“At length she guided them through the mazes of the wood to a little open glade” (389). Spring scene full of flowers. She takes them to the spot where Kennedy was murdered (I think it’s Kennedy). Long and winding passage to the seaside, where there’s a cave—Dimont calls it a dungeon and a badger-hole—“creep after the witch into that hole that she’s opening.” Oracular cave of rebirth. Light image again, 391–2. Hazlewood turns up. Bertram sees Hatteraick and remembers that he, “and his mate Brown, the same who was shot at Woodbourne” (Guy Mannering’s place, on a smuggler’s raid described by Julia) “had been the brutal tyrants of his infancy” [393]—titans around infant Zeus archetype. Flame rose and fell. Then Meg and Hatteraick talk: “Did I not say the auld fire would burn down to a spark, but wad kindle again?” [394]. Hatteraick says the hero “has been a rock ahead to me all my life” [394]—storm-god, more or less—he always swears by donner and blitzen. Meg drops a firebrand on flax that’s been steeped in whatever they used for gasoline: it “rose in a vivid pyramid of the most brilliant light up to the very top of the vault” [394]. Then Meg gives her signal (somewhat inevitably, “Because the hour’s come, and the man” [394]) and the three guys rush out and overpower Hatteraick, but not until he shoots Meg and nearly shoots the hero, who of course stumbles. Meg can’t understand why there are three—cf. the Waste Land extra man business. She says she wanted them to give her Bertram when he was five. (This gives Meg Merrilies a role as the hero’s mother: he calls her mother once.) Then there’s a scene of public recognition of the lost heir, begun by Jock Jabos, the postilion who’s been around earlier scenes. Cf. the Woman in White recognition scene by all the faithful lock-pullers. Jock Jabos gives “just the spark wanted to give fire to the popular feeling” [399]. Moment “when the frost of the Scottish people melts like a snow-wreath” [400]—counterpoint to spring imagery. Meg says “if my curse brought it down, my blessing has taken it off” [400]—womb and tomb mother. She dies attended by a clergyman who says, more or less, she wasn’t a Presbyterian, but her mentality was feudal, so maybe she’ll get to heaven.
Glossin and old Hazlewood have been claiming all along that Bertram is really a bastard son of Ellengowan, impersonating the lost heir. But this other double is produced: he exists all right, but he’s someone else. Glossin is then convicted of being accessory to the original kidnapping (we’re in a scene presided over by Pleydell again, who’s also re-enacting his role as sheriff in the earlier case). Testimony of Meg’s nephew, Gabriel Faa, leads to Henry Bertram’s producing “a small velvet bag, which he said he has worn round his neck from his earliest infancy, and which he had preserved, first from superstitious reverence, and, latterly, from the hope that it might serve one day to aid in the discovery of his birth” [410]. Well, that was all we needed. It’s the astrological horoscope, of course. Comment on the symmetry: Mannering the colonel and Pleydell the lawyer; Hatteraick the pirate and Glossin the lawyer (411). So then we adjourn to the jail where Glossin calls on Hatteraick, who’s been dreaming that Meg Merrilies dragged Glossin there by the hair and gave Glossin a clasp knife. Hatteraick kills Glossin—bear and fox, corresponding to Dinmont and, I suppose, Pleydell again on the amiable side. Hatteraick promises to write a full account of his doings—this villain’s statement is frequent, as in Woman in White—but uses the writing materials to hang himself. Back to the white pieces: Pleydell says Guy Mannering, who’s going to be living at the Hazlewood estate next to Ellengowan (I think; it doesn’t matter), can repair the old tower “for the nocturnal contemplation of the celestial bodies” [420]. Guy Mannering says, “No, no, my dear counsellor! Here ends The Astrologer” [420]. Well, it ends, with the magician renouncing his magic.
Because the scene annoyed me so much, I forgot to notice that Guy Mannering quizzes Julia on her silence about reporting that “Brown” had shot Hazlewood. This theme of the plot turning on the heroine’s silence recurs in The Moonstone, where Rachel won’t talk, and I think it may be connected with that curious dumb-girl business in Peveril of the Peak.
I’ve mentioned the scale-stairs on the cliffs: they’re repeated in connection with Pleydell’s lodgings in Edinburgh, where they’re said to be filthy. There seems to be a kind of counterpoint of law and action (Glossin sneers at Sampson that we go by law here, and not the gospel), which is part of the incorporating into society business.
Frye’s edition of The Antiquary, which he annotated: London: Dent, 1923. The novel was first published in 1816. Page numbers in square brackets are to the Samuel H. Parker edition (Boston) of 1830.
References to The Antiquary in Frye’s published work:
Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 195, 201, 202, 225, 227
“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 72
Said to be Scott’s favorite among the Waverley Novels, and a very genial and pleasant story it is, far less wooden than Guy Mannering. His introduction plays down the structure of the story and sends all the pseudo-critics scurrying off in pursuit of red herrings about “sources.” “The reader may be assured, that this part of the narrative is founded on a fact of actual occurrence” [iv]. He’s talking about Dousterswivel. Then he goes on to an enormous harangue about beggars and sources for Edie Ochiltree. Actually, Ochiltree is primarily an Autolycus figure in the sense of being the news, assimilated to the oral tradition. There’s a mail service, of course, and the postmistress has a lot of very snoopy gossips trying to pry into the mail, but Edie is the traditional source of news, and consequently he’s also the vice of the plot. Autolycus and vice suggest roguery, but Edie is a figure of great integrity, with his own strict begging code, and everything he does in the plot is benevolent. He’s compared archetypally with the palmer figure.
Two travellers opening, who are strangers but turn out to be a displaced father-and-son team. (That is, the mysterious hero, who lives remote and withdrawn from everybody else, calls himself Lovel but is really Neville, supposed to be somebody’s bastard son; he turns out to be the rightful heir of the Earl of Glenallan, and if I remember correctly the woman the Earl married was somebody Oldbuck was sweet on, which accounts for his crusty-bachelor humor. I suppose it’s time for another bracket.) Oldbuck is a pedant humour, an antiquary, of course, of German and middle-class origin: ancestor was a printer and he inherits bibliophile interests. His neighbour Sir Arthur Wardour is a contrasting humour, obsessed with breeding and purity of descent. Lovel has met his daughter in England and has followed her to Scotland, but the old fool won’t have anything to do with him because he’s convinced all bastards are bastards. He’s a half-assed Jacobite, but nothing serious—Oldbuck, being German in origin, is naturally a loyal Hanoverian. Well, he and Oldbuck have dinner, and quarrel over their opposed interpretations of history, so Arthur flounces off and he and his daughter get into a storm.
As in Guy Mannering, the imagery of cliffs and precipices runs against steep staircases (pp. 13, 64). The Wardours get stuck in a terrific storm on a niche on a precipice called Mother Bessy’s apron or something: they’re saved, first by Edie, then by Lovel, then by the help Oldbuck has got for them. The imagery is being hauled up on a rope out of the chaos of sea and air. Father and daughter and the ocean tide, plus a poor Tom type in Edie. Compared to Christian martyrs waiting for the lions to be uncaged—cruel crawling foam archetype.43 Lear epigraphs, of course. Chair on the rope: “to commit oneself in such a vehicle, through a howling tempest of wind and rain, with a beetling precipice above, and a raging abyss below” [83]—well, it’s awful. This Patmos o’ ours, Edie calls it. Well, Lovel goes home with Oldbuck and is put to bed in a “Green Chamber” said to be haunted. It’s full of tapestries, “The subject was a hunting-piece—branches of the woven forest were crowded with fowls of various kinds” [101]—hence green. Lovel has metamorphosis dreams: “He was a bird—he was a fish—or he flew like he one, and swam like the other. Miss Wardour was a syren, or a bird of Paradise … wild and wonderful metamorphosis” [104]. Just shows to go. You have to have metamorphosis, hunting and forest images at this point. Another “metamorphosis” of Oldbuck’s ancestor holding up a book with a motto—cipher in dream world. The motto is Kunst macht Gunst. Then Lovel wakes up and girl is playing and singing the “Why sitt’st thou by that ruin’d hall” poem [107].
Oldbuck tells Lovel the origin of the motto: mother-right situation of one Bertha choosing a suitor and demanding one who could print. All her noble suitors sloped off, ragged half-beggar suitor turns out to be Mr. Right. Basanos of print as emblem of main story, not that Lovel is a printer. Isabella talking to Edie “might be supposed, by a romantic imagination, an imprisoned damsel communicating a tale of her durance to a palmer” [123]. Oldbuck, who doesn’t know Lovel knows Isabella, much less that he’s in love with her, leaves them alone. “I cannot force you to adopt my advice—I cannot shut the door of my father’s house against the preserver of his life and mine—but the sooner Mr. Lovel can teach his mind to submit to the inevitable disappointment of wishes which have been so rashly formed, the more highly he will rise in my esteem—and, in the meanwhile, for his sake as well as mine, he must excuse my putting an interdict upon conversation on a subject so painful” [130–1]. Or, as she’d say now, Like, it’s no fucking good, man.
Lovel gets a letter, I forget who about at the moment, moves into town, and is invited to a party, a sort of picnic luncheon, in a happy valley type of place, with a “pure and profound lake” [173]. Dousterswivel is there, and Lovel reads a story (inset tale) written (apparently) by Isabella, about a German of the sixteenth century who made his fortune by getting lumps of gold from the demon of the Harz forest, then buggers it all and dies poor and disgraced. The point is to underline the alchemical symbolism which runs through the book, as astrological does Guy Mannering. The fairies, or whatever they are, are celebrating “the wedding of Hermes with the Black Dragon” [190]. Oldbuck says her skill is akin to that of the alchemists (extracting good moral from silly story). Hector M’Intyre, Oldbuck’s nephew and brother of Mary, who lives with Oldbuck (superfluous heroine Scott evidently can’t find a use for), instantly picks a quarrel with Lovel and fights a duel with him: M’Intyre is “killed,” as usual, so the hero goes into a pharmakos phase. Edie, who’d tried to stop the duel, hides Lovel in a cave, “screened by the boughs of an aged oak,” underneath a church, connected with it by a stair (193). They overhear Sir Arthur and Dousterswivel, whose patter runs “you see this little plate of silver—you know de moon measureth de whole zodiack in de space of twenty-eight day—every shild knows dat. Well, I take a silver plate when she is in her fifteenth mansion” [228], and so on. They sneeze and frighten Dousterswivel, who goes to “where a flat stone lay upon the ground” [232] and gets some silver he’d planted there beforehand. Twin senex device, both pedants, Whig and Tory. They go back with Edie, who guides them to some real treasure—I forget how all this works out, but it does—and Dousterswivel is astonished. Edie decoys Dousterswivel back to the church (I think it’s all in the church—an ancient ruined abbey) provokes him to quarrel, and Dousterswivel gets whacked by Steenie Mucklebackit, who’s there as part of the joke. They escape, but unluckily Steenie Mucklebackit steals, or rather picks up by accident, Dousterswivel’s notebook of something: the whole incident is interrupted by a Roman Catholic funeral, the burial of the Earl of Glenallan’s mother, whose servant Elspeth was. Elspeth is the old gammer in the Mucklebackit family. When she hears of it she digs out a talisman of recognition and gives it to Edie to give to the Earl, which he does, and says she has to see him. On hearing the news she’s “like a mummy animated by some wandering spirit into a temporary resurrection” [58]. The Earl is a melancholy recluse; his younger brother, who went to England and turned Protestant, is Lovel’s father, or maybe foster-father. Edie’s again called a palmer, and mistaken for a Catholic priest or friar. “The secrets of grit folk,” he says, “are just like the wild beasts that are shut up in cages” [74]. Steenie’s drowned; Hector M’Intyre attacks a seal (female) and is defeated, as he has only one arm good, other wounded in duel; Oldbuck teases him about this: curious emblematic significance before the cognitio begins. Proteus is mentioned. Note the epigraph to chapter 30 (273). Hector knows some Gaelic, and recites bits of a poem to Oldbuck which is a dialogue between Oisin and Patrick. Meanwhile Edie’s arrested for the assault on Dousterswivel.
Cognitio begins in fisherman’s hut in a house of mourning. “The minister next passed to the mother, moving along the floor as slowly, silently, and gradually, as if he had been afraid that the ground would, like unsafe ice, break beneath his feet, or that the first echo of a footstep was to dissolve some magic spell, and plunge the hut, with all its inmates, into a subterranean abyss” [99]. Dunno what that’s all about. Well, the cognitio. The Earl of Glenallan, made so by his mother’s death, hears from his mother’s old servant Elspeth that his mother and Elspeth plotted to murder the girl he’d married, and also made him think the girl was his sister, which she wasn’t. His father for some reason had her pass as his daughter for a while; motive for murder was the old bag’s jealousy about the Neville family—the girl wasn’t the earl’s sister but she was his cousin from that side. Elspeth suggests the earl burn her as a witch (303). Point is comitatus mentality: Elspeth hates whatever her mistress hates, though she also hated the Neville girl because of some silly schoolgirl remarks about her Scotch accent. Countess (old bag) didn’t know they were secretly married. Anyway, they pushed her over a cliff into the sea: tie-up of this theme. Note that the new generation, Lovel and Isabella, are hauled out of it. No, actually that didn’t happen: she had to produce the hero first, and die in chee-yildbirth. Countess gives Elspeth a gold bodkin to kill the kid with: “Nothing but gold must shed the blood of Glenallan” [120]—God, what a ham. Peroration: she’s had lousy luck ever since: “Has not the fire had its share o’ them—the winds had their part—the sea had her part?-–And oh!’ … that the earth would take her part” [121].
Well, of course Oldbuck was in love with the Neville girl, who’s Lovel’s mother, so the Antiquary and Lovel, meeting on the first page of the book, are displaced father and son. Glenallan comes to stay with Oldbuck, who puts him to bed in the Green Chamber—the tapestries have a motto from Chaucer, which we now learn was supplied by Miss Neville, so in a way Lovel spent the night in his mother’s womb, while all this metamorphosing was going on. Glenallan, of course, had spent his whole life stewing over God, I screwed my sister. Oldbuck, being a magistrate, had made inquiries at the time, and thinks there’s a good chance that the infant survived. Emphasis on both Earl and Elspeth as already dead. Choice and chance, 314: wonder if Yeats read this book early on. Oldbuck decides to take on more investigation, and says to Glenallan “If you want an affair of consequence properly managed, put it into the hands of an antiquary; for, as they are eternally exercising their genius and research upon trifles, it is impossible they can be baffled in affairs of importance” [142]. Dim background connexion of detection and archaeology, a physical equivalent of psychoanalysis. Meanwhile Lovel has fled out to sea with his second in the duel, a sailor named Taffrill—a lot of silly names in this book. Hero exiled and returning from the sea, after having murder and (by descent) incest charges hanging over him. Anyway, Oldbuck becomes a figure like the Pleydell of Guy Mannering: I haven’t a name of it; it’s the Judge Clement of Everyman in His Humour. He has to get Edie out of hock from a stupid magistrate. M’Intyre gives Edie a guinea, which he takes although it’s beyond his rules {he doesn’t take gold}, but doesn’t want “to be fishing for bawbees out at the jail window wi’ the fit o’ a stocking and a string” [160]. Rudens image. He’s been described by Oldbuck in Zen terms: “When he is hungry he eats… when weary he sleeps,” and is “the oracle of the district through which he travels—their genealogist, their newsman, their master of the revels, their doctor at a pinch, or their divine” [153]. Oldbuck bails him out, and there’s a rumor that Taffrill’s ship has been wrecked and the hero lost. Explicit reference to Plautus’ Euclio—buried treasure play, 345. Oldbuck wants to go back to Elspeth and get some more cognitio, and says “The human mind is to be treated like a skein of ravelled silk, where you must cautiously secure one free end before you can make any progress in disentangling it” [179]. Edie, who’s to go with him, says “she may come to wind us a pirn” [180]—I’m sure Yeats read this book.
They don’t get much out of Elspeth except ballads (naturally Oldbuck’s a collector), notably one on the battle of Harlaw, and her death-speech “Teresa—my lady calls us!—Bring a candle, the grand staircase is as mirk as a Yule midnight” [187]. Teresa was the furren [foreign] servant who was much more likely to have killed the baby. Well, Sir Arthur, whose “language and carriage were those of a man who had acquired the philosopher’s stone” [191] is being sold up. Dousterswivel had promised “to convert all his lead into gold” [193]—previously Dousterswivel has said something about the duel and people putting lead in each other, which leads to an alchemical remark of Oldbuck’s—I note this only because there’s a lot of treasure (reference to L’Avare, 367, as well as Euclio) imagery. So poor old Wardour is “in the fearful state of one who, hanging over a precipice, and without the means of retreat, perceives the stone on which he rests gradually parting from the rest of the crag” [194]—tie-up of this imagery. Isabella (her creator always calls her Miss Wardour) goes for a walk, and “chance” directed her into a glen, with a brook and an ascending path. Here she meets Edie, after a “recapitulation” in her mind of Lovel’s courting. Edie says “when the night’s darkest, the dawn’s nearest” [202], and that God, “wha rebuked the waters” [202] can save her again, then buggers off—incidentally, there’s a complex of transportation images, horses, carriages, ships, walking, etc., as part of the communication, or Staple of News, theme. A lot made of the fact that Oldbuck is a pedestrian hero, who never rides a horse. A lot of images, including “They stepped slowly down the magnificent staircase—every well-known object seeming to the unfortunate father and daughter,” etc. (383). Rescued by a last-minute letter from Wardour’s absent son, brought by Edie. Edie’s called a blue pigeon—his uniform is blue, an agent of communication, Noah’s ark, etc. Oldbuck says “This is a day of news” [216] and “these are such sieges and such reliefs as our time of day admits of” [220]—low mimetic is part of the point. There’s a wig-maker, technologically unemployed, as there are only three in the neighbourhood, who has nothing to do and so also retails gossip.
More cognitio: the treasure discovered by Edie in the Church was labelled “Search,” which turns out to be the name of the ship Lovel’s on. It was Lovel’s scheme to help Wardour out. Several times Oldbuck refers to Lovel as a “phoenix”—suggests death-rebirth, unique friend because displaced son, bird, alchemical affinities, etc. Edie is not only in a tricky slave role (much emphasis on his freedom, though he’s hardly an Ariel type) but an architectus of the plot.
Curious final scene: a false alarm of a French invasion, inspired by a “beacon” which turns out to be a bonfire made of the shovels and picks and stuff made of the digging, out of sheer pettishness, apparently. Oldbuck says Dousterswivel “has bequeathed us a legacy of blunders and mischief, as if he has lighted some train of fireworks at his departure” [237]. Final recognition scene: “let me have the pleasure of introducing a son to a father” [241]. “The proofs on all sides were found to be complete, for Mr. Neville had left a distinct account of the whole transaction with his confidential steward in a sealed packet, which was not to be opened until the death of the old Countess” [241]. Natch.
A lot made of the Tory-Whig contrast between Oldbuck and Wardour, between the Teutonic and Celtic sympathies of Oldbuck and his nephew Hector M’Intyre—he won’t listen to Ossian but is delighted by the ballad. It looks as though the Battle of Harlaw, where the Celts (Highlanders) were repelled by a Saxon and Norman army in 1411, were the ultimate archetype of the whole story, historically speaking, because Elspeth’s feudal mentality derives from the fact that her ancestor waited on Glenallan’s in that battle.
The point about the invasion is the consolidation of society in front of a common enemy, heralded by Dousterswivel escaping back to Germany with fire in his tail, so to speak. It takes the place of an elaborate recognition scene.
