Chapter V: Romance

Sixteenth-century poetic has no specific relation to Renaissance development of verse narrative. The more pervasive counsels and habits of imitation agree in exalting Vergil. Vergil did, indeed, guide the narrative sequence of Tasso; but narrative sequence is not a general Renaissance concern. Malory, Boiardo, Ariosto, Spenser, seek other narrative values. What they have in common preoccupation and common achievement is romance. Romance in a period of classicism, romance written in spite of humanism and sometimes by humanists—what should it be? It was response to the special audience of the courts; for, whatever humanism might say, the courts liked romances. It was response also to the wider audience steadily increased by printing. The response, both in medieval continuance and in distinctive Renaissance direction, constitutes an important chapter in literary history.

1. THE ROMANTIC CONTRAST

The good old times recreated by poetry for refuge and inspiration were found by Malory and Spenser at the court of Arthur; by the Italian romancers, at the court of Charlemagne. These, of course, are the two main medieval fields of romance, _matière de Bretagne and matière du roi_; and into either of them may enter incidentally the matter of Troy with the progeny of Aeneas or “Hector’s arms.” Though the Charlemagne tradition may be somewhat more distinct with its twelve paladins and its one traitor, the two are essentially alike in being, for the actual world out of joint, kingdoms of chivalry. Thither the Renaissance turned from the Wars of the Roses or the hired soldiers of Italy. Gunpowder had abolished single combat; feudalism was gone; chivalry had been reduced to ceremony. Therefore romance was out of date. No; the fact that romance survived the Renaissance shows that it has no date. The romantic _therefore_ is that poetry must once more revive ideals. Sinister violence in Warwickshire or Ferrara denies chivalry; romance revives it.

This fundamental motive strikingly unites the two fifteenth-century soldier romancers Malory and Boiardo.

Sir Thomas Malory (1394?-1471) was attached in his young
manhood to the retinue of the great Richard Beauchamp, Earl of
Warwick, widely celebrated as a pattern of chivalry. After much
military service he sat in the Parliament of 1445. Arraigned in
1451 before a local court at Nuneaton on the charge of breaking
into the abbey of St Mary at Coombe and robbing it, and further
of ambushing the Duke of Buckingham, he was remanded to the
King’s Bench and imprisoned for most of his last twenty years.
In Newgate Jail he finished his _Morte d’Arthur_ (1469-1470).
These few facts, opening much inference, tell us surely that he
was imprisoned for violence in a time of violence. The chivalry
that he celebrates in the greatest English literary work of a
sterile period has the relief of contrast.

Matteo Maria Boiardo (1434-1494), usually called “the Count,”
was brought up at the brilliant ducal court of Ferrara. He was
sent on embassies, married a Gonzaga, was gentleman of honor
to Eleonora, and governor (_Capitano_), first (1480) of Modena,
and then (1487, the year in which he published the first two
books of his _Orlando innamorato_) of Reggio. Tradition has
him genial and easy-going, and adds picturesquely that when
he found a sonorous name for one of his Carolingian heroes he
volleyed his castle bells.

His writing was abundant, various, characteristic of his time:
ten Latin eclogues and several Latin epigrams; many Petrarchan
sonnets, with _canzoni_ and madrigals; ten Italian eclogues;
_capitoli_ on fear, jealousy, hope, love, and excellence
(_virtù_); a five-act comedy, _Timone_, drawn from Lucian;
translations from Herodotus, Xenophon’s _Cyropaedia_, the
_Golden Ass_ of Apuleius, and the _Lives_ of Cornelius Nepos.

Different enough in fortune, the two had the same experience of actual war, and turned from it with the same literary motive, a wistful and generous desire to animate the dislocated and groping present with the courage and devotion of an idealized great past. Poetry of escape, this is also poetry of faith. It lifts Symphorien Champier’s clumsy _Gestes ensemble la vie du preulx chevalier Bayard_ (1525) with the ideal of a knight “sans peur et sans reproche.” It will seize upon the death of Sir Philip Sidney as romantic. It will survive the allegorizing of Spenser. It is the refuge from the industrial age in Tennyson’s _Idylls of the King_. If fighting and politics remain as ugly as in the fifteenth century, Edwin Arlington Robinson will not be the last poet of romance.

Boiardo makes the contrast very explicit.

