Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters

Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull

This series presents original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of literary
works and public figures in Great Britain, North America, and continental Europe
during the nineteenth century. The volumes in Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and
Letters evoke the energies, achievements, contributions, cultural traditions, and indi-
viduals who reflected and generated them during the Romantic and Victorian period.
The topics: critical, textual, and historical scholarship, literary and book history, biog-
raphy, cultural and comparative studies, critical theory, art, architecture, science, pol-
itics, religion, music, language, philosophy, aesthetics, law, publication, translation,
domestic and public life, popular culture, and anything that influenced, impinges
upon, expresses or contributes to an understanding of the authors, works, and events
of the nineteenth century. The authors consist of political figures, artists, scientists,
and cultural icons including William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Charles Darwin, William
Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Taylor, and their contemporaries.
The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD (Indiana University), FEA. She has taught
at William and Mary, Temple University, New York University, and is Research
Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She is the founder and edi-
tor of The Wordsworth Circle and the author of English Romanticism: The Human
Context, and editions, essays, and reviews in journals. She lectures internationally on
British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory, intellectual history, publishing
procedures, and history of science.

PUBLISHED BY PALGR AVE MACMILLAN:

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Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau
Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson
Byron, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson
Romantic Migrations, by Michael Wiley
The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider
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Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders
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Edited by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews
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Romanticism and Pleasure, Edited by Thomas H. Schmid and Michelle Faubert

9780230114487_01_prex.indd i 6/14/2011 5:54:49 PM

 Royal Romances, by Kristin Flieger Samuelian
Trauma, Transcendence, and Trust, by Thomas J. Brennan, S.J.
The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America, by David Dowling
Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain, by Clare A. Simmons
Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism, by Ashton Nichols
The Poetry of Mary Robinson, by Daniel Robinson
Dante and Italy in British Romanticism, Edited by Frederick Burwick and
Paul Douglass

FORTHCOMING TITLES:
Romanticism and the City, by Larry H. Peer
Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, by Gregory Leadbetter
Romantic Dharma, by Mark Lussier
Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought, by Peter Swaab

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 Da n t e a n d Ita ly i n
Br i t ish Rom a n t ic ism

Edited by
Frederick Burwick
and
Paul Douglass

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 DANTE AND ITALY IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM
Copyright © Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass, 2011.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–0–230–11448–7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Burwick, Frederick.
Dante and Italy in British Romanticism / Frederick Burwick, Paul
Douglass [editors].
p. cm.—(Nineteenth-century major lives and letters)
ISBN 978–0–230–11448–7 (hardback)
1. Romanticism—Great Britain. 2. English literature—Italian influences.
3. Italian literature—Appreciation—Great Britain. 4. Dante Alighieri,
1265–1321—Influence. 5. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321—Criticism and
interpretation. 6. Italy—In literature. I. Douglass, Paul, 1951– II. Title.
PR448.I73B87 2011
820.9⬘007—dc22 2011005261
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: August 2011
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.

9780230114487_01_prex.indd iv 6/14/2011 5:54:51 PM

 The Brightness of the World, O thou once free,
And always fair, rare Land of Courtesy!
O Florence! with the Tuscan Fields and Hills,
And famous Arno fed with all their Rills;
Thou brightest Star of Star-bright Italy!
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
The Garden of Boccaccio, ll. 73–77

The fifth canto of Dante pleases me more and more—it is that

one in which he meets with Paulo and Francesca— . . . I dreamt
of being in that region of Hell. The dream was one of the most
delightful enjoyments I ever had in my life . . . O that I could dream
it every night.
— John Keats, Letter of April 16, 1819

Yet, Italy! through every other land

Thy wrongs should ring, and shall, from side to side;
.....
Europe, repentant of her parricide,
Shall yet redeem thee, and, all backward driven,
Roll the barbarian tide, and sue to be forgiven.
— Lord Byron, Childe Harold 4.47

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 Also by Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass:
A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Ancient and Modern, by Isaac Nathan and
Lord Byron, 1988.
The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, 1992.

Also by Frederick Burwick:

Romantic Drama: Acting and Reacting, 2009.
Mimesis and Its Romantic Reflections, 2001.
Thomas De Quincey: Knowledge and Power, 2001.
Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination, 1996.
Illusion and the Drama: Critical Theory of the Enlightenment and Romantic Era,
1991.
The Haunted Eye: Perception and the Grotesque in English and German Romanticism,
1987.
The Damnation of Newton: Goethe’s Color Theory and Romantic Perception, 1986.

Also by Paul Douglass:

The Works of Lady Caroline Lamb, ed. with Leigh Wetherall Dickson, 2009.
The Whole Disgraceful Truth: Selected Letters of Lady Caroline Lamb, 2006.
Lady Caroline Lamb: A Biography, 2004.
Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature, 1986.

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 C on t e n t s

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1
Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass
One Wordsworth’s Italian Encounters 15
Marilyn Gaull
Two Sitting in Dante’s Throne: Wordsworth and
Italian Nationalism 29
Bruce Graver
Three Byron Between Ariosto and Tasso 39
Nicholas Halmi
Four Byron and Alfieri 55
Peter Cochran
Five Picturing Byron’s Italy and Italians: Finden’s
Illustrations to Byron’s Life and Works 63
Paul Douglass
Six Realms without a Name: Shelley and Italy’s
Intenser Day 77
Michael O’Neill
Seven Epipsychidion, Dante, and the Renewable Life 93
Stuart Curran
Eight The Poetry of Philology: Burckhardt’s Civilization of
the Renaissance in Italy and Mary Shelley’s Valperga 105
Tilottama Rajan
Nine Hemans’s Record of Dante: “The Maremma” and
the Intertextual Poetics of Plenitude 117
Diego Saglia

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 viii Contents

Ten Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy (1807) and

the Performance of Romanticism(s) 133
Diane Long Hoeveler
Eleven Coleridge, Sgricci, and the Shows of London:
Improvising in Print and Performance 143
Angela Esterhammer
Twelve Masaniello on the London Stage 161
Frederick Burwick
Thirteen Re-Visioning Rimini: Dante in the Cockney School 183
Jeffrey N. Cox
Fourteen “Syllables of the Sweet South”: The Sound of
Italian in the Romantic Period 205
Timothy Webb

Works Cited 225

Contributors 241
Index 247

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 Ac k now l e dgm e n t s

T he editors are very thankful for the support of the Romualdo del
Bianco Foundation of Florence in providing the symposium venue
that afforded the occasion for the sharing of scholarly work from
which Dante and Italy in British Romanticism has been drawn. In
particular, the editors wish to thank Paolo del Bianco, Carlotta del
Bianco, and Simone Giometti, Secretary General of the Foundation.
We admire the work of the Foundation deeply and encourage read-
ers to learn more about its mission to encourage an exchange of
knowledge among students, academicians and professionals from
universities, libraries, museums, and other public and private cultural
institutions and organizations worldwide. The editors express their
gratitude to Silvia Benvenuto for preparing an excellent index for this
volume.
The editors and contributors also owe a special thanks to Marilyn
Gaull for her mentorship and support, and to the members of the
editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan.

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 I n t roduc t ion

Frederick Bur wick and Paul Douglass

T he Grand Tour, intended to provide an elegant polish to the edu-

cation of young men of the landed gentry and nobility, typically took
the wealthy traveler and his entourage through France to Venice,
Florence, and Rome to wander amidst the ruins of classical antiquity
and behold the great treasures of the Renaissance.1 The nature of
the traditional tour was altered by the French Revolution, not simply
because the route to Italy was shifted through the Lowlands, the
German provinces, and over the Swiss Alps, but also because travelers
were more frequently accosted by banditti on the highways and by
beggars and unscrupulous merchants in the cities (Chaney 209–212).
In addition, the streets of London were soon crowded with Italian
immigrants hawking the same wares that were displayed in the market
places of Italy. As the Romantic era dawned, the Italian experience of
the Grand Tour had been radically recontextualized by political and
economic conditions affecting all of Europe. Italy took on new and
altered meanings for the Romantics. This fact, though widely recog-
nized, has not been rigorously assessed, especially in light of today’s
richly inclusive canon of Romantic-era literature. The essays in Dante
and Italy in British Romanticism thus undertake a major task: a sig-
nificant reevaluation of the role that Dante, Italian language, and
Italian culture played in the formation of the Romantic movement.
The reassessment comes from two angles. First, it recognizes those
major revisions that have taken place in our understanding of what
Romantic-era literature is and who wrote it. Second, it probes and
extends readings of the Romantic writers in an ever-widening context
of Italian cultural expression as it was disseminated, adulterated, valo-
rized, and transformed by and in their works.
Although the Romantics, like their predecessors, celebrated
Italian art and architecture, literature and music, there were also a
few detractors and denouncers of contemporary Italy and Italians.
William Hazlitt was among the more outspoken critics, a xenophobic

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 2 F r e d e r i c k B u r w i c k a n d Pa u l D o u g l a s s

observer of the Italians in London, and a malcontent spectator in

the opera houses of Turin and Parma. Licentious and unwashed,
Italians also “cheat, steal, rob (when they think it worth their while
to do) with licensed impunity.”2 When Hazlitt himself embarked on
the Grand Tour with the goal of seeing the great art works of the
Italian Renaissance, he noted the absence of any models of feminine
beauty.

The women of Italy (so far as I have seen hitherto) are detestably ugly,
They are not even dark and swarthy, but a mixture of brown and red,
coarse, marked with the small pox, with pug features, awkward, ill-
made, fierce, dirty, lazy, neither attempting, nor hoping to please.3

If there were such a thing as an Italian beauty, Hazlitt surmises, it

must be such a rare treasure that it is kept concealed from the “com-
mon gaze.” Eager to experience the much vaunted Italian opera,
Hazlitt in Turin discovers instead, “the extravagance of incessant
dumb-show . . . and heroines like furies in hysterics.”

Nothing at Bartholomew Fair was ever in worse taste, noisier, or

finer. It was as if a whole people had buried their understandings,
their imaginations, and their hearts in their senses; and as if the latter
were so jaded and worn out, that they required to be inflamed, daz-
zled, and urged almost to a frenzy-fever, to feel any thing. The house
was crowded to excess, and dark, all but the stage, which shed a dim,
ghastly light on the gilt boxes and the audience. Milton might eas-
ily have taken his idea of Pandemonium from the inside of an Italian
Theatre. (Hazlitt 10:196)

Although he blithely asserted that “the Neapolitan bandit takes the

life of his victim with little remorse” (Hazlitt 12:171), he hastened
to reassure his readers that at the time of his journey, 1824–1825,
the dangers had much abated. The alarm was perpetuated primarily
through echoes of old stories, but, in fact, the worst of the banditti
had been captured and executed (Hazlitt 10:255). Hazlitt repeated
the well-worn trope of Rome’s lost glory, visible only amidst “the
fragments of what has been.” Refusing to indulge the pathos of
the fall from former grandeur, he turned his attention to present-
day street-hawkers trying to peddle counterfeit artifacts of the past
(Hazlitt 10:258–259). Protesting the romantic excesses of literary
description, Hazlitt wrote that in describing the Fall of Terni (Childe
Harold 4.69–72), Lord Byron surrendered accuracy for the sake
of poetic effect, pretending it to be “torturous, dark, and boiling

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 Introduction 3

like a witch’s cauldron,” while Hazlitt insisted that the waterfall is

actually

simple and majestic in its character, a clear mountain-stream that pours

its uninterrupted, lengthened sheet of water over a precipice of eight
hundred feet, in perpendicular descent, and gracefully winding its way
to the channel beyond.

Conceding the power of Byron’s verse, Hazlitt objected only that the
description falsified the scene itself.

If this noble and interesting object have a fault, it is that it is too slen-
der, straight, and accompanied with too few wild or grotesque orna-
ments. It is the Doric, or at any rate the Ionic, among waterfalls. It was
nothing of the texture of Lord Byron’s terzains, twisted, zigzag, pent
up and struggling for a vent, broken off at the end of a line, or point
of a rock, diving under ground, or out of the reader’s comprehension,
and pieced on to another stanza or shelving rock. (Hazlitt 10:258)

Hazlitt’s strategy of undermining the effulgence of Romantic rep-

resentations of the Italian landscape, Italian peasants, Italian ruins
is akin to the strains of anti-Romantic debunking that one finds in
Heinrich Heine’s Harzreise or, as Hazlitt acknowledges, Byron’s Don
Juan. But even in granting Hazlitt’s reliance on a sardonic counter-
poise, there remains in his polemic an unmistakable residue of abid-
ing prejudice against Italian character and manners.
Aggravated by the influx of Italian immigrants in London, begin-
ning in the 1820s in consequence of the Carbonari insurrections,4
the discomfort with the crowded Italian presence was shared by many
of Hazlitt’s readers (Sponza 28–34). Their concerns were signifi-
cantly different from the disparagement of the Italians that had pre-
vailed in the previous century. Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several
Parts of Italy (1705), Samuel Sharp’s Letters from Italy (1766), and
Tobias Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy (1766), reported
on the experiences of the Grand Tour by affirming British superior-
ity to the degenerate state of modern Italy, where prevailing physical
and moral decline was only accentuated by the ruins of its classical
antiquity and the art treasures of the Medici dynasty. According to
most eighteenth-century accounts, Roman Catholicism had enslaved
the populace in superstitious ignorance and the rivalries among the
provinces and left them vulnerable to occupation, so that the country
regressed “into the barbarism of the middle ages” (Archenholtz 1:15).
A radical change of attitude from Italophobia to Italophilia became

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 4 F r e d e r i c k B u r w i c k a n d Pa u l D o u g l a s s

evident in The Arno Miscellany (1784) and The Florence Miscellany

(1786). Hester Lynch Piozzi, Robert Merry, William Parsons, and
Bertie Greethead joined in their unabashed dilettantish celebration
of sensibility and mannerist performance. These Della Cruscan poets
fostered an awareness of Italy as the revitalizing retreat of artists and
poets (Lessenich 161–163). On the Continent, Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe became an advocate of the art-nurturing culture. Recording
his travels to Italy in 1786–1787, Goethe waited thirty years before
publishing his Italian Journey (Italienische Reise, 1816–1817).
For the most part, the essays in this volume are preoccupied
with Italophilia. From the time of Chaucer’s reading of Boccaccio,
British culture responded continuously to persistent importations
from Italy. In the seventeenth century Italians introduced the com-
media dell’arte, which left its imprint in the form of harlequinades
and Punch-and-Judy shows. In the eighteenth century Italians con-
tributed to the advent of grand opera, virtuoso, and improvisational
performance. In the nineteenth century Britain also became a place
of refuge for Italians fleeing political turmoil. Among the enthusias-
tic mediators of Italian literature were William Wordsworth, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Mary Shelley, Felicia Hemans, and Germaine de Staël. Following the
upheaval of the Carbonari rebellion and the Risorgimento, exiled
nationalists settled in London’s “Little Italy,” where Foscolo and
Mazzini pursued active journalistic careers. Italian opera, includ-
ing the great soprano performers Angelica Catalani and Joséphine
Grassini, attracted enthusiastic London audiences, as did the virtuoso
violinist Luigi Paganini, and the improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci.
Through the foundational work of David Sultana and the meticu-
lous scholarship Edoardo Zuccato,5 Coleridge’s role as mediator of
Italian art and literature is widely acknowledged. Edoardo Crisafulli,
editor and commentator on Henry Francis Cary’s translation of
Dante’s Divine Comedy, has also acknowledged Coleridge’s gener-
ous support of Cary’s work and personal involvement as translator.6
Charles Lloyd, one-time ward under Coleridge’s tutelage, satirized
his mentor in the novel Edmund Oliver (1798) and spent his latter
years in an insane asylum in France translating the plays of Alfieri.
Dante excited the imagination of the artists, and Blake and Flaxman
were among those who provided visual interpretations of the Inferno,
Purgatorio, and Paradiso.
An oft-reiterated fiction prevails in literary criticism that the sensi-
bility of the elder Romantics was “German,” while only the younger
Romantics might properly be said to possess an “Italian” sensibility.

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 Introduction 5

In the opening chapter of this collection that fiction is effectively

demolished. In “Wordsworth in Italy,” Marilyn Gaull draws upon her
thorough command of the poet’s career and poetry to document the
deep familiarity with Italian literature that remained an informing
element in his writing throughout his career. She gives attention to
Wordsworth’s study of Italian under Agostino Isola, his early excur-
sion into Italy over the Simplon Pass in 1794, his continental tour
with his wife and sister in 1820, and his last Italian tour in 1837. The
emphasis of her exposition throughout is Wordsworth’s identification
of Italian literature with its native culture and with the broader com-
munity of letters. Dante, together with Virgil, Cervantes, and Milton
are absorbed into Wordsworth’s own poetry not simply as imitation
or appropriation but rather as a reassertion and reaffirmation of a vital
poetic heritage.
Following Marilyn Gaull’s account of Wordsworth’s lifelong
engagement of Italian letters as informed by his three Italian tours, the
way is prepared for Bruce Graver to turn to Wordsworth’s later tour of
Italy in 1837 and its literary aftermath. Like Gaull, Graver, too, takes
advantage of Duncan Wu’s account of Wordsworth’s reading of Dante
and Italian literature in two meticulous and comprehensive books.7
Graver begins his chapter, “Sitting in Dante’s Throne: Wordsworth
and Italian Nationalism,” with the late sonnet, “At Florence.” The
sonnet describes the poet outside the Florentine Duomo as he “stood
and gazed upon a marble stone, / The laurelled Dante’s favou-
rite seat.” Overwhelmed by his conjuration of “the mighty Poet,”
Wordsworth says that it was “in reverence” that he “sate down, /
And, for a moment, filled that empty Throne.” As Graver notes, the
sonnet addresses Dante not just as poet but also as patriot. Alert to
Wordsworth’s reiterations of the role of the poet in responding to
the country’s need, Graver discusses Wordsworth’s understanding
of Italian politics. Central to his analysis of the poems of the 1837
Italian tour is Wordsworth’s representation of Dante as a national
poet. More than merely “sitting in Dante’s throne,” Wordsworth
attempts to assume Dante’s voice in the Tour Memorials. As Graver
observes, the endeavor is caught in the paradoxical circumstance of
Wordsworth writing in English and as a foreign tourist.
In Chapter 3, “Byron between Ariosto and Tasso,” Nicholas Halmi
addresses the manner in which Byron, in creating Don Juan, attended
to the Orlando furioso, “A new creation with [its] magic line,” and
to the Gerusalemme liberata, “unsurpass’d in modern song” (Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage 4.40, 39). As Halmi observes, Byron refers
repeatedly to the two poets and even adopts their stanzaic form. Also

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 6 F r e d e r i c k B u r w i c k a n d Pa u l D o u g l a s s

like these two predecessors, Byron maintains a cavalier insouciance

rather than a soldierly obedience to the conventions of epic or heroic
poetry. Halmi, however, does not build his case on such character-
istics of form and genre. He presents evidence for a more pervasive
attribute of narrative structure. Like Ariosto and Tasso, Byron too
managed to engage the broad range of epic narrative by relying on the
casual links of contingency rather than subservience to the strictures
of a teleological narrative.
Continuing the focus on Byron, Peter Cochran turns from the
epic narrative to the drama. Just as Halmi argued that Byron aligned
himself with Ariosto and Tasso in a mode of epic poetry that repeat-
edly distanced itself from the very conventions of the genre, Cochran
argues that Byron found a kindred spirit in Alfieri in composing plays
that resisted the expectations of stage performance. Cochran traces
Byron’s discontent with stage practice to his experience at Drury
Lane. Attracted to the dramatic form, especially in its potential for
character exposition, Byron nevertheless doubted the attentiveness of
a London audience. Not until he arrived in Italy did Byron begin a
serious commitment as a playwright. Starting with Manfred, Byron
used the genre much as he had used the four Turkish tales and Childe
Harold for the delineation of the dark, troubled character that has
since been identified as the Byronic hero. He adhered to much the
same model in Cain, but a difference becomes apparent in subse-
quent plays. In 1819, Cochran explains, the plays of Alfieri begin to
influence his sense of dramatic form, evident in Marino Faliero and
The Two Foscari. Of Byron’s eight plays, Marino Faliero was the only
one performed during his lifetime. Questioning the nature of Byron’s
reception of Alfieri, Cochran suggests that Alfieri too, like many of
Byron’s other literary sources, was often mimicked for mere effect
rather than as serious model.
Although Paul Douglass’s essay, “Picturing Byron’s Italy and
Italians: William Finden’s Illustrations of Byron’s Life and Works,”
may seem to promise simply another chapter on Byron, the focus is
rather on the posthumous reception of the poet and his subsequent
influence on the tourist trade. As guidebooks for the hundreds
of tourists, and many more armchair travelers, seeking to explore
“Byron’s Italy,” William and Edward Finden, together with William
Brockdon, produced attractive volumes illustrated with steel-plate
engravings. These engravings, which played a large role in popular-
izing Byron as an author, also perpetrated a reductive, sentimental,
and simplified interpretation of his works. Douglass reveals how the
Landscape and Portrait Illustrations of the Life of Byron undermined

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 Introduction 7

the energy of Byron’s literary work and substituted a supercilious

detachment from the landscapes and human scenes portrayed.
Douglass demonstrates how the very selectivity of scenes from
Byron’s work avoids instances of struggle and violence, focusing
instead on attractive females, picturesque ruins, and rustic tranquil-
ity, complemented by sometimes acerbic commentaries, composed
by Brockedon, which distort, if they do not entirely falsify, Byron’s
(and Britain’s) ambivalent relationship to Italian language and cul-
ture, the Carbonari, and the Risorgimento.
The next two chapters give scrutiny to Percy Bysshe Shelley in Italy.
In Chapter 6, “Realms without a Name: Shelley and Italy’s Intenser
Day,” Michael O’Neill explores how in Shelley’s late responses to
Dante, subtle effects of kinship and distance coexist. As Shelley sug-
gests in A Defence of Poetry, Dante recognized an enduring dyna-
mism in words that enabled them to kindle new inspirations, being
“pregnant with a lightning which has yet found no conductor.”
O’Neill thus locates in Dante the source for Shelley’s conviction that
language could initiate a time-transcending causality and stimulate
inspirations that may be at a far cultural and ideological remove from
the original. O’Neill goes on to address Shelley’s attempt to reassert
that Dantesque causality of words in the material-bound causality of
political events. At issue was whether the creative spirit existing in
medieval or Renaissance Italy might be resuscitated in the present
or future. That Venice had fallen to the Austrians, O’Neill argues,
figured as a moment rather than as an end in Shelley’s call for opposi-
tion to the ever-evolving tyrannies of social, political, and religious
institutions.
In Chapter 7, “Epipsychidion, Dante, and the Renewable Life,” Stuart
Curran develops a provocative and engagingly revisionist approach to
a major poem that has perennially been read as an allegory of love,
predicated upon Percy Bysshe Shelley’s relations with Emilia Viviani,
whom he met while she was detained by her family in a convent near
Pisa in 1820. Although Shelley gave ample cause for a reading of the
poem as autobiographical, he also protested against that reduction-
ism, which allowed undue attention to the self-pity that can be heard
in some passages. In his alternative approach, Curran emphasizes how
the poem distills some of Shelley’s most sophisticated thinking on
the subject of aesthetics. He brings together problems of language,
expression, perception, and the visionary power that preoccupied him
throughout his career. Instead of being preoccupied with the passion
of the flesh and the wounds of mortal love, Epipsychidion grapples
with the conflict between “two overshadowing minds, one life, one

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 8 F r e d e r i c k B u r w i c k a n d Pa u l D o u g l a s s

death,” in order to establish the place of a divinely human creativity

in the scheme of universal experience. In this, Curran argues, Shelley
embraced the principle of the Vita nuova, the “renewing life”as it is
inscribed moment-by-moment in Dante’s great work.
In Chapter 8, “The Poetry of Philology: Burckhardt’s Civilization
of the Renaissance in Italy and Mary Shelley’s Valperga,” Tillotama
Rajan draws upon Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the
Renaissance in Italy (1860) as a relevant critical tool for analyzing
Mary Shelley’s description of Italy in Valperga. Because Italy had
no overarching system of government, Rajan declares in summariz-
ing Burckhardt’s argument, it was free to create different political
forms through its multiplicity of competing despotisms and repub-
lics. Paradoxically, she goes on to assert, the very fragmentation of
Italy allows for the birth of individualism, “personality,” and politi-
cal experimentation. Yet Italy by the same token could never con-
solidate itself as a nation and could not build on these experiments
(Burckhardt, Civilization 69–71). For Burckhardt, then, the Italian
Renaissance never achieved an “adequate embodiment of the Idea.”
Like Burckhardt, Shelley too researched her topic thoroughly, read-
ing “a hundred old books” to write Valperga, intimating a method
that is genealogical and anti-foundationalist rather than organized
by a master-narrative. Like Burckhardt, Shelley was interested in the
fragmented political geography of Italy at a time when Walter Scott
was using the historical novel to institute and canonize the British
nation-state. Like Burckhardt’s Civilization, Shelley’s novel is an
encyclopedic bricolage of the political, the historical, and the aes-
thetic, temporarily focalized through the passions of three distinc-
tive individuals (Euthanasia, Beatrice, and Castruccio), for whose
emergence as individuals Italy’s fragmentation serves as a condition
of possibility. Italy, Rajan proposes, drew Shelley’s attention because
of its untimely position in history as the place of something that had
not been adequately embodied. By the early nineteenth century that
something had still not found a form, and its immaturity, prema-
turity, or belatedness questions the very idea of adequate embodi-
ment implicit in theories of modernity. Shelley, writing well after the
period now called “early modern” finds in Italy a space from which
to think politics and history, as well as individuality, she uses philol-
ogy and romance to unsettle the emergent linkage of history with
modernity.
In Chapter 9, “Hemans’s Record of Dante: “The Maremma”
and the Intertextual Poetics of Plenitude,” Diego Saglia notes “an
entrenched resistance” in acknowledging the extent to which women

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 Introduction 9

writers were involved in the reception of Dante during the Romantic

period. To be sure, a wide range of perspectives were offered by such
women writers as Lady Morgan, Charlotte Eaton, Germaine de Staël,
and Mary Shelley. While many of the women writers were attracted
primarily to Petrarch, many also engaged extensively with Dante.
Recommending Felicia Hemans’s poem “The Maremma” (1820) as
an example of effective engagement with Dantesque narrative, Saglia
demonstrates how Hemans reinvents the tale of Pia de’ Tolomei,
adapting it to her own poetical idiom, but at the same time infusing
it with Shakespearean overtones. In his concluding paragraphs, Saglia
compares Hemans reworkings of Dante to those of Anna Seward
and Mary Shelley. Concentrating specifically on their “national”
approaches to the poet, Saglia emphasizes the contribution of these
women writers to the Romantic reevaluation of the Italian bard and
their relevance to discourses of cultural (and political) identity and
agency.
Another important woman writer of the era, Germaine de Staël
commanded a readership throughout Europe with such works as
Corinne, or Italy (1807). That novel, as published by John Murray in
London, was especially influential in Britain, the site of her heroine’s
destruction. In Chapter 10, Diane Hoeveler describes Staël’s novel as
an exploration of national character and historical destiny, as identi-
fied in the “Italy” part of the book’s title. Staël’s major accomplish-
ment, however, was to invent not just a female character, but a female
romanticism capable of rivaling in its performative potential the dom-
inant male discourses of Romanticism. Given the facility, mobility,
dexterity of mind and nature, Corinne’s energy and endurance is nev-
ertheless physically and emotionally limited. As Hoeveler observes,
Corinne was perfectly familiar with the roles of masculine discourse,
“Ossianism, Prometheanism, Faustianism, Rousseauvianism, or
Wertherism.” Through “Corinne’s grandiose and heavily coded femi-
nine performances” Staël may suggest to female readers a female rep-
ertory capable of promoting “a feminization of culture, history, and
social institutions,” but, as Hoeveler also notes, Corinne’s fate reveals
Staël’s awareness “that her noble intentions were doomed.” Having
cast her protagonist as an improvvisatrice, Staël does not sustain the
possibility that Corinne might provide nineteenth-century women
writers with a model of spontaneity and liberation. Her very choice of
performances predetermine an inevitable consequence. When Staël’s
improvvisatrice arrives in England, she is exposed to conventions and
constraints that undermine and ultimately destroy her health and
happiness.

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 10 F r e d e r i c k B u r w i c k a n d Pa u l D o u g l a s s

Linking the fiction of improvisational performance in Corinne

to the actual stage performance of the improvvisitore, Angela
Esterhammer challenges the illusory boundaries between the two.
In Chapter 11. “Coleridge, Sgricci, and the Shows of London:
Improvising in Print and Performance,” she finds a crucial media-
tion in Coleridge’s “The Improvisatore,” a poem written at the very
time of the London performance by the most famous of improv-
visatori, Tommaso Sgricci. The juxtaposition of these two events,
performance and text, shows processes of embodied and written
mediation to be distinct yet intertwined. Not only does the experi-
ence of real-life improvvisatori contrast with the fictional representa-
tions of improvvisatrici that were being offered to English readers
at the same time, but it also gives rise to important reflections on
mediation and mediality. In theatres and lecture halls, London audi-
ences had opportunities to encounter poetry as an oral rather than a
written medium, to discover how the conditions of immediacy and
embodiment affect the composition and reception of literary works.
Mediation becomes even more of an issue when print media attempt
to reproduce improvisational performances and give them a more
permanent form—for instance, when improvised poetry is published
or when periodicals review ephemeral performances. The resulting
reflections on mediality converge in Coleridge’s intriguing text,
“The Improvisatore.”
In Chapter 12, “Masaniello on the London Stage,” Frederick
Burwick traces the many dramatic productions based on the career
of Tommaso Aniello, the twenty-five-year-old Neapolitan fisher-
man, who 180 years earlier, in 1647, led the revolt against the rule
of the Spanish Habsburgs in Naples. With interest in Italian politics
reawakened in the 1820s by the failed Carbonari rebellion, eight dif-
ferent productions based on Masaniello and the revolt appeared in
the theatres of London between 1825 and 1829. The earliest ver-
sion, staged in 1649 in the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, was
crafted for a London audience seeking clues to the volatile political
circumstances. The mystery of those circumstances still intrigued the
audiences of the late 1820s, who expected as well the keen impulse
of revolutionary fervor charged with high degree of melodramatic
pathos. The productions themselves were caught up in the London
rivalries between the legitimate and the illegitimate theatres. George
Soane’s Masaniello, The Fisherman of Naples opened at Drury Lane on
February 17, 1825, but lost the race to Henry M. Milner’s Masaniello,
the Fisherman of Naples and Deliverer of his Country, which opened
ten days earlier at the Coburg on February 7, 1825. After Daniel-

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 Introduction 11

François-Esprit Auber’s opera, La muette de Portici, premiered with

great success in Paris, there was again a scramble in London to adapt
the libretto by Eugène Scribe for an English audience. When James
Kenney’s Masaniello: A Grand Opera in Three Acts opened at Drury
Lane on May 4, 1829, once again Henry Milner was prepared on the
very same night at the Royal Coburg to open his rival production,
Masaniello; or, The Dumb Girl of Portici, A musical drama, in three
acts. By no means compromised by musical adaption, the dramatiza-
tion of Masaniello’s fate still wielded its full political force and on
occasion revealed its power to rouse the crowd to rebellion. In track-
ing subsequent productions, Burwick notes as well the ballet version
by André-Jean-Jacques Deshayes, which adhered closely to Auber’s
opera, and the ballet by Jules Perrot, Ondine, ou La naïade, which
offered a new plot and new music. These links lead to Turner’s depic-
tion Undine giving the Ring to Masaniello (1846), a fitting coda to
the career of a “stage hero.”
Although very few critics have bothered, a strong case can be made
for the importance of Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini. Jeffrey Cox under-
takes a critical defense and justification of Hunt’s work in Chapter
13, “Re-Visioning Rimini: Dante in the Cockney School.” For one
thing, Cox points out, it was highly influential when it first appeared:
“We can find echoes of Rimini in such poems as Keats’s “Isabella,”
Shelley’s Epipsychidion, and the first canto of Byron’s Don Juan.” It
was Hunt, Cox insists, who “taught a generation of poets how to raid
the Italian cultural archive in order to remake British poetry, how to
use Italian classics to make Cockney poetry in the present.” Hunt’s
accomplishment, he readily grants, would not have been possible
without Cary’s translation of The Divine Comedy. Following Cary’s
own commentary on his translation, Foscolo, Coleridge, and Samuel
Rogers offered further critical assessment of Dante. The Paolo and
Francesca episode from the Inferno became an oft-revisited topos for
the second-generation Romantic. As the first chapters of this collec-
tion have shown, Wordsworth too was attentive to Dante, and he was
not alone among the first-generation poets, for Blake in his illustra-
tions to the Divine Comedy was a scrupulous interpreter of Dante’s
poetry. Cox also cites Coleridge’s comments on Dante in The Friend,
Shelley’s turn to La Vita Nuova in Epipsychidion, Keats’s use of Dante
in “The Fall of Hyperion,” and Byron in The Prophecy of Dante. Cox
does not deny the charge that Hunt, along with most of his contem-
poraries, lacked “a sense of tragedy.” Cox argues that Hunt may well
have had a different goal, deliberately crafting a narrative “beyond
tragedy.” In rewriting Dante, Cox maintains, Hunt created in Rimini

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 12 F r e d e r i c k B u r w i c k a n d Pa u l D o u g l a s s

an “innovative, avant garde poetry that sought through the extrava-

gance of its verse to image a world remade by love.”
The final essay in this collection moves beyond attention to indi-
vidual authors to a more comprehensive appraisal of one of the most
profound and pervasive aspect of the experience of Italy—the Italian
language. Timothy Webb opens Chapter 14, “Syllables of the Sweet
South: Figuring the Sound of Italian in the Romantic Period,” with
reflections on Enlightment philology with its contrary impulses of
a universal language, transcending nationalist identity, and its rein-
forcement of nationalist language through an intensified attention to
nationalist character. Webb goes on to focus on the fascination with
the sounds of the Italian language evident in the accounts of travel-
writers and creative artists during the Romantic period. The char-
acteristics of Italian were partly defined by way of comparison (for
example, with English, German, French, and Spanish), but they were
also regarded as giving expression to an identity that was quintessen-
tially and recognizably “Italian.” Sometimes this was connected not
only with the intrinsic nature of the language but with the energy and
dramatic force with which it was often enunciated: “gesture” is rarely
far away from such characterizations. Many writers insisted on the
softness of Italy and its femininity, characteristics that did not elude
the notice of Germaine de Staël, especially in Corinne, and which,
according to the narrator in Byron’s Beppo, featured identifiably in
its oral language where it could be distinguished clearly from the
more guttural sounds and speech patterns of the north. Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, Staël, Leigh Hunt, and
others who lived or travelled in Italy, recognized that a different
soundscape distinguished Italy from England and France and gave
expression to a culture also correspondingly distinct and different.
The differences were further enhanced by the fact that “Italian” also
varied from city to city. Coleridge in Sicily, Byron in Venice, Stendhal
in Milan, Leigh Hunt in Tuscany, Mary Shelley in Rome, Leigh Hunt
in Tuscany, Charles Burney in Florence, and Hester Piozzi returning
to her native country, acknowledged the existence of dialect with a
variety of responses. The very sound of Italian was often regarded as
liberating and creative and most travelers acknowledged a language
that was musical, resonant, and pleasingly expressive.
We acknowledged above that, for the most part, the essays in this
volume deal with Italophilia, and that is understandable, for a love of
Italian culture, language, and the sights, sounds, aromas, and sensual
impressions of Italy, lies behind the Romantic response—though com-
plicated sometimes by disappointment, anxiety, feelings of Imperial

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 Introduction 13

superiority, to be sure. Importations from Italy included Italians

themselves, as well as robust representations of Italy’s contemporary
political and literary scene, and these receive extended treatment in
the following pages. The effects of previous waves of influence have
not been neglected, including that of grand opera on the Romantic
response to Italy, a taste for which arrived also with Italian expa-
triates, and Mazzini and Foscolo are, therefore, merely representa-
tive of a large and noticeable Italian presence in the London of the
Romantics. This collection of essays consolidates previous scholarship
on the interpreters of Italy—from Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron,
and Hunt to Hemans and the Shelleys—and enlarges and extends
that knowledge with groundbreaking work on the visual arts and the
stage, including improvisation, painting, and theatrical productions
based on Italian history. Shelley’s deep and comprehending response
to Dante finds echoes throughout the book, and so it is fitting that
we end with an essay contemplating the lure of the Italian vernacular,
established for so many Romantic writers by Dante, but sought in
countless other venues after, as the Romantics embraced and assessed
what they believed to be their very own Italian heritage.

Notes
1. For a succinct description of the Grand Tour, see Redford, Venice and
the Grand Tour 17–23.
2. See William Hazlitt, Essay XVI. Hot and Cold [written 1826], in The
Plain Speaker (1826) (Hazlitt 12:170, 177).
3. This passage is drawn from Hazlitt’s Notes of a Journey through France
and Italy (1826), (Hazlitt 10:196; see also 10:249, 276).
4. The Carbonari (literally “charcoal burners”) were members of an
Italian protest movement that originated in Naples during the
Napoleonic Wars and grew into a loosely organized freemason-style
organization scattered across Italy (and into France). It consisted of
patriots who generally desired Italian unification, though their politi-
cal agenda seems to have been undefined. See Smith, The Making of
Italy: 1796–1870.
5. See Sultana’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Malta and Italy and Zuccato’s
Coleridge in Italy.
6. See Crisafulli’s “The Translator as Textual Critic.”
7. See Wu’s Wordsworth’s Reading 1770–1799 (1993) and Wordsworth’s
Reading, 1800–1815 (2007).

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 Chapter One

Wor ds wor t h’s Ita l i a n

E nc ou n t e r s
Marilyn Gaull

E ven “the most original poet now living,” as Hazlitt called

Wordsworth in The Spirit of the Age (1818), had “ancestral voices,” to
adapt a phrase from Kubla Khan. Receptive, studious, a literary life
full of encounter and exchange, Wordsworth acknowledged, among
others, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, Virgil, and
an array of Italian authors including Metastasio, Petrarch, Ariosto,
Michael Angelo, Chiabrera, Machiavelli, and Dante. He worried
about them: “We are all, in spite of ourselves, a parcel of thieves,”
he observed in a letter to Henry Crabb Robinson, when he offered
to send him the sonnets he wrote on leaving Italy if he promised not
to share them with “verse-writers.” To explain, he offered a “droll
example”: After Mary accused him of plagiarizing one of the sonnets,
he asked: “From whom?” “From yourself,” she replied in December
1838 (see Robinson, Diary 3:156). In editions of Wordsworth’s poetry
and letters, in critical essays, source studies, and biographies, scholars
such as Alan Hill, Stephen Gill, W. J. B. Owen, Duncan Wu, and
others have identified many of the textual echoes and influences from
Italian literature. His relation to Dante, Italy, Italian culture, and
language, however, is beyond words or phrases, images or concept;
it is as original as his poetry—personal, subtle, complicated, perva-
sive, unlike any other influence, a combination of learning, taste, and
experience. In this essay, I shall consider the range of Wordsworth’s

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 16 M a r ily n G au l l

Italian encounters—the textual, cultural, and biographical—how he

assimilated and expressed them, and how his originality is revealed
by them.

Wordsworth’s Italy
Defeated and fallen, divided into city-states unable to protect or gov-
ern themselves, Italy had been successively ruled by Spain, Napoleon,
and Austria, its one stable institution the Vatican, of which Rome,
once the capital of the Western world, was a synecdoche. In spite
of its many cultural achievements and creative genius, during
Wordsworth’s lifetime (1770–1850) Italy experienced a recurrent
social, political, economic, and military collapse, expressed (for the
British, at least), on the one hand, in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire (1776) and, sixty years later, in Bulwer Lytton’s
The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). Among the poets, some such as
Leigh Hunt, Keats, Byron, and Shelley, celebrated the Renaissance
Italy of art and epic, of Michael Angelo, Dante, Da Vinci, and the
idealized sculpture and architecture reconstructed in British gardens
and civic buildings. But a dark side of Italy pervaded the popular
culture. Ann Radcliffe, who had never been to Italy, made it the set-
ting for such gothic romances as Mysteries of Udolpho with its peril-
ous crossing of the Alps and The Italian, or the Confessional of the
Black Penitents (in Wordsworth’s library), with the fiendish monk
Schedoni, depicting the bandits, secret societies, vulnerable women,
rapacious aristocracy, and depravities associated with the Catholic
church. Shakespeare’s image of Italy in such plays as The Merchant
of Venice, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet offered a more subtle but
equally intense population of suspicious, treacherous, and tyrannical
men; helpless victimized women; passions; conflicts; greed; jealousy;
and forbidden love. Nonetheless, and in spite of the imagined and
real dangers of continental travel during and after the Napoleonic
wars, Italy continued to attract tourists, religious pilgrims, sexual
adventurers, some to study art and music or to produce it—such
as the Della Cruscans in Florence or later Shelley and Byron. The
Italian climate promised recovery from lung and nervous diseases,
but, with the recurrent cholera, it was just as likely to be a fatal des-
tination. Even the Italian landscape was made of contradictions: the
exquisite light, the mountains and forests celebrated in picturesque
paintings grew out of a traumatic earth history, especially after 1783,
the volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tidal waves that kept the
population on the edge of crisis.

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 W o r d s w o r t h ’s I t a l i a n E n c o u n t e r s 17

In Great Britain, impoverished Italian émigrés escaping Napoleon

and the political turmoil that followed his invasion led non-heroic
and un-Romantic lives in London as language teachers, merchants,
domestic servants, street performers, puppeteers (from Pulcinella to
Punch and Judy), actors in the spectacles or pantomime—itself natu-
ralized to the British stage from the commedia dell’arte. Among the
notables were two generations of Grimaldi and the Great Belzoni, a
giant of a man, perhaps the one Wordsworth confessed to seeing at
Sadler’s Wells “amid the uproar of the rabblement” (Prelude 7:273).1
There were Italian magicians and Italian magic (Giovanni Pinetti, the
first magician to hire a legitimate theater) and the electrical discover-
ies of Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta, both popular perform-
ing arts. Their skills were adapted for diorama, panorama, and stage
settings for melodrama and for Italian opera, the spectacle, music,
bel canto voices, lyrics, and tragedies that passed the strict British
censorship laws. As Giacomo Casanova scandalized European aris-
tocracy and published his experiences in his memoirs, his contempo-
rary, Cesare Beccaria, in Of Crimes and Punishments (1764), began
the humane and utilitarian reform of European and British justice.2
In 1837, while Wordsworth was on his last tour of Italy, Mazzini,
a failed revolutionary, was in London to recruit young patriots for
a new insurrection that would unify Italy; instead, he encountered
countrymen still depicted and sometimes behaving as gothic villains,
philanderers, or clowns (Cavaliero 44). In England, especially the
North Country, the heroic remains of Italy lay about the country-
side, the displaced and anonymous Roman ruins, forts, walls, bar-
rows, and roads, which were Wordsworth’s introduction to Rome and
Italian history, the closest he came before he attended university. The
Roman occupation, which had lasted for four hundred years, from
43 to 410 AD, was a presence in Wordsworth’s poetry and haunts his
imagination—the ghosts of Roman legions crossing Kirkstone pass,
and the “last holds of ambitious Rome” in a relic in Penrith, as he
writes in “Roman Antiquities” (1831).

Wordsworth’s Travels in Italy

Unlike other poets of his generation and later, Wordsworth did not
go to Italy for his health, to escape, or to die—although his daugh-
ter-in-law, Isabella, John’s wife, and two of his grandchildren who
had gone to recuperate from a mysterious illness did die in Italy. He
attempted three tours, the first at age twenty as a student with Robert
Jones, which he records in The Prelude. Crossing Simplon Pass, about

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 18 M a r ily n G au l l

to enter Italy, he records the threshold moment, the anticipation, the

prospective vision, which sets him apart from his retrospective con-
temporaries who visited Italy:

Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,

Is with Infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, expectation, and desire,
And something ever more about to be. (Prelude 6:538–541)

The second tour was in 1820, with Dorothy and Mary, Thomas
Monkhouse (Mary’s cousin) and his new wife on their wedding tour,
her sister, their maid, and several others they met along the way. After
visiting Annette Vallon and Caroline, her child by William, they
travelled by foot, coach, ferry, mule, boat, and encountered many
adventures including an eclipse at Lake Lugano, which Wordsworth
recorded in one of the thirty-nine poems he wrote, Memorials of a
Tour of the Continent (1822). The anecdotes that Dorothy, Mary, and
Robinson recorded reveal that this journey was more sociable than
poetic, sharing his youthful experience with his family and friends,
sharing pleasures, some mischievous: “Wordsworth was the greatest
poet England has had for generations,” a stranger announced at a
small inn. Wordsworth replied: “That’s a ridiculous remark for you
to make. My name is Wordsworth” (Robinson, Diary 2:181). On the
natives, Robinson says, “The physiognomy of the people does not
speak in favour of their ancestors . . . [they] have a feeble and melan-
choly character. The children beg . . . and sing unintelligible songs.
But what says the poet: ‘Thrice happy burghers, peasants, warriors
old, . . . / Heroes before your time in frolic fancy bold’ ” (Robinson,
Diary 2:176). His sense of the noble peasant, “Through utter weak-
ness pitiable dear” that he had celebrated at their summer festival
in Grasmere (Prelude 8:1–69) had survived in Italy. The inn where
they stayed in Lugano, Robinson reports, had been a refuge for the
disgraced Queen Caroline and her Italian lover, Bartolomeo Pergami,
he in Robinson’s room, and the queen in the adjoining room where
Dorothy stayed. They turned back at Milan because of the cholera.
Wordsworth’s third Italian journey in 1837, he said, had been
delayed for family and economic concerns. At age sixty-four, he
hoped it was not too late (he was to live another sixteen years) but,
as a poet, he feared it may have been too late to make the best use of
the experience. However belated, with Henry Crabb Robinson, he

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 W o r d s w o r t h ’s I t a l i a n E n c o u n t e r s 19

visited Rome, Florence, Bologna, Venice, Savona, the countryside,

and far from aged, Wordsworth hiked and climbed for hours, rising at
dawn, indefatigable, though early to bed because his failing eyesight
kept him from reading at night. He did occasionally socialize with
Robinson: he visited Severn and talked about Keats and a sculptor’s
studio to see the statue of Byron that was rejected by Westminster.
Among the three most powerful experiences: at Vaucluse, Petrarch’s
home, where for two or three hours he climbed “ the steep and rug-
ged crags,” he recalls (Robinson thought it was “dreary and uncom-
fortable”); inside St. Peter’s where he attended a mass celebrated by
the Pope in the Sistine Chapel; and a pine tree atop Monte Morio
in Rome that he embraced and commemorated in a poem in honor
of his late friend, Sir George Beaumont who had saved it “from the
sordid axe.”3

Wordsworth and Italian

Having completed all the requirements for Greek, Latin, and math-
ematics while a student at Hawkshead school, Wordsworth was free
when he entered Cambridge to concentrate on modern languages,
French, Spanish, German, and Italian at which he excelled. His tutor
was the accomplished Agostino Isola, exiled from Milan and hired by
the Cambridge faculty in 1764 to prepare students for the diplomatic
service, or to be tutors to wealthy travelling families.4 Using a con-
versational method of dialogue, which he invented and later turned
into a text book, he and Wordsworth translated the Renaissance
romances, Tasso, Ariosto, Boccaccio, Boiardo, Petrarch’s lyrics and
Metastasio’s, the anti-romance Don Quixote, Dante, and Machiavelli
whose writings had a profound, positive, and rarely recognized influ-
ence on him.5 Their lives remained entwined: after Isola’s death, his
granddaughter, Emma, was adopted by Charles and Mary Lamb. She
later married Charles Moxon, who became Wordsworth’s publisher,
financed his third tour of Italy in 1837, and accompanied him as far
as Paris, then published the collected poems of 1842, which include
the Memorials of a Tour of Italy.
Isola’s conversational style affirmed Wordsworth’s faith in the spo-
ken language while the vernacular epics and romances appealed to his
taste for the oral tradition, which was more congenial to his nature
than the formal and elaborate literary tradition that he had already
mastered. In an eloquent passage in Book Five of The Prelude, he
attributes his mature strength, his capacity to imagine and endure,

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 20 M a r ily n G au l l

“to live / In reconcilement with our stinted powers” to the tales and
romances he first encountered as a child, and the romances that sus-
tained him, the “dreamers,” “Forgers of daring tales!” “Impostors,
drivellers, dotards,” “we feel

With what, and how great might ye are in league,

Who make our wish, our power, our thought a deed,
An empire, a possession. (Prelude 5:522–529)

Along with Ovid, Basile, and Boccaccio (whom he could quote

by heart), with Isola, he read Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato
(1495), its continuation in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516–1532),
all of them drawing on a common body of familiar tales associated
with Roland, the great British hero, and Charlemagne, the French,
as they filtered down into the oral communities and circulated in
Great Britain, Europe, and the Middle East—where ever the chi-
valric romance or folk narratives flourished. In episodic verse, they
related the tales of aristocrats and folk heroes challenging each
other over women, religion, and land, allied with or against com-
peting supernatural forces, pagan or Christian, the enchantments,
wizards, magic rings, talking animals, hares, cats, owls, and the
hippogriff. If the narratives faded, the figures endured and popu-
lated distant tales through many countries and centuries, including
Wordsworth’s narratives. One example: originating in an Eastern
legend, the bleeding tree as a sign of guilt, appears in Dante’s
Inferno, where suicides are turned into trees devoured by harpies,
again in The Juniper Tree, which the Brothers Grimm collected
from various sources, and Wordsworth’s The Thorn. In this oral
recycling, as the tales passed through Italy, the images and narra-
tives acquired conscience and solemnity—in the legend of Cupid
and Psyche, for example, after many transformations, in different
languages and cultures, Psyche reappears as the lone goddess of
harvest and of death in Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper.” And,
like “Peter Bell,” in which Ariosto is a presence, and The Excursion,
after passing through Italy, the tales refocus on the tale-tellers’ nar-
ratives about telling stories.
Raised on such tales, Wordsworth savored romance epics, the
courtships, sufferings, contests, the fantastic voyages to the moon
(not Hades), and exotic lands, and, in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, the
madness of unrequited love. He carried Orlando with him on his first
walking tour of 1791 with Robert Jones through France, Switzerland,
and to Lake Como. Such tales fed his rebellious spirit and prepared

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 W o r d s w o r t h ’s I t a l i a n E n c o u n t e r s 21

him for “the long probation,” “The time of trial, ere we learn to
live / In reconcilement with our stinted powers”:

To endure this state of meagre vassalage,

Unwilling to forego, confess, submit,
Uneasy and unsettled, yoke-fellows
To custom, mettlesome, and not yet tamed
And humbled down. . . . (Prelude 5:515–522)

Orlando shaped his perceptions. Captain Michel Beaupuy, for exam-

ple, a French revolutionary officer, “wandered,” Wordsworth writes,
“As through a book, an old romance, or tale / Of Fairy” (Prelude
8:305–307). And walking by the Loire, he imagined Angelica, his
ideal love, the heroine of Orlando furioso, and Erminia (from Tasso),
satyrs, knights, all frolicking in the woods (Prelude 9:438; Liu 374
ff.). Orlando’s madness and travels, reappear, like the folk charac-
ters of oral legend, in Wordsworth’s many thwarted romances, his
own with Annette Vallon, The Borderers, The Thorn, The Forsaken
Indian Woman, the Vaudracour and Julia episode in The Prelude,
and even Coleridge’s obsession with Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, Sara
Hutchinson. Not The Sorrows of Young Werther, which inspired a gen-
eration of suicidal lovers, but Ariosto was Wordsworth’s mentor. And
while it appears that he renounced the romance tradition as early as
Peter Bell (the narrator does at least), where he cites and says farewell
to Ariosto’s hippogriff, in fact, he continues to publish the romances
in all his later editions, even in the collection of 1842, and retains
the tribute to the lifelong value of these romances in The Prelude
passage, Book Five, to be published after his death in 1850. Evolving
from his childhood, his Italian readings, and his own experience, the
romance voice survives as one of his many voices, an authentic part
of his poetic life.
For a time, Wordsworth lived the romance journey: his love affair
with Annette, his wandering conversations with Beaupuy, then,
returning from France, the revolution failed, his country at war, sepa-
rated from his love and his first child, he walked through Salisbury
Plain, the River Wye, North Wales, obstacles, encounters, a long
search for peace and a home recorded in The Prelude and in more
subtle ways in the Lyrical Ballads. The journey itself, like the poem,
has Petrarchan, Virgilian, and Miltonic antecedents, but also more
significant predecessors in Ariosto and Boiardo, perhaps Dante, per-
sonalized, localized, and historicized. Wordsworth’s association of the
romance legend with Italy reappears after the 1837 journey: Barthold

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 22 M a r ily n G au l l

Niebuhr’s History of Rome (1828), had rejected the legendary history

of Rome, the “old credulities,” as Wordsworth called them, in favor
of “severe research,” to which Wordsworth objects in Memorials of a
Tour of Italy, Sonnets IV and V.

Wordsworth’s Translations
For Wordsworth, a gifted linguist, translation was habitual from
his childhood—recreational, social, and therapeutic. Over the years
he read in Italian or translated Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Ariosto,
Metastasio, Machiavelli, Michael Angelo, Beccaria, Chiabrera, and
many others who are not recorded. Dorothy reports to her friend,
Jane Pollard, that after his return to Cambridge from his walking
tour, “He reads Italian, Spanish, French, Greek, Latin, and English,
but never opens a mathematical book. We promise ourselves much
pleasure from reading Italian at some time” (June 26, 1791). And in
1794, following his own dark time, “My Italian studies I am going to
resume immediately as it is my intention to instruct my sister in that
language.” And in April, Dorothy has “begun Italian,” reading the
annotated copy of Ariosto that he had carried with him on his walk-
ing tour (Wu 7). Translating Ariosto was a source of great pleasure,
several cantos, up to a hundred lines a day he said at one point, but he
never finished and it was not published until 1947.6
Although Petrarch was not considered a major poet in the eigh-
teenth century, Wordsworth paid homage by translating his verse,
by reviving and retaining the sonnet form, and in The Convention of
Cintra describing him as “a man of disciplined spirit, who withdrew
from the busy world” to “master” his own mind. In the Italian tour
of 1837, he took Robinson on a pilgrimage to Vaucluse where he re-
imagined the poet, who, in spite of scant citations, served as another
subtext in Wordsworth’s life and poetry.7
In 1802, Wordsworth translated five poems by Metastasio, who,
according to Gillen Darcy Wood, in the eighteenth century was the
most popular Italian poet in England. Wordsworth published them in
the Morning Post, in October and November, 1803, but, like his stan-
zas from Orlando, they were not republished until 1947, and the most
popular, La Partenza, (“Laura, farewell, my Laura”) was not recog-
nized as Wordsworth’s work until 1962. They did, however, have a
profound impact on the Lyrical Ballads, as Wood demonstrates.8 Like
Petrarch and Ariosto, Metastasio wrote lyrics that express longing for
one’s beloved, for lost, unrequited, or forbidden love. Since most of
these translations were written after he had married and settled in

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 W o r d s w o r t h ’s I t a l i a n E n c o u n t e r s 23

Grasmere with Mary and Dorothy, they seem to express the deep and
unresolved emotions he experienced parting from Annette and their
unborn child (Johnston 566).
In 1804, at the request of Robert Southey’s friend, Richard Duppa,
who was writing The Life and Works of Michael Angelo Buonarroti,
(1806), Wordsworth began translating Michael Angelo’s sonnets.9
After about fifteen of the three hundred sonnets, he explained in a
letter to Sir George Beaumont, he found the poetry,

the most difficult to construe I ever met with, but just what you would
expect from such a man, shewing abundantly how conversant his soul
was with great things. There is a mistake in the world concerning the
Italian language; the poetry of Dante and Michael Angelo proves, that
if there be little majesty and strength in Italian verse, the fault is in the
authors, and not in the tongue . . . so much meaning has been put by
Michael Angelo into so little room, and that meaning sometimes so
excellent in itself, that I found the difficulty of translating him insur-
mountable. (Letters: Early Years 1:628)

In 1810, along with Coleridge, Wordsworth began translating

Gabriello Chiabrera (1552–1638), whose collected works in many
genre appeared in five volumes in 1782. Wordsworth chose to trans-
late ten of the epitaphs, a unique set of portraits or sketches, and pub-
lished six of them in The Friend. Although learned, classical, formal,
and in many ways worldly, in the epitaphs Chiabrera’s language was
colloquial, the verse unrhymed, and the speakers were either local
people with an intimate knowledge of the deceased or the dead them-
selves. The epitaphs depict the obscure and humble, a shepherd, a
soldier, a writer, Titus, “invincible” in “the rage of literary wars,”
Abrosio Salinero, whose life was taken up with “odious litigation,” and
a “racking malady,” Lelio Pavese, “darling of the fascinating Loves,”
and the rhythmically challenging Francesco Pozzobonnelli, who died
at age twenty while his father was in some “foreign” land, and for
whom the “eyes of all Savona streamed with tears.” In “Musings
Near Aquapendente,” a meditative verse Wordsworth included in the
Memorials of a Tour of Italy, he pauses at Savona, the secluded village
where “gentle Chiabrera,” “pure poetic Spirit,” spent much of his life,
and with whom Wordsworth finds an affinity so far from Grasmere.
Chiabrera’s verse, he says, might have come from “a plain English
heart”: “glory then to words, / Honour to word-preserving Arts, and
hail / Ye kindred local influences.” Chiabrera was the inspiration for
Wordsworth’s Essay on Epitaphs and, I believe, for the Pastor and his
improvisational elegies on obscure local figures in The Excursion.10

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 24 M a r ily n G au l l

Wordsworth and Dante

Wordsworth read Dante while still a student with Isola in the 1790s,
when there were no complete translations. Although he was a pres-
ence in painting, Dante was not popular or familiar in England until
Henry Cary’s translation of 1814, which Coleridge brought to public
attention. Wordsworth had acquired the Parma folio of 1799, “much
the grandest book on my shelves,” and in 1824, observes in a letter
to Walter Savage Landor, “It has become lately the fashion to extol
[Dante] above measure. I have not read him for many years; his style, I
used to think admirable for its conciseness and vigor, without abrupt-
ness; but I own that his fictions often strike me as offensively gro-
tesque and fantastic, and I felt the poem tedious from various causes.”
The “grotesque and fantastic” accounts for its popularity: it appealed
to the same taste as such sordid gothic tales as The Monk and Vathek,
and the grotesque in art, the epitome of everything Wordsworth said
in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads he objected to in contemporary cul-
ture: “For the human mind is capable of being excited without the
application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very
faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this,
and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above
another in proportion as he possesses the capability . . . to endeavour
to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in
which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged . . . especially so in the
present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are
now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating pow-
ers of mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it
to a state of almost savage torpor.” To Wordsworth, The Inferno was
another intense and inescapable example (more dangerous and sinis-
ter because Dante was such a powerful writer) of the sickly genres that
he believed had destroyed the sensibility of the nation.
The Inferno was offensive to Wordsworth for personal as well as
aesthetic reasons; it violated political principles and religious beliefs
on which he had built his life. His character, disposition, and even phi-
losophy had been shaped by the Quaker experiences in his childhood
in Hawkshead. Although he affiliated as an Anglican, he was raised
in a Quaker community in Colthouse, attended Quaker Meeting
with Dame Tyson, acquired the language of inner light, the belief in
divine leadings and individual conscience, pacifism, egalitarianism,
simplicity, forgiveness, charity, a commitment to the present, to com-
munity, plain speaking, truthfulness, and a protective mission that
extended to all living things—all of which he brought to his poetry,

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 W o r d s w o r t h ’s I t a l i a n E n c o u n t e r s 25

politics, and Anglican faith. His Quaker background prepared him

for the penal reforms initiated by Cesare Beccaria’s On Crime and
Punishment (1764), who advocated equality before the law, punish-
ments suited to the crime, presumed innocence, and imprisonment
as opposed to torture and corporal punishment—principles adopted
in the Napoleonic Codes, by Bentham, and ultimately all of Western
civilization (Gibson 82). With its unforgiving, brutal, and retributive
justice The Inferno was deeply offensive, the arbitrary sufferings, the
failure of personal responsibility and of sympathy. For example, in
Canto 32, a public favorite (that fades in translation) with Virgil as his
guide, Dante visits Antenora, he calls it, where traitors are buried in
ice up to their heads, impulsively inflicts more pain on these helpless
and suffering figures, and leaves them screaming in anguish, kicking
one in the head and pulling out the hair of another who refuses to
divulge his name.
Beyond his Quaker instincts, Wordsworth was an ecumenical and
religious poet believing that all poetry is a form of worship and that
pagans, such as the ancient Greeks, “suckled on a creed outworn,”
were exemplary—surely nothing could be more unjust than to pun-
ish those such as Virgil, who, born before Christ, did not believe in
him. Moreover, Wordsworth was a lover, as he often says, of all living
things, not a soldier, judge, or priest; his sympathy was with the suf-
fering lovers, those whose forbidden or merely unbridled passion, a
torment in life, became, for Dante, demonized, a just cause for eter-
nal damnation based on a religion that equated virtue with celibacy.
Politically, Wordsworth’s long life encompassed the most tumul-
tuous period in Western history. His political attitudes, values, and
expression were shaped and altered by his experience. Rather than
merely abandoning his youthful radicalism, his belief in revolutionary
ideals, Wordsworth stopped being a revolutionary because there was
no longer a revolution. The alternative: to become, like the Solitary
in The Excursion, indeed, like Dante himself, alienated and enraged.
When the French Revolution became a Reign of Terror and “domes-
tic carnage . . . filled the whole year / With feast days,” as he wrote in
The Prelude, he was haunted with “ghastly visions . . . of despair / And
tyranny, and implements of death,” such as, one might add, in The
Inferno. When Napoleon became an aggressor, a conqueror, and even
threatened to invade England, Wordsworth, a patriot first, shifted his
attention from revolution to liberty and order, as he entitled his series
of sonnets “Dedicated to Liberty and Order.” Among Napoleon’s vic-
tims was Venice itself, which Wordsworth lamented in 1802 as “the
eldest Child of Liberty.”

