Month: April 2020

[Before the onset of Corvid 19 I was due to give a talk at the University of Pisa today. In lieu of that talk I thought I’d put up this essay I wrote a few years back, which touches on the relationship between Italy and England in the sixteenth century. It hasn’t yet been published, and I have no idea if it ever will be, so I’m making it available here, from Scotland to Italy with love.

Behind this post is the astonishing story of the Sienese nobleman Enea Silvio Piccolomini of Corsignano, later Pope Pius II, who found himself in my country, Scotland, in 1435, fathered a child here, and made his way back to Italy through England in disguise, because England and Italy were at war. He was nearly shipwrecked on the coast of Scotland and promised to walk barefoot to the nearest shrine of Our Lady if he survived; as a result of this promise, rashly made in a Scottish winter, he got frostbite in his feet and walked with a limp for the rest of his days. So he left a child in Scotland and Scotland left a limp with him. He nearly got slaughtered by Border rievers on his way south, and was hugely impressed by York Minster when he visited; he described it as walled with coloured glass. He was also much impressed by the beauty of Scottish women, though he thought Scottish men were barbaric. Later, he was the last Pope to be involved in a crusade – in fact he died on the way to the Holy Land, after which the crusade was sensibly cancelled. Besides being the only Pope I know of to have fathered a child in Scotland, he was apparently the only Pope to have written an autobiography while in office (the Commentaries), and certainly the only one to have written a work of erotic fiction (though the latter happened before his election to the papacy). This post is about that work of fiction: a Europe-wide bestseller called de duobus amantibus (The Two Lovers), and its possible influence on the early English novel.]

1. A Lost Golden Age of Tudor Fiction

Along with William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (c. 1553), George Gascoigne’s Adventures Passed by Master F.J. (1573) is the work of Tudor prose fiction or ‘novelistic discourse’ whose reputation has undergone the most radical transformation in recent years.[1] A lot of work has been done to trace Gascoigne’s influence on his English successors, but the question of where his proto-novel came from remains something of a puzzle. The Adventures is sometimes talked about as if it sprang fully-formed from its author’s head, spontaneously generated by a combination of quick wit and good fortune (which is just the impression Gascoigne meant it to give). The first purpose of this blog post is to show that this is not in fact the case; and the second is to argue for the largely unacknowledged complexity of the novelistic milieu of the 1560s and early 70s from which it emerged. Gascoigne had many different models of prose fiction available to him when he started writing the Adventures, and one model in particular, I shall argue, suggests the extraordinary sophistication of the humanist tradition of erotic novella-writing on which he drew.[2]

Of the possible influences on Gascoigne’s text, Geoffrey Chaucer’s long poem Troilus and Criseyde (mid-1380s) has rightly been given pride of place, along with its Italian source, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato (1345-50). The 1573 version of the Adventures opens with a homage to Chaucer, and the direct links between the climactic bedroom scenes in the poem and the novella have been noted.[3] Gascoigne also acknowledged the impact of the Italian short story writer Matteo Bandello when he revised the Adventures in 1575, disguising his rewrite as a translation from the salacious ‘riding-tales’ of a non-existent author called ‘Bartello’ whose name clearly echoes that of his real-life counterpart from Piedmont.[4] It is becoming increasingly clear, too, that Gascoigne wrote his proto-novel in the wake of a series of sophisticated English fictions: a native pre-novelistic tradition whose practitioners show a keen awareness of their English precursors in the field. The belated publication of Beware the Cat in 1570 may well have inspired him.[5] So might one or more of the many editions of the anonymous novella The Image of Idleness (c. 1556), whose epistolary form and wittily erotic content could have given him many hints.[6] William Bullein’s experimental novella-cum-textbook A Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence (1564), which influenced Nashe, might have suggested some of the pseudo-medical goings-on in the Adventures; and Gascoigne’s interest in questioni d’amore could have been sharpened by Edmund Tilney’s attractive garden-set novella The Flower of Friendship (1568), as well as by Henry Grantham’s 1566 translation of Boccaccio’s Filocolo.[7] Indeed, if one takes translations and reprints into account as well as original compositions, the 1560s could be seen as a golden age of prose fiction in English, making available to the aficionado a wider range of novelle, merry tales and imaginative dialogues than at any time in the country’s history before that decade.[8]

In this blog post, though, I shall argue that one of Gascoigne’s main inspirations, both for his proto-novel and for the delight in quick-wittedness that drives it, was a little-known book by the fifteenth-century diplomat Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II: the Historia de duobus amantibus (1444), translated into English as The Goodli History of the Ladye Lucres of Scene and of her Lover Eurialus – or more simply, Eurialus and Lucrece.[9] Piccolomini’s Latin narrative was much better known in sixteenth-century Europe than Chaucer’s Troilus, and proved as popular in England as in Gascoigne’s other stamping-ground, the Netherlands, where the first translation into English was made. John Coyle has described it with disarming accuracy as the best pornographic novel ever written by a future pope.[10] At the centre of Piccolomini’s narrative, I shall argue – as at the centre of Gascoigne’s – is a preoccupation with literary depictions of the Trojan War (Virgil’s, Ovid’s, Boccaccio’s, and in Gascoigne’s case Chaucer’s): and its playful toying with this theme helps to point up its preoccupation with the moral, political and social paradoxes beloved of the humanist movement. In Gascoigne’s and Piccolomini’s novelle the Trojan War becomes internalized in a pair of adulterous early modern lovers at a time of relative peace, a process that highlights the religious and cultural fissures that threatened to tear Europe apart in both men’s lifetimes. As with Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s versions of the Troilus story, the war also comes to stand for the social and moral hypocrisies that underlie religious conflicts. It’s this internalizing of Troy that I shall explore in this post, as indicative of the transference from Italy to England of an interest in what I’ll call the politics of the mind which found its best expression in prose fiction.

I shall begin with a brief account of Piccolomini’s literary career, and move on to a close comparison of his and Gascoigne’s masterpieces before returning to the Trojan theme of my title. In the process I hope to show that de duobus amantibus deserves to be thought of, alongside the Adventures, as one of the seeds whose long germination culminated in the rise of the novel in late seventeenth-century England.

2. The Seductive Stranger

The neo-Latin novella de duobus amantibus, written by a little man on the make, Enea Silvio Piccolomini (his surname means ‘wee man’, as he often reminds us), is a minor work of genius, a breath of Tuscan fresh air from the middle of the fifteenth century.[11] One of the most widely disseminated and often-translated narratives of the early modern period – a Europe-wide bestseller for 250 years – which was translated four times into English in Tudor times alone, it has nevertheless failed to get more than a passing mention in histories of English fiction. Yet the briefest glance makes it clear that here is a major point of origin for that remarkable series of Elizabethan proto-novels written in the 1570s and 80s, which began with Gascoigne’s own mini-masterpiece, The Adventures of Master F.J., and went on to include George Pettie’s Petite Pallace of Pleasure (1576), John Lyly’s two Euphues books (1578 and 1580), Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (written c. 1580-6, published 1590) and the astonishing outpouring of fictions in the 1580s and early 90s by Robert Greene. Not only may Piccolomini’s text have served as Gascoigne’s inspiration; it may also have fed its influence directly into the work of his successors, as its second Elizabethan translator William Braunche seems to have recognized in 1596 when he transformed the relatively plain style of the original into the highly-patterned prose of Lyly, Sidney and Greene.[12]