[The robber replied] “What I am doing every great lord does in
your upper world. They make havoc of their enemies in war for
aggrandizement and to cut a bigger figure. A single man like
me makes trouble for seven, perhaps ten; they rage against ten
thousand. And they do still worse than I in that they take what
they do not need.” [Said Brandimarte] “It is indeed a sin to
take from one’s neighbor as my world does; but when it is done
only for the state, it is not evil; it is at least pardonable.”
[The robber replied] “A man is more easily pardoned when he
frames the charge himself. And I tell you, and make full
confession, that I take what I can from any one who can less”
(II. xix. 40).

O Fame, attendant of emperors, nymph so singing great deeds in
sweet verse that thou bringest men honor even after death and
makest them eternal, where art thou fallen? To sing ancient
loves and tell the battles of giants. For the world of this thy
time cares no longer for fame or for excellence (II. xxii. 2).

Then with choice rhymes and better verse shall I make combats
and loves all of fire. Not always shall the time be so out of
joint as to drag my mind from its seat. But now my songs are
lost. Of little avail to give them a thought while I feel Italy
so full of woe that I cannot sing, and hardly can I sigh. To
you, light lovers and damsels, who have at heart your noble
loves, are written these fair stories flowering from courtesy
and valor. They are not heard by those fell souls who make
their wars for despite and rage (II. xxxi. 49-50).

The distinctive difference between the two fifteenth-century romancers is that Malory translates; Boiardo rewrites. Malory may contract or expand, adapt or add; but in general he follows what he calls “the French book.” Boiardo, finding the Italian versions vulgarized (_tra villani_, II. xii. 3), wishes to make the old tradition once more literary. To restore their dignity, he gives the paladins more than verse. So romance throughout the Renaissance, as before and since, both survived and was changed. It was rehearsed, translated, printed in its medieval forms; and it was shaped to a distinctive Renaissance pattern.

2. SEPARATE ROMANCES

What the presses most readily carried on from the Middle Age was the separate romances that had not been merged in one of the cycles. The old fairy-mistress story told by Jean d’Arras as _Mélusine_ (1387) was printed at Geneva in 1468. _Pontus and the Fair Sidoine_, translated into German in 1468, was printed in French at Lyon in 1484 and in German at Augsburg in 1548. _Amadis of Gaul_ traveled from Brittany to Spain and Portugal and back to France. The French prose version printed in 1540 and again in 1548,[33] typically romantic in love, adventure, and chivalry, deserved its popularity also by narrative skill. With some lyric dilation of love and an occasional allusion to classical mythology, the style is generally restrained to the narrative purpose. Description, rarely dilated, is often cleverly inwoven. Dialogue adds not only liveliness, but some characterization. Though the simple transitions sound like Malory’s (“Now the author leaves this and returns to the treatment of the child”), this shifting is not frequent; often it does not really interrupt; and generally the composition has distinct narrative sequence. The knighting of Amadis is not merely a scene in a series; it is a situation, prepared and pointed as at once fulfillment and promise. So the complication of the rings (Chapter XI) is carried out before our eyes through suspense to solution.

In such separate romances the Middle Age had advanced the art of verse narrative. Not only in Chaucer’s masterpiece _Troilus and Criseyde_, but also in the contemporary _Gawain and the Green Knight_, the story is carried forward in consistent sequence to a distinct issue of character. The Renaissance, though generally it had other preoccupations, caught some of this vigor in the telling of single romances. One of these, loosely related to the Arthurian cycle without ever being embodied, is of Giron; and this was put into Italian stanzas by Luigi Alamanni (1495-1556). An industrious and capable man of letters,[34] who spent much of his life in France, he was a convinced classicist. His _Gyrone il cortese_ (Paris, 1548; Venice, 1549), though it was written long after Ariosto had secured fame by quite other methods, shows that he felt the obligation of a single story, distinct from a cycle, to keep narrative sequence.

Alamanni’s Dedicatory Epistle, after relating the Arthur
stories to history, and mentioning some dozen of the Arthurian
heroes, expounds tournaments and the quests of errant knights,
and offers his Gyrone, as Caxton offers his Malory, to educate
toward true valor. Confessing that he has not always followed
his source in detail, he promises later “another new work of
poetry ... made in the ancient style and order and imitating
Homer and Vergil.” [This was fulfilled in the last years of his
life by his _Avarchide_.]