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 26 M a r ily n G au l l

Human violence, Wordsworth wrote, in a sonnet that could have

been addressed to Dante, even imagined, even for retribution, is not
a divine instrument: “Hath it not long been said the wrath of Man /
Works not the righteousness of God?” (see “Sonnets dedicated to
Liberty and Order”) So, his sonnets addressed to Italy, Venice,
Bologna, acknowledge great Italian history as a source of democratic
ideals and heroic action, “Fair land! . . . / awake / Mother of Heroes,
from thy death-like sleep.” In keeping with his character and his
experiences in France, he advised the fallen and broken city-states
of Italy to follow an evolutionary rather than the destructive revo-
lutionary process, “by no mere fit / Of sudden passions roused shall
men attain / True Freedom” (see Wordsworth’s three sonnets, At
Bologna, in Remembrance of the Late Insurrection, 1837).
Wordsworth first published the Memorials of a Tour of Italy, in
1842, in Poems Chiefly of Early and Late Years, a large and diverse
collection including several poems he had not yet published at all.
Some of them, I believe, respond not only to Dante and The Inferno,
but also to the theology embodied in the churches, paintings, mon-
asteries, religious retreats, and monuments that he saw in his 1837
Italian tour. He included the early unpublished Guilt and Sorrow
(1793–1794), originally called “Adventures on Salisbury Plain,” and
his drama, The Borderers (1796). These literally purgatorial poems
explore on a secular level the mysteries of evil, crimes committed out
of rationality gone wrong or impulse— “Action is transitory a step, a
blow, / The motion of a muscle, this way or that / ’Tis done, and in
the after-vacancy / We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed” (The
Borderers 3.i, 405–410; quoted after the Dedication of “The White
Doe of Rylstone,” in the 1836 edition). By publishing these poems
at this moment, after his last tour of Italy, he renews his faith in
them, as if a rebuke to Dante and his theology. “ The study of human
nature,” Wordsworth wrote in the introduction, “suggests this awful
truth, that, as in the trials to which life subjects us, sin and crime are
apt to start from their very opposite qualities, so there are no limits
to the hardening of the heart and the perversion of the understand-
ing to which they may carry their slaves” (Prose Works 1:69). And to
illustrate, he cites a man like “Orlando or Ariosto . . . a man of great
intellectual powers” that are “perverted,” his “energies” devoted to
“works of devastation,” “who lays waste to the groves that should
shelter him” (Prose Works 1:77)11—a mindless, impulsive, and blame-
less gesture Wordsworth himself recounts in “Nutting.”
Wordsworth admired Dante’s language. Dante was the “mighty
poet,” as he called him in the sonnet “To Florence,” with a “Patriot’s

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 W o r d s w o r t h ’s I t a l i a n E n c o u n t e r s 27

heart,” but he was revolted by Dante’s system and values, by the

exiled and alienated poet who wrote The Inferno, self-imprisoned in
his resentments and in the past, living out an unrewarding scenario
of revenge and retribution. Wordsworth’s beliefs, consistent through-
out his life, were the very antithesis of Dante’s. He was devoted to
the community of human life, the inner life, the sacredness of the
individual, the terrestrial “the very world that is the world / Of all
of us, the place in which, in the end, / We find our happiness or not
at all” (The Prelude, Book 10: 731–733). Dante was that opposition
that Blake considers “true friendship,” an opposition that affirmed
Wordsworth’s characteristic beliefs and practices.
Wordsworth appropriated, internalized and translated not only
Dante’s sacred spaces but also Milton’s and Virgil’s into the new sub-
jectivity of his age and into the more personal Quaker idiom of inner
light. At times, it sounded as if he were addressing them directly: “Not
Chaos, not the darkest pit of lowest Erebus, / Nor aught of blinder
vacancy, scooped out / By help of dreams—can breed such fear and
awe / As fall upon us often when we look / Into our Minds, into the
Mind of man— / My haunt and the main region of my song . . . ”12
But even as a countervoice, Dante was one of Wordsworth’s “ances-
tral voices.” Reading Dante next to Wordsworth reveals what is most
original in his poetry: his belief in the present, the terrestrial, the
existential self: “while we plough / This seas of life without a visible
shore, / Do neither promise ask, more grace implore / In what alone
is ours, the living Now.”13

Notes
1. All quotations from The Prelude are drawn from the 1805 version as
printed in Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill’s
1979 edition, listed in Works Cited.
2. See Draper’s “Cesare Beccaria’s Influence on English Discussions of
Punishment, 1764–1789.”
3. For further insights into these experiences of Wordsworth, see Wyatt,
Wordsworth’s Poems of Travel, 1819–1842, and Shackford’s still very
interesting 1923 article in PMLA, “Wordsworth’s Italy.”
4. See Sturrock, “Wordsworth’s Italian Teacher.”
5. For more on this topic, see Alan Hill’s “Wordsworth and the Two
Faces of Machiavelli” (1980), “Wordsworth and Italy” (1991), and
“The Triumph of Memory: Petrarch, Augustine, and Wordsworth’s
Ascent of Snowden” (2006).
6. In “Wordsworth’s Ariosto: Translation as Metatext and Misreading,”
Laura Bandiera attacks Wordsworth’s “surprisingly inadequate

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 28 M a r ily n G au l l

translation” “devoid of literary merits,” “disgusting licentiousness

that poisons Ariosto,” a “parody,” that “debases and belittles” the
text. Given Wordsworth’s repeated admiration for Ariosto, his tak-
ing it as the only text on his first journey over the Alps, using it to
teach his sister Italian, and given that the translation was a personal
exercise, never intended for publication or even for sharing, I don’t
understand this criticism.
7. On no evidence, Zuccato, in Petrarch in Romantic England, claims
Wordsworth “disliked” Petrarch (ix), accuses him of a “life long cam-
paign of erasure,” of being a “conservative opportunist” for dismiss-
ing “Petrarch the love poet” as “a rhetorician and a liar” (146).
8. See Wood, “Crying Game: Operatic Strains in Wordsworth’s Lyrical
Ballads” (2004) and “The Castrato’s Tale” The Wordsworth Circle
38 (2008): 74–79, which was later revised as Chapter 3 in Wood’s
Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840: Virtue and
Virtuosity (2010).
9. For more on Wordsworth’s translations from the Italian, see Kenneth
Curry’s 1938 article, “Uncollected Translations of Michael Angelo
by Wordsworth and Southey.”
10. See Mortimer, “Wordsworth as Translator from Italian.”
11. In a chapter called “Wordsworth, Dante, and British Romantic
Identity,” Luzzi proposes that Wordsworth’s Prelude is shaped by the
Divine Comedy, his “persona” closest to “the spirit and scope of Dante”
and that the revisions after 1837, his tour, reflect his recognition of his
affinity with Dante, which apparently improved his poetry. Illustrating
Wordsworth’s defects as a poet and as a human being, Luzzi analyzes
“Tintern Abbey,” which begins, he says, in a “ponderous disjunctive
manner” in a “sluggish and opaque” narrative voice which has “con-
founded and even infuriated its audiences for some time now” (no
citations are offered to verify this claim). He attacks “Michael” for its
“communitarian” ideal, which, he claims, accounts for his aversion to
Dante’s “radical politics.” In passing, he accuses Wordsworth of invok-
ing religion for “sociopolitical” reasons, essentially of being a hypo-
crite. Luzzi’s reading of Wordsworth, like Bandiera’s and Zuccatto’s,
cited above, illustrates the odd judgments contemporary Italian critics
bring to Wordsworth, for which I can find no explanation.
12. This passage was written as the conclusion to Home at Grasmere,
1799, and published as the Prospectus to The Excursion, 1814.
13. See Wordsworth’s Sonnet 10, Memorials of a Tour of Italy. He con-
tinues to serve the great tradition of Dante in England. In 2007, in
Grasmere, in the English Lake District where he spent his life, in the
museum attached to Dove Cottage, where he wrote his most original
poetry, The Wordsworth Trust mounted an award-winning exhibit
and published a magnificent catalogue called Dante Rediscovered:
From Blake to Rodin.

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 C h a p t e r Two

Si t t i ng i n Da n t e’s Th ron e:
Wor ds wort h a n d Ita l i a n
Nat iona l ism
Bruce Graver

W illiam Wordsworth visited the city of Florence just once, dur-

ing a hot week in late May and early June, 1837. It was not the
happiest of visits. He quarreled with his travel companion, Henry
Crabb Robinson,1 fell asleep in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, oblivious
to the attractions of the Venus de Medici and the snickers of other
English visitors, 2 and repeatedly said that his tour of Italy had come
“too late.”3 Robinson’s visit was not much better: besides the heat
and the quarrel, he had to listen to lengthy accounts of domes-
tic violence from Savage Landor’s estranged wife, who wanted to
enlist him to negotiate a marriage settlement for her daughter—not
exactly a holiday pastime (Robinson on Books 2:523). But there was
one incident that, according to both men, made the stay worth-
while, and generated one of Wordsworth’s most curious sonnets.
Just outside the cathedral, opposite the south transept, was a large
marble stone, called “il Sasso di Dante;” according to local legend,
it was the place where Dante, before his exile, loved to sit.4 And
Robinson induced Wordsworth to try it out: “I remember the plea-
sure he expressed,” Robinson recalled, “when I said to him ‘You
are now seated in Dante’s chair’ ” (Jackson 806). Wordsworth’s

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 30 B r uc e G r av e r

account, preserved in poem xvi of his Memorials of a Tour in Italy,

1837, is somewhat different.

At Florence
Under the shadow of a stately Pile,
The dome of Florence, pensive and alone,
Nor giving heed to aught that passed the while,
I stood, and gazed upon a marble stone,
The laurelled Dante’s favourite seat. A throne,
In just esteem, it rivals, though no style
Be there of decoration to beguile
The mind, depressed by thought of greatness flown.
As a true man, who long had served the lyre,
I gazed with earnestness, and dared no more.
But in his breast the mighty Poet bore
A Patriot’s heart, warm with undying fire.
Bold with the thought, in reverence I sate down,
And, for a moment, filled that empty Throne.5

For Robinson, sitting in the “Sasso” is a kind of tourist stunt, some-

thing he seems to have lured Wordsworth into doing, just to check
out his reaction. But in the sonnet, Wordsworth—at his most ego-
tistically sublime, or perhaps just having a daffodil moment—repre-
sents himself as solitary, “pensive,” contemplating his poetic heritage
for an undetermined length of time (maybe a full half hour?), and
then, “Bold with the thought,” he takes his place “for a moment”
as Dante’s heir and successor. It is as if Wordsworth’s face had been
Photoshopped onto the Botticelli portrait of Dante, keeping the lau-
rel wreath fully intact.6
Wordsworth makes clear what spurred his presumptuous-
ness: Dante’s patriotism. In 1837, that can only mean one thing:
Wordsworth is claiming Dante’s role as poetic advocate for a united
Italy.7 In 1830, when Robinson took up an extended residence in
Italy, hopes for the reunification of the country were high, especially
when Louis-Philippe of France expressed support for the nationalists,
and promised military aid against the Austrians, if they attempted
to intervene.8 “The desire to see Italy united was the fond wish of
most Italian politicians,” Robinson reported (Diary 2:507); he him-
self spent most of his time reading about and discussing Italian poli-
tics, and successful revolts in several northern Italian cities, including
Bologna and Urbino, made a united Italy seem more than a poetic
dream. But matters changed dramatically in spring of 1831, when
Metternich lowered the boom, Louis-Philippe reneged on his

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 S i t t i n g i n D a n t e ’s T h r o n e 31

promises, and Austrian troops brutally crushed the rebellions, exe-

cuting or imprisoning their leaders. Not until the revolutions of 1848
would the nationalist movement regain its footing.
In the space, then, between the failed rebellions of 1830 and
the Risorgimento that was yet to be, Wordsworth inserts his voice.
Sometimes the voice is prophetic, almost Miltonic, as when he apos-
trophizes Italy in “From the Alban Hills, Looking towards Rome.”
“Fallen Power,”

Thy fortunes, twice exalted, might provoke

Verse to glad notes prophetic of the hour
When thou, uprisen, shalt break thy double yoke,
And enter, with prompt aid from the Most High,
On the third stage of thy great destiny. (ll. 9–14)

A similar apostrophe, this one more reminiscent of the Shelley of

“West Wind,” closes poem xxiv, “After Leaving Italy.” “Italia!” he
writes,

on the surface of thy spirit . . .

Shall a few partial breezes only creep?—
Be its depths quickened; what thou dost inherit
Of the world’s hopes, dare to fulfill; awake
Mother of Heroes, from thy death-like sleep! (ll. 9, 11–14)

But more often the voice is cautionary, informed by Wordsworth’s

experience of the French Revolution, and deeply suspicious (in ways
that recall Burke) of violent change in the name of liberty. The three
sonnets At Bologna, in Remembrance of the Late Insurrections, 1837
give fullest expression to this point of view. In the first, he asserts
that

by no mere fit
Of sudden passion roused shall men attain
True freedom where for ages they have lain
Bound in a dark abominable pit,
With life’s best sinews more and more unknit. (ll. 1–5)

The image is from Dante’s Inferno, cantos 21–22, of the Bolgia of the
grafters, whose punishment is to be immersed in boiling pitch, while
demons “unknit” their “sinews” with grappling hooks. Such an allu-
sion tells us a good deal about how Wordsworth read the Commedia.
To be in Dante’s hell is a moral and historical judgment, more than

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 32 B r uc e G r av e r

a theological one. The Italian people cannot be truly free, as long as

they wallow in moral and political corruption, and I don’t think the
reference to graft here is just accidental. Like his American friend
George Ticknor—the greatest American Dante scholar of his genera-
tion, whom Wordsworth had just run into in Rome—Wordsworth
reads the Commedia historically, in the context of the politics of four-
teenth-century Italy.9 In addition, the political conclusion he draws
is from Burke: a country without a strong native tradition of liberty
cannot simply be freed overnight by insurrection. So Wordsworth
counsels “gradual progress,” a reliance on “Fortitude,” “Patience,”
“Prudence,” and the “golden mean,”10 addressing the passionate
Italian reformers as a seasoned counselor and teacher, much in the
same way that Michel Beaupuy had taught and counseled Wordsworth
in 1792. Thus the third Bologna sonnet ends with a simile that
describes the consequences of too hasty reform, a simile that may also
allude, more obliquely, to Dante’s cantos on the grafters:

Alas! with most, who weigh futurity

Against time present, passion holds the scales:
Hence equal ignorance of both prevails,
And nations sink; or, struggling to be free,
Are doomed to flounder on, like wounded whales
Tossed on the bosom of a stormy sea. (ll. 9–14)

So, as one would expect, the Wordsworth in 1837 Italy is very differ-
ent from the Wordsworth in 1790 and 1792 France. It is not that he
opposes reform; far from it. As a liberal neighbor of his wrote in 1839,
“The poet on Italian politics is all we can desire . . . [he] spoke with
strong and deep feeling of the present state of Italy, and the crushing
despotism of Austria. . . . I cannot think Milton himself could have
talked more loftily. . . .” (Fletcher 244). But Wordsworth had become
skeptical of sudden rebellion, carried out in the heat of passion, hav-
ing seen its effects in France. Too much is lost, and genuine liberty is
seldom attained.
It is in this context that we need to understand the poems
about monastic life included in the 1837 Memorials: “The Cuckoo
at Laverna,” “At Vallombrosa,” three sonnets on the monas-
tery of Camaldoli, and the short lyric “On a Ruined Convent in
the Appenines.” La Verna, Camaldoli, and Vallombrosa, all in the
Tuscan Appenines, were standard stops for the British tourist, rec-
ommended in both Forsyth’s and Eustaces’s Italian tours; Robinson
himself had visited them during his Italian residence in 1829–1831.

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 S i t t i n g i n D a n t e ’s T h r o n e 33

But Wordsworth gives them an unusual amount of space in his

Memorials, especially when we consider that sites like St. Peter’s or
the Colosseum or the Florentine cathedral are barely mentioned.
As we all know, he had been writing about monasteries, ruined and
otherwise, all his life, and in The Tuft of Primroses went so far as to
compare his life in Grasmere to the monastic retreat of St. Basil.
But it is another passage written for The Tuft of Primroses and later
revised for The Prelude that is most relevant here: the account of his
visit to the Grand Chartreuse. There Wordsworth, startled at the
sight of soldiers just outside the monastery walls, “commissioned to
expel / the blameless inmates,” imagines that the voice of Nature
herself speaks in protest: “Let this one temple last, be this one spot
/ Of earth devoted to eternity.” And to her protest, his “heart”
responded: “Honour to the patriot’s zeal! / Glory and hope to new-
born Liberty! / . . . But . . . spare / These courts of mystery. . . . /

be the house redeemed

With its unworldly votaries, for the sake
Of conquest over sense, hourly achieved
Through faith and meditative reason. . . .
(Prelude [1850] 6: 425–426, 434–435, 441–442, 448, 450–451,
456–459)

Now there is no statement this direct in the 1837 Memorials, but by

giving the Tuscan monasteries so much attention, by investing them
with so much cultural value—the legacy of St. Francis at La Verna,
of Milton at Vallombrosa, and, although he neglects to mention it in
the sonnets, of the Florentine humanists, who held learned sympo-
sia at Camaldoli—and by placing them side by side with sonnets on
Italian liberty, Wordsworth is expressing the hope that the Italian
reformers will show greater wisdom than the French, or for that mat-
ter, the English, whose ruined monasteries were one of his favored
haunts. It is thus important to note that the “Ruined Convent in
the Appenines” was not actually in the Appenines at all: it was in
France, as the original manuscript of the poem reveals.11 Wordsworth
translates the ruin to an Italian setting to serve as a warning to his
intended audience to protect the life of contemplation and meditative
reason—a warning that, in the event, was not heeded.
But who, exactly, does Wordsworth intend this audience to be? Or
rather, how does he expect his political counsels to reach the people
who, in his own estimation, are in the best position to act upon them?
To answer this question, it is necessary to give more attention to the

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 34 B r uc e G r av e r

liberal neighbor, referred to above, who so approved of Wordsworth’s

opinions on Italian politics: Mrs. Eliza Dawson Fletcher. Eliza
Fletcher, widow of a prominent Edinburgh lawyer and liberal Whig,
first met the Wordsworths in the summer of 1833 when she rented
Thorney How, in the Easedale valley just outside of Grasmere and
a short walk from Allan Bank, where her friends the Arnolds were
spending the summer (Fletcher 212–214). In her Edinburgh days,
Fletcher and her husband frequently entertained Italian exiles, whose
nationalist sentiments she shared, and through them she met the his-
torian Sismondi, whose works she read and admired (Fletcher 165–
166). In 1840, she purchased Lancrigg, the farm adjoining Thorney
How, and remained intimate friends of the Wordsworths for the rest
of her life (Fletcher 246). In April 1837, while Wordsworth was on
his way to Rome, she met

a young Italian exile who at that time was a friendless stranger in

London. . . . He could not then speak English, and I very imperfect
French; but it was impossible not to be favourably impressed at once
by his truth and his sadness. He told me he was an exile, and with-
out endeavouring to excite my compassion, or dwelling at all on his
wrongs or his circumstances, by relating any particulars of his past
life, he said his present object was to obtain admission to some pub-
lic library, that he might give himself to literary work. He looked so
profoundly unhappy, and spoke so despondingly of the condition of
his country, and of the genius of Chatterton with such high admira-
tion, that I foolishly took it into my head, after he had left me, that he
meditated suicide. . . . (Fletcher 230)

This young Italian exile was Giuseppe Mazzini, who was not in fact
suicidal, but, having been recently released from a Parisian prison,
was looking for support for his “giovine Italia” movement. This was a
crucial moment in Mazzini’s career. As Maurizio Isabella explains, in
the 1830s, Mazzini needed the access to journals and reformist politi-
cal circles that a well-connected person like Fletcher could afford him.
He was convinced that earlier nationalist exiles, Foscolo in particular,
were too indebted to French political models, and that native mod-
els needed to be developed, based on native institutions. In addi-
tion, he needed to be able to make his case to the British people at
large, who had already been so supportive of the Italian nationalist
movement (Isabella 210–212, 214–215). Eliza Fletcher turned out
to be instrumental to his efforts: she wrote him letters of introduc-
tion and recommendation, both in Whig circles and in the circles of
Italian exiles living in Edinburgh (Fletcher 231–233). She remained

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 S i t t i n g i n D a n t e ’s T h r o n e 35

Mazzini’s friend, correspondent, and, we can assume, financial sup-

porter for the rest of her life.
Two years later, when Lancrigg unexpectedly came up for sale, Mrs.
Fletcher’s daughter Mary was in the Lake District visiting the Arnolds
and the Wordsworths. There she met the poet “with an Italian gentle-
man of the name of Miers.” Wordsworth asked him about Mazzini,
and heard a very high character of him in every respect. Mr. Miers
said that shortly before leaving Italy he had called on the mother of
Mazzini to ask her commands for her son. She was not well, but she
said, “Don’t tell Giuseppe that you found me ill, but tell him that not a
day of my life passes that I do not thank God for having given me such
a son.” Mr. Miers added that “it was worthy of a Spartan mother; but
what made it so valuable was, that it was uttered by a Christian one”
(Fletcher 243–244).12 Now this encounter, and these discussions, are
happening at the very time that Wordsworth is writing his Memorials
of a Tour in Italy, and beginning to conceive of them as a sequence of
poems. So although it is perhaps too restrictive to suggest that Mazzini
himself is Wordsworth’s target audience, the young Wordsworth to
the elder Wordsworth’s Beaupuy, it seems all but certain that the poet
had in mind the growing numbers of Italian political exiles in Britain,
men, like his teacher Agostino Isola, who had dreams of a united Italy,
and now had the hope and numbers and leadership and financial sup-
port to begin to bring it about. It would not surprise me at all to learn
that Wordsworth made a small contribution to the great cause.
But let us return to the moment that occasioned Wordsworth’s
sonnet “At Florence.” As Wordsworth was pausing before il Sasso di
Dante, and working up the energy to sit down in it, a cholera epi-
demic was sweeping the city of Naples. Wordsworth knew this: his
tour originally included Naples, Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the
magnificent ruins at Paestum. But word of cholera forced a change
of plans, and he and Robinson decided to head north instead, to
Florence and the Tuscan monasteries, and then north to the Italian
lakes and Venice.13 The cholera epidemic claimed many lives, and the
most notable among them was Italy’s greatest living poet, Giacomo
Leopardi.14 Did Wordsworth know this? Surely not while in Italy, but
almost certainly after his return to England, probably soon after land-
ing in Dover. For Robinson knew Leopardi personally, having met
and conversed with him during his stay in Florence in 1831 (Diary
2:507). Leopardi’s death left the throne of Dante, as Wordsworth
understood it, empty. When “for a moment” the English poet fills
that throne, it may be as a quiet tribute to the passing of the author
of “All’ Italia” and “Risorgimento.”

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 36 B r uc e G r av e r

Notes
1. Wordsworth gives particulars of his discomfort with Robinson’s hab-
its in a letter to Mary Wordsworth, dated July 17, 1837 (Letters of
Williams and Dorothy Wordsworth 425–427). Robinson, he writes,
“takes delight in loitering about towns, gossiping, and attending
reading-rooms, and going to coffee-houses; and at table d’hôtes, etc.,
gabbling German, or any other tongue, all which places and practices
are my abomination” (426).
2. Of his nap in the Tribuna, Wordsworth wrote: “It was very hot weather
during the week we stayed at Florence; and, having never been there
before, I went through much hard service, and I am not, therefore,
ashamed to confess, I fell asleep before this picture [Raphel’s “John the
Baptist”], and sitting with my back towards the Venus de Medicis.”
3. See Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth, Poet-
Laureate, D. C. L. 2:232.
4. Wordsworth himself was more than a little skeptical about this legend.
In the notes dictated to Isabella Fenwick, he remarked: “Upon what
evidence the belief rests, that this stone was a favourite seat of Dante,
I do not know; but a man would little consult his own interest as a
traveller, if he should busy himself with doubts as to the fact” (Jackson
807). There is now a restaurant of the same name at the site of the
stone seat.
5. All quotations from the Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837, are from
Wordsworth’s Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed.
Geoffrey Jackson.
6. In fact, Dr. John Davy (Sir Humphry’s brother and the attendant phy-
sician during Wordsworth’s last illness) thought Wordsworth closely
resembled the known portraits of Dante. Davy’s wife, Margaret
Fletcher Davy, concurred: “I thought if the laurel wreath had been
there, it would have been nearly the same face as that which we see
in the portraits considered authentic of that poet [Dante] of an older
time” (quoted in Rice 38).
7. This view of Dante as advocating Italian unification was promoted in
England in the writings of two prominent Italian exiles: Ugo Foscolo
and Gabriele Rossetti. For a discussion of their role in reviving British
interest in Dante, and their political readings of the Commedia, see
Maurizio Isabella’s Risorgimento in Exile (204–206).
8. Robinson’s account of the political events of 1830–1831 can be found
in his Diary (2:478 ff).
9. Ticknor’s unpublished three-volume commentary on the Commedia
survives in the Ticknor Collection at Dartmouth College. At the
time of Wordsworth’s Italian tour, the Ticknors were also in Italy;
Wordsworth met them briefly just before leaving Rome, met up with
them again in the northern Italian lakes, and traveled with them to
Venice and Germany.

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 S i t t i n g i n D a n t e ’s T h r o n e 37

10. “Fortitude” is mentioned in the first sonnet of the three, l. 13;

“Patience” and “Prudence” are mentioned in the second, ll. 2, 13;
“the golden mean” is also from the second sonnet, l. 8.
11. See Jackson’s notes to Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 781, 807.
Unfortunately, Jackson does not give a photograph or transcription of
the manuscript version; it must be reconstructed from his apparatus.
In the Fenwick Note to this poem, quoted by Jackson, Wordsworth
comments: “The Political Revolutions of our time have multiplied on
the Continent objects that unavoidably call forth reflections such as
are expressed in these verses. . . .” (802).
12. Isabella notes that much of Mazzini’s success with British radicals
was due to “the intense religious dimension of [his] message” (211).
13. Wordsworth first voice fears about the cholera epidemic in a letter
to his family, dated April 27 or 28, 1837 (Letters of Williams and
Dorothy Wordsworth 394). By May 6, he had given up hope of visiting
Naples, “on account of the Quarantine” (ibid. 398).
14. The standard account in English of Leopardi’s death can be found in
Origo (251–255).

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 Chapter Three

B y ron Be t w e e n
A r iosto a n d Ta sso
Nicholas Halmi

“I think I can explain myself,” wrote Byron in Don Juan, “with-

out / That sad inexplicable beast of prey— / That Sphinx, whose
words would ever be a doubt” (9.50).1 I too hope not to need the
Sphinx, but I shall not be able to explain myself without elaborat-
ing on the implied promise to situate Byron between Ariosto and
Tasso—and not merely alphabetically. The question to be addressed
here is this: in what relation does Don Juan, as a poetic project,
stand to Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, “A new creation with [its] magic
line,” and to Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, “unsurpass’d in modern
song” (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 4.40, 39)? The question is worth
asking less for the specific reasons that Byron repeatedly links the
two poets and in Don Juan adopts their stanzaic form, ottava rima,
than for the general reason that none of the three poems conforms
fully or uncontestedly to the traditional conventions of the genre
with which each asks primarily to be identified, heroic poetry, or
epic. But for reasons to be considered, the answer cannot be formu-
lated adequately in the expected terms of personal affinity or literary
influence.
Byron’s devotion to the Ferrarese poets is clear enough. The cata-
logue of books he sold at auction in 1816, before leaving England
permanently, lists no fewer than two editions of the Furioso and
four of the Liberata, as well as John Hoole’s translation of the latter

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 40 Nichol as H a l mi

and John Black’s Life of Tasso.2 The epigraph to the fourth canto
of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818) applies to Byron himself a
quotation from one of Ariosto’s minor poems: “Visto ho Toscana,
Lombardia, Romagna, / Quel Monte che divide, e quel che serra
/ Italia, e un mare e l’ altro, che la bagna” (“I’ve seen Tuscany,
Lombardy, Romagna, / That mountain which divides, and that
which splits / Italy, and the one sea and the other which bathe it”)
(Ariosto, Satira 3.57–60). Not without justice might Byron claim in
Childe Harold, “I’ve taught me other tongues, and in strange eyes /
Have made me not a stranger” (4.8). Yet there was nothing strange
about his admiration of “the bard of Chivalry”: the latter half of
the eighteenth century saw a revival of interest in Ariosto and other
Italian poets, stimulated by Giuseppe Baretti’s Dissertation upon the
Italian Poetry (1753), and the publication of new translations of the
Furioso by William Huggins (1755) and John Hoole (1783). Among
Byron’s contemporaries, Robert Southey read Hoole’s translation
with delight while still a child (Brand, Italy 74–75); Wordsworth,
who studied Italian at Cambridge, was sufficiently interested in the
Furioso to take a pocket edition of it on his Alpine walking tour of
1790 and to translate two cantos from it in 1802 (Wu 7 [note 13];
Wordsworth, Poems 594–597); and Coleridge, who began reading
Ariosto in Malta in 1805, praised him for the flexibility of his lan-
guage in treating all manner of subjects gracefully (Lectures 1:291,
2:482). Where Byron differed specifically from Wordsworth and
Coleridge was not in his appreciation of Ariosto’s poetic skill, but in
his conviction of the suitability of ottava rima to English verse. (In
1846 Wordsworth advised a translator of the Liberata against try-
ing to preserve Ariosto’s rhyme scheme because “the unfavourable
nature of the English language for finding rhymes would render this
difficult, if not impossible” (Robertson x).) This is a point to which
I shall return after considering Byron’s more complex engagement
with the author of the Liberata.
Traveling from Venice to Rome in the spring of 1817, Byron made
a detour to Ferrara to see Ariosto’s tomb and Tasso’s asylum cell
(Byron’s Letters and Journals 5:217). This visit gave him occasion to
rebuke the city for having treated its two most distinguished poets
illiberally and to vindicate their poetic achievement in the face of the
adversity that both had endured. Black’s Life entertained the pos-
sibility that Tasso had been confined for having offended his patron,
Alfonso II d’Este—though not, as legend had it, for having fallen in
love with the duke’s sister Leonora (2:78–92)—but Byron chose to
present the poet unequivocally as the victim of a tyrant’s persecution.

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 By ron Bet w een A r iosto a nd Tasso 41

The fulfillment of the prophecy that Byron assigns to the imprisoned

poet in “The Lament of Tasso” (1817),

I shall make
A future temple of my present cell,
Which nations yet shall visit for my sake.
While thou, Ferrara! when no longer dwell
The ducal chiefs within thee, shall fall down,
And crumbling piecemeal view thy hearthless halls,
A poet’s wreath shall be thy only crown,
A poet’s dungeon thy most far renown,
While strangers wonder o’er thy unpeopled walls! (ll. 219–227)

is confirmed in the apostrophe to Ferrara in Childe Harold, which

incorporates from the prefatory note to “The Lament” Byron’s obser-
vation of the city’s decayed and depopulated state:

Ferrara! in thy wide and grass-grown streets,

Whose symmetry was not for solitude,
There seems as ’twere a curse upon the seats
Of former sovereigns, and the antique brood
Of Este, which for many an age made good
Its strength within thy walls, and was of yore
Patron or tyrant. . . .
And Tasso is their glory and their shame.
Hark to his strain! and then survey his cell!
And see how dearly earn’d Torquato’s fame,
And where Alfonso bade his poet dwell:
The miserable despot could not quell
The insulted mind he sought to quench, and blend
With the surrounding maniacs, in the hell
Where he had plung’d it. Glory without end
Scatter’d the clouds away—and on that name attend
The tears and praises of all time. . . . (4.35–37)

Projecting into the past a ventriloquized prophecy that he ful-

fills in his present pilgrimage to Ferrara, Byron implicitly not only
identifies himself with Tasso but, in a sense, becomes the poet’s
liberator, affirming his place in a cosmopolitan literary culture. Yet
he was hardly alone in such identification, for the popular legend
of Tasso’s suffering—imprisoned for love, slandered by his enemies,
censored by the Inquisition—was powerfully attractive in the eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries, conforming as it did to the

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 42 Nichol as H a l mi

conception of the artist as a solitary genius at odds with conventional

society. Rousseau, who claimed that Tasso had “predicted” his own
maleurs, drafted a ballet (now lost) on Tasso’s purported love for
Leonora (294 and n. 9). Goethe, who recognized parallels between
courtly life in sixteenth-century Ferrara and that in eighteenth-cen-
tury Weimar (Gedenkausgabe 24:635 [to J. P. Eckermann, May 6,
1827]), composed a drama on Tasso with the declared aim “of fill-
ing [his] mind with the character and fate of this poet” (19:110 [to
Duke Karl August, March 28, 1788])—who consequently appears
as a more ambivalent figure than Byron’s Tasso, the victim as much
of his own solipsistic imagination and unrestrained feeling as of oth-
ers’ mistreatment (Burwick, Poetic Madness 106–108, 123–124).3
Commenting in 1834 on Goethe’s drama, from which she translated
extracts, Felicia Hemans regretted that Tasso had been depicted as a
relatively weak character (“Scenes and Passages from Goethe” 612):
the subject of her own poem “Tasso’s Coronation” (1828), an awk-
ward combination of triumphalism and pathos, had been the belated
public recognition of his poetic powers. Had Shelley completed his
planned tragedy on Tasso, the protagonist would likely have been, to
judge from the two existing fragments (Cameron and Reiman 6:590–
592, 851–865), closer in character to Byron’s, still vigorous in mind
though oppressed by his imprisonment.
Brief as it is, the foregoing survey indicates that Byron’s interest in
Tasso’s life, or more precisely in a popular, romanticized interpreta-
tion of that life, was more characteristic of its time than distinctive
to Byron himself. He is not even the only poet for whom the self-
identificatory treatment of the figure of Tasso signals an intellectual
turning point and confirms a sense of poetic vocation (cf. Cameron
and Reiman 7:222–223), for Goethe’s Torquato Tasso, begun before
and finished (in substantially altered form) after his Italian sojourn of
1786–1788, is arguably “in many ways the axis round which his entire
literary career revolves” (Boyle 1:607). Yet neither Byron’s “Lament”
nor Goethe’s drama is especially concerned with the Liberata itself:
it is the conflictual environment in which that poem was composed
that provides the thematic medium for artistic self-reflection. The
particular interest of “The Lament,” for its part, consists not in how
it figures Byron’s relation to Tasso but in its presentation of a specific
place as the focus for historical meditation (Cheeke 94–95), a strategy
repeated throughout the fourth canto of Childe Harold.
In 1819 Byron returned to the subject of the posthumous vin-
dication of the Ferrarese poets. Like “The Lament of Tasso,” The
Prophecy of Dante takes the form of a proleptic soliloquy. Having

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 By ron Bet w een A r iosto a nd Tasso 43

Dante rate Ariosto and Tasso “greater still than” Petrarch (3.107),
Byron implicitly privileges the epic tradition, but without thereby
clarifying his own relation to it:

he [Tasso] and his compeer,

The Bard of Chivalry, will both consume
In penury and pain too many a year,
And, dying in despondency, bequeath
To the kind world, which scarce will yield a tear,
A heritage enriching all who breathe
With the wealth of a genuine poet’s soul,
And to their country a redoubled wreath,
Unmatch’d by time. . . . (3.149–157)

This is a generous but generalized tribute, leaving unspecified the

nature of the two poets’ respective bequests to posterity, let alone
more narrowly to Byron himself—for evidently Dante’s prophetic
gifts did not extend so far forward in time. If Ariosto and Tasso
are the legitimate successors of Dante, in what sense is Byron their
successor?
Framing that question in terms of influence will not get us far,
regardless of whether we have an affective or an idealist conception
of influence. Affective criticism, which assesses writers’ originality in
the context of their engagement with prior literature, derives from
the identification of influence with formal and stylistic imitation,
both of which had been recommended since antiquity as essential
components of a literary apprenticeship. Bryon himself had little
patience for questions of influence or indebtedness in this sense, and
he responded dismissively to Lady Blessington, for example, when
she broached the topic in conversation: “To be perfectly original,” he
is reported to have said, “one should think much and read little, and
this is impossible, as one must have read much more before one learns
to think. . . . But after one has laid in a tolerable stock of materials for
thinking, I should think the best plan would be to give the mind time
to digest it, and then turn it all well over by thought and reflection
by which we make the knowledge acquired our own” (Blessington
364–365). Like the individual ingredients of a stew cooked for hours
over low heat, the books one has read should be rendered unidentifi-
able by the process of reflection on them, the resultant concoction
exceeding the sum of its original parts.
To be sure, Byron’s insistence on the necessity of assimilating
knowledge might seem more compelling, and less defensive, if it
were realized more fully his own poetry. In contrast to Paradise Lost,

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 44 Nichol as H a l mi

whose overt allusiveness is almost inversely proportional to its perva-

sive learning, Don Juan is constantly advertising its literary contexts
and intertexts:

My poem’s epic, and is meant to be

Divided in twelve books; each book containing,
With love, and war, a heavy gale at sea,
A list of ships, and captains, and kings reigning,
New characters; the episodes are three:
A panorama of view of hell’s in training,
After the style of Virgil and of Homer,
So that my name of Epic’s no misnomer. (1.200)
.... ... ....
And if Pedrillo’s fate should shocking be,
Remember Ugolino condescends
To eat the head of his arch-enemy
The moment after he politely ends
His tale. . . . (2.83)

Confronted with such instances, one is tempted to extend to Byron

the criticism that a reviewer in the New Yorker once made of the film-
maker Peter Greenway: “He chews with his mouth open—we can iden-
tify almost every piece of art that has fed his imagination” (Rafferty).
This is the very opposite of assimilative, digestive reading.
But Byron is not, in fact, like Greenaway, whose allusions betray
an anxious desire to be taken seriously as an artist. The very stagi-
ness of Byron’s mock-identification with older poets, no less than
the vehemence of his rejection of the Lake poets, testifies to a fun-
damental dilemma that confronted him as an epic poet: while he
wanted to dissociate himself from contemporary English practitio-
ners of the genre, particularly Southey and Wordsworth, he could
not do so simply by claiming allegiance to epic tradition, for the
conventions belonging to that tradition were no longer adequate
to the distinctly modern conception of reality that impelled the
open-ended narrative of Don Juan.4 The instances of formal and
stylistic imitation or appropriation, as opposed to parody, that can
plausibly be attributed to him tend, therefore, to be localized and
independent of the overall project of the poem, with the obvious
exception of the stanzaic form. But ottava rima was used in much,
if not most, of the Italian narrative poetry Byron is known to have
read—by Boiardo, Francesco Berni, Luigi Pulci, and Giambattista
Casti, as well as by Ariosto and Tasso—and in the event his most
immediate stimulus to adopt the form came, as he acknowledged to

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 By ron Bet w een A r iosto a nd Tasso 45

John Murray (Byron’s Letters and Journals 5:267), from the mock
Arthurian epic, Prospectus and Specimen of an Intended National
Work (1817), by John Hookham Frere, pseudonymously known as
the brothers Whistlecraft. Frere’s poem convinced Byron that the
easy grace of the Italian stanza could be managed in English, per-
mitting him the “freedom,” meaning variety of tone and subject-
matter, that he admired in Ariosto, Pulci, Berni, and others (Byron’s
Letters and Journals 6:76–77). His appropriation of the form in
Don Juan was so thorough, in fact, that the archivist and histo-
rian Francis Cohen, writing to John Murray in 1819, regretted the
extent of his departure from Ariosto’s practice: “Lord B. should
have been grave & gay by turns. . . . And not grave & gay in the same
page, or in the same stanza, or in the same line.—If he had followed
Pulci more closely Ariosto more closely, he would have produced a
masterpiece & not a sport of fancy.”5
In Peter Vassallo’s comprehensive study of the influence of Italian
literature on Bryon’s poetry, Ariosto and Tasso receive far less atten-
tion than the eighteenth-century satirist Casti, whose Novelle galanti
Byron read in the summer of 1816, and Pulci, the sixteenth-century
“sire of the half-serious rhyme” (Don Juan 4.6), the first canto of
whose Morgante Byron translated in 1820. In addition, where the
Ferrarese poets are credited by Vassallo as the sources of incidents
in Don Juan, the differences from the originals are more striking
than the similarities. Although it is entirely plausible that for his ship-
wreck scene (Don Juan 2.23–110) Byron drew on Ariosto’s descrip-
tion of Ruggiero’s voyage from Marseilles to north Africa in Orlando
furioso (41.8–24), he also drew on contemporary accounts of ship-
wrecks, as was noted by reviewers—indeed a correspondent to The
Monthly Magazine accused him of outright plagiarism6 —and was
acknowledged by Byron himself in correspondence (Byron’s Letters
and Journals 8:186). If his purpose in including this episode, and
particularly its cannibalism, is to suggest that even the most powerful
taboos, let alone the tenets of conventional morality, prove dispens-
able when one’s survival is at stake, then the accepted factuality of
the nonliterary sources that he exploited, such as Sir John Dalyell’s
Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea (1812), is far more pertinent than are
any literary precedents. This point was not lost on Byron’s anony-
mous accuser in The Monthly Magazine: “The interest excited by the
well-imagined sufferings of the hapless crew in the vessel in which
Juan embarked, will not, I am sure, be at all diminished, but, on the
contrary, increased, by learning that the horrors of such a scene were
actually experienced by some of our fellow-creatures” (“Plagiarisms”

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 46 Nichol as H a l mi

19). As pure fiction, the cannibalism in Don Juan would be com-

pletely gratuitous, as it is in Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief.
Passing to cantos 5 and 9, we may certainly agree that the episodes
involving Gulbayez and Catherine the Great recall the seduction of
Ruggiero by Alcina in the Furioso (7.2–32) and of Rinaldo by Armida
in the Liberata (14.55–77). But in so far as both episodes in the Italian
epics are “allegorical representations of the triumph of the sensuous
over the rational” (Vassallo 95), the parallels with Byron collapse.
For whereas allegory assumes the existence of a coherent structure
of meaning existing outside the narrative and to which the narrative
is subordinate, Don Juan refers outside itself to historical facts and
human experiences rather than to structures of meaning. Moreover,
despite his qualified attraction to the supernatural in drama, Byron
did not follow his Ferrarese predecessors in allowing it into his epic:
the opulent grounds and palace through which the eunuch Baba
leads Juan and Johnson, from its “orange bowers, and jasmine, and
so forth” (5.40) to its “magnificent large hall” (5.51) and “glittering
galleries, and . . . marble floors” (5.85), are enchanting, perhaps, but
not enchanted. In contrast, Alcina and Armida do practice magic in
their respective gardens (Furioso 6.51–52, Liberata 10.66, 70), which
is why Ruggiero must be rescued from the one by means of a magic
ring (7.64–65) and Rinaldo from the other by means of a magic shield
(14.77). Byron’s naturalism, thus, distinguishes him fundamentally
from the romance epic tradition, as appears in greatest relief exactly
where his possible and probable appropriations from representatives
of that tradition are quite specific. His version of the “treacherous
earthly paradise” (Vassallo 96) is, precisely, earthly.7
Thus far I have been addressing the limits of affective criticism in
evaluating Byron’s relation to the Ferrarese poets, but his possible
allusion to both in the opening of the first canto of Don Juan opens
a broader perspective in which to view all three writers at once. In
the commentary to his edition of the poem, Jerome McGann notes
that Byron’s introduction of Juan as a hero faute de mieux—“I want
a hero: an uncommon want, / When every year and month sends
forth a new one”—recalls Orlando furioso 1.1–4, in which Ariosto
introduces Orlando and Ruggiero, and Gerusalemme liberata 1.36, in
which Tasso invokes the aid of Mente (memory) to recall the leaders
and companies of the crusading army. Since Ariosto’s passage itself
alludes to the opening of the Aeneid and Tasso’s to the invocation
preceding the catalogue of ships in Iliad 2.484–493, it is obvious
that both writers, and Byron in turn in alluding to them, are address-
ing themselves not only to the intended audiences of their poems but

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 By ron Bet w een A r iosto a nd Tasso 47

as it were to the conventions of the genre of which their poems are to

be members. The Furioso is not only a poem about “ladies, knights,
arms, and loves” (1.1), nor the Liberata only a poem about “pious
armies” (1.1), nor Don Juan only a poem about “fierce loves and
faithless wars” (7.8): each is also a contribution to the idea of some-
thing exceeding itself, heroic poetry in general.
This prompts the question of whether we might not make more
progress abandoning an affective for an idealist conception of influ-
ence, such as that implied in T. S. Eliot’s “ideal order” or Northrop
Frye’s “total form” of literature. Influence in this sense is not the
formal imitation of one writer by another, but form itself as the
expression of the participation by all literary works in the totality of
literature. The surrender of personality enjoined by Eliot on the poet
enables “dead poets, his ancestors,” to take possession of him and
“assert their immortality” through him (14): thus voided of personal-
ity, the poet becomes conscious of “not of what is dead, but of what
is already living” within him, namely the tradition (22). The meta-
phor of spectral possession is all too apt, for despite Eliot’s concession
that new works modify the existing order “ever so slightly” (15), it
is evident from his emphasis on the completeness, self-containment,
and timelessness of that order that he conceives it not as an aggregate
of individual works but as something autonomous and antecedent:
“the historical sense compels a man to write . . . with a feeling that the
whole of literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole
of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and
composes a simultaneous order” (14). Since the creative process,
understood in these terms, consists not in the poet’s negotiation with
the tradition but in the tradition’s self-expression through the poet,
the idealist critic cannot, in fact, account for the historicity of generic
conventions.
This limitation becomes obvious in Frye’s Anatomy, which articu-
lates an idealist theory of literature without, as in Eliot’s “Tradition
and the Individual Talent,” the burden of a corresponding scheme of
aesthetic evaluation. Individual works can be comprehended as parts
of the totality of literature, Frye explains, because the totality can be
comprehended in individual works. Each work is, thus, a synecdoche
of literature itself: “We said that we could get a whole liberal educa-
tion by picking up one conventional poem, Lycidas for example, and
following its archetypes through literature. Thus the center of the
literary universe is whatever poem we happen to be reading. One step
further, and the poem appears as a microcosm of all literature, an
individual manifestation of the total order of words” (121). From this

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 48 Nichol as H a l mi

anagogical perspective, the individual work, itself reduced synecdoch-

ically to a symbol—by which term Frye means “any literary structure
that can be isolated for critical attention” (71)—is to be understood
as the finite and temporal manifestation of “a single infinite and eter-
nal verbal symbol” (121). In appropriating the word monad as a syn-
onym for symbol in this context, Frye implies a certain affinity with
the metaphysical claims of Leibniz’s Monadology: that the monads of
which the universe is composed are arranged according to a divinely
preestablished harmony and have no interaction with one another. As
in Eliot, the concept of the whole effectively annihilates the possibil-
ity of meaningfully comparing the parts.
We seem to have reached an impasse. But fortunately we are not
compelled to abandon our three epics to the crowded isolation of a
monadic literary universe, for Frye himself, ironically, insinuates a way
of rescuing them. In his sole reference to Don Juan in the Anatomy, he
remarks the poem’s resistance to literary decorum: “Tristram Shandy
and Don Juan illustrate very clearly the constant tendency to self-par-
ody in satiric rhetoric which prevents the process of writing itself from
becoming an oversimplified convention or ideal” (234). To be sure,
Frye proceeds to assimilate both Sterne and Byron to his “third phase
of satire,” but his observation is sufficient to remind us that, whatever
their ontological status, conventions, genres, archetypes, and the like
are objects of consciousness, and as such can become the subjects of lit-
erature (in the older sense of subject as that about which judgments are
made, I hasten to add, as opposed to the modern philosophical sense as
that which makes judgments). Brian Wilkie’s perceptive consideration
of Don Juan from the perspective of genre consists to a large extent in
enumerating the variousness of Byron’s engagement with epic conven-
tions, from straightforward mockery, as in the abbreviated invocation
“Hail, Muse! et cetera” (3.1), to grimly ironic affirmation, as in the
boast with which he interrupts the narrative of the siege of Ismail:

Reader! I have kept my word,—at least so far

As the first Canto promised. You have now
Had sketches of love, tempest, travel, war—
All very accurate, you must allow,
And Epic, if plain truth should prove no bar;
For I have drawn much less with a long bow
Than my forerunners. . . . (8.138)

As I suggested above and have argued more fully elsewhere, Byron’s

simultaneous identification with and rejection of epic tradition was

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 By ron Bet w een A r iosto a nd Tasso 49

rooted in his recognition of a disparity between the historical con-

ditions of which that tradition is expressive and those of modern
European life as he experienced and observed it. While the attractions
of existing epics were too powerful, and Byron’s literary ambitions—
not least his desire to distinguish himself definitively from Southey
and Wordsworth—too great for him not to attempt make his own
claim to epic status, the anachronisms of the form were also too bla-
tant for him to ignore. Thus, one way his historical consciousness
manifests itself is in a literary self-consciousness. Recognizing what
might be called the situational analogies between Ferrarese poets and
Byron in this respect assists us in schematizing clearly the distinctive-
ness of the English poet’s contention with the formal conservatism of
the heroic genre.
In his lectures on aesthetics, Hegel suggestively attributed the
transformation of epic to the advent of modernity. The impingement
of Renaissance humanism on medieval culture, he explained, found
contrasting expressions in the Furioso and the Liberata: Ariosto
sought to preserve chivalric romance by ironizing it, Tasso to revive
classical epic by Christianizing it (15:411–412). This distinction is
too simple, inasmuch as Ariosto also classicized his episodic romance
by incorporating into it a Virgilian dynastic plot—the marriage of
Ruggiero and Bradamante as the foundation of the house of Este—
while Tasso also romanticized his historical narrative by including
in its centre a romantic excursus—the detainment of Rinaldo by
Armida. Yet Hegel’s basic insight is undeniable. Tasso, who disap-
proved of the Furioso but was acutely aware of its popularity, himself
allegorized Rinaldo’s subjection as the absence of rational govern-
ment over the irascible part of the soul (Quint 38); but in generic
terms the episode constitutes that which, while not to be wholly
excluded from epic—for romance and epic are not, he maintains,
different in kind (Discorsi 576)—must be prevented from dominat-
ing it. If romance is the sugar with which we rim a glass of bit-
ter medicine to make it more palatable (“porgiamo aspersi di soavi
licor gli orli del vaso,” Liberata 1.3), the medicine itself is a unified
narrative grounded in a Christian interpretation of history: “I con-
cluded,” Tasso states in his Discourses on the Heroic Poem (1594),
“that the subject of epic [l’argomento de l’epopeia] must be based on
some historical event [qualche istoria] or some truth” (Disorsi 566).
And truth, he elaborates, is fundamentally historical: “If poets are
imitators, it is fitting for them to be imitators of the truth [il vero],
because the false [il falso] does not exist, and what does not exist can-
not be imitated” (Discorsi 522).

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 50 Nichol as H a l mi

Appealing to a standard of truth external to the poem, Tasso seeks

to restrict the role of contingency within the poem to that of a devia-
tion from the norm. Romance, as the narrative of the irrational force
of erotic desire, is the formal expression of contingency: Rinaldo
must be freed from Armida’s powers before the conquest of Jerusalem
can succeed, just as Aeneas must abandon Dido before he can ful-
fill his destiny in Latium. This connection between contingency and
romance must have been evident to Ariosto, who in the Furioso fre-
quently attributes to the agency of Fortuna, the personification of
contingency, events that cannot be assimilated to a teleological nar-
rative of Providence:

Si vede per gli esempii, di chi piene

sono l’antiche e le moderne istorie,
che ’l ben va dietro al male, e ‘l male e bene,
e fin son l’lun de l’altro e biasmi e glorie;
e che fidarsi a l’uom non si conviene
in suo tresor, suo regno e sue vittorie,
né disperarsi per Fortuna avversa,
che sempre la sua ruota in giro versa. (45.4)
[AUTHOR’S TR ANSLATION: One sees from the examples that
ancient and modern history afford that good follows ill and ill, good,
that glory ends in misfortune and the other way round, that man had
better not trust in his wealth, his rule, or his triumphs, nor despair if
Fortune opposes, for she always keeps her wheel turning.]

To be sure, the Christian deus ex machina intervenes finally to

ensure that Orlando’s madness is cured and the Saracen army driven
from Paris, but such intervention, like that of God’s having made
Orlando invulnerable to any weapon (“ferro alcun non lo può mai
ferire”), is strictly “outside human custom” (“fuor de l’uman uso”)
(34.63). Orlando is safe from the swords of other men, but not from
the force of his own desire, and his madness is a divine punishment
for his becoming enamored of a pagan woman. Human custom, in
the Furioso, is characterized by irrationality and accidence: “Men and
women are frequently shown as weak, fragile creatures, incapable
of contriving their own happiness, subject to repeated misfortune
through their own passions or the perversity of forces beyond their
control” (Brand, Ludovico 121). When Astolfo travels to the moon
to recover Orlando’s wits (in an ampoule helpfully labeled thus), he
is—to paraphrase Ariosto closely—astonished also to discover the wits
of many others he had not realized lacked them, including himself.

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 By ron Bet w een A r iosto a nd Tasso 51

Some lost theirs in love, others in seeking honours, still others in

seeking wealth or the favor of princes: “Altri in amar lo perde, altri in
onori, / altri in cercar . . . richezze; / altri ne le speranze de’ signori”
(34.84–5).
It is not surprising, then, that Byron, who understood reality
to be contingently self-realizing rather than divinely ordained and
providentially guided, found the open-endedness and multiplicity of
romance plots congenial, and choose for his hero a figure less heroic
than romantic, the master neither of his own feelings nor of the forces
that determine the course of his life. At once flouting and professing
faithful adherence to every convention of classical heroic poetry, Byron
not only cheerfully confessed his lack of a plan to John Murray—“The
5th. is so far from being the last of D. J. that it is hardly the begin-
ning. . . . To how many cantos this may extend—I know not” (Byron’s
Letters and Journals 8:78)—but acknowledged it in the poem itself:
“I meant to make this poem very short, / But now I can’t tell where
it may not run” (15.22), he tells us, confirming his earlier assurance
“that I have nothing plann’d” (4.5). Contingency is thus an inherent
structural (I shall not say organizing) principle of the poem, permit-
ting Byron the encyclopedic expansiveness of the epic while freeing
him from the imperial ideology implicit in a teleological narrative.
Indeed narrative contingency can become the occasion for reflection
on the contingency of human life, as in Byron’s astonishing inter-
ruption of Juan’s story to report on the assassination of the military
commandant of Ravenna on December 8, 1820:

The other evening (’t was on Friday last)—

This is a fact and no poetic fable—
Just as my great coat was about me cast,
My hat and gloves still lying on the table,
I heard a shot—’t was eight o’clock scarce past—
And, running out as fast as I was able,
I found the military commandant
Stretch’d in the street, and able scarce to pant.
....
But it was all a mystery. Here we are,
And there we go:—but where? five bits of lead,
Or three, or two, or one, send very far!
And this blood, then, form’d but to be shed?
Can every element our elements mar?
And air—earth—water—fire live—and we dead?
We, whose minds comprehend all things? No more;
But let us to our story as before. (5.33, 39)

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 52 Nichol as H a l mi

As this very passage reminds us, however, if Don Juan has no tele-
ology, it does have an author, the contingency of whose own death
imposed on the poem the conclusion its narrative did not demand.
Perhaps mindful that Astolfo had noticed the wits of many poets on
the moon (“di poeti ancor ve n’era molto,” Furioso 34.85), Byron
was not prepared to concede the autonomy of the imagination: as
his description of Wordsworth as “crazed beyond all hope” by vir-
tue of his “long seclusion” from society implies (Don Juan 1.205,
Dedication 5), poetry is vitiated by a failure to acknowledge a real-
ity external and prior to itself: the reality of lived experience. Hence
his indignant defense of Don Juan to Douglas Kinnaird: “It may
be profligate—but is it not life, is not the thing?—Could any man
have written it—who has not lived in the world?” (Byron’s Letters and
Journals 6:232). For Byron as for Tasso, epic justifies its existence
by its foundation in and reference to history: the difference is that
for Byron history is an immanently self-caused succession of events,
which is to say that he accepts no agency outside history by which it
is itself organized. The contingency of epic narrative is demanded by
the contingency of the world.

Notes
1. All quotations of the poetry are from Byron’s The Complete Poetical
Works. Ed. Jerome McGann and Barry Weller. 7 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1980–1993). References to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
are by canto and stanza number (e.g., in this case 9.50), and all other
references are by line numbers (e.g., l. 5 or ll. 8–10).
2. See Byron’s Miscellaneous Prose 232, 236, and 242.
3. For more extended considerations of Tasso’s reception in the con-
text of the cult of artistic genius, see Brand, Torquato 205–225, and
Burwick, Poetic Madness 105–143.
4. See Halmi, “The Very Model of a Modern Epic Poem.”
5. Qtd. in Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History (34). As Stabler notes,
Cohen’s substitution of Ariosto’s name for Pulci’s is symptomatic of
the preference among English readers of the time for romance over sat-
ire, though Ariosto was widely regarded as a licentious writer (Brand,
Italy 87–89; and see, for an example, Coleridge, Lectures 2:95).
6. See “Plagiarisms of Lord Byron Detected.” The Monthly Magazine, or,
British Register 52.357 (August 1821): 19–22, and 52.358 (September
1821): 105–109.
7. Limitations of space and the complexity of the topic preclude me from
considering here another area of apparent similarity and underlying
difference between the Ferrarese poets: their concern with conflict
between the Christian West and the Muslim East. That conflict

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 By ron Bet w een A r iosto a nd Tasso 53

furnishes the historical substratum of the Furioso, the primary nar-

rative of the Liberata, and the occasion of the extended military epi-
sode in Don Juan. But Byron does not share with his predecessors the
need to affirm (however qualifiedly or problematically) the normative
assumption of the superiority of the Christians. On contrary, the siege
of Ismail reveals the moral bankruptcy of wars conducted in the name
of Christianity:
“So now, my lads, for Glory!”—Here he [General Suvorov] turned
And drilled away in the most classic Russian,
Until each high, heroic bosom burned
For cash and conquest, as if from a cushion
A Preacher had held forth (who nobly spurned
All earthly goods save tithes) and bade them push on
To slay the Pagans who resisted battering
The Armies of the Christian Empress Catherine. (7.64)
For a comparison of Tasso’s attempt to subordinate romance to epic to
“the Western mastery . . . of a feminized East,” see Quint 40.

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 Chapter Four

B y ron a n d A l f i e r i

Peter Cochran

The Deformed Transformed, Byron’s last play, would have, had

he completed it, shown a return to the commercial style in which
Manfred is written. For Manfred, despite all Byron’s avowals to the
contrary, is tailored with great precision for Drury Lane. It features
apparitions and demons. Its lead is designed for Edmund Kean, who,
first, specialized in angst-ridden parts, and second, didn’t like having
actors opposite him who might draw the audience’s attention from his
brilliance. No protagonist could be more angst-ridden than Manfred:
and neither the Chamoix Hunter, the Witch of the Alps, Arimanes,
nor the Abbot, has any lines or moments to upstage him. Astarte does
upstage him, but only for fifteen seconds. So when Byron writes to
Murray, “I composed it actually with a horror of the stage—& with a
view to render even the thought of it impracticable, knowing the zeal
of my friends, that I should try that for which I have an invincible
repugnance—viz—a representation.—”1 he is being disingenuous.
The scenic demands the play makes—Alpine heights, hellish depths,
castle towers—are precisely what the vast machinery of Drury Lane
was designed to cater for.
The Deformed Transformed is—or would have been—likewise tai-
lored for popular consumption. Like Manfred, it ignores the unities
of place and time. It has magical transformations, spectral appari-
tions, warfare on stage, attempted rape, “four coal-black horses,”
choruses . . . even, at one point, an ignis fatuus. But Byron was by
now writing into a critical void, and no-one—not Mary Shelley his
copyist, Murray his publisher, or even Kinnaird his theater-wise agent

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 56 Peter Cochran

(he’d see Marino Faliero three times)—had the wit to see what he was
doing with his dramatic talent. What he was doing was acknowledg-
ing that his period of creative allegiance to Vittorio Alfieri was at last
over.
A revealing reminiscence by Byron runs as follows:

Last night [August 11, 1819] I went to the representation of Alfieri’s

Mirra—the two last acts of which threw me into convulsions—I do
not mean by that word—a lady’s hysterics—but the agony of reluctant
tears—and the choking shudder which I do not often undergo for
fiction.—This is but the second time for anything under reality, the
first was on seeing Kean’s Sir Giles Overreach. (Byron’s Letters and
Journals 6:206)

He saw Mirra at Bologna in 1819. The actress who played the lead
was Maddalena Pelzet (1801–1854), among whose best roles were not
only Mirra but Silvio Pellico’s Francesca da Rimini. She was eighteen
when Byron collapsed while watching her acting.
The last two acts of Alfieri’s tragedy Mirra show a family in the
last stages of disintegration, despite the goodwill of everyone within
and without the family group, and despite everything that the fam-
ily itself tries to do to discover what’s happening, and to prevent it.
The tragedy is inevitable: there are no malign characters; everyone
loves everyone else, and the harder they try to express their love, the
closer the catastrophe approaches. The secret lies in the incestuous
love of the daughter for the father; but such is Alfieri’s control that
her love is never expressed, only implied, and she kills herself (with
her father’s dagger), before the situation forces a full confession from
her. It’s a triumph of art expressing maximum horror with maximum
correctness: a study in what Byron described as “What I seek to show
in ‘the Foscaris,’ ” i.e., “the suppressed passion, rather than the rant
of the present day.”2 His two Alfierian tragedies, Marino Faliero and
The Two Foscari, imitate Alfieri with increasing fidelity. Faliero’s great
curse upon Venice in the last scene is hardly an expression of sup-
pressed passion, but consider this, from The Foscari, after the death
of Jacopo:

Officer: Prince! I have done your bidding.

Doge: What command?
Officer: A melancholy one—to call the attendance
Of –
Doge: True—true—true: I crave your pardon, I
Begin to fail in apprehension, and

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 By ron a nd A l fier i 57

Wax very old—old almost as my years.

Till now I fought them off, but they begin
To overtake me.

Enter the deputation, consisting of six of the Signory and the Chief
of the Ten.

Noble men, your pleasure!

Chief of the Ten: In the first place, the Council doth condole
With the Doge on his late and private grief.
Doge: No more—no more of that. (Two Foscari, V.i, 4–14)

Francis Foscari is ruined, deposed, and his son has been, in effect,
tortured to death by the state of which he is still the head: but all he is
prepared to say is “No more—no more of that.” By contrast, Faliero
“lets it all hang out.”
Sardanapalus shows Byron losing faith in the Alfierian idiom.
Jokes are occasionally suggested; they are banned from Faliero and
The Foscari. Violent action is permitted. In the last scene, two people
burn themselves to death on stage—no messengers here. But the effect
is still relatively chaste, as may be seen in the contrast between the
scene in Act I between Sardanapalus and Salemenes and that between
Ventidius and Antony in the first act of Dryden’s All for Love.3 At
one point in All for Love Antony laughs—at another, Ventidius
weeps—finally, the men embrace. For All for Love is a professional
play, designed to be acted by actors and to awaken the audience’s
empathy and feelings. I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that there is
no laughter, no tears, and no physical affection expressed, in any play
by Byron—not even in Manfred or The Deformed Transformed. All is
noble, stoic restraint. Byron, trying to be as like Alfieri and as unlike
Shakespeare as possible, fails—or refuses—to draw the audience into
the action of the play, by employing a much smaller expressive palette,
and by allowing his characters a much narrower range of emotions.
There’s a much better portrayal of male bonding, (“homosociality”),
in All for Love than there could be in a classical play by Byron. Here,
the major (and sick) male bonding in The Deformed Transformed is
(“would have been”) a new development.
The motive for suppressing passion is the same as the motive for
“bamming and humming”4: self-disguise; but although Byron was
adept at “bamming and humming” himself, it is not until the figure
of The Stranger in The Deformed Transformed that he puts such a
seemer as himself on the center stage.

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 58 Peter Cochran

Drama has a necessary social dimension, without which it can’t

exist and still call itself drama. Closet drama is a contradiction in
terms. It’s like secret drinking—a sign that someone’s failed some-
where. The Greek playwrights, Shakespeare, and Molière, all had the
advantage of writing for professional companies to whom they could
tailor their work, and for audiences whose tastes they could educate
while exploiting—though Molière had difficulty, as we know, edu-
cating some of his audiences. Alfieri worked very hard at writing
tragedies—but he had no company in mind when he did so (despite
Byron’s experience at Bologna), and no theater; indeed, he didn’t
really write for the stage at all, and had little knowledge of writers
who had. He didn’t read Aeschylus, Euripides, or Sophocles until his
writing career was nearly over (Alfieri, Memoirs 281; from Manhood,
Chapter 24); and he tried to ignore Shakespeare, for he was terrified
of being influenced, not just by Shakespeare, but by anyone:

He who reads much before entering on the task of composition often

unconsciously borrows from others and thus destroys all originality.
This reason, therefore, induced me to give up in the preceding year
the perusal of Shakespeare, a circumstance which I regretted the less
because I was obliged to read him in French. In proportion as this
author, to whose faults I was not blind, pleased me, the more neces-
sary did I consider it to abstain from reading him. (Memoirs 170; from
Manhood, Chapter 20)

It is a Byronic smoke-screen, for of Racine and Corneille, Alfieri

makes no mention. The lightly annotated edition of Mirra that I am
using5 lists seven borrowings from Racine’s Phèdre.
Byron studied Alfieri’s plays with care, though we can’t tell from
which edition—none appears in any of the three sale catalogues. One
inspiration for Marino Faliero was Alfieri’s La congiura de’ Pazzi, an
account of the 1478 conspiracy against the Medicis in Florence, which
it fictionalizes as thoroughly as Byron does that of Faliero against
Venice. As in Schiller’s Fiesco, the start of the proposed insurrection
is signaled by the sound-effect of a bell tolling. Although Alfieri
described it as a “liberty-breathing” work, it depicts the attempted
coup, correctly in historical terms, as as much of a failure as Faliero’s,
and the supposed libertarian motives that are supposed to inspire it
are as compromised as those of Faliero.
From Alfieri’s Agide Byron derived the idea of a ruler pitting him-
self against the state that in theory he rules: Agide, King of Sparta
(the story is from Plutarch), wishes to abolish all debts, and divide the

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 By ron a nd A l fier i 59

Spartan lands equally! Naturally Sparta will not tolerate these ideas,
and Agide is given a partially rigged trial, and condemned. He kills
himself in prison. Agide is dedicated ironically to Charles I, from
whose selfish story, says the dramatist, no tragedy could be written.
Byron’s Faliero compares himself to Agide (“Agis”) at V iii 20–1.
Assuming that Faliero is a libertarian tragedy—a debatable point—
other tragedies of Alfieri from which a libertarian position can be
deduced are Bruto Primo, dedicated to George Washington and about
Lucius Junius Brutus and his sons; Bruto Secondo, which climaxes
in Caesar’s assassination, and ends with Brutus triumphant, thereby
showing how revolution can succeed in the short term; Filippo, about
the conflict between Philip II of Spain and his son Carlos—the story
more familiar these days in the versions by Schiller and Verdi; and
Antigone, which tells of the classic conflict between Oedipus’s daugh-
ter and her tyrant uncle.6
But in writing such things, not only does Alfieri observe the uni-
ties with great strictness, but his dramas are marked, not by orations
in Roman Forums, not by midnight assassinations in Scottish cas-
tles, not by plays put on by hysterical Danish princes before their
guilty uncles, but by “insistent, tense dialogues or . . . introspective,
self-questioning soliloquies” “in the confined and oppressive settings
of royal palaces” (Pizzamiglio 198–199). Like Byron’s classical plays,
they utilize about twenty percent of the theater’s resources.
Alfieri’s position in relation to performance was in theory
uncompromising, though he relaxed it in real life, and sometimes
played his own tragic heroes. His early tragedy Cleopatra was acted
in Turin on June 16, 1775, along with a farce of his called The
Poets: “These two pieces were played on two successive nights, and
with applause. But, repenting that I had so rashly appeared before
the public, though it was very indulgent, I used every effort with
the managers to prevent further performances” (Memoirs 150–151;
from “Youth,” Chapter 15).
If anyone did put on one of his plays, Alfieri found it an awkward
experience:

During my stay at Turin I happened, without any great desire to do

so, to be present at the performance of my Virginia. It was brought
out at the same theatre where nine years before my Cleopatra had been
acted, and by nearly as able performers. One of my old school friends
had prepared every thing for this performance before my arrival, which
was wholly unexpected. He, however, requested me to coach the actors
as I formerly had done for Cleopatra; but my powers and above all

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 60 Peter Cochran

my pride being now greater, I refused to lend my aid. I knew our

actors and our audiences only too well and I wished not to be in any
way implicated in the actors’ incapacity, which was evident to me even
before having heard them. I knew that it was necessary to start with
an impossibility, that of making them speak and pronounce Italian
instead of Venetian; to make it appear as if the parts were uttered by
them and not by the prompter; in short, that it would be necessary to
make them understand (to feel would be requiring too much) the sen-
sations they ought to excite in the minds of their auditors. (Memoirs
232; from “Manhood,” Chapter 13)

Part of his problem, as we can see, had to do with the absence

of any effective Italian theater, and of any good professional actors;
but another part was linguistic. Where the Greeks, Shakespeare, and
Molière wrote without problems in the language of their day, Alfieri
didn’t know what the language of his day was—or rather, he did
know it, and despised it. He was born in Turin, a city neither Italian
nor French, but Piedmontese. When, as a youth, he first picked up a
copy of Ariosto, he had great difficulty understanding it. He had to
teach himself literary Italian.
At Drury Lane, Byron had (or rather, would have had) no such
barriers. His English was the audience’s English, and he would have
had many actors (not just Kean) whose talent he admired:

The long complaints of the actual state of the drama arise, however,
from no fault of the performers. I can conceive nothing better than
Kemble, Cooke, and Kean, in their very different manners, or than
Elliston in gentleman’s comedy, and in some parts of tragedy. Miss
O’Neill I never saw, having made and kept a determination to see
nothing which should divide or disturb my recollection of Siddons.
Siddons and Kemble were the ideal of tragic action; I never saw any
thing at all resembling them even in person: for this reason, we shall
never see again Coriolanus or Macbeth. When Kean is blamed for
want of dignity, we should remember that it is a grace and not an art,
and not to be attained by study. In all, not SUPERnatural parts, he is
perfect; even his very defects belong, or seem to belong, to the parts
themselves, and appear truer to nature. But of Kemble we may say,
with reference to his acting, what the Cardinal de Retz said of the
Marquis of Montrose, “that he was the only man he ever saw who
reminded him of the heroes of Plutarch.” (Marino Faliero, Preface)

Part of the reason for Byron’s Alfierian period was that Alessandro
Guiccioli—with whose wife he was going to bed—told him that he
looked like Alfieri (“the likeness to Alfieri was asserted very seriously

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 By ron a nd A l fier i 61

by an Italian who had known him in his younger days,” Byron’s Letters
and Journals 9:11). But a greater reason was the horror he experienced
at the ideas either of success or of failure: “Were I capable of writing
a play which could be deemed stageworthy, success would give me no
pleasure and failure great pain” (Marino Faliero, Preface). This is the
strangest thing, even given his House of Lords hauteur, and even in
what he asserts is the present vitiated state of public taste—his horror
at “the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd.”7 If he ever
condescended to write a tragedy in a commercial style, and permit its
performance, he really would be afraid in case it succeeded.
Not even Alfieri ever said that.

