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Fame, Poetry, and the Order of History in the Literature of the English Renaissance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

Edwin B. Benjamin
Edwin B. Benjamin*
Affiliation:
Bowdoin College
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Extract

Fame is surely one of the key words of medieval and Renaissance thought, like Love, Nature, Fortune, Envy. Such terms had for centuries a life of their own which they no longer appear to have; it is as if the years of myth-making, allegorizing, personifying gave them a concrete reality that our more positivistic age cannot accept. In spite of the difficulties of isolating such a term as Fame in the welter of material available, I would like to discuss some uses of it in the English literature of the later middle ages and Renaissance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 6 , 1959 , pp. 64 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1959

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References

1 Vergil, , Aeneid, IV, 174–188 Google Scholar; Ovid, , Metamorphoses, XII, 43–63 Google Scholar; Chaucer, The House of Fame, 1365-1392; Hawes, Stephen, The Pastime of Pleasure, ed. Mead, W. E. (London, 1928), 155–175 Google Scholar; Parts Added to The Mirror for Magistrates by John Higgins & Thomas Blennerhasset, ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge, 1946), pp. 67-68; Cotton, Charles, ‘Virgil Travestie’, Works (London, 1715), pp. 73–74 Google Scholar; Butler, , Hudibras, corrected and amended by Grey, Zachary (London, 1772), II, i, 45–76 Google Scholar; Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, Induction.

2 See, for example, Iliad, XII, 310-328; Beowulf, 1386-1389.

3 Burckhardt, , The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, tr. Middlemore, S. G. C. (London, 1945), p. 93 Google Scholar.

4 Malmesbury, William of, Chronicle of the Kings of England, tr. Giles, J. A. (London, 1847), p. 392 Google Scholar.

5 Paris, Matthew, English History from the year 1235-1273, tr. Giles, J. A. (London, 1889), 1, 461 Google Scholar.

6 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae, IX, chap. II; Jean Froissart, Les Chroniques, prologue.

7 It is only at the end of Part II that he mentions any one as late as the crusades.

8 Honour and renoun in the sense of a personal ethic seem much more important than Fame in Chaucer.

9 All references are to the F. N. Robinson text (Boston, 1957).

10 For the traditional association of Fame and Fortune see Patch, Howard R., The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), pp. 64, 110–112 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Neilson, William Allen, The Origin and Sources of the Court of Love (Boston, 1899), pp. 143 Google Scholar ff.

12 Lydgate, John, The Fall of Princes, ed. Bergen, Henry (Washington, D. C., 1923), 1, 221–222 Google Scholar.

18 Farnham, Willard, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (Berkeley, 1936), pp. 166–169 Google Scholar.

14 See his attitude toward Messalina (III, 785-786).

15 Sidney and Spenser are much more widely read in the classics and the new learning of the Renaissance.

16 Apparently Boccaccio was one of the first to revive the classical connection of poetry and the health of the state (see Osgood, Charles G., Boccaaio on Poetry, Princeton, 1930, p. xliii Google Scholar).

17 See particularly 54-65. A classic presentation of the poet's service to his mistress’ fame is canto 42 of the Orlando Furioso.

18 See introduction to The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge, 1938); Farnham, pp. 271-303; Zocca, Louis R., Elizabethan Narrative Poetry (New Brunswick, N. J., 1950), pp. 16–35 Google Scholar.

19 The Mirror for Magistrates, pp. 144, 293 “

20 Ibid., pp. 64-65, 67.

21 Works, ed. J. William Hebel (Oxford, 1932), II, 391.

22 Richard III, III, i.

23 See my article, “The King of Brobdingnag and Secrets of State’, Journal of the History of Ideas XVIII (1957), 572-579.

24 Tillyard, E. M. W., Shakespeare's History Plays (New York, 1946), p. 203 Google Scholar.

25 Ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, 1922), pp. 189-190. The somewhat anti-intellectual Philocosmus in Daniel's ‘Musophilus’ (Poems and a Defence of Ryme, ed. Arthur C. Sprague Cambridge, Mass., 1930, p. 84) admits a certain virtue in the setting up of patterns of heroic action.

Yet do I not dislike that in some wise
Be sung the great heroycall deserts
Of braue renowned spirits, whose exercise
Of worthy deedes may call vp others hearts,
And serue a modell for posterities
To fashion them fit for like glorious parts.