One of Piccolomini’s lifelong preoccupations, emerging in both his religious and literary writings throughout his career, was to expose a form of hypocrisy that lay at the heart of European civilization: the refusal to acknowledge the role played by the body in human affairs – the failure, that is, to accommodate humankind’s full humanity. In this he is a true humanist; a rhetorician and a poet rather than a logician or a philosopher. But he is an astonishingly daring and outspoken humanist, whose daring paid off to the extent that despite working through much of his career as a servant of the chief challengers of papal authority, the reformist Council of Basel, he successfully switched allegiance in mid-career and went on to become Pope. His switch of allegiance is seen by some as a career move, one of the supreme examples in the fifteenth century of unprincipled self-advancement; but he insisted that his transformation from agitator for ecclesiastical reform with a hyperactive sex drive to chaste clerical crusader for the papal supremacy was not so much a schizophrenic change of personality as a well-timed and appropriate shift in emphasis.[13] His choice of the name ‘Pius’ as his papal sobriquet alludes to Virgil’s identification of the protagonist of the Aeneid as pious Aeneas (Piccolomini’s forename Enea is the Italian form of Aeneas, legendary founder of the Italian nation). So when Pope Pius II urges his flock in a celebrated proclamation to ‘reject Aeneas; accept Pius’ he is asking them to recognize that he is the same man he was in his youth, but that his priorities have changed, as is expected of an intelligent man in the later stages of his life.[14]

This notion of humankind as an unruly composite, whose bodily needs must be met as well as its mental and spiritual requirements, can be found everywhere in Piccolomini’s writings. His influential treatise on the education of boys the ‘Art of Rhetoric’ stresses the training of the body as forcefully as the training of the mind, the value of poetry as well as the necessity to ingest philosophy, the crucial importance of using theory as a blueprint for practice.[15] As one might expect, the treatise has nothing to say about sex, since it was composed as a letter to a 10-year-old princeling, and Enea was a priest by the time he wrote it. But an equally famous letter to a teenage prince, Sigismund of Tyrol – written before Enea found his ecclesiastical vocation – suggests that sex can in fact form an integral part of a young man’s physical, intellectual and moral development.[16] When young Sigismund asked him to draft a love-letter to instruct him in the art of seduction, Piccolomini explained his motivation in acceding to the request in scrupulous detail. Given that desire is a ‘condition of human life’, he argues, sexual exploits should be undertaken in youth rather than old age, ‘since […] age is inept in love’. Echoing Andreas Capellanus and the school of courtly love he helped to found, he claims that ‘the custom of love… excites the sluggish virtues of youth’, encouraging young men to extraordinary feats of arms, letters and friendship, and enabling them to know ‘good and evil’ and ‘the stratagems of the world’. And he closes the letter with an unusual twist on a familiar literary trope. Writers of the Renaissance are forever urging their readers to treat their texts as bees treat gardens, shunning unwholesome weeds and drawing nectar only from the sweetest literary flowers – or else extracting goodness from weeds and flowers equally. But Piccolomini’s metaphorical gardens are not texts but the bodies of women: ‘as the bees sip honey from flowers, so you should learn virtue from the blandishments of Venus’. This identifies the female body, and the sexual adventures young men might experience with women, as a kind of book or library from which virtue can be extracted as effectively as – more effectively than? – from the tomes of the philosophers. This is a position that gets taken up by some of the most sophisticated English writers of early modern prose fiction, most strikingly John Lyly, as I suggested long ago in my book Elizabethan Fictions (1997).

Piccolomini’s own life, as unfolded in his collected epistles and his autobiography, the Commentaries, gave a perfect practical demonstration of his conviction that sexual adventures have an integral role to play in the development of a fully rounded human being. He fathered two illegitimate children that we know of: one in Scotland, where he was as impressed by the beauty of the Scottish women as by the barbarity of the Scottish men, and one in Strasbourg, with an English or Breton woman named Elizabeth. The Scottish child died in infancy, but Elizabeth’s son seems to have survived a little longer, since Enea wrote a letter to his father asking him to receive the boy into his household.[17] What is striking about this letter is the extent to which he defends his behaviour in literary terms. He begins by describing himself as ‘Aeneas Sylvius, poet’ – a title he used throughout this phase of his career, after being crowned laureate by Frederick III in 1442 – and nearly all the examples it deploys are drawn from the works of poets or fiction writers. When he wants to point out that his father, too, slept around in his youth, he quotes the story of Tancred and Ghismonda from Boccaccio’s great anthology the Decameron (c. 1348-53): ‘you begot no son of stone or iron, being flesh yourself’ (Enea’s own fictional lover Eurialus later uses the same quotation to defend his adulterous desire for Lucrece).[18] A few lines later, Piccolomini uses a different tale from the Decameron, to flesh out the details of his liaison with Elizabeth. Having asked her to leave her bedroom door unlatched and been twice refused, he tells his father that ‘I remembered Zima the Florentine’. This is Boccaccio’s story of a dandy who contrives to arrange a tryst with a woman sworn by her husband to silence, by appointing himself her ventriloquist, speaking her words for her, and setting up a nocturnal meeting, an arrangement with which she silently concurs by following his instructions to the letter. Enea chose to assume that despite Elizabeth’s show of reluctance she too would follow his instructions, which were delivered in the same way Zima delivered his; and when that night he made his way to her room, sure enough he found the door unlatched, whereupon they proceeded to conceive a son together. Enea’s sexual adventure, in other words, was modelled on that of a Boccaccian hero, Zima the dandy, and he uses the words of a Boccaccian heroine, Ghismonda, to defend it. Poetry, then, in Sidney’s sense of ‘fiction’ in verse or prose, for him offers practical help to desperate lovers. And in Piccolomini’s universe all men and women are to a greater or lesser extent lovers, often quite desperate ones. So those who disapprove of erotic fictions or the actions they encourage are no better, Enea claims, than the ‘hypocrite’ who ‘says that he knows no fault in himself’, in defiance of Christian doctrine (1 John 1:8).

Eloquence itself, in fact – the essential skill of a secretary, as he says in one of his letters, and an art whose supreme exponent is the poet[19] – is closely associated with illicit desire by Piccolomini. His attraction to Elizabeth began, he claims, with an admiration for her linguistic skills. For one thing, she spoke his language, Tuscan; for another, Enea ‘delight[ed] in women’s jests’, a field in which ‘she excelled’, reminding him of Cleopatra’s seduction of Ceasar and Antony with her playfully seductive use of language.[20] Her eloquence, in fact, bred eloquence in him. Inspired by his attraction to her, he quickly persuaded himself by analogy with great men – Moses, Aristotle, and certain notable Christians – to pursue his interest in her. For Enea, then, three major philosophical traditions of the world (the Jewish, the ancient Greek and the Christian) agreed in recognizing both the power of the sexual urge and its significant place in the make-up of the great public speakers and policy-makers. And even as Pius II, Piccolomini continued to think of rhetoric in sexual terms. In the famous ‘retraction bull’ he wrote to exonerate himself for defending the controversial Council of Basel[21] – an official pronouncement composed to prevent any of his earlier writings from bringing ‘scandal’ to his pontificate – Pius speaks of his old letters and pamphlets as the product of a youthful passion for articulacy: a passion which produces illegitimate texts as readily as a young lover produces illegitimate offspring. ‘Our writings pleased us,’ he confesses, ‘in the manner of poets who love their poems like sons’.[22] The sentence neatly identifies his pro-Basel polemics as works of poetry or fiction, while showing an amused tolerance for the ease with which a clever man may be seduced by the music of his own utterances.