Naturally one would expect a good deal about the oral tradition in the background of Scott, considering that he was a collector of ballads. Waverley is almost what I called it, Ossian II, and every novel almost has some character who sings snatches of ballads. David Gellatley in Waverley, Meg Merrilies, Madge Wildfire, Wandering Willie, Elspeth—there’s no end to them. The thing is that sometimes the oral tradition seems to be in background shaping the plots and archetypal destinies of the characters—I keep thinking of that Battle of Harlaw one in The Antiquary.
Classical romance is often said to be in the form of a commentary on a painting—Daphnis and Chloe is, and Achilles Tatius’ story is. I wonder if there’s a conventional connexion with the immensely elaborate descriptions in Scott, and the frequent references to what a painter could do with this here scene. Rembrandt, Wilkie, and several others get mentioned by name. Also: I remember when mother was reading Scott to me, how the descriptions made sense when the presentation was oral: had nothing to do but listen, and they could build up in my mind, point by point.
Also I noticed in reading Richardson’s Wacousta how the very badness of the style seemed in a way appropriate to the romance form. I haven’t got this clear, but it seems to me that writing of Jane Austen’s quality goes with a strong degree of realistic displacement, and that Scott’s creaky hay-waggon style really does seem the right medium for a romance where there’s a removal from reality: the characters aren’t speaking to you but are just being swept down the narrative current. I noticed that particularly in Anne of Geierstein, which is a late story, written after the financial collapse. In a sense the book isn’t written at all: it’s a draft written out, and the dialogue is too stilted to be believed. And yet it has an extraordinary pulling power, and I think it’s partly that goddam style.
Frye owned two editions of Redgauntlet, both of which he annotated: London: Dent, 1957, and Boston: Aldine, 1832, the latter published with The Pirate. Redgauntlet was first published in 1824. The page references in square brackets, as well as those Frye inserts, are to the Dent edition.
References to Redgauntlet in Frye’s published work:
Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 195, 196, 238, 244, 279
“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 74
Begins with the folklore situation of the two brothers, one staying at home, the other wandering: they’re not brothers, but the set up is traditional. The wanderer heads for the same part of Scotland that Guy Mannering is about, and is rescued from an incoming tide (same opening as The Antiquary) by a sullen and mysterious stranger who turns out to be his father. The same man calls on the friend’s father, though of course he isn’t recognized at that stage to be the same man, and the friend is warned (another folktale theme) of the hero’s danger by a mysterious female named Green Mantle, who turns out to be (what a revealing phrase that is) (a) a girl the hero had met in his father’s house (b) his own sister. The hero goes on to stay with a Quaker, then falls in with a blind fiddler: as he can play the fiddle too, he arranges to be an associate of his at a dance. On the way to the dance we get “Wandering Willie’s Tale,” about one of the stranger’s ancestors (and therefore the hero’s as well). Superb story as it is, I’m not sure about its relation, as an inset tale, to the whole design. The hero’s name is Darsie Latimer and his friend’s Alan Fairford; former English, latter Scottish and the son of a lawyer who thinks there’s nothing in the world but law. Hero doesn’t know who the hell he is, of course, and says “My life is like the subterranean river in the Peak of Derby, visible only where it crosses the celebrated cavern” [86]. Wandering Willie is the usual idiotes figure, usually a woman (Meg Merrilies, Madge Wildfire).
The lawyer-father, Alexander Fairford, is another pedant, but the supremacy of the law which is his obsession, almost, is thematic: the point of this book is that civil power is supreme over military power, mercantile over heroic ethics, which makes Redgauntlet’s corresponding obsession (Jacobitism) border on the psychotic. The 1745 rebellion is over, and nobody but nobody (except him) wants to revive it. So the lawyer father is a superego figure and the heroic one ain’t. Obvious that young Fairford has fallen in love with Green Mantle, to make things symmetrical: Darsie meets her at the dance and she bawls hell out of him for associating with “low” company, evidently with Scott’s approval: Scott the man is of course much more of a snob than Scott the romancer. Well, after an exchange of letters (the usual clumsy epistolary device, introduced parenthetically into Guy Mannering also), we get on to narrative, and begin with young Fairford getting, as his first case, one Peter Peebles, the kind of person who spends his life on a lawsuit that gets to be a joke to everyone but him, and who becomes a lawyer himself about his own case. Remarkable how different Scott’s attitude, as a professional lawyer, is to Dickens’. Well, Fairford takes the case, and is just going to make a resounding success of it, when he gets news that Darsie has been kidnapped in a smuggler’s raid on a fishing-net set-up operated by the Quaker (organized, it turns out, by Herries {who is Redgauntlet and the hero’s ultimate father}), and scrams the hell out of the court.
Then we go back to the hero and his damn journal—third means of telling the story. He’s abducted from the fishing-weir by his father, saved from a tide again (“the foamy crests of the devouring waves, as they advanced with the speed and fury of a pack of hungry wolves”). Incidentally, there are some interesting undisplaced images in the first tidal adventure: the servant of his father has teeth like an “ogre,” etc. Hero goes into delirium, during which “I am convinced I saw G.M.” [198].44 Curiously literal repetition of the Waverley situation. So he’s stuck like Pamela, unfucked and scribbling. Like Pamela, he shoves his MS into the lining of his coat—Word as clothing, as in the Hymn of the Soul. He’s interviewed by an old ass of a judge, a double of old Hazlewood in Guy Mannering, under the thumb of Herries. Father is present, and has a horseshoe mark when he frowns, which he does most of the time. This is a family trait, mentioned in the Tale, and also “awaked a dreadful vision of infancy” [214]. Peebles wanders in, looking for a “fugie warrant” to get back his advocate who’d buggered off. He calls Herries by his name, which makes latter look like Lucifer—Byronic topos. Hero remarks, 214, that he’d never known sorrow or hardship, and what he called that was “only the weariness of mind, which, having nothing actually present to complain of, turns upon itself, and becomes anxious about the past and the future.” Sufficient unto the day is the moral. Well, Herries is a Quixote figure of this historically obsessed type. He goes back to a Balliol-Bruce feud in the fourteenth century, much as Elspeth in The Antiquary goes back to Harlaw. As a result of that feud an ancient Redgauntlet killed his son in battle. That gave the horseshoe mark to the family. Father says “You were withdrawn from the bosom of your family, and the care of your legal guardian, by the timidity and ignorance of a doting mother” [234]—Zanoni setup, only with the general sympathy rather different. “The young hawk, accustomed only to the fostering care of its dam, must be tamed by darkness and sleeplessness” [234]—that’s his line. Note the doubled senex figures, and the Esau-Jacob relation between them. The imprisoned hero is supposed by the attendants to be mad, and Wandering Willie comes under his window and plays a collection of significant tunes: miniature anthology of them given. “In a wild, wandering, and disorderly course of life, men, as they become loosened from the ordinary bonds of civil society, hold those of comradeship more closely sacred” [243]—tribalism, in short, the characteristic of the outlawed societies of the night-world. Richard I and Blondel archetype45 referred to. Well, the compulsory interval of hero’s imprisonment finally ends, and he’s—guess what—disguised as a woman.
Meanwhile Alan Fairford goes in search of him, and lays a complaint before another ass of a magistrate: he’s not so much an ass as a henpecked husband whose wife is related to the Redgauntlets and is a furious Jacobite. “In his feudal pride, Redgauntlet might venture on the deeds of violence exercised by the aristocracy in other times” [259]. So the aristocracy has become a semi-outlawed society, still tribal but largely impotent. Usual relay race of romance, Alan being referred from one place to another. The drop-in-ocean passage from Comedy of Errors is quoted, 281. Alan goes to an old hypocrite with a cellar, “dived into the subterranean descent to which this secret aperture gave access” [286]. He’s in cahoots with smugglers, so we have for forza-froda Glossin-Hatteraick setup. Scott repeats his formulas pretty literally: the Earl of Glenallan in Antiquary is a double of Herries here, in temperament anyway. “Fairford, still following Job, was involved in another tortuous and dark passage, which involuntarily reminded him of Peter Peeble’s lawsuit,” 289. Of course the resemblance to Guy Mannering is natural enough, this being also a sequel to Waverley. Well, Alan gets on a ship run by a pirate (another novel echoes), whose name is Nanty Ewart, a person of some education, intelligence, even sensitivity, like the second pirate in The Pirate. Horrible story of screwing a girl he wanted to marry, but destroyed by moral virtue, so his father dies of heartbreak, the girl turns whore and is transported—four lives destroyed by nothing but social repression. Ewart assumes that Fairford must be a Jacobite, a cause he despises, his own being smuggling: “You think because the pot is boiling, that no scum but yours can come uppermost” [310]. Fairford is delicate and gets sick, so he’s transferred to “the old girls at Fairladies” [316]—two ancient Roman Catholic females. There he meets a mysterious priest called His Eminence—curious: he turns out to be Prince Charles, who of course has a brother who was a cardinal. Glimpse of his mistress, who turns out to be Charles’ undoing.
Back to Darsie and his female costume; sister buggering around, “and the air of mystery with which that interest was veiled, gave her, to his lively imagination, the character of a benevolent and protecting spirit,” 343. Sister-recognition scene follows—I mean he doesn’t know it yet; she does. Actually the man I’ve been calling his father is his goddam uncle: I never get these things quite straight. Anyway, she’s got birth tattoos too: “these five blood-specks on my arm are a mark by which mysterious Nature has impressed, on an unborn infant, a record of its father’s violent death and its mother’s miseries,” 354. Yuh. Footnotes emphasizing author’s and general male gullibility. She tells him a story about throwing down a Jacobite glove at the coronation of George III. (She did it.) “His fever-fit of love had departed like a morning’s dream, and left nothing behind but a painful sense of shame, and a resolution to be more cautious. …” [369]. You never know when a girl may be your sister. Darsie finds himself in the regular hero-isolation role: if he doesn’t turn Jacobite he’ll be imprisoned for life in some Bastille on the Continent; his only friend, apart from his sister, is a blind fiddler (Wandering Willie was a Faithful Attendant of the goddam family, of course).
Cognitio begins somewhere around 378, with the practically psychotic obsession of Redgauntlet. Darsie can’t get off his horse properly in his women’s clothes, so falls on top of Alan Fairford, who thinks he’s receiving a lady. However, the recognition is postponed. Redgauntlet has an extraordinary power of sewing things up: defeats Ewart the pirate in a duel; Benjie has a vice role in a tussle with the Quaker (too complicated to figure out). Redgauntlet condoles with Darsie on having stuffed him into a skirt: “Do not blush at having worn a disguise to which kings and heroes have been reduced. It is when female craft or female cowardice find their way into a manly bosom” [407], etc. Gradually, the antithesis of the pistis of Jacobite obsession vs. the gnosis of social reality takes shape. A richly comic scene at the end, where superannuated Jacobites, now at the stage where they just want to talk about their past loyalties, are confronted by Redgauntlet with a demand to do something. The representative of Oxford says that of course Oxford will support any cause in theory, as long as it’s reactionary enough, but won’t do anything. Others “whom mere habit, or a desire of preserving consistency, had engaged in the affair” [411] back away too. Disguised woman theme takes shape when the Jacobites ask about Prince Charles’s mistress. She’s a government spy, among other things: the moral rationalizations they put up make Redgauntlet mutter something about the last King Charles—a pathetic example of his general out-of-dateness. Redgauntlet says “I did not think so slight an impediment as that of a woman’s society” [419], etc. His sexism is what buggers him, ultimately. Strong suggestion that Prince Charles doesn’t want to do anything either: it’s all talk except for Redgauntlet, and his obstinacy in hanging on to his mistress is just a manufactured issue. Final irony when the Prince scolds Redgauntlet for not telling him how obstinate the Jacobites would be about his mistress: obviously he, like Redgauntlet, has no notion that he’s living in the eighteenth century, not the seventeenth. Several counterpoints of the obsession theme: Peter Peebles turns up again, and the Quaker says “were other human objects of ambition looked upon as closely” [429], etc. Peebles finds Fairford, whom of course he’s hunting for, with Darsie as female, and says “Ye maun leave this quean” [433], in a neat bit of counterpoint. The Campbells come: the king’s men: note final intervention of king, as in Tartuffe; the cause is so silly and trumpery nobody’s worried about it, so everybody’s pardoned. When the king’s general says “this will be remembered against no one,” Redgauntlet says “then the cause is lost for ever” [439]. However, there has to be a slaughter of suitors: I think Peebles, Crystal Nixon, a treacherous servant of Redgauntlet and Nanty Ewart all got killed somehow or other; but the main thing of course is Redgauntlet’s Esau role: “I shall leave England for ever” [442]; “as my hand will never draw weapon more, I shall sink it forty fathoms deep in the wide ocean” [442]—parallel to Prospero’s renunciation of magic. “The fatal doom will, I trust, now depart from the House of Redgauntlet” [442]; Prince Charles says the general has taught him the principle by which condemned men feel forgiveness for their executioner; general “could not help joining in the universal Amen! which resounded from the shore” [443]—great Pan is dead. Nanty Ewart and Nixon kill each other—latter tries to rat and former is disgusted—Peebles turns out to be somebody responsible for Ewart’s original disaster, in some way I’ve not marked, but I remember thinking it was a piece of over-designing.
The inset tale, dealing with the Redgauntlet ancestry, is a far more expert way of dealing with the historical background than the usual harrumph explicatory chapters such as we have in Waverley. Even Anne of Geierstein, a story that Scott never really wrote, but simply produced a draft of, in his usual hay-waggon prose style, has an inset tale dealing with the ancestry of the heroine. Many of the novels go back to oppositions of centuries back: the Tory-Whig business in Waverley really goes back to the “pacification” of Scotland in the massacre of Glencoe days; the kafuffle in Old Mortality is the Reformation issue of a hundred years back; Elspeth’s loyalties in The Antiquary were fixed by the Battle of Harlaw three centuries before, and so on.
Frye apparently read Arcadia in Sir Philip Sidney, The Complete Works, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922–26), an annotated copy of which was in his own library. Page references in square brackets below are from The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
References to Arcadia in Frye’s published work:
Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 200, 209, 218, 224, 228, 231, 235, 243, 250, 272, 278
“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 6, 40, 59, 70, 81, 86–7, 94, 172
Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, CW 5: 232
1. Begins with ow-oo of two shepherds, Strephon and Claius, about the departure of their (evidently mutual) girl friend, Urania. Strephon described as a hopeless shepherd: the setting is the sands which lie against the Island of Cithera. A curious technique, not quite euphuism, though there is a good deal of euphuistic prose in the Arcadia, of dropping into metrical units of rhythm, like the “John Peel” and other bits of jingle in Finnegans Wake. Things like “where we last (alas that the word last should so long last) did gaze” [61], etc., are pure euphuism, and so are bits of antithesis: “rather to commit themselves to the cold mercy of the sea, than to abide the hot cruelty of the fire” [65] (by the way, this first chapter introduces Pyrocles clinging to a burned ship: cf. Spenser’s Pyrocles, burning in unquenchable fire). No, I mean bits like “like a widow having lost her make of whom she held her honour” [66], and “they absented his eyes from beholding the issue” [68], and, still more, from the introduction (dedication to Countess Pembroke): “This say I, because I know the virtue so; and this say I, because it may be ever so” [57].
Well, back to the ow-oo: they then see Musidorus sitting on a “coffer”—theme of shipwreck and treasure from the sea—it turns out to be full of jewels. Strephon and Claius are Arcadians living in Laconia; asked why, they say only “Guarded with poverty, and guided with love” [70]. Emphasis on the “natural” learning inspired by love in Arcadia—a “pagan” equivalent of the prenatural powers of Adam in Eden. “Hath not the only love of her made us (being silly ignorant shepherds) raise up our thoughts about the ordinary level of the world, so as great clerks do not disdain our conference?” [63]. Well, Musidorus sees his friend Pyrocles out in the sea, and gets the shepherds to get a “Fisherman” to get a boat to rescue him, but those inevitable creatures the Pirates arrive; those manning the boat run away, and Musidorus has to leave his friend to his own devices: the fishermen don’t fancy Pyrocles much anyway, because he’s so goddam beautiful they think he’s a god.
2. Musidorus conducted from Laconia into Arcadia by the shepherds to the house of Kalander, a kindly but nosy old Polonius character. Arcadia described as a locus amoenus, not quite an earthly paradise. Kalander has a statue of Venus suckling Aeneas, where the blue streaks in the marble are made to look like her veins: I used to think this was deliberate allusion to bad taste which would give the reader an insight into Kalander’s character in this polite-style Henry James writing, but I dunno. A shepherd’s boy piping “as though he should never be old” [37]. Musidorus calls himself Palladius, and his friend Pyrocles Daiphantus. Romance convention of changed names, just to make it hard; there may however be something of a change of identity symbolized by it—in other words the amnesia archetype. House is hospitable, “not so dainty as not to be trod on, nor yet slubbered up with good fellowship” [71]. Kalander says he’s more impressed with virtue than pedigree, but nevertheless the sight of Musidorus’ jewels inspires a greater respect in him. Musidorus falls sick and nearly dies, taking six weeks to recover—death and rebirth archetype.
3. Kalander tells Musidorus about the Prince of the country, one Basilius, who has a wife “of more princely virtues than her husband” [76], and “it was happy she took a good course, for otherwise it would have been terrible” [76]. Two daughters, constructed on the sublime-beautiful principle. The Prince is in retirement with wife and younger daughter Philoclea; older daughter, the majestic type, is called Pamela. Pamela is forced to live with a trio of grotesques called Dametas, wife Miso, daughter Mopsa—praises of latter sung in ironic parody. Why? Reason picked up in King Lear, I think: Basilius interprets Dametas’ clownish boorishness as plain honesty—shrewd remark about the Prince “according to the nature of great persons, in love with that he had done himself” [78].
4. Prince sets a nobleman named Philanax to be Regent of the country in his retirement. Only son of Kalander, Clitophon, finds the Prince’s letter left around and makes a copy of it: Kalander theoretically doesn’t like this, but is too snoopy not to read the letter himself and even carry it around with him. So he reads it to Musidorus. One phrase, “it is weakness too much to remember what should have been done” [80], is repeated by the whore in The Duchess of Malfi at the moment of her death46—don’t know if it’s a common phrase. Well, Philanax tells Basilius he’s a silly ass to abdicate because of some damn oracle or other, “like one that should kill himself for fear of death” [81]. He’s sillier to have resolved not to allow either of his daughters to marry, acting the part of the grabby father of romantic comedy, and still sillier to allow Dametas the guardianship of Pamela. His judgment is “corrupted with a prince’s fortune” [82].
There follows a description of the amazing poetic culture of the shepherds of Arcadia. Two reasons assigned: one, “their living standing but upon the looking to their beasts, they have ease, the Nurse of Poetry” [84]. The other is that, unlike shepherds in other countries (i.e. England), they own their own sheep. Can’t get any poetry out of an enclosure movement. Anticipation of the great festivals of poetry that each book of the Arcadia ends with. “Sometimes under hidden forms uttering such matters, as otherwise they durst not deal with” [84].
5. War with the Helots, who don’t like gentlemen: Sidney naturally takes the side of the gentry. The captain of the Helots is a man named Demagoras, a suitor to an awful-beautiful heroine named Parthenia. Mother presses the match; she says nothing doing, because she loves Argalus, a hero to match. Demagoras, “loving nobody but himself, and for his own delight’s sake Parthenia” [88], is out in the cold after Parthenia’s mother dies of pure spite, and realizes “that not Parthenia was her own, she would never be his” [90]—God, Sidney writes well. So he rubs her face all over with a poison that makes her hideous. This makes no difference to Argalus, who wants to marry her as much as ever, but she won’t have it, and disappears. So Argalus goes against the Helots to revenge himself on Demagoras, but is captured. So is Clitophon, Kalander’s son, who goes to his rescue, which is how Musidorus comes to hear of it: Kalander doesn’t want to afflict his guest with his story, but he discovers it anyway and asks the steward. So both Argalus and Clitophon are being held for a torture-death. Note loathly lady archetype.
