SOURCE: “Cymbeline as a Renaissance Tragicomedy,” in Myth, Emblem, and Music in Shakespeare's Cymbeline: An Iconographic Reconstruction, University of Delaware Press, 1992, pp. 29-65.

[In the following essay, Simonds claims that negative assessments of Cymbeline are often the result of misunderstandings about the play's proper classification, and suggests that evaluated as a tragicomedy rather than a romance, the work is a masterpiece.]

Yet, with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury
Do I take part. The rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance.

—The Tempest

As E. D. Hirsch, Jr., has argued, we cannot hope to interpret a literary work with any degree of accuracy, much less criticize it fairly, until we have established its genre with a high degree of certainty,¹ and Ernst Gombrich has extended this same warning to the study of art history and iconography.² The problem of genre is particularly relevant to Shakespeare's Cymbeline, a play that is still considered to be “unsuccessful” or merely “experimental” by many literary critics. A misunderstanding of its genre lies, for example, at the heart of Samuel Johnson's scornful criticism of the play in the eighteenth century. Finding the work to be neither an emotionally cathartic tragedy nor an amusing comedy, and in no way Aristotelian, Johnson summarily dismissed it as a failure:

This play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogues, and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expense of much incongruity. To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names, and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.³

More recently Arthur C. Kirsch insisted that Cymbeline “is resistant to any coherent interpretation” because of these very incongruities.⁴

However, in a later study, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love, Kirsch modified his criticism by explaining the incongruities of the play in terms of Freudian dream theory and then admitting that Cymbeline is extraordinarily powerful as a work of dramatic art. In this tragicomedy, he says,

Time is simultaneously condensed and dilated, as it is both in the mystery drama and dreams, and the play returns us more directly, as those forms do, to the transcendental and primal processes of transformation. In Cymbeline as in the mystery drama, one world literally is ransomed and another destroyed, and the epiphany of that movement is confirmed in the actual manifestation of a god; and in the psychic drama of Cymbeline the resolution of erotic guilt is achieved through the “senseless speaking such / As sense cannot untie” of an actual dream within a play as well as through the style of dream-work in the whole of the drama. I think it is the return to these primal and sacred forms in Cymbeline that makes its theatrical self-consciousness seem finally so numinous and that enables the play as a whole to represent so great a range of erotic experience.⁵

This change of attitude, I believe, comes not only through Kirsch's preoccupation with Freud and modern psychology as a way of coming to terms with the unrealistic elements of tragicomedy but also through his simultaneous work with Christian ideas of redemption: the suffering caused by the “Fortunate Fall,” which made the redeemer necessary, and the spiritual purification that results from the marriage bond, a Pauline analogy to the redemptive bond between Christ and His Church.

Once we cease looking for the realism and unities of Aristotelian comedy or tragedy in its structure, as did Kirsch, Cymbeline does indeed begin to reveal its true dramatic value. In recognition of this fact, Northrop Frye, Barbara Mowat, and others have preferred to call the play a “Romance,” since some elements of its plot and its pervasive fairy-tale quality certainly derive from the romance tradition.⁶ But, as Caesarea Abartis has insisted, “romance is a narrative genre; its sprawling structure and episodic action are not immediately suitable for the two hours' traffic of the stage.”⁷ More importantly, there is no suggestion in the play of a narrative voice controlling the events, as in the more experimental and earlier tragicomedy Pericles. On the other hand, most narrative romances describe an extended journey of initiation, and Cymbeline does in fact have two such journeys: one for the hero to Rome and back again, and one for the heroine to the periphery of her kingdom and to a primitive existence based on virtue rather than on social level before she is restored to her father and finally to her husband. At the same time, the overall treatment of this story material is strikingly dramatic, often ritualistic, and even ceremonial in effect. Such ceremonial scenes include the exchange of love tokens between Posthumus and Imogen, the state meeting with the Roman ambassador, the funeral scene, and the famous series of reconciliations in act 5. Occasionally the play is pure spectacle for the theater, as in the scene of Imogen's resurrection from the dead only to discover a headless corpse lying by her side, and as in the even more theatrical scene of Jupiter's descent from the “heavens” to the sleeping Posthumus. All this is far more than narrative romance—it is the deliberate theatrical magic of a Jacobean court masque brought into the public playhouse to excite and influence the imagination of an audience. Yet the play is not strictly a masque either since there is no final dance to unite the audience with the players.

Joan Hartwig has demonstrated that Cymbeline, despite its admittedly romantic elements, is best characterized as a tragicomedy.⁸ More specifically, I will argue here that it is a Renaissance tragicomedy, which we can compare to other sixteenth-and seventeenth-century plays of the same genre and recognize as a masterpiece of its kind. Indeed those who have been privileged to witness a serious, rather than a farcical, production of Cymbeline have reported it to be a more deeply moving experience in the theater than it could possibly be in the study where so much of its inherent theatricality must be imagined.

I emphasize that the play's genre is Renaissance tragicomedy in order to distinguish it clearly from the many modern experiments with tragicomic form that have emerged out of a very different philosophical matrix from that of Shakespeare's time. Content does determine form. There was indeed such a self-conscious genre as Renaissance tragicomedy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a form invented by Italian poets to represent in drama the essential optimism of Christian Platonism more organically than was possible through either comedy or tragedy. This new genre was thoroughly discussed in The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry by Giambattista Guarini, who asked the rhetorical question, “what need have we today to purge terror and pity with tragic sights, since we have the precepts of our most holy religion, which teaches us with the word of the gospel? Hence these horrible and savage spectacles are superfluous, nor does it seem to me that today we should introduce a tragic action for any other reason than to get delight from it.”⁹ Thus for the Renaissance, tragicomedy transcends tragedy, which is a reenactment of human sacrifice for the good of the community. Tragicomedy, in contrast, dramatizes personal reform and a redeeming act of faith as part of a spiritual initiation rite. This new genre, combining both tragic and comic elements, was imitated with enthusiasm throughout Europe with varying degrees of success.

In any discussion of Renaissance tragicomedy, however, we must recognize that the presence of comic or visionary scenes within a tragedy does not automatically transform it into a tragicomedy, as has been claimed for both Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra,¹⁰ any more than the reminder of death at the end of Love's Labor's Lost changes its basic comic genre in the least. Shakespeare was never a simplistic playwright. Moreover, one of the commonly accepted characteristics of Elizabethan drama in general is just this tendency to place parodic comic scenes in tragedies, as in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and serious scenes in comedies. To take one obvious example of the latter, old Egeon is condemned to death by the duke in the very first scene of Shakespeare's early Comedy of Errors, but the play remains recognizably a comedy based on a classical model.

Renaissance tragicomedy can be defined broadly as a theatrical mixed-form that becomes something completely new, although it derives from at least four major literary ancestors. The first two ancestors are medieval and Christian: (1) the miracle play or saint's tale with its exceptionally virtuous hero or heroine, its central bloody martyrdom, and its climax of wonder,¹¹ and (2) the morality play with its testing pattern, which usually ends with gratuitous divine forgiveness for the erring hero.¹² The second two generic ancestors are classical and pagan and often overtly Neoplatonic: (1) the classical tragicomedies by Euripides, Plautus, and Terence, which were studied by Renaissance schoolboys, and (2) the esoteric romances of the Greeks and of the later Latin author Apuleius, all works that contain disguised information on the mystery cults of antiquity. The fusion of these traditions was first attempted in Italy through a pastoral play by Poliziano called Orfeo (c. 1480). Concerned with the violent death of Orpheus, this pastoral entertainment was structurally based on the native sacra rappresentazione, which indicates the spiritual focus of the genre from its Renaissance inception.