The first five books proceed as follows. After preliminary
adventures, Gyrone goes to his bosom friend Danain at
Malahalto. On news of a tournament they decide to go disguised
in black arms (II). But Danain’s wife languishes for love of
Gyrone and gains permission to go thither also under escort
while the two friends lodge with a hermit. After combats on the
way, they arrive at the tournament as Sagramor is victorious
in the first jousts. The beauty of Danain’s wife arouses the
jealousy of the other ladies and the passion of the Greek king
Laco. His ardor and his threats to seize her are overheard by
Gyrone, who courteously rebukes him in a lecture.

Further description of the combats at the tournament (III)
leads to the final victory of Gyrone and Danain. While Laco
still yearns (IV) toward Danain’s wife, a messenger arrives to
conduct her to a neighboring castle. Laco parts from Meliadus,
as Gyrone from Danain. Thus Laco and Gyrone are left sighing
for the same lady in the same forest. They meet, express their
admiration of each other, and sleep side by side in the wood.

In the morning Laco routs single-handed the lady’s whole escort
(V). The lady appealing eloquently to his honor in vain, Gyrone
arrives and fells him. While the lady debates with herself
whether to reveal her love, and Gyrone is torn by the conflict
of his own with his loyalty to Danain, they are irresistibly
drawn together. In a flowery mead by a spring they prepare for
love. But Gyrone’s lance falling knocks his sword into the
spring. When he has retrieved it, he reads as never before
its inscription summoning to honor, and turns it in shame on
himself. A peasant supervening betrays their sad plight to Laco.

Thus the story is brought definitely to a situation of character. Obvious as the Renaissance manipulation is in the space given to love, the handling makes this not merely lyric interlude, but story motive. Though Alamanni is unwilling, or unable, to carry this through the 28,000 lines of his twenty-four books, though he often fails to give that salience to critical situations which is evident here, he nevertheless achieves what the Renaissance cyclical romances generally ignored, narrative sequence. All he needed to make his _Gyrone_ shorter, tighter, more compelling, was firmer control of fourteenth-century narrative art.

For a classicist Alamanni is remarkably sparing of the fashionable Renaissance allusions. He does, indeed, use that paganizing phrase which was satirized by Erasmus. “In the consecrated temples, devoutly about the sacrifices in accordance with true example, they listened, adored, and besought the immortal Father”; when Malory would say, “They heard their Mass and brake their fast.” But in spite of many Vergilian similes and of occasional orations to troops, Alamanni’s classicism is not intrusive. Apparently he thought it had small place in romance.

3. THE ARTHURIAN CYCLE IN MALORY

Among Renaissance romances presenting a traditional cycle in medieval form the most distinguished is Malory’s _Morte d’Arthur_. Caxton’s preface is a manifesto of romance; and his table of contents displays most of the stories that had gradually been brought together by the Middle Age at the Round Table. Between the “_enfances_” of the first book and the last great battle in the west are Balin and Tristan; that Percival, here called Gareth or Beaumains, who was reared apart in the wildwood; the mighty Lancelot, his mistress the Queen, and Elaine who died for love of him; the quest of the Grail; the traitor Modred. They are not composed in a narrative sequence. Balin, Gareth, Tristan, for instance, remain separate stories. For there is no real connection in Balin’s glimpse of an earlier Grail story not used in Malory’s Grail books, or in Gareth’s coming to Camelot and his knighting by Lancelot. But there is no confusion. The separate stories are told straightforwardly; the main persons become familiar; and the exposure of Guinevere makes a crisis contributing to the subsequent ruin of the goodly fellowship. The _Morte d’Arthur_ is not merely a series. But its distinction is in style. Malory’s prose follows that medieval habit which may be called pure narrative, the telling of a story singly for its story values. It was not the only medieval narrative habit; nor is he the only fifteenth-century author to follow it; but it stands out both in contrast to classicism conceived as ornamental dilation and in his own quiet mastery. Without parade, without pause for ornament, he maintains a grave simplicity that ranges from homeliness to eloquence. His rhythm—he has little other sentence art—lingers or quickens with the action, and answers the emotion.

Is that knyght that oweth this shelde your love? Yea truly,
said she, my love he is. God wold I were his love (XVIII. xiv).