1444 was an annus mirabilis for Enea the poet. Having been crowned laureate two years earlier by the Emperor Frederick III, he confirmed the validity of the title by penning a trio of compositions: an epistolary satire on the misery of a courtier’s life (De curialium miseriis), a version of which George Gascoigne could have read in Alexander Barclay’s celebrated Eclogues (c. 1520);[23] a scandalous Plautine comedy called Chrysis, about love between priests and prostitutes in a brothel;[24] and his most widely-read work, De duobus amantibus. All three texts identify Enea as a detached, witty and sometimes acerbic commentator on contemporary European life, a tone made easier for him to adopt by the Emperor Frederick’s policy of maintaining a neutral stance in the conflict between the Anti-pope Felix V (who was elected by the Council of Basel) and Pope Eugenius IV (whom the Council opposed). And the play and the novella identify illicit sexual liaisons as the ultimate testing ground for the pervasive culture of sexual hypocrisy that possessed fifteenth-century Europe. They identify, too, exuberant speech as the peculiar province of lovers, who wield it honestly in the service of dishonest love, and in the process show up the degree to which eloquence has been commandeered for vastly more destructive purposes elsewhere in the world they inhabit.

Gascoigne could not have known Chrysis, since the play was lost from the time of its composition to the twentieth century; but it is interesting to note that Enea’s novella was penned by a practitioner of neo-classical comedy, just as Gascoigne’s Adventures sprang from the imagination of the translator of another Italian comedy, Ariosto’s I Suppositi, Englished by Gascoigne as Supposes (meaning something like ‘assumptions’).[25] And Chrysis can help us to interpret de duobus amantibus. Emily O’Brien has recently shown how Enea’s play satirizes the fifteenth-century fashion for Neo-Stoic philosophy: the intellectual tradition that rejects passion in favour of an idealized and unattainable rationalism.[26] In addition, Enea transplants the Grecian setting of his comedy to the political hotbed of Basel in the 1440s, identifying its characters with real-life participants in the struggle between he Anti-pope Felix and Pope Eugenius, and having the young man Charinus allude to the conflict between the pontiffs only to dismiss it as irrelevant to the concerns of non-politicians. ‘There are some gentlemen of the toga,’ Charinus observes,

who say there is some kind of awful dissension between pontiffs. For my part, I keep in mind that saying of the wise: that useless worries are best put behind you. Just as chickens who are destined to be slaughtered tomorrow fight amongst themselves for feed in the henhouse, so men contend for empire when they have no idea how long they’ll be permitted to hold it. If I’m going to give up something, I’d sooner give up an empire than my dinner (IV.164-74).

Accordingly, the characters in Enea’s play have little interest in virtue, as either the popes or the Stoic philosophers defined it. His lecherous priests consider their celibate status as the perfect excuse for evading the legal trap of matrimony and indulging in a perpetual round of free love. They resolve to punish their prostitute lovers not for sinning but for sleeping with other men besides themselves. And the prostitutes teach the priests in return a lesson not in celibacy but mutual affection, showing a warmth for their clerical lovers – despite their promiscuity – that scuppers the men’s plans to abuse the women for being as unfaithful as they themselves are. Overhearing the prostitutes profess their love for them near the end, the priests conclude that ‘it’s we who have been wicked and they good’ (XVIII.778); and the play closes with a reconciliation between whores and clerics which is celebrated with ‘three jugs of the best vintage wine’ (XVIII.802), as well as the applause of Enea’s male audience.

When another male character, then, tells us in the epilogue that the play’s moral is that ‘you should work hard to be virtuous, stay away from courtesans, pimps, parasites, and wild parties,’ and that ‘Virtue excels all things, and the virtuous man lacks for nothing’ (XVIII.807-812), we could be forgiven for assuming that he has completely missed the point. The word virtue has been appropriated by popes and politicians, and like the squabbles of politicians has little to do with what makes relationships work between ordinary men and women of flesh and blood. It seems likely, too, that the moral is a joke at the expense of the moralized versions of Terence’s often raunchy comedies that formed a staple of the medieval school curriculum. Unlike the philosopher, the schoolmaster or the power-hungry pontiff, the poet knows all about the emotional machinery that drives the households and daily activities of common people, and can discover a complex web of alternative virtues being practised there which do not involve an actual or presumed withdrawal from either hard work, hard play or a bit of hard core fornication.

All of which brings us to Enea’s masterpiece de duobus amantibus, one of the models, I suggest, for The Adventures Passed by Master F.J. A brief summary of what the two texts have in common can serve as a starting point for the comparison.

3. Divided Loyalties

Enea’s novella, de duobus amantibus, was written not much more than a year before he accomplished his spectacular political volte-ace, switching his professional role from apologist for the anti-papal Council of Basel to propagandist for the papacy. This imminent change of allegiance is signalled by the fact that it’s a book about divided loyalties. It concerns a German man, who finds his career as an official in the court of the Holy Roman Emperor at odds with his love-life, and a faithfully married woman of Siena, who finds herself in love with the German – a man who is not her husband – and transfers her affections to him without compromising her wholehearted commitment to the principle of loyalty to one’s lover. It is hard to imagine anyone who was not in Enea’s complicated position, or something like it, writing such a richly duplicitous text, which identifies certain intransigent problems at the heart of Christian morality and exposes them in painful detail through what is ostensibly the lightest kind of romance – the prose equivalent of a classical comedy.

Gascoigne’s proto-novel The Adventures Passed by Master F.J., too, is a story of divided loyalties. A young man from the South of England, the titular F.J., comes to stay with a Northern friend in his castle and initiates an affair with his friend’s wife, Elinor. Another woman in the castle, Frances, detects the affair and signals her attraction and loyalty to F.J. by showing him that she knows what he is up to, yet refraining from exposing his adultery. Instead she seeks to win him for herself with a mixture of witty banter, amorous fables, and hints about Elinor’s congenital promiscuity. F.J. finds himself attracted to both women, but cannot commit himself to Frances because (as in Capestranus’ treatise De amore) the allure of illicit, hard-won love proves far too intense to be surrendered for legitimate affection. Gascoigne, like Piccolomini, stood accused in his lifetime of a taste for sexual and political intrigue: he was indicted and acquitted as both a bigamist and a traitor, and his verse outside the Adventures celebrates and repents of adultery (real or imagined) with equal fervour. And if he did not switch his political allegiance in mid career as Enea did, his failure to find steady employment necessitated an equally developed capacity to change objectives and allegiances at a moment’s notice, a talent for spontaneous improvisation which is invoked by the word ‘adventures’ in the title of his novella.[27]

To live ‘at adventure’ in the sixteenth century was to live from day to day, seizing whatever chances or adventures fell in your path and resisting all attempts to confine you within the bounds of duty, obligation or (by extension) morality. Gascoigne’s well-attested delight in weaving his own reputation as an unruly adventurer into the plots of his various fictions could well have made Enea’s ingenious interweaving of autobiography and poetic invention singularly attractive to him. So too might Enea’s ambiguous recantation, when he transformed himself from Enea/Aeneas to Pius without ever quite rejecting the political and sexual exploits of his youth. Gillian Austen has made a thorough case for the ambiguity of Gascoigne’s many gestures of repentance in the last years of his life.[28] Where Enea cut off the sins of his youth in one clean gesture when he took the cloth (though he remained willing to recall the sins of his youth in ample detail in his autobiographical writings), Gascoigne carefully tailored each of his later texts to its intended recipients, switching with disconcerting ease between stern recantations of his youthful folly and continued dabblings in erotic poetry. He might well have seen Enea as something of a fellow spirit, with his pragmatic juggling of the claims of body and soul, the variety of his literary output, and his reputation as a man of sexual, political and even military action.[29]