As we know, Poliziano's hero Orpheus was the leader of the Muses, the priest of a mystery cult, and a poet-musician who attempted to combine sensory experience with divine harmony and intelligence in art by rescuing Eurydice (earthly beauty) from death and decay. The myth of his final sacrificial death as the subject of the first Italian pastoral tragicomedy is highly significant. According to Richard Cody, Renaissance Neoplatonists understood the Orpheus myth to be “an allegory of the death and new life of the rational soul, lost and found again in the flames of intellectual love,”¹³ and the Orfeo specifically made “the Orpheus myth an allegory of the cosmos and the human soul according to Plato.”¹⁴ The many Italian pastoral tragicomedies that followed Poliziano's Orfeo¹⁵ intermingled echoes of the language and rituals of Christianity, properly seen as a mystery religion itself, with the Orphic rites of antiquity recently discovered or “invented” by Ficino and his Florentine academy. Such plays concerned the implications for courtiers or “lovers,” as well as for professional poets, of the Platonic theology expressed in the Phaedrus, the Symposium, and later in the writings of Ficino, Pico, Lorenzo de Medici, and others, including Michelangelo as sonneteer. Thus Renaissance tragicomedy is from its beginnings a courtly, a philosophical, and a highly ritualistic form of theater requiring considerable sophistication and learning from its audience.

Fundamentally tragicomedy became for the Renaissance what the famous emblematic title page, engraved by William Hole for The Workes of Ben Jonson, visually suggests that it is: the most inclusive and the most sacred dramatic form of the period. Published in 1616, the engraving, based on an “architectural design,” bears an inscription from the Ars Poetica of Horace (line 92), “SI[N]GVLA QVAEQVE LOCVM TENEANT S[O]RITITA DECEN[T]ER,” which was translated by Jonson himself as “Each subject should retaine / The place allotted it, with decent praise,” according to Margery Corbett and R. W. Lightbown.¹⁶ It depicts the muses of the five dramatic genres utilized by Renaissance playwrights: tragicomedy, satire, pastoral, tragedy, and comedy. The dominant figure of TRAGI COMOEDIA, wearing a crown and holding a sceptre, appears at the center of the upper level of the engraving, hovering—like an ancient tutelary deity—over the cartouche of a Roman theater. She is dressed like the figure of COMOEDIA (below on the right) in the tunic and chiton of an ordinary person, and she wears the slippers or socci proper to classical comedy. In keeping with her crown and sceptre, the tragicomic muse partially covers her humble costume with a richly jeweled robe like that worn by TRAGOEDIA below on the left, thus indicating her dependence on the social levels depicted in both primary dramatic genres.

In small niches on either side of her, we can just make out the figures of the true patron gods of the theater: Dionysos on her right and Apollo on her left. Dionysos is portrayed as a Wild Man,¹⁷ wearing nothing but two wreathes of grapevine or ivy—one on his head and one about his waist. In his left hand he brandishes a thyrsus, which is also entwined with leaves, while his right hand holds what is most probably a drinking cup. Apollo, whose head radiates light, has his left hand on his familiar attribute the lyre, and he carries what appears to be a scroll or prophecy in his right hand. He represents a shepherd, having served Admetus in that capacity on earth; in contrast, Dionysos is, of course, the wildest of Wild Men in classical mythology. These tiny figures tell us that either the shepherd or the Wild Man was considered to be a proper character in the mixed genre of tragicomedy. Both may also appear together in the same play with propriety, but they are not at all similar figures in iconography.¹⁸

This distinction between the two gods of the theater is further emphasized in Hole's engraving by the large personifications of Satire and Pastoral on the next architectural level below Tragicomedy. Satire is represented by an Italianate satyr (or possibly Pan himself), who holds a set of reed pipes and balances between his legs an elongated club or a defoliated sapling, the traditional weapon of wildness. The satyr is one of many forms in European art of the Wild Man, who may also be depicted as a sylvan hunter or a green man.¹⁹ In contrast, the personification of Pastoral drama to the lower left of Tragicomedy in the engraving is a well-dressed and obviously civilized or courtly shepherd. He holds the musical instrument called a recorder and balances between his legs a long shepherd's crook. Such a figure could never be confused with Shakespeare's most famous Wild Man, Caliban, or with the cannibalistic Bremo in Mucedorus.

Wild Men and shepherds may, of course, appear together in tragicomedy, as in fact they do in Tasso's Aminta, Guarini's Il pastor fido, and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale when satyrs perform a fertility dance during the shepherds' springtime festival, but the shepherds are usually predominant in the Italian tragicomedies, which are essentially pastorals. In Cymbeline, however, there are no shepherds, only warriors and hunters, and here the alternative world to the court is distinctly primitive, although Imogen does indeed wistfully yearn for a pastoral setting: “Would I were / A neat-heard's daughter, and my Leonatus / Our neighbour-shepherd's son!” (1.2.79-81). Instead Imogen, a royal princess, must learn to cook for three Wild Men in the rough mountains of Wales. This in turn may suggest a predominantly satiric or ironic social purpose underlying the events of Shakespeare's play (see Waith, 1952, 50-59), since wildness always symbolizes the lowest level of Renaissance society or the extreme opposite from the king and his court. If the Wild Man in a play is lustful, drunken, and violent like Caliban in The Tempest, the court—even when it is exiled to the green world—is correspondingly civilized and often carefully controlled by a magician ruler. If the Wild Men are honest, courageous, and courteous, as are Arviragus, Guiderius, and Belarius in Cymbeline, the court in contrast is lustful, greedy, violent, and essentially uncivilized. Such a court is satirized by the playwright, and reform then becomes the primary motif of the tragicomedy.

In the following discussion of Renaissance tragicomedy, I shall limit my observations to the shared characteristics we find in three major examples of the genre: Torquato Tasso's Aminta (1573),²⁰ Giambattista Guarini's Il pastor fido (1590),²¹ and William Shakespeare's Cymbeline (1609-10), the primary object of this study. These plays have at least nine specific characteristics in common, aside from the obvious traits of a peculiar mixture of genres, gratuitous happy endings after terrible dangers, and either the presence of both noble and apparently ordinary characters in Il pastor fido and Cymbeline or the stylistic technique of having simple shepherds speak elegant poetry in Aminta. The nine characteristics, with no hierarchical order implied, include (1) a strong emphasis on either pastoralism or primitivism; (2) the use of satyrs or Wild Men as the primary instruments of satire; (3) allusions to well-known literary sources and especially to previous tragicomedies, which remind the audience of the artificialities of the genre; (4) heroic self sacrifice; (5) formal commentaries on the nature and power of love and on the fortunate workings of providence; (6) provocative social equalizing achieved through love; (7) the setting of a wilderness cave as the place of psychic transformation and as a symbol of both womb and tomb; (8) the celebration of one or more blood rituals reflecting Platonic theology in order to make possible the required happy finale through a change in human perspective; and (9) an interest in the Orphic art of poetry itself and the problem of transforming sense into intelligence or images into Platonic Ideas.

