In Theocritus’s Idyll 1, a goatherd promises to award Thyrsis a magnificently fashioned cup if he sings as sweetly as he did in a previous singing contest. The goatherd then launches into a lengthy, ekphrastic passage describing the cup’s varied decorations, which include the representation of assorted human dramas. Among the figures depicted on the vessel, one finds a boy so absorbed in weaving a cricket cage that two foxes sneak up on him, one intent on stealing the grapes the youngster neglects to guard, and the other intent on snatching the bread the boy meant to eat. The youth likely represents the poet, or even specifically the pastoral poet, who takes the raw material of nature – in this case, asphodel stalks and rushes – and crafts it into an artful object – the poem or pastoral poem itself that conveys melodious, lyric expression like that of the cricket’s song contained by the cage of rustic construction.1
Over 1500 years separate the Idylls of Theocritus from the bucolic poetry and complex, pastoral romances of sixteenth-century Iberia, yet in the pages of the latter the cricket’s song remains as sweet and powerful as ever, and numerous poetic progeny have replaced the absorbed, child artificer in the vineyard. The focus of this essay is not pastoral song, nor even the structure per se of pastoral poetry and narrative in early modern Iberia, but rather the elaborate descendants of that lovingly constructed but ultimately quite simple cage, the artful edifices that often provide in microcosm mirror images of the sometimes labyrinthine, hybrid pastoral romances that contain them. Theocritus’s vignette portrays in miniature the humorous, ironic tension between innocent youth and wily fox, between art and nature, and between two different kinds of hunger – one that satisfies the body, the other that satisfies the spirit and the imagination. Frederick A. de Armas has noted similar tensions, albeit on a larger scale, in certain Spanish pastoral romances in which intricate buildings and monuments appear jarringly in the middle of the pastoral landscape, seemingly undermining the traditional juxtaposition between city and countryside identified with bucolic fiction (1985, 332–3).
Essentially these structures, and the episodes in which they figure so prominently, constitute extended examples of ekphrasis. While their mise-en-abyme symbolism, and the paradoxically symbiotic relationship they establish between art and nature, render these artful constructions of considerable interest and importance in these works of pastoral fiction, as complex descendants of Theocritus’s cricket cage they also embody another tension that lies at the heart of ekphrasis itself. In his classic book Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign, Murray Krieger emphasizes the power of ekphrasis to interrupt the temporal flow of discourse, and to create the illusion of freezing the action, and stopping time (1992, 7). Ekphrasis embodies a rhetorical paradox, the deployment of descriptive language, a temporal medium, to fix objects, characters, and the readers’ eyes and imagination in space (Krieger 1992, 10). The artful edifices of the Spanish pastoral romances compound this paradox through their function as places and spaces of convergence and transformation that impinge on characterization and plot advancement, and on the construction of the protagonist’s identity. So while the scenes that unfold in and around these special buildings may seem to escape narrative time, or stop the narrative flow, in actuality they play a key role in plot and characterization, that is, in moving the narrative forward in terms of time, space, and character development.2 Two examples will suffice to explore these matters in the pages that follow – Felicia’s palace in Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana (1559) and Dardanio’s cave in Lope de Vega’s Arcadia (1598) – with the understanding that the issues raised should serve as a modest point of departure for further study of the function of ekphrastic structures in these pastoral works and others. More significantly, however, the analysis that follows indicates that the ekphrastic foregrounding of these edifices sets off these constructions and their locales as special, qualitative focal points for readers’ attention and imaginative interaction, and marks these edifices and episodes as spaces and times of dynamic transformation, in the type of texts frequently deemed static, stilted, or frozen within literary conventions.
Paul Alpers has observed that Sannazaro’s Arcadia assimilates the Petrarchan lover to the Virgilian figure of narrative structure in sixteenth-century pastoral. He notes that Montemayor’s Diana subsequently establishes this transfer and modification as the normative standard for Renaissance pastoral, as well as the gathering of shepherds associated with classical pastoral metamorphoses, into a convening of lamenting lovers who recognize themselves in others’ tuneful complaints, focusing on loss or absence, and pointing the way to pastoral’s compensatory offerings (1997, 81, 349–51). In Montemayor’s fictional world, an operatic collection of lovers, tales, and poetic exchanges unfolds as a literal gathering up or gathering along the way of virtuous, but frustrated lovers into an aggregate band of pilgrims, set in motion by Felismena’s brave defence of the nymphs Polydora, Cinthia, and Dórida – acolytes all of the wise Felicia – when they are attacked by lascivious wild men. The nymphs reward Felismena’s valour and virtue, as well as that of the shepherds, with an invitation to accompany them to Felicia’s palace in search of remedies for the heterogeneous collection of lovers’ ills. Thus, in Book 4, the centre of Diana’s seven-book structure, shepherds and nymphs converge on Felicia’s palace – a temple, located in dense woods. As Rosilie Hernández-Pecoraro observes, “the magical palace dazzles the reader with its magnificence and opens a space and time where transformation can take place” (2006, 48).
Despite the efforts of some critics to identify this artful edifice with a specific, historical palace, Montemayor actually offers his immediate, target audience – urbane courtiers all, and likely aristocratic women for the most part – with an elaborately designed and decorated building that merges the architecture of literary models – the magical castles of romances of chivalry – with that of Renaissance villas resplendent with formal gardens and the harmonious integration of Graeco-Roman elements.3 Both architectural models would have been familiar to Montemayor’s privileged readers and readily accessible as imaginative visual constructions. Indeed, the single-file approach the pilgrim shepherds must assume along a narrow pathway that opens onto a flat, park-like space flanked symmetrically by two rivers and paved with stones in a checkerboard pattern with an ornate fountain in the middle captures the directed approach to the main entry typical of Italianate villa design at the time, and in a sense, corresponds to an imaginary rendering or animation of perspectival convergence in paintings by artists such as Paolo Uccello or Piero della Francesca, with their foregrounded checkerboard patterns and sharply delineated orthogonals converging on a vanishing point.4 This path, of course, also signifies the tortuous road the virtuous lover follows, which here leads the entire company through a magical portico that only permits passage to faithful, constant lovers, a supernatural feature reminiscent of similar structures in chivalric romances. The entrance itself resembles a triumphal arch or the grand portal of an intricately wrought Graeco-Roman temple with marble columns set in golden bases and capitals, while the mansion proper is square-shaped – that is, symmetrical, geometric perfection – laden with sculpted figures from classical antiquity:
Toda la casa parecía hecha de reluciente jaspe con muchas almenas, y en ellas esculpidas algunas figuras de emperadores, matronas romanas y otras antiguallas semejantes. Eran todas las ventanas cada una de dos arcos; las cerraduras y clavazón de plata; todas las puertas, de cedro. La casa era cuadrada y a cada cantón había una muy alta y artificiosa torre.