Notes
1. Byron to Murray, March 9, 1817, in Byron’s Letters and Journals
5:183–185.
2. Byron to Murray, September 20, 1821: text from National Library
of Scotland Acc.12604 / 4160E; Byron’s Letters and Journals
8:216–218.
3. See Barry Weller’s note in Byron’s Complete Poetical Works 6:614.
4. That means, “bamboozling and humbugging.” See William St. Clair,
“Bamming and Humming,” Byron Journal 7 (1979): 38–47.
5. Alfieri, Opere I, Int. Mario Fubini and ed. Arnaldo di Benedetto.
6. For Byron and Alfieri, see also Pudbres, Lord Byron, the Admirer and
Imitator of Alfieri. I am aware of no other studies during the interven-
ing hundred and three years.
7. Byron may be paraphrasing Sir Fretful Plagiary: “ . . . for if there is
anything to one’s praise, it is a foolish vanity to be gratified at it; and,
if it is abuse—why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned
good-natured friend or other!” (see Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The
Critic, Act I).

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 Chapter Five

P ic t u r i ng B y ron’s Ita ly a n d
Ita l i a ns: Fi n den’s I l lust r at ions
t o B y ron’s L i f e a n d Wor k s
Paul Douglass

William and Edward Finden successfully marketed Lord Byron’s life

and literary works in sleek, well-illustrated packages, including Landscape
and Portrait Illustrations of the Life and Works of Lord Byron (3 vols.,
1833–1834), with a text by collaborator William Brockedon. The
Findens published around the same time their Landscape Illustrations
of the Bible (1836) and a periodical called The Oriental Annual, or
Scenes in India (1834–1840). The latter work promotes British chau-
vinistic attitudes to the Middle East, to southern Europe in general,
and to Italy in particular. Thus, it is unsurprising that Landscape and
Portrait Illustrations of the Life of Byron employs Byron as a vehicle to
promote an idea of Italy in which, as Joseph Luzzi has said, the reader
can imagine the country as a repository of a great civilization, one that
would be better-off without the inconvenience of contemporary Italians
themselves. Many writers, including Goethe, Staël, and Foscolo, but
also Shelley and Byron, participated “in constructing their common
European heritage” by creating this “Romantic” myth about Italy
(Luzzi 54), and my essay grapples with this charge against Byron. In
some ways his work was twisted by Finden and Brockedon, who elided
Byron’s strong engagement with the politics and daily life of Italy while
exaggerating the superfeminine aspects of his women protagonists. At
the same time, it must be conceded that Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

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 64 Pa u l D o u g l a s s

and other Byron works often contrast Italy’s fabled history with its
contemporary cultural malaise. Nonetheless, Finden’s and Brockedon’s
Landscape and Portrait Illustrations is an exploitative work that evacu-
ates most of Byron’s violence and energy, focusing upon Orientalized
females, ruins, and rustic scenes. The contemporary countryside and
city environs are depicted as “the culturally impoverished antithesis
of [their] own illustrious heritage,” as Luzzi says (54). In this, Finden
and Brockedon have done an injustice to the poet, who read and spoke
Italian well, and engaged the Risorgimento to the degree that he risked
his own life at times.
In all their collections, William and Edward Finden each contributed
some of the pictures, but commissioned most of them to other artists,
including some, like John Frederick Lewis and Miss Corbaux, whose
careers were shaped by the public appetite for Orientalist fantasies.
They had previously published Landscape Illustrations of the Waverley
Novels (1830) and would go on to engrave and print a two volume work
titled Tableaux of National Character, Beauty, and Costume (1843)
with specially commissioned tales, such as Leigh Hunt’s “Albania—
The Love Letter.” Landscapes in Finden’s and Brockedon’s Landscape
and Portrait Illustrations of the Life of Byron stand beside portraits
of real people from Byron’s life, like Teresa Guiccioli and Margarita
Cogni. More often, however, the pictures offer female characters from
Byron’s works, many of whom are drawn from Greek and Italian set-
tings. Images from Byron’s works published here were afterward aug-
mented by additional portraits printed in The Gallery of Byron Beauties
(1836), a strand of Orientalist fabric woven through many publica-
tions of the 1830s and 1840s in England. The portraits emphasize
exotic themes that had helped to make Byron’s early work, such as
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), popular. Included, for example is
an image of the “Maid of Athens” from lines first published in Childe
Harold. Finden also gives a portrait of Parisina, the young lady who
“walks in the shadow of night” in a poem the first verse of which
Byron had given to Isaac Nathan as part of their Hebrew Melodies proj-
ect in 1815–1816.1 Parisina listens breathlessly for the approaching
steps of her lover gliding “through the foliage thick, / And her cheek
grows pale—and her heart beats quick” (Complete Poetical Works
3:359). Brockedon’s description of her glosses over the violence of her
story, in which her husband Azo (based upon the Marquis d’ Este of
Ferrara) puts his bastard son to death for having had an incestuous
liaison with her, leaving her to go mad with the grief of erotomania. A
similar elision of specifics characterizes Finden and Brockedon’s entry
describing Theresa, from Mazeppa, a poem whose eponymous hero (a

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 P i c t u r i n g B y r o n ’s I t a l y a n d I t a l i a n s 65

young page) is brutally punished for engaging Theresa in “[f]rivolous

and foolish play,” after he has noticed her exotic mixed-race look: “[S]
he had the Asiatic eye, / Such as our Turkish neighbourhood / Hath
mingled with our Polish blood” (Complete Poetical Works 4:181, 180).
The theme of madness noted in “Parisina” is continued in the portray-
als of Leonora d’ Este, from “The Lament of Tasso” and Laura, from
Beppo: A Venetian Story, which focuses on the cavalier servente tradi-
tion. In a typical portrait, Finden produces a placid image of Beatrice,
drawn from Byron’s apostrophe to her in The Prophecy of Dante. The
feminine inspiration for Dante’s Vita Nuova sits immaculately coiffed
and garbed, with hands crossed over a book—not reading, but preoc-
cupied by tasteful thoughts.
These women’s images may seem tame, but their Orientalized
dress and postures were erotic to contemporary male readers, invit-
ing the male gaze, and positioning that gaze in a harem of imaginary
lovers—for example in the portrait of Dudú, drawn from Don Juan:
“A kind of sleepy Venus seemed Dudú . . . etc.” (6.42 ff.; Complete
Poetical Works 5:311). Dudú’s lips are bee-stung. Her bodice is care-
lessly buttoned, and her bosom strains against the fabric as she lies
on an embroidered pillow with eyes half-closed, drugged perhaps
by sensuous desire (or laudanum?), as she fingers a flower. Another
portrait also engages the harem theme, but even more bluntly. The
image stems from a passage in the second canto of Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage about Ali Pasha’s harem:

Here woman’s voice is never heard: apart,

And scarce permitted, guarded, veil’d, to move,
She yields to one her person and her heart,
Tam’d to her cage, nor feels a wish to rove:
For, not unhappy in her master’s love,
And joyful in a mother’s gentlest cares . . .
...
Herself more sweetly rears the babe she bears. . . .
(Childe Harold 2.61; Complete Poetical Works 2:63)

This image, published in The Gallery of Byron Beauties, is titled “The

Light of the Harem,” portraying (presumably) one of Ali Pasha’s
many wives with her baby. An exotic yet domestic image, engraved
by William Finden himself, it is accompanied by a quotation from
Edinburgh Review cofounder Lord Francis Jeffrey, who remarks
appreciatively that “Lord Byron has made a fine use of the gentleness
and submission of the Eastern females,” drawing out the essence of

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 66 Pa u l D o u g l a s s

“female nature in general,” which Jeffrey describes as “Oriental soft-

ness and acquiescence” (Byron Beauties n.p.).2
Byron did often eroticize female characters along conventional
lines, and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is replete with such fantasies.
Harold specifically desires “the maid in her youth,” whose “caresses
shall lull me, her music shall sooth” (Childe Harold 2.72 ff.; Complete
Poetical Works 2:67 ), and yet the women in Childe Harold whose
images Finden engraves appear more complicated and powerful than

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 P i c t u r i n g B y r o n ’s I t a l y a n d I t a l i a n s 67

the soft-focus portraits and carefully abridged texts allow. This is as

true of the Maid of Athens and Laura as it is of Astarte, the Maid
of Saragoza, and Jephtha’s Daughter. I have argued elsewhere that
Byron’s debt to female writers like Charlotte Dacre and Madame
Staël runs deep, and indicates a strong engagement with female
identity.3 His verse portrayals of women do contain misogynistic
attitudes sometimes echoed in his letters: “Of all Bitches dead or
alive a scribbling woman is the most canine,” he wrote just before
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was first published (Byron’s LJ 2:132).
Certainly Byron railed against the “gynocrasy” (Don Juan 12.66,
16.52; Complete Poetical Works 5:514, 635). But that word in itself
recognizes a power singularly absent from Finden and Brockedon’s
works.
A similar but more troubling problem arises with Finden and
Brockedon’s “landscape” pictures. These generally convey moods
of stasis, calm, and reverie—not those of the energy, dynamism,
tension, and even terror that actually cohere in the verse Byron
wrote about Italy and Italians, like Mazeppa, Beppo, Parisina, The
Two Foscari, and Marino Faliero. Scene after scene is rendered with
placid waters. Bellagio, a military and strategic center during the
Napoleonic campaigns—and a place not mentioned by name in
Byron’s works or correspondence—is depicted as a sleepy, distant
waterway plied by a few vessels, while in the foreground four female
figures and one male engage in conversation and make unhurried
progress toward a shore where nothing awaits but a formal gateway.
Similarly portrayed is Messolonghi, where the poet had a band of
five hundred Suliote soldiers under his command and where he died
supporting the Greek rebellion. The engraving focuses attention on
a vessel apparently leaving port (no dock or commercial structures
appear) while human figures stand in conversation, walk, or tend
a fire on the farther barren shore under the windows of a mas-
sive structure virtually devoid of life. The waters of Messolonghi
ripple, but no drama is implied thereby. The same can be said of
Finden’s engravings of Interlachen, The Hague, and Yanina, prov-
ince of Ali Pasha, that “man of war and woes” whose harem fasci-
nated the Findens, but whose portrayal does not convey how “fierce
are Albania’s children” (Childe Harold 2.62, 2.65; Complete Poetical
Works 2:63–64). Instead the image offers the now-familiar formu-
las: placid waters, a few vessels meandering thereon; an imposing
domed mosque or other structure; and in the foreground human
figures quaintly costumed, engaging in desultory conversation or
gazing at the scene themselves.

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 68 Pa u l D o u g l a s s

It will not escape the attention of the consumer of these land-

scape images that, like the women’s portraits, they seem drugged,
passive, inert, and are costumed in the raiments of a distant past. The
feminization and pacification of the Italian landscape is part of the
general association of Italy with “the feminine categories of caprice,
reverie, and weakness,” as Luzzi argues, categories that epitomize
“generalizations about Italy as a feminine, premodern, and sepulchral
space whose present cannot escape the burden of its past” (Luzzi 67,
76). Like his contemporaries, de Staël and Foscolo, Byron admittedly
imbibed this attitude. The fourth canto of Childe Harold, like Beppo,
feminizes Italy in a Findenesque manner.

Italia! oh Italia! thou who hast

The fatal gift of beauty, which became
A funeral dower of present woes and past,
On thy sweet brow is sorrow plough’d by shame,
And annals graved in characters of flame.
Oh, God! that thou wert in thy nakedness
Less lovely or more powerful, and couldst claim
Thy right, and awe the robbers back, who press
To shed thy blood, and drink the tears of thy distress. . . .
(Childe Harold 4.42; Complete Poetical Works 138)

The distress of “Italia” like that of Greece, stems from its permanent
state of ruin, a situation richly illustrated by the Findens’s engravings.
Byron furnishes all they and William Brockedon could have wished
on this theme, as he continues his apostrophe to Italy:

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 P i c t u r i n g B y r o n ’s I t a l y a n d I t a l i a n s 69

For Time hath not rebuilt them, but uprear’d

Barbaric dwellings on their shattered site,
Which only make more mourn’d and more endear’d
The few last rays of their far-scatter’d light,
And the crush’d relics of their vanish’d might.
The Roman saw these tombs in his own age,
These sepulchres of cities, which excite
Sad wonder, and his yet surviving page
The moral lesson bears, drawn from such pilgrimage.

The city as sepulcher is emblemized in the Findens’s engraving

of Dante’s Tomb (the tomb was constructed in 1780 from plans
by Camillo Morigia), a scene that evokes the solemnity of “relics
of . . . vanish’d might.” The vanishing point in the picture’s perspective
lies behind the tall doorway, framed itself by the walls of buildings as
they pour shadow on a caped figure who strides toward the tomb.

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 70 Pa u l D o u g l a s s

Reading the “sepulchres of cities” as a book, Byron adopts a cycli-

cal view of history:

That page is now before me, and on mine

His country’s ruin added to the mass
Of perish’d states he mourn’d in their decline,
And I in desolation: all that was
Of then destruction is; and now, alas!
Rome—Rome imperial, bows her to the storm,
In the same dust and blackness, and we pass
The skeleton of her Titanic form,
Wrecks of another world, whose ashes still are warm.

“The skeleton of her Titanic form,” echoes Shelley’s sentiments in

“Ozymandias,” yet Byron does not turn, as Shelley did, to the image
of a wasteland, but instead calls on Europeans and Britons to support
the Risorgimento:

Yet, Italy! through every other land

Thy wrongs should ring, and shall, from side to side;
Mother of Arts! as once of arms; thy hand
Was then our guardian, and is still our guide;
Parent of our Religion! whom the wide
Nations have knelt to for the keys of heaven!
Europe, repentant of her parricide,
Shall yet redeem thee, and, all backward driven,
Roll the barbarian tide, and sue to be forgiven.
(Childe Harold 4.45–47; Complete Poetical Works 139–140)

This last theme—still chauvinistic, to be sure, yet also a confession

of European “parricide”—is not included in Finden and Brockedon’s
comments, summary, and overview of Italy, nor communicated in
their texts and illustrations.
Byron’s life and works, though they provide plenty for Finden
and Brockedon to exploit, required warping to promote the view
of southern Europe and the East they embraced. Arrogant, supe-
rior, with intimations of condescension and ownership, the attitude
conveyed is of a tourist reviewing the remnants of his own cultural
past—someone who feels closer to the long-dead ancestors of the
lands he visits than to any contemporary population. This was not
Byron’s journey. Finden and Brockedon chose to include scenes
remotely if at all connected to “the life of Lord Byron” (as their
title promises), and they also often abandoned pretense of conveying

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 P i c t u r i n g B y r o n ’s I t a l y a n d I t a l i a n s 71

Byron’s sense of the scenes, people, and places he described in his

verse and letters.
For example, their third volume includes a rendering of the ruins of
the Ponte Rotto in Rome, another place Byron does not mention in his
works. The improvisation of Brockedon is peculiar: “This scene upon
the Tiber is one of antiquarian interest. The ruins are of the ancient
Palatine bridge; but there are vestiges of the piers of another, the Pons
Sublicius, a little lower down the river. . . .” Brockedon then describes
a song made up on the spot by an “enthusiastic Frenchman . . . and
chanted with great effect to one of the republican airs,” which cites
Brutus’s betrayal of Caesar as an immolation of the entire Italian race.
Brockedon then notes that the engraving includes an island, in the
distance, which “in the days of Roman splendour . . . was covered with
temples, and the ground built up, or cut away, until the island was
made to assume the form of a gigantic Roman galley.” But this titanic
achievement is, of course, now gone (Finden and Brockedon 3:n.p.).
Brockedon strains to include as much as he can of a barbaric, slavery-
inflected, larger-than-life Italian past, even when it isn’t represented
either in Byron’s works or in the engraving the text accompanies.
Similarly Brockedon seizes on Byron’s representation of Venice as a
text of an empire. Venice is rendered in several engravings in Finden’s
collection, including more than one scene in the Piazza San Marco,
the notes for which quote Byron describing Venice as having lost her

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 72 Pa u l D o u g l a s s

“thirteen hundred years of freedom” and sinking “like a sea-weed,

into whence it rose!”

In youth she was all glory,—a new Tyre,—

Her very by-word sprung from victory. . . .
Statues of glass—all shiver’d—the long file
Of her dead Doges are declined to dust;
But where they dwelt, the vast and sumptuous pile
Bespeaks the pageant of their splendid trust;
Their sceptre broken, and their sword in rust,
Have yielded to the stranger: empty halls,
Thin streets, and foreign aspects, such as must
Too oft remind her who and what enthrals,
Have flung a desolate cloud o’er Venice’s lovely walls.
(Childe Harold 4.14; Complete Poetical Works 2:129; printed also in
Finden and Brockedon 1:n.p.)

The commentary of Brockedon and Finden fixes the meaning of

this topos: “The Ducal Palace, in all the grandeur of its massiveness,
and all the topsy-turvy of its architectural character,” furnishes the
observer with the impression of “a vast incumbent structure upon an
apparently very inadequate support. . . . ” Contrast between contem-
porary weakness and massive antiquity is emblemized for Brockedon
in the fact that, upon one of the columns is set “the bronze winged
lion—the companion of St. Mark, and the emblem of the new patron
saint; a strange figure, which has been oddly compared by Simond
to ‘a colossal chimney-sweeper crawling out of a chimneytop.’ ”
Trivializing the column at St. Mark’s on the one hand, Brockedon
indelibly lays down the point for the British reader: Venice’s history
“is one of the most interesting, except that of our own country, to
which the political inquirer can turn his attention,” for it comprises
a “majestic combination of former splendour and actual decay,” that
allows the viewer consciously to engage in “reading a history” (Finden
and Brockedon 1:n.p.).
Another depiction of Venice elaborates the theme of the inad-
equacy of the present to antiquity. Brockedon’s description of the
Ponte Rialto begins solemnly, and then returns to that theme. His
definition of the lowly “modern” Italians includes a period extending
back almost to the era of the Medicis!

[The] Rialto was commenced in the year 1588, and completed in three
years. Pasquali Cicogna was then Doge of Venice, and his arms appear
in the centre of the arch. Vasari says the arch was built from a design

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 P i c t u r i n g B y r o n ’s I t a l y a n d I t a l i a n s 73

made long before by Michael Angelo; and it is curious to observe,

upon what in our day would by comparison appear to be a contempt-
ible work, how great names are pressed into the honour of having built
it. . . . [With] only [an] eighty-three feet span, [the bridge] is approached
by steps, for the curve of the arch is very abrupt. Upon it are two rows
of shops . . . chiefly furnished with jewellery, haberdashery, perfumes,
and articles for the toilette. (Finden and Brockedon 2:n.p.)

Brockedon’s description of Venice performs the twist on Byron’s

themes that this essay has sought to describe, starting with the famil-
iar nostalgia for an imperial past, as Byron expressed it in verse, and
then spinning that dream of an empire into the British bailiwick in
a way he would never have endorsed. Brockedon instructs the reader
that Finden’s engraving of Venice, seen from the entrance to the
Grand Canal, evokes “Venice in its glory, [rather] than in this its day
of degradation: these gondolas and gaieties are of other times; now
Melancholy pervades this city, and marks it for her own.” Brockedon
quotes Byron:

In Venice Tasso’s echoes are no more,

And silent rows the songless gondolier;
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,
And music meets not always now the ear:
Those days are gone . . . (Childe Harold 4.3; Complete Poetical Works
2:125)

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 74 Pa u l D o u g l a s s

And Brockedon comments, “This feeling will prevail in the mind of

every traveller, if he reflect, while he looks upon Venice, and con-
templates what she was. Some one has written of Venice that it is ‘a
huge pleasure-house’: his feelings must be strangely constituted who
thinks that a gleam of sun-light on a tomb is a pleasurable object.”
Brockedon elaborates on this macabre degradation of the city by quot-
ing from an anonymous writer in one of the literary annuals of 1829,
who asserted that “Venice was always an unintelligible place. . . . It was
always a dream, and will continue a dream for ever. . . .” (Finden and
Brockedon 2:n.p.).
Perhaps the preceding analysis is not entirely fair to the efforts
of Finden. Some of his images respond to one of Byron’s recurrent
themes in Childe Harold and Don Juan, namely “The eternal surge
/ Of time and tide,” under whose agency “the graves / Of empires
heave but like some passing waves” (Don Juan 15.99; Complete
Poetical Works 5:617–618). Finden’s engraving of Cadiz’s ocean sur-
face looks more alive in this spirit, as does that of Cape Leucadia.
In addition, the plate of Venice’s Lido, where Byron rode his horse
almost daily, depicts a roiling ocean. Similarly, the waters around the
Castle of Chillon are in motion, and some few of these scenes are rife
with aqueous turmoil, like the waters at Rhodes or along the coast
of Lisbon. The depiction of Gibraltar is an especially good example,
with its depiction of tens, if not dozens of squall-tossed vessels under
a lowering sky.
But such images capturing water in motion are the exceptions.
Violence and energy are absent from the vast majority of these engrav-
ings, which instead focus on the dead ruins of a once-great civiliza-
tion, formerly populated by great peoples, who, Britons are invited
to feel, would look down upon their descendants as undeserving of
the custody of so great a past—and so, those descendants have been
elided. The inhabitants of Italy appear in Finden’s and Brockedon’s
pages as a population in the dress of a rustic past. Landscape and
Portrait Illustrations of the Life and Works of Lord Byron validated a
mixed response of nostalgia and superiority by employing Byron as
its register. The poet would protest that rather than validating this
response, his work mocked and challenged the imperial pretensions of
the British nation-state. Finden and Brockedon skipped over Byron’s
satirical humor, his engagement with politics, and his gender-bend-
ing convention-challenging portraits and language in Don Juan. If
Byron became Finden and Brockedon’s ventriloquist’s dummy, how-
ever, it was not without his cooperation, for they are, after all, his

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 P i c t u r i n g B y r o n ’s I t a l y a n d I t a l i a n s 75

words, born of an attitude toward Italy and Italians he could satirize

effectively because he had shared it.

Notes
1. See Byron’s A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Ancient and Modern, by
Isaac Nathan and Lord Byron 62 ff.
2. Finden’s collections are not paginated, unfortunately.
3. See Douglass, “Lord Byron’s Feminist Canon: Notes toward Its
Construction.”

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 Chapter Six

R e a l ms w i t hou t a Na m e: Sh e l l e y
a n d Ita ly ’s I n t e nse r Day
Michael O’Neill

Part One
R omantic quests for “home” are endless, and often involve the
epiphanic or even eerie awareness that the imagination’s true dwelling-
place is homelessness. Such homelessness in its positive guise occurs
at the climax of Book Six of Wordsworth’s The Prelude.1 The book
makes much mention of houses real and metaphorical. Wordsworth
speaks of how he only wished at Cambridge “to be a lodger in that
house / Of Letters, and no more” (ll. 32–33); he plays with thoughts
of Coleridge’s life like “a man, who, when his house is built, / A
frame locked up in wood and stone, doth still, / In impotence of
mind, by his fireside, / Rebuild it to his liking” (ll. 302–305); visit-
ing France in the heyday of revolutionary fraternity, he enjoyed warm
hospitality (ll. 401–414). Yet when the imagination rises up “Before
the eye and progress of [his] song” (l. 526), Wordsworth, for all his
attachment to place in a poem such as Home at Grasmere, recognizes
that “Our destiny, our nature, and our home, / Is with infinitude,
and only there” (ll. 538–539). The moment is at once sublime and
full of an affecting trust in “hope that can never die” (l. 540; see
Jonathan Wordsworth 187–188).
Shelley, so often seen as all air and fire compared with a more
earthbound Wordsworth, shares with the older poet a sense that the
imagination may find a local habitation among particular times and

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 78 Mich a el O’Neil l

cultures, but cannot be confined to them. This essay will explore how
his imaginative engagement with Italian and Mediterranean cultures
entwines itself with exploration of what, to adapt a phrase from his
disenchantment-laden The Triumph of Life, might be called “realm[s]
without a name” (l. 396).2 Even his early encounters with Italy name
it as a country of the mind as much as a real place. “The beings of the
mind are not of clay” (Childe Harold 4.5): so Byron affirms in the
teeth of Venice’s contemporary decline (see Complete Poetical Works
2:126). Shelley does not so much idealize Italy as see that ideals must
always be related to and thus can never be identified wholly with real-
ities . “Tramontana at Lerici” by Charles Tomlinson delivers an aus-
tere rebuke to the projections of human beings onto an “air / Unfit
for politicians and romantics.” Given the location, the poem seems to
slap down supposedly Shelleyan attention-seeking in its conclusion’s
recognition that “One is ignored / By so much cold suspended in
so much night” (Tomlinson 15). But the Shelley of Lerici poems in
which he “sate and watched the vessels glide” (36) as though “They
sailed for drink to medicine / Such sweet and bitter pain as mine”
(43–44) was affectingly aware of the idealist’s fate. Such a fate finds
representation in this poem (“Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici”)
in “the fish who came / To worship the delusive flame” (53–54).
Shelley is both a worshipper of such delusive flames in the poem and
“the fisher with his lamp / And spear” (50–51) who hunts down the
delusions of idealistic projection.
That “delusive flame” burned with a finer brightness for Shelley,
among Italian scenes, as a poem such as Epipsychidion makes clear
in the very setting of its “isle under Ionian skies, / Beautiful as a
wreck of Paradise” (422–423) to which the imagined voyage of the
final section conducts us. “Ionian” suggests Greek influence, even
as the “Ionian Sea lies between southern Italy and western Greece”
(Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 403n). The island’s description as “a wreck
of Paradise” recalls Julian’s apostrophic address to Italy in Julian and
Maddalo as “Thou Paradise of exiles” (57). In Julian and Maddalo
“Italy” is a “Paradise” that confirms our exilic state; exiles go there
and encounter a beauty that confirms humanity’s fallen state, of
whom the exemplar is the self-torturing maniac. The best life has to
offer, it might seem, are conversations that are “forlorn / Yet pleas-
ing, such as once, so poets tell, / The devils held within the gates
of Hell” (39–41). Italy is both “Paradise of exiles” and a site that
brings Milton’s “devils” and “Hell” to mind. Shelley invests it with
an instability that derives from the dynamic of unsatisfied desire. This
dynamic drives Epipsychidion, where the phrase “wreck of Paradise”

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 S h e l l e y a n d I t a l y ’s I n t e n s e r D a y 79

concedes early on that the idealized isle, which is at once a remodeled

Italy and an erotic Utopia, has fallen away from some perfect state. It
is the splintered remnant of some diamond absolute, to adapt a phrase
from Seamus Heaney’s “Exposure.” It is in touch with “the age of
gold” (428), inhabited by “some pastoral people native there” (426),
as in some idyll, but it is also a place suspended “ ‘twixt Heaven, Air,
Earth, and Sea” (457) and “Bright as that wandering Eden Lucifer”
(459), where, though the reference is to the star rather than the fallen
angel, the juxtaposition of “Eden” and “Lucifer” brings into play
postlapsarian associations.
Italy’s doubleness as reality and emblem, as place and screen for
idealized or troubled projection, takes us close to the heart of the
Shelleyan poetic enterprise project as it comes into full, intricate being
after he left England in 1818. Lines Written among the Euganean Hills
deploys and examines a characteristic strategy in which the mind’s
desires map and do not map onto Italian geography and culture. The
poem sets out to substantiate and instantiate its initial proposition:
“Many a green isle needs must be / In the deep wide sea of Misery”
(ll. 1–2). “To such a one this morn was led / My bark by soft winds
piloted” (ll. 68–69) is Shelley’s way of saying that his experience is at
once local and generalizable, capable of taking on a particular habita-
tion yet always open to redefinition. The Italian scene is “such a one”
and evokes his own “paean” (l. 71), a word that rhymes purposefully
with “mountains Euganean” (l. 70). If the reversal of the word-order
points up the specificity of the place, the specific place delights the
poet because of its promise of something unspecific. The skyscape
toward which his gaze is drawn, if only in a simile that compares
rooks in sunlight with clouds against “the unfathomable sky” (l. 79),
brims with immanent and transcendent possibilities.
Again, when Shelley describes Venice in the poem, he brings to his
response multiple ways of looking and thinking. The first impulse in
his verse is to respond in Turneresque fashion to Venice as a place that
has been alchemized by “that chasm of light, / As within a furnace
bright” (ll. 104–105). The description is metapoetic; it suggests that
one way in which Venice appeals is that it embodies a capacity for ide-
alized disembodiment, of conversion into the symbol of imaginative
activity. Yet Shelley resists this merely sensuous appeal, merging his
aesthetic response into his historical reading of the city. He simulta-
neously rebukes and evokes the lure of the merely aesthetic in these
lines: “Those who alone thy towers behold / Quivering through
aerial gold, / As I now behold them here, / Would imagine not they
were / Sepulchres” (ll. 142–146). Such failure to “imagine” bears

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 80 Mich a el O’Neil l

witness to ignorance, for the poet, of recent Venetian history, its sorry
capitulation to forces opposed to the “Freedom” (l. 150) invoked, as
so often in Shelley, as a pervasive yet unlocatable alternative to things
as they are. Yet if Freedom is to reassert its “omnipotence” (l. 151),
the writing suggests, it will have to do with values that are both inher-
ent and conferred, and cannot, therefore, wholly divorce themselves
from “the mind which feeds this verse / Peopling the lone universe”
(ll. 318–319) in the epiphanic “now” at the poem’s center, a mind
that shows its sensitivity to beauty that manifests itself “Quivering
through aerial gold.” Shelley stages a conflict between a rigorous his-
toricism that would lead him to reject Venice if the city shows itself
incapable of regeneration (see ll. 160–166) and a responsiveness to
possibilities of betterment that seem momentarily actualized through
his imaginative work on the Italian scenes before him.

Part Two
Visionary experience in Shelley often involves a kind of verbal tremor,
a series of near-kinetic vibrations between inner and outer. In his
poetry of the Italian period, the scenes he describes seem often to
work as objective correlatives of his imaginative procedure. So when
the third section of “Ode to the West Wind” opens, “Thou who didst
waken from his summer dreams / The blue Mediterranean, where
he lay, / Lulled by the coil of his chrystalline streams” (ll. 29–31),
the terza rima, previously driven and headlong in its movement,
enacts its own slowed turning away from onward impetus as the word
“Mediterranean” idles for half the line. In this passage the sea occu-
pies the provisional, recurring present of “summer dreams,” in which
it is “lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams.” These streams coil
upon one another like a sleepy snake, turning away from flight into
the future, composing themselves into a fatally attractive image of
reposeful indolence. Ultimately the “blue Mediterranean” is an ally
of Burkean conservatism, engaged in retrospection. A watery reposi-
tory of what has already happened, it is its own somnolent spectator.
Shelley’s syntax is purposefully ambiguous in line thirty-three, “And
saw in sleep old palaces and towers,” since it could be the sea or the
wind that “saw in sleep.” The phrase “in sleep,” given that the wind
has already appeared as the agent of wakening (l. 29), suggests the
sleepy seeing applies to the sea. Yet for a moment transforming wind
and dreaming sea seem at one, as though, in the figurative workings
of the poem, what is laid bare is a collision that is also a collusion
between pleasure in the present (the aesthetic) and the lull before the

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 S h e l l e y a n d I t a l y ’s I n t e n s e r D a y 81

coming storm (revolutionary history in the making). The syntactical

slippages do not stop there; it is conceivable that “in sleep” works
forwards, attaching itself to the “old palaces and towers,” a possibil-
ity that intimates that when the Mediterranean is woken, so, too, the
sunken ruins of the classical past will, in some way, return.
What wind and Mediterranean see, to make of them a composite
subject, is alive, vibrant, ever-altering, “Quivering within the wave’s
intenser day.” The Mediterranean is classical past and sponsor of
reenvisioning present for Shelley; the natural world stands in for the
transformative imagination in that last line, which distils, if not a
Shelleyan essence, then one of his most typical modes of poetic being.
The palaces and towers lose their monumentality, reduplicated yet
altered in the medium of water, undergoing a metamorphosis within
“the wave’s intenser day.” The reality surrenders to the greater sig-
nificance of the reflective medium, which turns out to be, in some
way, intenser. This greater intensity derives from the wave’s function
as imaging and transfiguring medium, as objective correlative for the
poet who must come to terms with yet reject the past and hold open
an avenue to the future.
This section of the “Ode” opposes yet yokes together a symbol of
the Roman classical past, “a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay” (l. 32), and
an emblem of the democratic future, “the Atlantic’s level powers” (l.
37) that “Cleave themselves into chasms” (l. 38) before the wind’s
approach. Geoffrey Matthews succinctly suggests the significance of
“Baiae’s bay”: “A resort of the fashionable and the great under the
Roman empire, but also a scene of luxury and cruelty” (Matthews,
in Shelley: Selected Poems and Prose 200). Matthews presumably has
Tiberius’s sybaritic excesses in mind. But Baiae is also, for Shelley, the
product of volcanic fallout, hence the pumice isle, and, as Matthews
pointed out in “A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley” (reprinted in Shelley’s
Poetry and Prose), is associated allusively with revolutionary activity;
it occupies the space of its own overthrow. When Shelley visited the
bay of Baiae, the sight of “many picturesque & interesting ruins” was
disappointing by comparison with the “effect of the scenery”: “The
colours of the water & the air breathe over all things here the radi-
ance of their own beauty” (Letters of Shelley 2:61). An atmosphere
enveloping “all things” with “the radiance of [its] own beauty”
might stand both for Shelley’s own Mediterranean imagination and
for his awareness of natural realities that are self-sufficing and do not
depend on the imagination. Timothy Morton explores the meanings
of nature and culture in Shelley’s work, arguing that “If nature is to
culture as ground is to figure, then it has become impossible to tell

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 82 Mich a el O’Neil l

the difference between the two” (Morton 201). Shelley does not only
use nature as a means of representing the processes of imagining; he
also views it as having an otherness that stands in eternal and eternally
redemptive opposition to the ruins of culture and the longings of
human beings. “The radiance of [nature’s] own beauty” may lure us
into imagining a Utopian “windless bower . . . Far from passion, pain,
and guilt” (Lines Written among the Euganean Hills ll. 344–345);
yet even as it spurs on the transforming, revolutionary imagination, it
serves as a kind of rebuke to it, too.
The Mediterranean is set against the Atlantic in this section: “the
ruins of antique grandeur” against intimations of the new world. The
wind, emblem of inspiration, social change, and something close to
necessity, is operative in both, wakening the Mediterranean, forcing
the Atlantic to acknowledge its power. Rather as Auden does in his
early poem “Consider this and in our time,” Shelley here dallies with
the doomed realm signified by “old palaces and towers,” indicating
one way in which the Mediterranean (considered as cultural region
as well as maritime location) worked on his imagination. There is,
in him a striking absorption in the classical realm, which he reads
as both flawed and magnificent. Something of this carries over into
his response to Rome in Adonais: “Go thou to Rome, —at once the
Paradise, / The grave, the city and the wilderness” (ll. 433–434).
Building on the earlier “Or go to Rome” (l. 424), ‘the opening
injunction clarifies Shelley’s sense of Rome as paradoxical fusion of
triumph and failure, “the sepulchre” (l. 424), not of Keats, “but of
our joy” (l. 425), both the place that buried joy and where joy was
buried. After Athens, Rome is, for Shelley, the very essence of the
Mediterranean civilization on which, inspired by Winckelmann and
others, he brooded in his superb travel letters. Its beauty makes it a
“paradise”; its history a “grave”; ruination converts it into a “wilder-
ness,” even as it is the very type of human endeavor, a “city.”
Rome is a failed exemplar, in one sense; in another, a pointer
toward what can be recovered from the past so as to make for a bet-
ter future. It embodies the fact “That ages, empires, and religions
there / Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought” (“Adonais” ll.
426–427), that attempts to dominate must, Ozymandias-like, inevi-
tably destroy themselves. But it stands, too, for the mingled greatness
and abjectness of human attainment. Shelley’s writing about Rome
reveals both his acknowledgement of this inextricability and his wish
to separate out the aesthetic or spiritual wheat from the militaristic
chaff. Arguably his cultural vision benefits from its growing sense of
the difficulty of doing so, as when he writes in the Preface to Hellas

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 S h e l l e y a n d I t a l y ’s I n t e n s e r D a y 83

of the fact that Rome “spread . . . illumination with her arms” (Shelley’s
Poetry and Prose 431). Describing “two winged figures of Victory” on
the Arch of Constantine, he conveys something of his commingled
admiration and ambivalence: “Never were monuments so completely
fitted to the purpose for which they were designed of expressing that
mixture of energy & error which is called a Triumph” (Letters of
Shelley 2:86). Every record of Roman civilization, it would seem, was
also for Shelley a record of barbarism.
In The Triumph of Life that “mixture of energy & error which
is called a Triumph” becomes the dominant image in a poem that
drives toward the question at which the fragment breaks off: “ ‘Then,
what is Life?’ I said” (l. 544). Again, the past haunts the present, best
described in an image (that of the triumph) inherited from the Italian
past. Yet it is through his negotiation in the form and figuration of
the poem with the work of two poets associated with Italy—Petrarch
and Dante—that Shelley attempts to find an answer to that question
that does not sell life short. Both provide in their work—Petrarch in
his Trionfi, Dante in the Commedia—models of evolution toward
betterment that Shelley may ironize but cannot wholly discard. The
energy with which the poem questions error indicates Shelley’s refusal
simply to acquiesce in the kind of fatalism about history that tempts
Byron in the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage when he
asserts that history involves always “the same rehearsal of the past”
(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 4.108; see Complete Poetical Works 2:160).
Shelley is closer in spirit to Madame de Staël’s Corinne when, in that
work, debate about the significance of Rome includes the following
in book two, chapter four: “Rome . . . presents the melancholy aspect
of degradation and misery, but all of a sudden a broken column, a bas-
relief half destroyed, stones knit together in the indestructible man-
ner of the ancient architects, remind us that there is in man an eternal
power, a divine spark, which he must never cease to excite in himself
and revive in others.”3 This discernment of “a divine spark” serves as
an ally of Shelley’s prayer at the close of the “Ode to the West Wind”
that he might “Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth / Ashes and
sparks, my words among mankind” (ll. 66–67). The image brings to
mind the Dante who, in seeing Beatrice again in Purgatorio canto 30,
uses a Virgilian metaphor (applied to Dido) to convey his (unspeak-
able) feelings. Were Virgil still available as an interlocutor, Dante
“would have cried. . . . ‘The old flame / Throws out clear tokens of
reviving fire’ ” (Purgatorio 30.45, 46–47).4 The “old flame” of pre-
vious Roman and Italian culture, one might wish to allegorize the
passage in applying it to Shelley, is available as a source of “reviving

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 84 Mich a el O’Neil l

fire.” Yet the poet’s unaccompanied loneliness is also suggested. The

cultural hearth is “unextinguished.” The modern poet, inspired by
the best of the past and finding images of a better future in the very
Mediterranean air he breathes, seeks to initiate a process that “will
quicken a new birth” (30.64). Radical though Shelley’s visions of bet-
ter futures are, they are, for all their Utopianism, grounded in his
meditations on and negotiations with the past.
Rome is for Shelley a symbol of the wars of conquest that form
one part of the Mediterranean’s fractured legacy. Visiting Pompeii
(“Pompeii you know was a Greek city” (Letters of Shelley 2:73) he tells
Peacock), he reads history in complexly evolutionary ways: Pompeii
offers a model of how life should be led; its inhabitants “lived in
harmony with nature, and the interstices of their incomparable col-
umns, were portals as it were to admit the spirit of beauty, which ani-
mates this glorious universe to visit those whom it inspired. If such is
Pompeii, what was Athens?” (Letters of Shelley 2:73). This Hellenizing
zeal will find full flower in Shelley’s preface to Hellas and his asser-
tion, there, that “We are all Greeks” (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 431).
But the celebration of Greek culture commingles with lament that
incriminates the Roman empire as the source of all that is wrong with
modern civilization. The Mediterranean is, thus, the source of all
that is best and worst about the past and its legacies: “O, but for that
series of wretched wars which terminated in the Roman conquest of
the world, but for the Christian religion which put a finishing stroke
to the antient system; but for those changes which conducted Athens
to its ruin, to what an eminence might not humanity have arrived!”
(Letters of Shelley 2:75).
Italy and the Mediterranean region is very much for Shelley a cradle
of civilization (he is also, of course, aware of the claims of other, older
civilizations, as is clear from the setting of Prometheus Unbound I and
II.i, in the Indian Caucasus), but also a place in which perversions
of an original potentiality occurred. It is, in part, Shelley’s poetic
project to reclaim Mediterranean civilization from its falling off; its
literal topography becomes symbolic, much as a west wind blowing
in Florence in 1819 turned into one of the major Romantic emblems
of poetic inspiration. It is Shelley’s job as a poet to resuffer history,
yet redirect it. For all his objections to the “Christian religion,” in
section IV of “Ode to the West Wind” he reenacts Christ’s suffering
as he seeks to define his condition as a poet fallen on harsh times:
“I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” (l. 54). Melodramatic, even
distasteful, as the line can seem, it is worth noting how deliberately
Shelley stages the need to “fall,” if he is to rise again as the poet whose

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 S h e l l e y a n d I t a l y ’s I n t e n s e r D a y 85

“harmonies” (l. 59) assume an affectingly “deep, autumnal tone, /

Sweet though in sadness” (ll. 60–61) in the poem’s final section.

Part Three
Culture for Shelley is never fixed; its meanings alter when they are
viewed with altered minds. “All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first
acorn which contained all oaks potentially” (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose
528). In a comparable fashion, as Morton argues, “His cry was not
so much ‘back to nature’ . . . as ‘forwards to nature’ ” (Morton 204).
Nature itself is reborn in Shelley’s words. In his fascinatingly sophisti-
cated take on Godwinian perfectibility, Shelley deplores yet celebrates
the imperfect, much as Ruskin argues in “The Nature of Gothic”:
“Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decay-
ing, part nascent . . . to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to
check exertion, to paralyze vitality” (Ruskin 92). Shelley’s injunction
to “Go . . . to Rome” in Adonais precedes and seems to catalyze sub-
sequent gestures that combine world-weariness with the impulse to
transform: “What Adonais is, why fear we to become?” (l. 459). “The
One remains, the many change and pass” (l. 460), a line with mul-
tiple suggestions, includes the idea that there is a historical essence
that “remains,” a cultural value that endures, one that Shelley locates,
with provisos and qualifications, in the Mediterranean. It turns out,
as the stanza in question from Adonais reaches its hazardously bravura
conclusion, that Rome embodies a portal through which the “many”
strain toward the “One”: “Rome’s azure sky, / Flowers, ruins, stat-
ues, music, words, are weak / The glory they transfuse with fitting
truth to speak” (ll. 466–468). The poetry here recasts the relation
between the “One” and the “many” as the interaction between an
ultimate glory that is imperfectly “transfused” and the material con-
stituents of Roman nature and culture. True, they are inadequate
to speak of such “glory” with “fitting truth,” but they give a closer
intimation of such “glory,” the lines imply, than anywhere else that
the poet can locate. The Mediterranean over which the wind sweeps
in the ode turns into, one might think, the transformed sea, by way of
an allusion to the opening of Dante’s Paradiso across which the poet
sets out in the final stanza of Adonais.
At such a moment Italy is caught up and is almost the medium
and objective correlative of Shelley’s desire for change. Looking at
convicts hoeing weeds in St Peter’s square, he experiences a “conflict
of sensations,” seeing the clash between the clanking chains and the
“deep azure beauty” of the sky as producing “the emblem of Italy:

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moral degradation contrasted with the glory of nature & of the arts”
(Letters of Shelley 2:94). Even the arts could possess a glory that was
tainted; but in Italian nature Shelley found a store of images that
mirrored the workings of his imagination and bodied forth his own
love of process and change, and his interest in relativist, partial per-
spectives; he admired, for example, “the ever changing illumination
of the air” (Letters of Shelley 2:87) over the Pantheon. What is “ever
changing” might result in freedom from reification, monumentaliza-
tion, fixity, the tyranny of the unchangeable. It might also, and here
Shelley moves in a different direction, suggest something or some-
where more unconditioned, that might, like the “One” he hails in
Adonais, “remain.”
But what would remain must embody within itself the capacity for
purposive change. Such a capacity, for Shelley, was possessed by those
who could read the past, not as a lifeless scroll, but, in the way that
he read “each word” of Dante, as containing within itself “a burning
atom, a spark of inextinguishable thought” (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose
528). To this end, his writings in Italy show an astonishing array of
generic experimentation: odes, lyrical dramas, tragedy, elegy, dream
vision, Aristophanic spoof, complexly rhymed sonnets, the epistle,
the epyllion. Always the use of genres and forms bears witness to
a desire to rework, to alter, to stimulate response. The very stanza
form of “To a Sky-lark” imitates in its final alexandrine the trill of
the bird’s song, maybe; but it also reflects the leaping acts of imagi-
nation as typical of Shelley as they are of Dante who uses this image
of leaping in the Paradiso 23 to describe the necessary daring that
his “sacred strain” (23.61) must display in its “figuring of Paradise”
(23.60).5 It captures the way in which the poet draws inspiration from
the natural to depict his wish to be as one who “singing still dost soar,
and soaring ever singest” (“To a Sky-lark” l. 10). In the Italian light,
Shelley’s cultural and historical imaginations gain in resonance and
trenchancy, while his view of poetry alters decisively. “Didactic poetry
is my abhorrence” he declares in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound
(Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 209). It is significant that neither “Ode to
the West Wind” nor “To a Sky-lark” expresses a specific political idea.
In both we go beyond opinion to participate in the very energy of the
imagination. Both are intent on entangling the reader in their own
self-imitations, so that in the former we experience “the incantation
of this verse” (l. 65) and in the latter we imagine what it must be like
to be a “Poet hidden / In the light of thought” (l. 36–37).
This is an Italian poetry of delight in potentiality, the intensify-
ing play of the imagination. Shelley’s poetry seeks to give us access

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 S h e l l e y a n d I t a l y ’s I n t e n s e r D a y 87

to what Morton, glossing the close of A Defence of Poetry, calls “a

shading of the not-yet” (Morton 191). But the not-yet derives from
the has-been, if only by way of cancellation and annulment. Hence
the delight in negative epithets, which Timothy Webb has analyzed
in a justly celebrated essay,6 the hearkening after what A Defence calls
“the before unapprehended relations of things” (Shelley’s Poetry and
Prose 512), the pleasure taken by the speaker of “The Cloud,” at the
poem’s close, in “unbuild[ing]” (l. 84). When Prometheus names
Asia “thou light of life, / Shadow of beauty unbeheld,” he sees her in
the double way typical of the Italian period, as both “luminous” and
yet a “shadow” of “beauty unbeheld” (III.3, ll. 7-8). Over and over,
the poetry follows in Dante’s tracks as it ascends through modes of
sight toward possibilities of vision.
And yet the Italian light could play the imagination false; it could
turn into the intolerable, ideal-annihilating radiant blaze that streams
through The Triumph of Life, in which light is often a demonic par-
ody of paradisal effulgence, in which “a cold glare, intenser than the
noon / But icy cold, obscured with light / The sun, as he the stars”
(ll. 77–79). It is as though the light that elsewhere Shelley celebrates
and associates with Italy has turned on its celebrant. This destruc-
tive light threatens the light of the stars. Shelley’s figurative pattern
keeps open the possibility of some higher, better, former light, even
as it records the way such light is “obscured.” The sun is the ideal
that has turned out to mislead, to ally itself with the erosive effects of
a culture that the poem’s imagery of a triumph associates with “the
heirs / Of Caesar’s crime” (ll. 283–284), symbolizing the onward
rush of a conquest-bent and corrupting historical drive. The poem
allows the course of history since “Imperial Rome” (l. 113) little of
value; it traces less “the before unapprehended relations” than a near-
archetypal process of yielding “Freedom” (l. 115) to the power of
institutions and repressive structures. This aspect of the poem echoes
the verdict of that side of Shelley who sees Venetian beauty in Lines
Written among the Euganean Hills as sepulcher rather than exquisite
light-struck architecture. The counterbalance remains as a residue, the
sense derivable from the greatest poem in Italian literature, in which
“all things are transfigured, except Love” (l. 476), that something
still “Glimmers, forever sought, forever lost” (l. 431). That there may,
in the future, be possibilities that are still “unapprehended” finds
as its unstable guarantee the workings of questions and uncertain
imaginings.
Figurations of doubleness are themselves capable of further turn-
ings upon themselves here and elsewhere in Shelley. In Prometheus

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Unbound, the dazzling paradoxes of a light that obscures and blinds

act as tokens of a visionary assault on the visual, which in turn cor-
responds to an imaginative impulse to redefine. So in Act II, scene
5, the “VOICE (in the air, singing)” addresses a figure whose “lips
enkindle / With their love the breath between them / And thy smiles
before they dwindle / Make the cold air fire” (ll. 48–51). The extrav-
agantly performative rhyme of “kindle” and “dwindle” in Shelley
finds an appropriate gloss in the assertion made in A Defence of Poetry
that “the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible
influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness”
(Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 531).7 What the moment captures is the
instantaneousness of Shelley’s dealings with potentiality; he enacts,
now, in the present of composition and reading, tensions involved in
the workings of desire. Asia is seen as an unobjectifiable force whose
quasi-Dantean “smiles” “make the cold air fire,” her beauty the more
vivid because it evades the visual: “Fair are others;—none beholds
thee” (l. 60). The lyric is a microcosm of Shelley’s complexly affirma-
tive Italian poetry, poetry intensely and keenly conscious of its own
questing desires.
Act II of the lyrical drama set its first scene in “A lovely Vale in the
Indian Caucasus,” its second in “A Forest, intermingled with Rocks
and Caverns,” its third on “A Pinnacle of Rock among Mountains,”
its fourth in “The Cave of Demogorgon,” and its fifth “within a
Cloud on the Top of a Snowy Mountain.” The topography includes,
in the first scene, a transfigured pastoral version of the grim rocky
terrain of the first act and, thereafter, scenes that resist yet prompt
identification. Matthews in “A Volcano’s Voice” makes pertinent con-
nections to “the area round Naples which Shelley explored with such
delight in late 1818 and early 1819” (Matthews, in Shelley’s Poetry
and Prose 551). But once again Shelley uses Italy, especially Vesuvius
and its environs, in ways that are at once localized and more general-
ized. He implies in his volcanic imagery a destructive-creative duality:
the volcano destroys, but its destruction is of Jupiter’s rule, while its
fallout results in “extreme fertility” (Matthews, in Shelley’s Poetry and
Prose 552). Moreover, the second act refuses to be identified as solely
Italian in locale, and occupies most powerfully its own imaginative
and Utopian territory.
Shelley may have found in medieval and Renaissance Italy a model
of self-rule, which he hoped to see revived in the future. He may have
lamented the fact that Venice had fallen to the Austrians. But his
Romantic geopolitics sponsored less a fierce regionalism than a rec-
ognition of the threat posed by the tyrannies of empire, political and

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 S h e l l e y a n d I t a l y ’s I n t e n s e r D a y 89

religious (for relevant discussion see Michael Rossington). Incarnation

and realization present poetic and ideological problems to Shelley.
The moment of realization is the moment at which the workings of
desire are temporarily stilled. The quintessential Shelleyan impulse
is to put that arrest under pressure, to convert arrest into further
quest.
This self-exiled Englishman, at odds with his national religion, was
still able to champion the typical English Protestant virtues of inde-
pendence and resistance to control. Yet his poetry proposes a restless,
un-Procrustean universalism that exists through ceaseless dialogue,
such as is set going between the Voice in the Air and Asia in 2.5.
of Prometheus Unbound. Shelley’s Italian politics insist on symbolic
voyages, voyages that are made possible through poetry, as in Asia’s
lines: “My soul is an enchanted Boat / Which, like a sleeping swan,
doth float / Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing” (ll. 72–75).
Poets legislate by creating the possibility of inhabiting “Realms
where the air we breathe is Love” (l. 95). Throughout this song, Asia
unbuilds the past, taking us “Through Death and Birth, to a diviner
day” (l. 103). It is such an unbuilding that Prometheus Unboun as a
whole undertakes. The writing shimmers with recollections of pass-
ing over the bay of Baiae, and looking down into a past that hints at
“watery paths that wind between / Wildernesses calm and green” (ll.
106–107): paths and wildernesses that, for Shelley, were not solely
Italian, but that draw on his acutely rhapsodic response to the Baths
of Caracalla as a place in which “The paths still wind on, threading
the perplexed windings” (Letters of Shelley 2:85).
Those “perplexed windings” through Italian history, culture, and
nature include the layering upon layering of histories. There is, in
Shelley’s poetry, a recognition, that, as Iain Chambers has it, “we are
faced with the choice of either remaining prisoners of an implacable
past, and hence, of time itself, or of returning to that inheritance
to remember and interpret it in a manner that frees the present for
further possibilities” (Chambers 104). What prevents Shelley’s poetry
from being ineffectually angelic is its engagement with the—often
Italian—past. Vico is Chambers’s hero for his historicizing commit-
ment to the “grounding of thought and truth in time” rather than his
fellow Neapolitan Croce, criticized by Chambers for a commitment
to the idea that “art proposes an unconditional, disinterested, and
self-sufficient image whose character is universal” (Chambers 105,
104). But Shelley develops a vision that sees poetry as grounded in
history yet capable of imagining an autonomous state, or at least one
in which it is creative as well as imitative. When the Spirit of the Hour

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 90 Mich a el O’Neil l

describes the redeemed order of things in Prometheus Unbound, Act

III, scene 4, the speech sways between dismissing history as irrel-
evant junk and implicitly recognizing the power still possessed by
the supposedly discarded: the “Thrones, altars, judgement-seats and
prisons” (l. 164, which resembled indecipherable hieroglyphs written
on Egyptian “obelisks” (l. 170)) “brought to Rome by the conquer-
ing armies of the empire” (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 268n). Yet these
“ghosts of a no more remembered fame” (l. 169) are the stuff from
which Shelley weaves poetic dreams of a state in which humanity
might be “Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless” (l. 195).
Shelley’s imaginative investment in the “wave’s intenser day” of Italy
and the Mediterranean more generally finds expression in the image
he uses in “Ode to Liberty” of Athens’s enduring significance:

Within the surface of Time’s fleeting river

Its wrinkled image lies, as then it lay
Immovably unquiet, and for ever
It trembles, but it cannot pass away! (ll. 76–79)

Shelley adapts lines from Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas,

Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle” that express the poet’s earlier
deceived view that nature was wholly benign. “Whene’er I looked,”
Wordsworth writes of his former self-viewing the castle’s reflection in
the sea, “It trembled, but it never passed away” (l. 8). Wordsworth has
abandoned, as a result of “A deep distress” (l. 36), such a view; Shelley
refuses to let go of the belief that what Athens represented still has
continuing force. He sees Athens as a “wrinkled image” in the river of
Time, distorted by it, but forever stimulating, “Immovably unquiet.”
The phrase is a suggestive image for the way in which, for Shelley, the
past, especially the Mediterranean and Italian past, continue to open
up possibilities for the future, through the “intenser day” supplied by
the poetic imagination.

Notes
1. All references to Wordsworth’s poetry are by line numbers to The
Major Works, ed. with introduction and notes by Stephen Gill (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2000).
2. References to Shelley’s poetry and prose are to Shelley’s Poetry and
Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. 2nd ed. (New York:
W. W. Norton, 2002).
3. Quotation drawn from Corinne or Italy, intro. George Saintsbury, 2
vols. (London: Dent, 1894). Project Gutenberg Ebook.

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 S h e l l e y a n d I t a l y ’s I n t e n s e r D a y 91

4. References to Dante’s works are to The Vision, or Hell, Purgatory,

and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, trans. Henry Francis Cary (London:
Oxford UP, 1916).
5. See Stuart Curran’s “Figuration in Shelley and Dante,” in Dante’s
Modern Afterlife: Reception and Response from Blake to Heaney, ed.
Nick Havely. (New York: St Martin’s P, 1998), 49–59.
6. See Webb’s “The Unascended Heaven: Negatives in Prometheus
Unbound,” reprinted in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (694–711).
7. See D. J. Hughes, “Kindling and Dwindling: The Poetic Process in
Shelley,” Keats-Shelley Journal 13 (1964): 13–28.

