be to Walter Scott (ed.), The Poetical Works of Anna Seward, 3 vols (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne, 1810). 9 To John Thewall, 17 Dec. 1796: H. J. Jackson, The Oxford Authors: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985), 491. 10 To C. Smyth, 1 Feb. 1792; W. Scott (ed.), Letters of Anna Seward Written Between the Years 1784±1807 (New York: AMS Press, 1975), III, 114. 11 Northrop Frye, `Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility', English Literary History (1956), 144±52; Julie Ellison, Cato's Tears and the Making of AngloAmerican Emotion (Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago P., 1999).



202 Notes

12 Women poets were especially concerned with formulating poetic myths about Sappho that they could use to understand their own will to write, both within and against patriarchal conventions and constraints. See Felicia Hemans's `The Last Song of Sappho', Christina Rossetti's `Sappho', or Caroline Norton's `The Picture of Sappho'. It was for this same imaginative need that women poets wrote to each other, not just as in Barrett Browning's poems to George Sand, or hers and Christina Rossetti's poems to LEL, but also Dora Greenwell's poems to Barrett Browning and C. Rossetti, Amy Levy's `To Vernon Lee', or LEL's `Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans'. 13 Seward refers to all women poets as `Sapphos', understanding the term more generally than it has been taken in current critical discourse to mean a specific literary tradition since the publication of DeJean's study of the Sapphic tradition. The term is also less serious for Seward, and she names her favourite lap dog `Sappho' (`the sensible, the beloved little creature'), indicating not an irreverence for her literary foremother, but an affectionate relationship. While McGann uses `Sapphic' to denote poetry that comprehends the woman poet's nineteenth-century experience as abject (` ``culture'' and ``civilization'' do not want such a ``spirit'' to live on, it is too pitiless, too intransigent, too Sapphic': The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 168), I use the term to refer back to Sappho's poetic authority in presenting her experience as normative. This second meaning is closer to Seward's self-presentation. 14 Coleridge maintains an interest in the temporal and spatial problematic as an important element of his `metaphysics', and it is often propelled by historical events. In January 1802 he is busy `planning metaphysical works on ``Time and Space'' ' after news of the possible peace accord to be signed with Napoleon. 15 H. S. Milford (ed.), Cowper: Poetical Works, 4th edn (London: Oxford UP, 1967). Cowper remained one of Coleridge's favourite poets (Holmes, Early Visions Coleridge: 237). Hazlitt remembers Coleridge as dismissing Gray and Pope, and claiming Cowper as `the best modern poet' (quoted in Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions 195). 16 Curiously, it is also Lamb who notes the fairy bower of Hunt's prison rooms (D. Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 131). 17 Coleridge referred to the poem as his `lovely Lady' (Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions 347). 18 John O. Hayden (ed.), Romantic Bards and British Reviewers (Lincoln, NB: U. of Nebraska P., 1971), 141±2. 19 Geraldine has attracted a number of important readings of Coleridge's play with gender and sexuality, although without the connections to medievalism and troubadour poetry, or to Seward or Sapphism I am tracing here. See Karen Swann's ` ``Christabel'': The Wandering Mother and the Enigma of Form', Studies in Romanticism 23 (1985), 21±39, and `Literary Gentlemen and Lovely Ladies: The Debate on the Character of Christabel', English Literary History 52:2 (1985), 394±418; Charles J. Rzepka, `Christabel's ``Wandering Mother'' and the Discourse of the Self: A Lacanian Reading of Repressed Narration', Romanticism Past and Present 10:1 (1986), 17±43; Jane Chamber, `Geraldine's Read Obscenity: The Perverted Passion and Resurrection in ``Christabel'' ', Essays in Litera-



Notes 203

20

21 22

23 24 25

26 27 28 29

30 31 32

ture 12:1 (1985), 61±73; and Dennis Welch, `Coleridge's Christabel: A / version of a Family Romance', Women's Studies 21:2 (1992), 163±84. Significantly, in one of Coleridge's terrible opium dreams Dorothy Wordsworth, whose poetic imagination Coleridge rated highly, appears strangely not herself (àltered in every feature') and is metonymously connected to a lamia figure, à frightful pale woman', and then à figure of a woman of gigantic Height, dim & indefinite & smokelike'. See Kathleen Coburn (ed.), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Bollingen Series, Pantheon, 1957±73), I, 1250. The psycho-dynamics of the cultural relation of the maternal body to disgust is best worked out in Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982). See Margery Durham's exploration of Geraldine's alternative language, `The Mother Tongue: Christabel and the Language of Love', in Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane and Madelon Sprengnether (eds), The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985), 169±93. See Mark M. Hennelly, Jr, ` `Às well fill up the space between'': A Liminal Reading of ``Christabel'' ', Studies in Romanticism 38 (1999), 203±23. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), 264. Coleridge even believed that Wordsworth and Sara engaged in sexual activity: `Coleridge began to torture himself not only with the well-founded suspicion that Sara preferred Wordsworth to himself, but with the fear that the two had actually become lovers in the Queen's Head at Stringston, half a mile from Coleorton Church, at 10.50 a.m. on 27 December' (Gill, Life 256). Clearly Coleridge sees Wordsworth's knightly strategy as pre-empting his own love fantasies. Holmes traces the wyverne back to the dragon on which the effigy of a crusader knight at Sockburn church rests his feet, a tomb that had captured Coleridge's imagination there (Coleridge: Early Visions 251). Coleridge calls attention to the troubadour-history dynamics of this poem in his Ìntroduction' to it for the Morning Post: Complete Poetical Works, II, 1052±3. See J. T. Barbarese, `Dramas of naming in Coleridge', Studies in English Literature, 1500±1900 37 (1997), 673±99. Two indispensable studies of Petrarchism are Heather Dubrow's Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995), and Stephen Minta's Petrarch and Petrarchism: The English and French Traditions (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1980). All references to Smith's poetry will be to The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. by Stuart Curran (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993). Robert Chambers (ed.), Cyclopedia of English Literature (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, Grambo, 1854), I, 140. M. Brown, PreRomanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1991), 42. For an interesting history of the influence of elegy on Romantic literature, see John W. Draper, The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism (1928; New York: Octagon, 1967). The authoritative treatment is Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985); see also Eleanor M. Sickels, Gloomy Egoist: Moods and Themes of Melancholy from Gray to Keats (1932; New York: Octagon, 1969).



204 Notes

33 Elizabeth W. Harries has usefully commented on Smith's public-private strategy in ` `Òut in left field'': Charlotte Smith's Prefaces, Bourdieu's Categories, and the Public Sphere', Modern Language Quarterly 58 (1997), 457±74. 34 All references to Keats's poetry are to John Barnard (ed.), John Keats: The Complete Poems, 3rd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). 35 My reading of the urn's history depends on Cleanth Brooks, `Keats's Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes', in Wilbur S. Scott (ed.), Five Approaches of Literary Criticism (New York: Macmillan, 1962); Helen Vendler's The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983); Philip Fisher, À Museum with One Work Inside: Keats and the Finality of Art', Keats±Shelley Journal 33 (1984), 85±102. A. W. Phinney, `Keats in the Museum: Between Aesthetics and History' Journal of English and German Philology 90 (1991), 208± 30; Geraldine Friedman, `The Erotics of Interpretation in Keats's `Òde on a Grecian Urn'': Pursuing the Feminine' Studies in Romanticism, 32 (1993), 225± 44; James Heffernan, Èkphrasis and Representation' New Literary History 22 (1991), 297±317, and David Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 36 I am extending Marjorie Levinson's `surface' reading of `brede' in Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 129. 37 All references to Robinson's poetry are to Judith Pascoe (ed.), Mary Robinson: Selected Poems (Peterborough: Broadview, 2000). 38 Robinson attempts to further forestall misreading by giving the narrative plot of her poem in the subtitles for each sonnet listed at the beginning of the sequence, so that readers cannot escape the correlation between Sappho's rejected love, pursuit and despair and Robinson's, yet will necessarily read Robinson's story in the authorizing terms of the greatest female poet to have ever lived. 39 Òde Inscribed to the Infant Son of S. T. Coleridge, Esq.', and `To the Poet Coleridge'. 40 William Bell Scott (ed.), The Poetical Works of Letita Elizabeth Landon (London: George Routledge, 1873). 41 LEL was herself perceived as the troubadour's seduced lady rather than the troubadour herself, while her husband was depicted by her contemporary, the poet Emma Roberts, as a knight, working to end the slave trade with `chivalric energy'. See Tricia Lootens, `Receiving the Legend, Rethinking the Writer: Letitia Landon and the Poetess Tradition', in Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt (eds), Romanticism and Women Poets (Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 1999), 243, 245. 42 References to these lyrics are to Jerome J. McGann and Daniel Riess (eds), Letitia Elizabeth Landon: Selected Writings (Peterborough: Broadview, 1997).

3 The Legacy of Arthur: Scott, Wordsworth and Byron 1 Quoted in Richard W. Barber, Arthur of Albion (London: Boydell, 1961), xi. 2 They were further influenced by the Welsh romance of Madoc which, like Arthurian romance and connected to it, formed a kind of pre-history for British nationalism along with the myth of the Norman Yoke. See Gwyn A.



Notes 205

3

4 5

6

7

8

9 10

11

Williams, Madoc: The Making of a Myth (1979; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Madoc was supposed to have started a colony in North America; Southey's epic Madoc (1805) merely participated in the general revival of Arthurian ground and its utopian promise. This is the romantic identity of the Welsh bard, intensified by Edward I's `massacre of the bards'. The court bards of medieval Wales were more accurately historians and genealogists. See Gwyn A. Williams, `Romanticism in Wales', in Roy Porter and MikulaÂÏs Teich (eds), Romanticism in National Context, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 13. F. Jameson, The Political Unconscions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), esp. 118±19. If one thinks of Keats's first poetic efforts, especially poems such as `Calidore', it is clear that the poetic posture of the romance with its love-lorn attitude is more important than the romance itself. Similarly, Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets and Mary Robinson's Sappho and Phaon demonstrate a sonneteering posture that Wordsworth then targets in `Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room', which poses the transcendent possibilities of formal constraint as an argument against the laxity of the feminized sonnet. In his Essay on the Writings and Genius of Alexander Pope (1756), Joseph Warton classifies English poets into four classes, reserving the first class for òur only sublime and pathetic poets, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton': quoted in Jonathan Brody Kramnick, `The Cultural Logic of Late Feudalism: Placing Spenser in the Eighteenth Century', English Literary History 63 (1996), 871. For a discussion of the ideological nature of Byron's self-presentation in relation to aristocratic models, and especially his interest in his own genealogy, see Jerome Christensen's Lord Byron's Strength, Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), 32±87. Marilyn Gaull, English Romanticism: The Human Context (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 256±7. Gaull contrasts this attitude to other interests held by antiquarians, particularly the survival of folk traditions in rural communities and the cult of balladry associated with historically Celtic cultures such as that of Scotland. While I am more interested in what the Romantics chose to resuscitate from the past, the concurrent fascination with the survival of the past in the present offers equally rich insights into the Romantic uses of history. There are approximately two hundred extant manuscripts of Geoffrey's work, indicating its immense popularity and circulation (Barber, Arthur 28). The Old French `romanz' was first used to mean à book in the vernacular' in the 1240s, but referred only to translations from Latin. Wace drops this distinction. Ìn the second half of the twelfth century, the term is applied to what we call ``romances,'' but is, also, employed of chronicles, and continues to be employed of such works down into the fourteenth century': J. Douglas Bruce, Evolution of Arthurian Romance from the Beginnings Down to the Year 1300 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1958), 67, n.63. Lancelot is the favourite hero of the twelfth century, overtaking Gawain's place as court favourite. According to ChreÂtien de Troyes, Marie de Champagne, step-daughter of Henry II, gave him the material for Le Chevalier de la Charrette; de Troyes gave Lancelot his present character, following the mandates for the perfect knight given by Andreas Capellanus in his treatise on