[The entire house seemed made of glistening, veined marble with many merlons, and in them were sculpted some figures of emperors, Roman matrons, and other, similar antique objects. Each and every one of the windows was double-arched; the locks and nails of silver; all the doors, of cedar. The house was square and at each corner there was a tall and artful tower.] (259)5
Precious materials such as marble, silver, and aromatic, biblical cedar, with bas-relief emperors and Roman matrons highlight the characters’ crossing of a threshold in the text, a passage they have earned through devotion to pure, constant love, an emotion as rare and refined as the architectural elements described in the narrative. The geometric perfection of the cube-shaped palace mirrors the symmetrical design of the work itself, marking the centre of Diana’s seven-book structure, which at the same time correlates with the convergence of the individual cases of unhappy love along with the ascent in the text from the particularities of each pastoral pilgrim’s story to a higher level of conceptualization and abstraction about love – an ideological convergence and ascent conveyed in Platonic terms. For if Graeco-Roman design and ornamentation signal entry into the world of the sorceress Felicia, the shepherds’ stay with the lady will end with an academy that focuses on love staged in a garden setting, and which reenacts academic gatherings widespread in the urban and court culture of early modern Europe, and reaching back to classical antiquity with particular reference to Plato’s Symposium.
Once the pilgrims of love enter the interior space of Felicia’s palace, a sumptuous, richly detailed series of ekphrastic passages unfolds as the wise lady treats her guests to lavish court entertainment, and Montemayor describes ornate chambers decked in gold, silver, crystal, and precious stones, replete with mosaics, sculpture, and statuary. The crossing of the magic portal threshold, the movement from outside to inside, from natural forest to artful palace rooms also transforms the party of shepherds into spectators who watch and listen with wondering eyes and ears, and in some cases participate in the events carefully planned by their hostess. As Alastair Fowler has pointed out, ekphrasis was a common means of incorporating the viewer in Renaissance literature, although less attention has been paid to the fact that “Renaissance ekphrastic literature may imply subtly differentiated spectator roles” (2003, 77, 81). These subtle distinctions and varied roles come to the fore in Felicia’s palace where as non-passive spectators, the shepherds function as beschouwers, that is, as representative viewers who direct the gaze of the reader’s inner eye and cue an empathic response on the part of the audience, serving as fictional doubles of Montemayor’s reading public. Such figures were common in the painting and literature of the time, acting as authorial surrogates, gesturing to significant objects and actions, aiding in the interpretation of scenes, drawing readers / viewers into the work, and the like.6 In this instance, as a meticulous presenter, the narrator captures and communicates to readers the important elements of the decor, architecture, and performances in Felicia’s palace, creating the illusion of freezing the narrative flow and stopping the forward movement of the characters’ stories. Although this illusion may be powerful, especially in the wake of the shepherds’ pilgrimage through the landscape to achieve this destination, in actuality, Montemayor encourages active intellectual and emotional engagement from his readers as they pause along with the characters to think of the ideas about love staged in debates and conversations, and in performing artefacts that appear in Pygmalian mode to come to life before the eyes of fictional characters and reading public alike.
Consider the first activity staged by Felicia in her palace after a wondrous banquet served at tables set luxuriously, as if for the most refined courtiers. Three nymphs emerge from an adjoining chamber, playing the lute, harp, and psaltery respectively with such lovely harmonies that “los presentes estaban como fuera de sí” [those present were beside themselves] (Montemayor 1999, 261–2). Felicia then coaxes the shepherds to join in the concert with rustic rebecs and a panpipe, which all together create a polyphonic backdrop for the antiphonal exchange of the spontaneously formed choruses of nymphs and shepherds. This salon entertainment constitutes a debate in song form in which the nymphs criticize love harshly as a passion that negates reason and causes intense suffering, while the shepherds defend love as a force that ennobles and gives life despite the torment it may bring. The narrator then informs readers that Felicia and Felismena, cast in the role of representative spectators, “estuvieron muy atentas a la música de las ninfas y pastores, y así mismo a las opiniones que cada uno mostraba tener” [were very attentive to the music of the nymphs and shepherds, as well as to the opinions each one presented] (1999, 265), cuing Diana’s public to pay attention as well. When Felicia teasingly asks Felismena if perhaps some of the words may have touched her soul, the young lady responds, “Han sido las palabras tales que el alma a quien no tocaren no debe estar tan tocada de amor como la mía” [The words are such that the soul of the person they cannot touch must not be as touched by love as mine] (1999, 265). In this way the author not only encourages the audience to meditate on both sides of the unresolved debate, emblematic of the conflicted but loyal hearts that characterize the band of pilgrims, but also invites an empathic response from the reading public, suggesting that if they have ever loved, they should identify their own experiences as lovers with the emotional struggles of the shepherds. Through the performance, Montemayor reframes the lovers’ troubles of Books 1–3 as universal experiences in which readers see themselves depicted. And while the tuneful singers do not announce a winner of their debate, Felicia afterwards declares that love is virtue and favours those of generous spirit and lively understanding, which she emphasizes has nothing to do with noble blood or distinguished ancestors. This elevation and celebration of virtuous love and lovers endows the characters and their amorous conflicts with an almost heroic stature, a link that Montemayor develops in the subsequent ekphrastic scenes in Book 4, and that foreshadows the successful resolution of the shepherds’ respective situations.7