26 Works, ed. Hebel, 1, 311.

27 Marlowe, 1 Tamburlaine, V.ii.117-120, 125-126.

28 ‘Her beauty, her virtue, her good fame, her fortune will ever increase, like a young plant in fertile soil.’ Quoted by Lucas-Dubreton, J., The Borgias, tr. Philip John Stead (New York, 1955), p. 295 Google Scholar.

29 Works, ed. Hebel, II, 2; III, 2.

30 Waller, Edmund, Poems, ed. Thorn Drury, G. (London, 1893), II, 17 Google Scholar. Waller was known as ‘our English Virgil’.

31 ‘To my Lord Chancellor’, 1. 24. Reference is to The Works of John Dryden, ed. E. N. Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg Jr. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956), 1.

32 Note the traditional light imagery in the fine description of Absalom's progress (Absalom and Achitophel, 731-733):

From east to west his glories he displays,
And, like the sun, the promis'd land surveys.
Fame runs before him as the morning star, …
From Death and dark Oblivion (neer the same)
The Mistris of Mans life, grave HISTORY,
Raising the world to good, or evil FAME,
Doth vindicate it to ETERNITY.

33 Henry of Huntingdon, Chronicle, tr. and ed. Thomas Forester (London, 1853), p. xxvi.

34 The Boke Named the Governour, ed. F. Watson (London, 1908), pp. 46, 103, 45-46.

35 ‘Hypercritica’, in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Joel E. Spingam (Oxford, 1908), 1, 84-85.

36 Ed. 1666.

37 The Education of a Christian Prince, ed. and tr. Lester K. Born (New York, 1936), p. 190.

38 Sig. A2v-A3r.

39 Ed. cit., pp. 93-94.

40 Works (New York, 1932), x, 32-33. In The Reason of Church Government (III, 237) Milton also makes the connection between great deeds and eloquence:'… if the Athenians, as some say, made their small deeds great and renowned by their eloquent writers, England hath had her noble atchievments made small by the unskilfull handling of monks and mechanicks.’

41 See Elyot, p. 45; Ascham, Roger, The Scholemaster, ed. Arber, Edward (London, 1870), p. 130 Google Scholar.

42 XII, 109.

43 Ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York, 1927), p. 84.

44 Introduction to Clarendon, , Selections, ed. Huehns, G. (London, 1955), p. xliii Google Scholar.

45 See State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 11 (Oxford, 1773), 288. See also The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (Oxford, 1888), i, xiii.

46 History, I, 3.

47 History, III, 178; see also Letters, II, 328. Clarendon intended to publish the sketch of Falkland separately.

48 History, I, 120-125, I96.

49 See, for example, Iago on the subject of reputation (Othello, II.iii.270).

50 SirBuck, George, The History of the Life and Reigne of Richard the Third (London, 1647), pp. 13–14 Google Scholar.

51 Machiavclli, Discourses, I, x; Bacon, Works, ed. Spedding, Ellis, Heath (Cambridge, 1863), VI, 341; Hobbes, , Leviathan (Oxford, 1952), p. 52 Google Scholar; Harrington, , Oceana, ed. Liljegren, S. B. (Heidelberg, 1924), p. 212 Google Scholar.

52 Marvell, An Horatian Ode upon Cromvel's Return from Ireland; Clarendon, History, v, 278. The apparition that appeared to Cromwell, leading him to refuse the kingship, is historical; it also suggests the apparition that appeared to Caesar in Lucan (1, 186-212).

53 SirHarington, John, The Epigrams, ed. McClure, Norman E. (Philadelphia, 1926), p. 164 Google Scholar.

54 Essayes, tr. John Florio (New York, 1933), p. 569.

55 Poems, ed. Sprague, p. 86.

54 Ibid., p. no.

57 Works, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London, 1870), II, 73.

58 Ibid., II, 99.

59 The Poems, ed. Phyllis B. Bartlett (New York, 1941), p. 296.

60 III, 236; IV, 323-324; I, 60.

61 This passage goes over many familiar notions of honor and glory. Satan says that desire of Fame partakes of the divine, is the spark that raises man out of his materialistic self (cf. Robert Ashley, Of Honour, ed. Virgil B. Heltzel, San Marino, Calif., 1947, p. 31; Greville, ii, 69-70). Christ replies that the applause of the vulgar is worthless (cf. Montaigne, p. 565; Daniel, p. 87; Greville, n, 83-84), and that those ‘Worthies’ usually accounted glorious for their military deeds are not truly so (cf. Greville, II, 92).