Arte of English Poesie

Description

Published in 1589, The Arte of English Poesie can be considered the first full-scale work of poetic criticism in England-"a noble monument," in Professor Hathaway's words, "astraddle the rude beginnings of the speculative aspects of English literary culture." Its three main parts are a treatise on poets and poetry, an analysis of English prosody, and a discussion of rhetorical ornamentation-all treated compactly and thoroughly. While little of its thought was strikingly new for its time, since it drew on traditions going back through the Middle Ages to classical roots, its value lay in its synthesis of these ideas and its summation of an aesthetic movement. As such it provides important insights into the aesthetic philosophy of the English Renaissance.

Sujets

• Reino Unido
• Ireland
• United Kingdom
• Stephen Ireland
• Great Britain
• Royaume-Uni

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 15 juin 1971
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612779201
• Langue: English

Extrait

Kent English Reprints
THE RENAISSANCE
General Editor, Hilton Landry

Sir Philip Sidney The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia Introduction by Carl Dennis
George Puttenham The Arte of English Poesie Introduction by Baxter Hathaway
THE ARTE
OF ENGLISH
POESIE.
Contriued into three Bookes: The firft of Poets and Poefie, the fecond of Proportion, the third of Ornament.

Introduction by Baxter Hathaway
THE KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
A Facsimile Reproduction
Facsimile reproduction of the 1906 reprint published by A. Constable and Co., Ltd., and edited by Edward Arber.
Copyright © 1970 by Baxter Hathaway
All rights reserved
Standard Book Number 87338-045-2 hard/
87338-046-0 paper
Library of Congress Catalog Number 71-85107
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Merald Wrolstad
CONTENTS
Introduction
The First Booke, Of Poets and Poefie .
The Second Booke, Of Proportion Poetical .
The Third Booke, Of Ornament .
A Table of the Chapters in this booke, and euery thing in them conteyned.
INTRODUCTION
T O make a case for George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) as the first full-scale work of poetic criticism in England—as a noble monument astraddle the rude beginnings of the speculative aspects of English literary culture—one must shut one’s eyes to the book’s many shortcomings and base claims above all on its length, its compactness, and the thoroughness of its treatment. Very little in it is strikingly new, even for the English scene, which had notably fallen behind what was happening in France and Italy. For each of its three main parts—its treatise on poets and poetry, its analysis of English prosody, its discussion of rhetorical ornamentation—predecessors existed in long tradition receding into the mists of Greek and Roman antiquity and present in England even during the Middle Ages in at least rudimentary form. Nevertheless, if we exclude the presence and significance of Sidney’s An Apologie for Poetrie which presumably had been circulating in manuscript form during the years between its composition (c. 1583) and 1589 when Puttenham’s book appeared, none of its predecessors even for any one of the three parts had dealt with its subject matter so copiously, cogently, and in a manner as relevant to the contemporary scene—not in England and in English.
Students of the history of literary criticism have long been aware that a kind of specialized concern for the art of poetry did in fact exist throughout most of what we call the Middle Ages, but this concern was usually hidden under other names, other rubrics, particularly under the names of grammar and rhetoric. In late Classical Antiquity questions of prosody and verse forms were solidly consigned to the province of the grammarian, and the grammarian’s discipline was the base or trunk from which even rhetoric extended as an offshoot or branch. This concept of the history of specialization or distinction of these separate arts is not, it is true, clearly substantiated by the actual historical facts that can be brought into evidence, as Puttenham and most other writers of arts of poetry in the Renaissance would have been quick to assert, since most of them followed Cicero and Horace in advancing the poet’s claim to primacy in pioneering human civilization. The concerns of both Aristotle and Plato with rhetoric and poetics dwarfed their concerns with grammar and related linguistic arts. In the early centuries of academic classifications of arts and studies, the failure to distinguish between music and poetry, or even between music and philosophy, was a notable feature; music even continued to hold its place with grammar and rhetoric in the Postclassical seven liberal arts—the trivium and quadrivium, where poetry and poetics as such did not have a place. The basicality of grammar in this scheme was, so to speak, a construct or re-construct of that Postclassical world, the world of Donatus ( Ars maior , 4th century), Priscian ( Institutiones , 6th century) and Bede.
