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Two Notes on Imprese in Elizabethan Literature: Daniel's Additions to The Worthy Tract of Paulus Iovius*; Sidney's Arcadia and theTournament Scene in The Unfortunate Traveller

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Werner von Koppenfels
Werner von Koppenfels*
Affiliation:
University of Munich
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Extract

The list of examples appended by Daniel to his translation of Paolo Giovio's Imprese has proved rather a puzzle to his commentators. Joan Rees, author of the standard monograph on Daniel, gives what seems to be the generally accepted view on the subject: ‘Daniel at this time was himself a good Italian scholar…. Perhaps Florio helped Daniel to collect material for the original part of his work since all the examples in his own [i.e., Daniel's] collection of devices are Italian and it is not easy to find the sources. It is unlikely that Daniel had gathered them himself on the spot…'; and she adds in a footnote: ‘Giovio's book had been translated into French in 1561 but there is no evidence that Daniel based his translation on the French version rather than the Italian original.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , Spring 1971 , pp. 13 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1971

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References

1 The Worthy Tract of Paulus Iovius (London, 1585), the English version of the Dialogo dellTmprese Militari et Amorose (Rome, 1555). Daniel's additions are quoted from The Complete Works of Samuel Daniel, ed. Grosart, A. B. (London, 1896), v, 297–304.Google Scholar

2 Samuel Daniel (Liverpool, 1964), p. 5. Mrs. Rees's remarks summarize an article by Redgrave, G. R., written some fifty years earlier: ‘Daniel and the Emblem Literature,’ Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, xi (1910), 39–58 Google Scholar. Freeman, R., in her English Emblem Books (London, 1948), p. 47 Google Scholar, claims that Daniel collected his examples during his supposed travels in Italy.

3 Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, 2nd ed. (Rome, 1964), p. 354.

4 Complete Works of Daniel, a, 7.

5 Dialogo dell'Imprese militari et amorose Di Monsignor Giovio Vescovo di Nocera; Et del S. Gabriel Symeoni Fiorentino. Con un ragionamento di M. Lodovico Domenichi nel medesimo soggetto … (In Lyone, Appresso Guglielmo Rovillio, 1574).

6 Dialogue des Devises d'Armes et d'Amours du S. Paulo Iovio; avec un Discours de M. Loys Dominique sur le mesme subiet, traduit d'ltalienpar le S. Vasquin Philieul. Auquel avons adioustd les Devises Heroiques & Morales du Seigneur Gabriel Symeon (A Lyon, Par Guillaume Roville, 1561).

7 Cf. Complete Works of Daniel, n, 7, and The Complete Works of J. Lyly, ed. Bond, R. W. (Oxford, 1902), 1, 181 Google Scholar.

8 Cf. Tale XLI of the Novellino. As he is exclusively interested in the emblematic part of the story, Domenichi abandons Masuccio's double plot, i.e., he does without the second pair of lovers as well as the second love episode; the latter reappears in Conte cxxvn of Des Periers’ Nouuelles Recreations (1558), and in Fletcher and Massinger's play The Little French Lawyer, III, iii (1619). The emblem story itself had already been used by Rabelais in Ch. XXXIV of his Pantagruel (1532/33). For an analogous ring-message cf. Donne's poem AJeat Ring Sent, where the concealed pun is on jet: ‘throw away.'

9 In Masuccio, the place of action is Florence (and partly the French court); in Domenichi, an unnamed Italian town.

10 The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. McKerrow, R. B., 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1958), II, 271–278.Google Scholar

11 Cf. A. C. Latham, ‘Satire on Literary Themes and Modes in Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller,’ English Studies 1948 [=Essays and Studies, N.s. 1], 85-100; Baker, E. A., History of the English Novel, II (London, 1936)Google Scholar, 164f.; Landham, R. A., Sidney's Arcadia (New Haven, 1965), p. 383 Google Scholar ('Wilton's description of Surrey's tournament is a raucous laugh at Sidney …’); Davis, W. R., Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton, 1969), p. 224fCrossRefGoogle Scholar. (from an actual comparison of tournament passages in Sidney and Nashe the following conclusion is drawn: ‘This creaking description … could either be a comic exaggeration of what one actually saw in Renaissance pageants or a burlesque of this kind of description in romance … ‘ ) .

12 Coffman, Cf. G. R., ‘A Note on Shakespeare and Nashe,’ MLN, XLII (1927), 217–219 Google Scholar; and Harlow, C. G., ‘Shakespeare, Nashe, and the Ostrich Crux in 1 Henry IV,’ SQ, XVII (1966), 171–174 Google Scholar. I suggest that Nashe borrowed at least two further details from the Worthy Tract: the name of Wilton's mistress, Diamante (p. 298: ‘his Lady … whose name was also Diamante’), and one of his devices for the tournament, ‘a ball, striken down with a mans hand that it might mount’ (Nashe, p. 275; cf. Daniel, p. 299: ‘a Ball mounted vp on hye with the stroke of an hardie arme’).

13 Arcadia, ed. Feuillerat, A. (Cambridge, 1939), III, 12 (p. 422f.)Google Scholar.

14 The earliest instance is Homer's description of the shield of Achilles in Iliad, XVIII. 478ff.; the soldiers represented on the shield struggled ‘as if they were living men,’ and the fields in the background, ‘although they were made of gold, resembled the ploughed soil.’ The locus classicus of this naturalistic concept of art in antiquity is the well-known anecdote about the ‘Grapes of Zeuxis.’ For the role of this concept in Elizabethan arttheory Doran, cf. M., Endeavors of Art (Madison, 1954), pp. 65–70 Google Scholar.

15 The closed oven, whose flames burn and smoulder all the more, in emblem-literature refers to the danger of repressing one's emotions; cf. Covarrubias, Emblemas, n, 84, with the motto from Ovid, Met. rv.64: ‘Tanto magis aestuat.'

16 Earlier, Nashe had borrowed a detail from Dametas’ comic imprese and placed it in a different context (cf. Sidney, p. 430: ‘a great many armes and legges cut of’ widi Nashe, p. 275: ‘his bases outlaid with armes and legges … ‘ ) ; cf. also R. Anton's Moriomachia (1613; in Mish, C. C., Anchor Anthology of Short Fiction of the 17th Century [Garden City, 1963])Google Scholar with its obvious imitation of Nashe's tournament thus concluded: ‘So this little dangerous combat was ended, which since the battle between Clineasse and Dametasse the like has not been heard of…’ (p. 78).

17 Wolff, S. L., in a footnote to p. 335 of his Greek Romances in Elizabethan Fiction (New York, 1912)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, calls attention to Nashe's use of a ‘similar device.’ McKerrow, always on the lookout for close verbal parallels, has not done justice to Nashe's method of imitation by assimilation; cf. Nashe's treatment of certain episodes from Rabelais, which is discussed in my forthcoming article ‘Th. Nashe und Rabelais’ in Archivfür das Studium der Neueren Sprachen.