Than syr Bedwere cryed: “Ah! my lord Arthur, what shal become
of me now ye go from me and leve me here allone emonge myn
enemyes?” “Comfort thy self,” sayd the kyng, “and doo as wel
as thou mayst; for in me is no truste for to truste in. For I
wyl in to the vale of Avylyon to hele me of my grevous wounde”
(XXI. v).

4. THE CAROLINGIAN CYCLE ON THE STREET

The other cycle, the Carolingian, was popularized in Italy by street story-tellers, who seem to have been, on the piazza before audiences of artisans and shopkeepers, somewhat like the medieval _jongleurs_ before their successive groups of pilgrims. Their narrative art can be only guessed; for it was oral. But the guess is helped by the persistence, even to the present time, of the Carlomagno marionettes. The recital animated by these large puppets—for it is recital, not drama—is of a traditional version called _I paladini di Francia_, and goes on day after day by mere aggregation, and with many tirades.

5. PULCI

Italian literary manipulation of the Carolingian cycle in verse romances began with Luigi Pulci (1432-1484). His _Morgante maggiore_ (1481, though largely written by 1470)[35] is selective. Though it bulks large with more than 30,000 lines of verse, it does not rehearse the deeds of the paladins by the serial method of installments. At the end of Canto 5 two main stories, Orlando’s and Rinaldo’s, are brought together. At the end of Canto IX, having meantime moved together, the two arrive, with the other persons whom they have picked up on the way, for the relief of Montauban and of Carlomagno at Paris. There is narrative progress from salience to salience. The dialogue is lively. Though it does not amount to characterization, it suffices for speed and for mood.

Said Rinaldo, “Wilt thou be so obtuse as not to look at that
damsel? Thou wouldst not be acceptable as a lover....” Said
Oliver, “Thou art ever for thy jokes. Yonder is something more
serious than word-play” (IV. 61).

Oliver looked at Rinaldo, hardly able to hold his gaze for
weeping, and said: “’Tis true that man cannot hide love and
coughing. As thou seest, dear brother, love has caught me at
last with his claws. I can no longer hide this desire. I know
not what to do, what to decide. Cursed be the day on which I
saw her. What am I to do? What dost thou advise?” Said Rinaldo,
“Believe me, thou wilt leave this place. Leave the lady,
marquis Oliver. Our intention was not to yearn, but to find
Orlando” (IV. 88-90).

The naughty machinations of Malagigi are, indeed, comic interpolations; nothing comes of them; but the machinations of Gano have narrative function. There is hardly any separable description. Love laments are sketched, not dilated. Pulci is interested, and interests us, in his story as a story. To this end he takes a free hand with events. We have the usual paynim siege of Paris or of Montauban, but no attempt to include all the items of tradition. Pulci takes what he wishes and puts it where he wishes.

To call the poem a burlesque is misleading. The incidental farce, as in Boiardo and Ariosto, is rather appeal to Renaissance fondness for the grotesque as contrast. Though Pulci may have wished to pierce the inflation of the Carolingian street tirades, he was too clever to think of holding parody through 30,000 lines. Reducing the medieval aggregation to an intelligible story, he also, with an art more delicate than burlesque, reduced the style. Turning from both medieval gravity and Renaissance luster, he brought romance down to earth. Oliver falls in love promptly, utterly, and successively. The humor of this in real life Pulci frankly seeks. When two knights dare each other, he renders their speech not as oration, but as homely flyting. He is irreverent in the way of fashionable conversation. But his main object and achievement, as it is not parody, so it is not satire. It is pleasant, often humorous story of familiar antiquated persons in traditional events and setting, but in daylight.

6. BOIARDO

Boiardo, indignant at the degradation of the Carolingian heroes among the vulgar—how did he proceed toward elevation?

Who will give me the voice and the words, and utterance
magnanimous and profound? (I. xxvii. 1).

Till now my song has not ventured far from shore. Now I must
enter upon the great deep, to open immeasurable war. All Africa
lies beyond that sea; and all the world flashes with men in
arms (II. xvii. 2).

The poet seems to nerve himself, as Vergil at the opening of _Aeneid_ VII, for loftier diction. The average Renaissance poet of the next century would invoke the Muses for that “high style” which had come down from classical through medieval rhetoric. But the words of Boiardo’s invocation are not heightened thus; nor is his diction generally. He not only omits the Muses here; he is very sparing with classical allusion throughout.