We live in times that are favorable to laughter.
—Stéphane Guillon, French satirist
You cannot be memorably funny without at some point raising topics which the rich, the powerful, and the complacent would prefer to see left alone.
—George Orwell
For as long as I can remember, I have been strongly attracted to good comic writing. This is partly because I really do believe that a daily dose of laughter is beneficial to one's mental (and perhaps physical) health and partly because I find much human behavior (beginning with my own) and much institutional policy (beginning with that of the institution that employed me for forty-five years) quite ridiculous, in ways that prompt either howls of laughter or tears of despair. Given my already stated commitment to the former, I'm drawn to the kind of commentary on people and institutions that provides me with my minimum daily requirement. But it's also the case that I am fascinated by the ways in which the best comic writers offer both amusement at and sympathy for the human condition: not a simple task, nor one deserving of the patronization that such writers have all too frequently suffered at the hands of the high priests of high seriousness.
The following chapters offer appreciations of three premodern comic poets—Publius Ovidius Naso of Augustan Rome, Geoffrey Chaucer of late-medieval London, and Ludovico Ariosto of the high-Renaissance Italian court of the Este dukes of Ferrara—specifically, appreciations of how these privileged individuals, writing basically for elite audiences, make comedy out of two very dangerous topics, desire and authority. I want to stress the word “appreciations” because it signifies that my desired target for this book is the educated, general reader of reasonably wide, indeed, catholic tastes. This is not a scholarly work; however, its form and methods should not be taken as in any way a critique of the myriad scholarly investigations that my chosen texts have attracted, and from which the understanding of them has profited, over the last century and beyond. I am the profoundly grateful beneficiary of scholarship on and criticism of Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto, and I have tried to indicate specific instances of indebtedness in my notes and bibliography. But my research for the following chapters has, by design, not been exhaustive. My goal is not to alert my readers to the current state of Ovidian, Chaucerian, or Ariostan scholarship but rather to explain, as clearly and persuasively—but also as entertainingly—as I can, why I find these great comic writers not only fun to read but also challenging to think about (and with) and ultimately deeply instructive on personal, social, and political issues, both of their times and places and of our own. My fondest hope is that as a result of reading these essays of appreciation and elucidation, the reader will be tempted to discover for him- or herself the pleasures of firsthand acquaintance with their subjects.
A few words about how I arrived at my choice of topics seem in order. In the fall 2004 semester, I offered my final solo seminar after forty years of teaching in Columbia University's Graduate Program in English and Comparative Literature. Believing that although “aller Anfang ist schwer,” every ending should be fun, I decided to make my last hurrah a last guffaw as well, by proposing a seminar in appreciation of my three favorite comic poets, whom I had taught many times before but never as an ensemble. To my pleasant surprise, sixteen students signed up for the seminar, which, thanks to them, became one of my most exciting and satisfying teaching experiences.
From our discussions emerged two concerns central to all three poets: desire, with its capacity to make the men and women in its grasp behave selfishly, desperately, and, above all, foolishly; and authority—be it political, social, religious, or cultural—the wielders and defenders of which all too frequently open themselves to ridicule by their tyranny, vanity, hypocrisy, or downright ineptitude. Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto share a need to speak comic truth to power, challenging or mocking the claims of both political and literary authority even as they recognize their dependence on both. Now nibbling, now gnawing at the hands that feed them, these virtuosi of deflation and disrespect are also abundantly aware of the dangerous game they are playing vis-á-vis the most powerful members of their respective audiences, patrons and rulers who can reward but also (as Ovid, especially, was to experience) punish. For what defines the world of these comic writers is the fact of so much authority gathered in so few people, not diffused by universal suffrage or by the mass media (and, now, the Internet). To my students, as to me, the resultant high-wire act, in which fantasies of comic audacity seem often to court real rebuke and even disaster, is a central part of the achievement and ongoing attractiveness of these three great poets.