As we turn to the Dark Ages, we can sense the withdrawal of poetics into rhetoric and grammar, and the withdrawal in turn of the chief classical rhetoricians—Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Hermogenes, the author of the Ad Herennium —into the fold of the grammarians, who in turn kept alive as best they could their Ovid and Virgil in the West and Homer and the Greek Anthology in the East. During the period of the first real stirrings toward a revival of learning—that period that C.H. Haskins called “the Renaissance of the 12th century”—rhetoric and poetics had some faint show of life independent of grammar, but this was also the period that exhibited the rise of Scholasticism with its glorification of logic and the preempting by logic even of much of the space in the school grammars. It was during the two centuries (13th and 14th) of the domination of the Schoolmen that attention paid to rhetoric, with its emphasis on eloquence, style, figures, colors, ornaments, reached a low ebb. The fact that Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer in the 14th century, represented a real turning away from the Gothic Night (that potent myth of Petrarch’s that seven centuries of darkness lay between him and the glories of Antiquity) should not blind us to the other fact that it was the more limited domain of the Schoolmen and their logic and disdain for linguistic excellence that comprised the chief enemy.
We can gain one of our best insights into the situation of a writer of an art of poetry during the late Renaissance, like Puttenham, by observing a graph representing a kind of fever chart for the health of grammatical studies (comprising rhetoric, poetics, prosody) for the whole intervening period going back to Donatus and Priscian. Of particular importance during those centuries of the “Gothic Night” were three or four books that came into being in a brief, compact period at the end of that early or false Renaissance of the 12th century—such books as the Doctrinale of the Norman Alexander of Villedieu (1199), the Ars versificatoria of Matthew of Vendôme (c. 1175), the Doctrina de arte versificandi of Geoffrey de Vinsauf (c. 1200), and the Graecismus de figuris et octo partibus orationis, sive grammaticae regulae versibus latinis explicatae (c. 1212) of the Flemish Évrard de Béthune. Alexander of Villedieu’s Doctrinale was a grammar in 2645 leonine hexameters that attempted to adapt to modern conditions the historical monuments of Donatus and Priscian. It is representative of the rationalization of the “barbarous Latin” ultimately to be overturned by the humanists. At the same time that we may feel compelled to classify Alexander’s work in the ranks of the opposition we should recognize that it, and other text-books like it, continued to comprise a base of operations for most of the Renaissance. Haskins points out ( p. 138 ) that 267 editions of the Doctrinale were published between the invention of printing and 1588. Its influence in the world that Puttenham grew up in must have been pervasive as intermediary between the grammarians, rhetoricians, and prosodists of Late Antiquity and those of the Renaissance, even though Puttenham makes no reference to him and none to any of the writers from the beginning of the 13th century I have cited. There are only two references in the Arte to Donatus and only one to Priscian. The point at hand is that Puttenham’s book represents the culmination of a long tradition in each of its three principal aspects and this tradition or traditions can best be charted by noting the shrinkage of poetics and rhetoric into grammar and eventually their renewed expansion and separation.
In the middle distance as one recedes from the immediate scene of the Elizabethan literary world, one discerns that other displacement of rubrics in terms of which poetry was subsumed under the title of rhetoric. This is the province of the 15th century of the “Rhetoriquers” in France—that group of minor poets, including Jean Marot, Jean LeMaire de Belges, Pierre Gringoire, Jean Molinet, Jean Meschinot, Jean Bouchet, and Olivier de la Marche, who concocted elaborate artificial allegories. Poetry was conceived by them as complex rhetorical structures and the class term “poetry” was submerged, while the content of rhetoric became poetic forms. This displacement of terms, is contradistinction to a specialization of liberal arts or disciplines, did not lead noticeably to the development of more elaborate treatises on either rhetoric or poetics. It did however, encourage concern with style, supporting the parallel rhetorical shift of interest to dictamen —epistolary and secretarial rhetoric, which could lead ultimately to the semantics by which, on one hand, a poet could be called the archetypal “clerk”—a tendency as old certainly as the Goliardic poets of the Middle Ages—and, by which, on the other hand, the principal stylist could be a papal secretary like Sadoleto or Bembo who could express the wishes of the Curia in an elegant Ciceronian Latin. In the English tradition, the raisoneur upon whom much of the rhetorical activity of the 16th century turned relating to the general European concerns with style was Erasmus, who was in general the moderate opponent of the idolatrous Ciceronians who were a dime a dozen in the early 16th century in Italy. Detailing of the complications of all these changes is out of place here where the point is that during a rather long period in the 15th and early 16th centuries poetry and poetics were treated as if they were the actual content subsumed under rhetoric. One by-product of the dominant Ciceronianism of the early 16th century was the prevalence of an orthodoxy in the schools according to which truth was conceived as a union of sound philosophic doctrine and eloquence. This salience of belief, reflecting Plato’s eternal war between the sophists and the philosophers, was derived directly from Cicero’s De oratore , 1 who tempere