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 Chapter Seven

E P I P S Y C H I D I O N , Da n t e , a n d t h e
R e n e wa bl e L i f e
Stuart Curran

The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over

the stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world.
—A Defence of Poetry 1

O ne of the great paradoxes of literary history is the veneration of

the self-professed atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley for Dante Alighieri, to
Shelley, uniquely among his contemporary readers, the master poet
who codified for medieval Europe a dramatic, totalized Christian
mythology and a moral universe centered on the transformative power
of love. Since this is a poetic discipleship that, like a lodestone, has
attracted my concerted attention on several occasions and over almost
four decades, a brief rehearsal of, and perspective on, those previous
pursuits will establish a context for the present inquiry.
As the lengthy comparison in A Defence of Poetry alerts us, Dante
was, along with Milton, a major influence on Shelley’s writings
(525–528). Indeed, I would argue that, when all is said and done,
he was the preeminent influence. We can trace Shelley’s profound
veneration for the republican Milton throughout his writings, and
clearly the “Satanic” version of Paradise Lost that we find instituted
in Prometheus Unbound as well as, before it, in Frankenstein (and
which was appropriately initiated by Godwin a generation earlier in
An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice [1:261–262]), testifies to

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 94 St ua rt Cur r a n

how resonantly that model affected the Shelley household. Even so,
from Shelley’s early maturity he interacted with Dante in a singularly
intense manner that defies all simple explanation.
In my study Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic
Vision (1975) the epic vision in question was that provided by the
Divine Comedy. From the perspective of time and the accumulation
of scholarship, were I to rewrite that study today, I would make the
connection far more explicit than the loosely draped structure that
governs the discourse in that book. There, beginning from Shelley’s
own highly dramatic account to Peacock of reading Dante in the
dimly lit space behind the sanctuary of the Milan Cathedral (Letters
of Shelley 2:8), the essential argument stipulated that this experi-
ence of Dante, in Italian and on Italian ground, prompted Shelley
to reconsider Dante’s mythological model from a modern, secular
stance, conceiving within that perspective what would constitute
hell (the self-consumed, self-destructive personal and social arenas
of The Cenci and the first act of Prometheus Unbound), paradise (the
liberating third and liberated fourth acts of the lyrical drama), and
purgatory (the conflicted odes of 1819–1820). Today, I would wish
to allow greater room for the model of purgatory, since I think that
Shelley, in his interrogation of the function of poets—of himself in
particular—in that modern, secular world, was responding to how
prominently in the Purgatorio Dante confronts earlier poets, Latin,
French, and Italian, as he slowly spirals toward the summit of earthly
experience and beyond. Ralph Pite, I should note, in his estimable
Circle of our Vision (1994) devotes his chapter on Shelley directly to
his response to the Purgatorio.
I returned to the Dantean model again for the major conference—
Shelley e L’Italia—that Lilla Crisafulli and Allan Christensen orga-
nized for the 1992 bicentennial celebration of Shelley in Rome.
There, my starting point was the remarkable phrase of Dante’s from
Paradiso 23.61, “figurando il paradiso,” which in modern critical
parlance we might translate as “configuring paradise,” a phrase that
reveals how conscious Dante is of the metaphorical limitations of a
language that always falls short of a truth that transcends its own
instrumentation. Shelley’s version of that concept is Demogorgon’s
vatic “The deep truth is imageless” (Prometheus Unbound 2.4; l. 116),
and what I wanted to bring to focus in that comparison was how it
could be that one poet immersed in a Christian poetics and another
committed to a skeptical, if not explicitly atheistical, aesthetic could
reconcile themselves so wholly over the problematics of metaphor:
both poets, to quote briefly from that essay, “us[e] figuration, against

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 Da n t e , a n d t h e R e n e wa bl e L i f e 95

its normative expectation, to disconcert, to dissimulate at first glance,

and thus to enforce an act of questioning as prior to any agreement
that may be struck between signifier and signified” (“Figurando il
Paradiso: Shelley e Dante” 55). So, if I can briefly sum up where these
considerations had led me, I would say that over those two decades I
had moved from seeing Shelley simply adapting the tripartite model
of the Divine Comedy to circumscribe the modern world and his place
as poet within it, thereby essentially construing Dante from a themat-
ically charged moral and social perspective, to later embracing him as
a master of poesies, a maker and breaker of images, revealing there a
deeply based intellectual affinity that represented itself poetically in a
sophisticated hermeneutical deconstruction.
The third consideration was aired only sketchily in the keynote
lecture I gave for the major March 2008 conference, (Trans)national
Identities / Reimagining Communities, organized by the Centro per
Studi Romantici of the University of Bologna along with the British
Association for Romantics Studies (BARS) and the North American
Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR), which was later pub-
lished along with other papers from that extraordinary gathering in
the European Romantic Review. A much expanded exposition of that
argument lies within the annotations for Shelley’s first translation of
Dante in the spring of 1814 (a sonnet included in the Alastor volume
of 1816) to be published in the third volume of the Johns Hopkins
University Press edition of The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Although more limited in scope than the other two interventions,
this one has a direct bearing on the subject of this present essay.
The translation in question is of Dante’s sonnet addressed to Guido
Calvalcanti, “Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lappo ed io”—Guido, I would
like for you and Lappo [that is, the poet Lapo Gianni] and I—a poem
that envisions the poets embarking with their ladies in a poetic boat
where they would drift on endlessly conversing about love. Shelley,
it is true, had something of an obsession with boats—in the end
a fatal one—but this particular model became deeply internalized,
resulting in various boat-island configurations we can trace across his
poetic oeuvre, from “Alastor” to Lines Written among the Euganean
Hills, to the end of Epipsychidion. Appropriately, he quotes directly
from the Cavalcanti sonnet in a letter he addressed to Emilia Viviani
in 1821 (Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts 170–171). In addition, that
fact leads me to the large point behind Shelley’s selection of this son-
net as the first concrete sign of his investment in Dante’s writings,
that what Dante envisions there is the world around which the Vita
Nuova is structured, one involving a coterie of poets who inspire one

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 96 St ua rt Cur r a n

another with, and reify their community through, their devotion to

chivalric love. “Dante,” Shelley testifies in the Defence, “knew the
secret things of love even more than Petrarch” (525); his Paradiso
“the most glorious imagination of modern poetry . . . is a perpetual
hymn of ever-lasting love” (526). The model of a community of like-
minded poets who believe, to adapt the last line of Shelley’s preface
to The Revolt of Islam, that “Love [should be] celebrated everywhere
as the sole law which should govern the moral world” (Poetical Works
37), is an absorbing ideal to which Shelley aspires from his days at
Bracknell in 1813 reading Dante’s sonnets under the tutelage of
Cornelia Turner to his encouraging Leigh Hunt’s emigration to Pisa
in 1821 in order to establish The Liberal there with Byron and the
Shelleys.
This ideal most directly finds its voice in Epipsychidion. That was,
it could be argued, the essential view of the poem among Victorian
Shelley critics (Brooke), but it has long receded before the necessary
deflation of their vague Platonic abstractions. The chief instrument
to that end, more than being merely influential, has been the wholly
dominant reading by one of the twentieth-century’s magisterial
Shelley scholars, Kenneth Neill Cameron. Because of this, more than
a half century after the publication of his “Planet-Tempest Passage,”
Epipsychidion now stands today as what must be called the most per-
versely misread poem in Shelley’s canon. From Cameron’s emphasis
on the biographical bases of the poem, it has become an all but uni-
versal habit to conceive of the representation of the Moon in this
poem as a thinly disguised and a thoroughly unflattering, even to
some a morally reprehensible, portrait of Mary Shelley. Similarly,
modern readers of Epipsychidion—if, indeed, any of them should care
any longer to be so forcibly entangled in what this model would sug-
gest are the confessional ramblings of the poet’s unbridled egocen-
tricity—may be divided on whether the Comet alludes to Shelley’s
youthful infatuation with Harriet Grove or to that later, much more
salacious target of retrospective gossip, Claire Clairmont. (So emi-
nent a scholar as Marian Kingston Stocking, in her introduction to
the Clairmont correspondence, thus identifies her without raising a
question—or an eyebrow.) In all fairness, it must be granted that
in the postwar exhaustion of absolutes and ethos of reconstruction
dominant in 1948 Cameron’s attempt to set Shelley’s feet on solid
ground had then to have seemed salutary. Yet, so overdetermined has
the poem been by critical and editorial interventions following his
lead and reducing every element in a clearly allegorical poetic universe
to a crude biographical base that it is rare that any reader can listen

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 Da n t e , a n d t h e R e n e wa bl e L i f e 97

to the pleadings of the preface—or, more exactly, of the three differ-

ent versions of the preface—or the literally dozens of rejected cou-
plets foretelling misreadings both inadvertent and deliberate, or the
poet’s various letters stipulating the poem’s intent, demanding that
we sharply distance the author from his text. Shelley goes so far in the
published preface as to kill the poet off as stipulated agent, leaving
himself as a mere literary executor for a figure who has died—not just
died, we might emphasize, but who (to quote from the first sentence
of that preface) “died at Florence” (P&P 392). We could, of course,
see this as an artful ruse to keep us from looking downriver toward
the menage at Pisa. Or, in deliberate contrast, we might instead want
to revert to that Dantean harmonious coterie of poets as it fell prey
to civil strife and truly “died at Florence,” as another way to interpret
the offhand remark of a poet schooled in the allegorical mode of an
earlier century.
To exemplify just how well schooled Shelley is in this mode of
discourse, how his very terminology reflects that of a culture a half
millennium preceding his, let us juxtapose two passages. The first is
from the Vita Nuova, (4.1–3 in Michele Barbi’s discredited, but still
universally adopted, numbering), where Dante recounts an unsettling
dream that was his response to encountering the mature Beatrice after
an interval of nine years from their first acquaintance:

[I]o divenni in picciolo tempo poi di sì fraile e debole condizione,

che a molti amici pesava de la mia vista; e molti pieni d’invidia già si
procacciavano di sapere di me quello che io volea del tutto celare ad
altrui. Ed io, accorgendomi del malvagio domandare che mi faceano,
per la volontade d’Amore, lo quale mi comandava secondo lo consiglio
de la ragione, rispondea loro che Amore era quelli che così m’avea
governato. Dicea d’Amore, però che io portava nel viso tante de le sue
insegne, che questo non si potea ricovrire. E quando mi domandavano
“Per cui t’ha così distrutto questo Amore?”, ed io sorridendo li guar-
dava, e nulla dicea loro (4.1–3)
I soon became of so frail and weak a condition that many friends wor-
ried about my appearance; and many who were filled with envy sought
at once to know what I wanted wholly to conceal from others. And I,
aware of the malicious questioning that they put to me, through the
will of Love, who commanded me according to the counsel of rea-
son, replied that Love it was who had so guided me. I spoke of Love
because I bore on my face so many of his signs that it could not be
concealed. And when they asked, “For whom has this Love so ravaged
you?”, I regarded them smiling and said nothing. (Trans. Cervigni
and Vasta 53)

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 98 St ua rt Cur r a n

The second is from a letter Shelley wrote to Charles Ollier on February

12, 1821, accompanying the manuscript of Epipsychidion and direct-
ing him how to publish it:

It is to be published simply for the esoteric few; and I make its author
a secret, to avoid the malignity of those who turn sweet food into
poison; transferring all they touch into the corruption of their own
natures. My wish with respect to it is, that it should be printed imme-
diately in the simplest form, and merely one hundred copies: those who
are capable of judging and feeling rightly with respect to a composi-
tion of so abstruse a nature, certainly do not arrive at that number—
among those, at least, who would ever be excited to read an obscure
and anonymous production; and it would give me no pleasure that the
vulgar should read it. (Letters of Shelley 2:263)

The point in juxtaposing these passages is to demonstrate the extent

to which Shelley, in representing his purposes to Ollier, has accom-
plished a remarkable internalization of the character of the Vita
Nuova, where Dante continually presents himself as hiding himself
from the multitude who gossip among themselves and misconstrue
his motives as merely carnal. We might add to this example the care-
fully distanced language of the preface:

The present Poem, like the Vita Nuova of Dante is sufficiently intel-
ligible to a certain class of readers without a matter-of-fact history of
the circumstances to which it relates; and to a certain other class it
must ever remain incomprehensible, from a defect of a common organ
of perception for the ideas of which it treats. (P&P 392)

In an earlier draft, the determining phraseology is even stronger—

“it must & ought ever to remain incomprehensible” (Complete Works
2:376–377, emphasis added), indicating the pains Shelley took to
enforce the allegorical character of Epipsychidion. In the Vita Nuova
the more that Dante refuses a simple explanation, paradoxically, the
more ineffable is the notion of Love he conveys. That, of course, is
exactly the point Shelley labors to make.
It took many years after Shelley’s pointed citation of the Vita
Nuova in his prefatory note before Timothy Webb was led to under-
take a systematic comparison of the two poems. He was followed in
knowledgeable accounts by Earl Schulze and Alan Weinberg, so that
we now have in the critical literature a solid foundation for under-
standing the ways in which Shelley strove to accommodate as well as

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 Da n t e , a n d t h e R e n e wa bl e L i f e 99

to diverge from Dante’s model. But Webb and Weinberg, the latter
with something of an apologetic endnote, insist that the biographi-
cal transferences of the poem cannot be ignored (Webb, Violet in the
Crucible 200; Weinberg 282, n.22). I would propose, against that
admonition, that we must do exactly that. The original readers of
Epipsychidion in England, particularly the Συνετοí or elect readers
Shelley imagined for this text (Letters of Shelley 2:363), as he had like-
wise for Prometheus Unbound, would, with a few obvious exceptions,
have had no familiarity with the poet’s experiences in Italy and, there-
fore, no basis for reading the poem within the biographical strait-jacket
that scholarly diligence has devised for it. Indeed, as the poem was
published anonymously, most readers would have had no familiarity
with the poet at all. A contemporary Italian like Francesco Pacchiani,
who held the chair in logic and metaphysics at the University of Pisa,
who was confessor to the Viviani family and tutor to its children,
and who both introduced the Shelleys to Emilia and provided the
poet with his figure of Emily as “Poor captive bird!” (Epipsychidion l.
5), however surprised he might have been by the sexual tenor of the
poem, would surely have read Epipsychidion, through his formal train-
ing as well as his clerical asceticism, within the perspective provided
by Dantean allegory. Thus, to dismiss the biographical template is not
to distort our reading but, rather, exactly the opposite, to restore the
actual conditions in which this poem was originally invested.
But some will say, that still leaves us with a Sun, a Moon, a Comet,
at least one lodestar, in addition to the “many mortal forms” in which
the poet “rashly sought / The shadow of that idol of [his] thought”
(ll. 267–268), all pursued at some point in his harried emotional
existence. These, they would aver, surely cannot be ignored: in what
Shelley a year after writing Epipsychidion called “an idealized history
of my life and feelings” (Letters of Shelley 2:434), they must have con-
crete embodiments.2 My answer is, “not in this poem.” It does not
necessarily follow that we need wholly to abstract Shelley’s principal
figures, as Earl Wasserman does, improbably forcing the poem into a
context provided by the Song of Songs and collapsing it into a stark
polarity between “the Moon of sublunary mutability and the Sun of
transcendent eternity” (439), even though certainly Shelley observes
and finally valorizes a dialectical tension between these “Twin Spheres
of light who rule this passive Earth, / This world of love, this me; and
into birth / Awaken all its fruits and flowers” (ll. 345–347). What
matters most is not, I would argue, where any such figure stands as an
allegorical counter within the patterning of Shelley’s solar or sidereal

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 100 St ua rt Cur r a n

system, but their sheer number. In addition, in this Shelley follows

and extends the model of Dantean allegory. We might surmise, as
well, that the several conflicting accounts of the nature of Love in
Plato’s Symposium, which he translated in 1818, must have come to
his mind as reinforcing such emphatic diversity.
To engage Epipsychidion in this mode, especially given the exis-
tence of several valuable exegeses within a Dantean context on which
we can already rely, does not require close reading as much as it does
an understanding of what the poets share as a general tenor and in
their textual strategies. Shelley himself in his preface, in a custom-
ary manner that this late in our experience of him we ought to have
learned to recognize, virtually tells us how to approach his poem.
First, he cites the Vita Nuova as a model for readers to bear in mind.
And then, in a move that otherwise is without logical purpose, Shelley
quotes the conclusion—admittedly beautifully written—of a transla-
tion he had made (and never fully published elsewhere) of a second
Dante poem, the first canzone from Il Convito, beginning, “Voi
ch’intendendo il terzo ciel movete, / udite il ragionar ch’è nel mio
core.” Shelley translates this without elaboration as, “You who intel-
ligent the third Heaven move, / Hear the discourse which is within
my heart.” This is the by-now famous poem in which Dante laments
to those who preside over the sphere of Venus, the reserve of idealized
love, that, accompanied by much agony, a new love has replaced what
he had felt for Beatrice. Webb, who first printed Shelley’s translation
of this poem, bridles a little at Dante’s allegorization of this second
figure as Philosophy (Violet in the Crucible 296–297), but that is how
Dante himself characterized the poem in a later commentary, one to
which Shelley had access. Shelley knew that this was not the end of
the matter either, since Beatrice herself was to be reconfigured once
more as divine theology in the Paradiso, where, one presumes, she
finally trumps human philosophy. What Shelley’s prefatory citation
calls attention to, however, is not a particularized allegorical reading,
but rather the way in which Dante, both in the Vita Nuova and in his
later writings multiplies the number of idealized figures whom Dante
pursues and to whom he finds himself devoted. In the Vita Nuova
there is, early on, a woman whom he uses as a screen to disguise his
devotion to Beatrice (5.3); after Beatrice’s demise another woman,
particularized by her compassion for his wretched state, threatens
to usurp Beatrice’s position in his heart (35.2). Dante juxtaposes
Beatrice with such other figures so as to underscore how constant is
the impulse to love even where we would remark what we call incon-
stancy in its objects. Shelley surely had this example in mind when,

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 Da n t e , a n d t h e R e n e wa bl e L i f e 101

contemplating in retrospect the circumstances that brought him to

write Epipsychidion, he remarked

I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and
I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it,
consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps
eternal. (Letters of Shelley 2:434)

The multiplicity of potential objects for one’s love is an essential

core to the argument of Epipsychidion.

True Love in this differs from gold and clay,

That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths; ’tis like thy light,
Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human phantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
Of its reverberated lightning. Narrow
The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
The life that wears, the spirit that creates
One object, and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity. (ll. 160–173)

The citation of imagination within this litany should remind us that

composition of the Defence of Poetry is only a few weeks away. There
poetry replicates these “thousand prisms and mirrors”: “It awakens
and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thou-
sand unapprehended combinations of thought” (517). Immediately
thereafter Shelley makes the connection with the Love that he cel-
ebrates in Epipsychidion: “The great secret of morals is Love; or a
going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with
the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person not our
own. A man to be greatly good must imagine intensely and com-
prehensively . . . The great instrument of moral good is the imagina-
tion” (517). Going out of our own nature, essential as it is to the
operations of both imagination and love, has a moral end because
it involves the free giving of the self to what it contemplates. That
voiding of the self is fundamentally recreative, since it requires a con-
tinual reconstruction of the self and an attendant recalibration of all
its surroundings.

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 102 St ua rt Cur r a n

The lengthy allegorical account of shifting lodestars, Shelley’s

“idealized history,” then, should be read not so much as a disguised
account of what might be vulgarly termed his love life but as the
continuing evolution of a prototypical human being undergoing the
incessant transformations by which love manifests itself within one’s
psychic life. As others, Schulze especially, have emphasized, Shelley
distinguishes himself from Dante by emphasizing the physical dimen-
sions of love, but as the extraordinary sexual imagery of his imagined
island paradise makes clear, the physical is not meant to be equated
with mere carnality. Rather, it is seen as a means to a higher unity, of
the sort that Shelley had painstakingly rendered in his translation of
Plato’s Symposium in his first year in Italy.

We shall become the same, we shall be one

Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?
One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew,
Till like two meteors of expanding flame,
Those spheres instinct with it become the same,
Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still
Burning, yet ever inconsumable (573–579).

The key concept here is of transfiguration, of being formed anew

within what Shelley calls “that calm circumference of bliss” (550).
That this is how he conceived of Dante’s aim throughout his career is
made explicitly evident in Shelley’s final tribute to his predecessor, in
late lines from the The Triumph of Life:

Behold a wonder worthy of the rhyme

Of him who from the lowest depths of Hell
Through every Paradise and through all glory
Love led serene, and who returned to tell
In words of hate and awe the wondrous story
How all things are transfigured, except Love . . . (ll. 471–476)

There are two extensions of this notion of transfiguration that dis-

tinguish the arena of Epipsychidion. The first is the way in which a
transfiguration is by its nature a reconfiguration, both of the self and
of what the self contemplates. This might explain the way in which
Emily, in this poem, defies any rigidity of conception. Shelley begins
Epipsychidion apostrophizing her with a dizzying array of figures
beginning with “Sweet Spirit” (l. 1); then, adopting Pacchiani’s fig-
ure of the captive bird, as a “Nightingale” (l. 10); then, resorting

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 Da n t e , a n d t h e R e n e wa bl e L i f e 103

to metonymy, as a “spirit-winged Heart” (l. 13), followed by her

transcendental assumption as a “Seraph of Heaven” (l. 21)—all this
within twenty-one lines. By line 71 he has employed twenty-eight
such individual figures. In the end his inability to render any single
quality that energizes his devotion and his poetry forces Shelley to fall
back on the category that unifies all this figural displacement: Emily
is “A Metaphor of Spring and Youth and Morning” (l. 120) but still,
and unavoidably, “a Metaphor.” If we parse that word carefully, it
represents in its Greek roots a carrying across—which is to say once
again, a transfiguration, a going out of one’s nature.
Yet in Shelley’s later poetry there is always a counterthrust to the
creative elaborations of figuration, one, as I noted earlier, he shares
with Dante, a recognition that all diction, as necessary as it is, is by
its nature inadequate to the task it assumes. As the poem reaches
for a transcendent climax in its edenic bower, it collapses of its own
weight.

The winged words, on which my soul would pierce

Into the height of Love’s rare Universe
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire (ll. 588–590)

This sense of inadequacy shares with it the inadequacy of the

solitary mind that turns to words to discover itself and relate to its
surroundings. Part of how one renews oneself, in this conception,
is to write oneself, thus in a second sense to reconfigure the self.
No sooner is the self written, however, than, like love, it must be
rewritten. Dante’s initial sonnet in the Vita Nuova, “A ciascun’alma
presa e gentil core” (3.10–12), is written specifically to be reinscribed
by other poets in his circle. Throughout his developing narrative
Dante continually centers attention on the act of inscription through
a poetic closure to each episode, emphasizing the importance of his
bearing nuanced witness to the alterations in the nature of his love.
Even after the death of Beatrice he reveals himself, like Shelley at
the end of Epipsychidion, as unable to continue in his customary cre-
ativity and suddenly breaks off his poetic composition. Although the
work concludes enigmatically by announcing its title, “Qui finisce
la Vita Nuova di Dante Alighieri” (42.4)—Here ends the new life of
Dante Alighieri—the renewing life is what Dante is actually inscrib-
ing moment-by-moment throughout the work’s progression.
If one locates Epipsychidion not just within a particularized series
of events in Pisa but rather within the context of the texts that will
follow within weeks of its composition, Adonais and the Defence of

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 104 St ua rt Cur r a n

Poetry, Shelley’s emphasis on the rudiments of creativity, what draws

it forth and what it attempts to realize, is the constant in each of these
works. In each the creative process is fundamental to the renewal of
the self, and these efforts of recreation are themselves, in the words
of the Defence, “episodes to that great poem, which all poets, like
the cooperating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the
beginning of the world” (522). They are, as this amazing metaphor
indicates, not static entities but rather always in motion, always in the
process of renewal, through all time.3 It is here, I believe, and not in
the particularized details of Shelley’s biography, that we should locate
the essential impetus behind Epipsychidion.

Notes
1. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat.
2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002) 526. Unless otherwise indi-
cated, all further references to Shelley’s poetry and prose are drawn
from this edition and cited by page number, or by line or stanza and
canto.
2. It can be no accident that in choosing this language Shelley exactly
repeats the formulation by which he had characterized the Vita Nuova
in A Defence of Poetry: “Dante understood the secret things of love
even more than Petrarch. His Vita Nuova is an inexhaustible fountain
of purity of sentiment and language: it is the idealized history of that
period, and those intervals of his life which were dedicated to love”
(Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 525).
3. The metaphor of fire that Shelley employs to characterize the islanded
union of the lovers in Epipsychidion explicitly emphasizes an irre-
ducibly kinetic nature that conflates temporalities: “One passion in
twin-hearts, which grows and grew, / . . . ever still / Burning, yet ever
inconsumable” (ll. 575, 578–579).

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 Chapter Eight

Th e Poe t ry of P h i l ol o g y :
Bu rc k h a r d t ’s C I V I L I Z A T I O N O F T H E
R E N A I S S A N C E I N I T A LY a n d M a ry
Sh e l l e y ’s VA L P E R G A
Tilot tama Rajan

I n his 1860 book The Civilization [Kultur] of the Renaissance in

Italy, Jacob Burckhardt argues that because Italy had no overarching
system of government, it was free to create different political forms
through its multiplicity of competing despotisms and republics.
Paradoxically, the very fragmentation of Italy allowed for the birth
of individualism, “personality,” and political experimentation—an
experimentation marked by Burckhardt’s use of the term “art” to
describe both the Italian states and concomitantly their fascination
with war. Yet Italy by the same token could never consolidate itself
as a nation and did not build on these experiments (69–71, 79, 98).
Its wars constantly disintegrated what its art—in the broad sense—
had produced. For war, as Jacqueline Rose argues, marks a “limit” to
claims of “absolute knowledge,” even as such claims are “offered as
one cause—if not the cause—of war” (16–18).
For Burckhardt, then, the Italian Renaissance never becomes
the “adequate embodiment of the Idea,” to evoke Hegel’s descrip-
tion of classicism: the position in which, according to Julia Lupton,
Burckhardt puts the Renaissance between the Middle Ages and
modernity in his tacit version of Hegel’s three-part cultural scheme

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 106 Ti l o t t a m a R aj a n

(8–9).1 In Hegel’s Aesthetics classicism moves beyond the indetermi-

nacy of the Idea in the Symbolic phase, and synchronizes inside and
outside; yet in Hegel’s concave dialectic it is only the midpoint of the
historical triad. It is then superseded by the Romantic as a return to
the dissonance of spirit and the material forms available to it (77–81),
as if Hegel recognizes that the adequate embodiment of the Idea is
itself an inadequate idea. But if Hegel disavows his own resistance
to perfectibility, Burckhardt embraces it when he criticizes Hegel for
seeking “the affirmative in which the negative vanishes” (Reflections
19). Yet despite this criticism, and the more materialist and empiri-
cal approach that we can also associate both with the increasing
dominance of the novel in the middle of the nineteenth century
and the shift from philosophy to history in German universities,
Burckhardt’s work, in Ernst Gombrich’s words, can still be described
as a “Hegelianism without metaphysics” (26). For Burckhardt also
speaks, in residually Hegelian terms, of a history that is inhabited
deep down, by a “spirit” that is all the time “building a new house,”
whose “outward casing” will again and again disintegrate (Reflections
37). And in his Letters, distinguishing what he calls “contemplation,”
which is oriented to “the concrete, to visible nature, and to history,”
from “speculation,” which understands things “from the standpoint
of first principles,” Burckhardt nevertheless uses the vocabulary of
German Idealism when he says that “the development of the spirit
to freedom, has become my highest conviction.” “I respect specula-
tion as in every epoch one of the highest expressions of the spirit,” he
writes, “only instead of Speculation itself, I am looking for its correla-
tive in history.” And this correlative Burckhardt finds in the “facta” of
history. “To me history is poetry. . . . [To] you philosophers . . . history
is a source of knowledge, a science, because you see, or think you see,
the primum agens where I only see mystery and poetry” (50–51).
Placing it within a broader theoretical spectrum, this paper sug-
gests that Burckhardt’s reading of the Renaissance is one lens
through which to view Mary Shelley’s historiographical project and
her fascination with early Renaissance Italy in Valperga: Or, the Life
and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823), published
five years after Burckhardt was born. Like Burckhardt, who accord-
ing to Gombrich, “collected seven hundred excerpts from Vasari’s
Lives” and other sources, “cutting up his notebooks in little slips
for use in appropriate places” (18), Shelley read “fifty old books”
to write Valperga (Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 2:592). She
thus developed a method that, rather than being organized by a
master-narrative, was anti-foundationalist in the form that Foucault

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 Th e Poe t r y of P h i l ol o g y 107

sometimes characterizes as “genealogy” (“Nietzsche” 139–140) and

sometimes as “general” rather than “total history” (Archeology 3–10).
Like Burckhardt, Shelley was interested in the fragmented political
geography of Italy at a time when Walter Scott was using the his-
torical novel in the service of total history to canonize the British
nation-state. And like Burckhardt’s Civilization, Shelley’s novel is an
encyclopedic bricolage of the political, the historical, and the aes-
thetic, temporarily focalized through the passions of three distinctive
individuals whose emergence as individuals is possible only against
the backdrop of Italy’s fragmentation.
Philology, which Nietzsche described as “ephexis or undecisive-
ness in interpretation” (169), is one point of convergence between
Shelley’s and Burckhardt’s projects. Burckhardt’s presentation of
Renaissance life, which he himself describes as a “string of marginal
notes, . . . extending over some years” (Civilization 271), does not
reach conclusions. He provides a cross-section, rather than a “his-
tory” in the nineteenth century sense of a coherent narrative. For
as Martin Rudwick explains, before the French Revolution history
involved an account not necessarily tied to a sense of time (53).
Burckhardt’s information takes the form of an array; his arrange-
ment is encyclopedic and conjunctive, and does not use a logic of
sequence and subordination. Implicit in his method is, therefore, a
historiography that sets itself against the more teleological history of
spirit’s self-organization that was an available and indeed dominant
model at the time, even if the seamless functioning of that model in
Hegel and German Idealism is often complicated. This historiogra-
phy is spelled out by Burckhardt in his Reflections on History, where
he distinguishes his work from Hegel’s, noting that he takes “trans-
verse section of history in as many directions as possible,” rather than
constructing the “longitudinal sections” characteristic of the “phi-
losophy of history current hitherto.” His work, he insists, has noth-
ing to do with “system” or “theodicy”: “The philosophy of history
is a centaur, a contradiction in terms, for history coordinates, and
hence is unphilosophical, while philosophy subordinates, and is hence
unhistorical” (Reflections on History 32–33).
Shelley’s choice of Italy as the scene for her reinvention of the histor-
ical novel may also have to do with the uniquely Italian focus on what
Burckhardt calls the state as a work of art. By this term Burckhardt does
not mean that the state is to be conceived as a totality: whether that
totality has been achieved or is still coming into being, as in Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right. Indeed contrary to Hegel, Burckhardt does not
focus on the state but on that lower grade of organized collective life

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 108 Ti l o t t a m a R aj a n

that Hegel calls civil society: bürgerliche Gesellschaft, which for Hegel
is “atomistic” (Philosophy of Mind 257). Hegel’s understanding of civil
society versus the state is modeled on his distinction between the plant
and the animal or human organism from his early Jena System to the
Encyclopedia. The plant “fall[s] apart” into a “number of individuals”
and is “impotent to hold its members in its power.” By contrast, the
animal organism, like the state, is a whole that subsumes its differ-
ences, synchronously and teleologically. To do this it must have dif-
ferences, but conveniently the rights of the part and whole do not
come into conflict, as each member is “reciprocally end and means”
(Philosopohy of Nature 276, 303).
In contrast to Hegel, who criticizes civil society as an aggregate of
individual self-interests (Philosopohy of Mind 256–257), Burckhardt
sees the structural category of individualism as being one of the great
achievements of the Renaissance, even if its particular manifestations
(in the Borgias for instance) were disastrous. By the state as a work of
art, Burckhardt, therefore, does not mean the fusion of aesthetics and
governmentality within a traditionally organicist model that Marc
Redfield, following de Man, calls aesthetic ideology. Aesthetics in this
form participates in “processes of mediation” that are properly called
“technical,” becoming a technics that produces a certain kind of sub-
ject within the collective subject of history (16). Rather Burckhardt
means a kind of inventiveness: a conscious focus on constructing,
even deconstructing, the state that becomes possible precisely within
the atomistic structure of Italy, as well as a formal theorization of
policy and statecraft that is also experimental, and of which a “consti-
tutional artist” such as Machiavelli is the prime example (Civilization
71 ). Importantly, despite his fascination with Italy, Burckhardt has
little positive to say about it. “Intrigues, armaments, leagues, corrup-
tion and treason make up the outward history of Italy at this period,”
he writes (74), in a comment that resonates with Shelley’s presenta-
tion of how Castruccio’s brief consolidation of fascist power is dissi-
pated by the schemes of Tripalda. Certain forms of statecraft in Italy,
Burckhardt writes, “attained a perfection” that is not without its own
“beauty and grandeur.” But “as a whole” Italy “gives us the impres-
sion of a bottomless abyss” (74). For no single form of state emerges
untarnished from its history. Indeed the republican state-form, which
Burckhardt prefers, does not achieve the same level of development
as the tyrannies. Florence, for which he has the highest praise as the
“most modern state in the world” (65), is essentially a failed state,
riven by the conflict of the Guelphs and Ghibellines that also forms
the backdrop to Shelley’s novel.

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 Th e Poe t r y of P h i l ol o g y 109

What then does Burckhardt find in Italy? Perhaps precisely that

it is the scene of multiple unrealized potentialities. The “work”
of art allows the state to be the product of “reflection and careful
adaptation” (73), but without any single form of state being perma-
nently implemented. Briefly Burckhardt sees other European coun-
tries—like France, England, and Spain—as having transformed the
feudal system into a “unified monarchy,” or as having given it the
outward appearance of cohesiveness in the form of “empire,” as in
Germany (19). But Italy benefitted from the fact that the papacy was
strong enough to hinder “national unity,” yet not strong enough “to
bring about that unity” (19–20). Just as Coleridge said that lacking
England’s “deep interest in the affair of the whole” and her sense
of “nationality,” Germany had many universities and was “forever
thinking” (Lectures 2.574), so Burckhardt feels that Italy produced a
“multitude of political units,” republican and despotic, and thus pos-
sessed a certain political vitality. To borrow his description of Siena,
Italy was a “workshop” (Civilization 73) for political forms whose
inadequacy deferred any end of history.
From this perspective, Burckhardt is particularly interested in the
despots of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, a focus that makes his
retrospect on Italy different from Sismondi’s emphasis on the repub-
lics, and provides a unique perspective on reading Shelley. For Shelley
takes as her hero Castruccio “prince” of Lucca, a petty “tyrant”
(in the Greek sense), pushing the republic of Florence to the mar-
gins of her novel. Moreover, unlike Sismondi she does not celebrate
Florence’s return to prosperity after the death of Castruccio, nor does
she note that Lucca itself returned to being a republic. In a curious
way Sismondi’s history risked leading to a condescending picture of
a once republican Italy overrun and debased in modern times into
a touristic relic: a binary we find in Byron’s representations of both
Greece and Italy. By contrast Shelley’s seemingly perverse interest
in the potential of the Signoria in Lucca—a compromise formation
between local autonomy and despotism—results in a less linear and
more dialectical view of Italian history, though it is a deeply negative
dialectic that refuses both the growing despotism of modernity and
the closure of hypostatizing a lost republican moment in the past.
Significantly, although Sismondi writes of the “middle ages” and
Burckhardt writes of the “Renaissance,” and although in terms of our
own periodization Shelley’s novel occupies an interregnum between
the two, for Romantics such as Hegel and the Schlegels, both alike
would have been postclassical or “Romantic,” which is to say unfin-
ished, inhabited by something still to come.

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 110 Ti l o t t a m a R aj a n

In line with this Romanticism, Burckhardt is interested in the

despotisms, perhaps for the same reasons that Bataille in “The
Psychological Structure of Fascism” later valorizes fascism over mon-
archy, as an expression of heterogeneity. Thus Burckhardt emphasizes
Italy’s unique tolerance of illegitimate birth. Unlike England, which
simulated dynastic lawfulness, Italy often admitted bastards “to the
succession,” a prime example being Ferrara (Civilization 30, 48),
where the bastard prophetess Beatrice in Valperga is briefly allowed to
open a new line of thinking. The most admired form of illegitimacy,
Burckhardt notes, was “presented by the condottiere” who, whatever
“his origin, raised himself to the position of an independent ruler”
(31), as Castruccio does in Shelley’s novel. Italy is also notoriously the
scene of crime. Here the more conservative Burckhardt, a critic of
the French Revolution, joins hands with the far more radical Godwin
in seeing in this “contempt of law” (Civilization 284) an anarchism
that contests the force of institution. Alongside this democratizing
fascism, where a “servant could become a king,” and which fasci-
nates and repels British writers from Middleton and Rowley’s The
Changeling onwards, women also had a higher place in Italy than in
Britain. “There was no question of woman’s rights or female eman-
cipation,” Burckhardt writes, “simply because the thing itself was
a matter of course”: “the great Italian women . . . had the mind and
courage of men” (Civilization 251).
For Burckhardt, then, Italy is the scene of an unbinding that is
the beginning of the “modern spirit” (Civilization 344): a spirit very
different from the Habermasian modernity and modernization pro-
moted by Scott in Waverley. For this spirit never consolidates itself
within a single paradigm, however diffuse, like commercial society.
Rather it consists of loose ends, beginnings to which one can go back,
within an economy of the fragment described by Friedrich Schlegel,
when he writes that fragments are “tendencies, ruins, and raw materi-
als”: promises of a system that they project as “subjective embryo[s],”
and also marks of its limitations (1, 20). Or as Julia Lupton explains,
commenting on Benjamin rather than Schlegel, the ruin “constitutes
a kind of rebirth,” wherein rebirth consists precisely in ruin, “namely,
the survival of a work beyond its period of cultural currency.” This
survival blocks the narrative of modernity, since for Benjamin “ruins
do not simply represent the devastated foundations of new and more
glorious buildings” but “persist beyond their supersedure” (Lupton
28). Lupton, to be sure, sees Burckhardt in very different terms from
Benjamin and Warburg. Picking up his own image of Italy as Esau,
“the first-born among the sons of Europe” (Civilization 98), she

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 Th e Poe t r y of P h i l ol o g y 111

sees his humanist Kulturgeschichte as having absorbed Italy’s falling

short into a straightforward narrative of modernity, in which the very
“prematurity” of its innovations “makes possible the maturation of
Europe” (Lupton 35).2 But leaving aside the placement of Burckhardt
in post-Hegelian art-history, I want to insist here on the usefulness of
his presentation of Italy to a historiography also articulated by Percy
Shelley, when he writes of time in terms of the shadow, the ghost or
Geist, “which futurity casts upon the present” (Shelley’s Poetry and
Prose 535). For both Shelleys history is a future haunted by a past that
bears the future within it, but containing as much shadow and ruin
as it does seed.
As a mise-en-abime of how Italy’s art falls short, it is worth paus-
ing over Burckhardt’s discussion of the emphasis on festivals as a site
where the Italians “developed their artistic powers” (Civilization
256), because Shelley too gives a certain prominence to such ceremo-
nial forms of collective life. Chapter Two of Valperga describes the
representation of Hell on May 1, 1304 in Florence, when the Ponte
al Carraia broke down under the weight of the spectators (65–67), an
episode also mentioned by Burckhardt. Of significance here is both
writers’ choice of an event that falls apart. In addition, Valperga’s first
volume ends with an elaborate account of Euthanasia holding court,
as a variety of “story-tellers, improvisatori, musicians . . . jugglers and
buffoons” perform for her (173).This somewhat tedious account is at
odds with Godwin’s editing of the novel to reduce the epic and exten-
sive elements that resembled the method of Scott, and his preference
for the intensively psychological in the relationship of Euthanasia and
Beatrice. It may reflect Shelley’s desire to make use of her research into
“fifty old books.” But beyond that, her empiricism, and her bifocal
inclusion of the psychological story alongside a history of Castruccio’s
career framed within a broader cross-section of Italian history, also
reflects a reluctance to succumb to a narrativity that could only pro-
duce a story of disaster, given that the lives of all three protagonists
end in death. The attention to documentation, whether of events or
festivals, is thus part of a historiography of unconcludedness. This
being said, the inclusion of the court episode, simply because it ought
to be included for thoroughness, is symptomatic of a frustration with
this part of Italian cultural life. For Burckhardt, both the “secular
drama” and the “higher poetical development of the mystery” were
inhibited by the Italian passion for “extravagant” external “display”
(Civilization 260). Perhaps like Burckhardt, Shelley too feels the lim-
itations of “art” as it exists at the time, whether in such practices of
everyday life as festivals and pageants, or in the high art of Dante to

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 112 Ti l o t t a m a R aj a n

which she pays formal respect at the beginning of the novel (Valperga
57). Indeed the fact that her only other reference to Dante involves a
spectacle that falls apart stands in marked contrast to the Romantic
idealization of Dante, for instance by Friedrich Schelling, who sees
The Divine Comedy as “a genre in and for itself,” “the most complete
interpenetration of everything” and “the entire genre of modern
poesy” (239–240).
In the remaining space I can only sketch what is opened up by
reading Shelley’s promissory pessimism with Burckhardt rather
than, for instance, with Godwin’s traumatic revision of the his-
torical novel in Mandeville (1817), which is set in the interregnum
between the execution of Charles I and the Restoration, and is, thus,
also concerned with a period of republican political experimenta-
tion. Shelley’s novel unfolds on two planes. On the “external” plane
that Burckhardt associates with history (Burckhardt’s Letters 49), it
provides a general history of Italy in the early modern period. This
history unfolds around the minor figure of Castruccio, Prince of
Lucca: a state that Burckhardt sees as insignificant a century later
(Civilization 73). But the novel is also the inner narrative of two
women not noted in “public histories,” and from whose “private
chronicles” Shelley draws in questioning the very concept of general
history as public history (Valperga 439). Euthanasia, an “indepen-
dent chieftainness and sovereign” in the world of men (252), and a
Guelph who admires Florence because of its patronage of the arts,
combines Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on the rights of woman with
Percy Shelley’s cultural idealism. Her name evokes both Asia in
Prometheus Unbound and Godwin’s hope for a euthanasia of govern-
ment. Betrothed to Castruccio, but growing steadily disillusioned
with him as he becomes enmeshed in the ambitions of realpolitik,
Euthanasia is Shelley’s only example of feminist autonomy, as she is
neither contained within marriage nor limited by destructive pas-
sion, like her rival and dark interpreter Beatrice.
Yet there is something old-fashioned about Euthanasia’s courtly
and feudal life, and her sovereignty functions only within the limited
realm of a small principality. Once she moves from culture to history
and politics, and becomes involved with Tripalda in the conspiracy
against Castruccio, her aims grow incoherent and her authority is
compromised. Moreover, admirable as she is on the private level, she
becomes interesting as a character only when her aestheticized ideal-
ism is challenged by her deep bond with Beatrice. Beatrice, whom
Shelley links to “the unfortunate Beatrice Cenci” (Valperga 200), is
the child of two female heretics. She is adopted and brought up in

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 Th e Poe t r y of P h i l ol o g y 113

the Catholic faith by the Bishop of Ferrara when her second mother,
Magfreda, is burnt. But at the encouragement of the Bishop’s sister,
the Marchesana, she constitutes herself as a female prophetess: a very
different but no less impressive public figure than Euthanasia. At the
peak of her power and charisma, she falls in love with Castruccio,
the expansionist ruler of Lucca. But when he deserts her, she loses
faith in her powers, degenerating into hysteria and madness, becom-
ing a pawn in the hands of the Macchiavellian witch Mandragola,
and then dying. Finally there is Castruccio himself: a minor paral-
lel to Caesar, Cromwell, and Napoleon in the way he ascends from
consul to prince, thus perverting the early ideal of a commonwealth.
Castruccio enters and exits the women’s stories as an object of desire,
though we “can know nothing” of his inner feelings (Valperga 439).
Only in his early life do we glimpse what Godwin in “Of History
and Romance” calls the “subtle peculiarities” of an “individual his-
tory” that thereafter is interpellated by the necessities of general his-
tory (History of the Commonwealth 360–361), though for Godwin
this necessity itself is contingently formed by rank, circumstance, and
historical period rather than being anything innate. And though, like
power in Foucault, Godwinian necessity is profoundly decenterd, a
process without a subject.
The terms “individual” and “general history” are ones Godwin
uses in “Of History and Romance,” where he distinguishes the gen-
eral history practiced by Scottish Enlightenment historians such as
Hume and Robertson, which can be mapped in terms of “regulari-
ties” and “recurrent laws,” from individual history as a site of varia-
tion and of “contingency”—of possibility, but also increasingly of
trauma (History of the Commonwealth 360–363). In Mandeville the
general history of the Cromwellian period is pushed out of focus, its
possibilities deformed by the pathological necessity of an individual
history that usurps the foreground. Like Shelley a few years later,
Godwin also makes his hero someone from the other side: a tormented
Royalist in Godwin’s case, and a potential despot in Shelley’s.3 Like
Mandeville, Valperga is also organized by an asymmetry between
individual and general history, and tellingly it is the individual that
Godwin wanted to emphasize in shortening it for publication. He
was struck by Euthanasia and Beatrice, but complained that the novel
“contain[ed] the quantity of four volumes of ‘Waverley’.”4 But signifi-
cantly Shelley herself never allows the vividness of individual charac-
ter to take over completely from the pedantry of historical detail—the
philology that Buckhardt saw as the “poetry” in history (Burckhardt’s
Letters 49, 51), or the poetry of a world of prose.

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 114 Ti l o t t a m a R aj a n

To read Shelley with Burckhardt, then, is to resist the tendency,

based on following the narratives of the female protagonists, to view
the novel in “longitudinal sections” that emphasize the closing down
of each character’s possibilities by the necessity of death. Rather it is to
organize the novel in transverse sections that also allow for a general
history of the individual that has yet to find a place in general history,
a dialectic between the two histories whose possibilities are fore-
closed by Mandeville’s claustrophobic focus on a single pathological
individual. For Euthanasia is not described as definitively drowning;
rather she is “lost” and “never heard of more,” and “sleep[s] in the
oozy cavern of the ocean” (Valperga 437–438), as the text’s materials
are returned to the cultural unconscious. They are restored, in other
words, to a world inhabited by the “shadows of all forms that think
and live,” to evoke Percy’s resonant phrase in Prometheus Unbound,
where he describes a world “underneath the grave” (Act I, l.197), in
which the real reverts into its image and the actual is returned to its
potential. Here the ruins of Euthanasia’s project remain fragments
to which we can go back, as it is unclear whether she lived too early
or too late: whether as a female ruler she is an anticipatory figure, or
whether her republicanism and idealism make her a nostalgic figure
at odds with modernity.
Beatrice, to be sure, is “ruined” by her involvement with
Castruccio. But the novel’s use of the witch to trivialize her pro-
phetic power and the Jacobin legacy it figures in the period of the
Regency contrasts strongly with Shelley’s romanticization, earlier in
the novel, of heresy as the socially produced, anamorphic distortion
of a still censored and inexpressible female creativity. Thus Beatrice
too survives her author’s move to dissolve and dissipate what she has
created. Although Beatrice’s power rests on a (self)-deception—the
subterfuge used by the Bishop to protect her when she is asked by the
Inquisition to walk on hot coals—the real reason for her fall is not the
falsity of her pretensions, but her sexuality. For Beatrice loses faith in
herself only when Castruccio leaves her, after which her author too
loses confidence in her own imagination. Significantly, Shelley never
has to suspend her disbelief in Beatrice’s “parents,” Wilhelmina and
Magfreda, because they remain outside the sexual circuit. Beatrice’s
loss of faith in herself is thus just as much a misrecognition as her
earlier appropriation of prophetic power, while her author’s manda-
tory demystification of the character can be seen as a falling short
in her art, a contingent necessity of the time at which she was writ-
ing. Finally, though Shelley’s contemporary Sismondi celebrated the
death of Castruccio because of the period of peace and prosperity

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 Th e Poe t r y of P h i l ol o g y 115

it opened for the Guelph state of Florence, Shelley leaves us with a

sense of disappointment at the abrupt termination of his career in
“the maturity of his glory” (Valperga 440). Like Cromwell, who
died on the same day, and whom Godwin later describes in terms
reminiscent of Shelley’s novel as having died prematurely before his
“experiments” could be consolidated, the figure of Castruccio haunts
us with a Byronic potential, even if this potential is only a phantasm
of the affect produced by the very different kinds of love that the two
women bear him.
Here the minor status of the hero of Shelley’s general history is also
significant. Minor literature, as theorized by Deleuze and Guattari,
is not written in a minor language but arises from a minor position
within a major language, thus deterritorializing this language (16). In
this case minor history deterritorializes what was a reality by Shelley’s
time: the discourse of the emergent nation-state alluded to in the
young Castruccio’s “romantic conception of a future union of the
Italian states” (Valperga 250). For this history focuses on Italy a cen-
tury before the period treated by Burckhardt, and thus before the hard-
ening of the distinction we might now make between despotisc states
and republics. Castruccio never actually takes the Macchiavellian title
of “prince.” Everything about his life is premature: while his promise
is unfulfilled, the harm he might cause also never quite comes to pass.
Everything about him is in some sense virtual and unrealized. To be
sure his ascendancy mirrors the recapture of republican by monarchic
impulses that we see in the careers of Cromwell and Caesar, also fig-
ures who interested the Godwin family. But Shelley deals with the
intertwined histories of Lucca and Valperga at a point when national-
ism and the nascent commune are still intertwined within a moment
of potential prior to the inscription of this possibility within a narra-
tive of modernization. It is in this sense that, echoing Deleuze and
Guattari, we can say that as deterritorialization, the story of a minor
career, even if reactionary, “designates . . . the revolutionary conditions
for every literature within the heart of . . . established literature” (18).
“Literature” here means something like what Burckhardt designates
by “poetry,” namely material that lends itself to further writing.
In line with this further writing, the political map of Italy as tra-
versed by Shelley includes a multitude of city states but no nation-
state. It thus contains no dominant state-form, but rather a variety
of emergent and residual forms, including the nascent commune that
never quite comes into being; the republic of culture, Florence, which
seems for the moment unable to sustain itself in the face of moderniza-
tion; and the Signoria of Castruccio, which is not quite a despotism,

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 116 Ti l o t t a m a R aj a n

and whose charismatic leader in some ways foreshadows later figures

such as Garibaldi, thus raising the complex issue of local autonomy
versus government that is part of the relation between nationalism
and “freedom.” It includes, as well, the despotism of the Viscontis,
the forces of German and papal imperialism, and as against the latter,
local bishoprics such as Ferrara, which quietly resist papal domination
and protect a space for dissent in the form of the heretic Beatrice and
her female parents. In this array of possibilities, nothing has quite come
to pass nor has any possibility been definitively negated. This is to say,
that minor history, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words—or we could say
“philology”—destructures and opens the field of history itself, mak-
ing it an archive with “multiple entrances” (3). Shelley “enters” this
field differently, through Castruccio, Beatrice, and Euthanasia. Her
archival work and the “imagination” that, according to Burckhardt,
“fills up the lacunae” of this work (Burckhardt’s Letters 49), allows
us, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, “to discover what other points
our entrance connects to, what crossroads and galleries one passes
through to link two points, what the map of the rhizome is and how
the map is modified if one enters by another point” (3).

Notes
1. I would obviously want to qualify Lupton’s claim that for Burckhardt
the Renaissance, as a resumption of classicism, is an “expressive total-
ity” (7), defined by “the harmonization of subject with object and form
with theme” (8). Rather, Burckhardt evokes Hegel’s notion of classi-
cism only to turn away from it as an analogue for the Renaissance.
2. As Lupton further elaborates, Burckhardt’s Italy “at once resurrects
the ancient past and forms the superseded grounds of the modern
present.” It is “the first born among the sons of modern Europe,” but
in “Burckhardt’s narrative of cultural rebirth, Italy, for all its inno-
vations, is ultimately like Esau, who, logically set up to receive his
father’s blessing (here classical civilization), . . . wittingly and unwit-
tingly facilitates the ascendance of the younger son (the modern
nations of northern Europe)” (12–13, 35).
3. For further discussion of Mandeville see my essay, “The Dis-
Figuration of Enlightenment: War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel
in Godwin’s Mandeville.” Godwinian Moments: From Enlightenment
to Romanticism. Ed. Robert Maniquis and Victoria Myers (U of
Toronto P, 2010).
4. Godwin, letter of February 14, 1823, Abinger papers, Bodleian Dep.
C524, quoted in Hill-Miller, 225 n.3; letter of November 15, 1822,
quoted in Lady Jane Shelley, 904B–904C.

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 Chapter Nine

H e m a ns’s R ec or d of Da n t e:
“Th e M a r e m m a” a n d t h e
I n t e r t e x t ua l Poe t ic s of
P l e n i t u de
Diego Saglia

I n the autumn of 1827, the American artist William E. West visited

Felicia Hemans at her home in Rhyllon, North Wales, and painted
three portraits of the popular poet at the request of Alaric Watts, the
editor of the Literary Souvenir. One of them, later to be used as a
frontispiece engraving in the 1839 Memoirs of the poet by her sister,
represents a woman with elegantly curled hair covered by a white
veil, a high-waisted dress with puffed upper sleeves and gauze lower
sleeves, and a narrow waist restrained by a plain belt. Reclining on a
scroll-ended arm rest, Hemans appears to be dressed in some generic
contemporary, late-Romantic or early-Victorian, style. The overall
effect, however, recalls the Italian Renaissance.1 If this is undoubt-
edly appropriate for the author of The Restoration of the Works of Art
to Italy (1816) and The Vespers of Palermo (1823), still, this image of
the poet (almost) in masquerade also conjures up a scenario of cross-
cultural interference. Hemans’s attire follows contemporary fashion,
but, in keeping with the eclecticism of Regency style, it also sports
an exotic air that partly distances her from a specifically English or
British figurative canon. Presenting her as visually and culturally
ambiguous, the engraved portrait posits Hemans as an intercultural

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 118 Diego Sagli a

subject. At the same time, it intimates how her uses of Italy and
Italian culture function through an interaction of forms of appropria-
tion and ventriloquism.
Even a cursory glance at Hemans’s output amply confirms her pro-
tracted recourse to Italian themes. In poem after poem, she reworked
Italian topics and created intertextual links with Italian literature
and culture more generally.2 For instance, although in Restoration
she clearly speaks from the standpoint of a British poet, she voices
fervently patriotic Italian principles so that the text also reads as a
“quasi-Laureate” intervention in the cultural politics of the Italian
peninsula.3 Her works also assimilate and rewrite Italian literature
by way of translation (e.g., her 1818 Translations from Camoens and
Other Poets features two sonnets by Petrarch) and incorporation
(Restoration, for instance, contains embedded “sonnets” and refer-
ences to Petrarch). Her use of Italy amounts to an assimilation of,
and an identification with, this country and its culture that largely
follows the path traced by Madame de Staël’s Corinne (1807) and its
Anglo-Italian protagonist.4 Indeed, Maria Jane Jewsbury indirectly
defined Hemans as “the Italy of human beings” and remarked that
her “Italian extraction” partly accounted for “the passion which, even
in childhood, she displayed for sculpture and melody”; while Letitia
Landon noted that Hemans’s verse seemed molded on an other,
Italian(ate), set of aesthetic principles that brought it in line with “the
finest order of Italian singing—pure, high, and scientific” (Jewsbury
561, 565).5
However, if Hemans defines Southern cultural geographies (and
Italy in particular) as congenial spaces for women, she also entertains
less accommodating views on Italy, imagining it as a menacing and dan-
gerous place for female subjects. As West’s Italianate painting makes
plain, Hemans occupies an intercultural position, and thus, however
deeply she may identify with Italy as a feminized and female-friendly
geocultural dimension, her works also figure it as a problematic, if not
utterly hostile, dimension. And these premises provide an essential
context for Hemans’s appropriation and reinvention of Dante in “The
Maremma,” a poem first published in the Edinburgh Magazine and
Literary Miscellany in November 1820. This text reworks the brief
and enormously suggestive reference to Pia de’ Tolomei in Purgatorio
5.133, where the Siennese woman informs the wandering poet that
her husband was somehow instrumental in her death in the malaria-
infested Maremma. Hemans takes this typical example of Dante’s
incisively concise art and turns it into a medium-length metrical tale
that recalls other Romantic-period expansions of Italian medieval

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 H e m a n s ’s R e c o r d o f D a n t e 119

texts, such as Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini (1816), William Herbert’s

Pia della Pietra (1820), and Edward Wilmot’s Ugolino (1828), from
Dante, or John Keats’s Isabella, William Wilmot’s Tale of Gismunda
and Guiscardo (1819), and John Hamilton Reynolds’s The Garden of
Florence and The Ladye of Provence (1821), from Boccaccio.
Yet, “The Maremma” is an unusual reinvention of an Italian liter-
ary source, in that Romantic women writers were conspicuously more
attuned to Petrarch than Dante. As Edoardo Zuccato has recently
observed, they were actively “involved in the revival of Petrarch,”
whereas “they generally disliked Dante,” altogether an excessively
“masculine, muscular figure” (Petrarch ix, x). In point of fact, more
female writers read, translated, and rewrote the gentle and plangent
Petrarch than the virile and sinewy Dante, a commonplace distinc-
tion that Ugo Foscolo helped to popularize in his Essays on Petrarch
(1821; 1823). It is equally true, however, that women authors—Anna
Seward, Mary Shelley, and Hemans, for instance—read, discussed,
and rewrote Dante between the 1780s and the 1830s as part of their
interventions on literary heritage, national culture, history, and the
figuration of gender. “The Maremma” offers a significant testimony
of Romantic women’s engagement with Dante’s verse and, therefore,
of an alternative form of discursive transposition of human experi-
ence than the more immediately congenial mode of (post-)Petrarchan
poetics. In addition, Hemans’s poem provides a figuration of Italy
that corrects more familiar notions of this country as an Edenic, fem-
inized cultural geography by making it complicit in the destruction
of the beautiful, innocent, and powerless heroine.
In examining Hemans’s Dantean expansion, this essay concentrates
on a series of interconnected practices ranging from appropriation
and adaptation, to expansion, reinvention, and revision. As it attends
to the poet’s deployment of these textual mechanisms, it throws light
on the complexity and suggestiveness of her engagement with a dif-
ficult poet and one of the founding fathers of literary modernity.
Moreover, by recovering its intersection of several intertexts besides
the Commedia, the essay charts the development of Hemans’s opera-
tion of rewriting out of a dialogic tension between several voices that
defines the poem as a national and cosmopolitan utterance concerned
with the condition of woman in a male-dominated milieu, the issue
of authorial self-positioning and its own cultural status as a “record.”
In this perspective, Hemans’s appropriation and modification of
Dante opens up some significant insights not only into her figuration
of woman, but also her reflection on the memorializing function of
poetry itself.

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 120 Diego Sagli a

“The Maremma” and

the Poetics of “Plenitude”
As a manifestation of the Romantic tendency to the amplification of
medieval sources, “The Maremma” appears not to have pleased the
editors of the recent anthology Dante in English (2005). Their anno-
tations convey a dislike for this unnecessary inflation of Dante’s con-
cise sketch in such remarks as: “Dante says nothing, one way or the
other, about La Pia’s moral character; he says nothing about her at all”
(Dante in English 165). Similar observations cast Hemans’s poem as a
redundant effort and express disapproval of its expansive and expres-
sive mechanisms, which also partly reflects the diminished popularity
of narrative verse and sentimental poetics. Taking an alternative route,
instead, we may envisage her “overflowing” text not as the product
of a poetics of pleonasm, but rather as the expression of a poetics
that tends to maximize narrative, thematic, and formal effects—that
is, a poetics of “plenitude” tasked with developing all the possible
implications of narrative and lyrical material. In an introductory note
to the first publication of “The Maremma,” Hemans interestingly
observed that her “little Tale . . . was intended to have been enlarged
by the introduction of other characters and incidents, and afterwards
published separately” (“Maremma” 395). In other words, she had
originally entertained the idea of making an entire metrical tale out
of Dante’s lines, had it not been for the appearance of “a poem on
the same subject by a writer of considerable celebrity” (ibid.), possibly
Byron’s Parisina (1816). Though it could not be given free rein to the
full, this quasi-novelistic drive to amplification through characteriza-
tion and plot complications is integral to the poem. It pervades and
qualifies a text that encapsulates the poet’s interest in the recreation
of emblematic female figures from history or literature, her creation
of a sentimental idiom that may adequately convey the themes of the
domestic affections and woman’s destiny, and her concern with the
socially and culturally prescribed nature of gender. As with much of
Hemans’s production, “The Maremma” becomes meaningful once
we have found ways of assessing its textual abundance not as repeti-
tive redundancy, but rather as the pursuit of expressive plenitude—
the representation of the entire thematic and ideological potential of
a given poetic material.
Composed of 246 iambic pentameter lines divided into sestets,
Hemans’s poem is written in the “Venus and Adonis” stanza, similar
to the sestet in a Shakespearean sonnet, a form Hemans also used in
her Tales, and Historic Scenes, in Verse (1819). The text is preceded

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 H e m a n s ’s R e c o r d o f D a n t e 121

by a quotation from Ugo Foscolo’s essay on Dante in the Edinburgh

Review for February 1818, which also contains the original lines on
Pia de’ Tolomei. To these, Hemans adds an excerpt from François
de Malherbe’s celebrated poem “Consolation à Monsieur Du Périer”
(1607) about the death of his daughter. The poem combines narra-
tive and descriptive sections, with a decisive prevalence of the latter
mode that emphasizes the emblematic nature of the tale. In terms of
narrative structure, instead, the text broadly follows the cycle of the
seasons and the transition from summer to autumn and winter.
The opening section of “The Maremma” contrasts the natu-
ral beauty of Italy and its hidden threats (the invisible miasmas of
malaria), and thus reads as an adaptation of the Virgilian topos of latet
anguis in herba. In this panoramic view, death lurks in the beautiful
and fruitful landscape of Italy. The poem then depicts the wedding of
Bianca (Hemans’s name for Pia) and Pietra—“A voice of music, from
Sienna’s walls, / Is floating joyous on the summer air” (“Maremma”
396, ll. 55–56)—as well as providing portraits of the two characters.
But soon the joyful tone gives way to a gloomier atmosphere induced
by the husband’s jealousy and suspicion. As Pietra decides to send
his wife and child to his ancestors’ house in the Maremma, the text
evokes the natural features of this beautiful but unhealthy region as a
prelude to the death of the child and, then, Bianca herself. The final
stanza seals the poem with a memorial to the unfortunate woman.
Narrative is a distinctive component of this phase in Hemans’s pro-
duction, when she visibly aligns her production to the metrical tales
made popular by Byron, Scott, and Thomas Moore. However, “The
Maremma” also visibly inclines to emotional evocation and explora-
tion and the use of symbolic imagery, all of which impart a clearly lyr-
ical quality to its stanzas. In particular, this intersection of lyrical and
narrative characterizes her later collection Records of Woman (1828)
and its gallery of poetic portraits of fictional and historic women from
different times and places. Hemans’s use of the term “record” is of
course intriguingly polysemous, as it refers not only to women’s for-
gotten achievements, but also to the female affections through its ety-
mological link with the Latin recordari, itself derived from cor, cordis,
the heart. Since all of these formal and thematic features are relevant
to “The Maremma,” this poem may be seen as an anticipation of the
content, style, and ideological concerns of the later collection.
Also from the thematic point of view, the poem reworks several
recurrent topics in Hemans’s output from the 1810s to the 1820s,
which it deals with in accordance with her distinctive poetics of
“plenitude.” Her Dantean poem thus inflects the themes of gender

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 122 Diego Sagli a

and the affections by focusing on a family circle that does not bring
fulfillment, but rather sadness and death, to the female protagonist.
The conflict between husband and wife is then conveyed by gendered
contrasts between inflexibility and pliability, hardness and sweetness,
or light and darkness. Indeed, the poem pointedly comments on man’s
inability to understand a woman’s emotional and spiritual life: “Oh!
can he meet that eye, of light serene, / . . . / Yet deem that vice within
that heart can reign?” (“Maremma” 397, ll. 121–125). In addition,
Hemans touches on the theme of the South as a lethal geography
that brings death to the female subject through the “sun-bright waste
of beauty” (397, l. 141) of the Maremma. This landscape, and Italy
more widely, points to further leimotifs such as the contrasts between
nature and art, music and silence, fertility and sterility, or the imagery
of air and breezes, all of which Hemans weaves into her modulation of
narrative and lyrical modes. This orchestration of themes and motifs
is deployed within what Michael O’Neill has perceptively called “the
mournfully stately movement of Hemans’s six-line stanzas” to pro-
duce a text whose “tone teeters over without toppling into an abyss of
sentimentality” (O’Neill 47).

Hemans’s Intertextual Rewriting of Dante

Michael O’Neill has also usefully pointed out the presence of echoes
from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Eolian Harp” and Thomas Gray’s
“Elegy” in Hemans’s text (ibid.). Such references are an integral part
of a poem that offers itself as a web of intertexts—a “hypertext,”
in Gérard Genette’s terminology from Palimpsestes (1982)—that
glosses and reworks a series of preexisting “hypotexts.” In point of
fact, the poem advertizes its intertextual nature from the outset, in
the epigraphic apparatus that simultaneously discloses some of the
mechanisms regulating Hemans’s engagement with the episode of
La Pia. As anticipated, “The Maremma” begins with three clearly
identified intertextual presences—Foscolo, Dante, and Malherbe. Of
course, the medieval poet and the Commedia play a pivotal role. But
the Romantic commentator and the Renaissance poet provide further
relevant keys to understand Hemans’s assimilation of Dante’s lines
into her own poetry and poetics.6
The first and most substantial epigraph is from Foscolo’s review of
Giosafatte Baglioli’s Dante: with a New Italian Commentary (1818)
and Henry Francis Cary’s The Vision of Dante (1818). Foscolo’s
piece was Hemans’s main source of inspiration and information for
her poem, and she followed it so faithfully that, as the editors of

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 H e m a n s ’s R e c o r d o f D a n t e 123

Dante in English remark, it misled her into some glaring factual mis-
takes (165, 170). However, questions of accuracy aside, Foscolo’s
essay opens up some crucial insights into Hemans’s rewriting of
Dante’s lines. Indeed, he notes that La Pia’s “few words draw tears”
from readers, her brief account being a “deeply pathetic” blend of
“domestic unhappiness” with “death” and “cruelty” (Foscolo 460).
Concentrating both on the psychological contents of the story and
its effect on readers, Foscolo emphasizes the emotional potential of
Dante’s character and points to the possibility of rereading it by way
of an aesthetics of affect, which is precisely what Hemans’s poem
does.
Foscolo also provides an important clue to Hemans’s “angliciza-
tion” of Dante by comparing the Italian bard’s characterization with
Shakespeare’s, “[o]f all tragic poets” the one who “most amply devel-
ops character” (Foscolo 459, 458).7 Moreover, for the benefit of his
British readers, Foscolo highlights how “The history of Desdemona
has a parallel” in the story of Pia, a remark that Hemans reproduces in
the first publication of “The Maremma” but which disappears from
the version published in her 1839 Works (Foscolo 459).8 Fixing the
terms of the comparison and contrast between Dante’s compressed
portraits in the Commedia and Shakespeare’s multifaceted figures,
the Italian poet and critic envisages the possibility of reinventing a
Dantean figure through the type of detailed and heightened por-
traiture associated with the national bard. Hemans would have been
naturally alert to these observations, as she was a fervent admirer of
Shakespeare who fully endorsed the commonplace view of his works
as unsurpassed mirrors of the human soul. In an early poem, she
had expressed her enthusiasm for the playwright “whose magic lays
impart / Each various feeling to the heart,” and singled out for
praise Ophelia’s empathetic power: “We learn to shed the generous
tear / O’er poor Ophelia’s sacred bier” (Works 1:7–8). Much as in
Foscolo’s remarks, here the character’s complex emotional makeup
interacts directly with the reader’s and elicits a powerful response.
This was exactly what Hemans experienced years later when she saw
Edmund Kean in Richard III and Othello, and, in a letter of October
1820, confessed: “I felt as if I had never understood Shakspeare till
then” (Works 1:42). Whereas the emotional power of Dante’s figures
is an effect of textual economy, Shakespeare crafts his characters by
way of what Foscolo termed “amplitude,” a category that is akin to
Hemans’s poetics of “plenitude.” Thus, the critic’s suggestively tran-
scultural presentation of Pia relates to Hemans’s reinterpretation of
this character through a Shakespearean mediation that bears on her

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 124 Diego Sagli a

psychological exploration, as well as on her adoption of the “Venus

and Adonis” stanza.
If Dante’s Pia, Shakespeare’s Ophelia, and Hemans’s Bianca die
because their men reject them, Hemans intensifies further the link
with the Shakespearean precedent by placing her character’s death
in an Italy oxymoronically imagined as a cemeterial “garden of the
world.” Shakespeare’s text famously surrounds Ophelia with flo-
ral imagery. Laertes calls her “rose of May” soon after she begins
to distribute wildflowers to the other dramatis personae, while her
corpse ends up floating among wildflowers, herbs, and water-plants.
Hemans’s adoption of the link between death, woman, and the floral
dimension is also announced by the epigraph from Malherbe (“Et
rose elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses, / L’espace d’un matin”), which
emphasizes the fragility and transience of life, as well as reechoing
the classical connection of youthful womanhood and the fresh-
ness and beauty of a rose, as in the topos collige, virgo, rosas (from
the “Idyllium de rosis” variously attributed to Ausonius or Virgil).
Hemans weaves these images into her distinctive use of flowers as
symbols of the death and dissolution that inevitably awaits female
beauty. In the conclusion, Bianca appropriately mutates into the “fair-
est flower” that the voice of death calls “in every gale” (“Maremma”
398, ll. 175–176) as it “[b]ids the young roses of [her] cheek turn
pale” (398, l. 178). In other words, Hemans rewrites Dante through
a language of sentiment that compounds Shakespearean intimations
with Malherbe’s Petrarchanism and her own distinctive figuration
of death through the topos of the broken flower (or, sometimes, the
mown ear of corn) that harks back to Catullus, Virgil, and Ovid.
As is customary with Hemans, “The Maremma” collects, inter-
weaves, and recycles fragments from named sources or a general lit-
erary repertoire of themes and images, and integrates them into her
own poetical idiom. In particular, it reworks these materials as part
of a subtle process that threads Dante’s and Malherbe’s lines into the
poem’s formal texture, as their stanzaic structure and rhyme schemes
converge into those of Hemans’s Shakespearean stanzas. Indeed,
since Dante’s terza rima lines are quoted as a quatrain rhyming abab,
they present the same structure as Malherbe’s excerpt and also mirror
the first four lines of Hemans’s sestets. Eventually, this almost seam-
less transition from paratext to main text comes up against the final
rhyming couplet of the “Venus and Adonis” stanza. By thus weaving
her Italian and French epigraphs into an English literary form, the
poem effects a productive appropriation of two eminent voices from
what J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi called the littératures du Midi in

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 H e m a n s ’s R e c o r d o f D a n t e 125

his homonymous 1813 study, which Hemans greatly admired. A care-

fully orchestrated choir of different voices, her Dantean recreation is
an instance of cosmopolitan verse that resonates simultaneously with
questions of personal poetics and the national literary heritage.