1. PASTORALISM OR PRIMITIVISM

The first specific characteristic of Renaissance tragicomedy is an emphasis either on pastoralism, which is concerned with Apollonian Orpheus and courtly poetry, or on primitivism, which leads us into the irrational and savage world of Dionysos where Orpheus met his death. In pastoral plays the satyr will appear only in forest scenes. Plays accentuating primitivism, however, may not have a single shepherd in the dramatis personae, although his lack is subconsciously felt by the audience. In Cymbeline, for example, the world of the play is undergoing a psychological and spiritual preparation for the birth of the Good Shepherd or Christ, as many scholars have noted.²² This means that the main characters must mature as human lovers and learn caritas (sacrificial divine love and forgiveness) before the appearance of the true God of Love on earth and the beginning of the New Dispensation in sacred history. Tasso more openly symbolizes the advent of the Good Shepherd into Arcadia by the figure of Amor dressed as a shepherd in the prologue to his Aminta. Guarini's main characters are all shepherds and nymphs except for one large, hairy satyr.

2. SATYRS AS INSTRUMENTS OF SATIRE

Second, satyrs or Wild Men are the primary instruments of satire within such plays. As Eugene M. Waith has pointed out in his discussion of the relationship between satyr and satire, “It was not so offensive to hear harsh or coarse abuse from the lips of an outlandish creature who was known in legend to be harsh and coarse by nature. The satire could be accepted, like the licensed insults and ribaldry of the Feast of Fools, as part of a ritual or game” (1952, 51). In Tasso's Aminta the satyr attacks Sylvia, a personification of Platonic Beauty, while she is bathing nude in a forest pool. After tying the chaste nymph by her hair to a tree, he then attempts to rape her. However, the good shepherd (and poet) Aminta arrives just in time to save her from violation, although he too longs to see and understand the secret of Sylvia's beauty. This crucial scene of gazing on beauty bare by both the satyr and the shepherd-poet is narrated in the play rather than dramatized; but a graphic version of it in oils, emphasizing the sharp contrast between the dark woods inhabited by the satyr and the golden meadows where the shepherds pasture their flocks, was later painted for the court of Ferrara by Domenichino, possibly to help those in the audience who had trouble seeing Platonically with the mind's eye.²³ It is significant that the only satiric lines in Tasso's tragicomedy are placed in the mouth of the rapacious satyr, who comments bitterly after the famous nostalgic chorus “O bella età de l'oro” [“The Golden Age”] that love itself is now only a commodity to be bought and sold:

E veramente il secol d'oro è questo,
Poiche sol vince l'oro, e regna l'oro.
O chiunque tu fosti, che insegnasti
Primo a vender l'amor, sia maledetto.

(Tasso 257)

(This is indeed the age of gold; for gold
Is conquered of all, and gold is king.
Oh thou, whoe'er thou wert, that first did shew
The way to make love venal, be thou accursed.)

(Hunt 165)

The love of gold also dominates Cymbeline's court in Shakespeare's tragicomedy, and we hear similar lines from Cloten, the doomed satyr dressed as a prince:

                                                                                                    'Tis gold
Which buys admittance (oft it doth) yea, and makes
Diana's rangers false themselves, yield up
Their deer to the stand o' th' stealer: and 'tis gold
Which makes the true man kill'd, and saves the thief.

(2.3.66-70)

In fact the sharpest satirical barb in Cymbeline seems to be that the Wild Men bred in nature are true and pure, while the artificial court harbors slanderers and rapists and routinely banishes civilized counselors such as Belarius. Furthermore, since Cymbeline celebrates primitivism rather than pastoralism, satire is probably the major political thrust of the play rather than the flattery of a purified court that we see in Aminta and in Shakespeare's wedding tragicomedy, The Tempest, where savagery exists but is always under the control of Prospero's white magic, perhaps as a theatrical example of how reason must control the passions in Plato's ideal society.

The Satyr (now capitalized in the dramatis personae) is once again the vehicle of satire in Guarini's Il pastor fido. Emerging from the edge of the forest, he grabs the false nymph Corisca—Guarini's artistic imitatio of a lady of the court—by her hair and announces that he intends to rape her. But in this comic allusion by way of the nymph's luxuriant hair to the central incident in Tasso's Aminta, Corisca's hair turns out to be nothing but an artificial wig. It comes off in the Satyr's hand, and she escapes her attacker with ease. In John Dymock's 1602 translation or adaptation, which Shakespeare might well have read,²⁴ the Satyr—left holding Corisca's wig—cries out in frustration,

O me my head, my backe, my side. Oh what
A fall is this? I scarce can turne myselfe,
And she is gone and left her head behind?
Vnusuall wonder. Nimphs and shepheards come,
Behold a witchcraft tricke of one that's fled
And liues without a head! How light it is?
It hath no braines, there commeth out no blood.

(Dymock 1602, sig. G^v)

(Oimè il capo! Oimè il fianco! Oimè la schiena!
Oh che fiera caduta! A pena i'posso
movermi e rilevarmene. E pur vero
é ch'ella fugga e qui rimanga il teschio?
Oh maraviglia inusitata! O ninfe,
o pastori, accorrete e rimirate
il magico stupor di chi sen fugge
e vive senza capo. Oh come è lieve!
Quanto ha poco cervello e come il sangue
fuor non ne spiccia!)

(Guarini 170)

We are to understand from this speech that the beauty of courtly ladies is often artificial, unlike intellectual beauty in the realm of Ideas. Guiderius makes similar comments over the dismembered head of Cloten in Cymbeline, once again observing that the head in question has no brains (4.2.113-15). The source of this peculiar anticourtier trope is a fable by Aesop and an emblem by Andrea Alciati to be discussed later in this study.

3. OBVIOUS ALLUSIONS TO PREVIOUS TRAGICOMEDIES

Such forthright allusions to previous tragicomedies constitute the third characteristic of the form. For example, Guarini takes the name of Tasso's hero Aminta (deriving from Amor) and uses it in Il pastor fido as his name for the first faithful shepherd who died in Arcadia's distant past to save a sinful nymph. In Cymbeline, Shakespeare may also be alluding to the bloody veil that falsely signifies Sylvia's death in Tasso's Aminta, when the English playwright has Pisanio send a bloody cloth to Posthumus as proof of Imogen's death. On the other hand, a common source of the bloody veil for both plays could also have been Ovid's tale of Pyramus and Thisbe in the Metamorphoses. Both allusions are very likely intended by Shakespeare. In addition, J. H. Whitfield sees a number of striking references to Guarini's Il pastor fido in the later Shakespearean tragicomedy, including the ultimate repentance and forgiveness of the slanderers Corisca and Iachimo, the use of oracles in both plays, and the device of lost babies eventually found.²⁵ Such allusions remind the audience of the generic type they are watching and of all its many artifices.

We can find other important allusions to Il pastor fido in Shakespeare's text as well. After Guarini's Silvio has wounded the nymph Dorinda, having mistaken her for a beast hiding in the woods, he begs her to shoot an arrow of revenge into his breast.

Ecco gli stali e l'arco;
ma non ferir già tu gli occhi o le mani,
colpevoli ministri
d'innocente voler; ferisci il petto,
ferisci questo mostro,
de pietade e d'amore aspro nemico;
ferisci questo cor che ti fu crudo:
eccoti il petto ignudo.

(Guarini 314-16)

(Wound not mine eyes or handes, th'are innocent;
But wound my brest, monster to pittie, foe
To loue: wound me this hart, that cruel was
To thee: behold, my brest is bare.)