In the spirit of that seminar, then, my goal in the following chapters is a deeper, more satisfying intuition of how such poets go about constructing a world that simultaneously amuses, enlightens, and disturbs us—an exceptional achievement for which Renaissance theorists had a name: serio ludere, serious play.
The challenges posed to the comic poet by the topics of desire and authority are in fact quite divergent. (Since my three poets are men, I'll use the masculine pronoun in generalizing about premodern comic poetry; in the modern era, women novelists and, more recently, women stand-up comedians have successfully overthrown the male hegemony over funny business.) His basic problems in dealing with desire are conceptual and technical: what does he want to say about this most universal, most problematic, most exalted, and most easily mocked component of the human affective experience, and how can he say it in a way that is both amusing and, at some level, recognizably truthful? The major challenge is to avoid appearing to stand somewhere outside and above the human condition, looking down from an elevated location on the perplexing, often painful experience of love and lust with an air of superiority, scorn, or judgment. This is the perspective of satire, not of comedy: a perspective that often deploys the tropes and commonplaces of misogyny, misogamy, even misanthropy as shafts of savage indignation launched against an all too easy target, viz., the silly words and sillier deeds of besotted lovers. By contrast, the comic writer must engage desire empathetically, betraying affection for and identification with those caught up in its toils, even as he communicates a lively sense of how ridiculous, how irresistibly funny, the whole business is, as desire bends us out of shape, makes us prey to self-delusion, even makes us sick. He can appropriate the discourses of misogyny and misogamy, but never unironically, always with a wink to the audience that says, in effect, that frustration, hurt feelings, or insecurity may make such formulations attractive as emotional safety valves, but they're not to be confused with the truth—whatever that may be.
On the other hand, the peril posed by authority to the premodern comic poet, in particular—one who writes or performs in a milieu dominated politically by emperor, king, or despotic prince and culturally by established “classics” and the achievements of illustrious predecessors—is pragmatic: in training his comic sights on authoritative figures and concepts, how much can he get away with without risking his status, his safety, even his life? How can he laugh at cultural authority without being branded as a philistine or someone with no respect for established excellence, or at political authority, its foibles and follies, its inconsistencies and hypocrisies, its overreaching and underachieving, without feeling its wrath? Can a comic poet ever count on the continued tolerance of even the most permissive patron or prince when his predilection for parody and relish for ridicule focus on the powerful one's personal quirks, ideological imperatives, or announced policies?1
It seems to me that the achievement of great comic poets is in fact closely related to their well-honed capacity for outrageousness. To be successfully funny they have to take risks: bringing to the surface in witty, virtuosic language the contradictions and self-aggrandizement lurking beneath the ringing pronouncements and espoused credos of their political leaders; pouncing on the inconsistencies and ridiculing the pieties of the religious, economic, social, and cultural systems to which their audiences subscribe; and (to universalize their appeal and stand the test of time) submitting to hilarious and embarrassing scrutiny the desire-driven routines, transactions, and interpersonal interactions in which all of us engage—that rhizome of strategies for surviving and thriving in which we invest time, energy, pride, and ego.
Such poetry aims to amuse but also to enlighten. Ovid jokingly literalizes the truth-telling aspiration of the comic poet when he “reports” the response of an incredulous young Roman male (“aliquis iuven[is]”) to reading the Amores: “quo ab indice doctus / composuit casus iste poeta meos [what bigmouth spilled the beans to that poet about my love life]?” (Amores 2.1.9–10). In fact, however, truth telling can also rebound on its maker in the form of censure or worse. To be really effective, the premodern comic poet had to skate on thin ice: if the ice held, he reaped the rewards of enjoyment and appreciation from his well-placed audience, plus support and advancement from official patrons or other powerful well-wishers; if it cracked, he could find himself in some very cold water indeed.