Hemans’s Record of Dante

At the end of the introductory section, before going on to depict the
protagonists’ wedding, Hemans refers to Bianca as “ . . . one who per-
ished, left a tale of woe, / Meet for as deep a sigh as pity can bestow”
(“Maremma” 396, ll. 53–54). Thus indirectly casting her poem as a
“record of woman,” she tasks it with an elegiac and monumentalizing
function. Furthermore, as it develops, the text reveals yet another
typical feature of her “records”—the fact that this act of poetic “re-
membering” (both “recalling” and “piecing together again” the lost
memory of women’s achievements) results in a narration of conflicts.
All the poems from the 1828 collection present this underlying struc-
ture—as in “Properzia Rossi,” which contrasts artistic aspirations
with reciprocated love; or “The Indian City,” where a Muslim mother
challenges an entire Hindu city whose inhabitants have slaughtered
her son; or “The Switzer’s Wife,” in which domestic ties are briefly in
conflict with the call of patriotic duty. If memories of woman can only
be appropriately recovered and represented in terms of an agon, “The
Maremma” establishes the ground of this confrontation by making
nature—which encompasses the woman-as-rose and determines her
“fate” (l. 115)—into a field of contending forces.
As the epigraphs make plain, the ambivalent nature of the
Maremma encapsulates the poem’s web of conflicts. It is both
extraordinarily bountiful, as in the classical topos of laus Italiae or
Italy as “the garden of the world,” and treacherously lethal, accord-
ing to the equally garden-related Virgilian topos of latet anguis in
herba. Hemans soon discloses the hidden perils of the luscious Italian
landscape by observing that “Mysterious danger lurks, a Syren, there”
(395, l. 13). In its destructive incarnation, moreover, nature subju-
gates civilization by gradually and inexorably dismantling man-made
artifacts, and architecture in particular. Since malaria decimates the
population, buildings stand empty and silent, a recurrent image in
Hemans’s elegiac compositions, as in the description of the Alhambra
in The Abencerrage (1819) or the childless home in “The Graves of
a Household” (1825). The poet amplifies and ennobles this scene
by introducing a historical perspective, when the “illustrious hills of
Rome” and their ruined grandeur also become prey to “that subtle

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 126 Diego Sagli a

spirit of the air” (396, ll. 43, 45).9 It is within this overwhelming
landscape that Hemans places Bianca, who, as the “fairest flower” of
all (398, l. 175), is reminiscent of Ophelia and embodies the fragile
and powerless side of nature.
As the battleground of life and death and the antagonist of civi-
lization, nature is also the crucial site of the conflict between man
and woman. In point of fact, the text qualifies the male character as
a counterpart to, or a human manifestation of, the natural world. As
his name implies, Pietra is a stony figure. He is a dark and brooding
character in contrast to Bianca’s brightness, his “sullen gloom” and
“dark . . . glance[s]” (ll. 119, 131) overtly antithetical to her “eye, of
light serene” (l. 121). Moreover, just as the landscape hides terrible
dangers, he harbours dark feelings: “. . . calmly can Pietra smile, con-
cealing, / As if forgotten, vengeance, hate, remorse” (ll. 103–104).
Finally, by presenting him as a warrior, the text emphatically associ-
ates him with violence, grimly depicting him as he stands “fearless
in the ranks of death, / ’Mid slaughtered heaps, the warrior’s monu-
ment” (ll. 93–94). Thus starkly set out, the contrast between male
and female characters generates the incomprehension on the part of
Pietra, who fatally misinterprets Bianca’s actions and contrives her
death and that of their child. Intriguingly, Hemans rereads Dante by
placing an episode of misreading at the centre of her own fictional
recreation.
Through its combination of narrative and lyrical modes, “The
Maremma” inserts this net of conflicts into a tightly knit web of
images and figures, which, as seen above, are the building blocks of
her poetics of “plenitude.” This orchestration of themes and leitmo-
tifs eventually converges into the final stanza, an envoi that seals the
tale by projecting it onto the planes of memory and time, and offers a
final problematic formulation of the act of inscription:

No sculptured urn, nor verse thy virtues telling,

O lost and loveliest one! adorns thy grave;
But o’er that humble cypress-shaded dwelling
The dew-drops glisten and the wild-flowers wave –
Emblems more meet, in transient light and bloom,
For thee, who thus didst pass in brightness to the tomb! (398, ll.
241–246)

In these closing lines, Hemans elaborates a version of the “trace,”

that recurrent, concluding figure that encloses a text’s unresolved
tensions and conflicts and relays them to posterity in the shape of

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 H e m a n s ’s R e c o r d o f D a n t e 127

an inscription of memory through the media of nature or art.10 As

it captures the idea and possibility of the poem’s survival, the trace
is a testimony of its continuing cultural significance. It emphasizes
the uninterrupted resonance of the poem’s melody and message.
Therefore, it is also a point of arrival—and yet not one—a figure of
incompletion that confirms the unresolved status of the conflicts laid
bare by the text.
Both the echoing effect and the notion of incompletion are cen-
tral to the trace in “The Maremma,” a “record” that works through
thematic anticipations and subsequent reelaborations. Indeed, several
traces emerge in the poem well before the final stanza. The Roman
hills explicitly “bear / Traces of mightier beings” (396, l. 44); Bianca’s
beauty is on a par with that of the Mona Lisa, “that daughter of the
south, whose form / Still breathes and charms, in Vinci’s colours
warm” (396, ll. 65–66), a reference taken from Giorgio Vasari’s Vite;
and, finally, the text anticipates Pietra’s “vain remorse,” the dead
Bianca’s haunting presence as that of an “an accusing angel,” and
the transformation of her tomb into “a martyr’s shrine” that shall be
“hallow’d in his eyes” (398, ll. 217–220). Through such references,
Hemans assembles a narrative that forcibly withstands the demise and
effacement of the subject—intended as the character and the poem’s
topic—and replaces it with memory and inscription, “Faded, yet
scarce forgotten” (396, l. 75). As a result, the network of conflicts in
“The Maremma” translates into a text of death and survival.
As the climax of these anticipations, the closing stanza emphati-
cally denies Bianca (and Hemans’s poetry, too) the most hallowed
of literary formulations of the trace, the Horatian topos exegi monu-
mentum aere perennius. Here, no monument is raised to the memory
of the woman, not even that of poetry “more lasting than bronze.”
The trace is here fragile and transient—dewdrops and wild blossoms
expressive of Bianca’s incarnation of nature and the image of woman-
as-flower. Nevertheless, though fragile, these traces are recurrent and
self-renewing, and thus may never be effaced. This feminized version
of nature is ultimately triumphant within the long-term perspective
of the “trace.”
Yet, precisely because it elides all poetic records from Bianca’s grave,
the closing stanza says something crucial about Hemans’s poem as a
“record of Dante.” Initially, the poet asserts that her text reechoes a
“tale of woe” (396, l. 53) about Bianca’s death, a precedent that, in
view of the epigraph from Foscolo, we may identify with Dante’s text.
Then, in the closing lines, she disallows language and writing as suit-
able ways of commemorating the woman’s tale. This contradiction

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 128 Diego Sagli a

casts a fascinating metapoetic light on the poem’s conclusion. On the

one hand, Hemans defines her own text as an appendix to dewdrops
and wildflowers, the only appropriate repositories of Bianca’s memory.
On the other, she relegates Dante’s lines to the same secondary posi-
tion. Her poem is thus not an agon with an awe-inspiring forefather
and, therefore, the result of competitive aemulatio. Instead, in the
face of the woman’s “tale of woe” (emblematic of the fact that “It is
our task to suffer,” (398, l. 227)), Dante’s seminal lines and Hemans’s
own amplification are equally faulty and inadequate. In consequence,
the last stanza squarely puts “The Maremma” at the same level as the
Commedia, at least as far as the proper way of producing a “record
of woman” is concerned. On the whole, a rather daring thing to do
with one of the foundational works of Western literature and one of
the tutelary father figures of literary modernity.
The final lines of “The Maremma” visibly redirect what Michael
O’Neill terms the “epitaphic economy” of Dante’s lines (47). For, if
in Dante it is Pia herself who voices her own epitaph, Hemans awards
this task to a poetic voice who, simultaneously, disinvests (written,
engraved. or sculpted) epitaphic inscriptions to provide an open-
ended finale to a “record of woman” that is also a “record of Dante,”
and one in which Hemans’s voice has the last word.

The Fate of Inscription

As is customary with Hemans’s shorter compositions, “The
Maremma” is not an immediately evident text. It does not present
itself as an arduous, intellectual achievement, but rather as an effort-
lessly melodious and transparent composition. Nevertheless, if we
attend to the connections between the epigraphs and main text, the
poem becomes visible as a work in which amplification contributes
crucially to its manipulation of a composite hypotext. In this perspec-
tive, “The Maremma” is not a mere rehearsal of familiar images, an
instantly recognizable reproduction of a repetitive poetical formula.
Instead, it is a skillful elaboration of themes and forms, complete with
suggestively metapoetic intimations, which draws on national and
foreign literary modes and precedents, and holds a precise place in the
development of Hemans’s corpus.
Far from being a transparent and thus easily readable composi-
tion, “The Maremma” is a multilateral intertextual conversation
that is centered primarily on Dante’s lines about Pia as mediated
by Foscolo’s interpretation, yet it also includes Malherbe, Byron,
Shakespeare, Madame de Staël, Vasari, and Simonde de Sismondi. A

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 H e m a n s ’s R e c o r d o f D a n t e 129

typical instance of Hemans’s output, the poem portrays the unjus-

tified immolation of a woman to male insensitivity and misinter-
pretation, recording her stoic acceptance of adverse events. In her
claustrophobic imprisonment, Bianca embodies missed opportuni-
ties, wasted motherhood, and the sacrifice of female generosity and
fertility. Yet, even as it rehearses some of Hemans’s familiar tropes
and images, “The Maremma” reflects on the nature of “records,”
the practice of inscription, and the status of cultural memory and
heritage.
Moreover, through its links with the national poem of Italy and
the father of Italian literature, Hemans’s text provides further insights
into her relation to this country and its culture. In the early nine-
teenth century, “Italy” stood for a geopolitical situation of cohesion
in diversity and fragmentation, and a cultural dimension unrelated
to a unitary state. Designating a national canon that was not the pre-
rogative of a single nation, Italian literature had traditionally con-
stituted a shared heritage and cultural currency, its literary wealth
readily lending itself to operations of appropriation and identifica-
tion. Furthermore, as a deterritorialized dimension, Italian literature
was particularly germane to Romantic-period women writers’ percep-
tions of their own uncertain and fluctuating cultural status. With
these premises in mind, we may take another look at the significance
of Italy for Hemans’s verse and her literary status. As it created the
cultural conditions for the emergence of, in Esther Schor’s words,
“far more than a frail lyric voice,” Italy and its literary heritage were
important loci of identification and intervention, authorial self-po-
sitioning, and poetical elaboration (Schor 245). In this light, “The
Maremma” appears as part of a wider process centered on the accli-
matization of foreign literatures and the internationalization of the
national literary tradition. But, as an expression of Hemans’s ventrilo-
quism of Italy, the poem also matters as a peculiar instance of Dante’s
reception in Romantic-period literature.
Indeed, “The Maremma” subsumes Dante’s lines into a figura-
tive and metapoetic discourse that ultimately formulates a judgment
on his poetic achievement and cultural status. Indeed, Hemans’s
text revises Dante’s foundational role as the primary source of her
poem and, more broadly, as one of the earliest voices in the canon
of modern classics. The author does not question Dante’s central-
ity. As her Shakespearean references make plain, she endorses the
Romantic canon of great predecessors, which, with variations, also
comprised such figures as Milton, Aeschylus, and Calderón. By con-
trast, her text repositions the lines on Pia, which we could read as a

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 130 Diego Sagli a

synecdoche for the entire Commedia, by placing them in a dialogic

relation with other texts in her multifaceted and hybrid narrative-
lyrical composition.
This manipulation of Dante is at its most visible in the concluding
“trace.” There, Hemans questions the epitaphic finality of Dante’s
lines by appropriating their function and rewriting them into her own
last words on Bianca, which, in contrast to the Italian source, convey
fragility, fluidity, mutability, and endless self-renovation. The tomb-
stone quality of Dante’s lines (“stony,” as in Pietra’s name) becomes
an open-ended utterance contained in such ephemeral natural fea-
tures as flowers and dew. By thus making the whole tale into an end-
lessly self-renewing “trace,” the poem places Dante’s inscription of
Pia on the same level as its reinscription of Pia as Bianca. Both nar-
ratives have equal dignity, as they belong to a common repository of
tales and images from which “records” can be drawn and fashioned.
In Hemans’s revisioning of the original status of Dante’s lines, his
words are not the earliest statement on Pia, but rather fragments of a
much wider archive of tales and characters. Moreover, by placing Pia’s
tale in a field of interacting intertexts, Hemans’s engagement with
Dante produces a reinscription of his verse that questions the nature
and aptness of the act of inscription itself. Thanks to its choir of inter-
secting voices and double-edged implications, “The Maremma” testi-
fies to the aesthetic and ideological complexity of Romantic-period
receptions and recreations of Dante by women authors. It also illumi-
nates the wonderfully resonant results of Hemans’s recourse to Italian
literature and its founding father in order to promote reflections on
cultural and literary issues in simultaneously personal, national, and
international perspectives.

Notes
1. Please see Hemans, Selected Poems, 467.
2. As Isobel Armstrong notes, nineteenth-century women’s poetry fea-
tures a sustained “movement to Italy” that expresses identification
with “an “impassioned land” or emotional space outside the defini-
tions and circumscriptions of the poet’s specific culture and national-
ity.” This geocultural shift gives them the possibility of “testing out
the account of the feminine experienced in western culture by going
outside its prescriptions” (Armstrong 324, 325). On Hemans’s figura-
tions of Italy, see also Leighton’s Victorian Women Poets (17).
3. On Stuart Curran’s idea of Hemans as a “Laureate manquée,” see
Sweet, “History, Imperialism, and the Aesthetics of the Beautiful:
Hemans and the Post-Napoleonic Moment” (172).

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 H e m a n s ’s R e c o r d o f D a n t e 131

4. Hemans mentions Corinne in a footnote to “The Maremma.” See

“The Maremma,” The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany,
7 (November 1820) 396. All further references, by page and (where
appropriate) line numbers, are from this first edition. Line num-
bers are taken from the version published in Dante in English. Ed.
Eric Griffiths and Matthew Reynolds (London: Penguin, 2005)
164–175.
5. See also Letitia Elizabeth Landon, “On the Character of Mrs.
Hemans’s Writings,” in Hemans, Selected Poems, Prose and Letters
(472, 473).
6. On the functions of epigraphs, see Gérard Genette, Paratexts:
Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1997). 156–60.
7. On Hemans’s hallmark “anglicization” of foreign literary and cultural
traditions, see Susan Wolfson’s remarks in “ ‘Domestic Affections’
and ‘the spear of Minerva’: Felicia Hemans and the Dilemma of
Gender” (132).
8. See “The Maremma,” 395, and Hemans (Works 3:129).
9. On Rome and malaria in Romantic-period culture, see Richard
Wrigley, “Infectious Enthusiasms: Influence, Contagion, and the
Experience of Rome,” Transports: Travel, Pleasure and Imaginative
Geography. Ed. Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon (New Haven and
London: Yale UP, 1996) 75–116; and “Pathological Topographies
and Cultural Itineraries: Mapping “Mal’aria” in Eighteenth- and
Nineteenth-Century Rome,” Pathologies of Travel. Ed. Richard
Wrigley and George Revill (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000)
203–228.
10. See my own essay “Ending the Romance: Women Poets and the
Romantic Verse Tale.”

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 Chapter Ten

Ge r m a i n e de Sta ë l’s C O R I N N E , O R
I T A LY (18 0 7) a n d t h e P e r for m a nc e
of Rom a n t ic ism(s)
Diane Long Hoe veler

W hile in the grip of mourning for her beloved father, Germaine de

Staël (1766–1817), made the first stop on an Italian tour in Florence
during December of 1804. She expected it to be warm, but found
instead that it was bitter cold, and she wrote dejectedly to a friend,
“Winter displeases more there [in Florence] than anywhere else,
because the imagination is not prepared for it” (qtd. in Moers 210).
That mixed sense of disappointed expectation, grief, and fierce com-
mitment to the imagination imbues Corinne, ou l’Italie, the novel
she published a scant three years later, whose eponymous protagonist
lives in Florence from the ages of ten to fifteen, and who returns to
spend her final exile before dying there in 1803. Corinne becomes the
embodiment of Staël’s vision of prospects for a feminine Romanticism
that is doomed to the chill of death even as it struggles to be born.
For the past twenty years literary critics have been approaching
Corinne from a variety of angles: as a performance of heroinism
(Moers), as a work that is situated within the discourses of neoclas-
sicism and pre-romanticism (Gutwirth, Lokke, Vargo), or as a text
about romanticism itself (Furst, Naginski, Vallois, Luzzi, Schoina).
It is sometimes seen as an allegory of the French Revolution (Kadish,
Tenenbaum), a historical record of the romantic craze for improv-
visatore (Esterhammer (2005), Simpson, Gonda, Weintraub), a

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 134 Di a ne Long Hoev el er

fictionalized version of the author’s own life (Balayé, Starobinski,

Sourian); or an early manifestation of Cixous’s l’ecriture feminine
(DeJean). This essay will look at Corinne as a series of very literal
performances that enact through the exceptional woman’s body and
voice the emergence of a new but aborted romantic feminine sen-
sibility. In other words, Staël attempted in her novel to explore not
just issues of national character and historical destiny, the “Italy”
part of the book’s title, but to invent a type of female romanticism
that would rival in its performative potential the dominant male dis-
courses of Romanticism that she knew all too well, that is, Ossianism,
Prometheanism, Faustianism, Rousseauvianism, Alfierianism, or
Wertherism. In presenting Corinne’s grandiose and heavily coded
feminine performances under the censorious gaze of Oswald, Staël
suggests to her female readers how they too can and indeed must
perform a feminization of culture, history, and social institutions. But
Staël seems to have also known from the beginning that her noble
intentions were doomed, and the choice of performances that Corinne
enacts throughout the text makes this, in fact, very clear to us.
John Isbell has claimed that Corinne has to die at the end of the
novel because the Revolution and Liberty were dead by the time
of Napoleon’s coup d’etat in 1799 (xiii), while he also has asserted
that the name “Corinne” became shorthand for “suffering heroine”
throughout nineteenth-century Europe after the publication of the
book in 1807 (xi). Yes, Corinne the novel allegorizes the process by
which modern nation-states attempted to be born, but the other,
more important issue is that Corinne the character does not merely
or passively suffer; she performs her suffering in what Balayé has called
a “specularizing” manner; she displays it as a text writ large for her
reading audience. She would not let them look away from the specta-
cle of what they had done to her. All of which is to say that Napoleon
did not like this book (Gutwirth, Madame de Staël 235).
When Juliet, the young daughter of Oswald and Lucile asks her
father, “What is a Corinne?” (396),1 she might be anticipating A. O.
Lovejoy’s famous query, what is romanticism? Sprawling, contradic-
tory, complex, and hyperbolically grandiose, Corinne the character
and romanticism the cultural and literary movements are difficult if
not impossible to neatly define. By my count, Corinne plays twenty-
four different roles throughout the novel, very close to the number
of definitions that Lovejoy proffered for “romanticism” with a capitol
“R.”2 But the final role played by Corinne is as the harbinger of her
own death, the stage-manager of her own demise. An enthusiastic

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 CORINNE, OR ITA LY 135

translator of Goethe’s “Bride of Corinth,” Staël praised the poem’s

“funereal pleasure . . . where love makes an ally of the tomb, where
beauty itself is a frightening apparition” (qtd. in Gutwirth, Madame
de Staël 274). Like Sappho flinging herself off Cape Leucade out of
frustrated love for Phaon, or Corinna, the Greek lyric poetess who
was virtually erased from history by her student/rival Pindar, Corinne
seems to have been destined to lose her creativity and die as soon as
she spotted Oswald in her audience. His seems to have been the face
she was waiting for, the reincarnation of the lost and dimly remem-
bered disapproving British father/son who says no to the attempts of
the warm and passionate hybridized Italian/British woman to make
a place and seize a name for herself in the emerging and contested
culture of romantic creativity.
But before looking at Corinne as a series of performances that circle
around female mourning, liebestod, melancholia, and finally death, I
want briefly to acknowledge Angela Esterhammer’s pioneering work
on the “romantic performative,” as well as the studies that a number
of anthropologists have done on performance as a species of speech-
act theory. As Esterhammer notes, “The identity of an individual or a
group can be called performative if that identity is established through
the very process of practicing it—so that doing and being, or saying
and being, or becoming and being, are indistinguishable” (Romantic
Performative xii). Corinne becomes who she is by performing as a
“Corinne,” whether as an improvisatore, a dancer, a poet, a musician,
an artist, an actress, a sibyl, a Catholic theologian, a tour guide, an
Amazonian, or a ghost who haunts her dead father’s estate. Corinne
says something very similar to this in a conversation with Oswald,
“Why ask a nightingale the meaning of his song? He can explain it
only by starting to sing again; we can understand it only by letting
ourselves go to the impression it makes” (109).
Esterhammer also notes that this aspect of the social performative
recalls Aristotle’s definition of energeia, “an action that contains its
end within itself, or acting that does not stop when some external ter-
minus is reached” (Romantic Performative xii). But Aristotle’s ener-
geia can be understood as strikingly similar to what Corinne calls her
“supernatural enthusiasm . . . the definite feeling I have that the voice
within me is of greater worth than myself” (46). In On Germany
(1810), Staël had defined enthusiasm as the God within us (qtd. in
Lewis 26), and it is this core of her creative energy that is finally
sapped during her disastrous return to England when she is relegated
from being a performer to a voyeur.

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 136 Di a ne Long Hoev el er

After studying a variety of tribal groups, the anthropologist Elinor

Keenan defines what she calls the practice of “ceremonial speech or
oratory,” and contrasts it to what Michelle Rosaldo has called “invo-
catory speech” (Bauman 12–13), both of which are very similar to the
improvisational style that Corinne uses in her extemporaneous recit-
als in Rome and Cape Miseno. But such performances are generally
culturally specific acts that serve the needs of a particular community,
and that is precisely the question that is raised by the performances
of Corinne. What and whose needs are being served by Corinne’s
improvisations, ethnic dances, or theatrical performances? Is she
enacting a relevant cultural past or is she in fact a living, animated
ruin, an anachronism that can only remind her society of what it has
lost and can never replace? Victor Turner, for instance, claims that
performance is a practice or event that reveals a culture’s “deepest,
truest, and most individual character” (qtd. in Diana Taylor 4). And
more recently, Diana Taylor has defined “performance” as a “vital act
of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of
identity through reiterated twice-behaved behavior” (2–3).
The larger debate on performance has in fact occurred over pre-
cisely this point: can any performance be understood as universal and
transparent in its significance and meaning, or is it in its very nature
artificial and constructed, bracketed and framed as standing apart
from other social practices that occur within a culture?3 Corinne’s
many performances throughout the novel raise precisely this ques-
tion: how “true” is anything she does apart from that one act that
contains within itself an undeniable meaning—her death. And doesn’t
she in fact know this from the very beginning of the novel? Doesn’t
she know that staging her own death as a performance-piece can be
finally the only act that her culture will accept from her? A desper-
ate romantic performance, inspired perhaps by the examples of both
Sappho and Werther, Corinne’s death can be read as an act of bitter
anger directed toward a culture that had rejected her gifts and love
and, by extension, the place of the exceptional and creative woman in
the new romantic era.
Examining a variety of Corinne’s performances will allow an inter-
rogation of Staël’s conception of the emerging feminine romantic aes-
thetic, poised as it was against neoclassicist and masculinist tropes.4
Set during the period 1794–1803, Corinne positions Italy the coun-
try and Corinne the woman as a beautiful ruin/siren that beckons the
melancholy British aristocrat and naval officer Oswald, Lord Nevil, to
a mysterious terrain. In many ways, the love/hate dialectic between
them stages an allegorical conflict between an older masculinized,

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 CORINNE, OR ITA LY 137

Ossianic aesthetic and an even older feminized Sapphic one, both of

them in thrall to the power of the father as the lost object of desire.
Staël would go on to write a short drama entitled Sappho in 1811, in
which the exceptional woman kills herself after being rejected by her
lover, Phaon. As Gutwirth observes, “Only in the act of dying can she
be restored to the sense of self she had lost in love” (Madame de Staël
265). While Ellen Moers reads Oswald as modeled on Richardson’s
Sir Charles Grandison (201), I think he can more accurately be read
as something like the spirit of an Ossianic warrior brought to life—
Northern, melancholic, and father-obsessed—who opposes the spirit
of Corinne: Southern, Catholic, exuberant, and also, unfortunately,
father-obsessed as well. That is to say, on one level the novel is an
allegory about how nations and national ideologies attempt to create
and renew themselves through the appropriation, control, and dis-
semination of artistic and cultural capitol.
Arriving in Rome as the hero of Ancona, Oswald encounters a
strange spectacle, certainly not something he would have witnessed
in London: the crowning of a woman by the laurel wreath of poetic
genius on the steps of the Capitoline in Rome. Dressed in white and
blue, like a composite of Correggio’s Madonna della Scala, Dante’s
Beatrice, and the Domenichino sibyl, Corinne makes her first appear-
ance in the novel and it is no coincidence that she appears in a public
space as a divinely inspired prophetess, giving the impression of “a
priestess of Apollo” (23). But this is a muse who has inspired herself,
and as a creator and an object of feminine worship, she arrives to
deliver the first of her spontaneous improvisations on “The Glory and
Happiness of Italy.” This performance, with its references to Dante,
Tasso, and Petrarch, suggests initially the poet’s necessary role as
nationalistic herald and preserver of a country’s glorious past; but
finally her performance politicizes and genders genius and throws into
stark relief the glories of the ancient Roman republic as contrasted to
the despotism of Napoleon’s brutal expansionist campaigns.
The first and most obvious of Corinne’s many and disparate per-
formances are her forays into drama, coding as they do Staël’s inquiry
into the nature and role of dramatic literature for a society, a subject
she had treated at length in her essay “On Literature” (1800). During
her stay in Weimar in 1803, Staël saw the opera Die Saalnixe (The Saal
River Nymph) based on a tale by La Motte Fouqué. Shortly thereaf-
ter she wrote to her friend Hochet: “I saw the other day a German
play which gave me the idea of a novel I think charming” (Balayé,
“Corrinne en Spectacle” 97–98). That novel became Corinne, and
the origins of its composition in a German opera about a hero who

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 138 Di a ne Long Hoev el er

is an earthly knight and a heroine who is a watery river nymph sug-

gest that from the very beginning Oswald and Corinne are meant to
represent how impossible it is for the two sexes to ever live together.
We see a bit of this operatic residue when Corinne and Oswald coin-
cidentally meet at the Trevi Fountain after a four day separation: “He
bent down over the fountain to see better and his own features were
then reflected beside Corinne’s” (74–75). This watery merger of the
two is a momentary illusion, however, and almost immediately their
talk turns to the necessity of suffering.
The romantic performative of this text posits public displays of
suffering and an adamant division between the sexes as two of its
nonnegotiable terms. We hear some of this when Prince Castel-Forte
says to Oswald, “Look at Corinne. Yes, we would follow her in her
footsteps, we would be men as she is a woman, if men could, like
women, make a world for themselves in their own hearts, and if the
fire of our genius, compelled to be dependent on social relationships
and external circumstances, could be fully set alight by the torch of
poetry alone” (27). Trusting one’s own genius, finding one’s Coeur,
as in Corinne or the heart, one’s authentic voice within, is the chal-
lenge that Corinne flings at her audience of mere mortals. Very few,
however, can find that voice, let alone perform it successfully in the
public sphere.
Translating Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet herself (121), Corinne
is not hesitant to take to the boards in order to play the role of Juliet,
a role that Staël had seen Mrs. Siddons perform to great acclaim in
England. This liebestod is performed so convincingly that Oswald
is dragged from the theater, groaning loudly during Juliet’s death
scene. Back in her dressing room still costumed as the dead Juliet,
Corinne greets Oswald who finds himself compelled to play the role
of Romeo, crying out “Eyes, look your last! Arms, take your last
embrace” (127).
Understanding that this self-dramatizing scene is a prelude to his
eventual desertion, Corinne accuses Oswald of even now wanting to
leave her. The Romeo and Juliet scene is the first of many such per-
formances that suggest that Corinne’s love of Oswald is doomed and
that in fact she knows this already, has always known it, and wants
only for him to acknowledge that both of them are at the end of his-
tory, the end of culture as they know it. We know that Staël herself
performed something quite similar while writing Corinne during the
summer of 1806, Jean Racine’s Phèdre (1677), a neoclassical work
that showcases a father’s death-dealing curse on his son and the vio-
lent lust and anger of a woman hopelessly in love with her stepson and

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 CORINNE, OR ITA LY 139

forced finally to suicide. When Corinne takes Oswald on a tour of her

art gallery at her estate in Tivoli, she specifically draws his attention
to Guerin’s painting of Phèdre, Hippolyte, and Thésée, an oedipal
triangle that anticipates the doomed curse that will result from the
letter that Oswald’s own father sends from beyond the grave.
Later, Corinne is persuaded to perform as the sorceress Semiramis
in Gozzi’s light opera Daughter of the Air, a comic work that depicts
the female magician as a “coquette gifted by hell and heaven to conquer
the world. Brought up in a cave like a savage, skilful as an enchantress,
imperious as a queen” (294). The role seems tailor-made for Corinne,
and indeed she agrees to perform it despite her growing anxiety about
Oswald’s intentions. At the point where she appears costumed as the
Assyrian queen of Ninevah, as an “Amazon queen,” Oswald begins
crying in the audience, overwhelmed not simply with Corinne’s show
of female, castrating power, but with a very real fear for his reputa-
tion because their affair is now the subject of public scandal in the
London “news-sheets” (297). Performing this role of female political
and military power is quickly punished as Oswald criticizes Corinne,
she faints and bloodies her head, allowing Oswald to nurse her back
to health and assert his dominance once again (298).
As the dancing partner of the Neopolitan Prince d’Amalfi, Corinne
performs the tarantella, a folkdance noted for its “ritual steps and
the charming tableaux they present to the eye” (91). The highlight
of the dance is the ritualized fall to the knees that each participant
makes while the other dances in staged triumph around the part-
ner. Turning her bodily performance into a text, Corinne is able to
make “the spectators experience her own feelings,” “her enthusiasm
for life, youth, and beauty” (91). This transfer of emotions from the
artist to the audience is very similar to romantic empathy, or what
Keats would later call negative capability: “Everything was language
for her; . . . an indefinable passionate joy, and imaginative sensitivity,
stimulated all the spectators of this magical dance, transporting them
into an ideal existence which was out of this world” (91). Again, the
reference to the power of performative art to transport its viewers to
another world beyond this one suggests a return to a neoclassical, pla-
tonic ideal realm above this one, a world that stands in stark contrast
to the death-obsessed romantic place that Corinne has just shown
Oswald on her tour of Rome.
Another dominant performance undertaken by Corinne is that of
tour guide to the sights of Italy for Oswald. The grand tour that
was part and parcel of the aristocratic young man’s coming of age is
manipulated in this novel by Corinne, who appropriates the cultural

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 140 Di a ne Long Hoev el er

capitol that is Rome for Oswald’s gaze. His visits to the Pantheon,
St. Peter’s, the Capitol and Forum, St. John Lateran, the tomb of
Cestius, the Villa Borghese, and the Vatican Gallery become charged
venues by which she seduces his historical imagination (86), aligning
herself with the glories that were and forever will be Rome. The set-
piece here is the visit to the Coliseum by moonlight (276) that was, of
course, inspired by Chateaubriand’s 1804 letter from Italy and printed
in the Mercure: “Rome sleeps amidst its ruins. This star of the night,
this globe one imagines as finite and deserted wanders in its pale
solitude over the solitude of Rome.” After reading this, Staël wrote to
a friend: “To stay in Rome, as Chateaubriand says, calms the soul. It
is the dead who live in it, and each step one takes here is as eloquent
as Bosseut on the vanity of life. I will write a sort of novel that will
serve as framework for a trip to Italy and I think many thoughts and
feelings will find their proper place in it” (qtd. in Gutwirth, Madame
de Staël 164). This scene in her “sort of novel” made the Coliseum
by moonlight a locus romanticus for later poets like Byron in Manfred
(1817), Percy Shelley in “The Coliseum” (1818), Lamartine in the
Méditations (1820), Hawthorne in The Marble Faun (1860), and
James’s Daisy Miller (1878).
In her last stop before leaving Rome, Corinne visits St. Peter’s
and imagines “what that building would be like when, in its turn, it
would become a ruin” (277). Corinne participates in the mania for
ruin that was sweeping romantic Europe at this time. Chateaubriand
can perhaps be seen as the originator of the romantic ruin, “the
ruined ruin,” a structure that “suggests that even the record gen-
erated by destruction can pass away” (Blix 177). In an event that
is somewhat analogous to the British dissolution of the monasteries
during the reign of Henry VIII, the royal tombs at Saint-Denis, Paris,
had been destroyed by the revolutionaries in 1794, revealing “that
the historical thread has been broken, and even the memorial of the
bygone monarchy has been wiped away” (Blix 177). This event itself
expresses the modern anxiety that history can indeed be lost, for if
even the mighty are not immune from the ravages of time, no one is.
The Roman ruins that Corinne tours, so evocative of a lost past glory
and also ominously predictive of Napoleon’s eventual defeat, suggest
a sweeping historical pessimism not simply in the novel, but shared by
a segment of European elite culture, obsessed as it was with nostalgia,
revolutionary regret, and anxiety about political futility.
On Cape Miseno, near the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and
framed by the tomb of Virgil, Corinne gives her last and most bril-
liant improvisation, on the subject of “the memories aroused by these

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 CORINNE, OR ITA LY 141

places” (233). Speaking more about herself and other female mourn-
ers like Agrippina, Cornelia, and Tasso’s sister, Corinne bemoans
“strange destiny” (235), that “fate that pursues exalted souls, poets
whose imagination springs from the force of their love and suffer-
ing” (237). When Corinne concludes this improvisation, she states:
“Perhaps our fate will be decided by what we do tomorrow; perhaps
yesterday we said a word that nothing can redeem. . . . Oh, God, but
what does grief want to tell us?” (238). With a “deathly pale” face,
Corinne has finally performed the question that has haunted this text
from the beginning, exactly what role do fortune or fate play in our
lives versus how much are our decisions and decisive actions, our per-
formances, able to counter this force, worshipped by the ancients as
the goddess Tyche, luck.
It would appear that Corinne’s fate caught up with her on the
grounds of her dead father’s estate, as well as in a London theater
and in Hyde Park. When Corinne attends David Garrick’s revision of
a play by Thomas Southerne, Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage (1694)
in London (1782), she not only witnesses the performance of Mrs.
Siddons as the suicide Isabella onstage, but the mirroring action in
the boxes: Oswald’s obsessive gaze on Corinne’s own half-sister, the
blond Lucile (328-–329). No longer a performer, but now a passive
viewer caught in the triangulated theater of the voyeur, Corinne has
become powerless to alter the fate that Oswald’s father had destined
for all of them. Her death as performance-piece in Florence concludes
with the words written by Corinne and read by a young woman in her
stead: “The great mystery of death, whatever it may be, must grant
peace. You assure me of that, silent tombs. . . . I had made a choice on
earth and my heart no longer has a refuge. You decide for me; my fate
will be the better for it” (402). But to cede one’s life to the designs
of fate is to sink back into the origins of human history. Corinne
denounces modernity and instead embraces the sort of fatalism that
art is charged with denying. On an allegorical level, the scene sug-
gests that not only Italy, but also France as a nation will pass from
view and eventually be eclipsed by England, the nation that moder-
nity is destined to reward.
It was not for nothing that Elizabeth Barrett Browning praised
the novel, observing “Corinne is an immortal book, and deserves to
be read three score and ten times—that is once every year in the
age of man” (Brownings’ Correspondence 3:25). Browning, in fact,
chose a depiction of the triumphant Corinne, crowned in the wreath
of a poet, for her own tomb in Florence. The “myth” of Corinne,
of an exceptional, creative woman who is idolized, even worshiped

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 142 Di a ne Long Hoev el er

by her society for her talents and her ability to transform her own
and her culture’s sufferings into cultural capital, is part and parcel of
women’s attempts to seize the modern, romantic spirit for themselves.
That Staël knew how difficult if not impossible this goal would be is
proclaimed throughout the novel in Corinne’s many ominous per-
formances. One need only mention the names of Marina Tsvetaeva,
Sarah Teasdale, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Virginia Woolf to see
how fearfully prescient she was.

Notes
1. All references to Corinne, or Italy are to the translation by Sylvia
Raphael, in the edition with an introduction by John Claiborne Isbell
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998).
2. Corinne enacts these twenty-four performances: improvvisatore,
tour guide, ethnic dancer, actress, painter, musician, “nun,” voy-
eur at theater, debater, Catholic apologist, sibyl, “wife” of Oswald
on British ship, water nymph, savior of Oswald after near-drowning
episode, epistolary confessor, wreath-bearer to Oswald in Ancona,
“Amazon queen” in opera, fallen woman in British scandal sheets,
father-haunted, stalker of Oswald in Hyde Park, ghost to Lucile on
their father’s property, teacher of Juliet and Lucile, Dido to Oswald’s
Aneas, and stage-manager of her own death.
3. Apropos of Corinne’s performances, Peggy Phelan writes:
“Performance[s] cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or other-
wise participate in the circulation of representations of representa-
tion. . . . Performance’s being becomes itself through disappearance”
(qtd. in Diana Taylor 5). Joseph Roach makes performance cotermi-
nous with memory and history, while J. L. Austin refers to cases in
which “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action”
(qtd.in Diana Taylor 5).
4. In Madame de Staël, Novelist (1978), Gutwirth observes that “A rich
mass of intuition linking past and present is a ground of Romanticism,
and Italy represents Romantic fullness as against the ‘masculine’ lin-
earity of Enlightenment England” (210). Or, “Italy is Romanticism,
England the Enlightenment” (215). Or, “If Romanticism can be char-
acterized as a dissent bathed in despair, Corinne is certainly one of its
first fruits” (279).

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 Chapter Eleven

C ol e r i dge , S gr ic c i, a n d t h e
Show s of L on don: I m prov isi ng
i n P r i n t a n d P e r for m a nc e
Angela Esterhammer

R ecent research on Romantic literature and performance has shown

that the improvisation of oral poetry was one of the features of Italian
culture that elicited strong reactions from nineteenth-century British
writers.1 In Italy, improvising poets had long been displaying their
talents in venues ranging from courts and salons to theaters and mar-
ketplaces; the male improvvisatore had a history going back at least to
the Renaissance, and by the eighteenth century female improvisers or
improvvisatrici were not uncommon. During the Romantic period,
especially when the end of the Napoleonic Wars brought about an
increase in international mobility, the influence of this performance
genre became surprisingly widespread across Europe, with eyewit-
ness accounts, commentaries, and literary representations appearing
in hundreds of English, French, German, Scandinavian, and Russian
texts.
The project of literally and figuratively importing improvvisatori to
northern Europe proceeded along several routes. Most frequently, for-
eigners witnessed improvisational performances during visits to Italy;
thus, the reception of improvised poetry can be traced in the writings
of well-known or lesser-known tourists and expatriates, among them
Goethe, Byron, the Shelleys, and Madame de Staël. As descriptions of
real-life improvvisatori and improvvisatrici appeared in travel literature,

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 144 A ngel a Ester h a mmer

and as Romantic texts like Byron’s Beppo or Don Juan adopted some
of the characteristics of improvisation, fictionalized representations of
improvisers also began to feature with increasing frequency in nine-
teenth-century literature. Parallel to this textually mediated reception,
another channel of communication was opened up by improvvisatori
who travelled northward themselves and performed in other countries.
During the 1820s, there was a moment when political events, literary
trends, and developments in performance and print media converged
to produce a sudden surge of interest in the spontaneous, experien-
tial, interactive genius of poetic improvisers who appeared in France,
Germany, and England. This lesser-known encounter whereby British
Romantic audiences and authors responded to improvisational perfor-
mances within the entertainment scene of early–nineteenth-century
London merits more attention than it has received. Not only does the
experience of real-life improvvisatori contrast in interesting ways with
the fictional representations of improvvisatrici that were being offered
to English readers at the same time, but it also gives rise to impor-
tant reflections on mediation and mediality. In theaters and lecture
halls, London audiences had opportunities to encounter poetry as an
oral rather than a written medium, to discover how the conditions of
immediacy and embodiment affect the composition and reception of
literary works. Mediation becomes even more of an issue when print
media attempt to reproduce improvisational performances and give
them a more permanent form—for instance, when improvised poetry
is published or when periodicals review ephemeral performances. The
resulting reflections on mediality converge, as I will seek to demon-
strate, in Coleridge’s intriguing though little-known late text “The
Improvisatore.”
Studies of the reception of improvised poetry in England have often
focused on female writers, and the Italian improvvisatrice has been
seen as a model for nineteenth-century English poetesses from Letitia
Elizabeth Landon to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The most familiar
channel of reception for poetic improvisation, in other words, is one
that led from Italy through Switzerland and France to England, hav-
ing been opened up by the publication of Germaine de Staël’s popular
novel Corinne, or Italy in 1807. Staël’s own experience of improvisers
and improvisation during her Italian tour of 1804–1805 merges with
her ideal of the sociability of the French salon to shape her mem-
orable protagonist, the improvvisatrice Corinne. While it has been
argued that the improvvisatrice-persona provided nineteenth-century
women writers with an exotic model of spontaneity and freedom, that
it liberated them to express emotion, to write from the heart, and

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 Coler idge, Sgr icci, a nd the Shows 145

to transgress the boundary between private and public spheres, the

importation of Staël’s half-Italian improvvisatrice to England was in
many ways fraught with difficulty.2 In the novel itself, exposure to the
conventions and constraints of English society ruins Corinne’s health
and happiness. In the process of the novel’s reception, the enthusiasm
of Landon or Barrett Browning vies with critique and condemnation
ranging from The Corinna of England (1809), a moralistic satire that
appeared soon after the first publication of Staël’s novel, to magazine
verse of the 1820s and 1830s that warned young women to steer
clear of Corinne’s literary ambition if they valued their health and
reputation. While Corinne was undeniably important and sometimes
inspiring for the (self-)construction of the nineteenth-century woman
poet, the influence of Staël’s version of the improvvisatrice in Britain
is a complex story in which conservative and progressive values, pri-
vate and public spheres, and natural and performative identities per-
sistently come into conflict.
The story of how poetic improvisation was imported into English
culture becomes more multifaceted still when one considers the pres-
ence of actual, rather than fictional, performers. Many English read-
ers read about the improvvisatrice but few would have seen a female
improviser perform; to do so, they would have had to travel to Italy
themselves. Other than the great Corilla Olimpica’s visit to the
Austrian court at Innsbruck in 1765, there is little or no evidence of
improvvisatrici performing outside of Italy. The few English travel-
ers who ventured to Italy during the Napoleonic Wars might have
heard Fortunata Fantastici or Teresa Bandettini improvise poetry in
salon settings, and among the much larger number of tourists who
took advantage of the reopening of the Continent after 1815, some
might have caught a performance by Rosa Taddei in the theaters of
Rome. By contrast, male performers enjoyed a much higher profile in
English media and culture during the post-Waterloo years, both in
reports from English tourists in Italy and in London itself. The public
debut of the star improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci in Italy in 1816 was
astutely timed to coincide with the resumption of large-scale transal-
pine travel, and he was accordingly recognized with gushing reviews
in London’s Literary Gazette, the German Morgenblatt für gebildete
Stände, and other English and European periodicals.
Because male performers who enjoyed success in Italy often went
on international tours, English readers intrigued by accounts of the
exotic phenomenon of extemporized poetry didn’t have to travel to
Italy to experience it; it came to them in London. Already during the
late eighteenth century improvvisatori like Angelo Talassi had visited

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 146 A ngel a Ester h a mmer

England and astounded the circle of Hester Lynch Thrale and Samuel
Johnson with their talent (Piozzi 121–122). During the post-Water-
loo era, Italian poets, intellectuals, and numerous improvvisatori had
a different kind of motivation to travel abroad: many were compelled
to flee repercussions for their actual or suspected involvement in the
events of the early Risorgimento. Several members of the Italian
diaspora who took refuge in London attempted to continue liter-
ary activity and build a reputation among the English as well as the
Italian expatriate community; they became Italian correspondents for
literary magazines, offered public lectures on Italian literature and
culture, and, in some cases, displayed their abilities as improvvisa-
tori. One example of the networking involved is recorded in a letter
by the poet Thomas Campbell, who, on March 15, 1824, wrote to
enlist a friend’s help in introducing to England “an Italian poet, an
improvisatore” who had just escaped from Naples aboard a British
ship (Beattie 2:428). Circumstantial evidence suggests that this new-
comer, unnamed by Campbell, is very likely Gabriele Rossetti, who
was forced to flee prosecution after his involvement with the recent
Carbonari revolt in Naples, who spent the rest of his life in England
as a professor of Italian, and who became, quite literally, the father
of the pre-Raphaelite movement. Gabriele Rossetti eventually gave
up improvising after his relocation to England, and the account he
includes in his verse autobiography La vita mia of why he did so
makes a fascinating story in itself. It was not only a matter of opting
for the high culture of a professorial chair at King’s College London
rather than the less distinguished role of a public entertainer, but,
more importantly, the danger that improvisation posed to his health.
Improvising, Rossetti claims, killed his brother Dominick, and he too
suffered spasms and paralysis due to the nervous strain caused by this
stressful mode of composition and performance (Rossetti 34).
Nevertheless, during the 1820s and 1830s Gabriele Rossetti
offered public lectures for London audiences about Italian litera-
ture, including the tradition of poetic improvisation, and sometimes
illustrated his point by extemporizing verses himself. Other Italian
exiles as well as touring celebrities gave similar performances: Ugo
Foscolo, Filippo Pistrucci, the Marchese Spinetto, and in one notable
instance that I will return to later, Tommaso Sgricci, the most famous
nineteenth-century improvvisatore. Reports of these performances,
along with audience responses that combine fascination, admiration,
bewilderment, and skepticism over the quality or the authenticity of
the improvised poetry can be traced in the diaries of London’s fash-
ionable elite3 and in public print media. But how do printed texts

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 Coler idge, Sgr icci, a nd the Shows 147

hold fast and reproduce experiential genres, performances that are

by definition unrepeatable and perhaps unreportable? Improvvisatori
appeared in London just at the time when a rapidly changing media
environment brought such questions about experientiality, embodi-
ment, publication, and reading to the fore.
If the two-way exchange of tourists, exiles, and expatriates between
England and Italy partly accounts for the surge of interest in poetic
improvisation during the post-Waterloo period, the avid reception
accorded this art form was also fed by the rapid evolution of print
and performance media in England, especially in the metropolis.
As Richard Altick demonstrated in The Shows of London in 1978,
thereby opening up a field of study that is only now being explored
in detail, the growth of middle-class audiences with leisure time and
money resulted in avid experimentation with new visual and expe-
riential media: panoramas, dioramas, live exhibits, melodrama and
other forms of illegitimate theater, public lectures, dramatic readings.
The decade of the 1820s was also notable for the plethora of literary
magazines that started up, revamped themselves, merged, and often
went under again as they tried to interface with the new cultural
offerings in such a way as to achieve and maintain a viable readership.
Both print and performance media unmistakably reflect the vogue
of things Italian, and one of the interesting revelations that comes
from studying the international reception of Italian improvvisatori as
reflected in literary magazines is how sharply the popularity of this
performance genre peaked in the year 1824.
This trend takes shape when one notes the density of references to
improvised poetry and improvisational performance in textual records
of all kinds during the mid-1820s. Literary magazines and newspa-
pers carry advertisements and reviews of performances by improvvi-
satori; they commission feature articles on the topic of improvisation
and run translations of such articles that appeared in other languages
and other venues; they review scholarly books about extemporized
poetry in other cultures and other historical eras. The New Monthly
Magazine—an especially significant example, since it led the market
in terms of circulation and influence (Sullivan 331, 336)—ran the
following improvisation-related items in 1824:4

• A long documentary essay entitled “Italian Improvisatori” (vol. 11,

193–202).
• An announcement of an upcoming performance in Paris: the
improvisation of an entire drama by the French poet Eugène de
Pradel (vol. 12, 208).

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 148 A ngel a Ester h a mmer

• Four months later, a favourable review of Pradel’s performance (vol.

12, 400).
• A review by Stendhal of a performance by the improvvisatore
Tommaso Sgricci, also in Paris (vol. 12, 509).
• A long review of a French-language book on “Popular Songs of the
Modern Greeks” that enthusiastically highlights the Greeks’ “fac-
ulty of improvisation, (which they possess even in a more remark-
able degree than the Italians)” (vol. 11, 139–148; the quotation is
from page 140).
• A favourable review of Letitia Landon’s The Improvisatrice and
Other Poems (vol. 12, 365–366).

The 1825 volumes of the New Monthly Magazine followed up with

two poems on the improvisation theme by Felicia Hemans (13:369–
370 and 14:122–123) and a short story entitled “Giulio: A Tale” and
described as an “Improvisation” by, of all people, Napoleon Bonaparte
(13:119–128). The popularity of improvisers was also noticeable in
visual culture: the annual exhibition at the Louvre in 1824 promi-
nently featured a painting by the Swiss artist Louis-Léopold Robert
entitled L’improvisateur Napolitain. Byron died in 1824, and the
flood of memoirs, reminiscences, and evaluations that immediately
began to pour from the press often latched onto the improvvisatore
persona to describe his genius, sometimes by explicitly calling him an
“English Improvisatore” (London Magazine 10:452) and sometimes
by characterizing the style of his poetry and his conversation more
generally as spontaneous and responsive to the moment. With sur-
prising suddenness, poetic improvisation became a cultural reference
point for periodicals and their readers in London, Paris, and Berlin.
The major improvisational sensation of 1824 was the first inter-
national tour of Tommaso Sgricci, the most flamboyant and con-
troversial improvvisatore of post-Napoleonic Europe, a law student
turned performer who specialized in extemporizing entire multiact
dramas. In March and April of that year, Sgricci displayed his tal-
ent before large theater audiences in Paris. These performances were
highly praised and reported on in detail in French, German, and
English magazines, and—as was common practice with improvvi-
satori who achieved celebrity status—his improvised tragedies were
immediately printed and offered for sale. A long, laudatory review of
Sgricci’s extemporized tragedy Bianca Capello quickly appeared in the
French-language paper Le Courier de Londres, which was published
twice a week in London for the local émigré community. This review
was reprinted in English translation in the April 1824 issue of the

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 Coler idge, Sgr icci, a nd the Shows 149

London publication La Belle Assemblée, an English-language maga-

zine that addressed a female readership and signaled its pretensions
to cosmopolitan elegance with its French title. The review is notable
for its detailed synopsis of each of the five acts of Sgricci’s improvised
tragedy, supplemented by extensive quotations of the speeches that
Sgricci had improvised in Italian verse, which were translated by the
reviewers into French and then into English prose. In this respect,
the review follows the common practice of Romantic-period book
reviews that regularly quote at great length from the book in ques-
tion. But quoting Sgricci’s orally improvised poetry in print involves
a significant change in medium: instead of a public spectacle in a
crowded theater, where the forward movement of time governs the
compositional process of the performer and the listening experience
of the audience, the printed review offers a remediated experience of
potentially solitary reading, where the reader can stop, leave, return,
and reread at any time.
In seeking not only to evaluate Sgricci’s Paris performance but
effectively to re-create it for English readers, the review, therefore,
becomes an instance of what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin
have recently termed “remediation.” Yet the attempt to reproduce
Sgricci’s improvisation by means of a full synopsis contrasts ironi-
cally with the reviewer’s insistence that the performance is by nature
unreproducible. “We have been witnesses of this wonderful achieve-
ment,” the review observes, “and our admiration has been shared by
a numerous and select audience; but we assert, that it is necessary to
witness this miraculous improvisation” (Belle Assemblée 29:175). The
review concludes by underlining spontaneity as the defining aspect of
this “literary phenomenon”: “We may apply to the improvisation of
such a tragedy, what has been said of the birth of Minerva: ‘Elle sort
tout armée de son cerveau.’—She sprang all armed from his brain!”
(Belle Assemblée 29:175). Citing historical as well as contemporary
examples of innovative media, Bolter and Grusin identify a persistent
“contradictory imperative” or “double logic of remediation” (5): that
is, the paradoxical need to resort to hypermediacy or multiple lay-
ers of mediation in order to simulate immediacy. This double logic
aptly describes the practice of Sgricci’s reviewers, as they reproduce
Sgricci’s improvised drama through layers of texts translated from one
language and genre into another, all the while seeking to erase media-
tion by describing improvisation as an art of immediacy and an event
that needs to be witnessed, not read about. As the Belle Assemblée’s
reviewer realizes, poetic improvisation appealed to Romantic audi-
ences largely because of the illusion that it provided an immediate

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 150 A ngel a Ester h a mmer

experience of poetic creation, even a direct conduit into the mind

of the poet. According to the treatise Über die Improvisatoren (On
improvisers) by the Romantic-period writer Carl Ludwig Fernow,
who was cited throughout the nineteenth century as an authority on
this subject, the experience of improvisation is one “where the poet,
in the moment of creative enthusiasm, pours his song directly into the
listener’s soul” (304).
In addition to La Belle Assemblée, the New Monthly Magazine also
recognized Sgricci’s Paris performances with a review contributed by
the French novelist Stendhal, who was a regular Continental corre-
spondent for London periodicals during the 1820s. Reporting on
another of the tragedies that Sgricci improvised in Paris in 1824,
The Death of Charles I, Stendhal praises Sgricci’s talent as a quick
thinker and a dramatic actor, although he is more ambivalent about
the literary quality of the extemporized tragedy. Indeed, Stendhal
puts his finger on the disenchantment that resulted whenever an
improviser allowed his or her works to circulate in print (although
it rarely dissuaded them from doing so). “The intellectual effort is
certainly an extraordinary one to witness,” he comments, “but when
the result is taken down, printed, and submitted to the calmer judge-
ment of the closet, it must be confessed that there is very little of
originality or beauty of composition to be found in it” (New Monthly
Magazine 12:509). The review is addressed to a London readership
who would have the opportunity of experiencing Sgricci in person
in the future, since the improvvisatore had announced an upcoming
tour to England. For any of the New Monthly’s readers who propose
going to Sgricci’s performance Stendhal outlines what kind of experi-
ence they could expect and recommends some background reading:
“a good preparation for hearing him will be to read, some time in the
day before going to his Academia, an act or two from the Aristodemo,
or Cajo Gracco of Monti, or from the works of any other Italian dra-
matic poet” (New Monthly Magazine 12:509). Stendhal’s review thus
sets the media of print and performance into a different relation: in
this case, the printed review actually precedes and anticipates the live
spectacle, creating specific parameters for the audience’s experience
of it.
In the end, Sgricci’s much-anticipated London performance was
much delayed: he did not tour to England until after a second Paris
appearance two years later, in the spring of 1826. At that point, his
performance was anticlimactic—yet the restrained response to it is
worth considering in some detail for what it reveals about the expec-
tations of a London audience in the mid-1820s. The reception of

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 Coler idge, Sgr icci, a nd the Shows 151

this performance by the most famous of improvvisatori also forms

a revealing background for Coleridge’s “The Improvisatore,” a text
written in the same place at very nearly the same time. The juxtaposi-
tion of these two events, performance and text, shows processes of
embodied and written mediation to be distinct yet intertwined.
Sgricci’s appearance in London’s Argyll Rooms on Monday, June
5, 1826 was reviewed under the heading “Sights of London” by the
Literary Gazette, a periodical that had enthused about his extraordi-
nary talent ever since his debut in Italy ten years earlier. The London
performance was attended, the reviewer begins, by a select audience
of about a hundred who were able to afford the high ticket price of
one guinea—a pricing scheme in keeping with the Argyll Rooms’
pretence to high-class exclusivity, despite their morally dubious repu-
tation. Curiously and crucially, however, on this occasion Sgricci did
not improvise at all. Instead, he read aloud from the printed version
of The Fall of Missolonghi, a tragedy he had improvised two months
earlier on a Paris stage. What Sgricci offered his London audience was
thus a one-man performance of a once improvised but now scripted
drama, in which he played seven different male and female roles and
that of the chorus. But the audience clearly missed the excitement
of on-the-spot composition, and the Literary Gazette reported that
Sgricci’s performance was at best energetic and passionate, but lacked
credibility as drama—or, for that matter, as improvisation. The mate-
riality of the printed book he held in one hand distracted from his
performance, as did his habit of stroking his “profusely arranged”
coiffure with the other hand. Sgricci further destroyed dramatic illu-
sion by announcing the name of each character before he read that
character’s lines (Literary Gazette 490:365).5
In order to explore some nuances of the performance culture of
1820s London, it is worth pushing further on the admittedly specu-
lative question of why Sgricci, the great improvvisatore, declined to
improvise for his English audience. Indeed, the framework for his
performances in London and Paris was completely different. In Paris,
especially in the spring of 1824 when Sgricci performed his first
improvisations outside of Italy, reviews highlighted the fact that the
performance was set up as a rigorous test of his talent. Respected
French poets and literary critics served as judges to monitor the cir-
cumstances, especially to make sure that Sgricci was not informed of
the topics proposed by audience members until moments before he
began improvising, in order to eliminate the possibility of premedita-
tion or any other deception. The genuineness of Sgricci’s spontaneous
genius was the main feature that impressed Paris audiences as well

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as French, English, and German reviewers who spread word of his

triumph across Europe. But at his London performance two years
later, the key element of spontaneity was eliminated, leaving Sgricci
to impress the audience with his ability to impersonate seven different
characters, to move from one into the other instantaneously, and to
arouse emotion by an impassioned performance.
But why did Sgricci fail to give the audience exactly that which
they had presumably come to see? Unless his motivation was a com-
pletely contingent one (such as fatigue or illness), perhaps it could be
interpreted as a misguided attempt to adapt to the London perfor-
mance milieu, and even to the specialized venue of the Argyll Rooms.
Instead of leaving the topic for the improvisation up to the whim of
the audience, it may have seemed advantageous to retain control over
it in this case in order to capitalize on the cachet that adhered to the
name “Missolonghi” since the death of Lord Byron. Perhaps Sgricci
was also aware that, even at the height of its popularity, poetic impro-
visation in England tended not to take the form of full-scale theatrical
spectacle. Rather, extemporized poetry was channeled through the
well-established institution of public lecturing. In London, touring
celebrities as well as long-term expatriates like Gabriele Rossetti and
Ugo Foscolo were more likely to take to the podium than to the
stage, to give lectures about Italian literature in general and the tra-
dition of improvised poetry in particular, and sometimes to enliven
their presentations with impromptu demonstrations of their own
ability to improvise. Reviews and other records indicate that London
audiences’ exposure to improvvisatori was mostly of this kind, rather
than full-scale improvisational spectacles or formally judged exhibi-
tions of the sort that were ubiquitous in Italy and that became a fash-
ionable novelty in French and German cities during the mid-1820s.
Presumably this was, in part, an issue of language: Italian poets might
lecture in English, but they normally improvised poetry only in their
native language, often at a speed that made it difficult for English
listeners to follow.
When Sgricci came to town in 1826, poetic improvisation was
one among several forms of solo oral performance that offered enter-
tainment and instruction. Indeed, the Literary Gazette mentions
that the expatriate Italian poet and improvvisatore Filippo Pistrucci
“exhibited” on the same evening as Sgricci’s performance and
announces their intention to improvise together on a future occa-
sion, although evidence that this team appearance ever came about
is lacking (490:365). At the same time, lectures were taking place
regularly in London theaters. La Belle Assemblée mentions, among

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 Coler idge, Sgr icci, a nd the Shows 153

others, Mr. Bartley lecturing on astronomy at the English Opera

House and Mr. Thelwall lecturing on Shakespeare at the Haymarket
(Belle Assemblée 29:178–179). Dramatic readings were also enjoying
success: La Belle Assemblée regularly advertises and recommends Mr.
Smart’s series of readings from Shakespeare, which he performed
each winter for a decade beginning in 1817, and Mr. Putnam had
recently presented some well-received evenings of “readings and reci-
tations” at the Argyll Rooms themselves, according to the European
Magazine, and London Review (European Magazine 83:88). Sgricci
essentially adopts this format, offering his audience at the Argyll
Rooms a dramatic reading of his own pre-improvised tragedy.
Another intriguing English counterpart to the improvvisatori were
the one-man shows of the comic actor Charles Mathews. Since 1818,
Mathews had been appearing each season at the Lyceum Theater in
the patented performances he called At Homes, in which he imperson-
ated multiple characters in a partially scripted and partially improvised
mixture of monologue and patter-song, capping each performance
with a finale in which he “became” each of that evening’s characters
in quick succession. As Jane Moody has shown, the consistent success
of Mathews’s performances owes much to their wooing of genteel and
middle-class audiences by offering them a form of illegitimate theater
that, through a domestic stage-setting and the performer’s intimate
address to the audience, mimicked the conditions of a private drawing
room (191–197). While Mathews’s comedy contrasts with Sgricci’s
pretensions to high tragedy, Sgricci’s choice of a performance genre
lying somewhere between impersonation and dramatic reading might
suggest an attempt to accommodate to the formats that were proving
successful with London audiences.
The Literary Gazette lends credence to this hypothesis by holding
up a talent Sgricci shared with Mathews for particular praise: namely,
the “diversity of style” and “inflexions of voice” with which he por-
trayed different characters (490:365). The reviewer further evaluates
Sgricci’s performance in terms of distinctions between English and
Italian tastes, and suggests that his foreign flamboyance was mod-
erated just enough to suit a London audience. “The movements of
the body were often foreign,—such as seem extravagant to English
eyes,” the reviewer notes, “but certainly not excessively so: a medium
between the best of the Italian stage and a native preacher, such as
Mr. Irving when warmed to the utmost” (490:365). This ambivalent
comparison with the popular though controversial Edward Irving,
minister of the Caledonian Church at Hatton Garden, is an indica-
tion that pulpit preaching had come to be evaluated—and, it follows,

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 154 A ngel a Ester h a mmer

experienced—according to many of the same criteria as stage per-

formance. Irving’s preaching in particular was noted for theatrical-
ity and extemporization. In 1823, the European Magazine had even
launched a monthly series called “Sketches of Popular Preachers,”
to which some readers promptly objected because of the disturb-
ing elision of religious services with popular entertainment. Indeed,
religion and theater approach one another especially closely in the
European Magazine’s sketch of Reverend Irving in the July 1823
issue, which likens the preacher to star actors David Garrick and
Sarah Siddons and to extemporary speakers (84:47). In this con-
text, it is hardly surprising that the Literary Gazette would choose
to compare the improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci to Reverend Irving
as a way of representing Sgricci to English readers who had not wit-
nessed his performance.
Whether or not it was a calculated attempt to anglicize his art form,
Sgricci’s nonimprovisation in the Argyll Rooms ultimately has the
effect of bringing his performance closer, in terms of mediation, to
the experience of reading. In reprising the text that he had improvised
for a Paris audience weeks earlier, Sgricci is doing something similar
to the reviewers who recreate his performances in print by summariz-
ing the action in detail and quoting extensive speeches. While he is,
obviously, still operating in the medium of embodied performance,
Sgricci eliminates most of the spontaneity and unpredictability of the
improvisational genre, putting correspondingly more emphasis on
the qualities of his language and the effectiveness of his dramatic
impersonations. Imported into the cultural marketplace of 1820s
London, the Italian genre of poetic improvisation undergoes signifi-
cant remediation.
The middle-aged Samuel Taylor Coleridge must have identified
to some degree with the improvvisatori who were lecturing and per-
forming in London, given his own long-standing habits of extem-
porizing public lectures and conceiving ideas in oral conversation.
Coleridge’s letters and notebooks of 1826 take no note of Sgricci’s
visit, although Coleridge had other Italian correspondents in London
and was closely befriended at this time with John Hookham Frere, the
writer and diplomat who had assisted Italian exiles (including some
improvvisatori) to settle in England. Nevertheless, within weeks of
Sgricci’s London performance Coleridge wrote “The Improvisatore,”
a curious text consisting of a supposedly extemporized lyric poem
prefaced by five pages of prose dialogue that stage this act of improvi-
sation as an amateur drawing room performance. While any possible
relationship between Sgricci’s visit and Coleridge’s depiction of an

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 Coler idge, Sgr icci, a nd the Shows 155

“Improvisatore” is purely speculative, Coleridge’s text and Sgricci’s

performance nevertheless form an intriguing juxtaposition. For, if
Sgricci’s performance moves away from improvisation and toward the
reading of a printed text, Coleridge’s “The Improvisatore” goes in the
opposite direction. It uses a print medium to re-create the experience
of live improvisation, depicting the process by which an impromptu
poem arises out of the contingencies of conversation in a distinctly
performative social setting.
In Coleridge’s text, Catherine and Eliza, two young women
attending a Christmas party, encounter a fifty-something gentle-
man who is identified only as “the Friend” and bears the nickname
“Improvisatore.” This gentleman converses with the two ladies
about love and poetry, then extemporizes a lyric poem on the topic
of their choice—that is, on the question of whether true love exists
and whether he has personally experienced it. As a hybrid of poetry,
prose, and drama, the text presents a generic challenge to readers and
editors. The Collected Coleridge includes “The Improvisatore” among
Coleridge’s Poetical Works and indeed treats the concluding sixty-
seven-line poem as the main text, relegating the much longer dia-
logue that precedes it to the status of a “prose introduction” (Poetical
Works 1:1055). Yet the generic hybridity of “The Improvisatore” and
its self-conscious contextualization of the lyric poem are precisely the
factors that give meaning to Coleridge’s title and contribute to the
remediation of improvised poetry that seems characteristic for 1820s
London.
Coleridge’s middle-aged protagonist is a dilettante performer who
has acquired his nickname “the Improvisatore” from his habit of “per-
petrating charades and extempore verses at Christmas times” (Poetical
Works 1:1057). The action and diction of the text characterize him as
a conjurer who can pull words out of the air, as if doing a party trick.
Revealingly, the text begins in medias res with Catherine’s question
“What are the words?” (1056); later in the dialogue, Eliza admits that
her formless sentiment “wants the word that would make it under-
stand itself” (1058). When the ladies look to the Improvisatore as the
one who can conjure up the wanted words, he responds by perform-
ing ever more challenging acts of improvisation. After warming up by
improvising a four-line paraphrase of one of Thomas Moore’s Irish
Melodies, he goes on to extemporize a brief lecture on the theme “is
there any such true love?” As a finale, he simultaneously composes
and performs a four-strophe poem “ex improviso” (1060), using an
irregular mixture of couplet rhymes, alternating rhymes, and tercets,
and a variable accentual meter.