The nymphs next lead their visitors on a tour of interior rooms and spaces in which the shepherds marvel at a succession of visual and auditory wonders, encomiastic, “speaking” sculptures, statuary, and monuments that equate the heroic deeds of great men with the virtuous lives of famous women, as Gustavo Correa has stressed.8 A commemorative column in an interior patio portrays such classical heroes who excelled in arms as Hannibal and Alexander the Great, along with such esteemed Spanish heroes as el Cid and Bernardo del Carpio, eliding the temporal distance and any qualitative distinction between the heroic world of classical antiquity and that of imperial Spain, revealing a nascent nationalistic consciousness apparent elsewhere in Montemayor’s text. These sculpted representations lead the characters to another room, in which they find the female counterparts of these glorious male warriors, women of exemplary virtue from antiquity and more recent Spanish history sculpted so skilfully that they seem to reenact their lives before viewers’ eyes:
[E]ntraron en una rica sala, lo alto de la cual era todo de marfil, maravillosamente labrado: las paredes de alabastro y en ellas esculpidas muchas historias antiguas, tan al natural que verdaderamente parecía que Lucrecia acababa allí de darse la muerte […] Y otras muchas historias y ejemplos de mujeres castísimas y dignas de ser su fama por todo el mundo esparcida …
[They entered a rich room, the upper part of which was all ivory, marvellously carved: walls of alabaster and in them sculpted many ancient stories, so lifelike that it truly seemed that Lucrecia had just killed herself there […] And many other stories and examples of chaste women worthy of their fame being spread throughout the world …] (Montemayor 1999, 274)
The spatial contiguity of the rooms and the symmetry of the artefacts displayed therein generate a metonymic link between exemplary, male martial prowess and remarkable female purity, an association that lends the amorous quests of the pastoral pilgrims an aura of reflected glory.9
The viewing of wonders culminates in the square-shaped (again that symbol of symmetrical, geometric perfection) innermost room of the palace, a shrine-like chamber ornamented with golden laurels enamelled in green and featuring a silver fountain in which water pours from the breasts of the statue of a golden nymph, an aquatic artefact resembling those found in Italianate gardens of the time. The spiritus loci of this room is the enchanted Orpheus, the arch-poet, arch-musician, and devoted lover par excellence, who magically comes to life as the nymphs and shepherds enter the room. In this space, Montemayor transforms his characters into a tableau vivant, rendering them temporarily immobile and fixing the women visually in the shape of a frieze with Felismena at the centre, while the men sit by the fountain:
Felismena se sentó en un estrado que en la hermosa cuadra estaba todo cubierto de paños de brocado, y las ninfas y pastoras en torno della; los pastores se arrimaron a la clara fuente. De la misma manera estaban todos oyendo al celebrado Orpheo, que al tiempo que en la tierra de los Ciconios cantaba, cuando Ciparios fue convertido en ciprés, y Atis en pino.
[Felismena sat down on a dais in the beautiful room that was covered with brocade cloths, and the nymphs and shepherdesses around her; the shepherds drew close to the clear fountain. They were listening to the celebrated Orpheus in the same way as in the time when he sang in the land of the Ciconians, when Cyparissus was changed into a cypress, and Attis into a pine tree.] (Montemayor 1999, 277)
The world of myth and metamorphosis lives again, blending past and present, even as “el enamorado” [the enamoured Orpheus] turns his gaze to “la hermosa Felismena” [the beautiful Felismena] and sings a 24-stanza laudatory catalogue of virtuous Spanish and Portuguese ladies, primarily members or contemporaries of the aristocratic circle which Montemayor served. Like all of the ekphrastic vignettes in Book 4, this scene undoubtedly has multiple symbolic functions, one of which is to suspend time with wonderment and divert the young lovers from their own suffering during that brief interval: “La canción del celebrado Orpheo fue tan agradable a los oídos de Felismena y de todos los que la oían, que así los tenía suspensos, como si por ninguno de ellos hubiera pasado más de lo que presente tenían” [The song of the celebrated Orpheus was so agreeable to Felismena’s ears, and to those of everyone who listened to it, that they were suspended [in time] as if nothing had happened to them except what they had before them] (1999, 293). The spectators’ absorption also underscores their empathic response, validating their amorous suffering and placing the shepherdesses, above all Felismena, the lady who presides over this impromptu salon performance, on a par with the objects of Orpheus’s praise. Moreover, metonymically the author situates his characters and the exemplary historical figures in contiguous locales, albeit one spatial and visual, and the other in auditory proximity, suggesting that Felismena and her pilgrim companions continue the illustrious tradition and metaphorical lineage of the heroic men and women depicted and celebrated in the rooms and artefacts of Felicia’s palace. Since Orpheus faced death and the fearful underworld in an attempt to reclaim his love, fittingly the visitors move from his interior chamber outside to a garden in which they encounter sepulchres of famous women who guarded and carried their virtue to the grave, and who now speak to the living wanderers in the garden through their epitaphs. Finally, the pilgrims walk from the garden cemetery into a garden grove and meadow, back into a more conventional pastoral setting, a place of relaxation for the nymphs, and the ideal space in which to have the academy, in which Felicia makes an eloquent, Platonic defence of pure love: “[T]odo el amor desta manera no tira a otro fin, sino a querer la persona por ella misma, sin esperar otro interese ni galardón de sus amores” [All love of this type has no other objective than to love the person for himself without expecting any reward or profit from that love] (1999, 299).