The first formal link between Enea’s and Gascoigne’s novelle is that both are contained within the framework of a letter, and that both are packed with epistolary exchanges between their central characters. This formal choice is hardly surprising in Enea, since he was one of the most respected letter-writers of the early modern period; and Gascoigne’s extensive use of the form may owe as much to Piccolomini as to the anonymous author of the first English piece of epistolary prose fiction The Image of Idleness (1556), which kept being reprinted throughout the first half of Elizabeth’s reign.[30] De duobus amantibus first appeared in a letter to the humanist Mariano Sozzini, and was frequently printed in the sixteenth century with this and another letter as explanatory prefaces; and although the Tudor translations of Enea’s text omit these epistles, Gascoigne’s considerable skills as a linguist could have given him ready access to them in Latin, by way of the various Italian, French and German editions circulating in his lifetime.[31] Enea’s prefatory epistles foreshadow the celebrated letters from HW and GT that preface Gascoigne’s Adventures in the book where it first appears, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573). The first of Enea’s letters as they are printed, to a German friend named Caspar Schlick, lets slip the fact that de duobus may be a roman à clef, and that Schlick has much in common with Eurialus. It thus anticipates the hints at a true-life scandal that run through Gascoigne’s Adventures, and to which Gascoigne alludes in the revised 1575 version of his novella, the Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire.[32] But Enea’s first epistle also resembles the letter from Gascoigne’s HW in the challenge it presents to orthodox morality, and in the way it sets the tone for the tale to come.

The bulk of the epistle to Schlick consists of an extravagant mock eulogy of that ‘very little Person’ Mariano Sozzini, who should have been surnamed ‘wee man’, Enea tells us – like Piccolomini himself – on account of his diminutive size.[33] Despite his small stature, Enea showers Sozzini with praise: he is ‘as great a Philosopher as Plato; in Geometry equal to Boetius; in Arithmetic to Macrobius’; he ‘paints like another Apelles’, carves like the legendary sculptor Praxiteles, and so on. Nobody, of course – let alone a little body like Sozzini – could possibly encompass all these qualities. And even if he did, the letter goes on to point out that even the best of men has some blemish that lets him down. Plagarensis, Enea observes, became enraged that his ass could not bear as many offspring at one birth as his sow; Gomicius thought he had fallen pregnant because he let his wife get on top when they were making love; and Sozzini, too, has his blemish. He is addicted to sex; and since Enea owes him a favour, the writer has duly obeyed the little man’s request to write him a pornographic novella to indulge his proclivities. But the letter ends by claiming, as Sidney did in his Apology for Poetry (1595), that a love of love is hardly a fault. ‘He who never was in Love,’ Enea declares, ‘is either a Stone or a Beast’, and any attempt to deny this would be hypocrisy. Human frailty in matters of desire is an intransigent ‘Truth’, and this frailty deserves due recognition from poets like himself.

The second epistle prefacing Enea’s novella, which is addressed to Sozzini himself, is equally witty at the expense of po-faced moralists. It begins by pointing out that Sozzini is fifty and Enea nearly forty, and that it would therefore seem inappropriate for either of them to show much interest in erotic writing. But Enea adds that Sozzini’s continued ‘Proneness to Amour’ protects him from ageing, and therefore promises that he will ‘rouze all the amorous Spirits of this grey headed Lover’ in the ensuing story. So when the letter closes by claiming that the tale of Eurialus and Lucrece gives a ‘warning to Youth, to avoid such Criminal Amours’ as the lovers indulged in, the rest of the epistle forbids us to take this seriously. Enea undercuts the moral of his narrative by placing it in a context where its obsolescence is palpable. And this process of setting up apparent moral judgements only to explode them in the next sentence – and perhaps reinstate them the sentence after – will become familiar as we read on. It is not a device that Gascoigne mimics directly; but he could have learned a lot, I think, from Enea’s willingness to play continually with set notions of right and wrong.

Piccolomini’s two prefatory epistles prepare us for one aspect of the story that follows: its playfully ironic tone, which undercuts the exalted pretensions of the courtly love tradition, laughs at Petrarchan idealism, and mocks the chivalric code as depicted in conventional romances. The Emperor’s court in the novella is a place where playfulness is endemic: the Emperor himself is both lover and joker, who delights in teasing Eurialus about his attraction to a married woman. At the same time, a strand of seriousness runs through the narrative, which comes to the fore in its final pages. Unlike the Emperor, Eurialus cannot afford to treat his affair with Lucretia as a joke; if he does, his career will suffer. The material conditions of fifteenth-century life dictate that a courtier cannot laugh freely at the things his master laughs at. And a married woman cannot afford to laugh at the things a male courtier might find amusing. Enea keeps reminding us of these incompatibilities, as if to draw our attention to the real social issues that get obscured by talk of moral idealism and the apparatus of conventional romance.

Again, it is the philosophy rather than the details of this constant play between light and darkness, the comic and the deeply serious that Gascoigne could have learned from. Gascoigne’s Adventures shares with de duobus an ability to veer between moods at a moment’s notice, and he makes repeated changes of tone and sensibility a defining feature of the relationship between his lovers. There is, however, one occasion when Master F.J., like Eurialus, learns the danger of telling jokes about infidelity in the context of royal courts. One of his poems celebrating his adulterous affair finds its way to the ears of Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers, who take offence at his claim to have got a monopoly on beauty now that he has got Elinor as his mistress (Pigman 176.22-31). Not much is made of the courtiers’ displeasure with F.J.’s boasting and its possible consequences. But the effect of its being mentioned is to stress the provincialism of F.J.’s affair, and to remind us that it would have had quite different personal and political repercussions if it had been prosecuted a little closer to the seat of power. Juxtaposed with the household of the Queen herself, F.J.’s hubristic comparisons of Elinor to a range of mythical deities and monarchs might have looked uncomfortably like treason. And the episode also demonstrates how easy it is for provincial doings to find their way to the cultural centre, however discreetly they may seem to be conducted. Enea’s text could well have laid the foundation for this perception of Gascoigne’s, given the atmosphere of increasing paranoia about the possibility of detection that pervades the Sienese narrative.

4. Women Versus Men

Like the Adventures, then, de duobus is a duplicitous or two-faced text, remarkable for its clear-eyed recognition of the torments as well as the delights of an illicit relationship. This tension is of course familiar from the literature of courtly love, but both Piccolomini and Gascoigne are astonishingly skilful in sustaining it; and they manage this feat, I think, through the complexity of their female characters. Gascoigne supplies his readers with two clever heroines: an adulterous wife called Elinor and her free-spirited but faithful sister (or sister-in-law) Frances, who between them test F.J.’s intelligence in the context of a three-way attraction. Enea, by contrast, gives his readers a single heroine, Lucrece/Lucretia, who seems to have been designed specifically to confound anti-feminist preconceptions about desiring women. Neither Gascoigne’s Frances nor Enea’s Lucretia permits readers the satisfaction of passing easy judgement on her actions. And part of what forbids such a judgement is the link both stories forge between the dilemma these women find themselves in and the greatest of all stories about adultery: the myth of Troy.