6. Sidney doesn’t tell a straight story so well, but Kalander and Musidorus (not called Palladius) make an expedition against a town held by the Helots, and get in by saying they’re Arcadian revolutionaries making common cause with them. Quite a fight, and it turns out that the Captain of the Helots is the hero’s old pal Pyrocles (Diaphantus). Peace and treaty, with Clitophon delivered, and Kalander, who’s been captured in the fight.
7. Treaty between Helots and Lacedaemonians, abolishing the class distinction and making the Helots equal with their former masters. Sidney isn’t such a snob as I thought—I don’t know what the hell happened to Demagoras. Anyway, when Argalus and others return to Kalander’s house, Parthenia turns up, only she says she ain’t, and proposes to Argalus, who turns her down because he assumes she isn’t Parthenia despite the resemblance. Well, she is: she visited the Queen of Corinth (Helen), who got her story out of her and got the well known Physician to fix her up. Somewhat strained comedy situation, with loathly-lady, death-rebirth, twin archetypes. Anyway, they’re fuxed up, or whatever the past tense is.
8. Pyrocles tells his adventures from the in medias res beginning: captured by pirates, promised his liberty if he’ll fight for them against the Spartans; kills the son or nephew of the King of Sparta; captured; rescued by Helots and becomes their chief. Argalus and Parthenia married. End of Section One: a comedy complete in itself. Oh, I see: Demagoras was killed, I think by Argalus, and succeeded in the Helot command by Pyrocles.
9. New section begins with Pyrocles falling in love: Musidorus makes a long speech at him. In an earlier chapter it’s said that to describe Parthenia one should set down what is excellent and then apply it—commonplace, but Renaissance Platonic commonplace. Here, the harangue says that behavior indicates the harmony between the graceful outward and well disciplined inward person—Courtier commonplace. Pyrocles isn’t listening, but “the very sound having imprinted the general point of his speech in his heart” [111], he answers. The prose style is getting opaque: in the previous chapter the summary of Pyrocles’ adventures includes one sentence about thirty lines of closely packed type long. My prose style ain’t anything to write epic poems about nuther.
10. Description of a hunt, of that curiously ritual kind that gets into Shakespearean comedy so much (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You Like It). I think it’s a displacement, by way of the Actaeon myth, of the Apuleius theme of metamorphosis; a quest which is part of the journey away from identity. Usually a love quest of some kind, with puns on deer and hart. In this chapter Kalander and two friends go out hunting, with Kalander yacking on and on like the garrulous old buffer he is—curious how thoroughgoing Sidney’s polite style is. Of course Kalander is genuinely kindly and hospitable, not an old fool. “The huntsmen handsomely attired in their green liveries, as though they were children of summer” [115]. “Their cry being composed of so well sorted mouths, that any man would perceive therein some kind of proportion, but the skilful woodmen did find a music” [115]. Very close to that extraordinary Midsummer Night’s Dream passage—something in the hunt-music business I haven’t figured out. “Even the Nymph Echo left to bewail the loss of Narcissus, and became a hunter” [115]. Death of the beast (stag), who sheds tears, as in As You Like It. “The Stag had bestowed himself liberally among them that had killed him” [116]. Sparagmos image, natch. Well, Pyrocles disappears—he’s in love, but it’s rather a blow to the friendship which is conventionally supposed to be superior to it. So we get a Two Brothers theme of Musidorus leaving Kalander (accompanied by Kalander’s son Clitophon however) to go hunt his friend in a secondary quest. If I can work out this hunting-metamorphosis theme it’s probably where my Surtees stuff goes.47
Incidentally, the changing of names is a part of the journey from identity, and the convention of the special pastoral name. Daphnis and Chloe, as I remember, are given special names to suit the world they’re in. Because I think Pyrocles-Daiphantus is about to acquire yet a third name.
Musidorus and Clitophon enter a locus amoenus, called “A pleasant valley” [118] with the murmuring music of waters “like a commonwealth of many families” [119] (springs running into a brook), and there Musidorus finds his friend’s armour strewed all over the damn place. Second sparagmos symbol, displaced. Puts it on; it’s hacked up and too big: cf. the opening of The Faerie Queene. Then Musidorus meets a coach with twelve servants who set upon him: he kills them all, approaches the coach, finds a lady with two female servants in it, apologizes perfunctorily for the minor social error of killing twelve people, which he does “either with cunning or with force, or rather with a cunning force” [119]—forza and froda48 again. The same turns out to be the Helen Queen of Corinth, previously mentioned. Sorry, it’s not Pyrocles’ armour he finds, but that of somebody called Amphialus, also mentioned, and Queen Helen’s lover, or something.
11. Helen tells her story which is that she was a Virgin Queen who didn’t want a lover, on account that would reverse things (“I as then esteeming myself born to rule, and thinking foul scorn willingly to submit myself to be ruled” [122].) Elizabeth in background, and also the archetype of the disdainful mistress, who’s really the virgin on the comic side, the Eros counterpart of the Christ to be sued for forgiveness as the descending virgin is to the incarnating Christ. The best of her suitors (note the Penelope situation again) is Philoxenus, whose friend is Amphialus: latter comes to plead the suit of the former in a Miles Standish or whatever it was situation; Helen natch falls in love with Amphialus; Knight’s Tale situation blows up; Philoxenus is killed and his father Tomotheus, who’s also Amphialus’ guardian, dies of grief on his body. So Amphialus tells Helen to go to hell and buggers off, also telling his page not to follow him (he does). So Helen takes on the role of travelling heroine and goes out to look for him, carrying his picture, so there’s a counterpoint of two hunts, Helen hunting Amphialus and Musidorus hunting Pyrocles, a love and a friendship. Page (Ismenus) meets Musidorus and Clitophon. Helen says “For this cause have I left my country, putting in hazard how my people will in time deal by me” [127], a contrapuntal movement to the abdication of Basilius. This abdication movement, by the way, besides being another West-side incarnation movement (Measure for Measure going through Nomos) also prefigures the recovery of the aristocracy projection. “The high-working powers make second causes unwittingly accessory to their determinations” [125]—references to providence rarer here than in Heliodorus.
12. Musidorus hunts all over Greece for Pyrocles, including Laconia, where “he found his fame flourishing, his monument engraved in Marble” [129]. Reflection of the hero in his story: cf. the sculptures on the walls of Carthage seen by Aeneas, which include a picture of him. His horse gets tired: one should keep in mind the quest symbolism of the animals on the pursuing side: hounds I’ve just mentioned: the “music” of their yapping being the descending to earth of the heavenly harmony of the sky—hound of heaven, in short. Or something connected with that: I still haven’t quite got it. Anyway: every knight is a centaur, a man on a horse, the horse being the helpful animal. The dog, as distinct from the group of hounds, is more commonly an attendant on a lower-world descent, as in Tobit, and the dog guarding the seven sleepers. There’s a dog here, attendant of Amphialus, and evidently symbolizing his fall to a still lower state through grief and guilt.
The horse brings Musidorus to a full stop, and he sees an Amazon, whose clothes are fully described in a way perhaps reflected in Spenser’s description of Belphoebe. She, or it, has a jewel-clasp representing Hercules with a distaff (Omphale archetype), and the motto “Never more valiant” [131]. Sings a song about being transformed, and Musidorus realizes it’s Pyrocles. P. doesn’t fancy M. staring at him “as Apollo is painted when he saw Daphne suddenly turned into a Laurel” [132], or asking him “what was the causer of this Metamorphosis” [132]. Musidorus gives him a long harangue telling him it’s silly to dress up like a woman: reason ought to be supreme over passion, and, in a Miltonic association, “it utterly subverts the course of nature, in making reason give place to sense, and man to woman” [133]. The harangue is Platonic “the true love hath that excellent nature in it, that it doth transform the very essence of the lover into the thing loved, uniting, and as it were incorporating it with a secret and inward working” [134]. Dialectic of heavenly love and the other kind, which “will not only make him an Amazon; but a launder, a distaff-spinner {Omphale}” [134]. Heroism obeys commands of reason: “We are to resolve, that if reason direct it, we must do it, and if we must do it, we will do it; for to say I cannot, is childish, and I will not, womanish” [133]. Pyrocles says he’s born and nursed of a woman, but he mostly says ow-oo and what’s wrong with this skirt anyway? One phrase of Musidorus’s fits the imagery of this area admirably: “O sweet Pyrocles, separate yourself a little, if it be possible, from yourself, and let your own mind look upon your own proceedings” [132]. Pyrocles’ answer is equally accurate on the East side: “In that heavenly love since there are two parts, the one the love itself, the other the excellency of the thing loved; I, not able at the first leap to frame both in me, do now (like a diligent workman) make ready the chief instrument, and first part of that great work, which is love itself” [136]. They go on to involved echoes of the word “measure,” which Pyrocles identifies with the “end” of love, which is desiring, though that’s not just fucking but a lifelong connection.
Musidorus says “it was a very white and red virtue, which you could pick out of a painterly gloss of a visage” [137]. White and red are symbols, not so much of love in itself, as of the outward manifestation or physical appearance of love: cf. Spenser’s “Hath white and red in it such wondrous power” (A Hymn in Honour of Beauty l. 71), and Marvell’s allusion in “The Garden.”49 That is, it’s the dame’s complexion, which in the medicine of that age was a clue to the inward temperament. The emphasis on the lover’s sickness, and the wound given him, presumably by the arrow of Eros, unites, all through the history of romance, three things: love itself, death and rebirth imagery (because the lover ritually dies of his attack of love and his mistress brings him to life again), and love as war (love as wound or disease, although the disease part of it is really a fourth area of imagery). Musidorus’ efforts to talk Pyrocles around are not very successful, so Pyrocles says “you are fitter to be a Prince, than a Counsellor” [139]. Incidentally, the name of the Amazon Pyrocles disguises himself as is Zelmane, so that gives the bastard three names. Evidently Zelmane is a real person Pyrocles was formerly in love with, so his dressing up as Zelmane brings a kind of Demeter-Proserpine or Venus-Psyche archetype in.
I keep missing things: in ch. 9, when Pyrocles falls in love, he wants to clear out, but Musidorus wants to stay, and describes the Arcadia they’re in as an earthly Paradise. “Do not these stately trees seem to maintain their flourishing old age with the only happiness of their seat, being clothed with a continual spring, because no beauty here should ever fade?” [112]. Grass like emeralds; harmony of birds; echoes and murmuring brooks, “some Goddess inhabiteth this Region, who is the soul of this soil” [112]. The point is that the same landscape looks different to different people, like the island in The Tempest.
13. Pyrocles’ story is that he fell in love with Philoclea’s picture, which he saw in Kalander’s house. Somewhere else—Man of Law’s Tale, isn’t it? Anyway, the picture is used as a communication medium, so to speak, and of course the whole ut pictura poesis complex is involved. Complicated, picture as Eros’ arrow: I haven’t got it all. So he dresses up as Zelmane and approaches the retreat where Basilius is with his queen Gynecia and his two daughters. Eunuchus archetype of man getting access to women’s quarters by making himself a woman or eunuch. Philoclea has black eyes, like Stella: color of hair not stated, but “why should I not rather call them [hairs] her beams” [146] suggests a blonde, also like Stella. Unusual coloring not commented on, either here or in Astrophel and Stella. Between her gawdawful-beautiful tits “there hung a very rich diamond set but in a black horn, the word I have since read is this: ‘yet still myself’ ” [146]. Fine virgin-in-lower-world-symbol.
14. The king has a revolving restaurant, turned around by water underneath, and artificial birds going guggle-guggle with water-pipes stuck into them—this childish nonsense is in Nashe, where one would expect it, as well as here, where one doesn’t. So the connection with Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, I don’t know what. “My Reason (now grown a servant to passion) did yet often tell his master, that he should more moderately use his delight” [149]. Carrying on of prince-and-counsellor allegory, in the Miltonic shape. Complications: Basilius, who in spite of being a king is an old fool, and eighty years old besides, falls in love with Zelmane, and so does Gynecia, who suspects she ain’t a she. Twelfth Night situation: described as a “maze” [151] and a “labyrinth.” So Zelmane, like the woman who married the pansy, doesn’t know which way to turn.
15. The “ladies” amuse themselves, mainly by torturing birds. Then a challenge comes from Phalantus, a bastard brother of Helen of Corinth, and a good guy, only he’s fallen for a silly mistress named Artesia, sister of the Ismenus who’s Amphialus’ page: she got him the job because she likes Amphialus. In spite of her name Artesia isn’t a gusher but a narcist pool: she’d been taught “to think that there is no wisdom but in including heaven and earth in one’s self: and that love, courtesy, gratefulness, friendship, and all other virtues are rather to be taken on, than in one’s self” [154]. The person who taught her this was Cecropia, sister in law of Basilius, of whom more later. Anyway, she insists that Phalantus go charging around the country challenging everybody in her name. The reasoning is conventional: if Knight A knocks Knight B off his horse, Knight A’s girl friend is more beautiful than Knight B’s girlfriend. This seems to be the origin of the Squire of Dames business in Spenser.
16. So we get a tournament, with the usual procession and description of arms and mottoes. This progress of pictorial symbols certainly has some archetypal significance, but I don’t yet know what it is. It’s a development of course of things like the shield of Achilles, a contemplative pause is the headlong rush of “and-then” incidents.
Sidney does his best with his compulsory scene, describing the procession of conquered beauties with great conciseness and wit: of one he says “she was a Queen, and therefore beautiful” [159]. The eleven include Parthenia (who wasn’t defended by her husband, and tells him to stay out of the nonsense), Urania, and finally a “daughter to the King Plexirtus” [161] who bears the highly confusing name of Zelmane.
17. Phalantus does his stuff, overthrowing five knights, including one who’s supporting Gynecia, “which Basilius himself was content, not only to suffer, but to be delighted with” [162]. Cavaliere servente in its literal sense. Young shepherd named Lalus who wants to fight for Urania but hasn’t any armour; king won’t let him, “then began to feel poverty, that he could not set himself to that trial” [163]. Clitophon then enters and loses on points, to his great annoyance; then two disguised knights, who turn out to be respectively Pyrocles (Zelmane) for Philoclea and Musidorus for Pamela. After a lot of kafuffle Pyrocles is selected (after a three-cornered fight), and whales the daylight out of Phalantus, whose mistress promptly deserts him. Phalantus takes a courteous leave of Basilius, escorts Artesia back to her home, and tells her to go to hell—curiously incisive scene.
18. “Zelmane was like the one that stood in a tree waiting a good occasion to shoot” [168], carrying on the hunting metaphor. Yes, Muridorus has fallen in love too, luckily with Pamela, so everything’s symmetrical. Extraordinary story about keeping a man named Menalcas prisoner who has befriended him in the most generous way—romances like this sure don’t care about ordinary morals, except when they follow romantic conventions.
19. Musidorus, now calling himself Dorus, bribes Dametas to become a shepherd in his service. A remarkable locus amoenus description of the place the “pastorals” are going to be held follows. Trees “as if it had been to enclose a Theatre” [175], and arbors making a gallery, shaded from the sun—Paradise Lost echo, very slight. Well, out of the woods come a lion and a bear, symmetrical to the last, one for each hero. Philoclea runs away from the lion and Pyrocles tears him up, cutting off the head and running back to give it to his girlfriend. She runs “like Arethus when she ran from Alpheus” [176], the winds blow up her skirts, so Pyrocles doesn’t run too fast or start yelling hey here’s your head on account he wants to see more. Lovely parody-song by Dametas in praise of his own life—he hides from the bear like the peasant in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, book 6. He’s “no whit out of countenance with all that had been said, because he had no worse to fall into than his own” [181]. The beasts were let out by Lady Cecropia, mother of Amphialus (who was originally Basilius’ nephew and his heir, until the two girls were born). She’s a Bad Woman, clearly. Basilius pays no attention, because he “thought so much of his late conceived commonwealth, that all other matters were but digressions unto him” [182]. That is, his retreat is a comic obsession like the philosophy one in Love’s Labour’s Lost and other humorous resolves. Some Gonzalo overtones. After this the great firework show of the “Eclogues” begins and winds up the book.
Extraordinary firework display of poetic virtuosity at the end of the first book: this is a central idea of the whole design from the beginning. I suppose it represents a climb up the Eros hill: first we get the tournament, a ritual war for the sake of ladies, corresponding roughly to the games section of Classical epics; then, as we get nearer the summit of the pastoral world, a higher ritual or contest of poetry. Cf. Spenser, using this for the final quest of Courtesy or good words. This final scene is a masque with torches used. The shepherds who ran away from the lion and bear are made torch-bearers. The first offering is a leaping dance like a braule, to pipe music, which “made a right picture of their chief god Pan, and his companions the Satyrs” [182]. Pan is, I suppose, the element of rusticity in shepherd life: Dametas’ parody song about having save his own life is addressed to Pan. Then the shepherds improvise couplets; then there’s a dialogue poem; then a long poem containing a fable, sung by, apparently, Sidney himself, who’s represented as being sunk in love-melancholy, like Jaques in the forest of Arden. Then a lively dialogue about the pros and cons of married life; then Strephon and Claius come back into the action and sing that magnificent double sestina. Then Zelmane sings Sapphics, and that ends the show.
Arcadia, Book Two (1590 version)
1. Operatic scene of erotic complications: the old Basilius loves Zelmane, and sings a poem beginning and ending “Let not old age disgrace my high desire.” Gynecia, who knows that Zelmane is actually a man, and is violently in love with him, finds herself in a Phaedria type of situation. Zelmane, of course, wants Philoclea (as Gynecia knows).
2. Scene shifts to Musidorus, or Dorus, who wants Pamela, and makes love to the foolish Mopsa as a way of getting his sentiments across to Pamela. Apparently this sort of thing is considered cricket. “These beasts, like children to nature, inherit her blessings quietly; we, like bastards, are laid abroad, even as foundlings to be trained up by grief and sorrow” [222]. Pastoral model of state of innocence; love melancholy as symbol of the Angst that such a surrounding inspires in humanity, nature’s bastard. Pamela says “it is not for us {women} to play the philosophers, in seeking out your hidden virtues; since that, which in a wise prince would be counted wisdom, in us will be taken for a light-grounded affection” [226]. Not quite sure what this means, but it’s clearly about the female role in love rituals.
3. Very complicated chapter, a narrative on two levels. Musidorus is telling Pyrocles that he told Pamela that story of his origin, so that his account is on the level of “truth” in relation to Pyrocles, and of “fiction” in relation to Pamela (because, by a further complication, he’s telling it to her in front of Mopsa, who has to be deceived). Musidorus and Pyrocles are princes of Thessaly and Macedon respectively, shipwrecked at the beginning of the story. “Arcadia was … the charmed circle, where all his spirits for ever should be enchanted” [229]. I.e., he’s in love with Pamela, the “sublime” or haughty (well, majestic) sister. Note that Basilius is really the impotent old king, modulated to (a) retirement (b) deception, or better self-deception, about the honesty of Dametas (c) infatuation with Zelmane (senile). Hero says when he fell in love with Pamela “he left in himself nothing, but a maze of longing, and a dungeon of sorrow” [229]. Maze and dungeon are objective correlatives of love-melancholy in a pastoral setting, drawn from the night-world below. Strephon and Claius do have the same girl friend, but are still friends.