Throughout Book 4, visual symmetry and musical harmony provide artistic counterparts for the balanced exchanges in debate and dialogue that occur in Felicia’s palace, which also serve as an objective correlative for Diana’s strong advocacy for controlling destructive, irrational passions as crucial to the attainment of perfect, devoted love. Moreover, these scenes in Felicia’s palace, which seem to stop the forward movement of the narrative and retard or undercut the chronological flow of time, linking mythic figures from the distant past with historical figures of Iberia and with the fictional spectators-protagonists of Montemayor’s book, constitute an imaginative nucleus of idealized, aggrandized, virtuous love for Diana, providing the conceptual impetus and motivation for the successful unravelling and resolution of the multiple, thorny plotlines, that is, for the transformation of the protagonists’ unhappy love into amorous joy shared with a partner who reciprocates their love with equal, devoted measure, except for Sireno, who at least appears to regain some of the equanimity suggested by his name (sereno) with the timely intervention of Felicia. The promise of pure, devoted love enshrined in the sorceress’s temple, and performed before the eyes and ears of the readers’ imagination, radiates out from this nucleus, transforming the sorrow and melancholy of the lachrymose Books 1–3 into the happiness and delight of Books 5–7, marred only by the disturbing encounter between Sireno and Diana in Book 6.
Montemayor in fact does present this urbane, sophisticated edifice as a space of transformation, where thanks to Felicia, the worthy, long-suffering pilgrims step on the road to recovery through requited love, although Sireno drinks the much-criticized elixir of forgetfulness. The focus on Felicia’s cures and palliative potions, however, which appear in Book 5, has obscured the most interesting transformation that occurs in Book 4, which pertains to Felismena. Indeed, Montemayor does not resolve her case until the end, in Book 7 of the romance, when this female protagonist wanders over the border into Portugal near the author’s hometown. There the nymph Dórida fortuitously appears at just the right moment to administer the elixir of remembrance to Don Felis, thus restoring the lovers’ felicidad (happiness) in the devoted love they share for one another. Felismena, dressed once again like the goddess Diana, saves her beloved from death at the hands of his warrior antagonists with the skilful use of her bow and arrows, while the potion brings his dead, forgotten love for her back to life. In a sense, this heroic beauty succeeds, where the mythic Orpheus failed, in reviving the object of her affection and reclaiming his love, reuniting them as a devoted couple who can now regain their true identities even as they recover each other’s love.
From the beginning of this pastoral romance Montemayor has taken great pains to distinguish Felismena from the other pilgrims of love; he accomplishes this in part through the unsubtle linkage of names in the troika Felicia, Felismena, and Felis. Moreover, by blood and experience Felismena is a lady accustomed to the life of city and court (la gran Soldina), yet when she first appears she is dressed as a shepherdess bearing the attributes of Diana, a bow and quiver of arrows. Her active defence of the nymphs’ chastity from the wild men in Book 2 further emphasizes the mythological connection. Nevertheless, Dórida also identifies her as a child “de la discreta Minerva, que tan gran discreción no puede proceder de otra parte” [of the wise Minerva, for such great wisdom could not originate anywhere else] (Montemayor 1999, 190). Thus, for her, arrival at the palace of the wise woman Felicia is a symbolic homecoming in which the sorceress greets her as a mother might welcome a daughter or certainly a kindred spirit. Felicia separates her almost immediately from the other pilgrims, and sees to it that she is sumptuously dressed in clothing and jewellery corresponding to her elevated social status, and virtually transforms her into a human icon bearing gems that signify passion, chastity, a just spirit, great worth, and so forth, all qualities which arise in the debates and discussions about love that unfold in the palace.10 Felismena embodies throughout Diana the combination of chaste, devoted love and martial prowess commemorated and tied together at Felicia’s palace, where a life-size statue of the goddess Diana serves as the reigning spirit of the temple (275) and presides over the room devoted to artwork depicting exemplary women, who are celebrated in the song of Orpheus. Felismena remains in character as the aristocratic lady while she attends the court of Minerva and Diana encapsulated in Felicia and her palace, but assumes the costume of Diana once again when she resumes her active role in quest of Don Felis. Along the way she helps solve the shepherdess Belisa’s troubled amorous affair, and so when Felismena finally encounters her own beloved, her bow and arrows must be employed once again to rescue Don Felis and keep their love alive.
Unlike Diana, Lope’s Arcadia presents a retrospective, critical, and subjective anatomy of the author’s former love affair with Elena Osorio and of his former self, a project supported by the overall, structural design of the book. In Lope’s hands, the pastoral world and the conventions of pastoral fiction become powerful vehicles for self-portraiture and introspective self-analysis. Like Montemayor’s romance, Lope’s work features a central, pivotal book, in this instance Book 3 of five books, which stages a vignette with a strong ekphrastic focus, here in the shape of Dardanio’s cave. As in Diana, readers encounter intricate, descriptive detail and an exchange with a male counterpart to Felicia that advances the plot towards the denouement. Yet in contrast to Diana’s catalogue of amorous cases, and idealizing, universalizing approach to love, Arcadia tells the tale of just one very unflattering type of love – the jealous, possessive kind that blocks upward movement into the higher realm of Platonic purity, and which instead pushes the lover into shattering acts of vindictiveness and self-destruction. Lope’s alter ego Anfriso thus moves through madness and recovery, not of his beloved Belisarda, but rather a recovery that is more of a discovery and conversion to the avocation of poet, which unfolds in Book 5 in a series of scenes architecturally framed by Anfriso’s admission into the Palacio de Poesía [Palace of Poetry] and the Templo de Desengaño [Temple of Disillusionment or Disenchantment], both described by Lope in rapturous, ekphrastic detail.11 Ray Keck has characterized Arcadia as a “pastoral romance of ascetic pilgrimage,” and indeed, rather than Diana’s pattern of aggregation of pilgrims of love and their convergence on a magical, beautiful palace that celebrates perfectly harmonious and symmetrical design as a backdrop for discussions that similarly celebrate idealized, Platonic, perfect, heroic love, Lope separates and isolates Anfriso from the rest of the pastoral community, situating him in Book 3 in Dardanio’s cave, where events unfold that will further unravel the strained relationship with Belisarda, precipitating her unhappy marriage to another man, and that will propel him into madness, isolating him even more from the shepherd community (1999, 72–3).