(Dymock sig. N)

In Cymbeline, Imogen, hearing that Posthumus believes her sexually false and thus beastly, offers her heart to Pisanio's knife in a like manner:

                                                                                                    Come, here's my heart,
… Prithee, dispatch:
The lamb entreats the butcher. Where's thy knife?
Thou art too slow to do thy master's bidding
When I desire it too.

(3.4.79-99)

The male-pursuing women, Dorinda in Il pastor fido and Imogen in Cymbeline, are considered to be no better than wild animals by the men they love and thus easy prey—because of their weak feminine nature—to the temptations of material lust and self-indulgence, unlike the more rational male of the species. However, both authors clearly intend this sexist aspersion to be recognized as false, as the plots amply demonstrate.

Allusions to other famous literary works actually abound in these tragicomedies, suggesting the assumed presence of a very sophisticated audience. Shakespeare even alludes through his plot based on sexual jealousy and through the similarities between the characters of the stage slanderers, Iago and Iachimo, to his own tragedy Othello, as many commentators have noticed.

4. HEROIC SELF-SACRIFICE AS THE SIGN OF TRUE LOVE

Heroic self-sacrifice, portrayed as a type of Erasmian folly leading to joy in the end, is a fourth common factor in the Christian tragicomedy of the Renaissance. Aminta flings himself off a cliff in Tasso's play when he is told that Sylvia has been devoured by wolves. Yet the act is a “Fortunate Fall” since the shepherd is not killed, and his minor injuries excite pity and then love in the breast of the previously cold Sylvia. In Il pastor fido, Nuntio informs Titiro of the shepherd Mirtillo's offer to die as a sacrifice to Diana in place of the condemned nymph Amarillis, whom he loves:

Già con l'ordine sacro,
per condur la tua figlia a cruda morte,
il sacerdote s'inviava, quando,
vedendola Mirtillo (oh, che stupendo
caso udirai!), s'offerse
di dar con la sua morte a lei la vita.

(Guarini 340)

(And now with sacred order goes the Priest
To bring thy daughter to her bloodied ende,
The whilst Mirtillo (wondrous thing to tell)
Offer'd by his owne death, to giue her life.

(Dymock sig. O)

Mirtillo's willingness to die for her convinces Amarillis at last that her natural love for the shepherd is a true love. In a similar fashion, Shakespeare's Posthumus, believing Imogen to be already dead by his own order, offers himself as a sacrificial atonement for his crime: “so I'll die / For thee, O Imogen, even for whom my life / Is, every breath, a death” (5.1.24-26).

5. THE NATURE OF LOVE AND THE WORKINGS OF PROVIDENCE

Fifth, we discover similar commentaries on the theme of love and the workings of divine providence, or God's love, in all three of these Renaissance tragicomedies. Although various kinds of human love are dramatized, discussed, and criticized in these plays, the main focus is ultimately on caritas, which was the type of love most highly regarded by Christianity. Tasso, for instance, opens his Aminta with a prologue delivered by the little love god Amor, disguised here as a shepherd. As I have previously mentioned, this allusion to Christ as the Good Shepherd and God of Love would have been unmistakable to an alert Renaissance audience. Amor pretends, however, to be only a naughty Cupid hiding from his mother Venus, or Nature, so that he—rather than Nature—should determine the targets for his divine arrows. He thus mingles with the “lowly populace,” as did Christ, where the goddess will never think to look for him. Amor promises that during the play he will cause the chaste nymph Sylvia to love Aminta at last through her feelings of “pity,” feelings that have little to do with sexuality. He also promises that the dramatic form and language of the play will be new:

Queste selue hoggi ragionar d'Amore
S'udranno in nuoua guisa: e ben parrassi,
Che la mia Deità sia qui presente
In se medesma, e non ne suoi ministri.
Spirerò nobil sensi a rozi petti;
Raddolciro de le lor lingue il suono;
Perche, ouunque i mi sia, io sono Amore,
Ne pastori non men, che ne gli heroi;
E la disagguaglianza de soggetti,
Come a me piace, agguagliore questa è pure
Suprema gloria, e gran miracol mio,
Render simili a le piu dotte cetre
Le rustiche sampogne.

(Tasso 233)

(After new fashion shall these woods today
Hear love discoursed; and it shall well be seen,
That my divinity is present here
In its own person, not its ministers.
I will inbreathe high fancies in rude hearts;
I will refine and render dulcet sweet
Their tongues; because, wherever I may be
Whether with rustic or heroic men,
There am I, Love; and inequality,
As it may please me, do I equalize;
And 'tis my crowning glory and great miracle,
To make the rural pipe as eloquent
Even as the subtlest harp.)

(Hunt 150)

Thus Amor warns that tragicomedy will not be realistic because lowly shepherds will speak the poetry and dream the dreams of epic heroes. The subtle political point of this courtly play will then be the equalizing of the social classes in poetry, or an evocation of the Christian brotherhood of man, since love is common to all men and women and all are loved equally by God. Tasso does not bring the lovers Aminta and Sylvia onstage in the last scene of his play, preferring instead to have Elpino describe their ecstatic reunion in his hermit's cave. Aminta has been transformed through his “Fortunate Fall” from the unrequited lover to the beloved, while Sylvia is metamorphosed through her feelings of pity from a cold follower of Diana to a “wild Bacchante” or a priestess of Dionysos. All this is clearly not to be misunderstood as the story of an ordinary love, as the Chorus reminds us at the end of the play.

Il pastor fido echoes the same spiritual motif of “the faithful shepherd” who, like Christ, is willing to sacrifice himself for love. Guarini's variation on Tasso's reunion of the lovers in a cave is to have his lovers Amarilli and Mirtillo imprisoned by the Satyr in a cave, where they are later found by the shepherds and accused of adultery. The familiar classical plot device of “the lost one found” ultimately saves Mirtillo from becoming a sacrifice in place of Amarilli to the moon goddess Diana. He is neither a stranger in Arcadia nor a lowly shepherd at all but the lost descendant of Hercules to whom Amarilli was originally promised. The final Chorus expresses Guarini's basic Christian-humanist message: “Quello è vero gioire / che nasce da virtù dopo il soffrire” (“True joy is a thing / That springs from Vertue after suffering”). The same idea is reinforced by the Silvio-Dorinda plot in which the hunter Silvio does not know how much he loves his pursuer Dorinda until he mistakenly wounds her with an arrow and witnesses her suffering—at which point the hunter becomes the hunted: the beloved becomes the lover.

Although the God of Love does not actually appear in Il pastor fido, his impending birth as a monster within nature (that is, as an immortal deity imprisoned within the body of a mortal man) is referred to in the text as an expected outcome of Arcadia's long years of suffering in a fallen state after a nymph betrayed her lover. Carino, the foster father of Mirtillo, exclaims,

O provvidenza eterna,
con qual alto consiglio
tanti accidenti hai fin a qui sospesi,
per farli poi cader tutti in un punto!
Gran cosa hai tu concetta,
gravida se' di mostruoso parto:
o gran bene o gran male
partotirai tu certo.

(Guarini 370; italics added)

(Eternall prouidence which with thy counsell hast
Brought all these occurents to this onely point,
Th'art great with childe of some huge monstrous birth,
Either great good or ill thou wilt bring forth.)