Of the poets under consideration in the following chapters, Ovid most clearly takes aim at contemporary ideological programs, in their often hypocritical relationship to actual patterns of behavior.2 Ovid is also the comic poet of lifestyles, whose poetry is, to borrow A. O. Scott's description (in the New York Times) of politically oriented late-night television comedy, “wired into every fluctuation of the Zeitgeist”—or at least into major fluctuations in the zeitgeist of Augustan Rome, including its culture's many gaps between ideology and practice. Nonetheless, the aim of the Amores and Ars amatoria is less “calibrated to flatter the moral and intellectual self-regard of [its] audience” (to quote Scott again) than it is to amuse them by offering a comic mirror of their erotic behavior, its foibles and inconsistencies, and thereby—who knows?—perhaps to encourage insights that might undermine their “self-regard” as members of a powerful, modern elite enjoying the pleasures afforded by life in the world's capital city.3
Chaucer's comic poetry centers more on his narratorial persona's outsider status, combining frequently expressed inadequacy or perplexity with respect to desire, intimidation in the face of illustrious literary forbears (ancient or recent), and defensiveness in response to the disrespect, patronization, or outright antipathy he experiences, or anticipates, from those in his audience (be they kings, bossy innkeepers, or skeptical lovers) who declare (or might declare) their authority to judge him and his writings. Richard Firth Green and other Chaucerian critics see in this strategy of negative self-presentation a risible mimesis of the poet's position vis-á-vis the court, the Crown, and the nobility to whom he turned for patronage and advancement; one could also argue that it plays out, at the metaphoric level of personal inferiority, the situation of the language (English) in which he addresses a court audience accustomed to seeking entertainment in French texts. The perils and self-exculpatory gestures of the translator and “lewed compilatour” (i.e., uneducated collector of material authored by others) are as much staples of the Chaucerian repertory as are the repeated statements of being “unlikely” or unschooled in matters of the heart.4
At least later in his poetic career, Chaucer's major audience was probably not the court per se, but rather a London cohort of literate clerks, lawyers, royal household knights, and government bureaucrats: a fairly new stratum that existed in a complex economic, social, and political relationship to more established structures of power and rank. Hence, even as the poet's enactment of inferiority—especially in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women (about which I will have a good deal to say)—reflected his recognition of his delicate relationship to King Richard II and his court during the 1380s (a decade that featured Richard's quarrels with some of his most powerful subjects and Chaucer's consequent vulnerability as the king's appointee to the Controllership of Customs for the Port of London), that self-denigrating posture could also serve a separate function as a comic mirror for his London circle, recording or prompting that group's wry meditations on the tension between its importance to the state and its near-invisibility in traditional “estates” thinking.5
Perhaps the most ingenious form taken by a comic mirror is that found in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, where the poet invents several narratorial surrogates, among them the sycophantic courtier and the passion-addled lover of a “cruel” (that is, sexually unresponsive) mistress. Through these figures (the latter based in part on the Ovidian narrator-lover of the Amores, as well as on the frustrated protagonists of the Petrarchan lyric and its many Renaissance imitators), the comic writer becomes a full participant in the world at which he is laughing. But then, at the exact midpoint of the Furioso, Ariosto has his amorous narrator claim that he is experiencing a lucid interval (“lucido intervallo”), during which he can see clearly the damage that desire inflicts on him and all other lovers. That lucid interval—of uncertain duration and origin—can stand as a metaphor for the insight of the comic writer that enables him to hold up the mirror of ridicule and complaint—not the satirist's savage scorn—to the world of which he is an inhabitant, the crazy game in which, though an astute spectator, he's also a player. Moreover, in what might be called an externalized lucid interval a few cantos later, the poet has no less exalted a personage than one of the four authors of the Christian Gospels—those repositories of divine truth—explain to a knight, while on a visit to the Moon (!), that poets who celebrate the exploits of heroes and the virtues of rulers, thus supporting both cultural and political authority (as the Ariostan courtier-narrator repeatedly does), are in fact notorious liars!