While the embodiment of virtuous, exemplary love unites Montemayor’s pilgrims on a guided path to Felicia’s palace and the happy resolution of their lovers’ ills, Anfriso’s weakness, his jealous, impetuous nature, leads him astray literally and figuratively. In fact, Lope’s very active narrator informs readers that Anfriso leaves Belisarda and the community simply to allow the gossip circulating about them to cool: “[D]espedido y desesperado, salió de la asperísima y agradable sierra sin alma que le guiase ni camino cierto por donde fuese. Y determinado a morir de tristeza … y trocando el hábito de pastor en el de peregrino, por inhabitables montes tomó el camino de la bella Italia” [Dismissed and desperate, he left the harsh and pleasant mountains without a soul to guide him or a sure road to follow. And determined to die of sadness … and changing his shepherd’s clothing for that of a pilgrim, he followed the route to beautiful Italy through uninhabitable wilds] (Vega 1975, 221). This change of clothing from shepherd’s garb to pilgrim’s robes visually signals the initiation of Anfriso’s transformation of identity in Arcadia. The youth wanders off the path during the night, gets caught in a fearful thunderstorm, and while he laments his fate, the wizard Dardanio discovers him in the wilderness: “Y como sentado sobre una peña suspirase, no de otra suerte que el pájaro solitario en secos árboles, fue oído de un hombre rústico que de aquellas soledades era dueño, y desde sus tiernos años estudiando el arte mágica las habitaba” [And as he sighed while seated on a rock, not unlike a solitary bird in dry trees, he was heard by a rustic man who was the owner of those solitary spaces, and who since his tender years, while studying the magic arts, inhabited them] (1975, 221). Only in retrospect does Anfriso, or the reader, recognize that the protagonist’s swerving from his journey to Italy, a trip undertaken as an irrational act of desperation that has only suicide in combat as its destination, and his stumbling into the wizard’s domain, provide the axis on which the plot turns and metamorphoses into a pilgrimage towards the embrace of a poet’s identity.
Artful rusticity perhaps best describes the cave and milieu of the wizard Dardanio, who wears a curious tunic of leaves and twigs that identifies him with the green world of the forest. Frederick de Armas and Javier Blasco have pointed out that hermetic tradition pervades this episode as well as Arcadia as a whole, and de Armas also stresses the association between caves, wisdom, and poetic inspiration, linked to Anfriso’s future as a poet.12 In contrast to the elegant sophistication of Felicia, Dardanio, who is certainly as sympathetic and hospitable as she, resembles an ascetic hermit with his eccentric garb and long locks and beard. While vast expanses and large displays of formal, intricate, precious art and architecture greet the wondering eyes of Montemayor’s prilgrims, Dardanio invites Anfriso into the cave to contemplate primarily one artefact that serves as his constant companion: “[E]ntre varias cosas le mostró labrado su sepulcro de blanco mármol, a la cabeza del cual le mostró una pirámide en cuyo hueco, dentro de una caja de acero, pensaba poner sus libros para que después de su muerte se conservasen hasta que en otros siglos fuesen descubiertos” [Among various things he showed him his sepulchre of white marble, at the head of which he showed him a pyramid, inside of which he was planning on putting his books in a steel box so that after his death they would be preserved until in other centuries they were discovered] (Vega 1975, 222). Dardanio and Anfriso slip into the respective roles of presenter and beschouwer in this scene, and direct readers not to scan a field of imagery (the indeterminate “varias cosas” [various things]), but rather rivet their gaze on the sorcerer’s white marble sepulchre, a perpetual memento mori that silently bespeaks desengaño and highlights the wizard’s function as desengañador (disillusioner or disenchanter), one of Dardanio’s multiple functions in the text. The pyramid, an ancient, volumetric, commemorative marker crowns the tomb, and draws the eye to the treasure housed inside in the steel strongbox, which contains Dardanio’s books of learning, the legacy he intends to leave future generations. The juxtaposition of the grave, space of fleshly disintegration, with the steel container, which resists decay and protects the thoughts embodied in words, suggests the supremacy of art in general and texts in particular as purveyors of enduring wisdom and lays special claim to art’s immortal fame, which extends beyond the death of the books’ creator.
These artefacts encapsulate Anfriso’s transformation in visual form, too, since that process begins with an experience of profound desengaño – the death of his identity as Belisarda’s devoted lover – followed by his embrace of the art of poetry as a more worthy object of his enduring passion. The implication, of course, is that poetry will be Anfriso’s true legacy and the repository of his eternal fame, as it is that of his creator Lope. This fixing of the audience’s contemplative gaze then shifts to a simple repast of wild fruit in this space of retreat and inner reflection, not an extravagant courtly banquet, and this context provides a fitting frame for the intimate, introspective exchange between wizard and shepherd hero, who confesses his intention to die in battle in Italy’s wars. Signficantly, Dardanio does not promise him the successful resolution of his love affair, but rather prophesies that Anfriso will triumph over his enemies without specifying what form that victory will take, as long as he can maintain patience: “que como tú tengas paciencia, que las cosas más ásperas quebranta a esa misma envidia pisarás el cuello” [if you have patience, which breaks the harshest thing, you will trample the neck of that very envy] (Vega 1975, 224–5). Yet that patience is precisely the quality that eludes Anfriso at this critical moment in Arcadia, and that will subsequently launch him into madness.
