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Aretino and the Harvey-Nashe Quarrel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

David C. McPherson
David C. McPherson*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Abstract

Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe disagreed violently about Pietro Aretino, the Italian polemicist and pornographer (1492-1556), and their differences about him help to explain why Nashe was able to make a laughingstock of Harvey in their literary quarrel. During Harvey's youth (in the 1570's), he held the then prevailing view that Aretino was a gifted polemicist and politician (only in the 1590's did English writers begin to think of the Italian almost exclusively as a pornographer). In 1592 Harvey attacked Aretino just as violently as he had earlier praised him. His change of opinion must have occurred because he had had his fingers burned writing satire in 1580 and because Nashe, now his opponent, was praising Aretino extravagantly as the Scourge of Princes. Harvey, because of his distaste for Aretino and indeed for all satirists, was now writing as a man of reason above scurrility. Nashe, with Aretino as one of his models, cultivated an opposite pose, that of the lashing modern prose satirist, long on hyperbole and short on sober seriousness. Harvey, with his ponderous irony, was no match for Nashe, the “true English Aretine.“ (DCMcP)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 84 , Issue 6 , October 1969 , pp. 1551 - 1559
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1969

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References

1 Oscar James Campbell announced in print years ago that he was planning to publish such a study, but as far as I can learn he never did so. See “The Relation of Epicoene to Aretino's Il Marescako,” PMLA, xlvi (1931), 762, and Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's ‘Troilus and Cressida‘ (San Marino, Calif., 1938), p. 180. Edward Meyer, Machia-velli and the Elizabethan Drama (Weimar, 1897), claimed to have collected over 500 references to Aretino (p. xi).

2 Most of my information is from Edward Hutton, Pietro Aretino (London, 1922), still the best life of Aretino. Two more recent biographies in English lack sufficient documentation; they are Thomas Caldecot Chubb, Aretino, Scourge of Princes (New York, 1940), and James Cleugh, The Divine Aretino: A Biography (New York, 1966).

3 The bibliographical history of these bawdy writings is obscure for obvious reasons, but David Foxon has traced them brilliantly in Libertine Literature in England, 1660–1745 (New York, 1965), pp. 19–30. He notes that / Sonnetti Lussuriosi were published in Rome by 1527, while / Ragio-namenli were published in two parts: Paris [Venice], 1534, and Turin [Venice], 1536. The dialogues were published together, with some apocryphal pieces added, by John Wolfe (who was also Gabriel Harvey's printer and sometime employer) in 1584. Wolfe's false imprint “Bengodi” (“enjoy yourself well”) clearly fooled no one.

4 Hutton's account of Aretino's reputation in Elizabethan England is (pp. 264–267) is wrong, as I shall demonstrate, in claiming that sixteenth-century English references to Aretino “are all the same; they treat him as the great exemplar of the obscene” (p. 265).

5 Works, v, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford, 1937), iii.vii.59–62.

6 See Robert Greene, The Black Book's Messenger (1592), Sig. C3V; John Eliot, Orlho-epia Gallica (1593), Sig. D2V; Thomas Lodge, A Margarite of America (1596), Sig. C4V and Wits Miserie (1596), Sig. M4V; John Marston, Certaine Satyres (1598), in Poems, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1961), Satyre ii. 140–146, and The Scourge of Villanie (1598), Satyre iii.79–80 and xi.136–155; John Donne, Satyre iv.70, in Poems, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (Oxford, 1912), i, 161, and also Donne's pamphlet, Ignatius his Conclave (1611), Sig. E4r–v; William Browne, Britannia's Pastorals, Book i (1613), ed. Gordon Goodwin (London, 1894); 1.75, Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York, 1957), pp. 700–701, 704–705; Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess (1624), in Works, Vol. vii, ed. A. H. Bullen (London, 1886), iii.ii.256–257.

7 Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII, Vol. xvii (1542), No. 841, and Vol. xxi, Part 2 (1546–47), Nos. 399 and 775; fol. 94.

8 Despite the fact that The Pilgrim was not published until the eighteenth century (I have used the edition of J. A. Froude, London, 1861), the dedication may be considered significant because Thomas returned to England, was clerk of the Privy Council under Edward VI, and wrote the influential Historié of Italie (1549) and Principall Rules of the Italian Grammar (1550).

9 See the Penitential Psalms in Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir (London, 1949), pp. 203–226; on the relationship of these poems to Aretino's I Selti P salmi (1534), see H. A. Mason, Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period (London, 1959), pp. 203–221.

10 “The First Italianate Englishmen,” Studies in the Renaissance, viii (1961), 197–216.

11 English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge, Eng., 1904), p. 223.

12 Three Proper and Wittie Familiar Letters (1580), Sig. F; Works, ed. A. B. Grosart, 3 vols. (London, 1884–85), i, 93. When quoting Harvey, Ronald B. McKerrow in his edition of Nashe, 5 vols., rev. F. P. Wilson (Oxford, 1958), always cites the original edition as well as the Grosart; given his bibliographical wisdom, I have decided to follow the same practice. In checking Grosart's text of several passages i wished to quote against the Huntington Library copies of the originals I found numerous minor discrepancies. In these cases I follow the Huntington copy.