The first of the links with Troy is that both novelle describe an affair between a married woman and a foreigner, reminiscent of the relationship between the Trojan Prince Paris and the Greek Queen Helen. In this they run counter to the best-known contemporary versions of a Trojan love story, Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, in which Cressida is a widow and Troilus her fellow Trojan. Enea’s and Gascoigne’s lovers have more in common with Paris and Helen, whose affair sparked off the Trojan war, than with the much less politically explosive relationship between Troilus and Cressida. Gascoigne stresses the parallel by naming his heroine Elinor, which gets changed to ‘Helen’ in one of F.J.’s poems (Pigman 175.21-177.24), while Enea gives his heroine a husband called Menelaus and a brother-in-law called Agamemnon, while repeatedly associating his hero with Trojans such as Memnus and Paris. Intriguingly, though, both writers mix up their lovers with Troilus and Cressida too. Enea’s hero Eurialus, for instance, has a go-between called Pandalus, while Master F.J. becomes a member of ‘Troylus sect’ (Pigman 189.5) when he gets jealous of Elinor. The double parallel with Helen/Paris and Cressida/Troilus identifies both couples as simultaneously enemies and friends as well as lovers – a paradox Gascoigne recognizes when he has F.J. refer to Elinor as his ‘friendly enemy’.[34] It also marks them out as subject to a higher dispensation, the helpless playthings of politicians whose agendas run counter to their own. Eurialus’s imperial overlord, the Holy Roman Emperor, governs his fate just as Priam governs that of Troilus, while F.J.’s hidden rival for Elinor’s love, the so-called ‘secretary’, turns out to be a far more potent ghost-writer of Elinor’s affairs than he is, a Homer or an Ovid where F.J. is just a clever schoolboy with too much pride in his own compositions. And the use of Troy as an analogy for these two affairs suggests that each set of lovers is in some sense doomed from the start. They are retreading old ground filled with the ruins of lost civilizations, and the location of this ground in Siena and England suggests that the tensions and contradictions that led to the fall of Troy are somehow replicated at the level of the town and even the household in early modern Europe.

In the 1573 version of the Adventures, Gascoigne associates F.J. with another character from the Trojan war, a figure who makes explicit the link between ancient Troy and early modern England. At the point when F.J. finally succeeds in arranging a secret liaison with his lover Elinor – in a deserted corridor of the castle at night – the narrator invites his male reader to share his imaginative complicity with the act of adultery that follows:

But why hold I so long discourse in discribing the joyes which (for lacke of like experience) I cannot set out to the ful? Were it not that I knowe to whom I write, I would the more beware what I write. F.J. was a man, and neither of us are sencelesse, and therfore I shold slaunder him, (over and besides a greater obloquie to the whole genealogie of Enaeas) if I should imagine that of tender hart he would forbeare to expresse hir more tender limbes against the hard floore (Pigman 168.11-18).

This passage is a wonderful example of the moral ambiguity of the 1573 Adventures (it was omitted from the cleaned-up 1575 version). It begins by implying the inexperience of the narrator, who has never undergone the pleasures he wishes us to picture. His inexperience becomes gullibility in the second sentence, where he claims to know the identity of his reader (‘I knowe to whom I write’): a reference to the fact that the whole narrative is supposed to have been contained in a private letter from the narrator G.T. to his friend H.W. – who promptly betrayed his friend by disobeying his instructions to keep it private and sending it to a printer to be published (Pigman 141.1-142.37). Any reader of the novella who is not H.W. is a beneficiary of this act of betrayal, and therefore complicit with it; in other words, betrayal is spread from person to person like an infection by the printed text we are reading. Yet treason is already endemic in the English people, because they trace their ‘genealogie’ to the arch-traitor Aeneas, whose grandson Brutus founded the island nation, according to Tudor legend. Gascoigne could have referred, if he wished, to ‘the genealogie of Brutus’ – and indeed this was the more usual formulation. But Aeneas’ treachery was proverbial, condemned in the Trojan histories of Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis as well as by the woman he abandoned, Dido Queen of Carthage, in Ovid’s Heroides.[35] By tracing F.J. and the male reader to a common ancestor – the legendary founder of Rome – Gascoigne makes them brothers in brutishness, capable of abandoning any pretence at a ‘tender hart’ and crushing the ‘more tender limbes’ of women without a moment’s reflection. And it is tempting to see the shadow of another womanizing Aeneas/Enea behind the allusion to Virgil’s ambiguous hero.

F.J.’s treacherous, Aeneas-like nature is confirmed soon afterwards in Gascoigne’s second set of extended references to the Trojan war. F.J. composes several poems or songs to celebrate his betrayal of his friend, Elinor’s husband; and one or more of these songs exposes the young man’s adultery as well as his hubris to the world at large. But the verses also expose him to the suspicion of Elinor, who suspects they were first written about some other lover of his, although F.J. later swears that he changed the name Elinor to Helen in one of the poems because ‘he toke it all for one name, or at least he never red of any Elinor such matter as might sound worthy like commendation for beautie’ (Pigman 177.13-15). The narrator tangles himself into fantastic knots of speculation at this point as to whether Elinor was right, and the Helen of the poem was someone different. Rumour has it, we learn, that F.J. did once have an affair with a woman called Helen; but she was not worth writing poems about, and besides the style of the poem suggests that it was written long before he met her, and besides it is clearly a sensible policy to adapt the same poem for use in more than one relationship. By the end of the passage, poetry has become the versatile tool or pimp of serial adulterers, a stalking horse (or Trojan horse) whose general purpose is always sexual and specific purpose always obscure. ‘Well[,] by whom he wrote it I know not,’ the passage ends:

but once I am sure that he wrote it, for he is no borrower of inventions, and this is al that I meane to prove, as one that sende you his verses by stealth, and do him double wrong, to disclose unto any man the secrete causes why they were devised, but this for your delight I do adventure (Pigman 177.24-29).

In other words, nothing about the poem is clear except that it can readily be adapted to treachery – such as the treachery we are condoning by reading F.J.’s poems, adventurously purloined from him for our voyeuristic pleasure. The one set of values the narrator seems to celebrate is the technical accomplishment of the poet: and he gives F.J. special praise for the originality of his compositions, ‘for he is no borrower of inventions’. But even this seeming ‘fact’ about F.J.’s originality proves uncertain; the next poem we read is a translation from the Italian, and therefore a ‘borrowed invention’. Lyrics are like so many Helens, available to be poached from one situation or language and deployed for erotic purposes in another; no wonder, then, if Elinor regards their male composer with equal distrust, and subjects the poet F.J. to the same cavalier treatment as his poems promise her. Like her namesake Helen, whose first experience of love was with that serial abandoner of women Theseus (as F.J.’s lyric about her reminds us (Pigman 176.9-10)), or like Criseyde in Chaucer’s poem, Elinor inhabits an environment where women are used by men as sexual playthings and political pawns, and under the circumstances it is hard to blame her for acting at all times in her own best interests, as she does when she swaps F.J. for another lover later in the story.