(Dymock sigs. P2 and P2^v)

To prepare for such an event, Guarini has all his characters (except for the incorrigible Satyr) put aside their desires for revenge, which are proper only to tragedy, in favor of a tragicomic and Christian act of charitable forgiveness. For example, although he has been betrayed by Corisca, the shepherd Coridone refuses to be excited to vengeance against her by the angry Satyr:

Ma non ho già sì basso cor che basti
mobilità di femmina a turbarlo.
Troppo felice e onorata fora
la femminil perfidia, se con pena
di cor virile, e con turbar la pace
e la felicitá d'alma bennata,
s'avesse a vendicar. Oggi Corisca
per me dunque si viva, o, per dir meglio,
per me non moia e per altrui si viva;
sarà la vita sua vendetta mia.
Viva a l'infamia sua, viva al suo drudo,
poich'è tal ch'io non l'odio, e ho più tosto
pietà di lei che gelosia di lui.

(Guarini 298)

(What shall I doe? Shall I attir'd with spleene,
Seeke with outragious furie for reuenge?
Fie no, I honour her too much: so bee
The case with reason waighed; it rather would
Haue pittie and compassion, then reuenge.)

(Dymock sig. M2)

In act 5, Amarilli and Mirtillo also forgive the lustful Corisca, whose plots have actually misfired and brought the true lovers together. As James J. Yoch, Jr., has observed,

Guarini made compassion, not passion, the most important psychological effect of the drama, and his exemplary discussion of feeling is emphatically moral. He saw compassion as the principal difference “between the continent and the incontinent, who can be called the soldiers of virtue, except that one does not have pity for his body and afflicts it that he may not have torment in his spirit, while the other is so tender of his body that he permits himself to fall into an offense of the spirit, which causes him the anxiety of repentence.”²⁶

Guarini's strong emphasis on repentance and forgiveness is anything but pagan, and it provides us with unmistakable evidence of the basic Christian purposes of Renaissance tragicomedy. Such purposes are not sectarian or doctrinal but are common to both the Catholic and Protestant cultures of the time and are always highly self-conscious in this new genre specifically designed by and for dramatic poets of the Christian era.

For example, Shakespeare apparently chose the undistinguished reign of Cymbeline as the period of his play because this was the very time when Christ was born in Bethlehem, as historian John Speed noted in his discussion of the many coins stamped to honor “Cunobeline.”²⁷ Posthumus repents his orders for Imogen's death and, like Guarini's Coridon in respect to Corisca, freely forgives Imogen's supposed adulterous behavior. She, in turn, forgives the unforgivable—his lack of faith in her chastity and his attempt to have her killed. Cymbeline forgives them all, including Belarius who has kidnapped the king's sons, and after Cymbeline submits to Caesar, Rome forgives the British revolt against the rule of Augustus in order to establish the pax romana so important to the Gospel accounts of the Nativity.

In the examination of love, however, Tasso sings of Amor in the Platonic sense as the desire for Beauty and exalts the poetry of Orphic passion to spur the human soul to gain knowledge of Ideal Beauty; while Guarini is careful to distinguish between the two opposing love gods or Cupids of Plato, an echo of which also appears in Shakespeare's Cymbeline. Indeed Tasso considers Eros to be simple lust and worthy only of the satyr in his tragicomedy. His love god from the beginning is Anteros, or the love of virtue, who hides under the garments of a shepherd in this play. The Chorus at the end of act 2 in Aminta praises this hidden god, or sacred love, as the true inspiration of poetry:

Amore, in quale scola,
Da qual maestro s'apprende
La tua sì lunga, e dubbia arte d'amare?
Chi n'insegna aspiegare
Cio che la menta intende,
Mentre con l'ali tue soura il Ciel vola?
Non gia la dotta Athene,
Ne'l Liceo nel dimostra,
Non Febo in Helicona,
Che sì d'Amor ragiona,
Come colá s'mpara
Freddo ne parla, e poco,
Non alza i suoi pensieri
A par de tuoi mestieri
Amor degno maestro
Sol tu sei di te stesso,
E sol tu sei da te medesmo espresso.

(Tasso 269)

(Tell us, O Love, what school,
What mighty master's rule,
Can teach thine art, so doubtful and so long?
Who shall enable sense
To know the intelligence
Which takes us heavenward on thy pinions strong?
Not all that learned throng
Among the Attic trees,
Nor Phoebus on his hill
Who sings of loving still,
Could truly tell us of thy mysteries.
It is thyself alone
By whom thou canst be shewn,
Sole manifester thou of all thy sense.)

(Hunt 174)

The broken rhetoric of love, Tasso then claims, is a far more powerful stimulus for the ascending soul than the writing of learned men because this rude rhetoric can be understood by everyone.

Guarini is less interested in discussing poetics or aesthetics through a series of eclogues within his play Il pastor fido and more concerned with actually dramatizing various kinds of love in action than is Tasso in Aminta. He openly displays his own classical learning and his philosophical intentions by way of a Platonic choral ode on the nature of love at the end of act 3. The ode begins “Come se' grande, Amore, / di natura miràcolo è del mondo!” (244), a passage that apparently derives from Andrea Alciati's Emblems 106, 107, and 108, all three of which discuss the power of love over heaven and earth alike. Previously Guarini has contrasted Eros—or the love of earthly beauty (which is only a shadow of divinity and must die)—with Anteros, the love of virtue and the soul, in the Chorus that ends act 2:

                                                            Il vero e vivo
amor de l'alma è l'alma: ogn'altro oggetto,
perché d'amare è privo,
degno non è el l'amoroso affetto.
L'anima, perché sola è riamante
sola è degna d'amor, degna d'amante.

(Guarini 172-74)

                                                                                (The true
And liuely loue is of the soule:
All other subjects want what loue requires,
Therefore they not deserue these amorous desires.
The soule because it only loues againe,
Is only worthie of this louing paine.)

(Dymock sig. G2)

Guarini's lovers unknowningly fall spiritually in love through a shared physical kiss (an exchange of breath was equated to an exchange of souls) during a game of Blind Man's Buff in act 3: “Soule knit to soule by th' earthly knot of loue” (Dymock sig. G2v). Eros begins the process of union; Anteros completes it.

The two contrasting loves, earthly Eros and spiritual Anteros, originated in Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium, then reappeared during the Renaissance in Ficino's De amore and in Alciati's Emblems 110 and 111.²⁸ I will discuss this tradition later in detail. Meanwhile, since Anteros is defined as the love of virtue by Alciati, Guarini's lines, and especially Dymock's translation of Il pastor fido, reflect the Italian jurisconsult's Emblem 111 on Anteros overcoming the flames of Eros with the flames of spiritual love:²⁹

Ma chi sa poi come a virtù l'amante
si desti e come soglia
farsi al suo foco ogni sfrenata voglia
subito spenta, pallido e tremante,
dirà: ‘Spirto immortale, hai tu ne l'alma
il tuo sola e santissimo ricetto’.
Raro mostro e mirabile, d'umano
e di divino aspetto;
di veder cieco e di saver insano;
di senso e d'intelletto,
di ragion e desio confuso affetto!
e tale, hai tu l'impero
de la terra e del ciel ch'a te soggiace.

(Guarini 244-46)

(But who feeles after how a louer is
Wak'ned to Vertue, and how all those flames
Do tremble out at sight of honest shames,
(Unbrid'led blust'ring lust is brought down to rest)
Will call thee Spright of high immortall blisse,
Hauing thy holy receptacle in the Soule.
Rare miracle of humane and divine aspectes,
(That blind) dost see, and Wisedom (mad) corrects,
Of sence and vnderstanding intellects,
Of reason and desire confus'd affects.)