4. Basilius goes out hawking. “For as a good builder to a high tower will not make his stair upright, but winding almost the full compass about, that the steepness be the more unsensible; so she, seeing the towering of her pursued chase, went circling, and compassing about, rising so with the less sense of rising” [236]. Widening gyre: note the winding stair in the tower image. Well, Sidney asks himself why the hell he doesn’t get down to how Philoclea’s feeling. It appears she’s got a terrific Lesbian crush on Zelmane (these things are easy to suggest in disguise-plots). “The only two bands of good will, loveliness and lovingness” [238]. Well, she makes a heroine of Zelmane and wants to imitate her, “Then dreams by night began to bring more unto her, than she durst wish by day” [240]. She goes to a “goodly white marble stone” [241] dedicated in ancient time to the Sylvan gods, where she’s already written a poem in praise of virginity. Stone of morality like the Pierre one—well, not really; it’s more a hard chastity symbol. “She went in among those few trees, so closed in the tops together, as they might seem a little chapel; and there might she by the help of the moonlight perceive the goodly stone, which served as an altar in that woody devotion” [241]. So she writes a palinode or retractation, saying she’s spotted, or something. “My parents have told me, that in these fair heavenly bodies, there are great hidden deities, which have their working in the ebbing and flowing of our estates” [243]. “Unlawful desires are punished after the effect of enjoying; but unpossible desires are punished in the desire itself” [243]. Not easy to see how far Lesbian affection can go.
5. Girls get together, and “with dear, through chaste embracements” [245], tell each other they’re in love. Usual setup, as I’ve said, of elder-sublime and younger-beautiful, hence some appropriateness as an Amazon. Pamela describes how well her boyfriend can ride, which of course proves he’s of noble birth. Centaur, and takes the ring with sprezzatura: great emphasis on the perfection of his bodily rhythms as, first, a rider, then a dancer, then an actor. “The handmaid of wisdom is slow belief” [247], says she, but she’s catching on fast. Note of course the Castiglione emphasis on grace of accomplishments, and the link, which as Yeats says is also in early Japanese culture (Tale of Genji), between heroism and delicacy. The knight is always the man on the horse (hippes, equites, cavaliers, rittere, etc.), and the horse symbolizes his mastery of what’s below him, in other words the integrity of his microcosm. Well, Dorus writes her a letter, delivering it “as if he had been but the coffin that carried himself to his sepulchre” [250]. Of course his accomplishments show he’s of princely blood despite the disguise. Here’s a central point for the fifth lecture: in primitive belief the king incarnates his whole people, so the Egyptian Pharaoh achieves immorality for that people: the notion of individual immorality comes later. Similarly, the fact that romance is usually about princes and princesses goes with the expectation that the reader will identify with that prince or princess, so the snobbery turns inside out as what I call fraternity.
6. Dorus continues his story, a contemporary one about him to Pamela, a historical one to Mopsa. In this chapter we begin to get the Utopian “historiology,” as Sidney calls it, that Fulke Greville speaks of. Note the appropriateness of flashback techniques to an Arcadian scene, as in Morris’ Earthly Paradise: i.e., reminiscent stories are what one would expect. Anyway, he tells the story of Euarchus, Pyrocles’ father, King of Macedon. He created a Tudor revolution in Macedon, finding his people victims of baronial tyranny, “the worst kind of Oligarchy; that is, when men are governed indeed by a few, and yet are not taught to know what those few be, to whom they should obey” [254]. Hence the king’s name was being abused to foster tyranny, and “wit abused, rather to feign reason why it should be amiss, than how it should be amended” [255]. The king cleaned up the exactions of those who “by a fallacy of argument thinking themselves most Kings, when the subject is most basely subjected” [256]. “In sum, I might as easily set down the whole Art of government, as to lay before your eyes the picture of his proceedings” [256]. He makes friends with Dorilaus, King of Thessaly, and they make a cross-marriage, marrying each other’s sisters. Musidorus born first; soothsayers predict great things of him; King of Phrygia gets scared (Herod theme) and goes to war, “not considering, that if it were a work of the superior powers, the heavens at length are never children” [257]. Well, he and his allies got beat up, and “they begat of a just war, the best child, peace” [257]. Wonder if Yeats, of course [sic]: wish he’d inherited Sidney’s sense.
7. Sketch of ideal education of prince(s): “so that a habit of commanding was naturalized in them” [259]. Go off in the inevitable ship, and learn something about sailing: “to consider the art of catching the wind prisoner, to no other end, but to run away with it; to see how beauty and use can so well agree together, that of all the trinkets, wherewith they are attired, there is not one but serves to some necessary purpose” [260]. He goes on to a digressive sentence about love and the loadstone, latter compared to mistress drawing a hard heart, and “make it aspire to so high a Love, as of the heavenly Poles” [260]. These random images have some point always, even one in chapter 6 about shooting at the mid-day sun. Well, we then get the inevitable storm, described with great liveliness and, I think, reminiscent of the opening of the Aeneid. These storms symbolize (a) plunge into experience (b) the anxiety of “falling” asleep in a dream world. “The tyranny of the wind, and the treason of the sea” [262]—these are political overtones latent in the opening scene of The Tempest too. “Certainly there is no danger carries with it more horror, than that which grows in those floating kingdoms. For that dwelling place is unnatural to mankind .…” [262]. Well, the princes escape; two Phrygians captured in the recent war and ransomed by their generosity give up their planks to them, or something—twin servant theme. (Incidentally, Pyrocles’ father and mother die early and he’s brought up with Musidorus.)
8. Pyrocles cast on shore of Phrygia, which has a shore, like Bohemia in Shakespeare, and is grabbed by the Herod-type king, still terrified by prophecies about Musidorus. He’d much rather kill Musidorus, but Pyrocles will have to do. Interesting assumption that tyranny and an inquisitive police force go together: tyrant is of course melancholy, with a “toad-like retiredness” [265]. Makes a great ritual of executing Pyrocles; Musidorus picked up by a fisherman and taken to the King of Pontus, where he hears of Pyrocles’ trouble and offers himself instead. Damon and Pythias archetype. He’s accepted, but Pyrocles disguises himself as the executioner’s assistant and puts a sword in his hand at the moment of death: they start fighting and eventually the soldiers start fighting among themselves, on the dragons’-teeth principle, “wherewith certain young men of the bravest minds, cried with loud voice, Liberty” [269], and a revolution breaks out. King flees, gathers a counter-revolutionary force and is beaten in the field—Bosworth archetype.50 Also killed, with his son, one by Musidorus, other by Pyrocles, nach. People are cautious, in a Renaissance way, make Musidorus their king because he’s born a prince, but Musidorus resigns the crown to an older man next in succession—Gonzalo archetype, and buggers off. During the story he lapses into the first person, but Mopsa’s apparently asleep.
9. Sorry, it’s a nobleman of Pontus that picked up Musidorus; the king is another tyrant, though “humorous” and capricious rather than consistently melancholy. He has an envious counsellor, “a man whose favour no man could win, but by being miserable” [272]. The two brothers who’d given up their plank fall into his hands; he makes a great deal of them at first, “praising himself in heart, in that he praised them” [272]. But of course it can’t last, and he eventually executes them. So Musidorus and Pyrocles make war on him (the people of Phrygia are grateful enough to follow them), and execute him on their tomb, which they build. The counsellor is under sentence, but “his heart brake even to death with the beholding the honour done to the dead carcasses” [273]. The princes then go and kill a couple of giants, and bugger off again: “thinking it not so worthy, to be brought to heroical effects by fortune, or necessity (like Ulysses and Aeneas), as by one’s own choice, and working” [275].
10. This chapter is the source of the Gloucester theme in King Lear. (Dropped stitch in 9: Pyrocles could have been King of Pontus, as Musidorus of Phrygia, but he finds a sister in the line of succession, marries her to the Gonzalo type in Phrygia, and unites the kingdoms.) Back to 10: princes are in Galatia in the winter, where there’s “so extreme and foul a storm, that never any winter, I think, brought forth a fouler child” [275]. They see an old blind man and his son, “poorly arrayed” [275]: he’s the King of Paphlagonia; son’s name is Leonatus (Shakespearean name). Refugees, “no man dare know, but that must be miserable” [276]. Leonatus begins the story and says his father was “driven to such grief, as even now he would have had me to have led him to the top of this rock, thence to cast himself headlong to death” [276]. King takes over story in order to blame himself for favoring a bastard son named Plexirtus, to the point of condemning his good son to death, only the ruffians as usual don’t do it, so he escapes and lives poorly. Pyrocles takes over all government, “so that ere I was aware, I had left myself nothing but the name of a King” [278]—link with the main Lear story. Also the Tempest theme, of course. Blinds the king and then lets him go, “neither imprisoning, nor killing me; but rather delighting to make me feel my misery” [278]. So he wants to jump over the cliff, “meaning to free him [the good son] from so Serpentine a companion as I am” [279]. Well, Plexirtus turns up, having heard of Leonatus and determined to kill him himself, “though no eyes of sufficient credit in such matter, but his own; and therefore came himself to be actor, and spectator” [279]. The two princes try to rescue them, and are assisted by a force from the new King of Pontus, who was warned in a dream to follow them, because where they were was “a fit place enough to make the state of any Tragedy” [280]. Pyrocles is rescued by a couple of heroic, if mistaken supporters, wanting “rather to be good friends, than good men” [280], but he loses the kingdom and the blind king is re-established, giving the rule to his good son, then “even in a moment died” [281]. Pyrocles manages to get himself pardoned by hypocrisy and fawning and self-accusation, “while the poor villains, chief ministers of his wicked, now betrayed by the author thereof, were delivered to many cruel sorts of death” [282]. Usually sharp tone. Princes go off to rescue the Queen of Lycia, named Erona.
11. Interruption and back to the Arcadian retreat—cf. Ariosto and the retirement of Orlando. Mopsa falls asleep and snores, but as soon as Musidorus attempts a declaration of love “while this dragon sleeps, that keeps the golden fruit” [283], Pamela wakes her up. Well, then the girls go to the river Ladon to bathe (“wash themselves,” Sidney says), and Zelmane, in an Actaeon-among-Diana’s-nymphs role, watches them get undressed and into the stream. Zelmane naturally gets a tremendous erection which inspires her with song; she (i.e. Zelmane) grabs a lute; her heart danced to the music and her feet beat time to it, “while her body was the room where it should be celebrated; her soul the Queen which should be delighted” [287]. The song, not unnaturally, turns out to be a catalogue of Philoclea’s beauties, from stem to stern, or rather from hair to feet. Black eyes again; ears with “maze” imagery—curious how the ears are labyrinthine long before their anatomy was known; navel (I’m skipping, though he doesn’t) a “seal of virgin-wax” (symbol of the virginal cunt); belly is, or leads to, the place where
In that sweet seat the boy doth sport:
Loath, I must leave his chief resort,
For such a use the world hath gotten,
The best things still must be forgotten. [289]
The last couplet is apparently being quoted. Curiously haunting pieces of prudery, with overtones that go away beyond it. Maybe we’re close here to the whole secret of forgetting, and of why the most obvious things are the hardest to see—cf. also of course the maternal diagram in Finnegans Wake. Some overtones too in the prose ow-oo that precedes the poem: why doesn’t the river stop and embrace Philoclea properly? “But the reason is manifest, the upper streams make such haste to have their part of embracing, that the nether, though loathly, must needs give place unto them” [286]. Elizabethans put political metaphors into the damnedest places.
A silly episode follows: Amphialus, referred to in Book One, is close by, and his spaniel grabs Philoclea’s glove and then her notebook. Zelmane follows, and as soon as he hears that he’s facing a potential rival his erection modulates and he gets as furious as a bull in heat (which he is) and falls on Amphialus, who, thinking he’s fighting a woman, backs off and finally gets a wound in the—guess where—thigh. They part as chivalrous enemies. Actually the episode isn’t really silly: it’s psychologically quite accurate. What makes me impatient is (a) the idealizing of the hero (Pyrocles) which makes this kind of thing ideal too and (b) the general atmosphere of tee-hee.
12. It wasn’t a notebook of course; it was a “paper” containing a poem written by Basilius, which is a dialogue between Basilius and Plangus about the latter’s ow-oo about Erona, who’s being threatened with death. Only things to note are: first, Shakespeare seems to have kept reading after chapter 10:
Let dolts in hast some altars fair erect
To those high powers, which idly sit above,
And virtue do in greatest need neglect. [297]
Not that it’s a particularly specific echo. The rhymes get longer as the poem goes on, and towards the end they become triple: rightfulness and sightfulness. Interesting that so many of these poems are dialogues; there’s a comment in the Eclogue section of Book One about the shepherds’ composing their poems antiphonally, and the dialogue poem (I don’t want to be superstitious about it, but that’s what it looks like) introduces the Platonic conception of the symposium-dialogue into the Arcadian surrounding. I wish the bloody ribbon would work.51
13. Philoclea tells the story of Erona. Daughter of king of Lycia, where Cupid is worshipped, with a lot of naked statues. Erona goes tsk-tsk and gets her father to destroy all the images: this gets Cupid sore and he makes her fall in love with someone called Antiphilus. Tiridates king of Armenia, who used to love her, now hates her and leads an army in to bugger things up. Pyrocles and Musidorus turn up and in a combat of three apiece they kill their opponents but Plangus, on Armenia’s side, takes Antiphilus prisoner. So Tiridates holds him as a hostage: Erona gets Pyrocles and Musidorus to rescue him; they do and kill Tiridates. A Christian writer dealing with pagan polytheism of course can get some interesting results; “if Cupid be a god, or that tyranny of our own thoughts seem as a God unto us” [304].
14. Regular technique of interruption of these retrospective narratives: Miso brings in a scheme to tell stories by lot and insists on telling hers first, so we have a grotesque lower-class parody besides all the courtly stuff. It appears that the ability to tell a story well is an upper-class characteristic, as in the third book of Castiglione. It’s followed by a parody-poem deriving Love’s descent from Argus and Io. Mopsa then has her turn, telling an old nurse’s fairy tale, until she’s interrupted by the ladies.
15. Story of Plangus. It’s the Phaedria story again: he falls in love with a woman, or thinks he does: “if that may be called love, which he rather did take into himself willingly, than by which he was taken forcibly” [313]. His father the king (his mother’s dead) gets to hear about this, and tries to stop it, but the only result is that the silly old bugger falls in love with her himself. Sends son away to a war and marries her; son comes back, stepmother makes a play for him. When he says no, she plots against him, and he’s exiled to avoid being executed. Curious how persistent this theme is in romance.
16. More about the Basilius-Zelmane business: he gets Philoclea to plead his cause, or rather Zelmane arranges this, for obvious reasons.
17. In the resulting interview between Philoclea and Zelmane, the latter declares himself to be himself, i.e., Pyrocles. Philoclea knows she ought to disapprove, but doesn’t, and the epiphany of a male lover is compared to the satisfaction of Pygmalion. “Though the pureness of my virgin mind be stained, let me keep the true simplicity of my word” [330]. This means that Pyrocles can go on telling the story of his achievements in the first person—epiphany by hearing as well as sight.
18. Anaxius, the son of a man killed earlier by Pyrocles, is very proud, and challenges Pyrocles to single combat. Pyrocles agrees, but on the way he finds a man, Pamphilus, tied to a tree by nine women, who are pricking him, probably to death, with bodkins, proposing to end the fun by putting out his eyes. Pyrocles chases them away, all but one, named Dido, who’s still plenty sore. It appears he’s not very nice to the ladies. “He came with such an authority among us, as if the Planets had done enough for us, that by us once he had been delighted” [337]. He passes up nine women on various excuses, and her on the excuse that he’s seen prettier women, which naturally infuriates her.
19. Goes on to meet Anaxius, who comes two days late because he doesn’t like being kept waiting. Terrific fight, because Anaxius is no set-up, but in the middle of it comes the rescued Pamphilus, flogging his Dido with whips. Pyrocles leaves the fight to rescue her; she’s driven toward a castle where Pamphilus and his friends are going to strip her, apparently for a gang-rape or something. Pyrocles gets laughed at by onlookers for being a coward, but he thinks the lady has priority. So he rescues her in her own castle, and then finds that her father, named Chremes (comic churl name) is a miser and hates to be grateful because it might cost him something. Sounds like the Malbecco theme in Spenser. “Such a man, as any enemy could not wish him worse, than to be himself” [343]. There’s a price on Pyrocles’ head, so Chremes decides to betray him: Pyrocles is in a very tight spot until Musidorus comes along, and then the King of Iberia, father of Plangus. Chremes is sentenced to be hanged and his daughter is killed by “clowns” [344].
20. The Phaedria lady is named Andromana, and when Musidorus and Pyrocles come into her kingdom she’s sole ruler, her infatuated husband having given everything into her hands. Well, she wants both Musidorus and Pyrocles, “often wishing, that she might be the angle, where the lines of our friendship might meet” [348]. Sounds like a fairly acute angle. They say so, she says you won’t, eh, and sticks them in prison. She’s got her fool king to disinherit Plangus and give the heir rights to her own son, named Pallidius, a Good Guy in spite of his ancestry. He’s in love with a woman named Zelmane, who doesn’t love him and does love Pyrocles. Anyway, they get let out of jail.
21. Another tournament, less elaborately described than the earlier one: held on the anniversary of Andromana’s marriage to her clunkhead. Queen Helen of Corinth sends knights. She’s praised because “she made her people by peace, warlike; her courtiers by sports, learned; her Ladies by Love, chaste” [352]. Sounds vaguely allegorical, though there’s very little if any Elizabethan-nudges in this story. Well, the heroes are let out to take part in this tournament, then run away to Bithynia, whence Andromana chases them with, I think, “threescore” knights, but, hell, that’s only thirty apiece, and “we esteemed few swords in a just defence, able to resist many unjust assaulters” [356]. Curious that Sidney goes in for this crap: he’s enough of a soldier himself to know how silly it is. Palladius, the virtuous son of this randy hag, is treacherously murdered, whereupon “many of his subjects’ bodies we left there dead, to wait on him more faithfully to the other world” [356]. Andromana eventually discovers her son’s death and kills herself.
22. I thought he’d killed Pamphilus, the treacherous Don Juan type, but he evidently hadn’t: this chapter begins with another lady’s ow-oo. So he sticks her in a house “dedicated to Vestal Nuns” [359], and is then overtaken by Zelmane disguised as a page-boy and calling her Daiphantus, both names that P. himself takes earlier. She serves him for two months, at least, while he’s in Bithynia; then he goes back to Galatia, the kingdom where the Gloucester type was blinded by Plexirtus and rescued by Leonatus. We remember that Leonatus forgave his bastard brother, whose cause was supported by two very brave but misguided knights, named Tydeus and Telenor. Leonatus finds that Plexirtus is gonna poison him, so he sends him off to conquer Trebizond: he goes, but manages to inveigle Tydeus and Telenor into fighting each other, so they kill each other, so Plexirtus is killed at the end of the chapter, and as he’s Zelmane’s father that makes a complication for the next chapter.
23. Actually he isn’t dead; Sidney’s language is ambiguous. What happens is that Zelmane, now Pyrocles’ page, pines away and dies, because (a) her father’s a Bad Guy and Pyrocles is his enemy and (b) Pyrocles doesn’t love her and never will. Death-bed speech, asking Pyrocles and Musidorus to take the names Daiphantus and Palladius (her unsuccessful lover) when they go to Greece. Pyrocles remarks to Philoclea, to whom of course he’s telling all this story, that “if my stars had not wholly reserved me for you, there else perhaps I might have loved, and (which had been most strange) begun my love after death” [367]. Then: “yet something there was, which (when I saw a picture of yours) brought again her figure into my remembrance” [367]. I don’t know what he’ll make of this, if anything, but the Ligeia archetype is there.
Somebody named Otave, along with two giants, is attacking the King of Pontus, who’s the friend of Musidorus and Pyrocles. Plexirtus has been made prisoner by a knight who has reason to hate him, and lets him out to be devoured by a horrible monster, with the proviso that if anybody likes him well enough to kill the master instead he’ll go free. So Pyrocles does, on account he’s promised Zelmane he would, while Musidorus cleans up on the giants.