F.J.’s Helen poem marks him out as a betrayer, although he continues to pose throughout the narrative as if he were the soul of amorous integrity. Enea’s male lover Eurialus is also a betrayer, abandoning Lucretia so as not to compromise his political future. Here, then, is another way in which Gascoigne’s narrative has more in common with de duobus amantibus than with Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer’s innocent Troilus has had no experience of love before he falls for Criseyde, whose widowhood teaches her to be far more wary of the sudden twists and turns of fortune than her lover has yet learned to be. There is an element of Troilus’s innocence in both Eurialus and F.J., but it is the heartless, self-serving innocence of a young man who thinks the pose of courtly lover is a game, and has no idea how much they will damage themselves and others with their infidelities. And once one has recognized this first set of family resemblances between the two texts – Enea’s and Gascoigne’s – a number of others present themselves, binding the books together in intriguing ways.

Both pairs of lovers are defined in their narratives as being at once foreign to each other and fellow citizens of the same emotional nation. The German Eurialus tells the Italian Lucretia: ‘call me no straunger, I pray the, for I am rathere of thys contrye, than he that is borne heare, sythens hee is but by chaunce, and I by myne own choyse’ (Morrall 16.27-29). Later, of course, his foreignness reasserts itself, as he decides to throw in his lot with Emperor Sigismund rather than his lover, and abandons Lucretia as Aeneas abandoned Dido – or as that other Aeneas, Piccolomini, abandoned his women in Scotland and Strasbourg. F.J. and Elinor, too, begin by assuming that they share a common language: the discourse of continental courtship, whose French, Italian and Spanish lexicon litters their conversation, covertly signalling their willingness to subscribe to continental amorous practices, of which adultery was supposed to be one. In one sentence F.J. gives Elinor a French congé or greeting accompanied by the Spanish gesture of kissing the hand (Bezo las manos), and the cod-Spanish gesture of a kiss on the lips described in the cod-Spanish phrase zuccado dez labros, before reciting a poem in the Italian form of a Terza sequenza (Pigman 149.31-34). The Babel of different languages anticipates the inevitable breakdown in communication, when the lovers’ foreignness to each other reasserts itself as it did in Enea’s novella. F.J. loses track of Elinor’s meaning and avenges himself by raping her; and Elinor at once avenges herself in turn by transferring her affections to another man. The frail city of their relationship, built on the slenderest of foundations, collapses and leaves no trace – like Babel or the City of Troy. In all versions of the Trojan legend the city betrays itself. Without Paris’s ruinous affair with Helen, and Troy’s condoning of it, the war with Greece would never have started; without the city’s rash acceptance of the wooden horse its towers would not have fallen; and in many versions it is the Trojan Aeneas who is responsible for persuading his fellow countrymen to bring the horse inside the city walls. By their allusions to the Trojan war, both Piccolomini and Gascoigne put betrayal at the heart of their stories – and at the heart, I would suggest, of the cultures they inhabit.

Both texts reinforce this theme of self-betrayal by replacing a war between two separate peoples, the Trojans and the Greeks, with what is effectively a civil war. The states where the action of the novelle takes place are in each case enjoying a fragile peace between bouts of conflict. Eurialus comes to Siena in the train of Emperor Sigismund, who is often at war (as Eurialus tells Lucretia) but pays his visit to the city en route to a diplomatic mission in Rome; while the Southerner F.J. arrives in the North parts of England not long after the Northern Rebellion of 1569, when the Catholic lords of the North of England rose against the Protestant settlement that had been imposed on them by the South, as part of the ongoing religious struggle between Reformers and Counter-Reformers.[36] But despite the official lull in hostilities in both texts, conflict continues: between adulterers and husbands; between the lip-service paid to laws and customs in Renaissance Europe and the passionate, wit-fuelled relationship pursued by the lovers in defiance of both; between the literary conventions of courtly love or chivalric romance invoked by the adulterers on the one hand, and their repeated violation of those conventions on the other. And the potential for violence in these conflicts is signalled by the conspicuous presence of swords in sexual encounters. Master F.J. carries a sword to his first assignation with Elinor, on the bare floorboards of the gallery. Eurialus too carries his sword to his first assignation with Lucretia. Their love-making is interrupted by her husband, which condemns Eurialus to an hour or two of cowering in a closet; and when he later recalls the episode, swords figure prominently in his recollection: ‘though I hadde escaped [her husband’s] handes because hee hadde no weapon, and I hadde a sweard by my syde, yet hadde he a man wyth hym, and weapons honge at hande uppon the wall, and there was many servauntes in the house […] and I shoulde have ben handled accordynge’ (Morrall 25.13-18). So war in these narratives is no mere metaphor (although it is that too, especially in the Adventures). There are physical dangers involved, and phallic weapons can end up damaging their bearers, as well as the women they are supposedly intended to protect. Swords, like penises, have divided loyalties, and unsheathing them can lead to a host of unpredictable consequences.

Eurialus’ inner torment, both while he is locked in the closet and afterwards when reflecting on his predicament, dramatizes a central conflict in both narratives: the internal war of attrition between the male lover’s contradictory attitudes to his mistress. Throughout the text Eurialus careers between emotional extremes: delighted celebration of the wonderful sex he is enjoying and outbreaks of lacerating self-disgust in which he berates himself for falling prey to the wiles of women. Gascoigne’s protagonist too gets trapped in mental turmoil – the self-inflicted excruciation of jealousy – which leads him half way through the story to mistrust the elusive word-games with Elinor he has so far relished, and to re-read the letters she has sent him as products of duplicity rather than affection. This agonized reinvention of himself and her leads to his rape of Elinor, a rape that is linked with their earlier liaison in the corridor by being described in terms of a sword attack: ‘he drewe uppon his new professed enimie, and… thrust hir through both hands, and etc.’ (Pigman 198.19-21). Violence in the civil war of these two narratives springs from an interior split or fragmentation in men which inflicts appalling damage on women’s bodies.

Both texts stress the inwardness of the affairs they describe – their origin and growth in the enclosed space of the lovers’ minds and bodies – by careful concentration on the physical details of the buildings where they take place. Gascoigne’s Elinor knows of secret passages between her bedchamber and his, and we quickly become familiar with the ambience of the bedchambers themselves, where F.J. languishes in a jealous fever and Elinor holds court. In the same way, we build up a vivid picture of the streets and buildings that surround Lucretia’s house in de duobus, and learn much about the marital bedroom where she and Eurialus make love. The effect of all this architectural and mental inwardness is a mounting sense of claustrophobia, which culminates in the failure of either affair to escape from the confines of the house where it got started. In each case, it is the woman who stays trapped in the building at the end of the story, unlike her Greek and Trojan counterparts, as if to confirm her continued subjection to the laws and customs she has dared to challenge. Both stories, then, imply that the conditions which gave rise to their own particular Trojan War remain in place after the affair has fizzled out, and that the conflict will carry on into successive generations. Notwithstanding the passions that have been aroused in Siena and Northern England, the European household and the rules that are presumed to govern it remain unchanged, and the emergence of further labyrinthine secret histories – post-Trojan histories – like the ones we have witnessed seems inevitable.

5. Names and Naming

Lucretia’s name in de duobus amantibus promises exactly this. It is an inspired choice of name and a deeply unsettling one. It means that hovering over Enea’s heroine is the shadow of rape – the rape that is carried out in Gascoigne’s story – and a corresponding problematization of the early modern anti-feminist tradition of laying the blame for any sexual act, consensual or otherwise, squarely on the woman, who must therefore pay the price for it. Lucretia shares her name with a founder of Rome as distinguished as Enea’s namesake: the woman whose rape set off a revolution, leading to the collapse of the Roman monarchy and the foundation of the republic. She is physically beautiful, described in loving detail by a seemingly besotted narrator; and like Elinor and her sister Frances she is amusing and intelligent as well (‘Who would then leave to love,’ Eurialus cries, ‘when he seeth suche wit and learning in his maystres?’, Morrall 15.35-6). But despite this perilous fusion of beauty and intelligence with powerful desire, Enea never once lets her integrity be questioned. Whenever Eurialus gets frightened or frustrated by his affair, he lapses into the commonplaces of fifteenth-century misogyny; but he always finds his anti-feminism demolished by the unarguable fact that Lucretia lends no fuel to it.