206 Notes

12 13

14

15

16

courtly love, Tractatus de Amore. Lancelot's strict devotion and humility to his lady, elements of courtly love emphasized by Capellanus, are supposed to be the influence of the Countess on de Troyes' composition. De Troyes is the first author to make a major theme out of Lancelot's adulterous love for Guinevere, and both the sublimity of their love and the Queen's punishment for it are probably borrowed from the story of Tristan and Isolde: Henri de Briel and Manuel Herrmann, King Arthur's Knights and the Myths of the Round Table: A New Approach to the French Lancelot in Prose (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1972), 117±21. Gawain is the oldest hero of the Arthur cycle, belonging to the Celtic folktales. He is the solar hero whose strength lessens towards noon. Percival, originally the Peredur of the Mabinogion belonging to the king's retinue, becomes Percival through the French. But according to the Vulgate Version (c.1215±30) Percival is the descendant of Bron, Joseph of Arimathea's brother-in-law and Galahad's cousin. His father is king of the Waste Land. Percival is both naive or simple, and chaste. His reputation for simplicity comes from his continual references to what his mother has taught him. His one love is Blancheflor, according to ChreÂtien de Troyes, and his love for her causes him great transport according to both Le Conte du Graal and the Peredur. Sir Percival was the forerunner of the Christian hero, Sir Galahad, Percival's tenderness towards his lady being replaced by Galahad's rejection of all women. In the Queste del Saint Graal (1230) it is Percival's aunt who predicts that the three knights who are chaste and pure will succeed with the Grail quest (de Briel and Herrmann, King Arthur's Knights 48, 52, 58). Percival ends his life in a religious order. Galahad is the Christian hero, invented by the authors of the Vulgate Version to counter the carnality of Courtly Love (de Briel and Herrmann, King Arthur's Knights 55). He is the son of Lancelot by the daughter of Pelles (through magic Lancelot believes he is sleeping with Guinevere). Galahad not only resists sexual temptation, he never entertains sexual desire nor wants contact with women. Galahad terminates his adventures when he reaches Sarras and the Spiritual Palace. There he partakes of the Grail's mysteries and, having nothing further to achieve, dies. His soul, the Grail and the Dolorous Spear are taken to heaven by angels. At the same time, this emphasis on the male society of the Order of Chivalry and the Round Table meant that the female function was de-emphasized; as Barber notes, Guinevere's ònly function in the French romances was to be Lancelot's lover', and for Malory `[n]either is she Arthur's queen in more than title, for Arthur's great interest is his company of knights . . . Ànd much more I am sorrier for the loss of my good knights than for the loss of my queen; for queens I might have enow' (133). For instance, Hazlitt's volume title The Round Table, begun with Hunt, is resonant with Arthurian implication (Hunt was `to play King Arthur': D. Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 128); Hazlitt reviewed Sismondi's De la Litterature du Midi de L'Europe for the Edinburgh Review, and he quotes often from Pope's Eloisa to Abelard (one of the important medievalizing texts for the late eighteenth century, particularly for women writers such as Anna Seward).



Notes 207

17 Alfred does retain his hold on the popular and historical imagination, however. He provided the subject matter for poems by Henry Pye and Joseph Cottle, and provided historian Sharon Turner with the image of the ideal king because of his creation of a centralized government and code of laws (A. Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 85). Tories valued him for his association with strong social and political order, while Whigs valued him as an example of primitive democracy. Even in the mid1820s Mary Shelley names her hero's eldest son, who was to grow into a model leader as the hope of the nation, Àlfred' in The Last Man. 18 Dryden, in his `Knight's Tale' and other works, set the fashion of imitating and modernizing the old romances and ballads. Prior to Percy's revival of interest in the authentic article, his editor notes that: `We have produced in England imitations or adaptations of ballads [such as those by Parnell, Prior, and Tickell] ± no faithful reprint of the genuine thing.' Only Addison and Rowe, during Queen Anne's reign, `had a genuine relish for old ballads'. Addison's taste having been awakened on the Continent, he discovers `Chevy Chase' to be a heroic poem (devoting two numbers of the Spectator to it and one to `Children in the Wood'), quoting from Jonson and Sidney to support his judgment. Percy was less confident than Addison, adding to and changing many of the ballads he chose for his collection in order to make them more palatable to his contemporaries. Joseph Ritson challenged Percy's editorial practices and charged that the entire Folio had been fabricated (like Macpherson). He continued the attack in his own Ancient English Metrical Romances (1803): `Certainly this is a most extraordinary, as well as unfortunate, book, and the labour of the right reverend editour in correcting, refineing, improveing, completeing, and enlargeing, the orthography grammar, text, stile, and supplying the chasms and hiatuses' (Ritson, Metrical Romances I.cviii±cxlii; quoted in John W. Hales, and Frederick È bner Pub., J. Furnivall, Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, London: N. Tru 1868, I, viii, n.2). Nevertheless, Percy's contribution stimulated historical thinking. 19 There are many sources for Gray to draw on for this model of poethood: Geoffrey's first work was the Merlin prophecies, which he then included in the Historia; Spenser's Book III of The Faerie Queene devotes considerable space to Merlin's prophecies of Britomart's marriage and progeny; and Percy's Reliques include a lengthy romance entitled `Merlin'. 20 See Williams, `Romanticism in Wales', 22. As he notes, Welsh bards were not just historians but antiquarians themselves; moreover, the contemporary collection of their songs was performed by middle-class antiquarians who, like Scott and Percy, were striving to establish a higher social caste for themselves. In other words, the Welsh antiquarian collection of folk and bardic songs during the Romantic period provided Scott with a link between medieval history, poethood, antiquarianism and nationalism. All references to Scott's poetry are to The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, ed. by J. Logie Robertson (1904; London: Oxford UP, 1951). 21 Scott also resembles the historic Welsh bards, but Merlin offers a stronger identification, as well as a prophetic impulse so that history can seem to predict a safer future. Merlin's prophecy of Britomart's genealogical import-



208 Notes

Notes 209

bring the Maid of Norway to Scotland upon the death of Alexander III. By a poetical anachronism, he is here placed in a later era. He was a man of much learning, chiefly acquired in foreign countries. He wrote a commentary upon Aristotle . . . and several treatises upon natural philosophy, from which he appears to have been addicted to the abstruse studies of judicial astrology, alchymy, physiognomy, and chiromancy. Hence he passed among his contemporaries for a skilful magician. Thus begins Scott's lengthy note on the historical wizard (fn. xxviii, Scott Poetical Works, 64). 23 Alice Chandler notes Scott's primary sources to include contemporary editions of Froissart's Chronicles, Commines' Memoirs, Chaucer and Barbour's Bruce, as well as collections such as George Ellis's Specimens of Early English Poets (1790) and Specimens of Early English Romances in Meter (1805), and Joseph Ritson's Robin Hood (1795) and Ancient English Metrical Romances (1802). His secondary sources include important contemporary historical research including Sharon Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest, 3 vols (1799±1805), and the work of social historian Joseph Strutt and medieval historian Robert Henry, as well as imaginative reconstructions such as Goethe's GoÈtz von Berlichingen, which Scott had translated in 1799 (27±8). See Jerome Mitchell, Scott, Chaucer and Medieval Romance: a Study in Sir Walter Scott's indebtedness to the literature of The Middle Ages (Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 1987) for Scott's specific use of medieval materials. 24 Although the entries are for castles, abbeys and watch towers, there are several entries at the end of the second volume on war implements, including an artificial steel hand that would supply any Gothic enthusiast with material: `The Steel hand and Arm, and the Horn of Carslogie', was a reference to a working hand given to the laird of Carslogie by the Scottish king for losing his limb in service to his country. The volumes are accompanied by an appendix of contracts, bonds and letters, which provide a more materialist sense of medieval life. 25 An antecedent for Lay of the Last Minstrel is William Mason's second drama, Caractacus: Mona on Snowdon calls: Hear, thou king of mountains, hear; Hark she speaks from all her strings . . . Snowdon, mark! 'tis magic's hour Now the muttered spell hath power. 26 Scott reflects on the problem of historiography and romance as a kind of fantastic history in his 1824 Èssay on Romance'. 27 See Marlon B. Ross, `Scott's Chivalric Pose: The Function of Metrical Romance in the Romantic Period', Genre 18 (1986), 267±97; Stuart Curran, Poetic Form



ance for Elizabeth I also provides Scott with a particularly impressive medievalizing attitude towards history as a literary event. 22 Sir Michael Scott flourished during the 13th century, and was one of the ambassadors sent to

28 29

30

31

32 33

34 35

36

and British Romanticism (NY: Oxford UP, 1986), 138±9; and Duff, Romance and Revolution 122±3. See my discussion of the Bride of Lammermoor in E. Fay, A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998), 137±43. Percy was originally interested in Chinese literature, translating a Chinese novel from the Portuguese, then in native balladry, and finally in Nordic folk literature. There are four editions of the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, the first in 1765 when he was 36 years old, and the last in 1794. The first edition contained 176 poems, only 45 of them taken from the Folio MS. Percy collected ballads for years with a view to combining them with some of the ballads from the Folio. He enlisted the aid of the literati of the day, and Shenstone was to have been a co-editor if he had lived. Goldsmith, Garrick, Johnson, Shenstone, Gray and Grainger, among others, helped Percy. But Johnson himself, as well as Warburton and Hurd, reviewed it ungenerously. Nevertheless, the Reliques attained general popularity and in 1769 Percy (originally Pearcy; he changed his name to sound more aristocratic: See Williams, `Romanticism in Wales' 12) was made chaplain to George III. The best known example of this play is Scott's multiple framings in the Tales of My Landlord, the series of novels compiled by Jedediah Cleishbotham through the mediation of Peter Pattieson, and authored not entirely willingly by Walter Scott. See Marilyn Butler, Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in his Context (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). Duff analyses another of Peacock's medievalist novels, Melincourt, with its recreation of the kind of courtly symposium depicted by Castiglione such as Shelley was much taken with, on the spirit of chivalry. Duff views this symposium as a recreation of the chivalric talk of Hunt's circle at Hampstead and the aptly named Albion House at Marlow (Romance and Revolution 150±2). A. Chandler, A Dream of Order 115±19; K. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 125±7. All references to Wordsworth's poetry are to Stephen Gill (ed.), Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), to The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (NY: W. W. Norton, 1979), and to Thomas Hutchism (ed.), Wordsworth: Poetical Works, rev. by Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 137. In other words, Wordsworth's speakers are not presented as melancholic or dejected, and so represent a clear sanity against which the sufferer is initially judged, as is the Leech Gatherer. But the speaker comes to see how the victim has general and specific connections to what he has been meditating, so that the speaker can be seen as partially diseased and the victim as at least partly healthy. Coleridge's poetics were grounded in his attempts to systematically interrelate philosophy, politics and religion, through which he developed his Unitarian belief. Despite the remarkably fertile exchange of ideas between