No formal entertainment follows the humble dinner or the words of advice that will go unheeded – no singing and dancing, and no philosophical debates that extol the ennobling qualities of idealized love. Yet Dardanio’s cave does house a gallery of statues of illustrious heroes past, present, and future from ancient Greece and Italy, and more contemporary Spain, with distiches on the base of the figures that enable them to “speak” silently of their great deeds. This introduces another element of kinship with Montemayor’s Diana. Significantly, the catalogue of heroic statues begins with Romulus and Remus, identified by Dardanio as “fundadores de la sagrada ciudad cabeza del mundo” [founders of that sacred city, the head of the world] (Vega 1975, 225), which skilfully elides the temporal distance between Roman and Spanish empires, imperial capital and global, religious capital of the Catholic church, tracing continuous lineage from the mythic Roman brothers to the current Habsburg rulers and their pursuit of a global, Catholic empire. Lope freely mixes statues of mythic figures with those of historical heroes, and males and females, and thus Anfriso sees figures of King Arthur and Charlemagne alongside those of Artemisia and Cleopatra. The nascent nationalism apparent in Diana’s statuary becomes much more explicit here as Dardanio informs the readers-spectators that “[e]stos de esta parte son algunos españoles dignos de mayor memoria que los antiguos griegos y romanos” [these in this area are some Spaniards worthy of greater memory than the ancient Greeks and Romans] (1975, 227), and predictably begins his list with Bernardo del Carpio and el Cid to end perhaps less predictably with the great Duke of Alba.13 Lope incorporates gestures into the scene by means of deictic demonstratives such as “este” [this] and “aquel” [that] that emphatically repeated throughout the show-and-tell presentation of Anfriso’s magician host serve as a prelude to Dardanio’s declamation of the lines written on the base of the sculptures, “porque de tan ilustres varones no te quedes sin oír sus alabanzas” [because you will not stay without hearing the praises of such illustrious men] (1975, 232).14 The wizard’s voice provides a medium through which the illustrious figures speak one by one, encomiastically voicing their own accomplishments in first-person poetry. This performance consolidates the association between poetry, wisdom, heroism, and immortality established in Dardanio’s cave and signals the displacement or substitution of Arcadia’s previous focus on love, thus marking the beginning of the text’s thematic transformation along with the transformation of the protagonist Anfriso. While Montemayor’s Felicia appears to rely on pharmacological concoctions linked to time and memory for cures for lovesickness and the happy resolution of the pilgrims’ amatory ills, Dardanio employs artwork for therapeutic purposes, setting before Anfriso heroic models for him to emulate, and at the same time distracting him from his own self-pity, self-absorption, and suicidal melancholia. The narrator tells readers that hermit and shepherd while away the night with the statues: “Con estas varias quimeras, que sin estar hechas con el arte transmutatoria le obligaban a creer que formalmente las había, engañaba Dardanio la imaginación del enamorado Anfriso” [With these various chimeras, that without being made by the transmutational art, obliged him to believe they were actually there, Dardanio tricked the imagination of the enamoured Anfriso] (1975, 246).
Lope links Dardanio’s cave, then, with veering off the beaten path, swerving from the original goal, substituting poetic ambition for amorous devotion, as Anfriso’s love madness metamorphoses at the end of Arcadia into the divine frenzy of poetic inspiration, predicated on divergence from the life the protagonist has previously led in the community of shepherds. In this way, Dardanio’s modest dwelling plays a crucial part in a structural pattern of displacement and substitution in Arcadia, serving as the fulcrum of Anfriso’s dramatic change into a poet in the romance, and at the same time functioning as a space of psychological convergence in which the flawed hero’s driving passion of jealous love and the opportunity to indulge that weakness fatefully meet. His downward spiral into madness begins when the magician grants Anfriso a wish, like a fairy godfather, and the young man does not choose what readers might expect, such as marriage with Belisarda or even the chance to be with her forever, but rather requests just to see her. And see her he does, but just that alone, thanks to Dardanio’s powerful magic that enables them to fly through the air and disguise themselves such that they cannot be recognized. Lope presents a compelling case of “be careful what you wish for” as Anfriso sees Belisarda give Olimpio a ribbon as she attempts to satisfy his irritating, unwelcome wooing with a trinket intended to convince him to leave her alone. The hero has unwisely cast himself in the passive role of a spectator close enough for visual observation, but too distant to hear the exchange of words between his beloved and the rival suitor, leading the unduly jealous, voyeuristic lover to an act of misprision – the erroneous belief that Belisarda has betrayed him – which pushes him beyond the limits of what he can bear and into madness, from which he will eventually emerge a poet.
Lope counterbalances Anfriso’s adventure in Dardanio’s cave in the second half of Book 3 with a plein-air academy staged by the shepherds that coincides with the protagonist’s return. The central section of Arcadia thus concludes with a gathering in a pastoral setting that foregrounds the performance of a variety of poetic forms as well as discussions about the arts, featuring such typical topics of debate as the relationship between art and nature and the paragone or competition between the sister arts of poetry and painting. This virtuoso display of literary topoi and poetic praxis further emphasizes the dramatic crossover in the text, and signals the marked change in Anfriso’s identity from bucolic lover to Orphic poet. At the same time, the academy exalts the calling of the poet, the identity ultimately chosen by Lope-Anfriso, as described by Danteo:
No sólo ha de saber el poeta todas las ciencias, o a lo menos principios de todas, pero ha de tener grandísima experiencia de las cosas que en tierra y mar suceden, para que, ofreciéndose ocasión de acomodar un ejército o de escribir una armada, no hable como ciego, y para que los que lo han visto no le vituperen y tengan por ignorante. Ha de saber ni más ni menos el trato y manera de vivir y costumbres de todo género de gente; y, finalmente, todas aquellas cosas de que se habla, trata y se vive, porque ninguna hay hoy en el mundo tan alta o ínfima de que no se le ofrezca tratar alguna vez, desde el mismo Criador hasta el más vil gusano y monstro de la tierra.
[Not only must the poet know all the sciences, or at least principles of all of them, but he must also have great experience of the things that happen on land and sea, so that, if an occasion to refer to an army or describe a fleet should offer itself, he will not talk blindly, so that those who have seen it will not vituperate him and consider him ignorant. He must know no more and no less than the social discourse, way of life, and customs of all types of people; and, finally, [he must know] all of those things that are said, dealt with, and lived, because there is nothing in the world too high or low that he will not some time have to address, from the Creator himself to the most vile worm or monster on Earth.] (Vega 1975, 268)
As this demiurgic representation of the poet suggests, for the latter part of Book 3, stimulation of the eyes of the mind cedes pride of place to appeal to the readers’ powers of understanding.