13 Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia, ed. C. G. Moore Smith (Stratford, 1913), p. 124. Harvey's use of the epithet “Unico” requires a brief comment. When Harvey and Nashe use the name Aretino, they invariably refer, I am convinced, to Pietro, not to Bernardo Accolti of Arezzo (d. 1534), though G. Gregory Smith thought otherwise in Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford, 1904), i, 379. It is true that Accolti was often referred to as “Unico,” but Harvey often couples “Unico” with “The Scourge of Princes,” an epithet which unquestionably refers to Pietro (e.g., Pierces Supererogation, Sig. B2'; ii, 44). See also McKerrow, iv, 150.

14 Marginalia, p. 156. See also pp. 137, 168,196.

15 See Harold S, Wilson, “The Humanism of Gabriel Harvey,” J. Q. Adams Memorial Studies (Washington, D. C, 1948), pp. 707–721.

16 He planned to spend “a yeare or twoo” in Italy, but as far as we know his plans fell through; see Three Letters, Sig. i; Grosart, i, 25.

17 George Gascoigne, Complete Works, ed. John W. Cun-liffe (Cambridge, Eng., 1907), i, 29.

18 Marginalia, p. 162. In calling Aretino a “héroïque poet” Harvey is presumably referring to the frightfully bad uncompleted epic Marfisa, part of which was published in Venice, 1535.

19 See, e.g., A New Letter of Notable Contents, Sig. D; i, 289–290, and Pierces Supererogation, Sig. Zv-Z2; ii, 270–271.

20 See Pierces Supererogation, Sig. B2V; ii, 44 and C2V; ii, 54–55.

21 Sig. Zv; ii, 271. See Jochaimus Perionius, Ad Henricum Galliae regent ... 7. Perionii ...in Pelrum Aretinum or alio (Paris, 1551) and Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, De Incerli-titdine el Vanitate Scienliarum (Coloniae, 1568), Sig. R6V. See also the translation by James Sanford (1569; 2nd ed., 1575), Sig. Bb3.

22 A New Letter of Notable Contents (1593), Sig. D; i, 289–290. Harvey's first reference is to Il Genesi (Venice, 1538); his second to I Ragionamenli, already cited; the third to L'Humanild di Christo (Venice, 1535); the fourth, I cannot identify; the fifth, to La Vita di M aria Vergine (Venice, 1539), the sixth, to La Pultana Errante, originally a poem by Lorenzo Veniero (Venice, c. 1538), later a prose work of the same title, perhaps by Niccolò Franco (both Veniero and Franco were disciples of Aretino, so the attribution of their works to him is understandable—see Foxon, pp. 27–28); the seventh, to La Vita di San Tomaso Signor d Aquino (Venice, 1543); the last, to an anonymous work (not by Aretino) with an obscure bibliographical history, for which see McKerrow, iv, 279.

23 I am not arguing, in the teeth of McKerrow's views (see v, 128–129), that Nashe read Aretino's works extensively. But I do argue that the young Englishman was inspired by Aretino's example even if he heard about the Italian only at second or third hand.

24 Works (far from complete, however), trans. Samuel Putman (Chicago, 1926), ii, 79. For the Italian of the passage, see Tulle le opère di Pietro Arelino, Tomo i, Lettere, a cura di Francesco Flora (Milano, 1960), p. 72.

25 Aretino, Works, i, 183; for the Italian, Prologo, La Corligiana in Quattro Comédie Del Diuino Pietro Aretino (Venice [actually John Wolfe, London], 1588), Sig. H4v See also McKerrow's Nashe, i, 259–260, and note thereon.

26 For the importance of the persona idea in studying Nashe, see G. R. Hibbard, Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), esp. pp. 11, 23, 46.

27 Lodge, Wits Miserie (1596), Sig. I; see also Thomas Dekker, News from Bell (1606), Sig. C2r–v.

28 See The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. W. Mackay Mackenzie (London, 1932), p. xxxii (introd.). To get an idea about the nature of the insults, see “The Flyting of Kennedy and Dunbar,” p. 11, Il. 193–200.

29 The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York, 1962), p. 383.

30 McKerrow's fine index lists all of the burlesque names with page references.

31 Four Letters, Sig. C2; i, 178. This passage uses many of the same words Harvey had earlier used to describe Aretino's style.

32 The barbed passage, 22 lines long, in A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592) was quickly canceled; it is reprinted in Wilson's additional notes to the McKerrow Nashe, v, Supplement, pp. 75–76.

33 See Pedantius, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Louvain, 1905), introd. and esp. 11. 2860–61. Nashe points out the attack, i, 303.

34 Wilson, “The Humanism of Gabriel Harvey,” p. 720, has a different theory about Harvey's contradictions concerning Aretino. He believes Harvey praised Aretino in private writings such as the marginalia but felt obliged to criticize him in public.

35 Pierces Supererogation, Sig. H3; ii, 111. From this point on, all quotations of Harvey are from Pierces Supererogation.

36 C. F. Tucker Brooke, “The Renaissance,” in A Literary History of England (New York, 1948), p. 440.