Her fusion of bodily and mental perfection remains as marked at the end of the tale as it was in this lyrical passage near the beginning:

Her mouth small and comely, her lyppes of corall colour, handsom to byte on, her small tethe, wel set in order, semed Cristal through which the quivering tonge dyd send furth (not wordes) but moost pleasant armony. What shall I shewe the beautye of her chynne, or the whytenesse of her necke? Nothynge was in that bodye not too bee praysed[. A]s the outwarde aparaunces shewed token of that that was inwarde, no man beheld her that dyd not envy her husbande[. S]he was in speche as the fame is, the mother of Graccus was, or the doughter of Hortentius. Nothynge was more sweter, nor soberer than her talcke. She pretended not (as dothe many) honestye by hevy countenance: but with mery vysage, shewed her sobernes, not fearefull, nor over heardye: but under drede of shame, she caryed in a womans hart (Morrall 3.35-4.10).

It is only after agonized self-interrogation and a lengthy correspondence that this paragon of loyalty transfers her allegiance from her husband to a German stranger; and once the transference has been completed, her ‘honestye’ and ‘sobernes’ remain unshakeable. This deeply honest form of dishonesty – a carefully considered change of mind as complete as the change of the physical object of her desire – is a state few early modern English poets could allow their women to inhabit. Gascoigne had to split his heroine in two in order to present women from as complex a perspective as Piccolomini did, while Lyly and Greene never tried anything so controversial. I wonder whether, in creating such a heroine and calling her Lucretia, Enea aimed to stage a revolution in the attitudes of his contemporaries to desire itself? If so, the attempt was a failure of heroic proportions. But I suspect he knew his attempt would fail, and was determined only that it should fail heroically.

The most complex use of Lucretia’s name occurs in the final letter of the narrative, in which Eurialus explains why he has to leave her, and why he cannot take her with him. It’s her name, he insists, that has prompted both these acts of seeming betrayal, which he presents as being in her own interest. ‘Thou knowest thou art maryed into a noble familye,’ he says, ‘and haste the name of a ryght beautyful and chaste Lady’ (Morrall 38.2-3); and the English phrase used by the translator neatly collapses the distinction between two meanings of the word ‘name’: designation and reputation. The latter meaning is taken up when he suggests another name that might become linked with hers if she should elope with him: ‘Lo,’ the world would say, ‘Lucres that was called more chast then the wyfe of Brutus, and better than Penelope, foloweth an adulterer […[ it is not Lucres, but […] Medea that folowed Jason’ (Morrall 38.8-12). He concludes by insisting that his abandonment of her will preserve her as the living image of the woman her name commemorates. ‘Another lover peraventure wolde otherwyse counsel the,’ he writes, ‘and desyre the to ronne thy way, that he myghte abuse the as long as he myght, nothynge regardynge what shulde befall of it, whyle he myght satisfye hys appetite[;] but he were no true lover that wolde regarde rather his own lust, than thy fame’ (Morrall 38.26-31). The image he presents of this alternative lover, dragging her like a camp-follower round the battlefields of Europe as he follows in the train of the Emperor, reminds us of what he claims not to be: Diomedes seducing Cressida, Tarquin raping Collatinus’ wife. By invoking these examples, however, he glosses over his own resemblance to the Jason who abandoned Medea. And he also inadvertently betrays his excessive respect for fame and fortune, which he demonstrates by pursuing his political ambitions at the expense of his devotion to Lucretia. Earlier, he persuaded a relative of her husband’s – Pandalus – to act as messenger between them by offering him an earldom. Here Eurialus shows that he shares Pandalus’s preference for position over personal loyalty. The Emperor made Eurialus ‘ryche and of great power,’ he points out, ‘and I cannot departe from hym without the losse of my state, so that if I shulde leave hym, I coulde not convenientlye entertayne the’ (Morrall 38.17-19). The mixture here of genuine concern for Lucretia and deep self-interest, of the exalted vocabulary of courtly love and the double-speak of hypocrisy, renders it as complex a piece of prose as anything written in the following century. Eurialus’s dishonest play on his lover’s name also anticipates Master F.J.’s equally dishonest games with the names ‘Elinor’ and ‘Ellen’.

One of the things this letter and its aftermath show us is how far Enea’s text works to subvert its reader’s expectations. If Lucretia is never condemned by Piccolomini, neither is Eurialus. He leaves her like a traitor, but is never the same again, psychologically speaking; he is grief-stricken ever after. Having refused to carry her off on this occasion, he tries and fails to find an opportunity to run off with her later. And their final meeting causes such physical torment to both parties that all doubts of Eurialus’s continuing desire for Lucretia are banished: ‘one love and one mynde was in two devyded, and the harte suffred particion. Parte of the mynde wente and part remayned and all the sences were disperpled and playned too departe from theyr owne selfe’ (Morrall 39.33-6). Body and soul, reason and emotion are damaged by the lovers’ parting, and it’s easy to see this as a comment on Piccolomini’s culture, which can see no way to reconcile the needs of the flesh with those of the mind and spirit, the pursuit of a career with the satisfaction of desire. Enea and his protagonists inhabit a radically divided community, and its unification could only ever have been effected by drastic collective action – an ethical revolution – to accommodate the needs of the body alongside the demands of the sacred and secular authorities.

The moral complexity of Enea’s narrative may well have been one of the things English readers prized about it. The 1553 English translator tones down or omits the rare moments of moral commentary that occur in the Latin. Instead he tacks on a few verses at the end which stress not the immorality of the affair but the agonies it inflicted:

Love is no plesur, but a pain perdurable
And the end is deth which is most lamentable
Therfore ere thou be chayned with suche care
By others peryls, take hede and beware (Morrall 41.5-8).

One might be reminded of the apparently ‘moral’ conclusion of Gascoigne’s revised Adventures of 1575, in which a woman dies as a result of the lovers’ affair – though the woman who dies is Elinor’s blameless sister-in-law Frances, not the unfaithful Elinor, while the latter goes on to live ‘long in the continuance of hir acustomed change’ (Pigman 215.29-216.16 note). The death of Frances is as bereft of moral purpose as her rejection by F.J. was in the first version, and serves, like Lucretia’s death in de duobus amantibus, to satirize the early modern tendency to equate literary value with the delivery of simplistic moral lessons, without much concern for their relevance to the difficult world inhabited by the reader.