210 Notes

37 38 39 40

41

42

43

44 45

46 47

the two poets between 1796 and 1802, and their joint projects concerning a universal humanitarianism centred on the Òne Life', Coleridge was unable to convert Wordsworth to his interpretation of the one God; for Wordsworth the Òne Life', like his art, remained a fundamentally social phenomenon. See Roe, Radical Years 11, 35, 229; R. Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990). Coleridge thought of writing à lengthy, reflective poem, not unlike Cowper's ``The Task'' ', which became `The Brook' but using a different form, in the summer of 1797 (Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions 161). Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 112. See David Bromwich's excellent discussion of The Borderers in Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, 1998), 44±68. Bromwich believes, however, that The Borderers, as a working through of the problem of individual guilt, was in dialogue with Coleridge's masterpiece `Rime of the Ancient Mariner', rather than Osorio: it `was the poem by a rival poet of his generation that Wordsworth had to work through to become the poet he felt himself destined to be' (Disowned by Memory, 67). Charles Robinson argues that the Shelley circle had read at least four numbers of Coleridge's The Friend, containing `Hymn Before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouny' and `Kubla Khan', and Shelley may have possessed the complete reprinted Friend of 1812. He also knew of `Christabel' through Byron (Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Flight, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976, 35±6). Either the world is made ùnreal' by the perceiving subject, or in the act of perception, a man recognizes himself in multiple places as èlements representing the diversified images of his ego': The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954±1955, trans. by Sylvana Tomaselli (NY: W. W. Norton, 1988), 166±7. As Marlon Ross notes, for Wordsworth `[i]t is the poet as man of action, as masculine quester, as ruler of visionary empires' that predominates, so that `he ends by repressing the feminine presence in the poetic transaction. His world of poetry quickly becomes, unconsciously but purposively, a world of aggressive desire and conquest' (The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry, NY: Oxford UP, 1989, 38). Ì think that in at least one of the Lucy poems ± but the mood gets into all the rest ± he was writing about someone still alive who he wanted to prove was dead to him' (Bromwich, Disowned by Memory 18). One week after publishing the Dejection Ode to celebrate William and Mary's wedding, Coleridge published a vindictive satire of Wordsworth's abandonment of his French beloved. `Spots in the Sun' names Annette, and as Gill comments, it `can only be read as convicting Wordsworth of sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy' (Life 206). Coleridge's analysis of Wordsworth's prior troubadourism is insightful, but precludes any insight into his own dreadful troubadourian treatments of both Sara Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson. Jerome J. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 56. Another minor work by a great writer on a similar theme is . . .



Notes 211

Wordsworth's The Egyptian Maid (1830). It is meant to be a moral tale on the subject of purity, but neither narrative nor moral stands out clearly. There is no inspiration from the chivalric code, and the poet had certainly read little other than Malory. Sir Galahad, the only knight never associated with a lady in the romances, is the husband chosen for the maid, since he is the only one pure enough. (Barber, Arthur 144±5) 48 As Gill comments, The Broadstone of Honour is à gallimaufry of chivalric lore as ``Rules for the Gentleman of England''. . . . this text-book of ``the oldentime'' moved many an idealistic young man ± Tennyson amongst them ± and pointed the way for the early Victorian return to Camelot. What is striking is that Wordsworth should have been susceptible to it' (Life 365). 49 In Elizabethan England, `[p]erceptions of history as a record of social change rather than as a storehouse of timeless examples for the use of the moral philosophy were in their infancy'. But the fact `that Spenser included a complete, traditional, labored-over history from Troy to Elizabeth . . . argues that Spenser either had a conservative, even medieval, conception of his own society or that he thought such a conception appropriate to his purposes' ( James W. Broaddus, Spenser's Allegory of Love: Social Vision in Books III, IV, and V of The Faerie Queene, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1995, 36). In other words, like his anachronistic treatment of chivalry, Spenser's treatment of history should be understood in terms of a double-consciousness appropriable by the Romantics for similar tasks of historical comparison. Spenser's `laboredover history' in this sense resembles Shelley's history of the Cenci family. 50 Britomart is the organizing figure of Books III±IV of The Faerie Queene, but Broaddus also reads hers as `the organizing quest' of Books III±V, a significant plot vehicle for Book IX of The Prelude, and he reads her character as the major figuration of Spenser's àllegory of love' (17, 25). 51 Nevertheless, as the Norton editors of The Prelude point out, the 1850 revision of this passage emphasizes the Spenserian connection through an extended focus on chivalric emblems, and inserts the morality Wordsworth later attaches to chivalry that is missing from the 1805 version (Wordsworth, Abrams and Gill, The Prelude 39, n.1). 52 Wordsworth's emotional relation to ruins is connected to graveyard meditations, as is Byron's similar stance in Childe Harold IV, but his sensitivity to medieval ruins may have a bodily resonance to his childhood experience of playing on the tops of the castle dungeon ruins at the back of the Cockermouth house as a child: the `forbidding playground of the ruins of Cockermouth Castle, with its dungeons beneath flower-topped walls, remained magical terrains in the memory of the poet as late as his seventy-third year' (Gill, Life 15). 53 By contrast, Byron's Don Juan is taught athletics rather than meditation, so that he may scale a nunnery's walls rather than contemplate them. The sincerity of Wordsworth's medievalism, versus Byron's ironic version, is nevertheless undercut by his representation of romance as non-productive, and thus resembles Byron's undermining of Don Juan's gallantry and romantic naivete. 54 Not just rhetorical emptiness attend this disruption by the real, but actual evasion:



212 Notes

Notes 213 Having touched this argument I shall not, as my purpose was, take note Of other matters which detained us oft . . . . . . but I will here instead Draw from obscurity a tragic tale.

55 See EÂmile Legouis' William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon (London: J. M. Dent, 1922). 56 From the forward to `The Earle of Westmorlande': the historical ballad of Charles Neville is included in Percy's Manuscript Folio; the Neville story is also popularly known by two other ballads, `The Rising in the North', and `Northumberland betrayed by Douglas', both also in the Folio and the Reliques. Wordsworth treats this subject in his `White Doe of Rylstone'. The story concerns plans to marry Mary Queen of Scots to the widowed Duke of Norfolk, both Catholics, in order to restore Romanism. No treasonous reasons for the alliance were hinted at to the Duke, but Elizabeth was not informed of the plan while the French and Spanish courts were. When discovered, the plotters (Northumberland and Westmorland, the Blandamour and Paridal of The Faerie Queene) were summoned to London, and Norfolk was committed to the Tower (Hales, I. 292±3). 57 Wordsworth also depends on Nicolson and Burn's The History and Antiquities of the Counties of Westmorland and Cumberland, and Whitaker's The History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven. His inspiration, beginning with `Song, at the Feast of Brougham Castle', came from his visit to Bolton Abbey, a physical encounter with ruins whose impact on him has resonance with the convent ruins of the Prelude IX. See Peter Manning, Reading Romantics: Text and Context (NY: Oxford UP, 1990), 168±72, 178±81, 189±91; and Nicola J. Watson, `Footnoting the Romantic Forms of History and The White Doe of Rylstone', The Wordsworth Circle 24 (1993), 141±3. 58 In one sense Spenser is only replicating what the Arthurian tales already accomplish in their high medieval depiction of sixth-century Britons. 59 See Evan Radcliffe, `Wordsworth and the Problem of Action: ``The White Doe of Rylstone'' ', Nineteenth-Century Literature 46 (1991), 157±80. 60 Frances Ferguson's reading of the poem in Wordsworth: Language as CounterSpirit (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1977) as quest emphasizes the linguistic nature of the quest, but her delineation of the boy's quest is importantly worked out in medievalizing terms. 61 P. Bourdieu Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984). 62 This characterization is derived from Christensen, 3±31, and Jonathan D. Gross, `The Emergence of the Word Liberal: Byron in His Public and Private Dimension', Dissertation, Columbia University, 1992. See also W. Paul Elledge, Ìmmaterial Matters: Byron, Bogles, and Bluebloods', Papers in Language and Literature 25 (1989), 272±81. All references to Byron's poetry are to John Jump, (ed.), Byron: Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970). 63 For an astute analysis of Byron's vexed relation to his audience, see Jerome J. McGann, `Byron and ``The Truth in Masquerade'' ', in Robert Brinkley and



(IX.543±5, 550±1)

64 65

66 67

68

69

70 71

72

73

Keith Hanley (eds), Romantic Revisions (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 191±209. For this version of Byron's relation to his audience, see Christensen, Lord Byron's Strength 142±84. Duff, Romance and Revolution 123. Duff points to George Ellis's 1812 review of Childe Harold I and II in which Ellis complains of Harold's anachronistic knighthood. Byron's reply in his Àddition to the Preface' (1813) was that medieval chivalry was a mere playacting that disguised profligacy and deceit, and that medieval gallantry was hypocritical. Collins was important for Byron's lyrical intensity, with its implications for sensibility, and for his belief in poetry's visionary capacity, important to Romantic conceptions of the sublime. See Cheryl Fallon Giuliano, `Gulnare/Kaled's `Ùntold'' Feminization of Byron's Oriental Tales', Studies in English Literature, 1500±1900 33 (1993), 785±807. For an important early treatment of cross-dressing in Byron, see Susan J. Wolfson, ` ``Their she condition'': Cross-dressing and the Politics of Gender', English Literary History 54 (1987), 585±617. See Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), for the history of the French aristocratic female warriors (`frondeuses') during the seventeenth-century Frond, who served as models for the woman as Amazon (36±42). Freud linked all forms of paranoia to a repudiation of homosexuality, but Lacan emphasizes the same sex aspect of the love relation, finding its most important aspect to be the reflexivity of the love. The paranoiac loves a `semblable': Ìn other words, the `òbject'' [of love] is nothing but the ``subject'' himself: far from desiring an object of erotic love, as Freud would have it, the paranoiac loves himself (hates himself ) in a lifelike double': Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. by Douglas Brick (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1991), 23±4. See Atara Stein, ` `Ì loved her and destroyed her'': Love and Narcissism in Byron's ``Manfred'' ', Philological Quarterly 69 (1990), 189±215. Instead of the pleasure of a narcissistic meeting of the self in the mirror, the subject experiences the moment of `his most intimate aggressivity', which he projects on to objects of similar misrecognition: other men: Jacques Lacan, EÂcrits: A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan (NY: W. W. Norton, 1977), 307. It is this hostile image that becomes fixed as the ideal ego; the ideal ego from this point replaces the ego-ideal. `From this point on, the ego is a function of mastery, a play of presence, of bearing, and of constituted rivalry.' For a careful reading of Marino Faliero with two of Byron's other history plays, see Daniel P. Watkins, `Violence, Class Consciousness, and Ideology in Byron's History Plays', English Literary History 48 (1981), 799±816. The standard readings on which I rely are Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron's Poetic Development (Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago P., 1968), 205±16; Peter J. Manning, Byron and His Fictions (Detroit MI: Wayne State UP, 1978), 107±22; Carl Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1970), 181±6; and Andrew Rutherford, Byron: A Critical Study (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1961). Byron's insistence on fact deflects attention away from the role of honour in his own part in a domestic triangle; the choice of subject for this play, published the same year his mistress leaves her husband to live with him,



214 Notes

suggests that his attention to Faliero rather than Steno is, as with the attention to history, an attempt to deflect attention away from his own seduction of a lord's wife. 74 I am purposely simplifying authorial intent. Watkins reads the swing away from private-sphere jealousy as a conscious decision to emphasize the political situation by focusing on how public-sphere emotions ± namely, honour ± can be instrumental in instigating revolution (`Violence' 800). However, by calling this a knightly response, I have not deviated far from Watkins's interpretation. 75 For an unconventional reading of punishment as theatrics in the play (`the play is not about failure but about success, or, to be precise, about the social machinery for transforming failure into success', itself a dramatic undertaking), see Christensen, Lord Byron's Strength 266, 267±75. This issue will be further taken up in Chapter 5. For a discussion of the textual strategy shifting between dramatic and novelistic conventions, see Michael Simpson's Àncestral Voices Prophesying What? The Moving Text in Byron's ``Marino Faliero'' and ``Sardanapalus'' ', Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38 (1996), 302±20.