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 156 A ngel a Ester h a mmer

While the extemporized poem presents itself as an “ANSWER”

(1060) to the assigned question “is there any such true love?” (or
might it be answering the initial question “what are the words”?), its
most remarkable feature is that it constantly calls attention to its per-
formative status by evading any firm ground or constative meaning.
The lyric meditates not on the fact or experience, but rather on the
idea or “fancy” of being in love. Encouraged by the young ladies to
confess that he has personal experience of true love, the Improvisatore
instead avows only that he “fancied that he had” it (1060). Even
though his poem ends on a note of “CONTENTMENT,” the question of
whether the emotion was “real or a magic shew” (1062) remains curi-
ously unresolved. The poem’s final lines address a listening lady and
anticipate her response to the Improvisatore’s utterance: “Lady! deem
him not unblest” (1062). But since the lyric and the entire text end
here as abruptly as they began, there is no indication as to what either
of the young ladies might “deem” or what her response to the poem
might be. The dialogue portion of Coleridge’s text, on the other
hand, explicitly dramatizes the listeners’ feedback in response to the
Improvisatore’s prose discourse. One of the ladies, Eliza, is noticeably
more receptive, while her friend Catherine voices mild skepticism and
reminds the Improvisatore that she expects a “more sincere” answer
(1057). Catherine’s and Eliza’s responses raise the question of sin-
cerity by returning repeatedly to the question of whose feeling the
Improvisatore is interpreting: his own? theirs? or is he, in the man-
ner of a stage performer “perpetrating charades” and in the genre of
the “magic shew” that his poem self-consciously evokes, feigning an
emotion because it’s what his audience requests? By embedding an
ambiguous lyric poem that dwells on the terms “fancy,” “conceit,”
“uncertainty,” “hollowness,” “shadows,” and “magic shew” within a
mini-drama that depicts the poet as a dilettante performer convers-
ing about what it means to be sincere and constant, Coleridge’s “The
Improvisatore” foregrounds questions of performance and authentic-
ity. It risks juxtaposing the traditional timelessness and transcendence
of poetry, especially love poetry, with the time-bound conditions of
live performance, including contingency, ephemerality, and the pres-
ence or absence of audience response.
When it was first published, Coleridge’s brief text featured a still
more elaborate frame: in all, the original publication comprised two
titles, two subtitles, and three sections. The dialogue and poem dis-
cussed thus far bore the main title “The Improvisatore” and a subtitle
enclosed in quotation marks—“John Anderson, My Jo, John”—which
quotes yet another title, that of a song by Robert Burns to which the

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 Coler idge, Sgr icci, a nd the Shows 157

speakers allude in their dialogue. Preceding all this was a preamble in

prose and an overall title for the series of which Coleridge apparently
intended “The Improvisatore” to be only the first installment. While
it is futile to try to separate texts from paratexts, the longest and most
substantial section of “The Improvisatore” remains the five-page dra-
matic dialogue. Significantly, the effect of this prominent section is
to depict the conditions that give rise to the extemporized poem: the
nature of the venue, the characteristics of the interlocutors, the dis-
cussion of possible topics and the listeners’ request for a specific one.
In other words, attention shifts from the lyric poem per se onto the
process from which it arises; by depicting the Improvisatore in real-
time interaction with his audience, the text reproduces the conditions
of live performance.
The outermost layer of the incomplete frame sets the creative pro-
cess on yet another level. It consists of the series title “New Thoughts
on Old Subjects, or Conversational Dialogues on Interests and Events
of Common Life. By S. T. Coleridge Esq.” and a prose preamble in
which Coleridge addresses his reader directly. While this title casts
the author in the role of philosopher (“New Thoughts”) or talker
(“Conversational Dialogues”), the voice that speaks through the pre-
amble is above all that of the poet who takes pleasure in the quotidian
yet wonderful “freshness of Sensation” that endows “old and famil-
iar Objects” with “Novelty” (Poetical Works 2:1250). As editor J. C.
C. Mays notes (Poetical Works 1:1055), these formulations closely
echo Coleridge’s comments in the Friend (2:73–74) and Biographia
Literaria (2:7 and 1:80–81) about Wordsworth’s contribution to the
Lyrical Ballads, which was “to give the charm of novelty to things of
every day.” In “The Improvisatore,” the sudden genial observation
that permits a fresh responsiveness to everyday objects takes the form
of an ex improviso poem. Coleridge’s preamble thus sets Wordsworth’s
poetic practice and the art of the improvvisatore on the same level:
they become two alternative ways of describing the interaction of the
genial spirit with the contingencies of everyday life.
This reading of Coleridge’s text seeks to tease out the implications
of its elaborate framing while putting the emphasis on its main title,
“The Improvisatore.” It has been suggested that the title deliberately
echoes Letitia Landon’s popular The Improvisatrice, and Anya Taylor
has explored the resonances between the two texts, arguing that
Coleridge is here presenting an alternative perspective to Landon’s
gender politics and her portrayal of unhappy love. While Coleridge’s
“Improvisatore” is certainly about love, setting it into the context of
mediality and performance during the 1820s suggests that it is also

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 158 A ngel a Ester h a mmer

about the creative process, the status of poetry, the relationship of

poet and audience, and the ephemerality of art, especially in a literary
field increasingly dominated by popular, commercial, and consum-
able forms. This last point gains support from the context in which
Coleridge’s “Improvisatore” first appeared: it was a hasty, money-
making piece published in The Amulet for 1828, one of the popular
annuals that had rapidly become the main publication venue for origi-
nal poetry during this decade. In his letters Coleridge describes “The
Improvisatore” both as an actual improvisation and as a commodity
when he complains that he sold it to the editor of The Amulet for less
than ten pounds, parting with it too cheaply and impulsively on the
day it was written, before he had time to reflect on its value (Collected
Letters 6:699). Coleridge, like Tommaso Sgricci, finds himself obliged
to commodify both poetry and improvisation for the 1820s market—
although Sgricci evidently fared better in that regard by performing
his improvised text for a live audience at a guinea a head.
Importing poetic improvisation into nineteenth-century England
was thus a ramificatory project. Coleridge’s “Improvisatore” takes its
place among many imaginative and fictional depictions of improv-
visatori and improvvisatrici by Staël, Landon, Mary Shelley, William
Godwin, Sydney Owenson, Alexander Pushkin, George Sand, Hans
Christian Andersen, and other contemporaries. Concurrently, due to
a conjunction of historical, political, cultural, and medial factors, the
vogue of the improvising performer spread across Europe and peaked
during the year 1824. Fed by the presence of Italian improvvisatori
and lecturers on Italian literature, nurtured by an experimental—
and experiential—performance culture, and promoted by market-
conscious periodical publications, improvisation took on distinctive
forms in 1820s London that give rise to questions concerning media-
tion and remediation. How does the experience of reading poetry
compare to that of hearing it being improvised—or watching a previ-
ously improvised piece being read aloud, or reading an improvised
poem in print, or reading a review of an improvisational performance
in a magazine? The hypermediality that results when improvvisatori
are imported onto the London scene and into English print culture
highlights the differences among these experiences, yet also blurs
the boundaries between media. It is worth recalling that in the early
nineteenth century the word “performance” could as easily refer to
a book, a poem, an essay, or a painting as to a stage production—
just as the word “reading,” then and now, can refer to an oral public
performance as well as a silent individual experience. Taking place at
the intersection of reading and performance, English adaptations of

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 Coler idge, Sgr icci, a nd the Shows 159

Italian improvisation become a focal point of medial change in the

latter days of Romanticism.

Notes
1. For an overview of this topic, see Caroline Gonda, “The Rise and
Fall of the Improvisatore, 1753–1845” (2000); Erik Simpson,
“ ‘The Minstrels of Modern Italy’: Improvisation Comes to Britain”
(2003); Jeffrey C. Robinson, “Romantic Poetry: The Possibilities for
Improvisation” (2007); and Angela Esterhammer, Romanticism and
Improvisation, 1750–1850 (2008).
2. For a fuller discussion of this issue, see Esterhammer, “The
Improvisatrice’s Fame: Landon, Staël, and Female Performers in
Italy” (2007).
3. One example is the diary kept by Frances Williams Wynn from 1797
to 1844, which contains accounts of lectures and performances by
Rossetti, Foscolo, Pistrucci, and Spinetto.
4. The issues of the New Monthly Magazine are numbered and bound
as three volumes per year; thus, the 1824 volumes are 10 (January–
June), 11 (July–December), and 12 (Historical Register). Each vol-
ume is paginated separately.
5. The review appears in the “Sights of London” section of the Literary
Gazette No. 490, the weekly issue for Saturday, June 10, 1826. The
journal is paginated consecutively throughout each annual volume.

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 C h a p t e r Tw e lv e

M a s a n i e l l o on t h e L on don Stage

Frederick Bur wick

“I want a hero,” Lord Byron declared in the opening line of the

first canto of Don Juan. “An uncommon want,” he explained, for the
simple reason that there were too many candidates jostling for pub-
lic attention: “Every year and month sends forth a new one.” After
reviewing some thirty-two such candidates with political and mili-
tary credentials in British and French history, Byron observed that
none of these heroes or would-be heroes could serve the present need,
for inevitably, “the age discovers he is not the true one.” The want
was not as uncommon as Byron implied. When one turns to Byron’s
source, the theater, it becomes immediately evident that every new
melodrama presented yet another hero to meet the persistent public
clamor. After a decade of the Regency, the Prince had now become
King. Without agreeing with those who called him inept, it would not
be wrong to say that he was less ept than current needs of the 1820s
required. The defeat of Napoleon, the Bourbon restoration, and the
age of Metternich brought about a repression of liberal reform on
the Continent. And in Britain, because theater censorship prohibited
satirical or polemical drama directed against the government, there
was no opportunity for performances directly advocating changes
in the present British rule. Perhaps for that very reason audiences
flocked to plays depicting revolution and rebellion in other times and
climes. Among the many heroic revolutionaries who gained popu-
larity on the London stage in the 1820s, none was sought by more
playwrights nor celebrated in more performances than Masaniello,

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 162 F r e de r ic k B u r w ic k

the rebel of Naples. Here, I shall trace the career of that hero as he
and his story evolve and metamorphose, passing through the hands
of many playwrights and across the channel to Europe and back, in
the process sparking an event unique in theater history, for a perfor-
mance of Masaniello must be credited with a significant role in the
Belgian national revolution—a revolution even larger than that of its
titular hero.

Heroic Rebels of London Melodrama

The playbills of the period cautiously celebrate the melodramatic
exposition of heroic rebels. In representing heroes of England’s
historical past who opposed rulers of the time, it was important to
make clear that the corruption and cruelty of those rulers justified
the rebellion. Robin Hood thus made frequent appearances on the
stage, typically with displays of his skills as archer and swordsman.
As an outlaw his crimes were fully justified by his practice of robbing
from the rich and giving to the poor. An equally crucial element in
his assaults and robberies was the understanding that he was agitat-
ing against the misrule of King John who held the throne while
his absent brother, Richard the Lionheart, was busy leading the
Third Crusade. Quite often these plays were performed as comedies
ridiculing the Sheriff of Nottingham’s persecution of hardworking
commoners.1
Often billed as the Scottish Robin Hood, Robert Roy MacGregor
was another folk hero and outlaw whose exploits were dramatized by
playwrights of the period.2 Just as Rob Roy was billed as the Scottish
Robin Hood, Twm John Catty was introduced to the stage as the
Welsh Rob Roy.3 The theater managers apparently thought it would
useful to explain that they were not, in fact, celebrating a Welsh hero
who fought against the English, but an “Ancient Briton” who con-
tributed to the collective strength of the kingdom:

The very strong and general interest excited by the various National
Dramas, which have celebrated the Heroes, and gives a local Habitation
and a Name to the popular Traditions and Historic Legends of the
Sister Kingdom, authorize the presumption that a Story characteristic
of the Country which afforded a shelter to our aboriginal Ancestors
from foreign Invaders, of a People who are no less justly than emphati-
cally styled the Ancient Britons, and displaying the Scenery, and
illustrating the manners of one of the most Picturesque Spots and
Romantic People in Europe, cannot be less acceptable to the Patrons
of the Drama.4

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 M asa niello on the London Stage 163

Another drama of Welsh nationalism, The Welshman; or, The Prince of

Cambria was staged at the Royal Coburg Theater on May 15 of the
following year, and Owen Glendower, too, was celebrated for leading
an heroic but unsuccessful rebellion of the Welsh against English rule
in Drury Lane’s production of Owen, Prince of Powys; or, Welsh Feuds
(January 28, 1822).
The London audiences were by no means exclusively native
Londoners. Indeed, native Londoners would have made up a small
minority, for at least 80 percent of the population were recent immi-
grants or first-generation Londoners.5 Many had arrived from the
provinces, others from Scotland (Lobban 452), Ireland,6 and Wales
(Jones 465–466, 476), and still others from the Continent (Flinn
154–163). Cheering non-British heroes on the stage neither inhib-
ited the applause for rebellion against repressive government abroad
nor the zeal for domestic reform. Like Robin Hood, Wilhelm Tell
was another folk hero of disputed historical authenticity who held
persistent popularity on the London stage for his bold opposition to
injustice. His defiance of Hermann Gessler, newly appointed Austrian
Vogt of Altdorf, was supposed to have sparked a fourteenth-century
rebellion that led to the formation of the Swiss Confederation, and
it was celebrated in an anonymous adaptation of Schiller’s William
Tell, the Hero of Switzerland at the Royal Coburg Theatre on July 2,
1821. Not just among the rebel heroes of the historical past, play-
wrights also found their heroes among current conflicts being waged
in Europe. Rafael del Riego y Nuñez, a Spanish revolutionary who
played a key role in the outbreak of the Spanish civil war of 1820–
1823, was applauded as a hero in the London melodrama Spanish
Martyrs; or, The Death of Riego less than two years later at the Coburg
(June 13, 1825). Members of the Spanish- and German-speaking
communities would have found their national pride encouraged on
repeated occasions.7

Italians in London
The plight of Italian nationalism might well have prompted among
the Italian community in London a sense of affinity with the predica-
ment of Tell as a Swiss hero struggling against Austrian control or,
more recently, Riego attempting to uphold the Spanish constitution
of 1812 abolished by Ferdinand VII. Inspired by the Spaniards, a sim-
ilar movement was launched in Italy. Guglielmo Pepe, a Carbonaro,
led his regiment in the army of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies in
mutiny. He conquered the peninsular part of Two Sicilies. The king,

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 164 F r e de r ic k B u r w ic k

Ferdinand I, agreed to enact a new constitution. The revolutionaries,

though, failed to court popular support and fell to Austrian troops of
the Holy Alliance. Ferdinand abolished the constitution and began
systematically persecuting known revolutionaries. Many supporters of
Carbonari insurrections were forced into exile, some fleeing to Paris
and others to London (Holt 258; Dennis Mack Smith, The Making
of Italy 137–138).
Many Italians had settled in England during previous centuries,
and Italian strolling artists had already wrought changes in British
drama. Harliquinades in the theaters and Punch-and-Judy shows in
the streets were both legacies of the Italian influence in the late sev-
enteenth and early eighteenth centuries. As documented by Lucio
Sponza in Italian Immigrants in Nineteenth Century Britain (1988),
the pattern shifted following the disintegration of Napoleonic rule
and the advent of the insurrections. In the 1820s Italians became a
more obvious presence in London street life. In tracing the migration
during the earlier nineteenth century, Sponza reveals that many trav-
elled by foot from the north of Italy to Austria, Switzerland, France,
Germany, with only a few managing a ship crossing to Britain.8
Although the great wave of Italian emigration occurred during the
latter half of the nineteenth century, Sponza accounts for four thou-
sand Italian immigrants arriving in England from 1820 to 1851
(Sponza 28–34).9 Half of that number remained in London. “Little
Italy,” a centre of the Italian community in London throughout the
nineteenth century, was situated in Clerkenwell and Hatton Garden
(Sponza 46–56).10 Giuseppe Mazzini, the writer, patriot, and revolu-
tionary, arrived there in exile with his Italian friends in January 1837,
lived in Laystall Street, founded an Italian language school in nearby
Hatton Garden in 1841, and frequently visited Sadler’s Wells Theatre
on Rosebury Avenue (Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini 211–246). Another
large group of Italians in London worked as seamen on British ships,
with lodgings on the Southbank, many settling with employment
as dock workers, stevedores, chandlers, and watermen. These would
have been among the audiences at the Royal Coburg Theatre on
Waterloo-road or the Surrey Theatre on Blackfriars Road.
During the 1820s the Carbonari insurrections had been thwarted.
At the end of the decade, Ciro Menotti led his revolutionaries
against the Duke of Modena, but the Austrian troops intervened and
Menotti was captured and executed. The efforts of the Italian uni-
fication movement, il Risorgimento, were being forcefully crushed.
Interestingly, neither Ciro Menotti nor Guglielmo Pepe were the
fallen heroes celebrated on the stage. That role was filled by another

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 M asa niello on the London Stage 165

revolutionary, Tommaso Aniello, the twenty-five-year-old Neapolitan

fisherman, who 180 years earlier, in 1647, led the revolt against the
rule of the Spanish Habsburgs in Naples. Eight different produc-
tions based on “Masaniello” and the revolt appeared in the theaters
of London between 1825 and 1829. There had been earlier versions,
not without volatile political implications, but those of the late 1820s
were also charged with a high degree of melodramatic pathos. The
revolutionary spark was by no means dampened by the emotional
sentiment.

Masaniello in Seventeenth-
and Eighteenth-Century Drama
The first English play based on the Neapolitan revolt was written just
two years after those events. The author of The Rebellion of Naples, or
The Tragedy of Massenello (1649) identified himself as “a gentleman
who was an eyewitness where this was really acted upon that bloody
stage, the streets of Naples. Anno Domini MDCXLVII.”11 He signed
himself “T. B.” and provided a further hint to his identity in his dedi-
cation “To the right worshipfull his honoured kinsman, John Caesar
of Hyde hall, in the county of Hertford, esquire.” As John Genest
observed, the author’s claim to be an eyewitness would have been
more credible if he had adhered more accurately to the known facts of
the uprising and the circumstances of Masaniello’s death.12
Regardless, the Neapolitan’s story would prove to have great stay-
ing power. As rector of the school in Zittau, Germany, Christian
Weise, wrote numerous plays for performance by his students, among
them the historical tragedy, Masaniello (1682). At almost the same
time in England there appeared a Tory satire against Anthony Ashley
Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, for his part in the insurrection against
the ailing Charles II to block the Catholic succession. Charged with
treason, Shaftesbury fled to Holland where he died in January 1683.
In the anonymous satirical pamphlet, Shaftesbury is identified as
Masaniello, not a hero but a rebel and traitor.13
During the course of the eighteenth century, there appeared two
further accounts of Masaniello that served as sources for the stage
adaptations in London in the 1820s. The first of these was Thomas
D’Urfey’s two-part tragedy The Famous History of the Rise and Fall of
Masaniello (1700).14 The second was the work by Francis Midon,. The
Remarkable History of the Rise and Fall of Masaniello (1729).15 Yet
another eighteenth-century text set an important precedent because
it interrogated the motives of the revolutionary hero. In 1732 David

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 166 F r e de r ic k B u r w ic k

Fassmann’s Wilhelm Tell und Masaniello accomplished this by pre-

senting the two heroes in an imaginary dialogue. Because the most
popular and widely performed staging of the fate of Masaniello in
the 1820s and the decades following was Daniel Auber’s opera, La
muette de Portici, libretto by Eugène Scribe (1828),16 it is important
to acknowledge that the materials had already received operatic inter-
pretation by the German composer, Reinhard Keiser, Masagniello
furioso, libretto by Barthold Feind (1706).

Soane’s Masaniello
In the 1820s, the insurrections that had commenced in the two
Sicilies and in the Piedmont elicited a growing public interest, espe-
cially within London’s Italian communities. To represent the just
claims of the Italian rebels, George Bolwell Davidge, manager at the
Royal Coburg, turned to his house playwright, Henry M. Milner, to
prepare an historical melodrama with Masaniello as heroic leader of
the revolt at Naples. At the very same time Robert Elliston, manager
at Drury Lane, who had a penchant for developing rival productions,
commissioned George Soane to write a five-act tragedy on Masaniello
with music by Henry Bishop.17 Winning the race against Drury Lane,
Masaniello, the Fisherman of Naples and Deliverer of his Country, “A
Serio-Comic Historical Melo-Drama and Neapolitan Spectacle, in 3
Acts,” opened at the Coburg on Monday, February 7, 1825. Ten days
later, on Thursday, February 17, 1825, Masaniello, the Fisherman of
Naples opened at Drury Lane; opened—and closed, for Soane’s play
was an utter flop. Haste may well have contributed to the failure, but
it seems likely that he also misjudged his audience. Cited by one critic
as a potential influence on Scribe (Hibberd 152), Soane’s Masaniello
was a disappointment even with Edmund Kean in the title role.
Christina Fuhrman has speculated that difficulty with censorship was
a contributing factor (Fuhrmann 89–106). As Fuhrman points out,
Soane’s script caused trouble with the censor, who liberally excised
and altered lines before allowing the performance.18 The problem,
however, was not that the political speeches were inflammatory, but
rather that Soane’s Masaniello sacrifices heroic integrity. When he
insists that “noblemen are nothing” and derides statesmen as “state-
cankers, who come between us and our monarch’s love,” he still
affirms the “monarch’s love” (Soane, Masaniello 6, 8). His downfall
is in becoming too much like the noblemen he had denounced, mov-
ing into a palace, abandoning his wife, and declaring his love for the
courtesan Olympia.

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 M asa niello on the London Stage 167

Soane’s play makes it clear that Masaniello was the man for the
moment. In the opening scene, Count Manfred warns the viceroy,
Duke D’Arcos, that the new tax “Will drive the people mad,” and
Caraffa adds that there is one among the masses who could “organize
revolt,” and that one is a Masaniello, “a man for treasons—bold and
stubborn;/ A proud contemner of authority” (Soane, Masaniello, 2).
In Act I, scene iii, a mob has already assembled. Bruno tells them they
need a leader. A hero is wanted

BRUNO: [. . .] you are a body, gentlemen,—a very handsome body,—

and ’tis fit you should have a head [. . .]
LUIGI: [. . .] it is a big body, and must needs have a big head to think
for it, or the whole creature will be preposterous. Therefore,
unmuzzle neighbour; who shall be the man?
BRUNO: Who but Masaniello?
MOB: Right! Right! (Soane, Masaniello, 9–10)

In spite of the claim by the reviewer in the Theatrical Observer that the
tale of Masaniello was “so well known that a description of the plot
seems unnecessary,”19 historical accounts varied in their conclusion to
that tale. The challenge to be confronted by each of the playwrights
was not in depicting Masaniello’s rise to power but in accounting for
his fall. A lust for power? For wealth? Or for a woman? Did he suf-
fer madness? Intoxication? Or was he poisoned? Was he betrayed by
the Spanish authorities? Or by his own people? In reporting on the
sources, Genest asserts that “the most probable and received opinion
is, that the Viceroy had given him an intoxicating draught.”20 Soane’s
resolution, according to the critic in the Examiner, was incongru-
ously unfortunate. Although the play pretends to be a tragedy, it is
“little more than a Melo-drama, attended with a fault, which from
the nature of the story is very extraordinary; that is to say, a surprising
want of action.” The action has been crowded into the first three acts:
Masaniello not only leads the revolt, he prepares for the peace. When
the Duke and his retinue take refuge in a church, Masaniello presents
the demands of the people, that the charter of Charles V be returned
and honored. The Duke promises to grant their request, but offers a
parchment that Masaniello recognizes as a forgery. If the true char-
ter is not delivered by daybreak, Masaniello vows to burn down the
church. At the close of Act II, Masaniello enters on horseback hold-
ing aloft the true charter of Charles V in his right hand. The weakness
of Soane’s drama is his handling of Masaniello’s downfall and the
Duke’s easy return to power. The turn comes amidst the celebrations

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 168 F r e de r ic k B u r w ic k

in Act III. The critic in the London Examiner objects specifically to

the “mawkish tissue of feminine interest—why lower the ruling pas-
sion of a man in the situation of Masaniello, by a silly and improbable
amour with a woman of quality, and the undesigned assassination of
a too tender and prying wife?” (qtd. in Genest 9:290–291). In the
third act, suspecting her husband’s affair, Lorina disguises herself as
a man. Failing to recognize her when she tries to reclaim his love,
Masaniello kills her with his knife. He immediately succumbs to grief
so overwhelming that his sanity fails. Convinced that the hero has
vanquished himself, the Duke pretends remorse:

DUKE: I grieve
Too much to see a hero—such a hero—
Subdu’d and prostrate.
M ASANIELLO: (Starting up!) No, Duke; he’s not subdu’d;
Bow’d to the dust, it may be—no subdu’d;
He’s still Masaniello—still your master.
Unfeeling pride!—Were you so visited,
I had not trod on your affliction. (Soane, Masaniello, 34)

But the Duke is right. Masaniello has already lost his capacity to lead
at the end of Act III. Acts IV and V depict Masaniello’s slow and
agonizing dissolution and death. If Masaniello’s purpose had been to
reveal the degenerate morality of the court, then Soane might have
allowed him to keep his honor by exposing Olympia’s fickle turn from
Caraffa to Masaniello. Instead, he presents Olympia as an honorable
woman, and Masaniello as being swayed by fickle lust. Taking advan-
tage of Masaniello’s grief and mental distraction, the Duke seduces
the populace to his side. In the fifth act, shot by his own people,
Masaniello dies denouncing “the treacherous nobles” and calling on
his “brave countrymen” to continue their fight for freedom (Soane,
Masaniello, 60). The drama, Genest declares, does Soane “no cred-
it—he has not hit off the character of Masaniello happily” (Genest
9:290).

Milner’s Masaniello (1)

The race to be first at Drury Lane resulted in a dramatic failure for
Soane, but Henry Milner’s first-place version at the Royal Coburg
(February 7, 1825), Masaniello, the Fisherman of Naples, was a decided
success, with repeat performances throughout February and a revival
the following year (June 5, 1826).21 Part of that success was no doubt

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 M asa niello on the London Stage 169

due to the enthusiastic response from the local southbank Italian

community (Sponza 39–45). The two plays are approximately the
same length, even though Milner adhered to the three-act division
of melodrama (62 pages), while Soane chose the five-act division of
tragedy (60 pages). But in dialogue, character development, and plot
structure Milner’s play is superior to Soane’s. Milner adhered closely
to Midon’s Remarkable History of the Rise and Fall of Masaniello as
his major source, 22 but may well have consulted as well with one of
the Italian expatriates in Southwark or Westminster.
A crucial development in the revolt, not even mentioned by Soane,
was the appearance on July 10, 1647 of five hundred banditti in the
marketplace of Naples. This occurred after the viceroy restored the
charter of Charles V and promised to comply with the demands of
the people. Sent by the outlaw Perrone, the arrival of the banditti
threatened further bloodshed and destruction. At first Perrone had
joined Masaniello, but he was bribed to aid the Duke of Mataloni and
his brother Don Pepe. When Masaniello accused Perrone as a traitor,
muskets were fired, but Masaniello escaped unwounded. In the ensu-
ing fracas, Perrone and about 150 of the banditti were killed. Don
Pepe was taken and put to death. This episode, which might have
corrected the “surprising want of action” in Soane’s drama, is fully
developed in Milner’s version in Act I, scenes iii and v, and in Act II,
scenes i and ii.
By no means as gifted an actor as Edmund Kean at Drury Lane,
nor as gifted as many other members of his famous acting family,
Henry Stephen Kemble nevertheless performed the role of Masaniello
with considerable power. He had in that role, as Kean unfortunately
did not, the advantage of effective dramatic situations and powerful
dialogue. Moreover, as suited the character of Masaniello, his lines
were tempered and restrained rather than boisterous and ranting.23
In following his source, Milner took several of Masaniello’s speeches
verbatim from the transcriptions in Midon’s History (see Midon
117–126). Following the defeat of the Spanish Guards who had been
ordered to fire upon the people of Naples, Masaniello addressed his
comrades with a modest pride in being a simple fisherman sharing in
their success as loyal patriots (I.v). Masaniello’s voice of controlled
determination gives way in Act III, scene ii, to the first indications
of incipient madness. Because of poor management of situation and
action, Soane allowed the hero of his play to be reduced to an embar-
rassing state of debility for two entire acts. Milner avoids this problem
by the simple expediency of a minor plot, drawn not from his histori-
cal sources but from popular gothic melodrama.

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 170 F r e de r ic k B u r w ic k

Like Soane, Milner too has given Masaniello a wife, but he has
avoided entirely what the critic in the The Examiner called a “mawk-
ish tissue of feminine interest.” Leona, wife to Masaniello, was played
by Miss Watson, who in 1818 had arrived at the Royal Coburg from
the Cheltenham Theatre and soon rose to prominence in such roles
as Helen Marr in William Barrymore’s Wallace, The Hero of Scotland;
Lady Calantha in Glenarvon (adapted from the novel by Lady Caroline
Lamb); Catherine in Gustavus Vasa (adapted from the German play by
Kotzebue); and Malvina in W. T. Moncrieff’s The Vampire.24 Milner
presented her with bravery, fortitude, and a revolutionary tempera-
ment every bit as bold as her husband’s. The gothic villain, Guilio
Genovino, a renegade Monk, was played by Rowbotham, a favorite
villain on the Coburg stage, cunning and duplicitous—plotting first
with the outlaw Perrone to pillage Naples, then plotting with Caraffa,
secretary to viceroy, to assassinate Masaniello. Genovino is a lecher-
ous predator as well, determined to bribe or force Masaniello’s wife
into his bed.
The first indications of Leona’s strength occur at the end of Act
I. Masaniello has pledged to lead the people in refusing to submit to
the tax imposed by the Spaniards. When the magistrates intervene to
enforce the law, Leona steps forth to deliver a bold address on behalf
of the people. Milner has given her words from one of Masaniello’s
speeches recorded in Midon’s History (see 108–112). The attempt
to arrest and imprison her is resisted by Masaniello who rallies the
people to her side. Before Masaniello meets with Genovino in Act
II, scene ii, Leona has already told him of the Monk’s lewd advances.
Expecting the worst of the low-minded villain, Masaniello is never-
theless shocked at Genovino’s demand that Naples be delivered up to
the pillage of Perrone’s outlaws. Masaniello disavows all connection
with the outlaws, who retaliate with an attempt on his life. Again,
Milner places Leona at the forefront, displaying her heroic devotion
in gathering the citizens of Naples to drive off the attack. Act II ends
with the success of the rebels, the reading of the charter of Charles V,
and the triumphal procession led by Masaniello.
Act III opens in a chamber in the viceroy’s palace, where Caraffa
reveals his plot with Genovino to kill Masaniello. In the next scene,
Masaniello begins his descent into delirium. Leona and the friends
who have gathered attempt to comfort him but are unable to deter-
mine either a cause or a cure. In this distraught state, Leona is again
approached by the Monk, who renews his lecherous proposal that he
now intends to enforce with the threat of having mad rebel impris-
oned and executed. Her acquiescence seems to be her only recourse

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 M asa niello on the London Stage 171

to preserve her husband’s life. In the ensuing scene (III.iii) the insan-
ity of Masaniello increases to a fevered pitch. Fearing for his life, he
attempts to escape and is assassinated by the contrivance of Genovino.
The heroic voice of Masaniello may be silenced, but the voice of
Leona still speaks. In an energetic address to the multitude, Leona
calls upon the people to secure the success they have gained against
the viceroy. And in her striking attack on the villain Genovino, she
avenges Masaniello’s murder.

Scribe’s Masaniello
Milner’s successful melodrama at the Coburg was performed through
February 1825 and revived again the following year in June 1826.
The next year, a different version of the story was created by Michele
Carafa de Colobrano, whose Masaniello ou le Pêcheur napolitain
opened on December 27, 1827 in Paris at the Opéra-Comique.25
Although this opera fared well in France, there were no contemporary
performances in England. And the most successful of all the versions
discussed here opened not in London but in Paris. It was Daniel-
François-Esprit Auber’s opera, Masaniello, ou La muette de Portici,
which had its premiere performance at the Théâtre de l’Académie roy-
ale de musique, February 29, 1828. The libretto had originally been
drafted by Germain Delavigne and corrected by Eugène Scribe. In
France, the circumstances of the Neapolitan insurrection had to be
represented with a certain caution because of the ultraroyalist mea-
sures of Charles X and the increasing discontent during these years
just prior to the July Revolution of 1830 and the overthrow of the
Bourbon monarch. Later this same year, 1828, the satiric verses of
the French songwriter, Pierre-Jean de Béranger, were the sole provo-
cation for having him arrested, fined 1100 francs, and imprisoned for
nine months. Scribe’s libretto reflected the current political agitations
not only in Italy but in France as well. In Act II, scene ii, Pietro and
Masaniello sing a duet (Amour sacré de la patrie—Sacred Love of the
Homeland) that became popular as a new Marseillaise.
As the subtitle reveals, Scribe has introduced a new subplot, a sub-
plot with sufficient melodramatic appeal to counter the exclusive atten-
tion to Masaniello. In dramatizing the fate of “La Muette de Portici”
(The Mute Girl of Portici), however, Scribe did not shift attention
away from the evils of Spanish; he provided, rather, a further instance.
Soane had given Masaniello an illicit affair with a courtesan, Olympia,
and a jealous wife, Lorina. Milner had provided him with a brave
and heroic wife, Leona, pursued by a fiendish predator, Genovino.

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 172 F r e de r ic k B u r w ic k

Scribe’s contribution was not a wife, but a sister, Fenella, a mute girl
who has been seduced and kidnapped by Alphonse, son of the Viceroy
of Naples. The effect of this change, of course, is to make the offense
against his sister, rather than oppressive taxation, the prime cause for
Masaniello to lead the revolt against the Spanish authorities. The expo-
sure of Alphonse’s transgression occurred on the eve of his marriage
to the Princess Elvira. She forgives him, but persuades him to make
amends to Fenella. While Alphonse searches for Fenella, Masaniello
loses control over the revolutionaries who are bent on the destruction
of the viceroy’s family. When Alphonse and Elvira seek refuge in the
fisherman’s hut, Masaniello risks the fury of Pietro, his rebel friend,
for wanting to protect them. Convinced that Masaniello is a traitor
who is undermining the effort to overthrow the oppressors, Pietro
secretly poisons Masaniello. In the last throes of his agonizing death,
Masaniello manages to aid Elvira in her escape. Alphonse marches with
a Spanish army against the Neapolitans, rescues Elvira, and quashes
the insurrection. In the concluding scene, Mount Vesuvius erupts and
Fenella throws herself into the lava in despair.
Because the rebellion is crushed and Spanish authority is resumed,
it may seem that Scribe’s libretto represents a political capitulation to
ruling power. Contemporary audiences, however, recognized in the
failure of the insurrection and the tragic fate of Fenella, an appeal to
revive the revolutionary cause. The very fact that Fenella is confined
to silence makes her an articulate representative of a populace denied
a political voice. The role of the mute in melodrama frequently served
as a symbol of “the defencelessness of innocence,” as Peter Brooks has
argued in “The Text of Muteness.” The silent performance demanded
of the audience a heightened attentiveness. Special exertions were
required, too, of the performer: “The mute role is in fact a virtuoso
role, [ . . . ] a role that demands of an actor a deployment of all his dra-
matic powers to convey meaning” (Brooks 56–58, 61). Although not
as violently mutilated as Lavinia in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,
Fenella was still a victimized character intended to arouse sympathy
and compassion.

Deshayes’s Masaniello
Following Thomas Holcroft’s Deaf and Dumb (1801) and A Tale of
Mystery (1802), the mute may have become a standard character in
melodrama, but Fenella is a character in opera (Burwick, Romantic
Drama 109–113). A nonsinging character in a principle operatic
role is a striking innovation, a bold hybridity of opera and ballet.26

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 M asa niello on the London Stage 173

Dance, of course, was a well-established component of melodrama

and opera, but for Fenella in La muette de Portici dance was as inte-
gral to the exposition of her character as song for any other operatic
character. Her silent cry of despair was communicated solely through
expressive body language. It should be no surprise, then, that the first
adaptation of Auber’s Masaniello in London was as a ballet. Opening
at King’s Theatre in March 1829 André-Jean-Jacques Deshayes’s
Masaniello, with music composed by Nicholas Bochsa, retained from
Auber’s score two vocal numbers, the wedding chorus and the barca-
role.27 The manuscript libretto submitted to the Lord Chamberlain
for the obligatory censorship contained Italian text for four choruses
and one solo with chorus.28 One contemporary critic found that “[t]
he plot, the action, and the music [ . . . ] seemed really to hold out an
invitation to mould all these into the shape of an interesting ballet,”
noting that “the opera itself contains so much dancing” and, even in
the originally vocal numbers, “the subjects are so replete with neat
and pleasing melody, that they essentially suited the purpose of ballet-
music.”29 The ballet-like performance, however, had the effect of flat-
tening the plot. Fenella was no longer estranged, for everyone in this
“opera without words” spoke her language.

Kenney’s Masaniello
Less than two months later, on May 4, 1829, Drury Lane and the
Royal Coburg theatres were once again competing with rival pro-
ductions of Masaniello. This time the playwrights were not Milner
and Soane, but Milner and James Kenney. Both had adapted Scribe’s
libretto for the English stage. Although still declaring the work to
be “a Grand Opera,” the production at Drury Lane conformed more
to the usual melodrama. Kenney substituted spoken dialogue for the
recitative in his Masaniello: A Grand Opera in Three Acts (1831) and
Barham Levius, the composer, reduced and replaced many of Auber’s
musical numbers in his version, Masaniello; or, The Dumb Girl of
Portici; a Grand Opera (1829).
Arguing that Soane’s version had been too “pointedly political,”
Christina Fuhrmann maintained that Kenney sought to avoid simi-
lar failure by amending “the more politically provocative aspects of
Scribe’s libretto” (Fuhrmann 89–106). As I have stated, my own assess-
ment is that Soane’s play failed because it was a bad play, with its major
action over by Act III, leaving a hero debased and dishonored, driven
mad not by his enemies but by himself. Fuhrmann’s commentary on
Kenney’s version, however, impresses me as completely accurate. She

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 174 F r e de r ic k B u r w ic k

effectively counters the contention published in Harlequin: a Journal

of the Drama on May 16, 1829 that the Drury Lane production was a
replication of the original French opera: “So exact is the copy, that we
could almost fancy ourselves on the stuffed seats of the parterre of the
Academie Royale de Musique.” In listing Kenney’s numerous subtle
changes, she observes obvious patterns. Whereas Scribe centered the
fault in the viceroy’s exploitative policies as mirrored in his son’s sexual
abuse of Fenella, Kenney’s version has the blame directed against the
injustices imposed at large by the Hapsburg Spaniards. Thus, he adds
an exchange in the marketplace scene in which a tax collector aggres-
sively demands money from two peasant women. Kenney also has
Masaniello refer directly to the tax as provoking the resistance: “Go
to the market-place, and read the new tax-table; that’s my weather-
glass. Who’ll set that to rights?” (Kenney, Masaniello 31, 20). The
fault rests with policy rather than with the officials appointed to gov-
ern. Alphonso, for example, is willing to shoulder the blame for the
people’s discontent, and Kenney gives him added lines to reflect that
“the natives have little cause to love us, and griefs like theirs, it should
have been my office rather to have relieved than aggravated” (Kenney,
Masaniello 8). Kenney’s Masaniello strives to organize the protest and
objects to the intemperate mob. Omitting Act IV, scene i, in which the
vanquished Spaniards beg for mercy, Kenney inserts instead a soliloquy
in which Masaniello laments, “Whither have my passions hurried me?
Seeking to rouse men to their rights, I have unkennelled bloodhounds
to their prey.” Kenney also abbreviates Pietro’s role, omitting the duet
with Masaniello, and curtailing the dialogue. He then has Borella
denounce Pietro’s poisoning of Masaniello for his presumed betrayal:
“The punishment should have waited the offence. ’Tis a black deed—a
rash deed—and you’ll repent it” (Kenney, Masaniello 35, 49–50).

Milner’s Masaniello (2)

On the same night that Kenney’s Masaniello opened at Drury Lane,
Henry Milner once again opened his rival production. Masaniello;
or, The Dumb Girl of Portici (Royal Coburg, May 4, 1829), followed
closely Scribe’s version. Milner, however, did not totally abandon his
first version, for the lines that he gives to Masaniello still echo the
speeches from Midon’s History. Selections from Auber’s score were
adapted by Thomas Hughes and Montague Corri, retaining the
overture, the choruses, and the barcarole.30 Even in this new version,
Masaniello remains for Milner the prominent advocate of liberty,
motivated not merely by the injustice against his sister. When Fenella

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 M asa niello on the London Stage 175

is captured at the marketplace, he sees it as an assault on the rights

of all: “Who dares to lay his hand on a free citizen of Naples?” The
struggle for freedom is a defense against ruthless exploitation of the
poor and innocent. Pointing to the children, he calls upon his fellow
Neapolitans, “Is it not your duty, when the tyrant snatches from their
famishing mouths the hard-gained morsel that their hunger asks?
Is’t not your duty to step in between, and fell to earth the monster
who would laugh and glory in their sufferings?” Milner emphasizes
the evil outcome of a rebellion without restraint. Shielding Elvira
from the mob, Masaniello is fatally wounded. With his dying breath,
he castigates his followers. Scribe had Elvira relate this moment to
Alphonse rather than actually showing it. By bringing it on stage,
Milner heightened the emotional impact of the dénouement. The
concluding scene now moves rapidly as one after another character
joins in the pantomimic tableau: Elvira is rescued; Masaniello is shot;
Fenella rushes in and throws herself on his body; Alphonso enters
with his troops and embraces Elvira. With the tableau thus complete,
Masaniello breaks the silence and utters his death speech: “[I] was
mad enough to think that liberty could take into her ranks those
whose abject souls stamps them eternally base slaves . . . never can fair
liberty unfold her banner, but where bright virtue stands to uphold
the sacred standard” (Milner, Masaniello; or, The Dumb Girl of Portici,
21, 18, 40). When Masaniello’s voice is silenced, the thundering voice
of Vesuvius grows louder, and the voiceless Fenella plunges to her
death into the erupting volcanic flow (Milner, Masaniello; or, The
Dumb Girl of Portici, 39, 40.).
This finale, a coup de théâtre, was the contribution of the house
mechanist, James Burroughs, a master of conflagrations and explo-
sions. As the deus ex machina in many melodramatic spectacles of
revolution, the pyrotechnics of Burroughs were frequently fea-
tured among the special effects at the Coburg. Many instances of
Burroughs’s pyrotechnics are noted in the playbills, such as the “Melo-
Dramatic Spectacle in 4 Acts, from the French Drama, Salvator; or,
The Invisible Brothers,” which apparently ended “with the Explosion
and Destruction of the Castle and Fortifications of the City of
Regusa.” Burroughs was listed as the technician for that spectacle,
and also for the fate of “Gondimar, who becomes the Victim of the
Temple of Death, and Vanishes with the Altar in multiplied Torrents
of Fire,” in an adaptation by Milner of the French production of The
Temple of Death, “which has [according to the playbill] for months
past excited the Wonder and Admiration of all Paris.” Burroughs
is credited with effects possessing “a degree of Magnificence and

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 176 F r e de r ic k B u r w ic k

an extent of Machinery never before attempted.” The technician

also staged pyrotechnic effects for Guy Fawkes; or, The Gunpowder
Treason! (September 22, 1822); the Siege of Acre; or, Britons in
the East (January 26, 1824); Miller and his Men (Covent Garden,
October 21, 1813); and the “Grand, Historical, Anecdotic, Local
Melo-Drama and Panoramic Spectacle,” The City of the Plague! and
the Great Fire of London (December 26, 1825). Following the great
fires at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, theatres installed rooftop-
water tanks that also served a double function in providing for storms
and waterfalls. Stage pyrotechnics were nevertheless a dangerous risk,
and perhaps for that very reason a thrill to audiences, as documented
in Giuseppe Antonio Borgnis’s Traité complet de mécanique appli-
quée aux arts (1820).31 The Coburg playbill for Masaniello prom-
ised a stunning display: “TREMENDOUS IRRUPTION OF THE
VOLCANO! Overflowing of the Lava . . . produced by entirely Novel
Scenic Contrivances, excelling all former efforts to realize THAT TRE-
MENDOUS PHENOMENON, THE EXPLOSION OF A VOLCANO!”32
A week following the opening of Kenney’s Masaniello at Drury Lane
and Milner’s Masaniello at the Royal Coburg, a third production, this
one an equestrian spectacle, opened at the Royal Amphitheatre (May
11, 1829).33 As Milner’s adaptation makes evident, Scribe’s Masaniello
could be presented with heightened emphasis on its revolutionary
purport. Certainly, the Italian immigrants in the Coburg audience
responded to the play’s echoing of events currently unfolding in their
native country. And it would soon become clear that the Italians were
not the only ones responding to Masaniello’s call to freedom.

Scribe’s Masaniello
and the Belgian Revolution
At a performance of Masaniello, ou La muette de Portici at the Théâtre
de la Monnaie, Brussels on the August 25, 1830, a riot broke out
that rapidly escalated into the revolution that led to Belgian inde-
pendence. Perhaps it is too much to claim that the Brussels perfor-
mance of Masaniello incited a revolution, but in a situation in which
discontent was so rampant it is easy to understand how a drama on
the plight of Naples could serve as a match to the powder keg. At
issue was the secession of the southern provinces from the United
Kingdom of the Netherlands. In the southern region the population
was Roman Catholic and French-speaking. There were high levels
of unemployment and, for those who were employed, unequal pay
among the working classes. The rule of King William I favored the

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 M asa niello on the London Stage 177

north. As a result of the Belgian Revolution an independent Kingdom

of Belgium was established on February 7, 1831 with the ratification
of the Belgian Constitution. Not until 1839, however, did the Dutch
acknowledge an independent Belgian government (see Logie 21).

Perrot’s Undine
Although it might seem only obliquely relevant, the ballet version that
was performed at Her Majesty’s Theatre, London; June 22, 1843, is
in fact crucial to the reception history of Masaniello in Britain. It had
an astonishing run, commanding the stage from 1843 to 1848, and
was frequently revived in years following. Not at all similar to the
earlier ballet version by André-Jean-Jacques Deshayes, which adhered
closely to Auber’s opera, the ballet by Jules Perrot, Ondine, ou La
naïade, had a new plot and new music. To be sure, the familiar plot
previously underwent significant changes in the “feminine inter-
est,” from the jealous Lorina, to the heroic Leona, to the abused and
exploited Fenella. But Perrot has taken that change even further by
centering his ballet, not on a mute of Portici, but on a mute of the
waters. Ondine, a naiade, entices the revolutionary fisherman Mattéo
into the sea. With music by Cesare Pugni, Perrot’s choreographic tale
was inspired by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine, which had
already been staged twenty-seven years earlier as an opera with a score
by E. T. A. Hoffmann (Königliches Schauspielhaus, Berlin, August
3, 1816). In merging that plot with the account of the fisherman-
become-revolutionary, Perrot appropriately shifted the location from
the Danube to the shores of Sicily, and replaced the aristocratic Sir
Huldbrand with the fisherman Mattéo.34 Rather than perish as mar-
tyr to a doomed rebellion, Mattéo the fisherman is brought into the
aquatic paradise beneath the sea.

Coda: Turner’s Undine

Giving the Ring to Masaniello
That moment of apotheosis is the subject of Masaniello as mythic
hero in Joseph Mallord William Turner’s painting, Undine giving the
Ring to Masaniello (1846). Turner has dismissed Mattéo and restored
his hero’s name,35 perhaps even punning on his name and the Italian
word for “ring” (anello). Intending the comment only as a snide jest,
the critic in the Art Union (June 1846) wrote: “We know the Doge
of Venice used to marry the Adriatic, and throw a ring into it, but we
were not aware that one of these rings had been picked up by Undine,

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 178 F r e de r ic k B u r w ic k

and given to Masaniello” (qtd. in Butlin and Joll 2:269). Turner

painted that scene in his Venice: the Piazzetta with the Ceremony of
the Doge marrying the Sea (1835), and another painting, The Grand
Canal, Venice (1837), has also been interpreted, perhaps mistakenly,
as depicting the annual ritual of “The Marriage of the Adriatic,” in
which the Doge espouses the sea (Butlin and Joll, plates 373 and
501, 2:219–10, 296). Wherever she has acquired the ring, Undine’s
purpose is exactly what Perrot celebrated in his ballet. Masaniello has
returned home, folded into the ranks of mythic heroes in the same
moment he is given his place in the Italian pantheon.

Conclusion
Exciting moments in theater history have occurred when an audience
is aroused to action by a play. Such a moment occurred at the premier
of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of Author (Sei personaggi
in cerca d’autore; Teatro Valle, Rome, May 10, 1921), with audience
members shouting “Manicomio! [Madhouse!].” Another stunning
moment was the response to Victor Hugo’s Hernani (Comédie-
Française, February 25, 1830 place) that set off the battle between
the Classicicists and the Romantics. Scribe’s Masaniello, however, was
the play that precipitated the most massive revolution in theater his-
tory. A hero was wanted, and it was a stage hero, Masaniello, who
sparked the action of the revolutionaries that fought for Belgian inde-
pendence. A performance of Masaniello achieved the unique record of
having provoked a national revolution larger than that led by its title
hero. A more modest victory was obtained in London, when not once
but twice an illegitimate theater on the south side of the Thames tri-
umphed in competition with the venerable Drury Lane. Soane failed
completely. Kenney met with modest success. But Milner, with two
very different versions of the rise and fall of Masaniello, packed the
Royal Coburg, as his own playbills confirm, with cheering crowds.
Masaniello’s story thus played a role in both the political and cul-
tural lives of the patriots—and expatriots—who crowded the seats in
London, as well as Paris and Brussels.

Notes
1. For example, the burletta Robin Hood was performed at New Theatre
[Tottenham Street Theatre] on November 27, 1810.
2. George Soane, Rob Roy, the Gregarach (Drury Lane, March 25, 1818);
Isaac Pocock, Rob Roy Macgregor; or, Auld Lang Syne! (Covent Garden,

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 M asa niello on the London Stage 179

March 12, 1818); William Henry Murray, Rob Roy (Edinburgh, June
10, 1818); Corbett Ryder, Rob Roy (Caledonian, Edinburgh, March
29, 1825); and an anonymous Rob Roy McGregor (Coburg, July 8,
1828).
3. Twm John Catty, the Welsh Rob Roy (Coburg April 14, 1823; The
Garrick, January 3, 1831).
4. British Library, mic.c.13137. Playbills 174, dated Monday, February 7,
1825.
5. See Mitchell 25, 77, 89, 102. See also Kershaw and Pearsall’s
Immigrants and Aliens. In 1793, when many refugees were arriv-
ing from France, the government introduced a Regulations of Aliens
Act (R AA). All foreigners coming to Britain were required to regis-
ter with officials. A Superintendent of Aliens was appointed as head
of the Aliens Office responsible for the registration of migrants. In
1798, a more rigorous law established a system of registration at
British ports, where migrants had to sign declarations upon entry
into Britain. Migrants already living in Britain, and those arriving
after January 1793, had to give their names, ranks, occupations, and
addresses to a magistrate. In March 1797, the home secretary dis-
tributed forms for providing details on all migrants who had arrived
after May 1792. Householders who had taken in migrants as lodgers
had to give details to local officials. Passports, issued by the secre-
tary of state, were required for travel outside of London. The war-
time regulations regarding aliens were repealed at the peace of 1814,
but were renewed with modifications later in the same year, and in
1815 when war broke out again. The R AA 1816 required masters of
ships to declare in writing to the Inspector of Aliens or Officer of
the Customs, the number of foreigners on board with their names
and descriptions. The R AA 1826 required migrants to send to the
secretary of state, or to the chief secretary for Ireland, a declara-
tion of their place of residence every six months. Most of the early
records of the Aliens Office have been destroyed but Foreign Office
Records at The National Archives, reference FO 83/21 contain lists
of migrants arriving at British ports for the period August 1810–May
1811. The vast majority of certificates issued under the Aliens Act
1826 were destroyed when the Aliens Office was absorbed in to the
Home Office in 1836, but there is an index of certificates from 1826
to 1849 at The National Archives in series HO 5/25–32, and CUST
102/393–396 contains certificates of arrival for the Port of London
from July to November 1826, and for the port of Gravesend from
October 1826 to August 1837. HO 2 contains original certificates of
arrival of individuals arranged under ports of arrival for the period
1836–1852. Each certificate gives the person’s name, nationality,
profession, date of arrival, and last country visited, together with
their signature, and sometimes other details.
6. See A. W. Smith’s “Irish Rebels and English Radicals 1798–1820.”

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 180 F r e de r ic k B u r w ic k

7. See Farrell’s “The German Community in Nineteenth Century East

London” and Panayi’s German Immigrants in Britain during the
Nineteenth Century, 1815–1914. Records of the Old Bailey docu-
ment a few skirmishes with the law by Spanish and Portugues sail-
ors in London. Another source are the records of the Portuguese
and Spanish chapels in London: Spanish/Portuguese communities
existed in Thameside, Sardinian chapel in Duke Street, Lincoln’s Inn
Fields, the Sardinian, Spanish chapel in Manchester Square, and the
Portuguese chapel in South Street, Grosvenor Square.
8. See also Taliani, L’emigrazione italiana in Inghilterra tra Letteratura
e Politica, 1820–1860.
9. The regional origins of most were the valleys around Como and
Lucca. The people from Como were skilled artisans, making barom-
eters and other precision instruments. People from Lucca specialized
in plaster figure making. The people from Parma were predominately
organ grinders, while the Neapolitans from the Liri valley made ice
cream.
10. As numbers increased and competition grew fiercer in London,
Italians spread to the north of England, Wales, and Scotland,
although never in great numbers in the northern cities. The Italian
Consul General in Liverpool, in 1891, reports that the majority of
the 80–100 Italians in the city were organ grinders and street sellers
of ice cream and plaster statues. The 500–600 Italians in Manchester
included mostly Terrazzo specialists, plasterers and modelers work-
ing on the prestigious, new town hall. In Sheffield 100–150 Italians
made cutlery.
11. T. B. [Thomas Belke, or Thomas Bakewell], The Rebellion of Naples,
or The Tragedy of Massenello. Commonly so called: but rightly Tomaso
Aniello di Malfa generall of the Neopolitans. (Printed at London,
For J.G. & G.B. at Furnivals-Inne Gate in Holborne, 1649); dedi-
cated “To the right worshipfull his honoured kins-man, John Caesar
of Hyde hall, in the county of Hertford, esquire,” signed: T. B.
“Written by a gentleman who was an eye-witnes where this was really
acted upon that bloody stage, the streets of Naples. Anno Domini
MDCXLVII.”
12. See Genest 2:161: “the author of this piece has dramatized the prin-
cipal events in a tolerable manner—it concludes with the funeral
of Massenello—a Herald proclaims a general pardon Massenello
revives and speaks the Epilogue—in the 3d act, Agatha, the 2d wife
of Massenello, stabs Flora, the daughter of Massenello by a former
wife, in the face—Massenello breaks Agatha’s neck between his
hands. Antonio, the son of the Viceroy, falls in love with Flora, and
means to marry her—in the 5th act, Ursula, Massenello’s daugh-
ter by Agatha, poisons Flora—as also her Grandmother—the latter
unintentionally—Flora dies—Ursula is cut in pieces, and thrown to
the dogs—as T. B. professed to write a true account of the story, he

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 M asa niello on the London Stage 181

ought not to have introduced circumstances, which not only did not
happen, but could not happen—Massenello was too young to have a
marriageable daughter.”
13. See Massinello; or, A Satyr against the Association and the Guild-hall-
riot.
14. Genest also provides a commentary on D’Urfey’s version and sum-
marizes the historical sources. He also notes that the two parts of
Masaniello were reduced to one by Thomas Walker and performed at
Lincoln’s Inn Fields, July 31, 1724 (2:158–163).
15. I have relied on a later edition of this much-published work (London:
Printed for R. Manby , 1756). For a recent history, see Villari, The
Revolt of Naples.
16. For an account of Scribe’s career, see Fuhrmann, “In Enemy
Territory? Scribe and Grand Opera in London, 18291833.”
17. For a brief account of Soane’s career, see Burwick, “George Soane.”
18. These interferences are documented in the British Library’s copy of
G. Soane, Masaniello, Plays Submitted to the Lord Chamberlain.
British Library Add. Mss. 42870, ff. 1–68.
19. Theatrical Observer February 18, 1825.
20. See Genest 2:160: “many and various are the reflections that have
been made upon his [Masaniello’s] sudden madness—some are of
opinion, that that stupendous height of power to which he arrived,
as it were in an instant, made him giddy and turn’d his brains—oth-
ers will have it to be occasioned by the great and continual fatigues
he underwent, scarce ever allowing himself time to take the natural
refreshments of food or sleep—but, the most probable and received
opinion is, that the Viceroy had given him an intoxicating draught,
which, by inflaming his blood, should make him commit such extrav-
agancies, as would oblige the people to despise and forsake him.
“On the 16th of July Masaniello was murdered with the appro-
bation of the Viceroy—at the time of his assassination the people
seemed stupified and motionless, but on the next day they buried
him with great solemnity.”
21. If the 1824 date of the imprint is correct, then Milner’s play was
published before its first performance at the Royal Coburg Theatre,
February 7, 1825.
22. Midon, Remarkable History of the Rise and Fall of Masaniello, first
published in 1729 (London: Printed for C. Davis, and T. Green,
1729), appeared in subsequent editions in 1747 (London: Printed for
C. Davis; and L. J. Davis, 1747), 1748 (Oxford: Printed by R. Walker
& W. Jackson, 1748); 1756 (London: Printed for R. Manby, 1756),
1768 (London: Printed by J. Browne, 1768), and 1770 (London: H.
Fenwick’s Wholesale Book Warehouse, 1770).
23. Rant and rhodomontade, according to William Oxenberry, were
prominent among H. S. Kemble’s shortcomings as an actor
(Oxenberry 1:146, 149–155).

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 182 F r e de r ic k B u r w ic k

24. The Vampire (August 21, 1820) was adapted from Charles Nodier’s
French adaptation of the novel by John Polidori, Lord Byron’s some-
time physician.
25. Lowenberg states in Annals of the Opera that Carafa de Colobrano’s
play was given at the Opéra-Comique 136 times and was revived in
1882; there were also performances in Ghent in 1828, and Amsterdam
1834.
26. See Marian Smith’s “Three Hybrid Works at the Paris Opéra, circa
1830.”
27. The barcarole is a Venetian Gondolier’s song, often sung to a
rhythm reminiscent of rowing. For comparison of Auber’s opera and
Deshayes’s ballet, see commentaries by John Waldie, who witnessed
performances in London, Paris, and other theaters. See esp. LVI,
77 (June 27, 1828), LVI, 337 (May 26, 1829), LVI, 370 (June 20,
1829), LVII, 4 (August 1, 1829), tLVII, 42 (September 4, 1829),
LX, 53 (September 25, 1832), LX, 94 (November 8, 1832).
28. Songs from Masaniello ou le Pêcheur de Portici, Plays Submitted to
the Lord Chamberlain, British Library, Add. Ms. 42985, ff. 43–44b.
Newspaper reports suggest, however, that only the two numbers
mentioned made the final cut for performance.
29. The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, May 1, 1829.
30. The score by Hughes and Corri does not survive, but the published
play prints the songs and choruses, with notes indicating musical
performance.
31. See Giuseppe Antonio Borgnis, Traité complet de la mécanique appli-
quée aux arts, Des machines imitatives et de machines théâtrales (Paris:
Bachelier, 1820), 294–298. See also Emaljanow 369–371.
32. British Library, mic.c.13137. Playbills 174, dated Playbill, May 4,
1829.
33. The Theatrical Observer notes a production of Masaniello (Royal
Amphitheatre, May 11, 1829); see also Nicoll 501.
34. Subsequently staged with the title, La naïade et le pêcheur, Perrot’s
ballet also drew from René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt,
Ondine, ou la Nymphe des Eaux (Théâtre de la Gaîté, Paris, February
17, 1830). See Au, “The Shadow of Herself: Some Sources of Jules
Perrot’s Ondine.”
35. See Stuckey, “Turner, Masaniello and the Angel”; Finley, “Turner,
the Apocalypse and History: ‘The Angel’ and ‘Undine’ ”; and Finley,
Angel in the Sun: Turner’s Vision of History, especially notes on page
233.

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 Chapter Thirteen

R e-Vision i ng R i m i n i:
Da n t e i n t h e C o c k n e y S c hool
Jef f rey N. Cox

I t has always been easy to laugh at Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini, a

rather unusual item in the history of prison writing. Even a modern
critic such as Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, writing one of the few
full critical studies of Hunt, speaks of the poem’s “structural and lin-
guistic flaws” (52). Romantic era defenders of traditional culture met
Rimini’s publication with a rousing chorus of jeers. The Quarterly
Review assailed Hunt’s “vanity, vulgarity, ignorance, and coarseness”
(14 [January 1816]:481); Blackwood’s Magazine called Rimini “inde-
cent and immoral,” and attacked not only its subject but its style:

Leigh Hunt’s chivalrous rhymes are as unlike those of Walter Scott,

as is the chivalry of a knighted cheesemonger to that of Archibald the
Grim, or, if he would rather have it so, of Sir Philip Sydney. He draws
his ideas of courtly splendour from the Lord Mayor’s coach, and he
dreams of tournaments, after having seen the aldermen on horseback,
with their furred gowns and silk stockings. We are indeed altogether
incapable of understanding many parts of the description, for a good
glossary of the Cockney dialect is yet a desideratum in English litera-
ture. . . . What, for instance, may be the English of swaling? (2 [October
1817]:198).