(Dymock sig. K2)

Once human lovers understand that what they really love in one another is not the body but the immortal soul, which reflects divinity, they become “true lovers” and can begin to understand that higher spiritual love that transforms their separate suffering into mutual bliss.

Tasso dramatizes the essential contrast between Eros and Anteros in his Aminta through the lust of the satyr for Sylvia's nakedness and the shy adoration of the nymph's beauty by Aminta. After Aminta saves Sylvia from the satyr and unbinds her hair from the tree, Sylvia echoes Christ's warning, “Noli me tangere,” to Mary Magdalene in the garden after his Crucifixion and burial. She tells Aminta, “See that thou touch me not, I am Diana's” (Hunt 176). Despairing then of ever being loved by Sylvia, Aminta threatens suicide, but his friend Daphne counsels hope:

Viui misero, viui
Ne la miseria tua: e questo flato
Sopporta solper diuenir felice
Quando che sia, sia premio de la speme,
Se viuendo, e sperando, ti mantien
Quel che vedesti ne la bella ignuda.

(Tasso 276)

(Live, live, unhappy one, in spite of wretchedness:
Endure thy state, to be at last made happy.
If thou dost live and hope, thy hope's reward
Will be what thou hast seen in that bare beauty.)

(Hunt 179)

All this echoes Diotima's speech to Socrates in Plato's Symposium about the effects on the lover who has gazed on beauty bare and his need to see through that which “makes it [beauty] visible”³⁰ to its underlying truth. Aminta is unable to achieve this vision, however, until after his leap from the cliff to join Sylvia in death (or so he believes) and after suffering the painful wounds that finally arouse Sylvia's pity and her love.

In Cymbeline, Shakespeare first embodies the two Cupids or types of love in the characters of Cloten and Posthumus, then displays them again in the two halves of Posthumus's life, before and after his conversion. In addition, Eros and Anteros are referred to iconographically in the play when Iachimo describes the andirons in Imogen's fireplace as “two winking Cupids / Of silver, each on one foot standing, nicely / Depending on their brands” (2.4.89-91), imagery that I shall discuss in detail later. Both Cupids warm the bath of chaste Diana, a scene pictured above on the plaster chimneypiece. Shakespeare, like Tasso, later implies that to be converted from a worshipper of Eros to a follower of Anteros, one must die to the sensory world, as does Imogen after taking the Queen's “doctored” medicine, and as does the shackled Posthumus when he falls asleep and experiences a celestial vision. In Christian terms, the old Adam must first die so that the new or redeemed Adam may be born.

Once the characters in tragicomedy have overcome their worship of Eros and have transferred their allegiance to Anteros, Divine Providence begins to act on their behalf. This strange miracle is commented on by observers within the play. For example, the wise hermit Elpino reminds us in Aminta that,

Veramente la legge, con che Amore,
Il suo imperio gouerna eternamente,
Non è dura, ne oblique, e l'opre sue
Piene di prouidenza, e di misterio,
Altri a torto condanna, o con quant' arte,
E per che ignote strade egli conduce
L'huom ad esser beato, e fra le gioie
Del suo amoroso Paradiso il pone,
Quando ei piu crede al fondo esser de' mali.

(Tasso 293)

(Truly the law, with which imperial Love
Governs eternally, is not a harsh
Nor crooked law; and wrongly are his works
Condemned, being full of a deep providence.
Oh with what art and through what unknown paths
Conducts he man to happiness and when
His servant thinks himself plunged down to the depths
Of evil; lifts him with a sparkling hand,
And places him in his amorous paradise.)

(Hunt 190)

Guarini gives similar lines to the Chorus in Il pastor fido:

          Ma chi sa? Forse quella, che pare inevitabile sciagura, sarà lieta ventura. Oh quanto poco umana mente sale, ché non s'affisa al sol vista mortale!

(Guarini 115)

But Dymock has old Montano make the above comment in the 1602 translation of the Italian play:

          Eternall heavenly powers,
How diuerse are your high vntroden waies
By which your fauours do on vs descend?
From those same crook't deceitfull pathes whereby
Our thoughts would faine mount vp into the sky?

(Dymock sig. Q)

In Cymbeline, the god Jupiter himself delivers similar theological truths to the ghosts of Posthumus' family:

Be not with mortal accidents opprest,
          No care of yours it is, you know 'tis ours.
Whom best I love I cross; to make my gift,
          The more delay'd, delighted.

(5.4.99-102)

Thus the central theological message dramatized in all three tragicomedies is very directly stated to the audience: that the suffering and sacrifices of love lead eventually to spiritual joy. Of course this love must be of a higher order than mere physical desire and sexual pleasure. Furthermore, we have in the above statements on Providence, or Divine Love in action, a clear direction toward a common understanding of the authors' thematic intentions in Renaissance tragicomedies, despite the usual critical resistance to intentionalism in the arts.

6. SOCIAL EQUALIZING

A sixth characteristic of Renaissance tragicomedy is the social equalizing mentioned by Tasso's Amor. All the characters in Aminta—except perhaps the satyr—represent known figures of the D'Este court at Ferrara, but all are merely shepherds in the play. Social equalizing also occurs among the characters in Il pastor fido, a play in which the high priest is as willing to sacrifice his own son as to sacrifice the child of another. In Cymbeline, both the king and his stepson Cloten are portrayed as fools, while the Wild Men in the Welsh mountains show themselves to be more pious, more courageous, and wiser than anyone at court. Indeed this tragicomedy ends with an actual demonstration of the brotherhood of man when Cymbeline accepts Posthumus into the royal family, calls Belarius his brother, makes peace with Rome, and agrees to resume the customary payment of tribute, even though the English have actually won the war and need make no further payments to the Roman Empire.

In Cymbeline, moreover, Shakespeare makes the telling point that the usual social distinctions in life are at odds with the unavoidable fact of death. In act 4, scene 2, the dialogue emphasizes the similarity of our bodily remains:

Arv.
Are we not brothers?
Imo.
So man and man should be;
But clay and clay differs in dignity,
Whose dust is both alike.

(4.2.3-5)

The difference between clay and dust is obviously paradoxical, thus a poetic criticism of a society that reflects neither nature nor divine proclamation: “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen. 3:19).

7. A CAVE SETTING

In addition, all three tragicomedies use a cave setting to symbolize both womb and tomb, and this is a seventh characteristic of the genre. A prison (The Winter's Tale) or a ship (Pericles) may substitute for the cave as a Platonic symbol of the body or the tomb of the rational soul from which it may be reborn. Specifically the cave is a mysterious place of transformations. Indeed such “underground chambers” were typical of early mystery religions, according to Mircea Eliade, who points out that, “Retiring into a hiding place or descending into an under-ground chamber is ritually and symbolically equivalent to a katabasis, a decensus ad inferos undertaken as a means of initiation. Such descents are documented in the more or less legendary biographies of Pythagoras.”³¹ A retreat into a cave may also be understood as a return to the womb of Mother Earth to be remade or reformed:

The initiation myths and rites of regressus ad uterum reveal the following fact: the “return to origin” prepares a new birth, but the new birth is not a repetition of the first, physical birth. There is properly speaking a mystical rebirth, spiritual in nature—in other words, access to a new mode of existence (involving sexual maturity, participation in the sacred and in culture; in short, becoming “open” to the Spirit). The basic idea is that, to attain to a higher mode of existence gestation and birth must be repeated; but they are repeated ritually, symbolically. In other words, we here have acts oriented toward the values of Spirit, not behavior from the realm of psycho-physiological activity.³²

Either way, a renewed and spiritually reformed human being is the result.