4 Keats and the Time of Romance 1 I take this as being what Keats learned from Byron, despite his dislike for Byron's poetry. As Bate notes, `Keats, of course, cared little for Byron' (John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 427). All references to Keats's poetry and letters will be to Jack Stillinger (ed.), John Keats: Complete Poems (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard UP, 1982), and Robert Gittings (ed.), Letters of John Keats: A Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). 2 See Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1991); M. M. Bhattacherje, Keats and Spenser (U. of Calcutta, 1944); Joan Grundy, The Spenserian Poets (London: Edward Arnold, 1969); and David Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 79±95. 3 Levinson explains this allegorizing tendency in terms of Keats's `strangely alienated reflexiveness', which is the result of his feeling `disinherited by the [literary] Tradition', such that `he intentionalizes the alienation he suffers by his social deficits' (Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 19, 10, 13). I want to extend this biographical reading to the presentation of poetic character, which is so often held at a distance. In this sense character is allegorized as representing an issue rather than individual will, and as representing the place of that issue in its historical context, as in Porphyro's figuration as a sexually motivated troubadour. 4 Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), 224. For a full discussion of this shift in political meaning, see Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Lectures and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993). 5 See Susan Wolfson's `Feminizing Keats', in Hermione de Almeida (ed.), Critical Essays on John Keats (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1990), 317±56. 6 Wolfson, in `Keats Enters History: Autopsy, Adonais, and the Fame of Keats', in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 17±45, anatomizes the effects of these epithets.



Notes 215

7 Bate is quoting from Keats's letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3 February 1818: John Keats 62. 8 John Gibson Lockhart's famous Cockney School of Poetry attack, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine; see G. M. Mathews (ed.), Keats: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 97±110. Both Levinson and Wolfson, cited above, have investigated the interrelation of gender and class in the critical attacks on Keats, as does Roe in Dissent 225±9. G. J. BarkerBenfield discusses the desire of the middling classes to be ladies and gentlemen (The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1992), 175). 9 Both Karen Swann's and Susan Wolfson's reading of `La Belle Dame' focus on knowledge, or what Swann calls `knowingness', and the interpretive heuristic. Both critics read Keats's poem against itself; Swann, in particular, viewing `seduction as ``harassment'' ' when it comes to the lady as muse. I want, instead, to turn the poem against Keats in terms of its gendering. See Swann, `Harassing the Muse' in Anne K. Mellor's Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 87; Wolfson, `The Language of Interpretation in Romantic Poetry: `À Strong Working of the Mind'' ', in Arden Reed (ed.), Romanticism and Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1984), 22±49. 10 `By the end of January 1818 he had written at least forty-one sonnets, all in the Petrarchan form. But from now until the end he was to write little more than half that number ± a total of twenty-five. Of these a fifth ± dashed down on the spur of the moment when he reverted to old habit ± are Petrarchan . . . The remaining eighteen are either basically or entirely Shakespearean' (Bate, John Keats 298). 11 See McGann's important discussion of the two versions in The Beauty of Inflections (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 31±42; Barbara Fass's study of the poem in connection to Romantic uses of folklore provides a useful counter-point: La Belle Dame sans Merci and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1974); Theresa M. Kelley's study of the poem's reception is invaluable: `Poetics and the Politics of Reception: Keats's ``La Belle Dame Sans Merci'' ', English Literary History 54 (1987), 333±62. 12 Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), 102. All references to Chatterton's poetry are to The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. by Donald S. Taylor, with Benjamin B. Hoover, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 13 Levinson reads Keats's debt to Chatterton differently, describing the earlier poet's medieval vision as `perfect' (Allegory 10). But actually Keats learns the art of simulacra from Chatterton; it is the epistemological issue and not the vehicle that he wants the poem to romance. See also Donald S. Taylor, Thomas Chatterton's Art: Experiments in Imagined History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978); Ian Haywood, The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideas of History and Fiction (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986); Nick Groom (ed.), Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (London: Macmillan, 1999); Lucy Morrison, `Chatterton and Keats: The Need for a Close Examination', Keats-Shelley Review 10



216 Notes

14

15

16

17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24

(1996), 35±50; and Brian Goldberg, `Romantic Professionalism in 1800: Robert Southey, Herbert Croft, and the Letters and Legacy of Thomas Chatterton', English Literary History 63 (1996), 681±706. Walpole was initially taken in by the forgery and offered to publish Rowley; Chatterton's enthusiastic response resulted in his unmasking. Thomas Warton, An Enquiry into the authenticity of the poems attributed to Thomas Rowley. In which the arguments of the Dean of Exeter, and Mr. Bryant are examined (London, J. Dodsley, 1782); and Thomas Tyrwhitt, A Vindication of the Appendix to the Poems called Rowley's, in reply to the answers of the Dean of Exeter, Jacob Bryant, esquire, and a third anonymous writer; with some further observations upon those poems, and an examination of the evidence which has been produced in support of their authenticity (London: T. Payne, 1782). See Sylvia Harcstark Myers's brief summary in The Bluestocking Circle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 129±30; Elizabeth Elstob, The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue, First Given in English: With an Apology for the Study of Northern Antiquities. Being Very Useful Towards the Understanding our Ancient English Poets, and Other Writers (London: W. Bowyer, 1715). Donald S. Taylor, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Reference to the Rowley poems explicitly are to Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley (1777) (Menston: The Scolar Press, 1969). James Dallaway's poem, Stanzas on the death of Chatterton (1788) is just one of the contemporary attempts to mythologize Chatterton's suicide as artistic despair. Coleridge's early Monody on Chatterton exemplifies the importance of Chatterton for the Romantic conception of poethood, and Henry Wallis's famous oil, The Death of Chatterton (1856), shows how enduring the myth was. `álla: A Tragycal Enterlude, or Discoorseynge Tragedie, wrotenn bie Thomas Rowleie; Plaiedd before Mastre Canynge, atte hys howse nempte the Rodde Lodge; [also before the Duke of Norfolck, Johan Howard.]' was composed December 1768 to February 1769, and published in the Rowley volume. London: Vernor & Hood, Newgate Street, 1802. See Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the BronteÈs (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1998). See Stillinger's note on the poem's sources in his edition, Complete Poems 463. See also Levinson's lengthy discussion of the two `La Belle Dame' versions in Allegory 45±95. Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994). Bennett bases his analysis of narrative on structuralist and poststructuralist theory, but interestingly leaves out Bakhtin's dialogic theory, or that of narratology. See Keats, Narrative and Audience 3±4. C. Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). The part of Ludolph in Otho the Great was written specifically for Kean (Letters 284). Boydell's `Shakespeare Gallery' captured the enthusiasm for Shakespeare aroused by Kean's newly psychologized dramatics and Joanna Baillie's revitalization of the Shakespearean mode, making scenes from Shakespeare contemporary art, and prints of them objects for every man's parlour walls. For a history of Boydell's impact, see Winifred H. Friedman, Boydell's Shakespeare



Notes 217

25 26

27

28 29 30 31

32

33

34

35

Gallery (NY: Garland, 1976), and Sven H. A. Bruntjen, John Boydell, 1719±1804: A Study of Art Patronage and Publishing in Georgian London (NY: Garland, 1985). Quoted in John Middleton Murry, Keats and Shakespeare: A Study of Keats's Poetic Life from 1816 to 1820 (London: Oxford UP, 1925), 43. Motion's reading Otho the Great, for instance, shifts to a central focus on the deceived Ludolph in direct reflection of Keats's mounting anxiety's over Fanny: `His violent agitation about Fanny is the thinly disguised theme of his most impressive scenes', the worry uppermost being `how might Fanny be behaving alone in town?' Keats (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), 422±3. See Barnard's transcription of Charles Cowden Clarke's Enfield commonplace book for how Keats turns Clarke's historical musings to romance, as well as Clarke's excerpts from Chatterton and Beattie's The Minstrel (esp. pp. 68, 76, 78). Haywood extensively treats Chatterton's historigraphizing in The Making of History, esp. 120±54. Walter E. Houghton, `The Meaning of Keats's Eve of St. Mark', English Literary History, 13 (1946), 64±78. Jack Stillinger, The Hoodwinking of Madeline, and Other Essays on Keats's Poems (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 95. It is a comment on Keats's own susceptibility to language's sensuality that he needed to try the fullness of a Chattertonian induction into historical language in St. Mark and `Gif ye wol stonden' even after his success with St. Agnes. Robert Browning may have been thinking about Porphyro's strength and his ultimate designs on romance when creating Porphyria's lover. The exchange in name from lover to beloved, from the living to the dead, contains an acute restatement of Keats's solution. See the special issue of Studies in Romanticism edited by Susan Wolfson, `Keats and Politics: A Forum', 25 (1986), 171±229, and Nicholas Roe's edited volume, Keats and History, for a full spectrum of historical analyses of Keats's oeuvre. The medieval is paradigmatically represented by the romance and is a romance form itself in Keats's mind, best represented by Renaissance figurings (Madeline and Porphyro as Romeo and Juliet rather than Abelard and Heloise). Stillinger's devotion of an entire book to Eve of St. Agnes points to the poem's importance (Reading The Eve of St. Agnes, NY: Oxford UP, 1999). The odes facilitate this process towards the tragedies in that they are all about history and tragedy: they mourn before the fact, as it were. Kelvin Everest sees the sexual education of the heroine necessary to the historicization of romance as already occurring in Ìsabella'. I agree with Everest that Ìsabella' certainly questions and disturbs romance; as he points out, the `carefully ironised oppositions between the worlds of the lovers and the brothers can be shown to operate at a level of conscious and deliberated intention in the poem' (122), an opposition that precipitates the temporal opposition of past and present worlds in St. Agnes. However, I believe that the overturning of romance only occurs with St. Agnes. (See K. Everest, Ìsabella in the Marketplace', in N. Roe (ed.), Keats and History, esp. 121±2. Everest argues Ìsabella' is a self-conscious stand against the critics' rejection of Keats. St. Agnes is even less `smokeable' than Isabella: that is, it is more selfconscious about this struggle. Keats's use of the term `smokeable' to describe