In the chapters that follow, then, I will attempt to characterize the themes of desire and authority as crises that function with cultural specificity to the moment in which, and audience for which, the poets wrote; as indices of the human condition conceived of, rightly or wrongly, as universal and timeless; and as literal or metaphorical representations of the difficult situation of the poet and his muse or vocation vis-á-vis the social and political powers on which his success, livelihood, and even personal safety depend. Responding with laughter to such a taxonomy of troubles might at first seem inappropriate, but I'm sure it's just the response Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto would have wanted, and indeed worked hard to provoke.
Ovid: Quotations from and references to the Amores give the book number followed by the number of the poem within that book, then the line number(s) within the poem, e.g., Amores 1.6.9–16. Quotations from and references to the Ars amatoria, Metamorphoses, and Tristia give the book number followed by the line number(s) within that book, e.g., Ars 2.305–10. Quotations from and references to the Remedia amoris and Medicamina faciei give only line number(s), as these works are not subdivided.
Chaucer: Quotations from and references to The Book of the Duchess, The Parlement of Foules, Anelida and Arcite, The House of Fame, and The Legend of Good Women give the line numbers of these poems. (The House of Fame is divided into books, and the Legend into Prologue and separate tales, but in both cases the line numbering is consecutive.) Quotations from and references to Troilus and Criseyde give the book number followed by the line number(s) within that book, e.g., TC 2.1–49. Quotations from and references to the General Prologue and tales of The Canterbury Tales follow the system adopted in the standard edition (The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed.), which is based on the order and grouping of tales and their interconnecting links found in the so-called Ellesmere manuscript (written within a few years of Chaucer's death); for each tale the number of its group is followed by its line number(s), e.g., CT 1.26–35.
Ariosto: Quotations from the Orlando Furioso follow the third (final) edition of the poem published by Ariosto, which has forty-six books, or cantos. Each canto is divided into eight-line stanzas (octaves, ottave). It's customary, in quoting from or referring to the poem, to give the canto number followed by the octave number and the line number(s) within the octave, e.g., OF 1.7.1–6.
1. Prof. Robert Provine, on The Leonard Lopate Show, radio program, WNYC, New York, 16 November 2007, “Please Explain: Laughter,” pointed out that Plato worries about comedy in the Republic, while Eco's Name of the Rose plays with the idea that comedy is subversive of the fear of God (and therefore of God's authority and, by extension, the authority of the institutional Church, as God's presumed mouthpiece, to control behavior in God's name).
2. Cf. twenty-first-century media comedy directed at the G. W. Bush administration and its war hawks who never served in the armed forces and may well have cheated to avoid doing so.
3. See A. O. Scott, “Falling-Down Funny,” New York Times Magazine, 12 November 2006, 22–24.
4. See Richard Firth Green, “The Familia Regis and the Familia Cupidinis,” in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (New York: St. Martin's, 1983), 87–108. Green sums up the issue thus, in Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 112: “Chaucer's self-depreciation…, for all its playful irony, reflects a quite genuine change that had come about in the relationship between the poet and his audience with the passing of the relatively independent status of the professional minstrel.”
Chaucer refers to himself as “but a lewd compilatour of the labour of olde astrologiens” in the Preface to his Treatise on the Astrolabe (a navigational instrument) (Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry Benson [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987], 662). For a discussion of this phrase and the concept behind it see A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship (London: Scolar, 1984), 190–210.
5. On the doctrine or, more precisely, the rhetorical construct, of the three estates of society—those who pray (the clergy), those who fight (knights and other professional soldiers), those who labor (traditionally, the peasantry)—see Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Gold-hammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). For a sermon on the three estates preached in Chaucer's London, 1387, see Ione Kemp Knight, ed., Wimbledon's Sermon: Redde rationem villicationis tue [Render an account of your stewardship], a Middle English Sermon of the Fourteenth Century (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University Press, 1967). On Chaucer's audience, see this volume chapter 2, note 2.