24. (I forgot to note the headnote to chapter 17: “Their conclusion, with re-entry to their intermitted historiology.” He uses this word at least twice in the headnotes, and it must be a very early use of it in English: note the persistence of the convention of romance, which runs from Heliodorus to Scott, of seeking affinity to historical writing.)
This chapter brings us back to the in medias res beginning, both the circular technique and the circumstances of the beginning being strongly reminiscent of Heliodorus. The two heroes decide to go into Greece, and their ship is outfitted by Plexirtus, who also plots to have them killed. The plot is disclosed by one of his henchmen, but the Captain, who has been a pirate, has also been suborned. They take new names as above, “as well for our own promise to Zelmane, as because we desired to come unknown into Greece” [371]. Theme of hero (doubled) coming over the sea to a new land. Captain does his stuff; some sailors take the heroes’ part, a fight breaks out, “(like the children of Cadmus) we continued still to slay one another” [374], the ship catches fire and burns up, Pyrocles grabs a mast, finds his sword on it, kills the Captain who’s also grabbed it, and gets tossed ashore in Laconia. And, says Philoclea, what about Musidorus? Dunno, he’s lost, says Pyrocles. No he ain’t and you know it, says she. “What is mine, even to my soul, is yours: but the secret of my friend is not mine” [375]. Anyway that’s cleared up, and we’re back where we started, now that we’re near the end of Book Two.
25. Gycenia has a curious dream, about Zelmane, whom of course she’s in love with. “Zelmane was vanished, and she found nothing but a dead body like unto her husband, which seeming at the first with a strange smell to infect her. … the dead body, she thought, took her in his arms, and said, Gynecia, leave all; for here is thy only rest” [376]. Funny how much the poets actually do know about dreams. More stuff about this, then a rebellion breaks out, where again Sidney takes the side of the gentry. Of course they aren’t armed, so it’s a little more plausible that Zelmane can kill them by droves, ending with a painter who wanted to see wounds as background study for a painting of the Centaurs and Lapithae. Zelmane cuts off both his hands, haw, haw.
26. Zelmane makes a speech to the surviving rebels, which makes a division of opinion among them, according to Elizabethan beliefs about the hydra-headed mob—and of course they would be mobs, too, in the absence of any authentic information. “Do you think them fools, that saw you should not enjoy your vines, your cattle, no, not your wives and children, without government; and that there could be no government without a Magistrate, and no Magistrate without obedience, and no obedience where every one upon own private passion, may interpret the doing of the rulers?” [385]. Typical example of sorites reason from anxiety-premises. This struck through “the rugged wilderness of their imaginations” [386]
27. Clinias, a leader of the mob, and a spy in the pay of Cecropia, had been stirring them up, taking advantage of the “strange retiring of Basilius” [387]. Funny how Sidney, and all his contemporaries, can advance these anxiety-arguments about order simultaneously with depicting actual rulers as fools. Being a hypocrite, he swings around as soon as his cause is lost, calling the mob “more mad than the Giants that would have plucked Jupiter out of heaven” [388], and starting opposition with a man who’s fallen in love with Zelmane and perceives “that the people, once anything down the hill from their fury, would never stop till they came to the bottom of absolute yielding” [388]—effective description of the avalanche mentality of crowds—so Clinias is wounded and takes shelter with the establishment, “bleeding for that was past, and quaking for fear of more” [388]. The mob is “divided in minds and not divided in companies” [388], so they start fighting with each other. After they disperse with about a score left alive, he tells a lying story about his part in the insurrection. There are some quite effective phrases about rebellion, as Sidney is nobody’s fool: “Public affairs were mingled with private grudges, neither was any man thought of wit, that did not pretend some cause of mislike. Railing was counted the fruit of freedom, and saying nothing had his uttermost praise in ignorance” [390]. The crowd says, according to him, “Let us do that, which all the rest think. Let it be said, that we only are not astonished with vain titles, which have their force but in our force” [391].
28. Dametas sings a second song in praise of himself for having preserved his own life: these songs are brilliant little parodies, and ought to be better known. Long discourse between Basilius and his regent Philanax, which takes us back to the situation at the beginning, contrapuntal to the shipwrecking of the two heroes. Basilius quotes the oracle, which he interprets favorably to his pursuit of Pyrocles-Zelmane. Recites a poem in praise of Apollo—note of course the oracle design theme.
29. Goes back to the story of Antiphilus and Erona (chapter 13). Antiphilus is loved by Erona, and evidently marries her, but he’s no good, falls in love with Artaxia, who hates his guts, passes a law making polygamy legal so he can marry Artaxia, is kidnapped by her and along with Erona sentenced to be sacrificed: he on Tiridates’ birthday, she on his death day six months later. Antiphilus “could not perceive that he was a king of reasonable creatures, who would quickly scorn follies, and repine at injuries” [398]. Well, Antiphilus does get sacrificed, mainly through women’s-lib types who don’t like the polygamy law. Silly story about agreement that Erona can be let go if Pyrocles and Musidorus turn up in time to rescue her. Plangus, the rightful heir of the story in chapter 15, does his best to find them, but they’ve disappeared, of course, and his appeal to Basilius himself is ignored (Basilius is telling this story to Zelmane), “the course of my life being otherwise bent” [406]. In other words he’s no better than Dametas. Some hope that Euarchus, whoever he is, will rescue her. Euarchus is Pyrocles’ father.
The Eclogues of the Second Book are less impressive than those of the First, but they’re very lively poems all the same. In reference to the late rebellion, the shepherds make a dialogue-song of Reason and Passion; then there are couple of debate poems, the second lively and humorous. Zelmane wants an ow-oo, as being more suited to her condition, and more aristocratic anyway. So a shepherd sings a dialogue-song of Strephon and Klaius, who appear to be absent. Then there’s an echo song and that’s it.
Arcadia, Book Three, 1590 Version.
1. Stock Courtly Love foolishness about Musidorus, who not only loves Pamela but says so, so she goes into the haughty-mistress routine and he goes charging around the woods saying ow-oo and writing an interminable elegy, which, we’re told, took him a lot of trouble. “Being a child of Passion, and never acquainted with mediocrity” [435]. Doesn’t want to commit suicide because “if it destroyed Dorus, it should also destroy the image of her that lived in Dorus” [437]. Leisure-class amusements.
2. Young women are invited to country-wenches sports, consisting of six girls in scarlet petticoats up to the knee—at least they come with the invitation. They decide to go, and are seized by twenty armed men, along with Zelmane, who doesn’t get a chance to draw her sword. This is Cecropia’s idea: when she married, she thought her husband would be the successor of Basilius; the husband died and she thought her son Amphialus would make it; then the old fool Basilius married Gynecia, a young woman—she’s the one who calls him a doting fool, but she’s right. So they’re stuck in a castle in the midst of a great lake, upon a high rock. Amphialus remains very decent; Cecropia does the Lady Macbeth act, saying she’d rather he hated Philoclea than loved her, because “Hate often begetteth victory; Love commonly is the instrument of subjection” [447].
3. So Amphialus goes in to make love to Philoclea, who gives him the obvious answers. She looks like Venus bewailing the murder of Adonis, although the Pluto-Proserpine myth is a lot closer. “You entitle yourself my slave, but I am sure I am yours” [449], etc. Heroine as slave—note the name Pamela echoing in Richardson.
4. A political chapter, telling how Amphialus tried to get a crusade going against Basilius’ regent, whom he represents as not only a bad man but of lower birth. A quite brilliant description of what the Elizabethans would call policy, using people according to their gifts, even according to their vices. He strengthens his castle “which at least would win him much time, the mother of many mutations” [454]. However, he has to remember at intervals that he’s in love.
5. Something I missed: Cecropia’s speech to Amphialus in chapter 2 is called in the headnotes her “auricular confession.” Also, in 3: Amphialus doesn’t want to dress too cheerfully because that looks like triumph, nor too mournfully because that looks like a bad omen for her. So his actual choice is carefully described: Sidney has his points as a novelist. Well, in 5 Cecropia visits Philoclea and tries to talk her over: “You think you are offended, and are indeed defended” [458], and other antitheses. Tries to rouse Philoclea’s curiosity by breaking off, but Philoclea “rather wished to unknow what she knew” [458]. Philoclea says she’s vowed to virginity: Cecropia makes a long rhetorical speech in favor of marriage and motherhood. Actually Cecropia is quite good at rhetoric. Finally Philoclea. says “whilst she was so captived, she could not conceive of any such persuasions … than as constraints” [462].
6. Cecropia now tackles Pamela, who responds with the prayer that got into Eikon Basilike and was so exploited by Milton. Not a bad prayer either, only the last sentence, God bless Musidorus, would have to be left off.
7. Basilius’ army, led by Philanax, comes to attack Amphialus, so we get an Iliad-type gut-cut. Amphialus’ chief counsellor, Clinias, is a coward, but Amphialus isn’t, so there’s a long catalogue of who got killed.
8. More gut-cut. Ismenus, Amphialus’ squire killed by Philanax, who’s then taken prisoner. A black knight, who will undoubtedly turn out to be Musidorus, appears and fights.
9. Amphialus retreats, and then makes an immensely long song to Philoclea. No dice. Philanax is release on Philoclea’s entreaty, after a speech about his honour.
10. A very long chapter, beginning with Pamela’s making an embroidered purse and going on to Cecropia’s temptation. She makes long speeches of the Shakespeare Venus type, urging that beauty should marry and produce offspring—Venus rather than the sonnets, because the arguments are supposed to be specious. Pamela says no, I marry whom daddy says I should marry, otherwise I offend God. To hell with God, says Cecropia: this sets up one of those endless Elizabethan arguments about how there must be a God, how impossible it is that the universe arose from chance, how absurd it is to think of nature as a democracy or anything but a Tudor monarchy, etc.: wonder if Milton was at all influenced by this for Comus. After all, he did spot the prayer in 6, unless Liljegren and that fool Empson are right.52 “Man, who while by the pregnancy of his imagination he strives to things supernatural, meanwhile he loseth his own natural felicity” [488]—that’s Cecropia. Pamela says if chance had ordered the cosmos heaviness would have gone so far down and lightness so far up that they’d never have stuck together. The sea “seems to observe so just a dance, and yet understands no music” [490]. “As if one should say, that one’s foot might be wise, and himself foolish” [491]. “whether you will allow to be the Creator thereof, as undoubtedly he is, or the soul and governor thereof” [491]. In other words the usual straw-atheist argument, with a great deal of anxiety about filthiness and corruption and shamelessness.
11. Cecropia is silenced but not convinced, being a bad lot anyway. Meanwhile Phalantus sends a very courteous challenge to Amphialus, which is accepted, and there’s a joust which Amphialus more or less wins. A great deal made of the pictorial designs made by the armour. Funny damn book, and a funny society, that wants this kind of thing for a literary convention. “Rather angry with fighting, than fighting for anger” [498].
12. Another very courteous challenge, this time from Argalus, who’s also trying to rescue Philoclea, although the general attitude of these knights seems extremely indifferent to the moral aspect of the situation. Anyway, Argalus is killed, and there’s a very tragic situation, with laments of his girlfriend Parthenia.
13. Dametas challenges Clinias, thinking he’ll be too big a coward to answer: they get prodded on by other people who want some amusement, so they have a farcical encounter in which on the whole Dametas has the best of it. “The cruel haste of a prevailing coward” [514]. Note carefully that the general rule about not following tragic-heroic with farcical-clownish scenes, which Sidney appears to accept for drama, appears not to hold for prose romance.
14. Clinias takes out his defeat in treachery and suggests poisoning Amphialus, with the connivance of Artesia—don’t know if she’s the same one that appeared before, but she’s the sister of Ismenus, so is looking for revenge. The two girls turn down the suggestion of assassination; Philoclea just says no, but Pamela makes a long speech beginning “wicked woman” [520]. “In whose mind Virtue governed with the scepter of Knowledge” [520]. The idea seems to be that Pamela and Philoclea are respectively penseroso and allegro types: certainly the emphasis on prayer and theology for Pamela indicates that she gets the sublimated symbolism. Zelmane more closely imprisoned, Artesia locked up and Clinias executed.
15. A knight named Anaxius breaks through the Basilius besiegers to help Amphialus: he saved his life once, so he “could not choose but like him, whom he found a match for himself” [521], because he’s pretty sold on himself. He’s welcomed by Amphialus, who proposes to show him the girls, but Anaxius says no, all girls fall in love with him and it’s a bore. They take him out on the lake anyway, with a quite lovely description of water music and a quite lovely poem (Amphialus is serenading Philoclea, of course, and this is just an excuse). Anaxius is crippled in the fight by a “cowardly” blow and “fell down, blaspheming heaven” [525]—Capaneus alazon type, maybe. The sortie almost does for the besiegers, but three knights, including the black one, turn the scale.
16. Somebody called the Knight of the Tombs challenges Amphialus, and is rather easily beaten. A. wants to spare the knight, but has already killed him—that is, her, on account it’s Parthenia. Tragic conclusion, and an epitaph, which in this edition is a blank.
17. Amphialus naturally feels terrible, and his mother comes to cheer him up by telling him he should rape Philoclea. He says no, he wants to respect her; his mother’s on the sado-masochist roller coaster and says women prefer being violated: they don’t really respect a man otherwise. Her example is Helen and Menelaus. “For what can be more agreeable, than upon force to lay the fault of desire, and in one instant to join a dear delight with a just excuse?” [533].
18. Amphialus is challenged by a “forsaken knight,” Musidorus again, and there’s a terrific fight, indecisive, that damn near kills both. Anaxius’ brothers try to help Amphialus and a green and a white knight (armour carefully described) defend Musidorus. Musidorus is awful sore he didn’t win. But Amphialus is getting to be a figure of almost tragic proportions, breaking his sword after Parthenia’s death, and trying to avoid this combat. He says when Musidorus says he’s doing injury to two ladies, “You shall not fight with me upon that quarrel; for I confess the same too: but it proceeds from their own beauty, to enforce Love to offer this force” [536].
19. Cecropia threatens to kill the two girls and Zelmane if the siege isn’t raised, and exhibits them on a scaffold. Zelmane is so mad she has a nosebleed. Kalander advises raising the siege; Philanax speaks against it, but Gynecia is so besotted on Zelmane, as the silly old dope himself also is, that he shuffles off.
20. Incidentally, it’s curious how these heroes call themselves cowards just because they lose in a fight: it’s not as though they’d quit. Partly rationalized by the convention that if Philoclea is watching, Amphialus ought to be able to lick anybody. Oh, well, I’ll never understand the gut-cut code: I didn’t understand the Iliad and still don’t. Anyway, the virgin-baiting gets going in this chapter, with Cecropia flogging the two sisters, “her heart growing not only to desire the fruit of punishing them, but even to delight in the punishing them” [553]. No dice: “they found in themselves how much good the hardness of education doth to the resistance of misery” [551].
21. Cecropia tries executing Pamela in the sight of Philoclea and Zelmane—probably it’s just a trick, but anyway we get the regulation ow-oo from Philoclea, “like lamentable Philomela” [559], which is the archetype, I suppose.
22. Cecropia tries to get Zelmane to propose submission to Philoclea, which he tries feebly to do, not happy about it, but no dice. Then he’s shown a dumb-show with Philoclea’s head cut off. Ow-oo follows. “And when he came again to himself, he heard, or he thought he heard a voice, which cried, Revenge, Revenge; whether indeed it were his good Angel, which used that voice to stay him from unnatural murdering of himself; or that his wandering spirit lighted upon that conceit, and by their weakness (subject to apprehension) supposed they heard it” [564].
23. Philoclea comes to Zelmane and explains that she ain’t dead, neither is Pamela: the one that got chopped was Artesia, dressed in Pamela’s clothes. All this is partly because Amphialus is so bunged up with fighting Musidorus he can’t do much, and Cecropia realizes if she overdoes it he’ll kill himself, or something.
24. Well, Amphialus gets up off his bed and goes to see the girls; Pamela, much the bitchier of the two, says go to hell you bastard; Philoclea just cries, because she loves his love if not him. He gets out of some woman what’s been happening, then charges after his mother, who’s on the “leads” at the top of the castle. She thinks he’s gonna kill her and falls off, confessing before she dies her scheme to poison whichever princess won’t marry him. So he sums up his life—not a good score, according to him—tries suicide, but his sword misses; however, he’s been wearing Philoclea’s “knives” next to him (they took them from her so she wouldn’t, etc.), so he kills himself with them.
25. Actually Amphialus isn’t dead yet: he’s awful tough. Anaxius gets over his wound, and threatens all the doctors with hanging if he doesn’t get better. Queen Helen, who’s always loved Amphialus, comes and begs his body to bury, which Anaxius eventually grants—he seems to be second in command for some reason. She, “straight warned with the obedience of an overthrown mind” [578], asks Anaxius for a safe-conduct, and his prestige prevents the people from rebelling at seeing his (Amphialus’) body carried away. Lamentation, long poem by one of the people. Anaxius has taken a scunner to all women, especially the two princesses.
26. So he charges into their room and says he’s gonna hang them with his own hands. Pamela says “Sister, see how many acts our Tragedy hath: Fortune is not yet a weary of vexing us” [580]. It’s tough because they were just beginning to hope for better things. Keep the heroines behind the bloody eight-ball. Trouble is, Anaxius falls in love with Pamela while doing his stuff; Zelmane then challenges him to combat, which he refuses. Anaxius is a comic character, an alazon strong enough to make good most of his boasts, and so conceited he can hardly believe Pamela when she goes into her disdain act. “Proud beast (said she) yet thou playest worse thy Comedy, than thy Tragedy” [583].
27. Zelmane tries to persuade the girls to temporize, and refer themselves to Basilius. They don’t want to, but they do. Basilius “took the common course of men, to fly only then to devotion, when they want resolution” [586]—he doesn’t know what the hell to do, so he consults the Delphic oracle, which says “to deny his daughters to Anaxius and his brothers, for that they were reserved for such as were better beloved of the gods.”
28. Anaxius has two brothers, Zolius and Lycurgus; they’re supposed to be for Zelmane and Philoclea respectively. Zoilus makes for Zelmane, who kills him; Lycurgus then falls on Zelmane, who eventually kills him too, because he’s wearing a garter he snatched off Philoclea’s leg. So Anaxius falls on Zelmane, and there’s a terrific fight, in spite of Zelmane’s having fought two already and being, I should think, somewhat out of condition. Zoilus’s soul is sent “to Proserpina, an angry Goddess against ravishers” [590].
29. “The Combatants first breathing, reencounter, and” [headnote to chapter 29]
Arcadia, 1593 continuation
We seem to be back at home. Musidorus appears now to have got the consent of Pamela to leave with her, which will break him away of Pyrocles. The latter, still disguised as Zelmane, is made love to by old Basilius, who in this version is as ridiculous as Dametas. Dialogue between the two friends making friendship and its loyalties supreme over love, even though Musidorus is evidently not doing so. Zelmane put Basilius off, then goes to the mouth of a cave, which is where Dametas had kept Pamela safely “in the late uproar,” with gold sand like the Tagas on the floor. “There ran through it a little sweet River, which had left the face of the earth to drown herself for a small way in this dark but pleasant mansion” [632]. Zelmane makes up a charming little song turning on the words dark and light, then she hears noises and sees pieces of paper with poems on them, so she realizes she’s not alone. The cave is also inhabited by Gynecia, who’s getting into a really sinister Phèdre mood, especially now that that old Basilius is thinking of going back to court. Meanwhile Musidorus has fits of conscience about leaving his friend (they’ve agreed not to reveal their real names, which seem extremely important), “but then was his first study, how to get away” [638].