Throughout the nineteenth century, other poets would continue

to make fun of Hunt’s poem. Henry Ellison, the minor, somewhat
spasmodic poet, complains in his sonnet on “Dante’s ‘Francesca Da

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 184 Jeffr ey N. Cox

Rimini’ ” of how “wits more weak [than Dante’s] / Play, dally with the
passion” of the story and “with freak / Of fancy overlay it” (Ellison, ll.
4–6), presumably complaining of someone like Hunt trying to expand
Dante’s brief episode. William Edmonstoune Aytoun, husband of John
Wilson’s daughter, contributor and staff member of Blackwood’s, and a
chief parodist of the Spasmodic School, wrote with Theodore Martin a
wonderful satire of Hunt in their Bon Gaultier Ballads, a poem imagin-
ing “an impassioned pupil of Leigh Hunt” writing a poem to her beau
after a Fancy Ball, where she uses many of the controversial words and
phrases from Hunt’s Rimini—she has a “clipsome lightness” (Aytoun
and Martin 165), for example, and she speaks of the “swaling of a
jaunty air” (166)—before closing with a turn from dancing that paral-
lels Paolo and Francesca’s turn from reading:

We pass’d into the great refreshment hall,

Where the heap’d cheese-cakes and the comfits small
Lay, like a hive of sunbeams, brought to burn
Around the margin of the negus urn;
When my poor quivering hand you finger’d twice,
And, with enquiring accents, whisper’d “Ice,
Water, or cream?” I could no more dissemble,
But dropp’d upon the couch all in a tremble.
A swimming faintness misted o’er my brain,
The corks seem’d starting from the brisk champagne,
The custards fell untouch’d upon the floor,
Thine eyes met mine. That night we danced no more! (Aytoun and
Martin 167)

Such attacks—gentle and violent—have obscured from us, as Jane

Stabler’s “Leigh Hunt’s Aesthetics of Intimacy” points out, the
positive reviews from the Augustan Review, the British Lady’s
Magazine, and the Eclectic Review along with the judicious readings
of the Edinburgh and Monthly reviews (104). For those around Hunt,
Rimini was a central cultural event, with Charles Lamb writing to
indicate that he and his sister “congratulate you most sincerely on the
fruit of your prison hours” that they had read “with great delight” (to
Hunt, March 23, 1816; Lamb’s Letters 3:209–210), and with Hazlitt
echoing in order to reverse Jeffrey’s condemnation of Wordsworth’s
Excursion, “I have read the story of Rimini with extreme satisfac-
tion. . . . This will do” (to Hunt, February 15, 1816; Hazlitt’s Letters
153.). Charles Cowden Clarke (1816) published a pamphlet defend-
ing the poem. Keats, who used a line from Rimini as the epigraph
to his opening piece to his 1817 Poems, wrote a sonnet “On Leigh

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 R e -V i s i o n i n g R i m i n i 185

Hunt’s Poem, The ‘Story of Rimini’ ” in March 1817, with Shelley

penning his response in 1816 in his “Lines to Leigh Hunt” and
John Hamilton Reynolds publishing a sonnet praising Rimini in The
Champion (December 8, 1816:390). We can find echoes of Rimini in
such poems as Keats’s “Isabella,” Shelley’s Epipsychidion, and the first
canto of Byron’s Don Juan. Hunt taught a generation of poets how
to raid the Italian cultural archive in order to remake British poetry,
how to use Italian classics to make Cockney poetry in the present.
Perhaps the most famous turn to Italy by Cockneys is the one to
Boccaccio taken up by Keats and Reynolds, who planned to collabo-
rate on a volume of versified tales from the Decameron as well as by
Bryan Waller Proctor writing as Barry Cornwall who like Keats ver-
sified the fifth tale from the fourth day in his Sicilian Story, but we
find a similar engagement with Dante. Through Henry Cary’s famous
translation of The Divine Comedy as The Vision of Dante among other
adaptations from Gray to Henry Boyd (see Tinkler-Villani), Dante
came to be widely read in England after Waterloo, as Ralph Pite has
shown; and Diego Saglia explores in particular how second-generation
romantics follow Hunt in taking up the Paolo and Francesca episode
from the Inferno.1 Cary, Foscolo, Coleridge, and Samuel Rogers all
offered important commentary on Dante and The Divine Comedy.2 To
glimpse the romantics’ wide engagement with Dante, we can think
of Blake’s illustrations to The Divine Comedy, of Coleridge’s com-
ments on Dante in The Friend, of Shelley’s turn to La Vita Nuova in
Epipsychidion, of Keats’s use of Dante in “The Fall of Hyperion,” or
of Byron’s evocation of Dante as the voice of national liberation in The
Prophecy of Dante—or, for that matter, of a sonnet by one of the more
notorious Cockneys, Cornelius Webb, where he praises Italy as the
“Mother of Dante and Raffaelle” (Sonnet 25, l. 1). Webb would also
call Byron “Our England’s Dante” in the lines mockingly quoted at
the opening of Blackwood’s Cockney School attacks.
We could trace a similar presence for other Italian writers in “sec-
ond generation” romantic texts. Having learned Italian as early as
1799, Hunt perused while in prison the fifty-six volumes of the
Parnaso Italiano. Long an advocate for Italian poetry, he sparked his
circle’s engagement with Italian pastoral drama, particularly Guarini’s
Il Pastor Fido and Tasso’s Amyntas, translated by Hunt in 1820 (see
Cox 123–145). Tasso would interest Byron, who penned his Lament
of Tasso, and Shelley, who contemplated a drama on Tasso’s life and
who used him as one prototype for the figure of the madman in
Julian and Maddalo. Hunt also worked with Pulci, whose ottava rima
would be imitated in very different ways by Shelley and Keats and

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 186 Jeffr ey N. Cox

whose Morgante Maggiore Byron would translate, calling it “the best

thing I ever did in my life” (to Murray, September 28, 1820, Byron’s
Letters and Journals 7:182), “my grand performance” (to Murray,
January 19, 1821, Byron’s Letters and Journals 8:65). While we might
reserve such praise for the Pulci-influenced ottava rima narratives of
Beppo and Don Juan, which are one culmination of the circle’s inter-
est in things Italian, the group did devote a considerable amount of
effort to translating Italian texts, again lead by Hunt who offered
versions of some twenty-three Italian poets and who penned his late
prose Stories from the Italian Poets (1845). Hunt’s A Jar of Honey from
Mount Hybla (1847) celebrating Sicily and pastoral poetry signals the
group’s engagement with that tradition. Another Italian prose col-
lection beyond the Decameron, the Florentine Observer, gave rise to
Percy Shelley’s “Ginevra” and Hunt’s “Florentine Lovers,” published
in the Liberal, and Mary Shelley considered recreating the collection
in an abridged English version.3 Italian history also attracted these
writers, as we can see in Mary Shelley’s Valperga; or, the Life and
Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, Percy Shelley’s The Cenci,
and Byron’s Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari. One could continue
to list poems set in Italy or in an Italianate milieu—Childe Harold IV,
“Ode to Venice,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Rosalind and Helen, and
Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills. As these links suggest, we
need to see this body of work as a collective effort, a group project to
recover Italian literature in the name of Cockney culture.
The Cockney project in Italy, like their attempt to create a “Cockney
classicism,”4 was not undertaken simply in the name of abstract liter-
ary taste or antiquarian interest but was instead a cultural act with a
complex political valence. Italy (not unlike Greece) was constructed by
contemporary English observers as possessing a glorious past and an
oppressive present; it provided not only artistic inspiration but oppor-
tunities (perhaps seen best in the case of Byron’s involvement with
Teresa Guiccioli family’s resistance to Austrian rule) for ideological
investment. The central involvement of women writers with Italy—
witness beyond Mary Shelley’s work, Madame de Staël’s Corinne, or
Italy, Felicia Hemans’s Vespers of Palermo or The Recovery of the Works
of Art in Italy and Lady Morgan’s Italy—suggests that Italy provided
a ground from which to contest central cultural assumptions. The
widely read Swiss philosophe Sismondi linked the late medieval rise of
Italian letters to a rebirth of liberty in Italian city states (Butler 119),
and, as Thomas Campbell noted in his Life and Times of Petrarch:
With Notice of Boccaccio and His Illustrious Contemporaries, the sup-
porters of Dante connected “the grand revival of his popularity in our

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 R e -V i s i o n i n g R i m i n i 187

own times to the reawakened spirit of liberty” (qtd in Pite 47). Italian
culture could then offer a less controversial ally than that of France
for the battle against the “Germanic,” “northern” conservative cul-
ture that, as Marilyn Butler has argued (112–117), was seen as being
embraced by poets such as Coleridge, Scott, and Wordsworth—the
Lake School in general—over against the “cult of the South” whose
devotees were the younger poets associated with the Cockney School
and London radicalism. The turn to Italy is a defining characteristic
of what we know as second-generation romanticism.
In the beginning, there was The Story of Rimini, which Byron
praised in a letter to the imprisoned Hunt as having “2 excellent
points . . . —originality—& Italianism” (to Hunt, October 30, 1815;
Byron’s Letters and Journals 4:326). The epistolary exchange between
Byron and Hunt about the poem, recently investigated by Timothy
Webb,5 helps define the power of The Story of Rimini, as the two
poets discuss their mutual investment in Italian culture. Hunt had
cited Italian literature in the notes to his Feast of Poets as a source
for revivifying “our fancy and versification” and for freeing English
poetry from French models (Selected Works 5:54). Byron agreed that
the Italians are “the only poetical moderns” (to Hunt, February 9,
1814; Byron’s Letters and Journals 4:50), as the Italian past becomes a
way to move forward in the present. Byron and Hunt were not alone
in locating the birth of modern poetry in Dante and his contem-
poraries. Schelling, in “Über Dante in philosophischer Beziehung”
(1803), called The Divine Comedy “the archetype of modern poetry”
(qtd in Pite 22), and A. W. Schlegel placed Dante on the romantic side
of his classic/romantic split. The path to originality, to modernity,
lies through an embrace of this literary past that can free the poet
from contemporary fashion into true creativity. What Hunt identifies
in The Feast of Poets as the Italian as opposed to the French School
would, when he wrote in The Examiner of December 1, 1816 his
“Young Poets” review of Shelley, Keats, and Reynolds (with Byron’s
Childe Harold III getting passing praise), become the “new school”
of romantic poetry. This school would, of course, be renamed by
its enemies as the Cockney School. If Hunt’s The Examiner is the
school’s political voice, The Story of Rimini was its founding poem,
a turn to a foreign cultural past in order to make modern British
literature.
Byron’s second term of praise for Rimini—“Italianism”—is also
an interesting one, for the “ism” suggests a self-conscious, distanced
relationship to Italian literature itself. Of course, it could point to
a kind of negative distance—an ignorance of the Italian language

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 188 Jeffr ey N. Cox

and a dependence upon existing translations for the project of adapt-

ing Italian literature. If the Cockneys are famously attacked for hav-
ing little Latin and less Greek, their turn to Italian sources perhaps
received even more extended contempt. In the first Cockney School
essay, Blackwood’s (2 [October 1817]:38) criticizes Hunt’s knowl-
edge of Italian literature as “confined to a few of the most popular
of Petrarch’s sonnets, and an imperfect acquaintance with Ariosto,
through the medium of Mr. Hoole,” the translator. Z. claims that
Hunt is “always desirous of being airy, graceful, easy, courtly, and
ITALIAN,” but these attempts merely show that “He has gone into
a strange delusion about himself” (2:40). The Honeycomb makes an
even more pointed case against Cockney Italianism:

What would our great poets of England have done without Italy!
that rich store-house to which they resorted . . . and what would our
little ones have done—what we may observe would have become of
Mr. Leigh Hunt, Mr. John Keats, and Mr. Procter, if Dante, Tasso,
and Ariosto, had never written, or been translated into English. It is
surprising how much Harrington, Fanshaw, Fairfax, and Hoole have
done towards facilitating a knowledge of the Tuscan tongue, and sup-
plying our Cit poets with a spirit of imitation, and subjects ready cut
and dry to their hand. (5 [July 15, 1820]:37–38)

The Cockneys are seen as seeking to acquire an unearned cultural

authority; they are trying to translate (in the sense of to transfer)
themselves across a cultural (and class) boundary through the use of
translations rather than through a true knowledge of the language.
Using the same term as Byron, Blackwood’s (16 [August 1824]:163),
in praising Joanna Baillie, launches into one of its ritual attacks upon
the Cockneys, branding them as descendants of the Della Cruscans:
“the insect tribe of the soi disant della Cruscan school . . . endeavoured
to moan and insinuate themselves into celebrity, by an absurd pre-
tension to Italianism, which caricatured refinement, and surpassed
Keats in folly, and Shelley in obscurity; and was not inferior to Leigh
Hunt himself in vulgarity and affectation.” “Italianism” is seen by
Blackwood’s as marked by a false refinement, an attempt to claim a
cultural inheritance one does not possess since one is filled with vul-
garity; by affectation, a self-consciousness about one’s project that
might lead to obscurity; and by folly—foolishness, even derange-
ment, but also lewdness, wantonness.
We need to recover from behind such abuse the sense in which
Byron could praise Hunt’s Italianism. Cockney Italianism should be

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 R e -V i s i o n i n g R i m i n i 189

understood as a self-consciously distanced and ironizing approach to

a foreign literature adopted in the hopes of achieving a certain cul-
tural power, a power that arises from a simultaneous linguistic and
erotic liberation that helps define the Cockney excursion into Italian
as linguistically hybrid and sexually worldly. What Blackwood’s labels
the “vulgarity” of Hunt, the “affectation” and “arrogance” of Keats,
the “obscurity” of Shelley are all markers of their resistance to a sup-
posedly classless literacy, grounded in a knowledge of foreign lan-
guages, that would in fact leave social distinctions in place; they are
signs of their struggle for a liberated language that can in turn image
a liberated body.
Francis Jeffrey, in his review of Rimini, while also pointing to
the “affectation” and “cant phrases” found in Hunt’s poem (477),
suggests how one might approach this issue differently, locating the
“peculiar and original” (476) nature of Hunt’s poetry in a turn to
early English and Italian poetry that is grounded in a recognition of
distance: where earlier poets “described things and actions as they
saw them, without expressing . . . the deep-seated emotions from
which the objects derived their interest. . . . The moderns, on the con-
trary, have brought these [emotions] most prominently forward, and
explained and enlarged upon them perhaps at excessive length” (476).
Jeffrey recognizes the impossibility of simply recreating the past, with
the drive to do so prohibiting innovation in the present. Byron noted
this distance himself in calling his Prophecy of Dante a “Harsh Runic
copy of the South’s sublime” (“Dedication,” l. 5), and we find similar
comments throughout Cockney poetry, as in Keats’s famous apol-
ogy to Boccaccio in “Isabella.” Hunt makes the clearest statement
on this self-conscious, ironic turn to a past literary moment in the
“Florentine Lovers,” by way of an explanation of why a writer, who
seeks to revive “the good faith and simplicity in the old romances,”
must make ironic interjections:

It is the fault of the “accursed critical spirit,” which is the bane of

these times, that we are obliged to be conscious of the matter at all.
But we cannot help not having been born six hundred years ago, and
are obliged to be base and reviewatory like the rest. To affect not to
be conscious of the critical in these times, would itself be a departure
from the natural. (The Liberal, 1 [1822]:70)

What has been ridiculed as awkward, affected, or contrived in Rimini

or for that matter what has been seen as “mawkish” and “smokeable”
in Keats’s “Isabella” are in fact features natural to the critical, ironic,

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 190 Jeffr ey N. Cox

self-conscious times in which we live—a point Friedrich Schlegel had

made in Germany. As “sentimental” poets, in Schiller’s sense, Hunt
and his circle must remain aware of their distance from “naive” clas-
sics such as Boccaccio, but they must also realize that in this difference
lies their ability to approach the natural through a self-conscious or
critical idea or ideal, which as Schiller argues produces modern litera-
ture as satiric and elegiac—a good description of the mode of poems
such as “Isabella,” with its satiric account of the world of capital and
its elegiac turns to romance, or Rimini with its sorrowful account of
entrapped lovers and its critique of patriarchal society (what Jeffrey in
his review sees as a blend of “the voluptuous pathos of Boccaccio with
Ariosto’s laughing graces”; 477). Through this modern, reviewatory
turn to a “classic” text, the Cockney use of Italian literature enables
them to locate their literary innovations in a valued foreign precursor
and to discover behind Byron’s “Runic copy,” behind what Shelley
calls in The Defence of Poetry “the mask and mantle” (Shelley’s Poetry
and Prose 526) of a past ideological moment embodied in the great
works of Italian literature, an argument for cultural and sexual libera-
tion in the present.
Before turning to Hunt’s Story of Rimini, we can see some of
the key tactics of this Cockney revision of Dante in Byron’s and
Keats’s engagement with the Paolo and Francesca episode, as Diego
Saglia’s “Translation and Cultural Appropriation: Dante, Paolo and
Francesca in British Romanticism” has forcefully shown. Hunt called
this canto of the Inferno “the most cordial and refreshing” moment
in Dante’s poem (Selected Works 165). Byron, who would translate
the passage in 1820, made a similar comment in disputing Schlegel’s
claim that Dante demonstrates a “want . . . of gentle feelings. Of
Gentle feelings! and Francesca of Rimini—and the father’s feelings
in Ugolino— . . . Why, there is gentleness in Dante beyond all gentle-
ness, when he is tender” (Byron’s Letters and Journals 8:39). Keats
would seem to have agreed. In writing to his brother and sister-in-law
about a sonnet he had recently completed, he explained

The fifth canto of Dante pleases me more and more—it is that one in
which he meets with Paulo and Francesca— . . . I dreamt of being in
that region of Hell. The dream was one of the most delightful enjoy-
ments I ever had in my life . . . o that I could dream it every night.
(Keats, Selected Poetry and Prose 326–327)

Keats, publishing a sonnet based on the dream in Hunt’s Indicator

(June 28, 1820; Keats, Selected Poetry and Prose 336), joins with

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 R e -V i s i o n i n g R i m i n i 191

Byron and Hunt in seeing the Paolo and Francesca story as con-
soling. He unites with Hunt in finding an erotic excitement and
liberation in Dante’s story of unsanctioned sex as a sin subject to
punishment. Comparing the “second circle of sad hell” (l. 9) to
the Arcadian site of Tempe and Mount Ida, where Paris awarded
Venus the prize as the most beautiful goddess, Keats reimagines hell
as a kind of paradise. Where Dante’s Francesca like other inhabit-
ants of his Inferno compulsively tells her tale, in Keats’s hell “lovers
need not tell / Their sorrows” (ll. 11–12) but instead enjoy kisses;
Byron suggests a similar reading of the episode when he wrote to
Augusta, comparing their forbidden relationship to that of Paolo
and Francesca, but noting that “Dante is more humane in his ‘Hell’
for he places his unfortunate loves . . . in company—and though they
suffer—it is at least together” (May 17, 1819; Byron’s Letters and
Journals 6:129). The Dantean parable of admonition about the dan-
gers of lust is converted into a romance of erotic consolation and
wish fulfillment.
As Saglia points out, Keats also follows Hunt in interjecting him-
self into Dante’s poem (Saglia, “Translation” 111), for if Hunt (most
clearly in the introductory lines of Canto 3) interpolates his impris-
oned subjectivity into his poem, Keats becomes in a sense both Dante
and Paolo in his reworking of the passage, voyaging to hell like Dante
and enjoying Francesca like Paolo. Saglia, following Frederick Beatty’s
“Byron and the Story of Francesca da Rimini,” finds a similar auto-
biographical investment in Byron’s translation, for Byron repeatedly
used the Paolo and Francesca episode to comment upon his own situ-
ation, whether his incestuous love for Augusta or his love triangle
with Teresa Guiccioli. Saglia sees Keats’s sonnet as a “rich intersection
of poetical reinvention, autobiographical projection and intertextual
quotation” (111), as he shows how Keats draws upon his own experi-
ences and how he interweaves key features of Cary’s translation. This
autobiographical turn and this reliance upon translated texts point,
of course, to what Hunt called the “reviewatory” nature of modern
creative work, to the “Italianism” of this work in both its positive and
negative senses.
Another typically Cockney and Keatsian device used to move
from Dante to a quite different vision is the merging of Italianate or
medieval or “romantic” material with classical allusions. Keats sets
up his sonnet with an elaborate simile involving the story—presum-
ably taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses—of Jove’s love for the nymph
Io: Juno, jealous of her husband, has the hundred-eyed Argus guard-
ing Io; Jove’s winged messenger, Hermes, lulls Argus to sleep by

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 192 Jeffr ey N. Cox

playing upon his pipe. Keats argues that just as Hermes causes Argus
to swoon and sleep, so does his own spirit play upon “a Delphic
reed” (l. 3) in order to charm and conquer the “dragon world of all
its hundred eyes” (l. 5) so that he can escape to visit Francesca in
her edenic hell. This mingling and shift from classical to medieval/
early modern/ “romantic” material is also found, for example, in the
opening of “Lamia” with its displacement of nymphs and satyrs by
medieval fairies or in the movement in “Ode to Psyche” from clas-
sical materials to echoes of Milton and beyond. These moves work
to historicize Keats’s borrowings, to place them in a cultural schema
in which prior cultural moments are always surpassed: the classical
culture of Virgil or Ovid gives way to the Christian culture of Dante,
and, by extension, Christianity will be superseded by the romantic
culture embraced by Keats. The autobiographical presence noted by
Saglia coupled with this historicizing frame enables Keats to follow
what Hunt argues is the “natural” critical, ironic bent of modern
poetry, creating enough distance from his great precursor so as to be
able both to draw upon his cultural cache and to put his metaphysical
ideology on its very bodily feet.
Byron, who contemplated a tragedy about Francesca and perhaps
began translating (with Hobhouse) Silvio Pellico’s play on the same
subject, made clear, as Saglia argues, the potential political import
of this Italian import. As Saglia puts it, “Byron and other liberal
Romantic literati transformed Dante into a symbol of libertarian ide-
als and action against tyranny as well as an emblem of the patriotic
poet and exiled voice of truth” (106). Byron undertook his translation
at the request of Teresa Guiccioli and to correct Cary’s translation. In
the headnote he wrote for the poem, he argued, “I have sacrificed all
ornament to fidelity” (Complete Poetical Works 4:280). Or as he put
it in a letter to Murray, “Enclosed you will find line for line in third
rhyme (terza rime) of which your British Blackguard reader as yet
understands nothing—Fanny of Rimini” (March 20, 1820; Byron’s
Letters and Journals 7:58). The striving for accuracy and erudition
combined with the slangy transformation of Francesca into “Fanny
of Rimini” allies the noble poet with his Cockney colleagues. Even in
seeking to translate the piece exactly, Byron seems to recognize that
he can never recapture the immediate terror and tenderness of Dante,
that there will always be the ironic distance of modern Italianism.
Again, the distance allows an opening for an idea or an ideology,
here Byron’s portrayal of Dante as a force of liberation: he wanted the
translation to be published with his Prophecy of Dante where the tale
of Paolo and Francesca might, in conjunction with the evocation of

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 R e -V i s i o n i n g R i m i n i 193

Dante as an opponent of tyranny in the longer piece, have been read,

as it was by Hunt, as an assault upon patriarchal oppression.
As Blackwood’s bitterly complained of The Story of Rimini, Hunt
remakes Dante’s episode of Paolo and Francesca’s adulterous, inces-
tuous desire into a luxurious narrative about the growth of an over-
powering love. As the poem opens on an often admired description
of “a morn of May” (1.1), a procession enters Ravenna, apparently
bringing Francesca’s intended, Giovanni, lord of Rimini, to wed her.
As Francesca learns too late, the party from Rimini in fact brings the
groom’s brother who marries her as a fraternal proxy. Hoodwinked
with desire’s faery fancy and the ploys of her father and husband, she
has already fallen for the man who will become her lover, famously
while they are reading the tale of Guinevere and Lancelot—“That
day they read no more” (3. 608). The first canto is given over to the
procession and the springing of what Hunt calls “the elaborate snare”
(2.49) in which Francesca is caught. The second canto, after a rushed
wedding (“Quick were the marriage-rites”; 2.82) and a paltry public
celebration, describes the trip to Rimini through a rather ominous
landscape, while the third tracks the rise of the love between Paolo
and Francesca. When in the autumnal fourth canto the love affair
is discovered, the lovers are not murdered by a revengeful husband
as in the sources; instead, the brothers fight a duel in which Paolo
commits suicide by running upon his brother’s sword. Francesca dies
of heartbreak and the two lovers are buried “side by side, and hand
in hand”—“and on fine nights in May / Young hearts betrothed
used to go there to pray” (4.517–520). This ending—often criticized
in the reviews (see Eberle-Sinatra 74–78)—is far from the tone and
attitude of Dante’s poem, where, whatever the appealing attributes of
the lovers, a sin is a sin. In Hunt’s poem, to the disgust of Blackwood’s
and other conservatives, love—even when it is adulterous and inces-
tuous—conquers all.
This triumph of love arises within a particular context. When the
opening procession arrives in Ravenna, we hear of “peace returning”
(1.26) and, while the sound of horses and trumpets might suggest
that “harnessed war were near,” in fact Paolo’s troops appear in the
“garb of peace” (1.143–144). The text does not indicate what war
has just concluded, though, as Hunt notes in his preface (166), the
historical Paolo does appear in Tassoni’s mock epic, The Rape of the
Bucket, which parodies a war between Modena and Bologna.6 While
we might recall other scenes of warriors entering a city to pursue love
after war such as those that open Much Ado About Nothing or Baillie’s
Count Basil, at the moment of the bulk of Rimini’s composition in

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 194 Jeffr ey N. Cox

1814 and its completion and publication in 1816, returning peace

must have evoked the recent end of the Napoleonic wars.
The official attempt to define that moment, particularly in 1814
but also again in 1815–1816, was marked by the kind of celebration
adumbrated in Hunt’s first canto. The festivities following Napoleon’s
abdication in the spring of 1814 were lavish, with new fêtes greeting
each arriving dignitary. On April 20, 1814, for example, there was a
triumphal procession for Louis XVIII from Hyde Park to Grillon’s
Hotel. Alexander I, King William of Prussia, Marshal Blucher, Prince
Metternich, and Prince Leopold joined the Regent at Covent Garden
on June 11, and the Corporation of London would offer a dinner
to the visiting monarchs on June 18. Wellington made his trium-
phant entry into London on June 28 to be met by the Queen at her
Buckingham House. One thousand seven hundred people (includ-
ing Byron) attended a ball at Burlington House to pay tribute to
Wellington on July 1, and another gala would be held at Carlton
House on July 21 in his honor. July 7 would witness the Service of
General Thanksgiving for the Allied Victory in St. Paul’s; while some
papers reported that the Regent was cheered all along the route to
the Cathedral, Hunt’s The Examiner, noting the number of troops
in place to keep the crowd under control, claims that “the applauses
bestowed were mixed with repeated hissings and groans” (July 10,
1814:446).
The government organized elaborate displays in London’s parks
that were opened to the public and to vendors who supplied them
with beer, food, and a variety of goods. One could hear military
bands, watch acrobats, and enjoy swings and merry-go-rounds, with
the festivities thus “forming,” as The Examiner put it, “a Vauxhall on
the most magnificent scale” (July 24, 1814:475). These daily plea-
sures were the backdrop for more extravagant displays, including fire-
works, admired by Charles Lamb, “rockets in clusters, in trees, and
all shapes, spreading about like young stars in the making” (letter
to Wordsworth, August 14, 1814; Letters 3:97). On the Serpentine
in Hyde Park, the battle of Trafalgar was reenacted on June 20 with
three-foot long ships maneuvering around the lake until the French
fleet went up in flames as the national anthem played. The Battle of
the Nile was fought again in St. James Park on August 1 for a joint
celebration of its anniversary and the Hanoverian Centenary. Also
on that day, in Green Park, James Sadler ascended over the crowd in
a balloon from which he dropped favors and programs announcing
other events. After dark, the crowds were delighted by a display in
which the “Castle of Discord”—about one hundred feet in diameter

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 R e -V i s i o n i n g R i m i n i 195

and one hundred thirty feet high, with transparencies and paintings
exhibiting “the devastations of war and the evils of Despotism &
Tyranny”—disappeared behind a cloud as fireworks announced its
transformation into a “Temple of Concord”: the upper part of the
temple then revolved to reveal the apotheosis of the Prince Regent
and the “Triumph of England.”7
This is exactly the kind of nationalist propaganda that Hunt
echoed in order to reverse in his masque, The Descent of Liberty, fin-
ished in the midst of these celebrations while he was also at work
on Rimini. Hunt, who in the preface to his Foliage volume called
England this “war and money-injured land” (8), clearly allies him-
self with those reformers within Parliament such as Samuel Romilly
and Lord Folkestone who were concerned about the militarization
of British social life after the end of the war, with the Prince Regent,
for example, opening Parliament in a field-marshal’s uniform and
with new institutions such as the Royal Military Asylum, the Royal
Military College, and the Military Club being created to grace the
peace.8 Hunt wrote in The Examiner for May 22, 1814 that the visit-
ing monarchs should not be greeted with military parades and feasts
but instead with instances of great British art. In fact, he recommends
the performance of a masque, much as he was writing, though Hunt
suggests it be written by Wordsworth or Southey with sets designed
by Turner (321–322). Hunt also argues that the Emperor Alexander,
rather than spending time with the Regent with his “disreputable
companions, . . . effeminate accommodations, . . . and insipidity,”
should instead travel to the Lake District to visit Wordsworth. In his
own dramatic offering, Hunt stages the kind of glorious transforma-
tion scene offered in the parks of London, as he images Napoleon as
the Enchanter floating on a dark cloud being defeated by an oppos-
ing cloud of Liberty, but he uses the spectacle to offer a different
reading of the end of the war, As I have argued elsewhere, Hunt in
his masque celebrates the victory, but not as a triumph for the Allied
Monarchs, but rather for the peoples of Europe; his final “Vision
of Real Glory” does not praise, say, the Prince Regent as did Nash’s
“Temple of Concord” display, but the yeomanry, artists, and lovers
who will build a utopia of peace, art, and pleasure (Cox 130).
By the time The Story of Rimini was published in 1816, Napoleon
had been defeated decisively at Waterloo on June 18, 1815. There were
fewer public demonstrations at the time—the battle would not be
commemorated with an official Thanksgiving until January 1816—
and the country failed to build a Waterloo monument to match its
remembrances of Trafalgar: Wellington would have to wait until 1822

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 196 Jeffr ey N. Cox

for the Achilles statue dedicated to him by the women of Britain with
the Merchants and Bankers of the City of London presenting him
with the Waterloo Shield in that same year. It is not that the govern-
ment was not concerned about controlling the public images of the
victory. For example the Licenser of Plays blocked the production of
what its anonymous author called “a mere trifle,” The Duke’s Coat; or,
The Night After Waterloo, a play based on a French precursor in which
an innkeeper mistakes an aide-de-camp wearing the Duke’s coat for
Wellington himself. In his preface to the published version, the anony-
mous author speculates that “the Licenser may think the Battle of
Waterloo too grave and tragical a subject for an Interlude” (Duke’s
Coat vi), a notion in keeping with the Licenser’s tendency to ban all
contemporary history from the stage and with conservative concerns
about the nature of tragedy that we will see again in reactions to
Hunt’s Rimini. While the theater, then, was not felt to be the place
to represent Waterloo, there were, of course, various commemorations
and celebrations. Wellington would host an annual Waterloo dinner,
eventually adding the Waterloo Gallery to Apsley House in order to
seat all his guests. More humbly, in Denby Dale, the second of its
famous gigantic pies—containing two sheep and twenty fowls—was
baked in honor of Waterloo (the first had been created for the recovery
of George III in 1788). There were private expressions of pleasure as
well: after the battle, Wordsworth and Southey danced around a bon-
fire on Skiddaw singing “God Save the King” and eating the standard
British roast beef and plum pudding (Bainbridge 153).
As the Lake Poets’ delight might suggest, there was an outpouring
of writing, both poetic and not, on the battle. Hunt’s poem is part
of a spate of post-Waterloo literature—we might note Southey’s Poet’s
Pilgrimage to Waterloo and Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode—that
sought to define the state of British society and culture after twenty
years of revolution and war. Hunt’s engagement in Rimini with the
contemporary political scene was clearer in the original opening he
penned for the poem but did not publish:

For not [merely] by contrast lov’d was Guido’s heir

Nor the mere dotage of a realm’s despair,
No pamper’d prodigal, unshamed in waste,
Whose childishness remains when youth is past,
No smirking idler ideot, trusting for its throne
To custom and a worn out race alone,
Nor aught that makes an old head shake to see
The fond neglect of sinking royalty[.] (qtd. in Short 209)

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 R e -V i s i o n i n g R i m i n i 197

Every bit as biting as Shelley’s famous 1819 lines on the “old, mad,
blind, despised and dying King” with his sons, the “dregs of their dull
race” (ll. 1–2), Hunt’s draft verses, surely alluding to the king (the
“old head” shaking “to see / The fond neglect of sinking royalty”)
and the Regent (“whose childishness remains when youth is past”),
would have opened a poem that, again like Shelley’s sonnet, moves
on to imagine a rebirth from a tomb; for if in Shelley’s poem a “glori-
ous Phantom may / Burst” from the “graves” created by government
oppression to “illumine our tempestuous day” (ll. 13–14), so at the
close of Hunt’s poem the tombs of Paolo and Francesca become a site
where lovers gather to celebrate an erotic liberation. While Rimini is
not explicitly a poem about the end of the war, it does offer its own
way of reading the postwar period, and it offers a new style of writing
in order to imagine a world of peace.
Hunt plots out two attitudes toward life after war in contrast-
ing the two brothers. Of the two, Giovanni, a model of “manly sol-
diership” (3:36), had a “countenance [that] was the martialler; and
’twas a soldier’s truly” (3:31–32). Absent war, his greatest pleasures
are engaging in the jousts and duels of “martial play” (l. 188) and
reviewing his troops. Hunt connects Giovanni’s outward violence to
an inward-turned egotism, an “ill-tempered pride” (l. 68), a “self-
love” (4:459); he does not recognize the needs of others, and while
he “struck a meaner deference in the many,” his nature “Left him, at
last, unloveable with any” (ll. 96–97). Giovanni remains so marked
by war and violence that he cannot accept the love open to him in a
time of peace. It might help to remember that on the very day that
peace was declared in November 1815, Austria, Britain, Prussia, and
Russia created the Quadruple Alliance, suggesting there was some-
thing to be allied against, even in peace, that there was no time to
turn to love when one had to maintain an ongoing war on the terror
the Jacobins at home and abroad supposedly threatened. Giovanni
would have understood the tactics of Castlereagh and Metternich.
Paolo, by contrast, was made for this time of peace: “Not that he
saw,” Hunt tells us, “beyond / His general age, and could not be as
fond / Of wars and creeds as any of his race—/ But most he loved a
happy human face” (ll. 107–110). His own face is “No soldier’s, for
its power was all of mind, / Too true for violence, and too refined”
(3:44–45). Where Giovanni is self-enclosed and thus unable to enjoy
the infinite variety of pleasures Francesca offers, Paolo finds himself
increasingly drawn to her as someone who can open up a realm of
peaceful delights, a realm of poetry and passion found in Francesca’s
pavilion, “Spared from the rage of war” (3:457).

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 198 Jeffr ey N. Cox

Hunt dreams of a perfect—because mutual—love for Francesca:

“To bless and to be blessed—to be heart-bare / To one who found
his bettered likeness there” (3:207–208). Celebrating female sexual-
ity, Hunt creates Francesca as a free sexual agent. Described as look-
ing on Paolo with “an eye / Of self-permission” (1:334), Francesca
has—in one of the phrases people love to ridicule—“stout notions
on the marrying score” (2:28), which Hunt later amended for clar-
ity to “She had a sense of marriage, just and free.” She is capable of
true companionate marriage, a marriage of true minds and of “dou-
ble . . . delight” (3:211). However, she finds herself in a world where
such delight is denied through the institution of marriage, here “The
holy cheat, the virtue-binding sin” (3:17). While she struggles to meet
the demands of her father and husband, “hard it is, she thinks, to have
no will” (1.115). As in Byron’s Manfred—another post-Waterloo take
on incestuous desire—love exists only beyond the laws and mores
designed to regulate sexuality. While Hunt follows his source in see-
ing the love of Paolo and Francesca as doomed, he makes it clear that
much of the fault lies with a culture that values masculine violence
over what is seen as a feminizing pleasure and that seeks to control
that pleasure, and particularly feminine sexuality, through a series of
oppressive regimes. The world may condemn the lovers, but Hunt
proclaims, “Who that feels one godlike spark within, / Shall say that
earthly suffering cancels not frail sin!” (4:401–402).
Blackwood’s was convinced that Hunt wrote the poem to defend
incest, aiming in Rimini “a deadly wound . . . at the dearest confi-
dences of domestic bliss” (2 [October 1817]:40). In the “Letter from
Z.,” Hunt’s adversary vows to defend marriage against men like Hunt
who “versify vice into virtue” (3 [May 1818]:199). Blackwood’s hinted
in its attacks that Hunt was perhaps working from his own personal
situation, and commentators have continued to find echoes of the
complex intimacy between Hunt, his wife Marianne, and her sister,
Elizabeth Kent. I think that Z. was not far wrong in his estimation of
Hunt’s rewriting of Dante, though I find his motivation more ideo-
logical than personal. Hunt believes that Dante was of the devil’s party
without knowing it, that behind the labeling of Paolo and Francesca’s
love as sin one can recover the erotic as a site of resistance to a society
dedicated to repression and violence. Hunt, like Shelley and others
in their group, was trying to imagine a sexuality freed from the rules
and roles of convention. Roe speaks of the free love ideal Hunt shared
with Shelley (195), and Kucich argues that Hunt and his circle cre-
ated “an important model of progressive gender relations.” 9 Hunt, as
he himself later put it, wrote against the “depreciators of this world”

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 R e -V i s i o n i n g R i m i n i 199

in order to celebrate “ourselves as what we really are—creatures made

to enjoy more than to know, to know infinitely nevertheless in pro-
portion as we enjoy kindly” (Foliage 15–16). He argues that social
bonds, community, are created through a proper appreciation of sex-
uality, “all the sentiment and social tenderness which a right sense of
the sexual intercourse is calculated to produce” (28). Hunt joins in
this with Shelley who in Epipsychidion argues for the power of erotic
love, which in its infinite mobility and proliferation of desire “differs
from gold and clay” (l. 160), or Byron who in Don Juan traces desire’s
ability to evade the constraining tentacles of various forms of cant
or Keats who, according to his friend Benjamin Bailey, embraced in
Endymion “that abominable principle of Shelley’s—that Sensual Love
is the principle of things.”10
As Hunt repeatedly makes clear, this liberation of the erotic is
to be accomplished through a revisionary poetics. While Dante was
sometimes praised for the purity of his language (i.e., in Coleridge,
Biographia Literaria 2:30), Hunt may well have turned to Dante as
an early advocate of vernacular language in order to push colloquial
speech as far as he can, as Eberle-Sinatra notes: Hunt “goes further
than Dante in his advocacy of ‘vernacular’ language by using collo-
quial language in the Story of Rimini, as well as simple, feminine, and
urbane words” (68). Hunt hoped to introduce “a freer spirit of versi-
fication” and “a free and idiomatic cast of language” (Selected Works
167), that is, to open up the heroic couplet—the very heart of con-
servative poetics—and to deploy what John Strachan has identified
as a “vibrant use of what might be called reclaimed vulgarisms.”11
The Italianate “new school” of Cockney poetics works to overturn
the “French” school embraced by conservatives such as Gifford and
Croker. Blackwood’s and its allies understood that Hunt was drawing
upon an Italian classic in order to complicate any restrictive sense of
the English language, to underwrite the importation of other socio-
lects into a hybridized literacy. They thus attack Hunt for creating
an illiterate, “Cockney” dialect. We have already heard Z. call for
a Cockney glossary, and Croker complained, “In what vernacular
tongue, for instance, does Mr. Hunt find a lady’s waist called clip-
some” (Quarterly Review 14 [January 1816]:477). Such coinages
along with various Cockney rhymes—most infamously the lines
“The two divinest things this world has got, / A lovely woman in
a rural spot!” (3:257–258)—infuriated critics but are in fact what,
Strachan again, labels “the avant gardist exploitation of the contrast
between historical narrative and the real language of men” (xvii). A
pseudo-Italian poem, offered in Blackwood’s (11 [March 1822]:363)

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 200 Jeffr ey N. Cox

and ascribed to a mock-Foscolo (“a certain great Italian genius, who

cuts a figure about the London routs—one Fudgiolo”), suggests that
the hybridized texts that arise from Hunt’s and Keats’s investment
in Italian literature result in a kind of mongrelized babble, neither
Italian nor English:

Signor Le Hunto, gloria di Cocagna

Chi scrive il poema della Rimini
Che tutta apparenza ha, per Gemini,
D’esser cantato sopra la montagna
Di bel Lugato, o nella campagna
D’Amsted, o sulle marge Serpentimini
Com’esta Don Giovanni d’Endymini
Il gran poeta d’Ipecacuanha?
Tu sei il Re del Cocknio Parnasso
Ed egli il herede appanente,
Tu sei un gran Giacasso ciertamente,
Ed egli ciertamente gran Giacasso!
Tu sei il Signor del Examinero
Ed egli soave Signor del Glystero.

The Cockneys are seen—given the references to the emetic ipecac-

uanha and the enema “Glystero” (for glyster, for clyster)—as engag-
ing in a kind of oral-anal dissolution of the literary into the fecal, of
evocative writing into the voiding of the bowels. As the dialogists in
Blackwood’s put it in querying the rhyme between Hunt’s journal as
the “Examinero” and “Glystero,” “Both vehicles of dirt, you know.”
Hunt uses his border raid across national literatures to justify a
shift across other registers, those within native language use as well
as those of class distinction—seen most directly in his dedication of
the poem to Byron, a move decried by Blackwood’s as an attempt by
a plebian to link himself to a lord. The turn to an Italian source is
revealed as an attempt to gain cultural capital across linguistic lines
when it has been denied across the divisions of rank. To take but
one example of using an Italian text to give authority to Cockney
practice, Hunt’s later translation of Redi’s Bacchus in Tuscany is
filled with what would have struck contemporaries as Cockneyisms
that turn out to be accurate translations of Redi’s original. We seem
to get a Cockney coinage when Hunt rhymes “muscular” with
“majuscular”—this being the first time the latter word is used in
English according to the OED—but we find that this is Redi’s word
“Majuscolo” and that Hunt supplies Redi’s note explaining that the

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 R e -V i s i o n i n g R i m i n i 201

word is used to refer to capital letters (Bacchus in Tuscany 2, 69). We

come upon an incredible word “goatibeardihornyfooted” and assume
we have one of Hunt’s infamous compoundings, but he in fact works
from “Capribarbicornipede” and notes that the Italians are very
proud of such compound words (Bacchus in Tuscany 32, 182). As the
Honeycomb complained in a passage cited above, the Cockneys—or
“Cit poets” as they call the Hunt circle—found in Italian literature
linguistic material “cut and dry to their hands”; Italian imports jus-
tify a redistribution of English cultural capital.
Z. also objected to Hunt’s generic moves. In his preface to the
poem, Hunt says of the Inferno itself that “some call [it] a satire, and
some an epic, and which I confess, has always appeared to me a kind
of sublime nightmare” (Selected Works 165). Hunt later referred to
the Paolo and Francesca episode as “a long tragedy in a half-a-dozen
lines” (Stories from the Italian Poets 1:67), but he wrote a revision-
ary romance. As one might argue of Keats’s “Hyperion” or Byron’s
Don Juan, Hunt’s Rimini turns most obviously from the epic of war
to a romance of love, and if the Inferno is, in Hunt’s words, a satire
“disposing both of friends and enemies” (Selected Works 165), then
Rimini—taking up what Hunt calls “the most cordial and refreshing”
episode of Dante’s poem (165)—sympathizes with everyone, even the
sinners. The poem’s relation to tragedy was more controversial. As Z.
points out in his attack on the poem, Hunt’s subject—incest—had
traditionally been thought of as a tragic subject, and Z. talks at length
of Sophocles, Euripides, Ford, and more modern tragedians such as
Alfieri and Schiller. For Z. following neoclassical notions of poetic
justice, tragedy insures that incest will be punished, and he criticizes
Hunt for avoiding tragedy, calling Rimini “the genteel comedy of
incest” (2 [November 1818]:197).
For conservative critics, Hunt’s poetic experiment is found wanting
in relation to traditional tragedy, here for lacking moral seriousness.
One key attack on Romantic writers has centered on their supposed
inability to create tragedy, with this complaint particularly being
wielded against Romanticism’s radical wing, say, Shelley, who has
been found to lack a tragic sense of life by denying the central reality
of evil. In a sense, the sharp criticism that surrounded Hunt’s poem—
not to mention the suppression of that dramatic “trifle” The Duke’s
Coat—arises from a contention that writers of the Romantic period
did not know how appropriately to deal with the tragedy of their time:
the threat of revolutionary France, more broadly the massive violence
that marked the Napoleonic wars. While I believe Romantic writers

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 202 Jeffr ey N. Cox

did remake dramatic tragedy in plays from De Monfort to The Cenci,

I also believe that central works of Romanticism such as Prometheus
Unbound and Faust join Hunt’s Rimini in finding that tragedy’s
vision of closure and death is not the last judgment on man’s condi-
tion, that there is a world of love and liberation to be won beyond
tragedy (Cox 144–145). It is, of course, true that the years between
1789 and 1815 have a tragic cast defined by the massive violence that
marked this era of worldwide war, as Mary Favret and others have
recently reminded us.12 Hunt, faced with serious historical matters
that might well have found their way into tragedy, chose to write a
romance, but he swerves from tragedy not to escape, to spiritualize,
or to displace the painful political realities that faced him, but instead
to insist that poetry, that Romantic culture, can preserve the hope
for creating a world on the far side of tragedy. Recently released from
prison into a world that was still not free, still attacking the govern-
ment and dreaming of a better future, Hunt, in rewriting Dante,
created in Rimini innovative, avant garde poetry that sought through
the extravagance of its verse to image a world remade by love.

Notes
1. See Pite’s The Circle of Our Vision: Dante’s Presence in English Romantic
Poetry; and see Saglia’s “Translation and Cultural Appropriation:
Dante, Paolo and Francesca in British Romanticism.”
2. See Braida’s Dante and the Romantics (65–87).
3. See Weinberg’s Shelley’s Italian Experience 139; also The Journals of
Mary Shelley 360–362; and The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley:
Letter to Hunt April 17, 1821 and letter to Charles Ollier January 16,
1827 [?] (189–97, 539).
4. See Roe’s Keats and the Culture of Dissent, esp. pp. 51–87, and see
Cox 146–186.
5. See Webb’s two fine essays, “Leigh Hunt to Lord Byron: Eight Letters
from Horsemonger Lane Gaol” and “Leigh Hunt’s Letters to Byron
from Horsemonger Lane Gaol: A Commentary.”
6. See James Atkinson’s 1825 translation of La Secchia Rapita; or, The
Rape of the Bucket, where he notes Dante’s account of Paolo and
Hunt’s expansion of that story (note to Fifth Canto, Stanza xliii).
7. The display was designed by John Nash with the transformation
engineered by the munitions expert, Colonel Sir William Congreve.
For an account of the display, see Farington’s The Farington Diary
(7:273–274).
8. See Halévy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century
1:92.

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 R e -V i s i o n i n g R i m i n i 203

9. See Kucich’s “ ‘The Wit in the Dungeon’: Leigh Hunt and the
Insolent Politics of Cockney Coteries,” published in Romanticism on
the Net http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/1999/v/n14/005850ar.
html. Accessed on March 22, 2011.
10. See Rollins, The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers (1:34–35).
11. See Hunt’s Selected Works (xvii).
12. See Favret’s War at a Distance.

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 Chapter Fourteen

“Sy l l a bl es of t h e Sw e e t Sou t h”:

Th e S ou n d of Ita l i a n i n t h e
Rom a n t ic P e r iod
T i m o t h y We b b

Part One
F or most people, the experience of traveling abroad, and particularly
of engaging with foreign culture, resulted not so much in feelings
of superiority as in confusion. Take, for example, the well-travelled
William Coxe writing in a book published in 1789:

I cannot describe how much I am perplexed with a variety of lan-

guages. I speak Italian or French with the principal gentry, and some-
times am obliged to hold a conversation in Latin. I talk a smattering
of German with my servant, who understands no other language, and,
with my guide and the common people, a kind of corrupt Italian, like
the Milanese. I write my notes in English. . . . (from Coxe’s Travels in
Switzerland, qtd. in Brant 139)

This letter catches, more accurately than many accounts, the bewilder-
ing linguistic realities of travel in a period long before the influence of
forces that were, at least partly, universalizing. Coxe’s account draws
to our attention the uncomfortable practicalities of making oneself
understood in a world of linguistic uncertainty, the crucial connec-
tion between the divisions of class and of languages, and the day-
to-day difficulties that these awkward conditions often produced. In

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 206 Ti mo t h y We bb

spite of his linguistic facility, Coxe found himself “perplexed” rather

than blessed or enriched by “a variety of languages” and feared that
this might result, not in a dimension that was more European and
more harmoniously inclusive, but in a “confusion of tongues,” a trou-
bling plurality with uncomfortable echoes of the Tower of Babel. As
Byron’s letters and Don Juan demonstrate, it was possible to recognize
in such plurality a situation that was both stimulating and creative,
but (like William Coxe) most travelers interpreted such confusion as
a difficulty rather than a creative opportunity. In this respect, Coxe
is representative. His linguistic perplexity is more extreme and more
internalized than that of the inquisitive and perceptive Lady Morgan,
for example, when she observes the phenomena she encounters on her
journey through border country from France into Italy; but she, too,
is suffering from a similar complaint to that of Coxe, when she records
a “confusion of tongues” and notices that the postilion replies to the
traveler’s questions “in a jargon composed of bad French, Italian, and
Piedmontese” (Morgan 1:23).
A different take on linguistic difficulty, with greater emphasis
on listening to a foreign soundscape, was offered by Thomas De
Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821). Unlike
Coxe or Sydney Owenson, De Quincey was not faced by the chal-
lenges of traveling abroad, but his five-shilling visits to the opera
house in London brought him into contact with a cultural dimen-
sion in which he could luxuriate and which reminded him (by way
of another traveler’s reminiscence) of the powerful and suggestive
attractions of ignorance:

And over and above the music of the stage and the orchestra, I had all
around me, in the intervals of the performance, the music of the Italian
language talked by Italian women: for the gallery was usually crowded
with Italians: and I listened with a pleasure such as that with which
Weld the traveller lay and listened, in Canada, to the sweet laughter
of Indian women; for the less you understand of a language, the more
sensible you are to the melody or harshness of its sounds: for such a
purpose, therefore, it was an advantage to me that I was a poor Italian
scholar, reading it but little, and not speaking it at all, nor understand-
ing a tenth part of what I heard spoken. (De Quincey 79)

In our turn, De Quincey’s suggestive memory reminds us how, for

many an English witness, Italian was a language primarily associated
with musical performance and how their first consciousness of Italian
was inextricably linked to origins specifically musical. Even beyond
its immediately musical context, the passage also claims (like many

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 “Sy l l a bl es of the Sw eet South” 207

another) that, as a language, Italian is inherently musical (a claim

also made by Charles Burney, the adventurous historian of European
music and Leigh Hunt, one of the first exponents of opera criticism).
For De Quincey, an evening at the opera seems to have been an exer-
cise in multiple musicality, since it included not only the primary
experience of the operatic music itself, as expressed by the singers and
the orchestra, but also the language of the libretto that was normally
Italian, and the “music of the Italian language” spoken by the audi-
ence during the interval. The delightful musicality of the occasion
was, therefore, happily overdetermined and linked to its Italianness
(or “Italianità,” as Italians themselves might have said).
De Quincey’s response obviously feminizes the language of the
opera house by associating it with “the music of the Italian language
talked by Italian women” and, later, with Isaac Weld’s response to
“the sweet laughter of Indian women.” In fact, Weld had made a help-
fully explicit connection himself, since he had reported that American
Indian women “speak with the utmost ease, and the language, as pro-
nounced by them, appears as soft as the Italian” (notice the defining
adjective “soft,” which occurs frequently in accounts of the Italian
language or its dialects) (De Quincey 220). De Quincey, like Weld
but with rather a different justification, derives a knowledgeable plea-
sure from not knowing Italian.
Strikingly enough, it was precisely this ignorance that had once
caused such trouble in audiences at the Italian Opera, though a sen-
sible system of practical compromises had gradually evolved. One his-
tory offers the following account:

From the time of Addison critics scoffed at the notion of an enter-

tainment in a language the audience could not understand. They had
a point, though the problem was alleviated in various ways. A small
minority of the audience knew some Italian, and others probably
picked it up.
Dual-language librettos and a lighted auditorium allowed one to fol-
low along. The conventions of gesture . . . were designed to assist in
understanding both emotion and action. Many librettos were used
over and over. The fact remains that subscribers might easily attend
half (and some might attend all) of the company’s performances, see-
ing five or ten or fifteen performances of a work they understood no
more than hazily, if that. (Price, Milhous, and Hume 1:9)

De Quincey had something in common with these audiences and

these subscribers; but his ignorance was willed and included the audi-
ence as well as the action on the stage and, as he tells his readers,

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 208 Ti mo t h y We bb

constituted one of the regular pleasures of opium. Such meaning-

ful passivity is entirely characteristic of the English Opium–eater: his
negative capability enables him to enjoy the phenomena of the occa-
sion, even the seemingly mundane, with a heightened consciousness
and no irritable reaching after fact and reason.
Though De Quincey’s experience seems to have been entirely
positive, the significance of not knowing the language one hears or
encounters can work in a variety of ways and serve many different
purposes, not all of them positive. In many cases, unintelligibility
can be troubling or isolating rather than delightful. In 1770 Charles
Burney was regularly puzzled by the range of Italian dialect, which
often proved too much for his flimsy linguistic confidence. For exam-
ple, he records at Padua: “The people here speak so Venetian, that I
can scarce understand a word they say.” Or again, he confides to his
traveling notes his own incapacity to make sense of what he hears:
“Through all the Genoese State, the language the people speak is
a jargon wholly unintelligible” (Burney, Eighteenth-Century 1:98,
308). Such ignorance can easily have the effect of making the trav-
eler feel excluded or threatened—see, for example, Coleridge on the
subversive uses of Erse and the uncomfortable sense that a language
not understood can be used to undermine the “innocent” traveler,
who cannot interpret what he hears; or see the stories of linguistic
impotence narrated by Mary Shelley and Byron (which feature in the
next section).1
On the other hand, as De Quincey seems to have realized, igno-
rance can sometimes liberate the imagination and encourage the cre-
ation of powerful and happily creative fantasies, which may not always
accord with the reality. Consider, for instance, the presentation of
the process at work in the Venetian memories of Edmund Malville
that feature in Mary Shelley’s dialogic story “Recollections of Italy”
(published in January 1824). In the face of the skeptical responses of
his interlocutor, Malville recreates the world of Venice in evocative
detail. One of his memories, which “combined to raise and nourish
romantic feeling,” concerns the Erse song of the gondoliers on his
nightly return from the opera: “The dark canal, shaded by the black
houses, the melancholy splash of the oar; the call, or rather chaunt
made by the boatmen, ‘CaStalì!’ (the words themselves delightfully
unintelligible)” (Shelley, Collected Tales 26). Here the unintelligibil-
ity is a climactic contribution to the charm. Or consider Dorothy and
William Wordsworth listening to half-articulate Gaelic “hootings”
in the Scottish highlands (Dorothy Wordsworth, Recollections 114),
or William Wordsworth interpreting the song of a solitary reaper

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 “Sy l l a bl es of the Sw eet South” 209

(suggestive to a traveler who did not speak Gaelic and its dialects),
or Keats asking John Hamilton Reynolds to read him some passages
from Homer because of the pleasurable “mistiness” of Greek to his
own uninstructed hearing (Keats, Letters 1:274).2 Sometimes the
benefits of such not knowing, whether calculated or inevitable, may
outweigh a reality that is limited (or unglamorously delimited) by a
knowledge of the language.

Part Two
On May 13, 1818 Mary Shelley wrote from Livorno to Leigh and
Marianne Hunt, who had spent the last night in England with the
Shelleys only a short time before and with whom they shared a strong
preference for Italy. Her letter is full of news and gossip but at its cen-
ter is a curious anecdote that is not so easily shared or dismissed.

They told us that whenever you call at an Italian house the servant
always puts her head out of window and demands chi è [who is it?]
whatever time of day or night it may be—The proper answer to this
question is amici [friends] but those people [who[ do no[t] know the
proper reply are terribly puzzled to know what to answer to this chi
è which meets them at every corner—one of their friends visiting a
house after having been kept a long time in the street while they were
screaming chi è to him from the window and he was exhausting all
answers to them but the right one—at length he made his way to
the stairs which as they always are in Italy, were dark and as he was
groping along the mistress of the house called out chi è and the poor
man quite confounded not recognizing the voice—called out Brut[t]a
bestia, andate al diavolo [nasty thing (literally), go to the devil]—and
rushed out of the house. (Mary Shelley, Letters 1:67)

This anecdote is suggestively supplemented by a story told by Byron

in a letter written from Albaro to James Wedderburn Webster on
October 26, 1822, in which he apologizes for his failure to make
contact:

I called at three precisely, and asked thrice for the Cavalier Webster,
in much better Italian than is spoken at Genoa [of which Albaro is a
suburb]; but the name seemed incomprehensible, tho’ not ye. title.
The answer was—Do you mean the “nobile Inglese” who came here
two days ago? I replied—I mean the Gentleman who called on me
yesterday. “He is gone out and returns at 5—to Dinner” was the reply.
I left no card, as it was not impossible that they w’d have left it with a

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 210 Ti mo t h y We bb

Stranger. It is provoking enough that you should have been detained

by their stupidity, for such it was as Count Gamba, who was with
me heard my inquiries, but repeated the name himself—as well as an
Italian can repeat a name with four consonants in it. (Byron’s Letters
and Journals 10:18–19)

With characteristic facility, Byron enjoys both the joke at the expense
of the amiable Pietro Gamba (brother to Teresa Guiccioli) and
the fact that Italian does not recognize the letter “w,” awkward in
the circumstances since (even ignoring the teasing possibilities of
“Wedderburn”) the name “Webster” begins with a “w” and itself
includes four teasing consonants. His own relations with the absurd
Wedderburn Webster (a name which was ludicrously problematic to
Italian speakers) ensured that he would have been maliciously amused
by such a situation. And yet, as the parallels between his story and
that of Mary Shelley improbably indicate, both narratives may convey
more than their authors originally intended about their own attitudes
to Italian culture and to the Italian language.
Some initial qualifications are in order. Neither anecdote adequately
expresses the mastery of the Italian language ultimately achieved by
its author. Mary Shelley became more confident in her own language
skills, partly because as the mother of small children she was often in
direct contact with Italians; on December 3, 1820 she wrote to Hunt
a letter in Italian while only a few months later she transmitted to him
a lengthy document, also in Italian. Her letters, particularly those to
Maria Gisborne and to Jane Williams both of whom shared her Italian
background, frequently make use of Italian words and phrases (Mary
Shelley, Letters 1:162–164, 190–193, 132). For his part, Byron had
been familiar with Italian texts before he left England, but his stay
in Venice and his closeness to Margarita Cogni, and later to Teresa
Guiccioli, ensured an intimate exposure to oral Italian that informed
his considerable correspondence in that language and richly supple-
mented his more literary encounters with its writers. In a sense, both
anecdotes are traveler’s tales (though Byron’s is ostensibly an excuse),
and take advantage of the comical possibilities of cross-purposes and
cultural misunderstandings. And yet perhaps they also give expres-
sion to a feeling of anxiety at least partly fuelled by an inevitable
sense of cultural difference and an awkward consciousness either of
linguistic incompetence or of the ultimate uselessness of words to the
uninitiated. In both stories, even native speakers of the language are
unable to crack the mysterious code. Something there is, it seems,
which is resistant to any obvious oral communication. In both cases,

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 “Sy l l a bl es of the Sw eet South” 211

the house remains at the heart of the problem, dark, mysterious,

impenetrable, bafflingly secret, indifferent to linguistic approaches.
The self-confident Byron was “a decent Italian,” as he declares in
an earlier anecdote in which he is forced to rely on his servant for
an explanation of a local idiom (Byron’s Letters and Journals 8:35),
and (by his own account) spoke much better Italian than is usual in
Genoa; as he declares in one letter, he even hoped in the fullness of
time to write poetry in Italian and anticipated that one day he would
meet his daughter and converse with her through the shared medium
of Italian (Byron’s Letters and Journals 6:105, 8:210). Yet even he was
forced to recognize that, in spite of his apparent fluency and his genu-
ine linguistic ambitions, he was inevitably excluded and could never
be totally familiarized or, in the truest sense, an Italian insider. Like
Mary Shelley, Byron eventually discovered that an “apparent” knowl-
edge of the language was sometimes less than adequate, especially
when one was faced with the challenge of making oneself understood
in a world that was inscrutably foreign.

Part Three
For visitors to Italy a first encounter with the sound of the Italian
language often conveyed a special significance. Sometimes the lan-
guage had been studied through books, less frequently by means of
oral instruction, but to hear Italian spoken by Italians in Italy was a
totally different experience and carried a primal charge. The differ-
ence is elucidated in some detail by Charles Burney, who visited Italy
in 1770, attracted by a professional curiosity about its musical prac-
tices and institutions. On July 19 in Milan he recorded the embar-
rassing reality: “Here I cannot help observing that 20 years study and
reading at home are of less use as to speaking a foreign language than
2 months practice abroad, among the natives.” Burney was so pain-
fully conscious of his linguistic limitations that he refused an invita-
tion to attend a conversazione: “But to confess the truth, I had had
such little experience in speaking Italian, that I found my powers of
conversation in that language were insufficient to qualify me for such
an honour. So I went a book hunting” (Burney, Eighteenth-Century
1:71, 80).
Other travelers had similarly upsetting linguistic experiences.
Coleridge, for instance, occupied much of his time on the voyage to
Malta in “fagging” Italian; but his first experiences of Sicily brought to
his attention the disconcerting difference between the neatly abstract
formulations of the grammar and the challenging realities of spoken

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Italian: “Difficulty of learning Italian in Sicily—1. from the utter

want of distinct Ideas & of Judgment which makes a muddy stream
of sound, 2. bad It[alian]” (Coleridge, Notebooks 2:2179). On another
occasion, he confided to his notebook a surprising comparison:

The Italian a most harmonious at least melodious Language in the

mouth of a sensible agreeably voiced Englishman, and the language of
Love itself set to the sweet tones of an accomplished, self-respecting, and
therefore of necessity reflectionate, English Lady / but in the mouths
of the Italians themselves (at least 99 out of a hundred of all ranks, tho’
of course more intensely in the lowest, and in the women worse than
in the men) it is beyond all comparison the most ear-insulting chaos of
shrill and guttural, up and down, sounds that I have ever heard, tho’
familiar with the sounds of the corrupt Maltese Arabic, and the Platt-
Deutsch of the Hartz. Rome is perhaps better than Naples, Florence
& c, but bad is the best—In the mouths of women of the Middle and
lower ranks there are really no words, but a fusion of sounds, the voice
breaking off, snapping as it were, more often in the middle, or after
the first Syllable of a word, than at the end of a word . . . it is all one
rough ragged Scab-rough, ragged & uneven, yet still but one.—How
indeed is it possible that persons so entirely unhabituated to reasoning,
so wholly the creatures of habit and momentary passions & impulses
should talk harmoniously?

Coleridge continued to explore possible reasons for such a paradox

and then modulated into another paragraph that, although relatively
short, is highly revealing both in its analysis of the sound-effects of
Italian and in the intensity of its personal remembering:

I have often heard a long sentence & without its being repeated found
that I had understood it yet for some sounds I have been so ear-pon-
iarded with the physical sound, that it was like seeing a fist that had
just struck fire from your Eye—Not so with the French or German.
(Coleridge, Notebooks 2:2812)

The complete and extraordinary notebook passage—analytical,

emotional and, on occasions, inventively metaphorical—clearly takes
its origin from a comparison between the Italian of the “right” kind
of English ladies and gentlemen and that of the Italians themselves
who, according to Coleridge, speak their own language less harmoni-
ously than the harmonious English: while the English are “agreeably
voiced” and produce “sweet tones,” the Italians (whatever their social
background) can only generate an “ear-insulting chaos.” In both

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 “Sy l l a bl es of the Sw eet South” 213

cases, an indignantly patriotic Coleridge pays attention to voice pro-

duction and to sound (or sounds): his analysis of Italian speech clearly
indicates that, with whatever prejudices, he has listened carefully to
the sound of the language. By using the phrase “in the mouth” or “In
the mouths” (which occurs three times in the course of this passage),
he emphasizes that what offends him most is the physical sounding
of the language itself. For Coleridge, as for Burney, but in a different
degree and with critical emphasis on the shortcomings of the Italians
rather than those of Coleridge himself, the reality of Italian speech
was a shock to his carefully organized preconceptions.
Linguistic challenges also faced other visitors to Italy, who had
some previous knowledge of the language. An instructive case is
that of Leigh Hunt, who had been a particularly keen observer of
Italian performers in the opera. Unlike De Quincey, he had listened
to Italian with knowledgeable attention, as is shown, for example, by
his detailed review of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.3 Hunt was exquisitely
alert to the characteristics of Italian speech production. His review of
a production of Thomas Arne’s Artaxerses published in The Examiner
on April 16, 1820 provides a striking example of the discriminating
sensitivity of his ear to the sounds of Italian (which, at this point, he
had only encountered in England and mainly, or exclusively, on the
stage, though he was a close friend of the Novello family, which had
its roots in Piedmont):

In Italy especially, where recitative had its origin . . . , the speech of the
inhabitants of some districts is perhaps as nearly allied to recitative as
to ordinary talking. . . . There are some Italian words the intonation of
which are decidedly musical, or what is called cantabile. Such are most
of the last syllables but one, and especially before a double consonant,
where a very marked suspension takes place, as if the speaker were
lingering over the beauty of it. When it closes a period, particularly at
the end of a stanza, it has a great resemblance to the favourite cadence
of recitative . . . [Hunt reports that a “celebrated living writer” regards
recitative] as the fittest mode of expressing tender and lofty passions—
the only sounds equal to a high sense of humanity.4

Charles Burney would have agreed in principle. He had also noticed

that the language of “the common people of Italy” was flavored by an
inherent musicality or, as he once put it, “The language of the Italians
is more favourable to music than that of any other people” (Burney,
Eighteenth-Century 2:78, 244). Burney’s emphasis here is different
from that of Hunt but both observers registered an unusual quality
in the spoken language.

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Hunt had translated from Italian when he was in England and was
regarded as an authority on and a promoter of Italian culture, par-
ticularly of opera and literature; his enemies in Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine had even suggested, with the wicked memorability of satire,
that he modeled himself on Petrarch whose appearance, they mali-
ciously claimed, he attempted to resemble. He had encouraged Keats
and Shelley to read Boccaccio, had involved Byron in the composition
of The Story of Rimini, and had used the Parnaso Italiano as well as
his own Italianate poem to make his two-year imprisonment endur-
able. Yet, in spite of all this expertise, there was a notable deficiency.
By his own admission, Hunt’s spoken Italian when he first arrived in
Italy was still literary rather than vernacular, and sometimes painfully
out of date: “I amused her [Teresa Guiccioli] by speaking bad Italian
out of Ariosto, and saying speme for speranza; in which she good-
naturedly found something pleasant and pellegrino [foreign]; keeping
all the while that pleasant countenance, for which a foreigner has so
much reason to be grateful.” As Hunt notices, Teresa Guiccioli herself
had an observable Romagnese dialect, though “to me, at that time,
all Italian in a lady’s mouth was Tuscan pearl; and she trolled it over
her lip, pure or not, with that sort of conscious grace, which seems
to belong to the Italian language as a matter of right” (Hunt, Lord
Byron 1:66–67).5 Hunt does not say, though the phrase “at that time”
clearly suggests, that this innocent early view was revised in the light
of later experience; though his sentence seems to imply that with the
painful passage of time he learnt to be less trusting in his admiration.
Yet, whatever the lessons of experience, it might be argued in Hunt’s
defense that idealization of the female speaker also characterized a
number of his contemporaries (e.g., it marks Coleridge’s “reflection-
ate English ladies,” who speak Italian so agreeably). In fact, such an
obviously gendered aesthetic belongs recognizably to that period in
the history of Italian travel, if not to all travelers.
Leigh Hunt finally sailed to Italy in the early summer of 1822.
Unlike Lady Morgan, or the Shelleys, or Byron, he did not reach
Italy by traveling through France or other countries where Italian
had, at best, a marginal existence. He and his family traveled to Italy
by sea and Hunt himself was self-consciously delighted by the appar-
ent conclusion of a happy arrival at the “queen-like” city of Genoa:
“The lucid Mediterranean sea washed against our vessel, like amber;
a sky, blue indeed, was above our heads: inconveniences and dangers
were left behind us; health, hope, and Italy, were before us.” This
account, which relies on many more telling details and a revealing
array of metaphors, was printed in an essay in the second number of

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 “Sy l l a bl es of the Sw eet South” 215

The Liberal, which was published on January 1, 1823.6 Though much

of Hunt’s account also appeared in later versions, certain details (such
as the sentence about the “lucid Mediterranean”) did not. Perhaps the
most significant part of his description did not enter the record till
1828 when it appeared in Lord Byron and his Contemporaries (to be
reprinted many years later as part of Hunt’s account in both versions
of his autobiography):

[A]t two o’clock, the waters being as blue as the sky, and all hearts
rejoicing, we entered our Italian harbour, and heard Italian words.
Luckily for us, these first words were Tuscan. A pilot boat came out.
Somebody asked a question, which we did not hear, and the cap-
tain replied to it. “VA BENE,” said the pilot, in a fine open voice,
and turned the head of the boat with a tranquil dignity. “Va bene,”
thought I, indeed. “All goes well” truly. The words are delicious and
the omen good. My family have arrived so far in safety; we have but
a little more voyage to make [to Leghorn], a few steps to measure
back in this calm Mediterranean; the weather is glorious; Italy looks
like what we expected; in a day or two we shall hear of our friends
[the Shelleys]; health and peace are before us, pleasure to others and
profit to ourselves [with the publication of what was yet to be named
The Liberal]; and it is hard if we do not enjoy again, before long, the
society of all our friends, both abroad and at home. In a day or two we
received a letter from Shelley, saying that winds and waves he hoped,
would never part us more.7

The description may seem innocent and “realistic”: the pilot’s “fine
open voice” is precisely the kind of detail that might strike so obser-
vant a critic of opera. Yet research reveals that, even if the detail has
a recognizable authenticity, the larger passage is a careful construc-
tion (or reconstruction). Hunt was right to think that “Va bene”
was Tuscan (a Genoese would probably have said “Va ben”): the sur-
prising formulation works precisely to underline the apparent and
unproblematic easiness of Hunt’s arrival. But one might query the
translation itself since “All goes well” is more inclusive and more por-
tentous than the Italian original, which probably signifies no more
than “Fine” or “All right.” It is impossible to say whether Hunt delib-
erately portrays his younger self as sadly guilty of an overinterpreta-
tion when he unfortunately reflects “The words are delicious and the
omen good”; but, in the light of Shelley’s tragic death scarcely three
weeks later, the rest of the passage certainly underlines the ironical
misappropriateness of the Italian. There is no reason to believe that
such words were not spoken at the time; but it is suggestive that they

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 216 Ti mo t h y We bb

did not enter the written record till 1828, by which stage Hunt had
had more than enough time to appreciate to the full the dramatic
ironies of his arrival at Genoa.
Yet another example is provided by the writer who was a close friend
of Hunt and whose presence in Italy constituted one of the main attrac-
tions that drew Hunt to Genoa and Pisa. Percy Bysshe Shelley had first
studied the language with a French émigré family in England but,
according to a letter to Thomas Love Peacock, his reactions to a direct
aural encounter consciously suggest the new beginning he so strongly
desired: “With what delight did I hear the woman who conducted us
to see the triumphal arch of Augustus at Susa speaking the clear &
complete language of Italy, tho’ half unintelligible to me, after that
nasal & abbreviated cacophany of the French!” (Percy Shelley, Letters
2:4). [the misspelling of cacophony seems to be Shelley’s, contriving to
make the sound of French even narrower and less pleasing than the
correct spelling]. As the Shelleys moved southward through France,
Mary Shelley had already acknowledged a growing sense of libera-
tion, when she recorded in a letter to the Hunts from Lyons that “The
sun shines bright & it is a kind of Paradise to which we have arrived
at through the valley of the shadow of death” (Mary Shelley, Letters
1:62); as she would put it many years later in Rambles in Germany and
Italy (1844), when she attempted a more mature replication of her
youthful experience: “We left the abrupt, gloomy, sublime north, and
gently dropped down to truly Italian scenes.”8
Percy Shelley’s epiphany, like that of many others, interprets the
sound of the language as part of a larger context. The Shelleys had
reached the north of Italy by way of France, and Percy Shelley’s
delight in the phonic character of the “clear & complete” language
was informed by a comparative instinct. For all her excitement at the
view from her hotel window in Lyons, Mary Shelley also recognized
the intimations of a transforming southern experience and shared her
husband’s preference for Italy: “Why to be born in such a town [as
Douai] is like living out of the circle of human things—an ambi-
tious individual of Douai would almost like Erostratus wish to burn
down a fine building or two to let his fellow men know that there
was such a place in the world” (Mary Shelley, Letters 1:62). Though
Lyons had its own dark and secret history, it was “a pleasant city and
very republican” but, as she told the Hunts, “In Italy we breathe a
different air [from that in France] and every thing is pleasant around
us” (Mary Shelley, Letters, 1:64). (Here, as so frequently, an Italian
experience seems to induce a more relaxed kind of breathing, as if the
climate itself were subject to influence.) Her letter of April 6, 1818

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 “Sy l l a bl es of the Sw eet South” 217

directed from Milan to the Hunts in England insists on that compar-

ative element that marks her husband’s letter to Peacock, also written
in Milan; for instance, she claims that “Italy appears a far more civi-
lized place than France” (Mary Shelley, Letters, 1:64). As the Shelleys
would have known, French may have been the language of the rights
of man (if not that of The Rights of Man) but it was still commonly
associated with decorum and claustrophobic convention.
The comparison between French and Italian was made in more
detail and with different emphasis by other travelers. In Ravenna in
March 1821 Byron gave expression to his own views on this sub-
ject, which were complicated but clear: “Though I read & compre-
hend French with far more ease & pleasure than Italian—(which is a
heavy language to read in prose) yet my foreign speech is Italian—and
my way of life very little adapted to the eternal French vivacious-
ness—& gregarious loquacity” (Byron’s Letters and Journals 8:91).
Byron’s preference for Italian (the harder and less obvious choice) is
affected by factors that seem to absorb the character of the language
in a larger identification of national characteristics. His connection of
the French with “eternal . . . vivaciousness” and “gregarious loquac-
ity” seems hard on a culture that produced Voltaire, Rousseau, and
the philosophes but is characteristic of the generalizations that shaped
his conduct and has much in common with the sweeping dismiss-
als of Charles Burney, Germaine Staël, and the Shelleys. Yet another
example is provided by Coleridge, who explored in elaborate detail
on more than one occasion the comparative possibilities of language.
Although he praised the superior “sweetness” of Italian, Coleridge
also noted a delightful superficiality that was unique to French:

French is at once the most perspicuous & the most pointed language,
& therefore the very own language of conversation & colloquial
writing, of light passion, and the social Vanity, which finds its main
pleasure in pleasing, & attains its end by turns of phrase (that like
the painted dust-plumes on the Butterflies wing, or the colours of a
Bubble must not be examined by the grasp). . . . (Coleridge, Notebooks
2:2431 [February 4, 1805])

Part Four
Perhaps this chapter should have begun with definitions; yet, how-
ever the language may have been defined, the experience of speaking
“Italian” or its local versions, and of engaging with the varieties of
Italian speech undoubtedly played a significant part in the framing

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 218 Ti mo t h y We bb

of definitions. For that reason, experience has been placed first, in

all its baffling complexity, followed by attempts at definition that are
culturally significant but necessarily partial (in more than one sense).
Many visitors and travelers felt impelled to generalize (in the usual
manner of visitors and travelers), but it seems best to concentrate here
on two definitions that suggest some of the leading characteristics
of Italian or “Italian” as perceived in the “Romantic” period, while
clearly indicating that most “definitions” are controversial, far from
scientific, and strongly inflected by personal concerns.
Both definitions are fictions within fictions written by sympathetic
non-Italians. The first is made by Germaine Staël in her hugely influ-
ential Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807) that allocates its opening chapters
to a description of aspects of contemporary Italy and its culture, and
then devotes the whole of Book VII to a detailed account of Italian
literature. Paradoxically but significantly, this description (like the
whole novel) was written in French and delivered by Corinne her-
self, who embodies the spirit of Italy with which she identifies, but is
half-English in origin and has even lived in Northumberland. In an
important passage in this chapter, Corinne defines Italian literature
(which she characterizes as “our”) by way of contrast with English;
this contrast exemplifies that difference between the north and the
south that is the most enduring feature of Staël’s controversial defini-
tion of Romanticism.