Throughout both versions of Gascoigne’s Adventures, in fact, Frances behaves like an Elizabethan successor to Enea’s Lucretia, making plain her desire for F.J. at every opportunity while never eliciting a word of condemnation from the narrator for her witty acknowledgement of her own attraction to him. Indeed, Frances’ nickname for F.J. – she dubs him her ‘Trust’ – echoes one of Lucretia’s letters, in which she identifies Eurialus (with equal irony) as ‘my onelye truste’ (Morrall 37.24). Perhaps Gascoigne’s killing off of Frances in his revised version was intended to strengthen her resemblance to Enea’s heroine. One might even consider Frances to have been as selfishly and casually abandoned as Lucretia was. After all, F.J. seems at one point to confirm his status as Frances’s lover and champion: when Frances dubs him her ‘Trust’ he names her his ‘Hope’ as if exchanging verbal tokens or emblems with her, thus sealing his status as her chivalric champion, perhaps even her betrothed. But although F.J. and Frances continue to address each other by these affectionate nicknames, the relationship they imply never comes to fruition – F.J. and Frances never become a couple – and ironically, all because of F.J.’s misplaced insistence that he is loyal to Elinor, despite the fact that he raped her. As in de duobus amantibus, in other words, notions of loyalty and betrayal, friendship and enmity, sexual promiscuity, sexual violence and sexual fidelity, are challenged and problematized at every stage of the Adventures, just as they are in the most interesting stories to have emerged from the myth of Troy.

As I’ve said before, it’s in the tone and moral complexity of his novella rather than its details that Gascoigne most clearly betrays his debt to the subtle mind of Piccolomini. Both men were citizens of a new Troy of intelligent, articulate, playful and destructive desire: a lovely, doomed city that never was and never could be, but whose contours they dared to superimpose on the map of their own particular time and nation. And it would seem to me well worthwhile to go on tracing the contours of that shared imaginative cityscape in more detail than I can manage here.

NOTES

[1] For the use of the phrase ‘novelistic discourse’ to describe early modern prose fiction see Constance Relihan, Fashioning Authority: The Development of Elizabethan Novelistic Discourse (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994), introduction. Throughout the paper I use the term ‘novella’ to describe prose fiction by Piccolomini and Gascoigne, but I do so loosely, meaning both to distinguish the kinds of narrative they wrote from the modern novel and to acknowledge its place in the prehistory of that genre.

[2] My thanks to Gillian Austen for inviting me to give a version of this essay as a paper at the Gascoigne Seminar at Lincoln College, Oxford, in September 2009.

[3] For the homage to Chaucer see George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. G.W. Pigman III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 143, lines 25-31. All references are to this edition, henceforth cited as Pigman. Pigman gives parallels between the Adventures and Troilus and Criseyde on p. 555.

[4] For the Bartello reference see Pigman, p. 140, lines 1-2, note.

[5] For the publication history of Beware the Cat see Beware the Cat: The First English Novel, ed. William Ringler and Michael Flachmann (San Marino, Cal.: Huntington Library, 1988), introduction.

[6] For the publication history of The Image of Idleness see ‘The First English Epistolary Novel: The Image of Idleness. Text, Introduction and Notes’, ed. Michael Flachmann, SP, 87 (1990), pp. 1-74, introduction.

[7] See R.W. Maslen, ‘The Healing Dialogues of Dr Bullein’, YES 38.1 and 38.2 (2008), pp. 119-35, and R.W. Maslen, ‘Edmund Tilney’, Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 136, Sixteenth-century Nondramatic Writers (Detroit, Washington, D.C. and London: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1994), 326-9. For Grantham’s translation see STC 3180-3182.

[8] For translations of the 1560s see the entries on prose fiction in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 2: 1550-1660, ed. Gordon Braden, R.M. Cummings and Stuart Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

[9] See E.J. Morrall, ‘Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pius II, Historia de duobus amantibus: The early editions and the English translation printed by John Day’, The Library, 16.3 (1996), 216-29, and Piccolomini (Pius II, The Goodli History of the Lady Lucres of Scene and of her Lover Eurialus, EETS 308 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), introduction. All references are to this edition, henceforth cited as Morrall.

[10] John Coyle of the University of Glasgow, in conversation.

[11] For Piccolomini’s jokey explanation of the meaning of his surname see Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius: Selected Letters of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), introd. and trans. Thomas Izbicki, Gerald Christianson and Philip Krey (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006), pp. 9-10. He repeats the joke about his surname in his letters to his father and to Mariano Sozzini discussed below.

[12] Braunche’s 1596 translation is The most excellent historie, of Euryalus and Lucresia, STC 19974.

[13] See Cecilia M. Ady, Pius II: The Humanist Pope (London: Methuen, 1913), and Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, introduction. For Piccolomini’s own retrospective account of his apostasy see Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, letter 69.

[14] For the proclamation see Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, entry 78 (pp. 392-406); the phrase occurs on p. 396.

[15] See Albert Baca, ‘The “Art of Rhetoric” of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini’, Western Journal of Communication 34.1 (Winter 1970), pp. 9-16; and Piccolomini, De liberorum educatione (The Education of Boys) in Humanist Educational Treatises, ed. And trans. Craig W. Kallendorf, The I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), introduction and pp.126-259.

[16] Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, Letter 38, pp. 180-1.

[17] Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, Letter 30, pp. 159-62.

[18] The editors of Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius do not note the phrase ‘you begot no son of stone’ as a quotation from Boccaccio, but E.J. Morrall cites the source in his edition of Piccolomini’s novella: see Morrall, p. 30, lines 7-8, note.

[19] The letter is cited in Benedikt Konrad Vollmann, ‘ENKYKLIOS PAIDEIA in the work of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini’, in Pius II: ‘El Piu Expeditivo Pontifice’, ed. Zweder von Martels and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), pp. 10-11.

[20] Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, p. 161.

[21] Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, pp. 392-406.

[22] Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, p. 399, my emphasis.

[23] See The Eclogues of Alexander Barclay from the Original Edition of John Cawood, ed. Beatrice White, EETS 175 (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), introduction.

[24] Reprinted in Humanist Comedies, ed. and trans. Gary R. Grund, The I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 284-347. All references are to this edition.

[25] The first version of Sidney’s Arcadia, the Old Arcadia, was divided into five acts like a comedy, and the same five-act structure has been traced in Lyly’s Euphues books; a number of works of early prose fiction, in other words, acknowledge their own affinity with classical theatre.

[26] Emily O’Brien, ‘Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini’s Chrysis: Prurient Pastime – or Something More?’, MLN 124.1 (January 2009), pp. 111-36.

[27] For the most up-to-date account of Gascoigne’s life see Gillian Austen, George Gascoigne (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), ‘The Literary Career of George Gascoigne: An Introduction’, pp. 1-21. For the term ‘adventures’ in Gascoigne’s novella see R.W. Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), ch. 3, ‘George Gascoigne and the Fiction of Failure’.

[28] Austen, George Gascoigne, pp. 14-21.

[29] The military aspect of Piccolomini’s career can be summarized by the fact that Pope Pius II died on an abortive crusade to liberate Jerusalem from the Turks.

[30] For Piccolomini as letter-writer see Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, introduction. For Gascoigne’s debt to The Image of Idleness see R.W. Maslen, ‘The Image of Idleness in the Reign of Elizabeth I’, ELN 41.3 (March 2004), pp. 11-23.

[31] See E.J. Morrall’s article, ‘The Early Editions’, and the introduction to his edition of Eurialus and Lucrece.

[32] The autobiographical elements of the Adventures are discussed in Pigman, p. 550. For his possible allusions to a scandal involving the Earl of Leicester see Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 5, pp. 103-22.

[33] References to the prefatory epistles are taken from their first translation into English, The History of the Amours of Count Schlick, Chancellor to the Emperor Sigismund, and a Young Lady of Quality of Sienna (London, 1708). All references are to this edition, which is unpaginated in the relevant section.

[34] See Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions, p. 134ff.

[35] For Aeneas as traitor see James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2: 1350-1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 3, especially pp. 79-80 and 87-88.

[36] See Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions, p. 133.