218 Notes

36 37

38

39

40

41

42 43

44

both female-titled poems is itself telling: apparently having to do with the various methods of self-torture practised by native American warriors as described in Robertson's History of America (1777), the term would clearly relate to Keats's poetic practice, but since he only uses it in relation to these two poems, it takes on a more teasing connotation, as in the self-inflicted torture of a troubadour longing for an impossible love and/or an impossible fame. For a different, historiographical interpretation of the term, see J. Chandler's discussion in England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1998), 395±402. Julia Kristeva, Proust and the Sense of Time, trans. by Stephen Bann (NY: Columbia UP, 1993), 7, 3. The problem that this allegorical play produces is apparent in critical response to Madeline's role in the crucial scene. Stillinger's assertion in The Hoodwinking of Madeline that Madeline has been raped reads literally rather than allegorically, as the ideology of courtly love. I am asserting a different structural model from the standard opposition between Porphyro's visual plot and Madeline's visionary plot, best known from Stillinger's Hoodwinking and `The Plots of Romantic Poetry', College Literature 12 (1985), 97±112 (revised as `Reading Keats's Plots' in de Almeida (ed.), Critical Essays on John Keats 88±102). For an analysis of this aspect of the poem as a treatment of Gothicism, see Anne Williams, The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1996), 226±38; Rosemary Maier, `The Bitch and the Bloodhound: Generic Similarity in ``Christabel'' and ``The Eve of St. Agnes'' ', Journal of English and German Philology 70 (1971), 62±75; and Beth Lau's more general reading of the poem as a warning against women reading Gothics in Keats's Reading of the Romantic Poets (Ann Arbor, MI: U. of Michigan P., 1991). This argument has already been made in terms of a gendered literary marketplace (see Susan Wolfson's `Keats enters History' in Roe, Keats and History 17± 45), but I want to make it in temporal terms, and in the uses of history to respond to the impending historical crisis presented by modernity and revolution. Stillinger documents the narrator's desire for Madeline: Òne may cite the narrator's obvious relish in Porphyro's situation as Madeline is about to undress ± ``Now prepare,/Young Porphyro, for gazing on that bed'' ', as well as the narrator's obvious verbal panting in describing Porphyro's viewing of the undressed Madeline (Hoodwinking 83). For this conception of history, see S. Sherman's Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form 1660±1785 (Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago P., 1996). The connection between historiography and the Beadsman belongs to Michael Macovski. Levinson offers a contrasting theory, that the Beadsman is a `frieze' effect, like the figures threading the top of classical urns; he tropes the intricate language play that, Levinson argues, Keats uses to ward off poetic depth; indeed, he is a synecdoche for the poem's `present tense of erotic pleasure' (Allegory 145±6). Chandler's important idea of momentous `days' comes from Marx's notion of momentous years from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: see Chandler, England in 1819, 19.



Notes 219

45 After Keats transforms Spenserianism to his own ends, he increasingly lives in the present tense. For him, 1819 is a year of intensive living, a `living year'. See Robert Gittings, John Keats: The Living Year (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1954). 46 Herbert Thurston and Donald Attwater (eds.), Butler's Lives of the Saints (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1956), I, 134. For a reading of the poem as hagiography, see Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature (Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago P.,1988), 60±6. 47 In Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, the perfect knight Orlando is bewitched by Angelica's beauty and forgets his knightly duty in order to pursue her. Spenser's The Faerie Queene borrows heavily from Ariosto's epic. 48 But angels are the bodies of exchange between life and death, so that Madeline's association with them gives her subjective experience in the poem a status that Porphyro's heat and fire do not have. Furthermore, Agnes, whose name means `lamb', links the stone and human angels with Christ and sacrifice. Madeline's passion, her self-absorption through the revelry ('She danced along with vague, regardless eyes': 64), her focus on the intended vision, are both parodies of Christ's passion and a false belief in `faery fancy'. 49 This is Levinson's characterization of Wasserman's reading: Allegory 98. 50 Dante Gabriel Rossetti will adopt this structure in `Jenny', turning it from the temporal problematic of St. Agnes into a verbal version of the altar triptych. His translation of Madeline into Jenny is a signal commentary on Keats's sexualization of the beloved. 51 The fantastic space created by the tomb/womb configuration provided endless fascination for the Romantics, from Godwin's Essay on Sepulchres and Wordsworth's Excursion to Shelley's Òde to the West Wind', and the De Lacey's woodshed in which the creature is rebirthed in Frankenstein. Here Porphyro's closet clearly invokes the ending of Romeo and Juliet, with its Renaissance version of this problematic. 52 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, trans. by Sylvana Tomaselli (NY: W. W. Norton, 1988), 169. 53 For an in-depth analysis of the sexual nature of medieval literature in general, see Alexandre Leupin, Barbarolexis: Medieval Writing and Sexuality, trans. by Kate M. Cooper (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989). Keats critics have most often read the poem as the progress of Porphyro's sexual maturation. 54 Levinson's comment that `Keats was afraid of his natural imagination; the enemy in Keats's poetry is inwardness itself' (Allegory, 130) is a variation on the content/sensuality dichotomy most critics continue to find in Keats. 55 The reader knows these stuffs from Beckford's `Caliph Vathek' as well as other Eastern tales, but through felt time nevertheless tastes these forbidden fruits by seeing their deliciousness. I read this as a knowing use of felt sense to structure a readerly pastness, a historical context, for his scene. For a reading of the power of eating in a seductive context, see Mervyn Nicholson, `Magic Food, Compulsive Eating, and Power Poetics', in Lilian Furst and Peter W. Graham, (eds.), Disorderly Eaters: Texts in Self-Empowerment (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1992), 43±60. 56 Levinson discusses this aspect of the narrative, whose plotting overloads the reader's temporal sense, as a problem between the level of fabula and of plot, a problem she defines as Keats's `textual incompetence' (Allegory 106±7).



220 Notes

57 `[T]he Miss Reynolds I am afraid to speak to for fear of some sickly reiteration of Phrase or Sentiment. When they were at the dance the other night I tried manfully to sit near and talk to them, but to not [no] purpose, and if I had't [sic] would have been to no purpose still ± My question or observation must have been an old one, and the rejoinder very antique indeed' (To Georgiana Keats, Letters 349). Bate explains that although Fanny Brawne is stylish and likes Gothic novels best, hers is not the fashionableness of taste Keats, following Hazlitt, so vituperatively dislikes (John Keats 429). 58 See Joseph W. Donohue, Jr, Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970) and Theatre in the Age of Kean (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1975). 59 Charles Rzepka, `Theatrum Mundi and Keats's Otho the Great: The Self in ``Saciety'' ', Romanticism Past and Present 8 (1984), 40±2. 60 Johnson prefaced an edition of Browne's Christian Morals with an important biographical sketch in 1756, making Browne available again as a cultural icon. 61 For analyses of Keats's difficult relations with women and textual treatment of this difficulty, see Beth Lau, `Keats's Goddesses', Philosophical Quarterly 63 (1984), 323±41 and Margaret Homans, `Keats Reading Women, Women Reading Keats', Studies in Romanticism 29 (1990), 341±70. 62 My reading of the play is indebted to Daniel Watkins's À Reassessment of Keats's Otho the Great', Clio 16 (1986), esp. 54±7, and 60±1. Andrew Motion reads Ludolph as a self-portrait, and Auranthe as his fears that Fanny would deceive him in his absence. Motion follows critical tradition in finding the two plays hastily written and simple bids for money, rather than strategic choices. With Otho, `Keats seemed to want to write a history', but descends quickly into an unintentional tragedy that revolves on Keats's fears of losing Fanny (Keats 420±2). King Stephen was again Brown's conception but quickly taken over by Keats; yet Motion reads the play through the failure of Otho and Fanny: Maud is simply another Fanny (Keats 429). 63 See Bernice Slote's Keats and the Dramatic Principle (Lincoln, NB: U. of Nebraska P., 1958). 64 Where I am contesting Rzepka's reading is in his assertion that Keats's fatigue with the theatre is due to a growing social insecurity. Indeed, Rzepka's analysis of Keats's interaction with Jane Cox as playing the àmoroso', a `mutual play-acting' which `Keats finds . . . a relief' precisely because it invokes the stereotype of the gallant (`Theatrum Mundi' 39), is tellingly close to a troubadourian reading. Jeffrey Cox devotes considerable space to the Hunt Circle dramas, but does not discuss either of Keats's plays: Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 123±45. 65 Both Roe and J. Chandler make important analyses of the politics latent in the great odes. See Roe, Dissent, esp. 230±67 and Chandler, England in 1819 529±43. 66 See Michael A. K. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd edn (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), and Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning (London: Edward Arnold, 1978). 67 See Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control (1971; New York: Schocken Books, 1975), and Michael A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, Language,



Notes 221

222 Notes

the man who redicules [sic] romance is the most romantic of Men ± that he who abuses women and slights them ± loves them the most ± that he who talks of roasting a Man alive would not do it when it came to the push . . . A Man's life of any worth is a continual allegory ± and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life ± a life like the scriptures, figurative . . . Shakspeare [sic] led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it. Keats's refusal to analyse, as does Coleridge, his àllegory' of troubadourian gender positions ± especially the idealized lady ± reveals how poetically empowering the beloved image is for him, both in her idealized and fallen states. 69 Bate, John Keats 566; Motion, Keats 420±8. 70 Stephen's reign ends finally, like Napoleon's and Hunt's, in failure. Although he successfully defeats Matilda, who withdraws from England in 1148, at the end of his reign his inability to fully control his warring lords forced him to designate Matilda's son Henry rather than his own son as his successor. 71 As if to underscore this point, Motion refers to Otho, and implicitly to Stephen as well, as `melodramatic' (Keats 422).

5 The Shelleys on Love 1 Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustine Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991), 267. 2 The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, (ed.), Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), II, 261. All references to Shelley's poetry are to Mary Shelley (ed.), The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London, 1839), and Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, (eds), The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (NY: Gordian Press, 1965). 3 Quoted in David Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Gene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 136. Since for Shelley chivalry is the hypocritical practice attacked in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Duff's chapters on Shelley necessarily focus on his satiric use of chivalry as a political weapon. 4 Timothy Webb, The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 49. 5 See James Chandler's different account of Shelley's approach to the historical material in The Cenci as his own version of Hegel's `necessary anachronism', that is, not as a past±present dialogue, but as a cognitive dissonance and recognition (England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1998), 500±2, 504). 6 For an analysis of the concurrency of the patriarchal state, see Michael Kohler, `Shelley in Chancery: The Reimagination of the Paternalist State in The Cenci', Studies in Romanticism 37 (1998), 545±89.



Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective (Victoria, Australia: Deakin UP, 1985). 68 In his joking journal letter to the George Keatses of 14 February to 3 May, 1819, Keats writes:

7 Tilottama Rajan, `Between Romance and History: Possibility and Contingency in Godwin, Leibnitz, and Mary Shelley's Valperga', in Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (eds), Mary Shelley in Her Times (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000), 88. 8 As Kenneth Cameron notes, Mary recognized herself in the moon and was chastened and probably deeply hurt by it: `The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion', in Donald Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (eds), Shelley's Poetry and Prose (NY: W.W. Norton, 1977), 637. 9 Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 21. Shelley plays with the structure Girard takes as the essential erotic triangle, for instance pacifying Hogg by the relation with Harriet or Mary, or acceding to Hogg's homosexual demands by straightening him through a heterosexual union, rather than rivalling him. 10 Shelley read The Faerie Queene nightly while composing Laon and Cythna, for instance, and Queen Mab uses Spenserian allegory with Mary as his queen (Duff, Romance and Revolution 155). For a full discussion of Shelley's debt to Spenser, see Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley and Romantic Spenserianism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991). Mary Shelley published Percy's 1818 Èssay on Love' in the Keepsake for 1829, a presumably unintentional irony in choice of venue that undercut the forcefulness of his system. 11 Webb discusses Dante's influence on Shelley's love poetry, especially for Epipsychidion: see The Violet in the Crucible 290±304. For a different account of Shelley's use of narcissism in thinking about love, see Teddi Chichester Bonca's Shelley's Mirrors of Love: Narcissism, Sacrifice, and Sorority (Albany, NY: State U. of New York P., 1999). 12 Sedgwick's analysis of the òbliquities' of power that constitute the need for triangulated relationships provides the political context for the I-you-rival triangle Eugene Vance describes. 13 See L. Clark Keating's summary for the relation between the Renaissance academy and eighteenth-century literary salons. Studies on the Literary Salon in France: 1550±1615 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1941), 14±15. 14 For an instance of this sensitivity, see Ingpen and Peck's placement of Shelley's love poem `From the Arabic, An Imitation' just before the poem and draft of `To Emilia Viviani' (The Complete Works 86±8). 15 `The Banquet of Plato', in Ingpen and Peck, The Complete Works VII, 161±220. Notably, the Moorish body of literature was condemned by the Christian church because it treats heterosexual and homosexual love identically. The Spanish Moor Ibn Hazm, a `stern moralist' and yet àrdent amorist', was widely known for his Ring of the Dove, an eleventh-century work that does not differentiate the gender of his beloveds except incidentally. Louis Crompton discusses Hazm's famous book in Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley, CA: U. of California P., 1985), 13. See Lois Anita Giffen, Theory of Profane Love Among the Arabs (NY: New York UP, 1971); and A. Easthope, Poetry and Phantasy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 63±95. 16 See James A. Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and the Poetic Mind (NY: Octagon Books, 1969), 381. Notopoulos comments that although Shelley may have read The Symposium at Oxford in Sydenham's



Notes 223

17

18 19 20

21 22

23 24 25 26 27

translation, his interest in 1817 is completely contemporary, so much so that it is the first Greek work Shelley read in the original. See G. J. Barker-Benfield's useful summary of the importance of The Courtier to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1992), 287±9. The Works of Plato, ed. by Irwin Edman (NY: The Modern Library, 1928), 333± 93. M. Foucault, The Uses of Pleasure, vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (NY: Vintage: 1990), 22±3. The Platonism of Shelley, 385. Notopoulos explains that òne of the main objects in translating the dialogue and in writing the prefatory essay was to explain to Mary and, if the translation were ever published, to the English world the subject of homosexuality, which formed a barrier to a true understanding of the Greek mind and prevented a true appreciation of Plato's genius' (The Platonism of Shelley, 384). Even so, Mary abbreviated much of the `Discourse' and deleted passages too shocking for contemporary taste when she did publish it. See Nathaniel Brown's discussion of the `Discourse' in Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979). Brown sees this essay as a road map into Shelley's poetics and philosophy. In this he is very close to Coleridge's uses of `Christabel' for poetic blockage and inspiration. Interestingly, he adopts a poetic method similar to Christabel's in The Cenci, and for affective motivation as well. Curran's analysis of his poetic style makes this clear: `within the line Shelley depends as much on a principle of stresses as he does on the iamb . . . he is effecting a compromise between the rigidity of blank verse and the looseness of a freer medium . . . [to try] to capture the free flow of thoughts spoken aloud' (Shelley's Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970, 51). Coleridge's use of the stress additionally helps situate us in an anterior time, a past discourse, and there may be some aspect of this in Shelley's approach as well. For the influence of `Christabel' on Shelley, see Charles Robinson, Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Flight (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 35±6. Èssay on Life', first collected in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. by Mary Shelley, Vol. I (Forman, 1880); Ingpen and Peck, The Complete Works VI 196. H. Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking (1959; Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1969), 74. See Paul Dawson's chapter on `The Unacknowledged Legislators', in The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 211±58. Joanna Baillie, A Series of Plays: In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind, Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1798). See Catherine B. Burroughs' analysis of Baillie's dramaturgy in this play: ` `Òut of the Pale of Social Kindred Cast'': Conflicted Performance Styles in Joanna Baillie's De Monfort', in Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (eds), Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices (Hanover: UP of New England, 1995), 223±35. Burroughs comments that the play is set in Germany ìn



224 Notes

28 29

30

31 32

33 34

35

an unspecified era', yet Jane De Monfort is a completely contemporary character (227, 224). The play's very vagueness of setting allows for a conflation of the present and a past that is coloured by Gothic and Shakespearean theatricality. Westminster Review, 35:2 (April 1841), 335. For the most pertinent discussions of this problematic for the following, see Curran, Shelley's Cenci; Jerrold Hogle, Shelley's Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works (NY: Oxford UP, 1988), 148±50; Jeffery N. Cox, In the Shadows of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and France (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1987); Julie Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, and Women (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 188±204; and J. Chandler, England in 1819, 483±524. For a discussion of guilt and punishment, see Mary E. Finn, `The Ethics and Aesthetics of Shelley's The Cenci', Studies in Romanticism 35 (1996), 177±97. Curran, Shelley's Cenci 40. Curran notes that Shelley's play not only tones down the cruelty of historical fact, but further idealizes Beatrice, following the popular myth that had developed around her story rather than seeking historical fact (42). Furthermore, his condensed time frame meant altering crucial facts, yet his insistence on strict history meant not altering related facts. As a result, `Beatrice appears coldly oblivious to the fate of her servant [Marzio]. And as a result the trial . . . has spawned a continuing interpretative controversy' (46). In this she is closer to Laon than Cythna, since she is capable of making decisions that involve violence and, unlike Cythna, her purity deteriorates in the face of her rape experience. This is the grounding principle that Chandler shows Shelley is dramatizing in The Cenci, the `casuistry of the general will', yet going beyond it to a more transcendently historical practice between past, present, and future (England in 1819 513). See R. J. White, Waterloo to Peterloo (London: Mercury, 1963). Chandler's analysis of The Cenci and casuistry forms this essential piece of my discussion of the play. See England in 1819, esp. 502±8. Scott, whose historical imagination is important to Chandler's argument, is also interested in casuistry, but Scott derives his thinking about morality from the Scottish Enlightenment tradition via Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments; there Smith works out the different theoretical approaches of casuistry (concerned with moral right, or what one ought to do) and jurisprudence (concerned with legal right, or the obligation due to one: 312±13). Jurisprudence is posterior to the act, a system of rules for judges to use in making decisions of wrongdoing; casuistry is anterior, providing a system of rules for individuals to use in acting correctly. I use `contingency' here to refer to the relative nature of historical conditioning, in which a particular outcome can be shaped but not fully determined. This is slightly different from Godwin's understanding of Leibniz's theory of possibility, in which a slight alteration in occurrence can redirect events (Rajan, `Between Romance and History' 92±3), and from the sense used by Jon Klancher to refer to the fictional possibility that novelists introduce into historical circumstances (Rajan, `Between Romance and History' 90±1). In his depiction of Beatrice's fall into casuistry as resulting from a particular act ±



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38

39

40

41

42 43

44

the rape ± and a particular religious belief ± that the rape contaminated her soul ± Shelley leaves open the possibility that Cenci might never have transgressed far enough either in fact or fiction, that her act need not have been determined. Byron leaves open no such possibility in his hero's fatedness. Andrew Bennett, `Shelley in Posterity', in Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (eds), Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), 222. Speaking of Beatrice, Lucretia and the brothers, Orsino says, Ì shall be well content if' they suffer `no heavier sin than what they suffer/From the devices of my love ± A net/From which she shall escape not' (I.ii.80±3). Furthermore, his analysis of casuistry shows that if it is self-blindness in Beatrice and her family, it can be systematically applied by others like himself: Ìt fortunately serves my close designs/That 'tis a trick of this same family/To analyse their own and other minds./Such self-anatomy shall teach the will/Dangerous secrets' (II.ii.107±11). Curran comments likewise: `That Beatrice's stance at her trial should be somewhat declamatory is only natural, but here the two greatest speeches are marred because they are written with little regard for her humanity' (Shelley's Cenci 60). As Deborah Elise White notes, Shelley's idealism is always a necessary ground for political action, rather than an evasion of it or of history: Àesthetic totalization , in which image and thought converge in a completely internalized mode, is merely a reflexive moment in an onging ± increasingly critical, increasingly historical ± dialectic': `Shelley and the Allegorical Imperative' Studies in Romanticism 34 (1995), 61. But in The Cenci Shelley aestheticizes terror away from history, putting his political agenda on shaky ground. Curran notes that Shelley's description of the Palazzo in his preface leaves out any mention of the Medusa head, `the single architectural detail that aptly redeems the otherwise austere and prison-like facËade, a grim Medusa's head' (Shelley's Cenci, xii). Ì have avoided with great care in writing this play the introduction of what is commonly called mere poetry, and I imagine there will scarcely be found a detached simile or a single isolated description, unless Beatrice's description of the chasm appointed for her father's murder should be judged to be of that nature' (Ingpen and Peck, The Complete Works 301). The play's focus on the attractive beauty and stern power of Beatrice's eyes is significant. Shelley based this aspect of her character on the portrait supposedly of her, which he believed to be painted by Guido Reni. Timothy Clarke, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 69, 72. Although the term ìdol' is borrowed from Bacon's Novum Organon, Shelley's use of it is idiosyncratic, as Clarke notes: Shelley's positive valence turns the residual lenses of Bacon's idol's, or preconceptions, into that which allows us to perceive and conceive ourselves. Mary Shelley translated the Italian manuscript her husband based his play on, `Relazione della morte della famiglia Cenci sequita in Roma il di II Maggio 1599', intending to publish it with the play, and she remarked on The Cenci being the only work Shelley discussed with her as he composed (Betty T. Bennett, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, An Introduction, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998, 48).



226 Notes

45 Although such speculation is relatively worthless, Cenci's inflated rhetoric in his speeches about the deaths of his two older sons, uncontrived but wished by him, may be Shelley's way of dealing with guilt over Clara and William's deaths, and of showing Mary his innocence by comparison with Cenci's cruelty. 46 This `translation' is enforced by Dante's knowledge of the troubadour lyric tradition. For the full impact of this influence from a modernist perspective, see H.J. Chaytor (ed.), The Troubadours of Dante; Being Selections from the Works of the ProvencËal Poets Quoted by Dante, with introduction, notes, concise grammar, and glossary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902). 47 David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 58±9. 48 See McGann's discussion this aspect of Marino Faliero in Fiery Dust: Byron's Poetic Development (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 207. 49 The other important difference between the two plays is that Byron focuses on punishment for revenge, and, following Baillie, how the criminal bears up with honour to this extreme condition; Shelley uses punishment to show how casuistry dishonours the individual. 50 Robinson's comparison of the difference between Byron's and Shelley's use of the centre±circumference model is helpful: `Lacking Shelley's faith in the imaginatively unified mind or center which could enlarge and purify the circumference of experience', Byron believed in the `radical separation between ``the circumferential self'' and the central ``self'' ' (8). 51 William Brewer, The Shelley±Byron Conversation (Gainsville, FL: UP of Florida, 1994), 39. 52 Brewer summarizes critical agreement on the urbanity of the conversation between `gentlemen', and concurs with Donald Davie that the poem replicates the `habit of gentlemen'. Like the critics he surveys, Brewer finds the poem's `conversation' unpersuasive, showing only the ìnadequacy of language as a means of communication', and reading the poem as a Romantic statement on this theme (Conversation 41±2, 44). By not relating the poem to the debate genre represented in Shelley's reading and translations during this period, critics have seriously misread and misjudged the poem's intent. See Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (NY: Schoken Books, 1967), 144. 53 John Cam Hobhouse, Èssay on the Imprisonment of Tasso', in Historical Illustrations of The Fourth Canto of Childe Harold: containing Dissertations on the Ruins of Rome; and An Essay on Italian Literature (NY: Kirk & Mercein, 1818), 13±28. 54 Joseph W. Lew suggests otherwise, noting that Èuthanasia's ``freedom'' and ``wisdom'' depend upon the accident of her father's blindness' which led her to learn Latin in order to read to him, Latin becoming `the vehicle by which Euthanasia gains access to male domains of knowledge . . . and her subsequent introduction to the bare possiblity of a ``history'' of the mind': 'God's Sister: History and Ideology in Valperga', in Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor and Esther H. Schor (eds), The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. (NY: Oxford UP, 1993), 166±7. 55 Valperga: or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, ed. by Stuart Curran (NY: Oxford UP, 1997), 34±5.