Yet towards the end of Arcadia, as Anfriso approaches the completion of his transformation in the text, Lope makes even greater demands on readers’ visualization powers and interpretive abilities. The highlight of Book 4’s wedding festivities for Salicio and Belisarda is an aquatic masque and tournament, a combination of a floating procession of allegorical figures and emblems, followed by a festive naumachia, an opulent entertainment worthy of a grand, aristocratic court. These activities lead up to Anfriso’s conversion to the study of the humanities and the practice of poetry by the wise woman Polinesta in Arcadia’s concluding Book 5, which features extensive ekphrastic passages rich in architectural detail and symbolic content, witnessed as readers accompany the protagonist through the Palace of the Seven Liberal Arts, the Palace of Poetry, and finally the Templo de Desengaño. Significantly, when Anfriso first meets Polinesta in Book 4, in a clear, intertextual reference to Diana he asks the sorceress for a remedy to make him forget Belisarda, which the wise lady refuses to do in a disdainful manner, stating, “querer un hombre olvidar, y no hacer diligencias para ello, no es dar materia en que pueda imprimirse forma, sino impedir todos los caminos de la humana física” [for a man to want to forget, and not take action to do so, is not to create material in which form can imprint itself, but rather to obstruct all paths of human healing] (Vega 1975, 358). She promises to help him when he is ready by applying a cure of diversion and distraction, that is, through a remedy of displacement and substitution whereby Anfriso will substitute poetry for love, transforming painful memories of lost love into raw material for poetic creativity: “[T]e llevaré al templo del ejercicio y artes liberales, cuya honesta ocupación divierta de manera tu fatigada memoria que no te acuerdes si en tu vida viste a Belisarda” [I will take you to the temple of exercise and liberal arts, whose honest occupation may divert your weary memory so that you will not remember if you saw Belisarda in your life] (1975, 359). Just as Polinesta appears to defeat Felicia in wisdom and healing methods, Lope indirectly asserts through the scenarios and artful edifices at the end of Arcadia that he bests Montemayor in ekphrastic practice, and in writing pastoral romances destined for aristocratic audiences, in effect displacing or attempting to displace the bucolic masterpiece of forty years ago.
At first glance, consideration of Felicia’s palace and Dardanio’s cave as places of convergence and transformation in Diana and Arcadia respectively elicits a list of fundamental differences. The background of the authors, and the shifts that transpired in Spanish society in between the works’ dates of composition, points to a critical perspective based on contrasts rather than similarities. While Montemayor spent most of his life in aristocratic service at peripatetic courts, Lope was a middle-class embroiderer’s son, who at the time he composed Arcadia sought entrée into the inner circle of the Habsburg court, and unsuccessfully pursued the position of court historian after returning to Madrid from exile.15 During the years separating the two romances, literary taste shifted and expanded in regards to prose fiction, the reading public grew larger and more diverse, and Madrid became the official capital and centre of the Spanish empire, albeit by 1598 an empire of tarnished lustre and diminished power. Yet clearly Lope and Montemayor continue extant literary conventions of both long-standing and more recent provenance, such as the rhetorical practice of ekphrasis, which originates in classical antiquity; the appearance of carefully described magical caves, temples, and palaces as visual and symbolic anchors for pivotal moments in narrative fiction, which claims ancient antecedents and also more recent models in the romances of chivalry; and extensive, creative passages enacting the oft-cited Horatian dictum ut pictura poesis, a simile that plays a leading role in the plot and style of Diana and Arcadia.
In analysing the artful edifices as transformative spaces in which time stands still, and narrative movement seems to freeze even as the plot actually advances and the protagonists undergo dramatic changes, however, it might prove constructive to add two more traditions to the list above of mutually supportive, nourishing conventions. Fernando Bouza Alvarez has observed that in the “sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there existed a clear awareness that what was oral, visual / iconic, and written (manifested as printed and manuscript texts and as public or silent reading) all fulfilled the same expressive, communicative, and recollective functions” (2004, 11). The scenarios that unfold in Felicia’s palace and Dardanio’s cave stimulate readers’ responsiveness to all three forms of communication, demonstrating the authors’ virtuosity in employing written words that evoke and encompass music, poetry, singing, and sonorous phrases, and conjure statues, emblems, monuments, and architecture of great vividness. The deployment of these communicative forms, in ways in which they often overlap or intertwine, distinguishes these scenes from others in the texts and alludes to their significance in the works as a whole. Moreover, the powerful, pleasing appeal to the audience’s eyes and ears of the imagination calls to mind the belief at the time in the therapeutic effects of music and painting in balancing the bodily humours, and in providing the mind with alternating moments of engagement and relaxation.16 This belief implies that these pivotal, ekphrastic scenarios of frozen time actually constitute moments in which readers engage with the text in a qualitatively different manner, and while the music, poetry, and visual imagery divert Montemayor’s pilgrims and Lope’s alter ego Anfriso and prove therapeutic and transformative to them, they also exercise different aspects of the readers’ imagination, entertaining them, inspiring wonder, and also inviting them to rest a moment, and perhaps tune the mind to a quieter, more contemplative key to consider what they hear or see, or maybe just pause simply to enjoy the spectacle staged for them to witness as beschouwers. Finally, as a narrative genre, one should not forget that Diana and Arcadia arise primarily from the melding of pastoral and romance. With characteristic emphasis on combinations and permutations of the themes of love, identity, freedom, and adventure, romance reinforces and alters pastoral’s performance of identity through subjective expression, opening up new pathways for the pursuit of other identities and selves, shifting identities that indicate that when the heroes and heroines of pastoral romance execute that final, pendular, homeward return that typifies the plot of these fictional worlds, they return other than when they first left. The magic wielded by the sorceress Felicia and the wizard Dardanio that yields the fulcrum on which the romances turn and the protagonists change, may in fact represent the authors’ creative power in the realization of pastoral romance’s potential for staging transformative process in the construction of identity.