The characterization belongs to the early version: Pamela is anxious to get away with Musidorus, whereas in the fuller version she’s the sublime penseroso virgin, full of prayers and theology, bristling at the least touch. Here in order to escape Musidorus has to fool Dametas, Miso and Mopsa, and exploits their vices, avarice in Dametas (tale of a buried treature [treasure]), jealousy in Miso (tale of Dametas’ carrying on with another dame), a story which includes the “my true love hath my heart, and I have his” [643] song, worthy of a better place) and curiosity in Mopsa (tale of Apollo and Admetus, not Alcestis but a wishing tree). A pretty scruffy set of lies, implying a far lower conception of Musidorus’ honour than the 1590 version would have tolerated. Anyway, Pamela and Musidorus do get away, and sing songs to each other.
This is altogether a cruder and coarser book: Musidorus sings Pamela a song, Pamela falls asleep, Musidorus gloats over everything including “that well-closed paradise” [653], gets interrupted by clowns, back to Zelmane in the cave—crude narrative switching. Well, Zelmane decides to tell Gynecia some of the truth—fraud is far more the impelling force of this version of the romance than of the fuller one—so she says she had to dress like an Amazon because she’d challenged an eighty-year-old (female) Amazon and been overthrown: hopes this will lessen Gynecia’s opinion of him-her, but no dice: “Gynecia whose end of loving her, was not her fighting” [656]. Gynecia even tries a striptease: “under a feigned rage, tearing her clothes, she discovered some parts of her fair body, which” [657], etc. Well, Zelmane has to temporize, so “they both issued out of that obscure mansion” [658] with Gynecia thinking she’s got a nibble. It occurs to Zelmane that “deceit cannot otherwise be maintained but by deceit” [658]; anyway, in the presence of Gynecia, Basilius and Philoclea, the last gets jealous and suspects Zelmane has thrown her over for her mother. Ow-oo follows. This version is very full of songs, some of them exquisite: the general idea seems to be when in doubt sing something. Well, Zelmane figures she’d better get the hell out of there too, now her friend has, so she “left the pleasant darkness of her melancholy cave, to go take her dinner of the King and Queen” [669]. Curious how persistently Sidney calls him her.
Zelmane now hatches a great scheme for getting both of Philoclea’s parents out of her way. She says she wants to live in the cave for a while, then makes assignations with both Basilius. and Gynecia to meet her in the cave. Meanwhile Philoclea’s sick, thinking Zelmane doesn’t love her any more. He doesn’t know this. So Zelmane promises both Basilius and Gynecia he’ll screw and get screwed in the cave, so they both have off for it. The archetypal shape of the young lovers escaping with the parents left jerking off in the cave has its points, I suppose. However, Philoclea sets up an ow-oo, after a rather interesting scene in which Zelmane comes and finds her lying on the bed in her smock. A lot of Courtly Love guff: Philoclea reproaches, Zelmane faints and thinks she’s dying; Philoclea thinks so too; Pyramus and Thisbe are referred to; he wakes up just in time, and then “began from point to point to discover unto her all that had passed between his loathed lovers and him” [688]. She says O.K. and faints; Zelmane begins to wonder if he’s done the real right thing and figures maybe not, however “he soon turned him from remembering what might have been done to considering what was now to be done” [689]. Not much, apparently, so he lies down with her on the bed, chaste as all hell, “it seemed love had come thither to lay a plot in that picture of death how gladly, if death came, their souls would go together” [690]. The third Eclogues then abruptly begin.
The occasion is the marriage of Thyrsis and Kala: “I think it shall not be impertinent, to remember a little of our shepherds, while the other greater persons, are either sleeping or otherwise troubled” [691]. More use of the class-contrasting scenes in romance, which of course the title Arcadia in itself justifies. One of the songs, the fable of the beasts said to be taught the poet by Lanquet, is transferred in 1590 to the end of I.
The Old Arcadia is close to the knockabout amorality of New Comedy, with the double adulescens role, impudent tricks by young men to get possession of their girls, baffling of the old and exploiting their senile eroticism (Gynecia of course isn’t old; she’s the stock Phèdre theme), and the general aim of anything goes. The New Arcadia is a sensitive and carefully thought out piece of writing, also far more conservative, the parental wishes being regarded as sacred no matter how silly they are. It’s quite an object lesson in the evolution from New Comedy to Romance. The use of fraud as the activating force is largely unquestioned in the older version (as it is to some degree in Heliodorus); in the later there’s hardly any explicit fraud at all, apart from the disguise theme.
The Old Arcadia wasn’t known until two MSS turned up in 1907; there are now six. A Dublin edition in 1621, by Sir William Alexander, added connecting material between the end of 1590 and the beginning of 1593; in a 1627 edition of R. B(eling) [Sir Richard Beling] added a Sixth Book. These are included in a modernized text by E.A. Baker in 1907. The 1593 Folio reprints a new version of the 1590 Quarto and adds a new version of the Old Arcadia to complete it. Feuillerat, who may be an ass but must know, says the 1593 Folio version of the 1590 Quarto includes a great deal of revision by the Countess of Pembroke, amounting almost to collaboration.
Book Four, 1593 Version
Begins with a farcical scene of Dametas, digging up a buried treasure that isn’t there, coming back to find Pamela run off with Musidorus, which he assumed means hanging for him, as he’s supposed to be holding her fast. He comes upon Mopsa, who’s climbed a tree that she thinks will grant her wishes; she falls out of it and keeps calling Dametas Apollo; then Miso comes back from the city, where she’s been sent on a wild-goose chase of jealousy, and where she got the whole city stirred up to hunt for Dametas and an imaginary Charita (they were delighted to hunt, Sidney says, because Dametas was unpopular and ridiculous). She thinks Mopsa is Charita, and so on. Dametas adjures his daughter by all the kindness he showed her when she was an infant, sure she wouldn’t remember back so far. It’s a good lively scene, but the brutality is crude. The book begins “The almighty wisdom evermore delighting to show the world, that by unlikeliest means greatest matters may come to conclusion: that human reason may be the more humbled, and more willingly give place to divine providence: as at the first it brought in Dametas to play a part in this royal pageant, so having continued him still an actor, now that all things were grown ripe for an end, made his folly the instrument of revealing that, which far greater cunning had sought to conceal” [715]. I quote this because it’s an excellent example of God as author-projection. Cf. the Dogberry outfit in Much Ado about Nothing.
Well, Dametas goes to look for Pamela in Philoclea’s chamber, where he finds her in bed with a Zelmane who quite obviously ain’t a female. Holds a lamp over them—Psyche is referred to. (Sidney keeps calling Pyrocles Zelmane, although he says he doesn’t need to any more). Meanwhile Basilius has had the bed trick played on him in the cave, and when dawn breaks he finds he’s there with his wife, after he’s made a long soliloquy about the beauty of Zelmane. She strikes a pose of great dignity and reproves him; he stammers and promises to do better, then drinks up a love potion she’s brought to the cafe for a different purpose. He gets too much of it and passes out. In fact it looks as though he’s really dead. Anyway, this sobers up Gynecia, whose ow-oo begins: “O bottomless pit of sorrow, in which I cannot contain myself, having the firebrands of all furies within me, still falling, and yet by the infiniteness of it never fallen” [727]. “She remembered a dream she had had some nights before, wherein thinking herself called by Zelmane, passing a troublesome passage, she found a dead body which told her there should be her only rest” [730]. Quite a dream. Meanwhile Dametas is giving the same scene a farcical turn: “Dametas that saw her run away in Zelmane’s upper raiment. I remember Zelmane told her to put this on, but I forgot why, and judging her to be so, thought certainly all the spirits in hell were come to play a Tragedy in these woods, such strange change he saw every way. The King dead at the Cave’s mouth; the Queen as he thought absent; Pamela fled away with Dorus; his wife and Mopsa in divers frenzies” [731]. Also Zelmane turned into a man. So he goes into the field and begins to make circles, conjurations against devils. Gynecia is caught running away by the Arcadian peasants, and says she wants to die or be put to death; the peasants mourn the death of Basilius “generally giving a true testimony, that men are loving creatures when injuries put them not from their natural course; and how easy a thing it is for a Prince by succession deeply to sink into the souls of his subjects, a more lively moment than Mausolus’ tomb” [733].
Well, Philanax arrives, arrests Gynecia, fetters Dametas, Miso and Mopsa with all the chains they can bear and orders them whipped every third hour, until “the determinate judgement should be given of all these matters”; i.e., this is the way of making the accused innocent until proven guilty. Meanwhile Pyrocles is going through a lot of uneasy meditation. Arcadia has one of those Midsummer Night’s Dream and Measure for Measure laws that any couple found “in the act of marriage without solemnity of marriage” [737] should be put to death; so maybe Philoclea will be executed, and how the hell did Dametas get in anyway? (through the cellar door). So he’s her murderer, as Gynecia is Basilius’. This is all in “the fourth book, or act,” the appropriate place for confrontation with death, I suppose. Thinks of killing himself, but there’s nothing to do it with (note that Dametas tried to hang himself before, his failure being ascribed to cowardice, this, evidently, to courage).
Actually this Pyrocles-Philoclea Liebestod scene is quite affecting, hard as it is to read in these interminable unparagraphed pages. His prayer (“and whensoever to the eternal darkness of the earth she doth follow me, let our spirits possess one place, and let them be more happy in that uniting” [740]) has its own beauty. The scene follows the outline completed so much more elaborately by Milton in Book Ten, of the two being willing to die with each other and then for each other. Well, it isn’t quite that, but Pyrocles tries to kill himself with a “bar” (Dametas has pinched his sword); the noise wakes up Philoclea: she says suicide is cowardly; he says not necessarily. Quite a bit of casuistry about the morality of suicide: he says “it is the right I owe to the general nature, that (though against private nature) makes me seek the preservation of all that she hath done in this age, let me, let me die” [741]. I don’t get it all, but the distinction of general and private nature is interesting. In Philoclea “a man might perceive, what small difference in the working there is, betwixt a simple voidness of evil, and a judicial habit of virtue” [741]. He reaches for the bar again, and she threatens she’ll kill herself by worse methods. Philanax then comes, the avenger of the order-figure, which is all he can take in, though he has had a hard time not being impressed by Philoclea’s obvious innocence.
Back to Musidorus, and Pamela awakened by the rabble of clowns: note the one escaping and the other left behind for sacrifice archetype, not that that lasts. The clowns are the remnant of the earlier rebellion, who have become forest outlaws. Musidorus kills a lot of them, but as he’s chasing them some more surround Pamela, and threaten to kill her, so in short they get the best of it and decide to haul Pamela back to the court and get a reward from the king. Pamela is so overcome she actually gives Musidorus a kiss. He tries to talk his way out of the situation, and nearly succeeds, but a troop of horsemen sent by Philanax comes along, grabs them, and hangs all the outlaws. Actually Pamela should be the next monarch, but in the meantime she’s a prisoner accused of a mortal crime—neat enough patterning. “There was a notable example, how great dissipations, monarchal government are subject unto” [766]. Actually the people are very confused, and there are parties wanting Gynecia as regent or Pamela or Philoclea Queen, or the two princes kings, and so on. An ambitious man named Timantus tries to make capital of it, and Kalander comes in, with his strong bias in favor of the two heroes. So Act Four ends indecisively.
The eclogues really form a chorus of the action, beginning with a “complaint” or lament for the dead king, a sestina, followed by a longer lament, then a rhymed sestina. In the first sestina all the end words are disyllabic; in the second most are. (Second sestina is in an ababcc stanza.)
Arcadia, Book Five, 1593 Version
Euarchus, King of Macedon and father of one of the heroes, visits Arcadia intending to see Basilius. Philanax thinks he sees a chance to end the commotion by making him judge, a sort of last-scene Clement figure. Oration: “Methinks I am not without appearance of cause, as if you were Cyclops or Cannibals, to desire that our Prince’s body, which hath thirty years maintained us in a flourishing peace, be not torn to pieces, or devoured among you” [785] (147; cf. 121). People are tired of faction and accept. Back to a long complicated account of the affairs in Greece, Euarchus preparing for a Latin invasion which gets called off when they realize he’s too well prepared for them, and something about Plangus and his effort to rescue Erona. Sounds as though this were following a different version than 1590, as of course it would be; it’s just that I don’t know how different. He gets to Laconia, and finds the Helot war, which Pyrocles had patched up, has broken out again, so he heads for Arcadia to see if he can persuade Basilius to go back to work. “Whether by his authority he might withdraw Basilius from burying himself alive, and to employ the rest of his old years in doing good, the only happy action of man’s life … a Prince being, and not doing like a Prince, keeping and not exercising the place, they were in so much more evil case, as they could not provide for their evil” [791]. So much for all the howl about his death. The Elizabethans, like the Erewhonians, looked their own hypocrisies straight in the eye and maintained they didn’t matter.
Philanax meets Euarchus with humility, “which not only the great reverence of the party but the conceit of one’s own misery is wont to frame” [791]. Euarchus is modest but knows he’s good. He meets a popular assembly: “no man thinking the matter would be well done, without he had his voice in it, and each deeming his own eyes the best guardians of his throat in that unaccustomed tumult” [796]. Unusually incisive writing in this part: “one man’s sufficiency is more available than ten thousand’s multitude” [796]. This Tudor sentiment accounts for what the impossible heroic achievements in battle symbolize. Euarchus’ oration: “Nor promise yourselves wonders, out of a sudden liking; but remember I am a man, that is to say a creature, whose reason is often darkened with error” [797].
Gynecia is in torments of self-accusation: these people appear to be instinctively Christian, in the sense of believing in a single God, though nominally pagan. Thus a prayer by Musidorus, back on 123: “looking up to the stars, O mind of minds, said he, the living power of all things. …” [758]. Well, Gynecia thinks in terms of “cries of hellish ghosts” [799] and the like; the two girls don’t have much to say, but the heroes are pretty eloquent. Thus Musidorus: “We have lived, and have lived to be good to our selves, and others: our souls which are put into the stirring earth of our bodies, have achieved the causes of their hither coming: They have known, and honoured with knowledge, the cause of their creation, and to many men (for in this time, place, and fortune, it is lawful for us to speak gloriously it hath been behoveful, that we should live” [803]. They discuss whether they can have memory in the next world, dependent as it is on bodily sense. “Then is there left nothing, but the intellectual part or intelligence, which void of all moral virtues, which stand in the mean of perturbations, doth only live in the contemplative virtue, and power of the omnipotent good, the soul of souls, and universal life of this great work, and therefore is utterly void, from the possibility of drawing to itself, these sensible considerations” [804]. Stoicism, verging on something very like a Buddhist annihilation of the ego. I suppose Stoicism, along with the Hermetic writings, was the evidence for the Elizabethans that every religion is Christian covered over with the rust of false tradition. Memory as we know it will be destroyed at death, but then we get a new memory when we return “to the life of all things, where all infinite knowledge is” [804], and become one with the Creator.
Kalander brings the talismans left with him—omens of death again. The trial scene is very long drawn out, with immense speeches by the prosecutor Philanax, and there’s a recognition scene in which Euarchus finds himself confronted by his own son and foster-son. So he doesn’t want to condemn them, but does. Finally the old fool himself gets up from the table his corpse has been laid on, and says—no, he doesn’t say anything, like Finnegan, but of course his poison has been only a thirty-hour sleeping draught. So the court dissolves, as Euarchus has no more power; Basilius is reconciled to his wife Gynecia, who’s now regarded as a pattern of virtue by everyone except Pyrocles and Philoclea who don’t give her away; and on the last page the heroes marry the girls and proceed to have offspring. Silly story, except for the archetypes.
Frye owned two editions of Ivanhoe: London: Dent, 1970, which he annotated, and Boston: Aldine, 1832, which was published along with The Talisman and Castle Dangerous. Page numbers in square brackets refer to the 1904 edition, published by the American Book Co. and edited by Francis Hovey Stoddard. Numbers in parentheses, which are Frye’s, are to the Dent edition. Ivanhoe was first published in 1819.
References to Ivanhoe in Frye’s published works:
Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 2, 25, 28, 29, 143, 172, 215–16, 218, 225–6, 228–9, 313
“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 58, 59, 72, 87, 88–9, 106
Anatomy of Criticism, 101; CW 22: 93
Begins with Gurth and Wamba discussing language, a subject returned to at the end. Norman-Saxon relations said to be those of an army of occupation and a resentful revolutionary population: historically dubious, but the point is that the Waverley situation is reappearing: outlawed society that can’t bring off an armed rebellion, but can infiltrate and eventually take over the oppressing society. Gurth and Wamba are near a circle of stones “dedicated to the rites of Druidical superstition” [6]. Gurth is the son of “Beowulph.” Wamba is the jester figure that runs all through comedy, but has the fidelity of the fool in Lear. Gurth is a swineherd, a more highly regarded occupation than now: pigmeat gets quite a play in this book, what with the Jews.
Cedric is the usual fanatical separatist, actually just an insular, wogs-begin-at-Calais Englishman, though in a position where he gets more sympathy from the reader. He’s a “franklin” or free Englishman, with his own servants: Athelstane, a good-natured glutton, is his candidate for the king of England, and he wants to marry him to Rowena, the blonde doll who is the technical heroine of this story. So he disowns and disinherits his son Ivanhoe, who has gone off to the Crusade with Richard I. Cedric’s dog is called Balder. Well, a worldly Prior and Brian de Bois-Guilbert turn up at Cedric’s demanding hospitality, and enter the stranger least likely to succeed, the disguised Ivanhoe. Isaac the Jew comes in later, I forget why. “Magnificence there was, with some rude attempt at taste; but of comfort there was little, and, being unknown, it was unmissed” [55]. Ivanhoe is disguised as a palmer; gets up early next morning and takes off the Jew, who’s about to be kidnapped by Front-de-Boeuf, also Gurth (by revealing his name in a whisper: convention of impenetrable disguise).
Ivanhoe is a good example of the way romance glosses over historical facts, but it also makes clear that they are being glossed over. That is, Isaac is stuck in Front-de-Boeuf’s dungeon and threatened with hideous tortures, and Rebecca is condemned at a so-called trial, actually a rationalized lynching as a sorceress. They both get rescued by a good-natured novelist, whose readers wouldn’t have tolerated anything else, but historically Jews were tortured and burned for witchcraft on no evidence. Scott emphasizes this (a) by notes: he even interrupts his narrative with a quotation from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to show what happened to people without rescuing novelists (b) by allusion: he says Rebecca got her medical knowledge from Miriam, who was burned at the stake as a witch (c) by the device of the inset tale coming in the opposite direction, as when the story of Ulrica, whose name for some reason has been changed to Urfried, demonstrates that kidnapped blonde dolls don’t always get away unscrewed.
There’s also the pseudo-historical treatment of Richard I: Scott is not so irresponsible that he doesn’t say that Richard was a lousy king, buggering off on a crusade and letting his kingdom go, almost literally, to hell. But he makes passes about his romantic temperament and his love of achieving errant quests all by himself. The “temple” on Zion becomes a kind of antithetical symbol in this book: Rebecca is compared by Prince John to the Bride of the Canticles, and there’s all the “Templar” business associated with Brian de Bois-Guilbert.
Two big set scenes: the tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouche and the storming of Front-de-Boeuf’s castle. One of the slogans shouted at tournaments was “Death of Champions” which assimilates them to gladiatorial fights, except for the status of the combatants. Scott has a remark on this, though he talks about applauding tragedies, which suggests that he thinks tragedies immoral (95). Ivanhoe, in disguise as usual, is called “Desdichado”—guess who read Ivanhoe.53 Vows to remain incognito very common then, Scott says. Gurth, carrying money, is stopped by the outlaw society of Robin Hood but let go unrobbed: again a resemblance to the Highlanders of the Scottish novels. At the tournament four are killed, thirty desperately wounded, four or five of whom never recovered, several more disabled for life. “Hence it is always mentioned in the old records, as the Gentle and Joyous Passage of Arms of Ashby” [136].