Notes 227

56 For a discussion of the importance of republicanism to Valperga, see Michael Rossington, `Future Uncertain: The Republican Tradition and Its Destiny in Valperga', in Bennett and Curran, Mary Shelley in Her Times 103±18. 57 Barbara Jane O'Sullivan reads Beatrice as a condemnation of Romantic vision, double-loading her significance in the novel: `Beatrice in Valperga: A New Cassandra', in Fisch, Mellor and Schor, The Other Mary Shelley, 140±58. 58 Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971), 427. 59 The claims about the 1819 notebook are drawn from Tatsuo Tokoo's article on the Bodleian manuscript (adds.e.12): `The Composition of Epipsychidion: Some Manuscript Evidence', Keats-Shelley Journal 42 (1993), 97±103. 60 For the most relevant discussion of the `Fragments', see Tokoo, `Composition' 99±100. 61 Christine Gallant discovers the embarrassing moments in Shelley to be Sartre-like loci of bad faith: Shelley's Ambivalence (NY: St Martin's Press, 1989). 62 See Stuart M. Sperry, Shelley's Major Verse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988). As Sperry notes, Shelley's rejection of the poem suggests à curiously compulsive experience' (159), which is interpretable as a recognition of casuistry. 63 Greg Knich, Èternity and the Ruins of Time: Shelley and the Construction of Cultural History' in Bennet and Curran, Shelley: Poet and Legistor of the World, 15. 64 The rejection of Percy by Mary can be read into the pathos of Giacomo's pain at his wife's domestic conspiracy against him. 65 Robinson notes that this pattern began with Shelley's attitude towards Elizabeth Hitchener: àre you not my second self, the stronger shadow of that soul whose dictates I have been accustomed to obey?' Shelley had developed the doppelgaÈnger concept by 1815 (Shelley and Byron 44). 66 The Shelleys were accustomed to think of scientific principles and psychological principles as being fundamentally analogical. See Betty T. Bennett, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 37±9. 67 John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986). 68 See Betty Bennett's survey of her political vision in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, esp. 24±5, and 30±2. 69 `The False Rhyme', published in The Keepsake printed for 1830 (London: Hurst, Chance [1829]), 265±8; in The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), 283±5. 70 See Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (NY: Routledge, 1988), 147. Mary Shelley made up for her difficulty in laying claim to Percy's body and affection by editing his body of poetry, and thus making it hers. For a discussion of this literary response to deep personal loss, see Mary Favret, `Mary Shelley's Sympathy and Irony: The Editor and Her Corpus', in Fisch, Mellor and Schor, The Other Mary Shelley 17±38. 71 The Choice ± A Poem on Shelley's Death, ed. and intro. by H. Burton Forman (London: Privately printed, 1876). The poem is also included in an Appendix to Rosalie Glynn Grylls's Mary Shelley (London: Oxford UP, 1938), 297±301. Mellor discusses its significance in Mary Shelley 146±7. 72 I disagree with Mary Poovey's thesis that her èntire career is characterized by the two competing impulses . . . [of] repeatedly bow[ing] to the conventional



228 Notes

73 74

75 76 77

78 79 80 81

82 83

prejudice against aggressive women by apologizing for or punishing her selfassertion . . . [and] demonstrat[ing] that imaginative self-expression was for her an important vehicle for. . . defining herself': The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago P., 1984), 115. For an important discussion of Mary Shelley's tales, see Sonia Hofkosh, `Disfiguring Economies: Mary Shelley's Short Stories', in Fisch, Mellor and Schor, The Other Mary Shelley 204±19. For the importance of Britomart's quest as integrating these three books of Spenser's poem, see James W. Broaddus, Spenser's Allegory of Love: Social Vision in Books III, IV, and V of The Faerie Queene (Madison, WI: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995). Elizabeth Barrett's early poems are replete with chivalric `lais' of loving maidens acting out male heroic parts, but doing so as servants (disguised as a squire instead of a knight, for instance) in order to protect their men. The Princess of CleÁves, itself a coterie production, captures this moment by taking place in the reign of Francis's son, Henri II. For a history of English Renaissance circulation of coterie texts, see Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993), and Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 22±3. In Òde to a Nightingale', the window that opens up onto the cornfields that Ruth would have known and wept in is very much in keeping with the Derridian `cupula' or hinge that I am suggesting here. In Bennet and Robinson, The Mary Shelley Reader, 263±73. For background on young women's increased religiosity, see David A. Kent (ed.), The Achievement of Christina Rossetti (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). In her 1938 biography, Mary Shelley, Rosalie Glynn Grylls provides an appendix of manuscript poems by Mary Shelley, including `The Choice', but several of her attributions are incorrect. Betty Bennett has recently republished Mary Shelley's poems in `Newly Uncovered Letters and Poems by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley', Keats-Shelley Journal 46 (1997), 51±74. See Judith Pascoe's discussion of `The Dirge' from Mary Shelley's letter to Maria Gisborne: `Poetry as Souvenir: Mary Shelley in the Annuals', in Bennet and Curran, Mary Shelley in Her Times 180±1. Betty T. Bennett, Mary Diana Dods: A Gentleman and a Scholar (NY: William Morrow, 1991). The `man', Mary Diana Dods, was both brilliant and physically deformed; as a woman she acted out the monstrous alienation and forbidden intellect of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein monster; as a man she produced literary works by `David Lyndsay' for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine that were very much in the vein of Byron's Oriental tales (Bennett, Mary Diana Dods 44±6), and Mary's own tales.



Notes 229

Abelard, Peter 11 allegory 57, 89, 97, 110±13, 128, 133, 139, 142, 212, 222, 223 Amadis of Gaul 101 anachronism 12±15, 23, 75, 77, 117, 119, 162, 184, 187, 200, 209, 222 antiquarianism 3, 7, 13, 49, 50, 71, 107, 208 Ariosto 9, 65, 89, 92, 101, 103, 201, 220 Arthur, King 64, 67±74, 77, 91±2, 102±3, 108, 114, 120±1, 207 Arthurian ballads 76±7 Arthurian romance 23, 65, 70±2, 74, 77, 103, 119, 205, 207, 213 Arthurianism 3, 13, 40, 65, 68, 70±2, 74, 76±7, 87±90, 95, 97, 103, 109, 119, 206 Baillie, Joanna 155±61, 167, 172, 190, 217, 224, 227 Bannerman, Anne 117, 119±21 Barker-Benfield, G.J. 25, 34, 216, 224 Bate, W. Jackson 113±16, 118, 124, 136, 197, 215, 216, 221 Beckford, William 13, 220 Beethoven 192 Bennett, Andrew 122±3, 161, 217 Bloch, Howard R. 19, 198 Bloom, Harold 6, 154, 171, 180 , 182 Bromwich, David 81, 83±4, 91, 94, 167, 211 Bourdieu, Pierre 99, 205 Brawne, Fanny 125, 197, 221 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 27, 63, 102, 202, 203 Burke,Edmund 10,92±3,121,124,143 Burton, Robert 126 Byron, George, Lord 26, 35, 42, 45, 58±9, 64±7, 70±2, 88, 98±109, 111±12, 122, 139, 148, 150, 153±7, 163, 166, 168±73, 176±7, 186, 188±9, 206, 211, 214, 215, 226, 227

Byronic 66±7, 100±4, 107, 111±12, 139, 170, 173, 189 canso 8, 15±16, 19±20, 25, 39 Castiglione, Baldassare 99, 151±2, 171, 182, 191, 210 casuistry 146, 156, 159±63, 165±9, 175±6, 178, 180±1, 187, 192, 225±8 Cathar Heresy 11, 23, 200 Chandler, Alice 6±7, 197, 208±10 Chandler, James 9, 14, 94, 131, 139, 156, 160±2, 166, 169, 200, 219, 221±2, 225 chanson de geste 15±18 Chatterton, Thomas 13, 73, 109, 112, 117±22, 124±6, 135, 216±18 Chaucer, Geoffrey 9, 11, 17, 84, 92, 99, 105, 126 chivalry 3±7, 14, 20±1, 23, 31, 48, 58, 60, 64, 66±78, 82±7, 90±2, 95, 98±100, 102, 108, 112, 119±21, 127, 140±4, 146, 148, 178, 188, 197, 201, 207, 210, 212, 214, 222 Clairmont, Claire 179 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 7, 16, 22±3, 25, 28±9, 31±3, 36±43, 45±9, 53±5, 57, 60, 62, 65, 79±82, 84, 94, 105±8, 111, 115, 117, 120, 123±4, 137±8, 142, 147, 155, 168, 203, 211, 217, 222, 224 Coleridge, Sara 32, 39, 211 Collins, William 29±30, 101, 214 Cottle, Joseph 208 courtly love 6±7, 9, 14, 18±21, 24, 26, 28, 30, 33, 39, 46, 51, 55, 64, 69±72, 82, 84, 89, 94, 101, 103, 106±7, 111, 133, 147±9, 150, 155, 158, 160, 163, 166, 169, 171±2, 184±8, 194, 207, 219 courtly love lyric 4, 9, 16±17, 23, 55, 57, 82, 123, 173, 200 fin amors 158

230



Index

Cowper, William 40, 80±1, 203, 211 Crystall, Ann Batten 35 Curran, Stuart 163±4, 166, 224±6 Dante Alighieri 9, 11, 22, 36, 59, 115, 139, 146±7, 150±1, 153±5, 158, 164±6, 169±70, 173±4, 186, 223, 227 Della Cruscanism 24, 33±4, 54, 59±60, 85±6, 88, 115 De Quincey, Thomas 156, 168 Digby, Kenhelm Henry 3, 87±8, 98, 109 drama 19, 26, 81±3, 86±7, 104±7, 112, 123, 127, 137±8, 139±44, 155±61, 164, 168±72, 176, 184, 187, 209, 217, 221 `dramatic subjacency' 83, 104±5 Gothic drama 86, 106 historical drama 5, 81, 106, 123±6, 138, 139±41, 157 melodrama 106, 128, 133, 144, 156, 222 Duff, David 5, 40, 64, 146, 197, 203, 207, 210, 214, 222 ego-ideal 12, 45, 72, 82, 92±3, 104, 133, 165, 183, 185, 214 Eleanor of Aquitaine 15 Elstob, Elizabeth 117, 217 Eusebius 10 Faust 104 feudalism 3±4, 6, 10, 15, 22, 41, 72±3, 78, 87, 197±8 fin amors see courtly love Francis I 157, 190±2, 229 French Revolution 9, 23, 36, 68, 71, 80±1, 88, 91, 93±4, 103, 107, 130, 148, 160, 167±9 Freud, Sigmund 93, 104, 107, 149, 158, 165, 185, 190, 200, 211, 214 Gaston, Paris see Paris, Gaston Gaull, Marilyn 68, 206 Gaunt, Simon 7, 15±16, 18, 21, 23, 201 Gill, Stephen 45, 81, 83, 85, 87, 94, 204, 211, 212