1 There is a vineyard hung with darkening clusters.
A small boy perches on a dry stone wall to guard them.
Two foxes shadow him. One sneaks along the rows
For plunder; another has fixed her tricky eye
On the quarter-loaf the boy keeps for his breakfast
And will not let him alone till she has snatched it.
Blithely intent, he shapes a cage for a cricket
From asphodel stalks and rushes. The bag with his food
Is forgotten; so are the vines. The toy absorbs him.
(Theocritus 1988, 56)
2 On the variety of purposes ekphrasis serves in Golden Age Spanish literature, see de Armas (2005a, 22). For recent studies on ekphrasis in Golden Age Spanish literature, consult the two books edited by de Armas (2004; 2005b). For an interesting point of comparison, see Persin 1997, who focuses on twentieth-century Spanish poetry.
3 On the setting and activities of Felicia’s palace as a veiled double for the festivities celebrated in 1549 in honour of then Prince Philip (the future Philip II) at the Binche palace, see Subirats (1968). For more on the aristocratic audience of the Diana, see Chevalier (1974). Hernández-Pecoraro notes that Felicia’s palace does pay tribute to a number of villas, palaces, and country retreats that actually existed, affirming the class status and hierarchy of Montemayor’s audience, and providing a welcoming space for both the readers and fictional shepherds (2006, 49–50). Fernando Bouza Alvarez urges caution, however, in determining the actual audience of such works, citing, for example, the admission by a nun of the Poor Clares that the only non-religious book she had read, and thoroughly enjoyed much to her harm, was Diana (1992, 110).
4 On the organization of space in Italian Renaissance gardens, consult MacDougall (1972, 46) and Lazzaro (1990, 70–1, 81). For examples of the relationship between formal garden design and literary works in early modern Europe, see Hunt (1978) and Collins (2002, 171–92).
5 Chevalier (1974, 46–8) is just one of numerous critics who have noted the influence of the chivalric romance on Diana, especially in regards to the role of the supernatural. For the longstanding symbolism and magical powers of the cube and other geometric and volumetric figures, see René Taylor’s classic article on magic and architecture in the Escorial (1967). All translations are by the author unless referenced in the appropriate passage.
6 Fowler’s chapter 5, “Involved Spectators,” addresses the complex, multifaceted roles of spectators incorporated into Renaissance fiction and visual arts (2003, 66–84). Fowler writes of the beschouwer (67–8), defining the figure in general terms on p. 210 as “a personage clarifying by mime or gaze the action in a picture.”
7 Here for the sake of argument I am overstating the case. It is highly ambiguous whether Sireno’s state of indifference to Diana, and his apparent impassiveness, can be viewed as desirable outcomes.
8 In his article on Diana, Correa demonstrates that the palace conforms to the structural pattern of the temple of Fame created by Ovid in Book 12 of the Metamorphoses, noting: “Lo peculiar en este sistema de configuraciones de la Fama es la fusión de los elementos amorosos (Orfeo) con los heroicos procedentes de la guerra (Marte) en un mismo plano de significación. En virtud de esta fusión el mundo sentimental de la novela adquiere una dimensión heroica en cuanto queda transmutado en sustancia honrosa al par de las acciones ejemplares y guerreras” [The peculiar thing in this system of Fame’s configurations is the fusion on the same level of meaning of amorous elements (Orpheus) with heroic ones originating with war (Mars). By virtue of this fusion, the sentimental world of the book acquires a heroic dimension in which it is transmuted into honourable material on a par with exemplary and warlike actions] (1961, 71). The courtiers and ladies who constitute Montemayor’s immediate audience likely account in part for this parity of amorous and bellicose fame, while in classical antiquity, of course, one finds the pairing of Venus and Mars. Readers of the wildly popular romances of chivalry also encounter this mixture of matters of love and war, although Montemayor anchors the mixture in historic or legendary Iberian men and ladies.
9 It is important to keep in mind in this regard that as one who worked and travelled among courtiers and royals, Jorge de Montemayor for most of his adult life was part of the circle of several important aristocratic women, including Philip II’s first wife, María of Portugal, and Philip’s sister the infanta Juana, who married Prince Juan of Portugal.
10 See the article by Márquez Villanueva (1978) on the elaborate symbolism of the gems.
11 See Collins (2004, 887–95) on the author’s fictionalization of autobiographical elements and on the symbolic function of the structure of Arcadia.
12 See Blasco (1990) and de Armas (1982–3 and 1985).
13 While history certainly supports this organization, note, too, its personal significance for Lope, who was ridiculed for Arcadia’s frontispiece, which bears a heraldic shield that asserts his kinship with Bernardo del Carpio, and who also served the young Duke of Alba, Don Antonio Alvarez de Toledo, and was protagonist of a scandalous love affair that in many ways paralleled that of the duke.
14 Susan Stewart notes that deixis implies proximity, and spurs reaction and reciprocity from the receiver: “The word deixis connotes the appearance of form in more than its visual dimensions and implies apprehension by touch or motion. Emphasizing the bringing forth of form over notions of imitation and representation per se, deixis yokes rhetoric – that is, an intention to move and a reciprocal receptivity to be moved – to visual and aural appearances. In lyric, painting, sculpture, and other arts, the stored activity of the maker is simultaneous to an implicity and reciprocal capacity for animation in the receiver’ (2002, 150).
15 Elizabeth Rhodes stresses that although Montemayor lived and worked in aristocratic circles for most of his life, he was likely of converso background, was not from a noble family, and had to work his way into royal favour (1992, 22–5). For more on Lope’s ambitions at this moment, see Wright (2001, 13–23). At the risk of oversimplifying, and of stating the obvious, I point out that the baroque aesthetics of desengaño and of elaborate, awe-inspiring design and sensory effects predominate in Arcadia while Renaissance harmony, symmetry, and balance pervade Diana.
16 Brooks (2007) and Gage (2008) are my primary sources here.
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