Tasso's Aminta and Sylvia, for example, are finally joined together in Elpino's cave from which they will eventually emerge transformed into mature lovers, or so we assume. Sylvia exchanges her virginity and her pride in chastity for compassionate love in the cave, thus renewing Aminta's life. Guarini's Amarilli and Mirtillo are imprisoned together by the Satyr in a cave, although the poet is silent about what actually happens during this period of darkness for the lovers. However, once they emerge to face the trial of Amarilli for adultery, we discover that Mirtillo, who originally entered the cave to spy on his adored Amarilli and to seek vengeance for her supposed infidelity, is now ready to die in his beloved's place as a sacrifice to Diana, goddess of chastity. In Cymbeline, Imogen enters the cave of Belarius as a disguised princess invited to dinner, but she emerges as the willing servant of Wild Men. The equalization process begun in the cave goes so far in Shakespeare's play that later Imogen is even able to recognize and grieve for the lineaments of her beloved Posthumus as they are reflected in the dismembered corpse of the once hated and feared satyr of the court whom she knows as Cloten. Although she believes the corpse to be that of Posthumus, the sight of Cloten's maimed remains (or his mortality) arouses her deepest pity and love and undoubtedly helps her to forgive Posthumus's murderous intents toward her own person by the end of the tragicomedy.

Perhaps the most important and seminal literary use of the cave was that of Plato in The Republic.³³ To be imprisoned in the cave is to be imprisoned in the body and thus in the deceptive world of the senses or of opinion, according to Socrates. There are two ways of escape for a living person: through dreams and through the use of reason, both of which provide supersensory knowledge to the prisoner. Shakespeare is particularly careful to suggest the Platonic symbolism of his cave imagery in Cymbeline, as we shall later see.

8. APOLLONIAN AND DIONYSIAN RITUALS

At this point, it seems clear that tragicomedy is all that Richard Cody has claimed too narrowly for the “pastoral” form alone in his provocative study The Landscape of the Mind, a book that was itself inspired by Edgar Wind's Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance.³⁴ As I have previously suggested, tragicomedy, whether pastoral or primitive in emphasis, is fundamentally an esoteric genre that reenacts and yet conceals the central mystery of Platonic theology and its most sacred rite, the laceration of the body for the purification of the soul. This ritual is the eighth characteristic of the genre. If the play ended at this point of human sacrifice, it would be called a tragedy. Cody describes the underlying ritual in such dramas as “the enactment of a myth of Apollo and Bacchus reconciled, such as the death of Orpheus or the flaying of Marsyas” (1969, 3). His perceptive choice of myths actually suggests the fundamental difference between a pastoral or lyrical tragicomedy, such as Aminta or Il pastor fido, and a primitivist or satirical tragicomedy such as Cymbeline. The myth of Apollonian Orpheus, shepherd poet and musician, is at first pastoral. His Dionysian death at the hands of Maenads does indeed reflect “the poet's inner life” (1969, 3), as Cody suggests, since an inspired poet is perpetually torn between reason (measure) and passion (feeling) in the composition of his art. Moreover, as a lyric poet determined to experience intellectual beauty through his senses and even to remain conscious during his descent to the underworld, Orpheus is forced at the last moment to relinquish the beautiful body of his beloved Eurydice to death and decay. According to Pico de la Mirandola, the Platonic example of Orpheus in the Symposium explains why Ideal Beauty is so difficult to grasp. Orpheus, “desiring to go and see his beloved Eurydice, … did not want to go there through death but softened and refined by his music, sought a way of going there alive, and for this reason, says Plato, he could not reach the true Eurydice, but beheld only a shadow or spectre.” From then on he had to be satisfied with poetic images or recollections—mere shadows of beauty and truth—in his art. In contrast, argued Pico, “Alcestis achieved the perfection of love because she longed to go to the beloved through death; and dying through love, she was by the grace of the gods revived” (quoted in Wind 1968, 157).

This tragic loss in the Orpheus story of the sensible in exchange for the intellectual leads at first to emotional despair and frustration. The poet discovers that he can recreate neither sensible nor spiritual reality directly in his art, although he can stir his listeners or readers, through his shared recollections of beauty, to strive toward an understanding of intellectual Beauty, Goodness, Truth, and Justice. Finally, this frustration may lead the poet to madness and dismemberment as a human sacrifice himself—a sacrifice acceptable to both Apollo and Dionysos, whose grisly fate of dismemberment Orpheus shared. Since the death of Orpheus is—despite Pico—a love death, happiness will surely follow, as the tragicomic genre always reminds us. Indeed, Ovid reports in Book XI of his Metamorphoses that Orpheus and Eurydice were at last joyfully reunited in the underworld after the poet's ritual death and dismemberment.³⁵

The myth of Marsyas, on the other hand, concerns the discovery that the body is actually the tomb of the soul, that it is no more than the form or container of meaning and must be transcended.³⁶ Marsyas's mortality is revealed when Apollo flays the skin from the body of the satyr who had rashly competed with divinity in a musical contest and won. “‘Help,’ Marsyas clamoured. ‘Why are you stripping me from myself?’”³⁷ Apollo's unspoken answer was, of course, “So that you may know yourself as mortal and understand the differences between the music of Nature and divine music.” Thus the satyr is forced to suffer and to weep until he understands his limitations and is then transformed into “the clearest river in Phrygia” (Ovid 145). To explain the religious point of the Marsyas story, Edgar Wind tells us that,

Marsyas was a follower of Bacchus, and his flute was the Bacchic instrument for arousing the dark and uncontrollable passions that conflict with the purity of Apollo's lyre. The musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas was therefore concerned with the relative powers of Dionysian darkness and Apollonian clarity; and if the contest ended with the flaying of Marsyas, it was because flaying was itself a Dionysian rite, a tragic ordeal of purification by which the ugliness of the outward man was thrown off and the beauty of his inward self revealed.

(1968, 172-73).

Such a process of purification is prime subject matter for the Renaissance tragicomedy.

Cody tells us that in Aminta, Tasso achieves the desired reconciliation of Apollo and Dionysos when Sylvia, who has not been eaten after all by wolves in the forest, revives the apparently dead Aminta by her wild kisses:

Ma come Siluia il riconobbe, e vide
Le belle guancie tenere d'Aminta
Iscolorite in si leggiadri modi,
Che Viola non è, che impallidisca
Si dolcemente, e lui languir si fatto,
Che parea gia ne gli vltimi sospiri
Essalar l'alma, in guisa di Baccante,
Gridando, e percotendosi il bel petto,
Lasciò cadersi in su'l giacente corpo,
E giunse viso a viso, e bocca a bocca.

(Tasso 296)

                                                  (but when Sylvia recognized
Amyntas, and beheld his beautiful cheeks
So lovelily discolored that no violet
Could pale more sweetly, it so smote her
That she seemed ready to breathe out her soul.
And then like a wild Bacchante, crying out
And smiting her fair bosom, she fell down
Right on the prostrate body, face to face,
And mouth to mouth.)