Doubtless there is not in our poets this profound melancholy, this

knowledge of the human heart which characterizes yours; but this
kind of superiority belongs rather, does it not, to philosophical writers
than to poets? The brilliant melody of Italian [La mélodie brillante de
l’Italien] is more suitable to [the] lustre [l’éclat] of exterior objects than
to meditation. Our language would be more appropriate for depicting
furor [la fureur] than sadness, because reflected feelings require more
metaphysical expressions, while the desire for vengeance animates the
imagination and turns sorrow outward. Cesarotti9 has made the best
and the most elegant translation of Ossian which exists; but it seems,
in reading it, that the words themselves have a festive air [un air de
fête] which contrasts with the somber ideas which they recall.10

Corinne (or Corinne ) goes further. Charles Burney had expressed

the opinion that “the language is more musical than in any other
country in Europe,” contrasting it on another occasion with the unfa-
vorable raw material of German (Burney, Eighteenth-Century 2:78;
see also 2:244). Other travelers were in agreement with this verdict,
though less precisely and with less technical authority. Corinne offers

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 “Sy l l a bl es of the Sw eet South” 219

an equation, or a connection, which is subtly but significantly dif-

ferent when it (or its central figure) connects Italian with music and
with nature: “One lets oneself be charmed by our sweet words . . . as by
the murmur of waters and the variety of colors.” Like De Quincey in
the opera house, acknowledging “the music of the Italian language,”
this submission to the effects of charm abandons analytical intellect or
irritable searching after fact and reason. Once again, there is a special
pleasure in passive ignorance and in not knowing; Italian ministers to
that special requirement. Why, queries Corinne (speaking also perhaps
for Staël?), should one ask the nightingale the meaning of its song? One
can only “understand” it by going along with the impression which
it produces. Italian poetry can achieve a variety of effects: “The mea-
sure of the lines, the harmonious rhymes, these rapid endings . . . imi-
tate sometimes the light steps of dance; sometimes more serious tones
recall the noise of the storm or clatter of weapons.” The emphasis
here may seem to fall on the imitative potential of verse (including,
one might observe, “the light steps of dance” which suggests that,
within its repertoire, Italian verse may include the superficially plea-
surable, not unlike French, according to Byron and Coleridge); but,
more significantly, Corinne (or Staël) actually claims that, although
Italian poetry and its gliding soundscape is beyond interpretation, it
is “a marvel of the imagination” (une merveille de l’imagination) and
produces a special kind of harmony that properly defies analysis.
A second “definition” is offered by a stanza 44 in Byron’s Beppo,
written when Byron was in Venice in latish 1817; the poem first
appeared in print, in England, in 1818. The narrator, who bears some
resemblance to Byron but who is also, recognizably, a literary per-
sona, a “broken dandy on his travels,” is calculating in traditional
fashion the rival merits of Italy and England. To this equation, the
language makes a significant contribution:

I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,

Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,
And sounds as if it should be writ on satin,
With syllables which breathe of the sweet South,
And gentle liquids gliding all so pat in,
That not a single accent seems uncouth,
Like our harsh northern whistling, grunting guttural,
Which we’re oblig’d to hiss, and spit, and sputter all.

Written in an Italian verse-form which was new to most English read-

ers, the whole stanza is predicated on a contrast between the pleasing

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 220 Ti mo t h y We bb

phonetic effects of Italian and the gruff languages of the north, such
as English and German. It celebrates “the language,” though travel-
ing and experience must have suggested (as alert readers were perhaps
expected to recognize) that such generalizations were dangerous, not
least because the language varied greatly from locality to locality. The
narrator’s admired Italian has much in common with the “beautiful
language” celebrated in the dedicatory essay to the fourth Canto of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that also pays tribute to the “paese tutto
poetico, che vanta la lingua la più nobile ed insieme la più dolce”
(Byron, Complete Poetical Works 2:123). But, as Byron was well aware
even when he wrote Beppo, “Italian” is not the same as Venetian.
Venetian (or Veneziano) was, as Byron said, “soft & peculiar” or, as
he told John Murray, “something like the Somersetshire version of
English.”11 The emphasis on softness was part of a long interpretative
tradition. For example, Metastasio had even defended the translations
of Hoole by claiming that “the language itself is so soft and musical,
that no other can furnish words equivalent in sweetness.”
Charles Burney, who reported this, had listened attentively to the
speech of the Venetians and observed: “The Venetians seem to try,
in pronouncing good words, to make the language already soft, still
more soft” (Burney, Eighteenth-Century 2:102, 1:103). Nearly forty
years later though only about a year after the publication of Byron’s
poem, Mary Shelley reported to Leigh Hunt: “The Romans speak
better Italian & have softer voices than their country men” (Mary
Shelley, Letters 1:92), clearly suggesting that softness is not a uni-
versal quality of spoken Italian and shifting the centre of softness as
far south as Rome. Hunt himself was sensitive to the dialectal mani-
festations of softness. Not long after he had arrived in Italy, he felt
able to inform readers of The Liberal that, in spite of their reputation
for speaking “pure Italian,” “The Pisans in general . . . seem to have
corrupted their pronunciation, and the Florentines too, if report is
to be believed. They use a soft aspirate instead of the C, as if their
language was not genteel and tender enough already.”12 And Isaac
Weld’s Indian women (as remembered by De Quincey) spoke a lan-
guage that appeared “as soft as the Italian.”
Yet, in spite of all these testaments, softness is a characteristic that
does not feature in all versions of Italian, and it is highly controver-
sial. Consequently, the narrator’s claim is not the simple endorsement
it may appear. According to the narrator, the language sounds “as if
it should be writ on satin”; it provides an unbroken harmonious flow
(“gentle liquids gliding”). In contrast to this easy progress, which is

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 “Sy l l a bl es of the Sw eet South” 221

partly mimed by the gentle fluency of Byron’s own verse, the stanza
sets the heavily accented soundscape of the northern languages,
whose awkward utterances are simulated by the difficult movements
of the verse itself (“our harsh northern whistling, grunting guttural,/
Which we’re oblig’d to hiss, and spit, and sputter all”). As so fre-
quently, the separate identity of the text is difficult to distinguish
from the facts of Byron’s own life and opinions.13 In his own person,
Byron distanced himself in one letter from the inhuman “eructation
of sound” that he claimed as a characteristic of German, while in
another he admitted that his knowledge of German was limited and
that he used the language mainly for purposes of swearing (to some
extent, Byron may have been reflecting the confusing linguistic situ-
ation lamented by Coxe, though here, as elsewhere, he was taking
calculated pleasure in the simplifications of stereotyping) (Byron’s
Letters and Journals 8:26). Italian, the narrator of Beppo argues, is
attractive partly because it seems to be liberated from such uncom-
fortable linguistic constraints. If “not a single accent seems uncouth,”
the primary implication concerns the ways in which individuals speak
Italian (and the ways in which it is received by a hearer); yet avoidance
of effects which are too obviously “uncouth” may also be facilitated
by the nature of the language, because, in Italian, accentuation is only
minimally evident. According to this account: “the stanza concen-
trates on language as a combination of sounds rather than a system
of signs or a conveyor of precise meanings” (Webb, “ ‘Soft Bastard
Latin’ ” 75). This version of “Italian” has much in common with that
of Staël in its concentration on musicality and the pleasing sound-
pattern of the language, and in its focus on sensually gratified recep-
tion at the expense of exact interpretation. Strangely enough, too, its
emphasis on communication that transcends or avoids the restrictions
of conventional “meaning” even comes close to Staël’s controversial
characterization of Italian.
These lines in Beppo are also based on an overt geographical con-
trast between the guttural speech of the north and the “syllables
which breathe of the sweet South”; both polarities are underlined
by Byron’s use of characterizing alliteration, while the South’s ani-
mating relaxation (“breathes”—compare Leigh Hunt’s “breath-
ing passion”) is set against the grotesque activities of the northern
verbs, with their ugly concentration of “s” and “t” sounds (“hiss,
and spit, and sputter”). All of these contrasts are enforced by the
structure of the verse and the fact that the final two lines, which
clinch the presentation with their forced comic rhyme, are longer

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 222 Ti mo t h y We bb

than the other lines in the stanza. Where Pope would have signaled
the contrast through the force of antithesis, Byron employs the
structure of ottava rima, which establishes a different kind of equa-
tion but allows him much the same kind of mimetic indulgences as
his master. Here, too, the poem seems to be in accord with Staël
and to offer that kind of contrast between north and south that was
common to travelers and to which Corinne had accorded the most
influential expression.
Yet, just as softness turns out to be a feature that is less than reliable,
this attribution of the guttural to the unpleasing north, as opposed to
the mellifluous south, can be contradicted by the facts of autopsy (or
personal observation). Dante, who provided a pioneering account of
Italian dialects in De Vulgari Eloquentia, noticed that the language
could be either soft or harsh. He observed that there was a dialect
which, because of “the softness of its words and pronunciation, seems
so feminine that it causes a man, even when speaking like a man, to
be believed to be a woman.” There was also, another type of dialect
that worked in the opposite way: this language was “so bristling and
shaggy in its words and accents that, owing to its rough harshness,
it not only distorts a woman’s speech, but makes one doubt whether
she is not a man” (Dante, Translation of the Latin Works 46–47).
Dante may have established the importance of the subject; many
later travelers continued to confirm his basic findings. For example,
Tobias Smollett, who visited Italy in 1766, recorded examples of
the “bristling and shaggy” that would have come as no surprise to
Dante. His offended sourness justifies Laurence Sterne’s nickname
“Smelfungus” for Smollett, but this does not negate Smollett’s accu-
racy of observation:

You have often heard it said, that the purity of the Italian is to be found
in the lingua Toscana, and bocca Romana. Certain it is, the pronuncia-
tion of the Tuscans is disagreeably guttural: the letters C and X they
pronounce with an aspiration, which hurts the ear of an Englishman;
and is, I think, rather rougher than that of the X, in Spanish. It sounds
as if the speaker had lost his palate. I really imagined the first man I
heard speak in Pisa, had met with that misfortune in the course of his
amours. (Smollett 231)

Charles Burney, whose visit took place only four years later, also
noticed this feature: “It is astonishing how gutturally the Florentines
speak particularly words with a hard C or Q” (Burney, Music 108).
In the next century, Coleridge characterized Italian (as we have seen)

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 “Sy l l a bl es of the Sw eet South” 223

as “beyond all comparison the most ear-insulting chaos of shrill and

guttural, up and down, sounds that I have ever heard.” He described
its effects with forceful disillusionment: “for some sounds I have been
so ear-poniarded with the physical sound, that it was like seeing a fist
that had just struck fire from your Eye.” The awkward compound
word “ear-poniarded” gives expression to Coleridge’s search for the
most appropriate word and strikingly embodies the uncomfortable
physicality of his linguistic experience. Like Smollett and Burney
before him, Coleridge also registered Florentine pronunciation with
that mixture of shock and exasperation that often accompanies the
loss of an ideal:

After the being used to the sweet Roman Pronunciation, the

Florentines appear to have lost the roof of the mouth & so to substitute
the throat, that the person who speaks most distinctly, quite gargles/
and of those who speak least unpleasantly, the sounds to a foreigner’s
ear seem wandering about in the roofless Hollow of the mouth seek-
ing in vain for a something necessary to make them words. (Coleridge,
Notebooks 2:2862)

In contrast, Beppo’s Italian language is conspicuously feminized.

This emphasis not only underlines the contrast between the “sweet
South” and the north, but also makes its mark on suggestive descrip-
tions such as “melt like kisses from a female mouth,” where the seduc-
tive impact of Italian can hardly be separated from other factors that
were part of Byron’s own linguistic education. Much the same might
be claimed for the celebration of liquids. As Tony Tanner puts it:
“Everything is made to seem to contribute to the unashamed arousal
and satisfaction of desire, including the language, indeed particu-
larly the language, with its ‘gentle liquids gliding all so pat in’—
which could hardly be more frankly lubricious” (Tanner 53). What
Beppo begins to provide here is an erotics of language, or perhaps an
account of language inflected by a strikingly personal dimension.
Through the narrator, Byron seems to be profiting from his own
initiation into Italian; his “female mouth” makes an interesting con-
trast to Coleridge’s “In the mouth,” which punctuates an account
of the language dictated by Coleridge’s own concerns and is much
less comfortable with its soundscape. Here, as elsewhere, sound is an
essential part of a full cultural immersion; but here, too, the repre-
sentation of sound is even more subjective, a product of psyche and
informing context rather than of scientific observation or objective
aural attention.

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 224 Ti mo t h y We bb

Notes
1. See Coleridge on “The Facilities of Concealment Afforded by the
Erse Language” in Essays on His Times 2:414.
2. In spite of its appearance of immediacy (“Behold her, single in the
field. . . .”), William Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper” was essen-
tially inspired by a reading of the manuscript of Thomas Wilkinson’s
Tour to the British Mountains. See William Wordsworth, The Poems.
Ed. John O. Hayden, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale UP
and Penguin Books, 1997), 1:659–660, 1013. Stanzas 3 and 4 are
devoted to the problem of interpreting an unfamiliar language.
3. The Examiner, No. 501 (August 3, 1817), 489–490.
4. The Examiner, No. 642 (April 16, 1820), 251.
5. For “trolling,” see Hunt’s account of the Pisans, especially: “But
they speak well out, trolling the words clearly over the tongue.” For
Italian linguistic tolerance, see Hunt’s description of Pietro Gamba,
to whom he had to apologize for “running on in my bad Italian,”
and his admiration for Luigi Gianetti of Pisa, to whom, during a
walk from Florence to Maiano, he “must have uttered a thousand
malapropisms, not one of which did he give me a sense of by a smile”
(Hunt, Lord Byron 1:38–39).
6. “Letters from Abroad. Letter 2.—GENOA,” The Liberal, 2nd ed., 2
vols. (1822), 1:269.
7. Hunt’s Autobiography adds a further detail to the irony: “—Alas! for
that saying.” The time of arrival (14.00 on June 15) is confirmed by
the essay in The Liberal, 1:270 (see preceding note). For Shelley’s let-
ter of June 19, 1822 to Hunt, see Percy Shelley, Letters 2: 437–439,
esp. 438.
8. Mary Shelley, Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844), in The Novels
and Selected Works 8:265.
9. Melchior Cesarotti (1730–1808) also translated the Iliad and the
tragedies of Voltaire.
10. See Hogsett 128–129. Hogsett’s versions are the source of this and
subsequent translations, which have been tested against the original
French.
11. For Byron on Venetian, see Byron’s Letters and Journals 5:133, 138;
for a detailed account of Byron and the Italian language (including
Venetian), see Webb, “ ‘Soft Bastard Latin.’ ”
12. “Letters from Abroad. Letter 1.—PISA,” The Liberal, 1 (October
15, 1822): 118–119.
13. This problem is discussed in Webb, “ ‘Soft Bastard Latin’ ” 75–79.

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 Wor k s C i t e d

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 C on t r i bu t or s

Frederick Burwick, Professor Emeritus at UCLA, has taught courses

on Romantic drama and directed student performances of a dozen
plays. Author and editor of twenty-six books and over a hundred arti-
cles, his research is dedicated to problems of perception, illusion, and
delusion in literary representation and theatrical performance. His
book, Illusion and the Drama (Penn State, 1991), analyzes affective
theories of the drama from the Enlightenment through the Romantic
period. His Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (Penn
State, 1996) won the Book of the Year Award of the International
Conference on Romanticism. He has been named Distinguished
Scholar by both the British Academy (1992) and the Keats-Shelley
Association (1998). Recent publications include his electronic edi-
tion of The Theatre Journal of John Waldie (California Digital Library,
2008), Romantic Drama: Acting and Reacting (Cambridge UP,
2009), and Playing to the Crowd: London Popular Theatre, 1780–1830
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Peter Cochran read English at Cambridge, where he was President
of the Marlowe Society and Secretary of the Footlights, and sat at
the feet of F. R. Leavis. He then acted professionally for nine years,
his finest roles being Inspector Truscott in Loot, Ed in Entertaining
Mr. Sloane, and Jonathan Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace. While
teaching English and Drama in Bishop’s Stortford, he did a PhD at
Glasgow, where he sat at the feet of Drummond Bone. His thesis was
an edition of Byron’s The Vision of Judgement. He is now an inde-
pendent scholar living in Cambridge. He has lectured on Byron in
many places worldwide, and is responsible for the editions of Byron’s
works and correspondence on the website of the International Byron
Society. His books include Byron and Bob, Byron and Hobby-O, and
“Romanticism”—and Byron.
Jeffrey N. Cox is Professor of English and Humanities and Associate
Vice Chancellor for Faculty Affairs at the University of Colorado,
Boulder. He is the author of Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School:

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 242 Contr ibutors

Shelley, Keats, Hunt, and Their Circle (Cambridge 1998), and the
editor of Seven Gothic Dramas 1789–1825 (Ohio UP 1992), Slavery,
Abolition, and Emancipation in the British Romantic Period Volume
5: The Drama (Pickering & Chatto 1999), Keats’s Poetry and Prose
(Norton 2008), and (with Greg Kucich) Collected Works of Leigh
Hunt, Vols. 1 and 2: Periodical Essays 1805–1821 (Pickering & Chatto
2003), and (with Michael Gamer), The Broadview Anthology of
Romantic Drama (2003), and (with Larry Reynolds) New Historical
Literary Study (Princeton 1993).
Stuart Curran, Vartan Gregorian Emeritus Professor of English
at the University of Pennsylvania, holds a Laurea Honoris Causa
from the University of Bologna. He is President of the Keats-Shelley
Association of America and author of several books, including Annus
Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (Huntington Library,
1975), Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford 1986), and edi-
tor of The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (1993).
Paul Douglass is Professor of English and American Literature at
San Jose State University, where he also directs the Martha Heasley
Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies and the Steinbeck Fellows Program
in Creative Writing. He is author of Lady Caroline Lamb: A Biography
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and The Whole Disgraceful Truth: Selected
Letters of Lady Caroline Lamb (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and the
editor (with Leigh Wetherall Dickson) of The Collected Works of Lady
Caroline Lamb (Pickering and Chatto, 2008). He is also an editor,
with Frederick Burwick, of The Crisis in Modernism (Cambridge
University Press, 1992) and A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Ancient
and Modern, by Isaac Nathan and Lord Byron, a facsimile edition
(Alabama 1988). His essays and reviews have appeared in Keats-
Shelley Journal, European Romantic Review, The Byron Journal, and
Newstead Abbey Byron Society Review. In 2009 he was selected as
San Jose State University’s “President’s Scholar,” and in 2007 was
named as one of the recipients of the Elma Dangerfield Award of the
International Byron Society for publication of new and original work
related to the life, works, and times Lord Byron.
Angela Esterhammer holds a Chair in English Literature at the
University of Zürich. She works in the areas of English and German
Romanticism; performativity, performance, and improvisation; and
philosophy of language. Her publications include Creating States:
Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton and William
Blake (1994), R. M. Rilke’s Two Stories of Prague (1994), The

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 Contr ibutors 243

Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German

Romanticism (2000), Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850
(2008), and the edited volumes Romantic Poetry (2002) and Spheres
of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture (2009).
Recently published articles are on Romantic sincerity, Byron and cos-
mopolitanism, Coleridge’s journalism, and the fiction of John Galt,
and her current research examines interrelations among performative
media, print culture, periodicals, and fiction during the early nine-
teenth century.
Marilyn Gaull is Research Professor at the Editorial Institute at
Boston University. She has taught at William and Mary, Temple
University, and New York University, and is the founding editor of
The Wordsworth Circle as well as the editor of book series including
Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters (Palgrave). Her publi-
cations include English Romanticism: The Human Context (1988),
editions such as the Longman edition of Northanger Abbey (2005),
and articles, introductions, reviews, and public lectures in British
and American literature, intellectual history, folklore and oral perfor-
mance, and the history of science.
Bruce Graver is Professor of English at Providence College. He is
the editor of Wordsworth’s Translations of Chaucer and Virgil for
the Cornell Wordsworth series, an electronic edition of Lyrical
Ballads for Cambridge University Press, and essays in journals such
as European Romantic Review, Romanticism, Studies in Philology,
and The Wordsworth Circle. His recent publications include “Classical
Inheritances,” in Romanticism: an Oxford Guide, edited by Nicholas
Roe, and “Romanticism and the Classical Tradition,” in Blackwell’s
Companion to the Classical Tradition, edited by Craig Kallendorf.
His book-in-progress is called “The Stereographic Picturesque.” It
will examine stereo photographs of British and American landscape
scenery, especially scenes connected with the life and works of major
Romantic writers.
Nicholas Halmi is University Lecturer in English Literature of the
Romantic Period at the University of Oxford and Margaret Candfield
Fellow of University College. He is author of The Genealogy of the
Romantic Symbol (2007), coeditor of the Norton Critical Edition of
Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose (2003), and editor of the forthcoming
Norton Critical Edition of Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose.
Diane Long Hoeveler is Professor of English at Marquette
University, where she specializes in teaching courses on the Gothic,

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 244 Contr ibutors

British Romanticism, and women’s literature. She is author of

Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within (1990); Gothic Feminism:
The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës
(1998); and Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European
Imaginary, 1780–1820 (2010). In addition to publishing some sixty-
five articles on a variety of literary topics, she coauthored with Lisa
Jadwin a critical study of Charlotte Bronte, and edited the Houghton
Mifflin volume of Wuthering Heights. Her ten coedited volumes
of essays include Approaches to Teaching Jane Eyre; Approaches to
Teaching the Gothic (both for the MLA); Interrogating Orientalisms;
Comparative Romanticisms; Romanticism and its other discourses;
Romantic Drama; Romanticism and the Law (both for European
Romantic Review); Women of Color; Women’s Literary Creativity and
the Female Body; and the Historical Dictionary of Feminism. More
recently, she has coedited a new Broadview edition of Edgar Allan
Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. She served as President of the
International Conference of Romanticism from 2001–2003, and is
now coeditor of the European Romantic Review.
Michael O’Neill is a Professor of English at Durham University,
UK. Recent books include Wheel (Arc, 2008), a collection of poems,
and, as editor, The Cambridge History of English Poetry (2010). He
is coeditor (with Madeleine Callaghan) of Twentieth-Century British
and Irish Poetry: Hardy to Mahon (Wiley-Blackwell 2011). He is a
contributing editor on the multivolume Johns Hopkins edition of
Shelley’s poetry (the third volume is due out in 2011) and coediting
(with Timothy Webb) The Prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley 1818–1822 for
Oxford University Press.
Tilottama Rajan is Canada Research Chair and Distinguished
University Professor at the University of Western Ontario. She is the
author of four books, most recently Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays,
Godwin, Wollstonecraft (Johns Hopkins, 2010) and Deconstruction
and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida. Foucault,
Baudrillard (Stanford, 1001). She has edited Mary Shelley’s Valperga
(Broadview, 1998) and coedited four other volumes, most recently
Idealism Without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture (SUNY,
2004). She is working on a book entitled Entangled Knowledge:
Encyclopedics from Romanticism to Deconstruction.
Diego Saglia teaches English Literature at the University of Parma
(Italy) and his research interests focus mainly on Romantic-period
literature and culture, particularly their contacts and exchanges with

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 Contr ibutors 245

other European traditions. He is the author of a study on the Spanish

imaginary in British poetry of the Romantic period, Poetic Castles
in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (2000), has
edited a special issue on “Romanticism and Cultural Geography”
for the European Journal of English Studies (2002), and coedited
British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing,
Rewriting (with Laura Bandiera, 2005). His essays have appeared in
Textual Practice, Studies in Romanticism, The Keats-Shelley Journal,
Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, ELH, Studies in the
Novel, Gothic Studies, SEL and other international journals. He is
currently completing the first critical edition of Robert Southey’s
Roderick, the Last of the Goths and working on a book-length study of
the European dimension in British Romantic-period literature.
Timothy Webb is Senior Research Fellow and Emeritus Professor at
Bristol University. He is the author of Shelley: A Voice Not Understood
(1977), English Romantic Hellenism: 1700–1824 (1982), and The
Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation (1976). He was edi-
tor of Keats-Shelley Review from 1998 to 1992 and a founding edi-
tor of Romanticism. Webb is the editor of Shelley: Poems and Prose
(1995; originally published in 1977 in a shorter version as Shelley:
Selected Poems). He has also edited Yeats: Selected Poetry (1991), and,
with Alan Weinberg, The Unfamiliar Shelley (2008). He has served
as an editor for The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts series published by
Garland, and has also published numerous articles and book chapters,
mainly on Romantic or Irish topics. His fully annotated edition of
Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography, in two volumes, is scheduled for release
by Oxford University Press in late 2011 or early 2012. He is currently
hard at work on a book on Ireland and the English Romantics.

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 I n de x

Abencerrage, The (Hemans), 125 see Masaniello, ou La muette de

Addison, Joseph, 3 Portici (Auber)
Adonais (Shelley), 82, 85–86, 104 Augustan Review (journal), 184
Aesthetics (Hegel), 49, 105–106 Aytoun, William Edmonstoune, 184
affective criticism, 43
“After Leaving Italy” (Wordsworth), 31 Bacchus in Tuscany (Redi),
Agide (Alfieri), 58–59 200–201
“Albania—The Love Letter” Baglioli, Giosafatte, 122–124
(Hunt), 64 Bailey, Benjamin, 199
Alexander I of Russia, 194, 195 Baillie, Joanna, 188
Alfieri, Vittorio, 4, 56–61 Balayé, Simone, 134
Alfonso II d’Este, 40 Bandettini, Teresa, 145
Ali Pasha, 67 Bandiera, Laura, 27–28n6
All for Love (Dryden), 57 banditti, 1, 2
Altick, Richard D., 147 barcarole, 182n27
Amulet for 1828, The (annual), 158 Baretti, Giuseppe, 40
Amyntas (Tasso), 185 Barrymore, William, 170
Anatomy of Criticism (Frye), 47–48 Bataille, Georges, 110
Aniello, Tommaso Beatty, Frederick, 191
see Masaniello (Tommaso Aniello) Beaupuy, Michel, 21, 32, 35
Antigone (Alfieri), 59 Beccaria, Cesare, 17, 25
Ariosto, Ludovico Belgian Revolution, 162, 176–177
Byron and, 39–40, 43, 45–47 Bellagio, 67
interest in, 40 Belle Assemblée, La (magazine),
Orlando furioso: Byron and, 39–40, 148–150, 152–153
45–47; Fortuna in, 50–51; Hegel Belzoni, Giovanni Battista (the Great
on, 49; translations, 40, 188; Belzoni), 17
Wordsworth and, 20–21, 22, 40 Benjamin, Walter, 110
Aristotle, 135 Beppo (Byron)
Armstrong, Isobel, 130n2 improvisation and, 144
Arne, Thomas, 213 on Italian language, 219–220,
Arno Miscellany, The, 4 221–222, 223
Artaxerses (Arne), 213 Italy in, 68
Art Union (journal), 177–178 Landscape and Portrait Illustrations
At Bologna, in Remembrance of the Late of the Life and Works of Lord Byron
Insurrections and, 65
(Wordsworth), 31 Pulci and, 186
“At Florence” (Wordsworth), 30, 35 Béranger, Pierre-Jean de, 171
At Homes (Mathews), 153 Bianca Cappello (Sgricci), 148–150
“At Vallombrosa” (Wordsworth), 32–33 Bishop, Henry, 166
Auber, Daniel-François-Esprit Black, John, 40

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 248 Index

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 183, linguistic plurality and, 206

188–189, 193–194, 198, Napoleon and, 194
199–201, 214 Tasso and, 39–43, 45–47, 52, 185
Blake, William, 4, 11, 27, 185 translations, 185–186, 190, 191
Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, travels in Italy, 40
Countess of, 43 see also Landscape and Portrait
Blucher, Gebhard Leberecht von, 194 Illustrations of the Life and
Boccaccio, Giovanni Works of Lord Byron (Finden and
Cockneys and, 185, 189, 190, 214 Brockedon); specific works
Wordsworth and, 19, 20 “Byron and the Story of Francesca da
Bochsa, Nicholas, 173 Rimini” (Beatty), 191
Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 20
Bologna, 26, 31 Camaldoli, 32–33
Bolter, Jay David, 149 Cameron, Kenneth Neill, 96
Borderers, The (Wordsworth), 21, 26 Campbell, Thomas, 146, 186–187
Borgnis, Giuseppe Antonio, 176 Carafa de Colobrano, Michele, 171
“Bride of Corinth” (Goethe), 135 carbonari, 3, 4, 163–164
British Lady’s Magazine, 184 Cary, Henry Francis, 4, 24, 122–124,
Brockendon, William, 63–64 185, 191, 192
see also Landscape and Portrait Casanova, Giacomo, 17
Illustrations of the Life and Casti, Giambattista, 45
Works of Lord Byron (Finden and Catalani, Angelica, 4
Brockedon) Catholicism, 3
Brooks, Peter, 172 Cenci, The (Shelley), 94, 186
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 141, 144 censorship, 161, 166, 196
Bruto primo (Alfieri), 59 Chambers, Iain, 89
Bruto secondo (Alfieri), 59 Champion, The, 185
Bulwer Lytton, Edward, 16 Changeling, The (Middleton and
Burckhardt, Jacob, 105–114 Rowley), 110
Burke, Edmund, 32 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 140
Burney, Charles Chiabrera, Gabriello, 23
on musicality of Italian, 207, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron)
213, 218 Ariosto and, 40
on spoken Italian and dialects, 208, on the Fall of Terni, 2–3
211, 220, 222 on Ferrara, 41
Burns, Robert, 156–157 on history, 83
Burroughs, James, 175–176 on Italian language, 220
Butler, Marilyn, 187 Italy in, 63–64, 68–69, 78
Byron, Lord George Landscape and Portrait Illustrations
Alfieri and, 56–61 of the Life and Works of Lord Byron
Ariosto and, 39–40, 43, 45–47 and, 64, 65–70, 71–74
Coliseum and, 140 time and tide in, 74
Dante and, 120, 185, 190–191 Venice in, 71–74
on the Fall of Terni, 2–3 women in, 65–67
Hazlitt on, 2–3 cholera, 16, 19, 35
Hemans and, 121 Christensen, Allan, 94
Hunt and, 96, 187, 200, 214 Circle of our Vision (Pite), 94
improvisation and, 144, 148 Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy,
influences and, 43–44 The (Burckhardt), 105–114
Italian language and, 208, Clairmont, Claire, 96
209–211, 217 Clarke, Charles Cowden, 184

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 Index 249

Cleopatra (Alfieri), 59–60 Critic, The (Sheridan), 61n7

Cockney School Croce, Benedetto, 89
Blackwood’s on, 188–189, 199–200 Croker, John Wilson, 199–200
Italy and, 185–187 Cromwell, Oliver, 115
see also Hunt, Leigh; Keats, John; “Cuckoo at Laverna, The”
Story of Rimini, The (Hunt) (Wordsworth), 32–33
Cogni, Margarita, 64, 210 Curran, Stuart, 94
Cohen, Francis, 45
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Dacre, Charlotte, 67
Ariosto and, 40 Daisy Miller (James), 140
Dante and, 4, 24, 185 Dalyell, Sir John, 45
on Germany, 109 Dante Alighieri
Hemans and, 122 Byron and, 120, 185, 190–191
Hutchinson and, 21 Cockneys and, 185
improvisation and, 151, 154–158 Foscolo on, 36n7, 119, 121,
Italian language and, 211–213, 217, 122–124, 185
222–223 modernity and, 187
on language, 208 Shakespeare and, 123–124
translations, 4, 23 Shelley and, 83, 86
see also specific works tomb, 69
Coliseum, 140 translations, 24, 100
“Coliseum, The” (Shelley), 140 Vita Nuova, 95–96, 97–104
commedia dell’arte, 4, 17 women writers and, 119
Confessions of an English Opium Eater Wordsworth and, 24–27, 29–32
(De Quincey), 206–208 see also “Prophecy of Dante, The”
congiura de’ Pazzi, La (Alfieri), 58 (Byron); specific works
Congreve, Sir William, 202n7 Dante in English, 120, 122–123
“Consolation à Monsieur Du Périer” “Dante’s ‘Francesca Da Rimini’ ”
(Malherbe), 121 (Ellison), 183–184
Convention of Cintra, The Dante: with a New Italian Commentary
(Wordsworth), 22 (Baglioli), 119, 121, 122–124, 185
convito, Il (Dante), 100 Daughter of the Air (Gozzi), 139
Corbaux, Fanny, 64 Davidge, George Bolwell, 166
Corilla Olimpica (Maria Maddalena Davy, John, 36n6
Morelli), 145 Davy, Margaret Fletcher, 36n6
Corinna of England (Foster), 145 Deaf and Dumb (Holcroft), 172
Corinne (Staël) Death of Charles I, The (Sgricci), 150
Corinne’s performances in, 134–142 Defence of Poetry, A (Shelley), 87, 88,
critical interpretations, 133–134 93–94, 96, 101, 104, 190
Hemans and, 118 Deformed Transformed, The (Byron),
improvisation and, 144–145 55–56, 57
on Italian literature and language, Dei delitti e delle pene (Beccaria), 17, 25
218–219, 221–222 Delavigne, Germain, 171
origin of, 137–138 Deleuze, Gilles, 115–116
reception of, 145 Della Cruscan poets, 4, 188
on Rome, 83 De Quincey, Thomas, 206–208, 219
Corri, Montague, 174 Descent of Liberty, The (masque), 195
Courier de Londres, Le (paper), 148 Deshayes, André-Jean-Jacques, 173, 177
Coxe, William, 205–206 De vulgari eloquentia (Dante), 222
Crisafulli, Edoardo, 4 Discourses on the Heroic Poem (Tasso),
Crisafulli, Lilla, 94 49–50

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 250 Index

Dissertation upon the Italian Poetry “Elegy” (Gray), 122

(Baretti), 40 Eliot, T. S., 47
Divine Comedy (Dante) Ellison, Henry, 183–184
bleeding tree in, 20 Elliston, Robert, 166
Cockneys and, 185, 190–193 “Eolian Harp” (Coleridge), 122
Hunt on, 201 Epipsychidion (Shelley), 78–79, 96–104,
illustrations, 4, 185 185, 198
“The Maremma” and, 118, 119, 120, Erse, 208
122–130 Essay on Epitaphs (Wordsworth), 23
Schelling on, 112 Essays on Petrarch (Foscolo), 119
Shelley and, 83, 86, 94–95, 96 Esterhammer, Angela, 135
Vision of Dante, 4, 24, 122–124, Eugène Scribe, 166
185, 191, 192 European Magazine, 153, 154
Wordsworth and, 24–27, 31–32 Examiner, The
Don Giovanni (Mozart), 213 on Artaxerses (Arne), 213
Don Juan (Byron) on Cockney School, 187
contingency in, 51–52 on Masaniello (Milner, 1825), 170
on desire, 199 on Masaniello (Soane), 167–168
on heroes, 46, 161 on Napoleon’s abdication, 194, 195
improvisation and, 144 Excursion, The (Wordsworth), 20, 23,
Italy in, 3 25, 184
Landscape and Portrait Illustrations “Exposure” (Heaney), 79
of the Life and Works of Lord Byron
and, 65 “Fall of Hyperion, The” (Keats), 185
ottava rima in, 39, 186 Fall of Missolonghi, The (Sgricci), 151
on the Sphinx, 39 Fall of Terni, 2–3
Story of Rimini and, 185 Famous History of the Rise and Fall of
stylistic imitation in, 43–47 Masaniello, The (D’Urfey), 165
time and tide in, 74 Fantastici, Fortunata, 145
drama, social dimension of, 58 Fassmann, David, 165–166
Drury Lane (London) Favret, Mary, 202
Manfred and, 55, 60 Feast of Poets, The (Hunt), 187
Masaniello (Kenney), 173–174, 178 Feind, Barthold, 166
Masaniello (Soane), 166–168, 169– Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, 164
170, 178 Fernow, Carl Ludwig, 150
Owen, Prince of Powys (play), 163 Ferrara, 41, 110
special effects, 176 Fiesco (Schiller), 58
Dryden, John, 57 Filippo (Alfieri), 59
Duke’s Coat, The (play), 196, 201 Finden, William and Edward, 63–64
Duppa, Richard, 23 see also Landscape and Portrait
D’Urfey, Thomas, 165 Illustrations of the Life and
Works of Lord Byron (Finden and
Eberle-Sinatra, Michael, 199 Brockedon)
Eclectic Review, 184 Flaxman, John, 4
Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning, 183 Fletcher, Eliza Dawson, 34–35
Edinburgh Review Florence, 29–30, 108
Foscolo’s review of Dante, 119, 121, Florence Miscellany, The, 4
122–124, 185 “Florentine Lovers” (Hunt), 186
on Story of Rimini, 184 Florentine Observer, 186
Edmund Oliver (Lloyd), 4 Foliage (Hunt), 195
“Elegiac Stanzas” (Wordsworth), 90 Folkestone, Lord, 195

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 Index 251

“Forsaken Indian Woman, The” Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 20

(Wordsworth), 21 Grove, Harriet, 96
Foscolo, Ugo Grusin, Richard, 149
Dante and, 36n7, 119, 121, Guarini, Giovanni Battista, 185
122–124, 185 Guattari, Felix, 115–116
Hemans and, 121, 122–124 Guiccioli, Alessandro, 60–61
improvisation and, 146, 152 Guiccioli, Teresa
in London, 4 Byron and, 60, 186, 191, 192, 210
Mazzini on, 34 Hunt on, 214
on Petrarch, 119 in Landscape and Portrait
Foster, E. M., 145 Illustrations of the Life and
Foucault, Michel, 106–107 Works of Lord Byron (Finden and
Fouqué, Friedrich de La Motte, 137, 177 Brockedon), 64
Frankenstein (M. Shelley), 93–94 “Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io”
Frere, John Hookham, 45, 154 (Dante), 95–96
Friend, The (Coleridge), 23, 157, 185 Guilt and Sorrow (Wordsworth), 26
“From the Alban Hills, Looking towards Gustavus Vasa (play), 170
Rome” (Wordsworth), 31 Gutwirth, Madelyn, 137, 142n4
Frye, Northrop, 47–48
Fuhrman, Christina, 166, 173–174 Harlequin (journal), 174
Harzreise (Heine), 3
Gallery of Byron Beauties (Finden), 64, Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 140
65–66 Hazlitt, William, 1–3, 15, 184
Galvani, Luigi, 17 Heaney, Seamus, 79
Gamba, Pietro, 210, 224n5 Hebrew Melodies (Byron), 64
Garrick, David, 141, 154 Hegel, G. W. F., 49, 105–106, 107–108
Genest, John, 165, 167 Heine, Heinrich, 3
Genette, Gérard, 122 Hellas (Shelley), 82–83
Genoa, 214–215 Hemans, Felicia
George, Prince Regent, 194–195, 197 improvisation and, 148
Gerusalemme liberata (Tasso), 39–40, “The Maremma,” 118–130
46–47, 49 portraits of, 117–118
Gibbon, Edward, 16 on Tasso, 42
Gill, Stephen, 15 translations, 118
“Ginevra” (Shelley), 186 Hernani (Hugo), 178
Glenarvon (play), 170 Hill, Alan, 15
Glendower, Owen, 163 History of Rome (Niebuhr), 22
Godwin, William, 110, 111, 112, History of the Decline and Fall of the
113–114 Roman Empire, The (Gibbon), 16
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 4, 21, Hoffmann, E. T. A., 177
42, 135 Hogsett, Charlotte, 224n10
Gombrich, Ernst, 106 Holcroft, Thomas, 172
Gozzi,Carlo, 139 Home at Grasmere (Wordsworth), 77
Grand Canal, Venice, The (Turner), 178 Honeycomb, 188, 201
Grand Tour, 1, 3 Hoole, John, 39–40, 188, 220
Grassini, Joséphine, 4 Huggins, William, 40
“Graves of a Household, The” Hughes, Thomas, 174
(Hemans), 125 Hugo, Victor, 178
Gray, Thomas, 122 Hunt, Leigh
Greenway, Peter, 44, 46 Byron and, 96, 187, 200, 214
Greethead, Bertie, 4 on Inferno, 201

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 252 Index

Hunt, Leigh—Continued difficulty, 205–206, 208, 209–217

Italian language and, 213–216, musicality and softness of, 206–207,
220, 221 213, 218–223
on Napoleon’s abdication, 195 opera and, 206–208, 213
on opera, 207, 213 Shelley, Percy Bysshe and, 216–217
Shelleys and, 96, 209 Wordsworth and, 19–20, 22, 40
tragedy and, 201–202 Italians
translations, 185, 200–201, 214 Hazlitt on, 2
travels in Italy, 214 in Landscape and Portrait
see also specific works Illustrations of the Life and
Hunt, Marianne, 198 Works of Lord Byron (Finden and
Shelleys and, 209 Brockedon), 74
Hutchinson, Sara, 21 women, 2, 63–65, 110, 207
see also Italian expatriates and
immigrants immigrants
in London, 163 Italophilia, 3–4, 12–13
Regulations of Alien Acts and, 179n5
see also Italian expatriates and Jackson, Geoffrey, 37n11
immigrants James, Henry, 140
improvisateur Napolitain, L’ Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, A
(Robert), 148 (Hunt), 186
“Improvisatore, The” (Coleridge), 151, Jeffrey, Lord Francis, 65–66, 189
154–158 Jewsbury, Maria Jane, 118
improvisatori and improvisation Johnson, Samuel, 146
fictionalized representations of, Jones, Robert, 17, 20
144–145 Julian and Maddalo (Shelley), 78, 185
in Italy, 143–144, 145 Juniper Tree, The (Grimm), 20
in London, 145–154
women and, 143–145 Kean, Edmund, 55, 66, 123, 166, 169
Improvisatrice, The (Landon), 148, Keats, John
157–158 Boccaccio and, 185, 214
“Indian City, The” (Hemans), 125 Dante and, 185, 190–191
Indicator (Hunt), 190–191 Hunt and, 184–185, 187
Irving, Edward, 153–154 on Jove and Io, 191–192
“Isabella” (Keats), 185, 189–190 language and, 209
Isabella (Southerne), 141 on love, 199
Isabella, Maurizio, 34 Pulci and, 185–186
Isbell, John, 134 see also specific works
Isola, Agostino, 19–20, 24, 35 Keenan, Elinor, 136
Italian, The (Radcliffe), 16 Keiser, Reinhard, 166
Italian expatriates and immigrants Kemble, Henry Stephen, 169
in Edinburgh, 34–35 Kenney, James, 173–174
in Liverpool, 180n10 Kent, Elizabeth, 198
in London, 1, 3, 4, 17, 146, 163–165 King’s Theater (London), 173
in Manchester, 180n10 Kinnaird, Douglas, 55–56
in Sheffield, 180n10 Kucich, Greg, 198
Italian Immigrants in Nineteenth
Century Britain (Sponza), 164 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 140
Italian Journey (Goethe), 4 Lamb, Charles, 19, 184
Italian language Lamb, Mary, 19
Alfieri and, 60 Lament of Tasso (Byron), 41, 42, 65, 185

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 Index 253

“Lamia” (Keats), 191 Lucca, 114

Landon, Letitia Elizabeth, 118, 144, Lupton, Julia, 105–106, 110–111
148, 157–158 Luzzi, Joseph, 28n11, 63–64, 68
Landscape and Portrait Illustrations of Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and
the Life and Works of Lord Byron Coleridge), 21, 22, 24, 157
(Finden and Brockedon)
Italians in, 74 MacGregor, Robert Roy, 162
landscape in, 67–74 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 108
women in, 63–65 malaria, 121, 125
Landscape Illustrations of the Bible Malherbe, François de, 121, 122, 124
(Finden and Brockendon), 63 Mandeville (Godwin), 112, 113–114
Landscape Illustrations of the Waverley Manfred (Byron), 55, 140, 198
Novels (Finden and Brockendon), 64 Marble Faun, The (Hawthorne), 140
Last Days of Pompeii, The (Bulwer “Maremma, The” (Hemans)
Lytton), 16 Corinne and, 130n2
La Verna, 32–33 Dante and, 118–119, 120, 122–130
Leibniz, Gottfried, 48 form and themes, 120–122
“Leigh Hunt’s Aesthetics of Intimacy” reception of, 120
(Stabler), 184 Marino Faliero (Byron), 56–57, 58–59,
Leopardi, Giacomo, 35 61, 186
Leopold, Prince, 194 Martin, Theodore, 184
Lerici, 78 Masagniello furioso (Keiser), 166
Letters (Burckhardt), 106 Masaniello (Tommaso Aniello)
Letters from Italy (Sharp), 3 English plays on, 165–176
Levius, Barham, 173 Neapolitan revolt and, 165, 169
Lewis, John Frederick, 64 Undine and, 177–178
Liberal, The (journal), 96, 186, 214, 220 Masaniello (Bochsa), 173
Life and Times of Petrarch (Campbell), Masaniello (Carafa de Colobrano), 171
186–187 Masaniello (Kenney), 173–174, 178
Life and Works of Michael Angelo Masaniello (Milner, 1825), 166,
Buonarroti,The (Duppa), 23 168–171, 178
Life of Tasso (Black), 40 Masaniello (Milner, 1829), 173,
“Lines to Leigh Hunt” (Shelley), 185 174–176, 178
Lines Written among the Euganean Hills Masaniello (Soane), 166–168,
(Shelley), 79–80, 87 169–170, 178
Literary Gazette, 151, 152, 153–154 Masaniello (Weise), 165
Lloyd, Charles, 4 Masaniello, ou La muette de Portici
London (Auber), 166, 171–173
immigrants in, 163 see also Scribe, Eugène
improvisatori and improvisation in, Mathews, Charles, 153
145–154 Matthews, Geoffrey, 81, 88
Italians in, 1, 3, 4, 17, 146, 163–165 Mays, J. C. C., 157
Napoleon’s abdication and, 194–196 Mazeppa (Byron), 64–65
theater audiences in, 163 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 4, 13, 17,
see also specific theaters 34–35, 164
Lord Byron and his Contemporaries McGann, Jerome, 46
(Hunt), 215 Méditations (Lamartine), 140
Louis-Philippe of France, 30–31 Memoirs (Hemans), 117
Louis XVIII of France, 194 Memorials of a Tour of Italy
Lovejoy, A. O., 134 (Wordsworth)
Lowenberg, Alfred, 182n25 Chiabrera and, 23

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 254 Index

Memorials of a Tour of Italy Napoleon Bonaparte, 25, 134, 148,

(Wordsworth)—Continued 194–196
Dante and, 26, 30 Nash, John, 195
Italian politics and, 35 Nathan, Isaac, 64
on monastic life, 32–33 “Nature of Gothic, The” (Ruskin), 85
on Rome, 22 New Monthly Magazine, 147–148, 150
Memorials of a Tour of the Continent New Yorker (magazine), 44
(Wordsworth), 18 Niebhur, Barthold, 22
Menotti, Ciro, 164 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 107
Merry, Robert, 4 Nodier, Charles, 182n24
Messolonghi, 67 Novelle galanti (Casti), 45
Metamorphoses (Ovid), 191
Metastasio, Pietro, 19, 22, 220 “Ode to Liberty” (Shelley), 90
Metternich, Klemens von, 30, 194 “Ode to Psyche” (Keats), 191
Micheal Angelo (Michelangelo “Ode to the West Wind” (Shelley),
Buonarroti), 23 80–81, 83–85, 86
Middleton, Thomas, 110 Of Crimes and Punishments (Beccaria),
Midon, Francis, 165, 169, 174 17, 25
Miers, Mr., 35 “Of History and Romance”
Milner, Henry M. (Godwin), 113
Masaniello (1825), 166, “On a Ruined Convent in the
168–171, 178 Appenines” (Wordsworth), 32–33
Masaniello (1829), 173, 174–176, 178 Ondine (Perrot), 177
Milton, John, 27, 43–44, 78, 93 Ondine (Pixérécourt), 182n34
minor literature, 115–116 O’Neill, Michael, 122, 128
Mirra (Alfieri), 56, 58 On Germany (Staël), 135
Moers, Ellen, 137 “On Leigh Hunt’s Poem, The ‘Story of
Molière, 58, 60 Rimini’” (Keats), 184–185
Monadology (Leibniz), 48 “On Literature” (Staël), 137
monastic life, 32–33 opera, 2, 206–208, 213
Moncrieff, W. T., 170 Opéra-Comique (Paris), 171
Monkhouse, Thomas, 18 Oriental Annual, The (periodical), 63
Monthly Magazine, The, 45–46, 184 Orlando furioso (Ariosto)
Moody, Jane, 153 Byron and, 39–40, 45–47
Moore, Thomas, 121 Fortuna in, 50–51
Morelli, Maria Maddalena (Corilla Hegel on, 49
Olimpica), 145 translations, 40, 188
Morgan, Lady (Sidney Owenson), 206 Wordsworth and, 20–21, 22, 40
Morgante (Pulci), 45, 185–186 Orlando innamorato (Boiardo), 20
Morgia, Camillo, 69 ottava rima
Morton, Timothy, 81–82, 85, 87 Byron and, 39, 40, 44–45, 222
Moxon, Charles, 19 Shelley and Keats and, 185–186
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 213 Ovid, 191
muette de Portici, La (Auber), 166, Owen, Prince of Powys (play), 163
171–173 Owen, W. J. B., 15
see also Scribe, Eugène Oxenberry, William, 181n23
Murray, John, 55–56 “Ozymandias” (Shelley), 69
“Musings Near Aquapendente”
(Wordsworth), 23 Pacchiani, Francesco, 99, 102
Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe), 16 Paganini, Luigi, 4

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 Index 255

Palimpsestes (Genette), 122 light in, 87–88

Paradise Lost (Milton), 43–44, 78, 93 Milton and, 93
Parisina (Byron), 120 Valperga and, 112, 114
Parnaso Italiano, 185, 214 “Properzia Rossi” (Hemans), 125
Parsons, William, 4 “Prophecy of Dante, The” (Byron),
Partenza, La (Wordsworth), 22 42–43, 65, 185, 189, 192–193
Pastor Fido, Il (Guarini), 185 Psyche, 20
Pelzet, Maddalena, 56 “Psychological Structure of Fascism,
Pepe, Guglielmo, 163–164 The” (Bataille), 110
Perrot, Jules, 177 Pugni, Cesare, 177
Peter Bell (Wordsworth), 20, 21 Pulci, Luigi, 45, 185–186
Petrarch, Francis
Byron and, 43 Quarterly Review, The, 183
Hemans and, 118
Hunt and, 214 Racine, Jean, 58, 138–139
Shelley and, 83 Radcliffe, Anne, 16
Vaucluse, 19, 22 Rambles in Germany and Italy (M.
women writers and, 119 Shelley), 216
Wordsworth and, 22 Rape of the Bucket, The (Tassoni), 193
Phèdre (Racine), 58, 138–139 Rebellion of Naples, The (T. B.), 165
Philosophy of Right (Hegel), 107–108 “Recollections of Italy”
Pinetti, Giovanni, 17 (M. Shelley), 208
Piozzi, Hester Lynch, 4 Records of Woman (Hemans), 121
Pirandello, Luigi, 178 Redfield, Marc, 108
Pistrucci, Filippo, 146, 152 Redi, Francesco, 200–201
Pite, Ralph, 94, 185 Reflections on History (Burckhardt), 107
Pixérécourt, René-Charles Guilbert de, Regulations of Alien Acts, 179n5
182n34 Remarkable History of the Rise and Fall
Plato, 100, 102 of Masaniello, The (Midon), 165,
Poets, The (Alfieri), 59 169, 174
Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo Remarks on Several Parts of Italy
(Southey), 196 (Addison), 3
Polidori, John, 182n24 remediation, 149
Pompeii, 84 Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy,
Ponte Rotto (Rome), 71 The (Hemans), 118
Pope, Alexander, 222 Revolt of Islam, The (Shelley), 96
Pradel, Eugène de, 147–148 Reynolds, John Hamilton, 185, 187
Prelude, The (Wordsworth) Riego y Nuñez, Rafael del, 163
on entering Italy, 17–18 Robert, Louis-Léopold, 148
on French Revolution, 25 Robin Hood, 162
on homelessness, 77 Robin Hood (play), 178n1
on monastic life, 33 Robinson, Henry Crabb
Orlando’s madness and, 21 on Italy and Italians, 18–19
on romances, 19–20, 21 travels in Italy, 22, 29–30, 32, 35
Proctor, Bryan Waller, 185 Wordsworth and, 29–30
Prometheus Unbound (Shelley) Rob Roy (Robert Roy MacGregor), 162
Dante and, 94–95 Roe, Nicholas, 198
on didactic poetry, 86 Rogers, Samuel, 185
elect readers and, 99 Roman occupation, 17
Italy in, 84, 89 romantic performative, 135

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 256 Index

Rome Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft

Hazlitt on, 2 Byron and, 55–56
ruins, 17, 71, 140–141 Dante and, 119
Shelley on, 82–84, 85–86 Epipsychidion and, 96
St. Peter’s Basilica, 19, 140 Florentine Observer and, 186
Romilly, Samuel, 195 Italian language and, 208, 209,
Rose, Jacqueline, 105 210–211, 216–217, 220
Rossetti, Dominick, 146 Milton and, 93–94
Rossetti, Gabriele, 36n7, 146, 152 travels in Italy, 216–217
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 42 Valperga, 106–116, 186
Rowbotham, H. H., 170 on women, 112
Rowley, William, 110 Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Royal Amphitheater (London), 176 Boccaccio and, 214
Royal Coburg Theater (London) Coliseum and, 140
Italians and, 164 Dante and, 83, 86, 93–96, 97–104, 185
Masaniello (Milner, 1825), 166, on history, 111
168–171, 178 Hunt and, 185, 187, 197
Masaniello (Milner, 1829), 173, idealism, 112
174–176, 178 Italian language and, 216–217
special effects, 175–176 Italy as reality and emblem in, 78–90
Welshman, The (play), 163 on love, 198, 199
William Tell (play), 163 Pulci and, 185–186
Rudwick, Martin, 107 Tasso and, 42, 185
Ruskin, John, 85 translations, 95, 100, 102
travels in Italy, 216–217
Saalnixe, Die, 137 Wordsworth and, 90
Sadler, James, 194 see also specific works
Saglia, Diego, 185, 190, 191 Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis (Curran), 94
Sappho (Staël), 137 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 61n7
Sardanapalus (Byron), 57 Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea
Sasso di Dante, 29–30, 35 (Dalyell), 45
Schelling, Friedrich, 112, 187 Shows of London, The (Altick), 147
Schiller, Friedrich, 58, 59, 163, 190, 201 Sicilian Story (Proctor), 185
Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 109, 187 Siddons, Sarah, 138, 154
Schlegel, Friedrich, 109, 110, 190 Sismondi, J.C.L. Simonde de
Schor, Esther, 129 on Castruccio, 114–115
Schulze, Earl, 98, 102 Cockneys and, 186
Scott, Walter, 107, 110, 121 Fletcher and, 34
Scribe, Eugène, 166, 171–173, 174, Hemans and, 128
176–177, 178 on the Italian republics, 109
Seward, Anna, 119 on littératures du Midi, 124–125
Sgricci, Tommaso, 4, 145, 146, Six Characters in Search of Author
148–155 (Pirandello), 178
Shakespeare, William Smollett, Tobias, 3, 222
Alfieri and, 58 Soane, George, 166–168, 169–170, 178
in Corinne, 138 “Solitary Reaper, The” (Wordsworth),
Dante and, 123–124 20, 224n2
image of Italy in, 16 Sorrows of Young Werther, The
Titus Andronicus, 172 (Goethe), 21
Sharp, Samuel, 3 Southerne, Thomas, 141

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 Index 257

Southey, Robert, 40, 44, 49, 195, 196 “Temple of Concord” (Nash), 195
Spanish Martyrs (play), 163 Thanksgiving Ode (Wordsworth), 196
Spinetto, Marchese, 146 theater
Spirit of the Age, The (Hazlitt), 15 censorship and, 161, 166, 196
Sponza, Lucio, 164 London audiences, 163
Stabler, Jane, 184 special effects, 175–176
Staël, Madame Germaine de see also specific theaters
Byron and, 67 Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
Goethe and, 135 see Drury Lane (London)
improvisation and, 144–145 Theatrical Observer (journal), 167
travels in Italy, 133 Thorn, The (Wordsworth), 20, 21
see also specific works Thrale, Hester Lynch, 146
Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 148, 150 Ticknor, George, 32
Sterne, Laurence, 48, 222 “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth), 28n11
Stocking, Marian Kingston, 96 Titus Andronicus (Shakesperare), 172
Stories from the Italian Poets (Hunt), 186 “To a Sky-lark” (Shelley), 86
Story of Rimini, The (Hunt) “To Florence” (Wordsworth), 26–27
Byron and, 214 Tomlinson, Charles, 78
post-Waterloo literature and, 195–198 Torquato Tasso (Goethe), 42
reception of, 183–185, 187–189, Tour to the British Mountains
193–194, 198, 199–200 (Wilkinson), 224n2
tragedy and, 201–202 “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
St. Peter’s Basilica (Rome), 19, 140 (Eliot), 47
Sultana, David, 4 Traité complet de mécanique appliquée
Surrey Theater, 164 aux arts (Borgnis), 176
“Switzer’s Wife, The” (Hemans), 125 “Tramontana at Lerici” (Tomlinson), 78
Symposium (Plato), 100, 102 “Translation and Cultural
Appropriation” (Saglia), 190
Tableaux of National Character, Travels through France and Italy
Beauty, and Costume (Finden and (Smollett), 3
Brockendon), 64 Trionfi (Petrarch), 83
Taddei, Rosa, 145 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 48
Talassi, Angelo, 145–146 Triumph of Life, The (Shelley), 78, 83,
Tale of Mystery, A (Holcroft), 172 87, 102
Tales, and Historic Scenes, in Verse Tuft of Primroses, The (Wordsworth), 32
(Hemans), 120 Turner, Cornelia, 96
Tanner, Tony, 223 Turner, J. M. W., 177–178, 195
tarantella, 139 Turner, Victor, 136
Tasso, Torquato Twm John Catty, 162
Byron and, 39–43, 45–47, 52, 185 Two Foscari, The (Byron), 56–57, 186
Cockneys and, 185
Discourses on the Heroic Poem, 49–50 “Über Dante in philosophischer
Gerusalemme liberata, 39–40, Beziehung” (Schelling), 187
46–47, 49 Über die Improvisatoren (Fernow), 150
Shelley and, 42, 185 Undine (La Motte Fouqué), 177
as solitary genius, 42 Undine giving the Ring to Masaniello
Tassoni, Alessandro, 193 (Turner), 177–178
“Tasso’s Coronation” (Hemans), 42
Taylor, Anya, 157 Vallombrosa, 32–33
Tell, Wilhelm, 163 Vallon, Annette, 18, 21, 23

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 258 Index

Valperga (Shelley), 106–116, 186 Wilkinson, Thomas, 224n2

Vampire, The (Moncrieff), 170 William I, King of Prussia, 194
Vasari, Giorgio, 127 William I, King of the Netherlands,
Vassallo, Peter, 45 176–177
Vaucluse, 19, 22 William Tell (Schiller), 163
Venice women
Byron on, 71–74 in Childe Harold, 65–67
dialect of, 220 Dante and, 119
in Landscape and Portrait improvisation and, 143–145
Illustrations of the Life and and Italian literature, 186
Works of Lord Byron (Finden and Italian women, 2, 63–65, 110, 207
Brockedon), 71–74 in Landscape and Portrait
Shelley on, 79–80, 87 Illustrations of the Life and Works
Wordsworth and, 25–26 of Lord Byron, 63–65
Venice (Turner), 178 M. Shelley on, 186
Vico, Giambattista, 89 Petrarch and, 119
Virgil, 27 Wood, Gillen, 22
Vision of Dante, The (Cary), 4, 24, Wordsworth, Dorothy, 18, 22, 208–209
122–124, 185, 191, 192 Wordsworth, Mary, 15, 18
vita mia, La (Rossetti), 146 Wordsworth, William
Vita Nuova (Dante), 95–96, 97–104 Dante and, 24–27, 29–32
Vite (Vasari), 127 Gerusalemme liberata and, 40
Viviani family, 99 Hunt and, 195
“Volcano’s Voice in Shelley, A” influences on, 15–16
(Matthews), 81, 88 on Italian actors, 17
Volta, Alessandro, 17 Italian language and, 19–20, 22, 40
language and, 208–209
Wallace (Barrymore), 170 Lyrical Ballads, 21, 22, 24, 157
Wasserman, Earl, 99 Napoleon and, 196
Watson, Miss, 170 Orlando furioso and, 20–21, 22, 40
Watts, Alaric, 117 Petrarch and, 22
Waverley (Scott), 110 politics and, 25, 31–35
Webb, Cornelius, 185 Quaker background, 24–25, 27
Webb, Timothy, 87, 98–99, 100, 187 Robinson and, 29–30
Weinberg, Alan, 98–99 Shelley and, 90
Weise, Christian, 165 Ticknors and, 36n9
Weld, Isaac, 207, 220 translations, 22–23, 40
Wellington, Duke of, 194, 195–196 travels in Italy, 17–19, 20, 29–30, 35
Wells Theater, 164 see also specific works
Welshman, The (play), 163 Wu, Duncan, 5, 15
West, William E., 117–118 Wynn, Frances Williams, 159n3
Whistlecraft (Frere), 45
Wilhelm Tell und Masaniello Yanina, 67
(Fassmann), 165–166
Wilkie, Brian, 48 Zuccato, Edoardo, 4, 28n7, 119

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