Three people are in disguise in this tournament, Ivanhoe, King Richard, and Robin Hood, who is called Locksley—guess somebody else who read Ivanhoe.54 Robin Hood is a practically superhuman archer, not surprisingly. None of them attends the banquet John unwillingly (he wanted his own side to win, of course) gives.
King Richard wanders through the forest and takes refuge with a hermit who turns out to be Friar Tuck. Jokes about the holy water of St. Dunstan: “many a hundred pagans did he baptize there, but I never heard that he drank any of it. Everything should be put to its proper use in this world” [180]. Meanwhile Cedric is still nursing his senex humor, and is a most tedious old ass, except that his efforts are to consolidate the English around Athelstane and Rowena, not himself. The outlaws “were chiefly peasants and yeomen of Saxon descent” [192]. Cedric, Athelstane, Rowena, Wamba, Isaac and Rebecca are all kidnapped by a Norman raiding party and stuck in Front-de-Boeuf’s castle. The idea is a Norman’s named de Bracy, who wants Rowena. No, not Wamba: he volunteers to change places with Cedric, and does, risking being hanged. Gurth says of the outlaws “were the horned devil to rise and proffer me his assistance” [206], etc.: wonder if Margaret Murray is another reader of Ivanhoe.55
There’s some wit in the writing, even in the dialogue, despite the wooden style and the extraordinary ho-thou-caitiff-varlet lingo, which I think is Scott’s invention. “I saw the javelin was well aimed—I heard it whiz through the air with all the wrathful malevolence of him who cast it, and it quivered after it had pitched in the ground, as if with regret for having missed its mark” [188]. That’s Gurth the swineherd. Captives in the castle hear a horn “as if it had been blown before an enchanted castle by the destined knight, at whose summons halls and towers, barbican and battlement, were to roll off like a morning vapour” [217]. Undisplaced version. Various parties hear it, beginning with Isaac, threatened with torture: the scene is a terrible one, the rescue extremely perfunctory—nobody but nobody gives a damn about him, and he’s discovered by Friar Tuck who’s looking for liquor—all quite true to the time, though I wish Scott weren’t so damn literary that he had to model Isaac on Shylock. De Bracy’s assault on Rowena includes “dream not that Richard Coeur de Lion will ever resume his throne” [230]. Rowena can do the haughty-dame act because she’s been spoiled: naturally her disposition is what “physiognomists consider as proper to fair complexions, mild, timid, and gentle” [232]. Magical association with the weather, I suppose.
Well, we have to have an old sibyl in Scott, so we get Urfried or Ulrica, female prize of Norman conquest in earlier generation, and execrated by Cedric, very unfairly it seems to me even for him, in consequence. She does a Rahab act, setting the castle on fire and putting up a red flag to show it. “My father and his seven sons defended their inheritance from story to story, from chamber to chamber” [237]—Churchill tactics even then. “from hence there is no escape but through the gates of death. … My thread is spun out” [237]. Archetypal resonance. Rebecca again, “the arbitrary despotism of religious preiudice” [238], means she can have only “that strong reliance on Heaven natural to great and generous characters” [239]. Especially when heaven is backed by a novelist. Assaulted by Brian de Bois-Guilbert, she jumps up on the verge of a parapet, which is over a precipice as usual, and threatens to jump down. This gives Brian de Bois-Guilbert quite a charge. He’s a freethinker, by the way—use of the old legend about Templars used to rationalize Philip’s robbing and murdering of them. “Gold can be only known by the application of the touchstone” [247]—if she prefers death to dishonour she’s gold. Ulrica/Urfried again—no explanation why her name’s changed, but she underlines the hell imagery connected with the castle (248–9). Pre-Christian religion just behind her—I don’t know who Scott thinks Zernebock is—Borrow has something about it. “We become like the fiends in hell, who may feel remorse, but never repentance” [269].
Assault on the castle, with jumps back and forth in the narrative. Rebecca heals Ivanhoe, with a hint of romantic magic (263); tells him he’ll be well on the eighth day, though Scott doesn’t quite follow through the magic. “The idea of so young and beautiful a person engaged in attendance on a sick-bed, or in dressing the wound of one of a different sex, was melted away and lost in that of a beneficent being contributing her effectual aid to relieve pain” [288]—God, Scott’s a windy bugger. The sentence means that the displaced is lost in the romantic undisplaced. Rebecca is the dark girl, of course, “whose general expression was that of contemplative melancholy” [289]. Melodrama scene of Rebecca watching the assault from window and reporting to the invalid. She thinks it’s silly; he thinks boys have to fight. She says “is there such virtue in the rude rhymes of a wandering bard” [307] that knights do such things to become heroes of minstrel poems. Front-de-Boeuf dies like a fee-yund incardinate: he’s murdered his father, according to Ulrica, as though we needed that. She consigns him to the Saxon gods—“fiends, as the priests now call them” [317].
Scott says he got the castle burning from Le Grand Cyrus. Ulrica “appeared on a turret, in the guise of one of the ancient furies, yelling forth a war-song, such as was of yore raised on the field of battle by the scalds of the yet heathen Saxons” [331]. We get the war-song. “As if she had been one of the Fatal Sisters” (304). Athelstane is killed in the assault, which removes the obstacle to the hero’s progress. Scott brings him to life again later, because some reader of his wanted him revived, which gives us the same cadence we have in Sidney’s Arcadia: in other words a romancer can only go from one archetype to another, even when he’s doing something “original”—that is, silly and dishonest. De Bracy, in a passage of some pathos, asks Rowena to forgive him; she says she forgives him as a Christian; Wamba says that means she doesn’t forgive him at all. She’s a stupid dope, although her routines are I suppose the right ones. More of Isaac and his tiresome ducats-and-daughter act: I suppose part of the point, as in The Merchant of Venice it’s all stolen from, is that all the Christians are usurers too, only they’re not as clever at it.
The fall of Torquilstone, Front-de-Boeuf’s castle, is a death-and-revival symbol: it’s simply hell with Front-de-Boeuf in charge, but it really belongs to Ivanhoe, and as soon as it falls Richard begins to make his presence felt in the country. John meanwhile is plotting a conspiracy to seize control of the country: Richard, being an ass, lets him go, though a few of John’s lieutenants are hanged. Then we go on to this dismal shit Beaumanoir, Grand Master of the Templar order, who wants to burn Rebecca because she’s “bewitched” Brian de Bois-Guilbert and he’s trying to reform the order. Demonic counterpart of sudden return of Richard I, so both white and black sides get consolidated. He’s decided “that the death of a Jewess will be a sin-offering sufficient to atone for all the amorous indulgences of the Knights Templars” [390]. Caiaphas mentality. Brian de Bois-Guilbert uses words like bigotry: he’d have to be a pretty advanced heretic even to take in the notion of bigotry. Trial of Rebecca framed by agents for their own purposes, with false witnesses. Note the trial scene at the bottom of the well. The Grand Master thinks it’s an “approaching triumph … over the powers of darkness” [396]. (Incidentally, Front-de-Boeuf, much earlier, has spoken of a new regime about to begin, of unmitigated tyranny of Norman brigands) (254). Brian de Bois-Guilbert doodles on the floor with the end of his sword; Grand Master calls this “cabalistic lines” [397]. Archetype of the Depression Doodle. Grand Master’s tactic of purifying Brian de Bois-Guilbert by burning Rebecca achieves the pure perversion of life at the nadir of the action. This is emphasized by the fact that she almost miraculously restored crippled and bedridden people to life is turned against her as part of her witchery. In fact some of the witnesses against her are so-called doctors, “with the true professional hatred to a successful practitioner of their art” [403]. They want to tear Rebecca’s veil off—symbolic rape. Scott the lawyer says the evidence against Rebecca was half irrelevant and half impossible, but all accepted. “greedily swallowed, however incredible” [406]. I must think about this very common metaphor—it has some significance I haven’t quite got about the evil of belief. Rebecca speaks of “the fictions and surmises which seem to convert the tyrant into the victim” [407]. Jews say maybe her persecutors can be bought off, as money “rules the savage minds of those ungodly men” [415]. Point here: they’re too stupid to know what money is; they only know they want it. Rebecca’s hymn.
Scene with Brian de Bois-Guilbert as the Templar-tempter. Rebecca: “Thy resolution may fluctuate on the wild and changeful billows of human opinion, but mine is anchored on the Rock of Ages” [421]. Gives her an Andromeda cast, of course. Brian de Bois-Guilbert, the amorous dragon wanting to eat this virgin, proposes escape to Holy Land, joining Saracens, and making Rebecca a queen on Mt. Carmel. Zionism of a sort. Harps on the hideousness of her death, partly sales pitch, partly because he has no faith in an after-life himself. As the overlong dialogue goes on, it becomes clear that Brian de Bois-Guilbert, the strongest knight in England next to Richard and Ivanhoe, is a very weak man, and the despised Rebecca a very strong woman. Like Redgauntlet, his sexism is blinding: he can’t take in the notion of a strong woman, but he’s beaten on every front. Even his proud descent looks pretty parvenu compared to what a Jewess has. He thinks maybe he is bewitched after a fashion. The point is that he’s slipped a note into her hand saying demand a champion, meaning him; she does demand one and some boob rushes in to make sure that Brian de Bois-Guilbert will fight on the opposite side. He hasn’t the guts to get out of this, so he has to say things like “I have been a child of battle from my youth upward, high in my views, steady and inflexible in pursuing them. Such must I remain—proud, inflexible and unchanging” [429].
He says to his pal Malvoisin that if no champion for Rebecca appears he’ll have nothing to do; Malvoisin says “no more than the armed image of Saint George when it makes part of a procession” [431]. Ironic reversal. Richard and Wamba are waylaid in the forest by another Norman raiding party, this time led by Waldemar Fitzurse, who’s put all his eggs in John’s basket. The party is defeated with the aid of the Robin Hood bunch (horn), but Richard can’t resist “generous” actions and lets Waldemar Fitzurse go. Richard says to Wamba he thought he’d run away; Wamba says “I take flight; when you do ever find Folly separated from Valour?” [448]. Eventually Scott gets around to saying that knights-errant of romance are not historical heroes: “the wild spirit of chivalry which so often impelled his master {Richard} upon dangers which he might easily have avoided, or rather, which it was unpardonable in him to have sought out” [453]. “In the lion-hearted king, the brilliant, but useless character, of a knight of romance, was in a great measure realized and revived.” “his reign was like the course of a brilliant and rapid meteor. … his feats of chivalry furnishing themes for bards and minstrels, but affording none of those solid benefits to his country…” [454]. Note that he’s a king who retains his Falstaff band of outlaws, though even Robin Hood says “I would not that he dallied with time” [454]. Charter of the Forest extorted from the unwilling hands of King John—don’t know if that means Magna Carta was the charter of the oppressed Saxons—it sure as hell wasn’t.
Cedric again, with elderly Saxons committed to separatism and looking like “a band of ancient worshipers of Woden recalled to life to mourn over the decay of their national glory” [461]—the younger ones are all compromising with the Normans. Separatism, sexism, and racism are all obsessive humors in Scott, as Scott should be given the credit for realizing. Then we have to go through the revival-of-Athelstane nonsense. So back to Rebecca’s trial, where Richard and Ivanhoe are both haring to rescue her—interesting that the three most powerful knights in England are all concerned about her. What strength Ivanhoe has is her creation, we may note: but Scott doesn’t go all the way with his eighth-day cure: Ivanhoe is easily flung off his horse by Brian de Bois-Guilbert. Latter gets out of swearing the justice of his cause: Grand Master says “Bring forward the crucifix and the Te igitur” (433) [481], which I should check.56 However Brian de Bois-Guilbert blows up and busts of moral spontaneous combustion, “a victim to the violence of his own contending passions.” I suppose that’s partly because the hero and the dragon both have to symbolically die. Then we have the epiphany of Richard I, first made to the Robin Hood band; Athelstane, the stupid giant of the lower world, comes back from his death thinking better of his suit to Rowena and Cedric has to like it. “it was not until the reign of Edward the Third that the mixed language, now termed English, was spoken at the court of London”—language (446) [496] tie-up from beginning. Final interview of Rebecca and Rowena, with former leaving with her father for Spain. Rowena says get converted and I’ll be a sister to you; Rebecca stays polite but says she’s going to be one of the “women who have devoted their thoughts to Heaven, and their actions to works of kindness to men, tending the sick … ” [499]. Virgin celibate fate: Rowena asks her if there are Jewish convents. Dumb girl.
Points of design: Richard I and the Grand Master both return before expected, consolidating light and dark worlds. Torquilstone is usurped by Front-de-Boeuf and is really Ivanhoe’s: it’s destroyed along with Ulrica and presumably rebuilt in some form by Ivanhoe and Rowena. Rowena and Rebecca are the light and dark girls: mortal enemy of Ivanhoe and Brian de Bois-Guilbert parallel them. Athenstane the obstacle-king, pushed out of the way for both Ivanhoe and Richard I. Note the containing irony of history, in which John becomes king after all—Shakespearean wheel of fortune. Two separatist groups combine, as in Waverley, the Robin Hood bunch and the Cedric bunch.
As George Borrow’s father said to his mother, “it is in the nature of women invariably to take the part of the second-born” (Lavengro 46).
Frye owned one edition of The Pirate: Boston: Aldine, 1832, which was published along with Redgauntlet. The page references in square bracket are to the J.M. Dent edition (London, 1906). The novel was first published in 1822.
References to The Pirate in Frye’s published works:
Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 189, 195–6, 217, 225, 226, 229, 313
“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 58, 76, 95
Remarks in the introduction that “the professed explanation of a tale, where appearances or incidents of a supernatural character are explained on natural causes, has often, in the winding up of the story, a degree of improbability almost equal to an absolute goblin tale. Even the genius of Mrs. Radcliffe could not always surmount this difficulty” [6]. Could use as a comment on the Anne of Geierstein passage.
Scene in the Shetland Islands, where the Scotch, no less than the English, are Southerners. Begins with Basil Mertoun, the retired gloomy misanthropist with which so many romancers begin (cf. the figure in Le Fanu’s House by the Churchyard). “His misanthropy or aversion to the business and intercourse of ordinary life was often expressed in an antithetical manner, which often passed for wit, when better was not to be had” [13]. Tenant of Magnus Troil, who’s convivial and can’t understand him. “The usual thrill of indignation which indolent people always feel when roused into action on some unpleasant occasion” [18]. Beliefs in kraken, mermaids, sea-snakes; bottomless depths and secret caves of ocean.
Two girls described in a penseroso-allegro contrast: Minna’s black, melancholy, sublime. “As if Minna Troil belonged naturally to some higher or better sphere, and was only the chance visitant of a world that was not worthy of her” [27]. Brenda’s a blonde, fairy form, not so tall. Minna has “enthusiastic feelings proper to the romantic race from which her mother descended, the love of natural objects was to her a passion” [29]. Mordaunt Mertoun, the hero, visits them a good deal, partly because his father prefers a lot of absence, but his general attitude is phase two brother-sister. Terrific storm blows up and hero takes refuge with Triptolemus Yellowley, a comic Scotch miser and pedant (a less attractive Dominie Sampson), who lives with his sister, who’s more of a miser. Tedious chapter tracing his ancestry.
Sister sees the hero has a gold chain around his neck. Discussion about “Dangling in a rope’s-end betwixt earth and heaven,” answered by hero that it’s great to be “perched in mid-air between a high-browed cliff and a roaring ocean” [57]—cf. Antiquary. Enter Norna, the wild woman of this tale: the Shetlanders are good-natured people who don’t burn witches, so she gets away with being a “prophetess,” compared to Boadicea and Velleda. Dressed in red, dark blue and silver ornaments “cut into the shape of planetary signs,” and a staff “engraved with Runic characters and figures, forming one of those portable and perpetual calendars which were used among the ancient natives of Scandinavia” [60] and a divining rod. It isn’t that the Shetlanders are good-natured but that they’re in the primitive stage; Norna for them isn’t in league with Satan but with the “drows” (dwarfs). Her name is assumed and “signifies one of those fatal sisters who weave the web of human fate” [61]; she’d be sunk if anybody knew her real name. She claims power over the weather, which is stormy: Scott has been reading his namesake Reginald. Footnote saying the word “fey” means someone suddenly released from a humor, and therefore likely to die soon—projection of literary conventions on life.
Shetlanders are kindly and hospitable, but utterly ruthless and rapacious about wrecks: one of their earls passed a law against helping anybody getting wrecked. Hero stops peddler from stealing, as he considers it, a chest full of linen, and rescues a drowning man named Cleveland (the pirate of the title). Theme of treasure from the sea and of the saving of a man who turns out to be the villain (Cleveland isn’t quite that, but he sure gives a lot of trouble). It’s said that drowning men should be left to drown so they won’t care about the treasures they leave behind, “nae mair than the great Yarls and Seakings, in the Norse days, did about the treasures that they buried in the tombs” [91]. Grave robbery on land corresponds to this sort of thing on the sea. Norna again, compared this time to a Valkyrie. “When I hung around thy neck that gifted chain, which all in our isles know was wrought by no earthly artist, but by the Drows, in the secret recesses of their caverns” [109–10]. Scott doesn’t have a proper language for this female, and he gives her an intolerably lousy rhetoric, based on standard English—Meg Merrilies and Madge Wildfire don’t have this problem. Apart from that, Norna is interesting enough: she’s just sane enough to be able to ask herself if she’s crazy, and when she decides that it’s more fun being crazy, she certainly has my sympathy.
Hero finds himself excluded from Troil’s hospitality and from the two girls: he thinks it’s Cleveland’s fault (bad luck fished out of the sea) and it partly is, but it’s mostly the peddler’s revenge. He’s spread the notion that Mordaunt is playing eeny-meeny with the two girls. Several comic humors: Yellowley with his Utopian notions of turning Shetland into an eighteenth-century farming community; Halcro the bore, a small poet obsessed by his one glimpse of Dryden who holds on to people’s coat buttons and lectures the hero on not making speeches about himself. “Several of his pieces were translations or imitations from the Scaldic sagas, which continued to be sung by the fishermen of these islands” [160], who recognized Gray’s Fatal Sisters. Long set piece about Troil’s party, where Minna emerges as a Pirates-of-Penzance go-to-glory-and-the-grave female. A sword dance and a masque are elaborately described. Latter “represent the Tritons and Mermaids with whom ancient tradition and popular belief have peopled the northern seas,” are “grotesque,” and “no strangers, but a part of the guests” [167–8]. The only advantage of the hero’s isolated situation is that Brenda emerges as the girl he wants, i.e., who wants him. Halcro says the sun summons to labor and misery, the moon to mirth and love. A whale hunt follows—funny to find this in Scott—and Cleveland saves Mordaunt, primarily to pay off his debt and become his enemy. The wreck and peddler themes, along with the ballads, have strong Winter’s Tale associations. Pirate calls Yellowley the farmer “clod-compeller” [195].