Girouard, Marc 5±6 Godwin, William 10, 81, 146, 151±3, 160, 167±8, 174, 186, 196, 201, 220, 223, 225 Gothic 2, 5±6, 13, 22, 46, 55, 66, 68, 86, 95, 97, 104±5, 119, 129, 156±7, 187, 193±4, 198, 209, 219, 221 Halliday, Michael 142, 221 Hamilton, Elizabeth 201 Hamilton, Lady Emma 62±3 Hemans, Felicia 35, 155±6, 188, 202, 203 history 1±3, 7±14, 17, 21±6, 28±36, 40±2, 48±54, 57±65, 68±70, 72±80, 87±98, 101±4, 107±8, 111±14, 121±7, 129±41, 143±6, 129±41, 143±6, 151, 155±6, 159, 162±3, 165, 169, 174±81, 183±6, 198, 200±1, 205, 208±9, 212, 215, 218±19, 221, 225±6 historicist 6, 81, 146, 174 historiography 9, 14, 68, 125, 182, 209, 219 Holmes, Richard 28, 32, 82, 203, 204 Houghton, Walter 125±6, 218 Hunt, Henry 139, 144 Hunt, Leigh 23, 40, 111, 115±16, 160, 188, 201, 203, 207, 210, 221±2 Hurd, Richard, Bishop 66, 68, 87, 210 Hutchinson, Sara 25, 32, 45, 138, 204, 211 Jeffrey, Francis 75 Keats, John 7, 8, 13±16, 23, 26, 33, 36, 38, 45±8, 51±4, 58, 60±2, 64, 98, 108±31, 133±47, 155±6, 193, 197, 205, 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 229 Kemp, Anthony 1, 9, 200 Kristeva, Julia 127, 204 Kucich, Greg 110, 182, 200, 223 Lacan, Jacques 83, 104, 133, 180, 188, 211, 214 Ladies of Llangollen 31, 39



Index 231

lai (also, lay) 15, 18±20, 42, 45±6, 51, 70, 74, 97, 102, 201, 229 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth 33, 49, 54, 58±63, 108, 205 Lancelot 66±7, 69±71, 74, 94, 99±101, 103, 108, 206±7 Le Goff, Jacques 9, 11 Lee, Sophia 105 Liu, Alan 9, 200 Lockhart, John 115, 125, 136, 216 Macaulay, Catherine 2 Macpherson, James 24, 50, 73, 76, 117, 208 Malory, Sir Thomas 65, 68±71, 74, 76, 87, 90, 207, 212 Marie Antoinette, Queen of France 92, 94, 121, 143 Marie de Champagne 206 Marie de France 70, 74 Mason, William 29, 50, 209 McGann, Jerome J. 14, 25, 34±7, 49, 51, 60, 63, 85±6, 115, 170, 203, 216, 227 medievalism 1±9, 12±14, 23±4, 28±9, 41±2, 49, 53, 55, 57±8, 65±7, 70±2, 77±8, 82, 91±2, 95, 97±8, 101±4, 106, 109±11, 114, 117±24, 127, 134, 138, 146±8, 174, 178, 197±8, 203 Romantic medievalism 2±4, 6±8, 13, 23, 28±33, 48, 59, 64±5, 75, 80, 102±3, 109±11, 123, 140, 145, 148, 178, 196, 212 Victorian medievalism 2±3, 7, 12, 98 Mellor, Anne K. 189, 228 Mitchell, Jerome 6, 209 More, Hannah 85 Motion, Andrew 125, 218, 222 Napoleon 69, 75, 139, 144, 148, 203, 222 narcissism 104, 153, 214, 223 neo-platonism 146, 150, 153, 159, 179 Occitan 7, 15, 17, 22, 199

paranoia 45, 104, 107±8, 192±3, 214 Paris, Gaston 7 Plato 146±7, 150±2, 155, 158, 171, 173, 178, 181, 185, 191, 224 Platonic 33, 94, 115, 150±3, 179, 185, 191, 195 Peacock, Thomas Love 77±8, 210 Percy, Thomas 12, 49±50, 55, 59, 65, 68, 72, 74, 76±7, 87, 96, 117, 120±1, 208, 210, 213 Peterloo Massacre 130, 139, 141, 144, 147, 156, 159±60 Petrarch 9, 22, 33, 36, 49, 52, 55±6, 101, 115 Petrarchism 2, 5, 9, 24, 26, 33, 35, 46, 49, 52±8, 96, 113±16, 119, 202, 204, 216 Pope, Alexander 17, 29, 52, 66, 203, 207 Proust, Marcel 127±8, 129 Provence 6, 109, 132, 150 Rajan, Tilottama 148, 174±5, 225 Reeve, Clara 3, 201 Renaissance 5, 9, 14±15, 19, 25, 30, 49, 65, 67, 74, 76, 89, 96, 99±100, 104, 106, 109, 111, 113±14, 116, 124, 140, 148, 155±7, 160±2, 169, 173±5, 184, 190, 199, 218, 220, 223, 229 Ritson, Joseph 76, 208±9 Robin Hood 78, 114, 209 Robinson, Charles 163, 166, 170±1, 173, 185, 211, 224, 227, 228 Robinson, Mary 27, 33, 35, 54±60, 63, 119, 124, 202, 205±6 Roe, Nicholas 79, 82±3, 92±3, 211, 216, 221 romance 3, 5, 8, 11±14, 17±18, 21±4, 27±8, 36, 41±2, 51, 53±4, 58±61, 65±72, 74±8, 82±4, 87, 89±97, 100±18, 121±45, 177±8, 184, 188, 194, 197, 205±9, 212, 216, 218, 222 Ross, Marlon B. 209, 211 Rossetti, Christina 27, 63, 196, 202±3 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 220 Rzepka, Charles 138, 140, 221



232 Index

Sapphism 24, 27, 46, 173, 188, 203 Scott, Sir Walter 2±14, 23±4, 42, 45, 50, 59, 64±78, 81, 87, 97, 99, 102, 106±9, 127, 153, 156, 208±10, 225 sensibility 5, 17, 24±9, 31±8, 52±3, 56±7, 63, 79, 82, 84±7, 94, 101, 111, 115, 124, 134, 147, 150, 155, 160, 201, 214 Seward, Anna 17, 27±8, 31±41, 44, 46, 49±54, 57±62, 82, 86, 202±3, 207 Shakespeare, William 99, 113±14, 116, 124, 137, 140±1, 144, 156, 168, 200, 206, 216, 217, 225 Shelley, Mary Godwin 10, 17, 58, 102, 147±52, 154, 165, 168, 171, 173±8, 179, 186±96, 208, 226, 228±9 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 7, 10, 45, 58, 63±4, 82, 106±7, 146±73, 178±86, 188±9, 210±12, 222±8 Sherman, Stuart 130, 219 Sidney, Sir Philip 67, 99, 104, 108, 208 Smith, Charlotte 27, 33, 35, 39, 48±63, 113, 119, 206 solecism 122±5, 140, 144 sonnet 24, 27±8, 35, 50±7, 63, 66, 113±16, 142, 166, 178, 196, 202, 205±6 Southey, Robert 76, 101, 108, 163, 189, 206 Spenser, Edmund 9, 65±8, 88±90, 110, 112±17, 121±2, 126, 144, 201, 212±13 Spenserianism 2, 9, 16, 23±4, 66, 89, 92, 109±17, 123±6, 146, 170, 212±20, 223 Stillinger, Jack 125±6, 217±19

Tasso, Torquato 9, 65, 89, 92±3, 101, 103, 151, 172, 194, 201, 227 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 125, 212 troubadours 3±5, 7±8, 11, 14±18, 21±5, 30, 35, 38, 70±1, 75±9, 116, 199±201, 203, 205, 222 female troubadours 27±8, 36, 38, 54±63, 196 Romantic troubadourism 7, 23±6, 29±35, 39±42, 49±54, 64±7, 79±86, 94±95, 98±100, 104±10, 112±15, 121±5, 134±8, 140±5, 147±9, 152±5, 165±8, 172±3, 177±80, 187±96, 202, 211 trobairitz 7, 21, 27, 31, 36, 38, 47, 55, 57±8, 61, 63, 188, 196, 199 Troyes, ChreÂtien de 69±70, 206±7 Trumpener, Katie 11, 197, 210 Turner, Sharon 2, 208, 209 Vallon, Annette 83±4, 93 Vance, Eugene 39, 201, 223 Walpole, Horace 13, 50, 68, 72, 117, 119, 217 Warton, Joseph 7, 66, 206 Warton, Thomas 7, 66, 68, 201, 217 Waterloo era, post- 147, 155±6 Williams, Helen Maria 11 Wolfson, Susan J. 214±16, 218, 219 Wollstonecraft, Mary 186, 189, 201, 221 Wordsworth, Dorothy 16, 83±4, 202, 204 Wordsworth, William 7±8, 16±17, 23, 25, 35±6, 38, 42, 45±6, 50, 55, 64±72, 78±98, 106±12, 114, 123, 147, 155, 167±8, 204, 206, 210±13, 220



Index 233

Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal

Romantic Days, Romantic Nights

Tabasco, Its Romantic History

The Romantic

The Romantic

The Romantic

The Romantic Revolution: A History

Romantic Rebel

Romantic atheism

Romantic Signs

Wagner and the Romantic Hero

Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination

Seducer 05 - The Romantic

romantic encounter

Romantic Encounter

Something Romantic

Romantic Interlude

Romantic Questions

Wagner and the Romantic Hero

The Romantic Manifesto

The Romantic Manifesto

Repossessing the Romantic Past

Romantic Wedding Cakes

Recipes - Romantic Dinners

English Romantic Irony

Isn't It Romantic

Petrarch in Romantic England

Romantic Medicine and John Keats

Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture

Romantic Literary Families (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romantic Drama: Acting and Reacting

Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal

Romantic Days, Romantic Nights

Tabasco, Its Romantic History

The Romantic

The Romantic

The Romantic

The Romantic Revolution: A History

Romantic Rebel

Romantic atheism

Romantic Signs

Wagner and the Romantic Hero

Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination

Seducer 05 - The Romantic

romantic encounter

Romantic Encounter

Something Romantic

Romantic Interlude

Romantic Questions

Wagner and the Romantic Hero

The Romantic Manifesto

The Romantic Manifesto

Repossessing the Romantic Past

Romantic Wedding Cakes

Recipes - Romantic Dinners

English Romantic Irony

Isn't It Romantic

Petrarch in Romantic England

Romantic Medicine and John Keats

Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture

Romantic Literary Families (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romantic Drama: Acting and Reacting

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