Minna has a dream that says more than Scott knows about her state of mind: a mermaid “lashing the waves with that long scaly train … fair face, long tresses, and displayed bosom” [204]. Norna turns up in the girls’ bedroom: she’s a real Buttercup sibyl whom Minna believes without trembling, and makes Brenda tremble without believing. Evidently she’s their aunt and got screwed by a lover and went nuts. Also she was educated by her father (note this archetype) in pagan legends about Thor and Odin, she wants “like our primitive mother, to desire increase of knowledge” [209]. “I longed to possess the power of the Voluspae and divining women of our ancient race” [209], and naturally kids herself she does. At something called the Dwarfie stone she has a vision, “I felt the impulse of that high courage which thrust the ancient champions and Druidesses upon contests with the invisible world” [212]. Some being tells her she has to kill her father or something. Well, the lover turns up and screws; makes an assignation for midnight: she closes her father’s door so he won’t see her and he suffocates—I don’t know what with—charcoal, maybe. Well, the girls discuss all this next morning: Minna wants like hell to believe; Brenda doesn’t; Minna says she’s in love with Cleveland; Brenda obviously is with Mordaunt. The rest of the household are engaged in a sort of Halloween game (that parallel is mentioned) of consulting a sibyl, who’s supposed to be questioned and to answer in improvised verse. Norna takes over from another female, and tells the fortunes of the two girls, giving them the appropriate beautiful and sublime ones. Displaced oracle, of course. Magnus Troil also has the will to believe, and resents rational explanations of Norna’s powers. Minna is, as I’ve said, a separatist, with the Celtic (only it’s Norse) type of brooding on history, and the racism: “No one must ally with his house that is not of untainted northern descent” [244]—though this is her father’s. I should think about racist metaphors in romance: they’re more frequently class ones, of course: nobody must marry this girl but untainted noblemen or what not. Minna’s rhetoric is sillier, if not worse as rhetoric, than Norna’s: I’m sure Gilbert read this book.
Well, we’re gradually shifting over to the pirate theme: Cleveland begins to tell his story to Minna, and says “I saw, in short, that, to attain authority, I must assume the external semblance, at least, of those over whom it was to be exercised” [249]. Minna plays Desdemona to all this: “it seemed to me that a war on the cruel and superstitious Spaniards had in it something ennobling” [251], but as soon as she realizes that, as he says, a gang of pirates is not a choir of saints, she walks off in a huff of outraged adolescence. Then she hears Cleveland serenade her, a quarrel with Mordaunt under her window; goes out to investigate, runs into Claud Halcro, and gets blood on her bare foot. All this is going on at the summer solstice, St. John’s Eve, which the Troil family is celebrating. Mordaunt disappears, and even his father is worried. Proverbs: fey folk run fast, and the thing we are born to, we cannot win by. Anyway, he (father) runs into Norna at a ruined church: two nuts together. She tells him to go to the Orkneys: the fair at Kirkwall, whispering something in his ear to make him do so that we’ll find out about on p. 400 and something.
Minna’s sick, and is given medicines without relief—sounds as though she had to shit her guts out—and her father lets it out that Norna’s lover was named Vaughan and that she was stuck with a chee-yild. Note that Magnus Troil talks quite well: “after all the shifting of ballast, poor Norna is as heavily loaded in the bows as” [269], etc. Well, Minna forlornly wipes herself and they start off to Norna’s dwelling, “fabricated out of one of those dens which are called Burghs and Picts-houses in Zetland” [291]—sounds like the Skara Brae neolithic remains, or whatever they’re called. It’s away the hell up in a tower (so called) on a projecting point of rock divided from the mainland by a chasm of some depth (paraphrasing). Compared to an osprey’s eyrie: between heaven and earth; you get there up a dangerous path, approaching the verge of a precipice. Guarded by a dwarf who can hear and grin but has a shrivelled tongue and can’t talk. They creep through a crooked and dusty passage. Runic parchments, stone axes, a stone sacrificial knife, “used perhaps for immolating human victims, and one or two of the brazen implements called Celts” [297]. Tame seal, compared to a “terrestrial dog,” i.e., there are lot of these sea-parallels to land archetypes. Magnus says to Norna yack or else; she says that’s right, the spirits don’t answer unless you compel them. She recites a lot of rhymes, one with the line “When crimson foot meets crimson hand” [305], the latter being Cleveland, who’s referred earlier to washing blood off his hand as a pirate. Scott’s ain’t-it-quaint attitude to all this gives me a pain: after all, who’s using it for his benefit? What Norna does is put a heart-shaped piece of lead on a gold chain and stick it in Minna’s bzoom—alchemical symbolism in the background, with a lot of imputed-by-the-lower-orders-to gabble that Scott strews around like an insect repellent. This novel is an excellent example of the way a novelist uses undisplaced material for “atmosphere” while pretending that both he and his reader are awfully superior to it.
“The feeble lamp by which the sibyl was probably pursuing her mystical and nocturnal studies” [312]—penseroso tower, of course. Norna turns them out of her crag and throws most of the supper they’ve brought over the cliff, so they slope off and find a small cabin inhabited by Yellowley, Halcro, and somebody else. They were returning from an unsuccessful effort to get a hoard of coins Yellowley had found, which was stolen by her dwarf. “Scalds and wise women were always accounted something akin” [326]. She told Halcro and Yellowley to go to Kirkwall: romantic theme of appointed place for the stretto.
So they go to the Orkneys. Attack on synthetic Gothic: wonder what Abbotsford’s like. Cleveland meets an old pal of a pirate named (eventually: Scott is damn Scotch with his names) Jack Bunce. Part of the point is that the Orkneys are remote from the land point of view, but a sea-focus where sea-men of all countries and trades gather. A loop and a leap in the air. Occasion is the Fair of Saint Olla (Olaus), a few weeks after St. John’s. They talk together: Bunce is an attractive character who should have been an actor and is quoting constantly tags of plays. Cleveland tells him he stabbed Mordaunt, thought he killed him, but didn’t, and had him taken off him by Norna, “a person … to whom they ascribe the character of a sorceress, or, as the negroes say, an Obi woman” [340]. Sense of this kind of natural-religion all over the world. “She then pressed her finger on her lip as a sign of secrecy, whistled very low, and a shapeless, deformed brute of a dwarf coming to her assistance, they carried the wounded man into one of the caverns” [340]. Dumb attendant: cf. the girl in Peveril of the Peak.
Friend says: “That you should be made a fool of by a young woman, why, it is many an honest man’s case;—but to puzzle your pate about the mummeries of an old one, is far too great a folly to indulge a friend in” [342]. Archetypes are interesting: so is the device of the peddler’s booth, “resembling our first parents in their vegetable garments” [342]. Peddler is the one who stole Cleveland’s clothes (or bought them from Mordaunt senior’s housekeeper), and the pirate’s recognition of them is the first recognition scene. In the scuffle ensuing he’s nabbed by the police and Bunce escapes—familiar formula—but is rescued by the other pirates who are lounging about the place in a repetition of the masque formula. Chapter 33 has one of the “old play” epigraphs which refers to The Tempest: I’ve noticed the Winter’s Tale links, and when the Troil family comes to the cabin above Halcro says come to these yellow sands. Well, hero’s cured, “so efficacious were the vulnerary plants and salves” [350] that Norna used. Norna is the vice of the plot, appearing everywhere, though Scott says if all the people she appeared to held a meeting to discuss her there’d be nothing marvelous left. Yuh.
Hero wants to leave now he’s cured: Norna calls him ungrateful-clutch of night-world mother. He says he has his father; she says I yam yer mothaw. She hung the chain around his neck “which an Elfin King gave to the founder of our race” [352] (it would be a race), and a mere mortal mother wouldn’t have conjured the mermaid at midnight to give him good winds. She took the chain and put it on Minna because their union is “the only earthly wish which I have had the power to form” [353]. He says he prefers Brenda; she says Brenda’s a sissy. Note lower mother and dark girl link; hero’s going up the spiral. She says she told Cleveland to bugger off; Mordaunt tells her to stop her “intrigues”—vice role again. She says there’s a “demon” that tells her her control of the weather is a delusion: “there are rebellious thoughts in this wild brain of mine … that, like an insurrection in an invaded country, arise to take part against their distressed sovereign … Few would covet to rule over gibbering ghosts, and howling winds, and raging currents. My throne is a cloud, my sceptre a meteor, my realm is only peopled with fantasies; but I must either cease to be, or continue to be the mightiest as well as the most miserable of beings” [356]. Good summing up of night-world as illusion: note that Norna’s not only sane enough to ask herself if she’s sane, but sane enough to prefer her obsession, because it’s more fun. “My post must be high on yon lofty headland, where never stood human foot save mine—or I must sleep at the bottom of the unfathomable ocean, its white billows booming over my senseless corpse” [356]. Note (a) the top and bottom are the only possible points (b) the antithesis of cliff and ocean, which seems to haunt Scott.
Well, pirates have a parliament, where all but an inner cabinet get too drunk to know what they’re doing, and Cleveland is chosen captain instead of a tough nut named Goffe. They make a deal with the town council and Yellowley, called the “Factor,” is chosen hostage, “after the manner in which the victim of ancient days was garlanded and greeted by shouts when a sacrifice for the common weal” [374]. He escapes through Goffe’s connivance, so Bunce grabs the boat containing Troil and his daughters and the poet Halcro. A lot of aha-me-proud beauty, but Bunce lets the women go, remarking that they’re torches in a powder-room—not the modern kind, of course. He and Halcro recognize each other from old stage days, which makes the pirate sentimental—touch of self-mockery as Scott recognizes the affinity of his own scene to mellerdrammer. Minna’s still in love with the pirate, and once the yeow-my-cunt stage is over, goes around with a dopey look that Scott calls an “expression of high-minded melancholy” [399]. She finds Cleveland and proposes a wild scheme to “muffle yourself in my cloak, and you will easily pass the guards—I have given them the means of carousing” [400]. She musta been reading Scott or somebody. We part forever, she says, forever, answers a voice “as from a sepulchral vault” [400]. That’s Norna, believe it or not. Minna thinks she’s got her father out of danger, got Cleveland to go and got the hero safe. I haven’t got all the details clear. Norna then interviews Cleveland—she takes pains to figure out every “secret pass and recess” to build up her character as supernatural. She says “You are of that temperament which the dark Influences desire as the tools of their agency” [408]; he says cut out the shit; he’s known enough incarnate devils not to be afraid of a disembodied fiend. Point here: evil has to be incarnate as well as God. Dwarf appears “like some overgrown reptile, extricating himself out of a subterranean passage, the entrance to which the stone had covered” [410]. We get the works in this stretto. “Remarkable semicircle of huge upright stones, which has no rival in Britain, excepting the inimitable monument at Stonehenge” [411]. Troil is released: incidentally, Norna says she and her lover were betrothed by joining hands in one of these “Druid” circles.
So Minna, corny to the last, insists on meeting her pirate at this stone circle, where she looks like a Druid priestess if they built it, or Freya if the Danes did. As it is, she’s a neolithic nut. Fortunately the hero and his law-and-order bunch are watching, so when Bunce and others come to grab the girls they’re stopped and grabbed themselves: they get there “by cover of an old hollow way or trench, which perhaps had anciently been connected with the monumental circle” [428]. Well, Norna has her date with Mordaunt—I mean Mertoun—senior. He of course is the Vaughan who was her lover, but the hero ain’t her son, as she thinks: it’s Cleveland; Vaughan Mertoun married later and Mordaunt was the younger half-brother: Esau archetype, of course. Well, you can’t have these scenes without talismans, so she fishes out a box Cleveland had given her with a “legend” around the lid.
So Norna figures she’s buggered her son as well as her father, but the son and Bunce get pardons because they saved the virtue of two Spanish women, “persons of quality” [441], not just bargain cunts. So things straighten out: Esau-Cleveland remains spiritually attached to Minna the dark girl, who of course remains inscrewtable; he goes off to the Spanish Main again to do it legal. Jacob-Brenda get married, Jacob being Mordaunt; father goes into a convent, being a Catholic like most of Scott’s maladjusted people; Norna gets converted and almost cured, her architectus role finished, pushes the weather job off on God, and says in her will all her magic books should be burned. Renunciation of magic is all we needed. Minna hears Cleveland’s fallen in battle, which gives her all the sexual charge she wants. That’s all, and don’t ever again take so long to summarize one of these damn stories. Some of the notes are interesting, by the way: a prophetess named Little Vola in Greenland, circle of Odin where couples (“of the lower orders,” of course) plight their troth [457], drows or duergar associated with mines and metals under the earth attracted by blood [111], etc.
Frye owned one edition of Anne of Geierstein, which he annotated: Boston: Aldine, 1831, which was published along with Guy Mannering. The page numbers in square brackets below are to the Clarendon Press edition (Oxford, 1920), ed. C.B. Wheeler. The novel was first published in 1829.
References to Anne of Geierstein in Frye’s published works:
Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 218, 226, 229, 265
“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 29
Begins with the inevitable two travellers, this time a father and son, with an Italian guide, clambering around mountain-tops in Switzerland. They’ve lost their way: I can’t figure out all the landscape, but the general idea is that an avalanche has destroyed the path they’re following and left an abyss between them and refuge, refuge being the house of Arnold Biedermann, whose niece is Anne. The father and son are actually the Earl and son of Oxford, faithful to the Lancaster cause, going to Burgundy to get Charles the Bold on their side (it’s 1474, about); but they’re disguised as merchants named Philipson. It takes a long time to find that out. Well, what with mist and terrific winds, Arthur (the son) has a hell of a time wriggling up a precipice to find some continuation of the path, prays to the Virgin, sees Anne whom he at first thinks is the Virgin; she helps him to walk over a tree trunk which is a bridge over a chasm with a torrent running a hundred yards below. He’s scared. Note mountain-climb, maiden separated by a chasm with a torrent of water (the novel is subtitled Maid of the Mist), saved by maiden, clinging to tree to save himself from the torrent (there’s a second avalanche right where he’s there that nearly does for him). That’s most of it. “Clinging to the decayed trunk of an old tree, from which, suspended between heaven and earth, he saw the fall of the crag which he had so nearly accompanied” [24]. However, she’s as sure-footed as a mule, trips lightly over a narrow arch, disregarding a waterfall below, and takes him to safety, “a limited space of a mild and fertile character” [36]. “Through this mountain paradise the course of a small brook might be traced” [39]. Beauty in scenes of horror—Geierstein means vulture-rock, of course. I think there’s a farm and an abandoned castle beside it which was the abode of Arnold’s brother, who was an aristocrat (Arnold is too, but doesn’t make anything of it) and Anne’s father. Somewhat similar setup to the Bertram place in Guy Mannering. This is a late book and Scott has something of a phobia about dialogue, which considering what he produces (“Unhand me, base peasant” [20]) is no wonder. Arnold looks like Hercules and Jupiter.
Arthur is regarded as a sissy by the Swiss until he proves to be a terrific archer, wielding a bow nobody else can string, to which a “prophecy” is attached. This infuriates a Swiss named Rudolph Donnerhugel (curious how Scott likes words like that: cf. Hatteraick’s storm-language in Guy Mannering), so they fight a duel, interrupted because Anne sees what’s going on—heroine activity again. Anne with Swiss “bears” around her—maiden and shaggy grotesques. Arnold explains to Philipson senior how she was left with him by her father.
They discover that they both have business with Charles the Bold, so they set out together. Heroine flitters around, for reasons explained later connected with seeing her father: a lot of buildup about her being a phantom, then Rudolph tells a “Gothic” inset tale about the “Arnheim” family. What I’ve got in the MS is all right, I guess: it suggests a world of primary identity where she really is a fairy or spiritual being, but of course that has to be displaced.57 Arnheim, who’s a Rosicrucian or something, has a “Persian” magician come to stay with him: he had a thought she’d been supplied with a sin twister—I mean a twin sister—but the displacement is pretty dismal. So they take fond farewells and Arthur rejoins his father, where they go into a church to meet Margaret of Anjou, the Lancastrian queen. A lot of Shakespearean echoes, naturally: Arthur and her son born on the same night—I knew there had to be a twin theme somewhere.
Finally Oxford gets to the end of his mission and the presence of Charles the Bold, who eavesdrops on a conversation he has with Colvin, the English artillery expert in Charles’ service. Oxford says he hopes to see the red rose bloom in the spring again—Apuleius echo. Charles wants to “punish” the Swiss; Oxford tries to talk him out of it, knowing that the Swiss will be his Vietnam, the rock in the shallows: “these Swiss are very Scots to my dominions in their neighbourhood—poor, proud, ferocious, easily offended, because they gain by war” [370]—that’s Charles. Also he wants to clear out the Vehmgericht, which Oxford calls “those tremendous societies, whose creatures are above, beneath, and around us” [372]. Charles listens to deputies of his nobles and commons saying they won’t support any war with the Swiss; this annoys what Scott calls his “hereditary obstinacy” [396], as do the Swiss themselves, who turn up looking republican and base as all hell (actually Arnold is afraid of war, less because of possible loss than possible victory: that would corrupt their simplicity). So the embassy ends with declaring war. Meanwhile Arthur goes to Provence, where King Rene, Margaret’s father, holds a court with nothing but troubadour poets in it: he’s good-natured but fatuous, and can’t take in anything but amusement. Story of Cabestan told. “His Highness introduced also a new ritual into the consecration of the Boy Bishop, and composed an entire set of grotesque music for the Festival of Asses” [422].
So Arthur goes up a steep, rocky, circuitous path to a convent in a cleft of the crest of a mountain—monastery, I guess it is—“the wall on which the parapet rested stretched along the edge of a precipice” [426]. Wild sounds of wind—in short, a close repetition of the opening scene, only it’s the dark female, Margaret of Anjou, that he finds this time. Queen has a black plume with a red rose—she’s not a possible love object, but the penseroso polarizing with Anne is curious. The rain resembles the roar of cataracts. Well, there’s a cavern under the foundation of the convent. “Oracles, it is said, spoke from thence in pagan days by subterranean voices, arising from the abyss” [431]. This is the Queen, who’s consulted the oracle without result except of course a long penance for doing so. Arthur is reminded of his place of imprisonment. He wears a holy relic she’s given him, but of course a charm Anne gave him is beside it, and she sees it, though she doesn’t mind. He’s bitched up his job, because a Carmelite he trusted wasn’t trustworthy, and a passage in a letter written by his father said so, in invisible ink that had to be heated. I forget what happens in this complication. Anyway, Arthur doesn’t like all the jigging of music in Provence, being a solemn English philistine. “He was now initiated in the actual business of human life, and looked on its amusements with an air of something like contempt” [441]. Margaret’s plan involves pushing aside her sister Yolande, whose husband is allied with the Swiss—naturally when Charles attacks the Swiss and the Swiss take him to the cleaners her plans all fall to pieces. Oh, the Carmelite is our friend the Black Priest again, the hero’s prospective father-in-law.
The story also has a talisman of identity I haven’t been dealing with, a diamond necklace which de Hagenbach tries to steal and which Arthur tries to give Queen Margaret. The Queen dies on p. 389 and the Oxfords decide to enter Henry of Richmond’s service. Commines the historian, Scott’s main source, is introduced as a character. Charles is beaten a second time; Oxford goes and pulls him out of his melancholy, though not permanently. Rudolph Donnerhugel sends a challenge again to Arthur, but this is a joust on horses with lances and flat ground, something the Swiss don’t have, so Arthur skewers him. Meanwhile Charles gets tapped by the Vehmgericht bunch and Arthur has an interview with his father-in-law-to-be in propria persona. “I stand so much on the edge of the grave, that methinks I command a view beyond it.” “The Duke of Burgundy is sentenced to die, and the secret and Invisible Judges, who doom in secret, and avenge in secret, like the Deity” [497]. Undisplaced archetype closely behind. “He has won great los and honour” [501]—that’s twice that word is used.58 Anyway, papa approves of the match. Well, there’s a third battle, Charles is murdered as foretold and uncle Albert is dead too. The dumb Sigismund says “It is to be hoped he has not gambled away his soul beforehand”—dice: and refers to Arthur’s killing Rudolph, “no more than if you had beat him in wrestling or at quoits—only it is a game cannot be played over again” [510].
“The high blood, and the moderate fortunes, of Anne of Geierstein and Arthur de Verde, joined to their mutual inclination, made their marriage in every respect rational” [511].