(Hunt 192)

These lines, Cody argues, “imply all that Renaissance pastoralism means: an off-stage rite of nature by which Aminta's love is consummated; a ‘maimed’ rite of the Platonic theology by which a tragic union in death is controverted and the life of the soul in the natural world is celebrated; an Orphic initiation at the hands of a Bacchante by which the shepherd's voice is purified; and a rite of art by which these others become a play scene of Elpino (G.-B. Pigna) telling the Chorus (Ferrara) how the court-poet (Tasso) deserves his patronage” (1969, 74). Aminta's willingness to suffer death and dismemberment for love is all that the gods require in order to transform death into life and separation into union. The same idea is stated as a paradox in Matthew 16:25: “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”

A similar offstage rite of nature is celebrated early in Il pastor fido when the nymph and her faithful shepherd are imprisoned or buried alive in the cave by the jealous Satyr. But the final act of the play celebrates an even more profound ritual than that of sexual union. Echoing the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, old Montano prepares to sacrifice his once lost but newly found son Mirtillo (the first Silvio) in order to fulfill his priestly duties to the divine law of Diana. However, the blind Tirenio, priest of Apollo, reminds Montano just in time of the ancient oracle that once promised happiness to Arcadia when “two of heauens issue [Hercules-Jupiter and Pan, or heaven and earth] love vnite, / And for the auncient fault of that false wight, / A faithfull shepheards pitie make amends” (Dymock sig. P4). At this point Montano happily remembers that Mirtillo's name was originally Silvio before the flood swept the infant away. Since Amarilli had really been promised to the first Silvio, the natural love between nymph and shepherd was divinely ordained from the beginning. Guarini's tragicomedy ends therefore with the recognition of human blindness and with forgiveness all around, followed by the lovers' joyful matrimonial ceremonies. But even then, on the brink of marital union with his beloved, Mirtillo wonders if he is only experiencing a dream:

Questi mi paion sogni,
a dirti il vero; e mi par d'ora in ora
che'l sonno mi si rompa
e che tu mi t'involi, anima mia.
Vorrei pur ch'altra prova
mi fesse omai sentire
che'l mio dolce vegghiar non e dormire.

(Guarini 408-10)

(This seemes a dreame, and still I am afraid
My sleep should breake, and thou my soule shouldst flye away.
In better proofe my sences would I steepe,
That this sweet sight is not a dreaming sleepe.)

(Dymock sig. Q4^v)

The marriage must be consummated in the physical world for Mirtillo to trust his happy good fortune. Such observations have much in common with Bottom's dream in A Midsummer Night's Dream, with Posthumus's celestial vision in Cymbeline, and with well-known speeches by Caliban and Prospero in The Tempest. They will certainly remind us of that remarkable seventeenth-century tragicomedy La vida es sueño by Calderón de la Barca, which like Cymbeline emphasizes primitivism rather than pastoralism.³⁸

Guarini's happy ending is also made possible by a popular ritual of the hunt—the triumphant display of the quarry's head onstage. Silvio, the younger, a hunter of beasts and a worshipper of chaste Diana, has killed the winter boar, which symbolizes both the fear of death and sexual lust in opposition to life and gentle love. “Behold his head, that seemes to breath out death” (Dymock sig. M), shouts the Chorus of Huntsmen and Shepherds, as they bring in the bloody trophy impaled on a stick. Silvio has now made the pastures safe to plow and to sow by killing the fearsome animal and dismembering it. A successful hunt is also clearly analogous to a character's achievement of self-control.

Like his Italian predecessors, Shakespeare celebrates the sacred rites of Apollo and Dionysos, to say nothing of Orpheus, in all his late tragicomedies. We find the Dionysian myth of Alcestis rescued from death by a drunken Hercules carefully embedded in The Winter's Tale, and a Dionysian ritual of drunkenness and revolution, both controlled just in time by Prospero, in The Tempest. Although he neither explains nor proves the point, Northrop Frye states that “Orpheus is the hero of all four romances” by Shakespeare.³⁹ Following Frye's lead, Peggy Ann Knapp makes a convincing case for the similarities between the popular medieval romance of Sir Orfeo and Pericles in “The Orphic Vision of Pericles,” while David Armitage effectively argues the presence of the myth of Orpheus's dismemberment in all Shakespeare's late “romances,” as he, like Frye, prefers to call these plays.⁴⁰

In Cymbeline, the Ovidian myth of the flaying of Marsyas is first represented through Shakespeare's imagery of removed garments, as it is in King Lear as well. When Imogen reads Posthumus's letter to Pisanio accusing her of adultery, she says, “Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion, / And, for I am richer than to hang by th' walls, / I must be ripp'd:—to pieces with me!” (3.4.52-54). Such a ripping to pieces does not physically occur, although we assume that it does occur psychologically. After Pisanio calms her down, he insists that Imogen exchange her feminine dress for the masculine clothing of a page and continue the search for her husband. By becoming her “other” or male self through this change of outer appearances, Imogen escapes the slander directed at her “woman's part” and learns to humble her royal pride. Posthumus likewise removes his courtly garments and outer protective armor when he receives from Pisanio the bloody cloth proclaiming Imogen's supposed death. In keeping with the equalizing propensity of tragicomedy, he dresses as a humble British peasant: “To shame the guise o' th' world, I will begin, / The fashion less without, and more within” (5.1.32-33). Iachimo calls him in this disguise, “A very drudge of Nature's” (5.2.4), thus identifying Posthumus at this point with Marsyas and the natural world of Pan.

Shakespeare, always the virtuoso, includes the death of Orpheus (a sacrifice to Dionysos) as well as the flaying of Marsyas (a sacrifice to Apollo) in this complex tragicomedy of primitivism. Ironically his Orpheus is Cloten, the satyr in a prince's clothing who is beheaded by Guiderius, the true prince in a satyr's hairy garments. It is the fool Cloten who invokes Apollo through his hired musicians in the lovely aubade sung to awaken Imogen to his lust:

Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings,
                    And Phoebus gins arise,
His steeds to water at those springs
                    On chalic'd flowers that lies;
And winking Mary-buds begin to ope their golden eyes;
With every thing that pretty is, my lady sweet arise:
                    Arise, arise!

(2.3.19-29)

It is Cloten who echoes the “Odi et amo” of Catullus, the Roman love poet so often inspired by Apollo: “I love and hate her: for she's fair and royal” (3.5.71). It is Cloten who is advised by a courtier to change his shirt since, “the violence of action hath made you reek as a sacrifice” (1.3.1-2). It is Cloten whose severed head is thrown into the creek that will carry it out to the sea, just as the musician Orpheus's head, now singing prophecies, floated down a river and over to Lesbos after his dismemberment by the Maenads. And it is the beastly Cloten whose bloody trunk is at last embraced by Beauty—as Bottom was embraced by Titania—and who is thus ritually accepted as a sacrifice to Eros and to Dionysos. Since Love, as well as Dionysos, was a death god for antiquity, as Wind reports (1968, 152-70), Cloten must first die physically to earn this embrace, after which the play as a whole passes into the prophetic mode of Orphism. John Warden states that for the philosopher Ficino, Orpheus was both “the lover and prophet of love,”⁴¹ a notion that becomes part of the Shakespearean vision as well. Thus, of the three tragicomedies we have been discussing, Cymbeline is perhaps the most direct in its theatrical reenactment of those occult pagan rites of poetry as the art of metaphor that transforms nature into truth and as a divine art that can only be practiced under the auspices of both Apollo and Dionysos.

Yet we must remember that these are indeed “maimed rites.” In tragicomedy, heroes and heroines may be wounded, but they never die. Through closeness to death, they are initiated into maturity and spiritual insight. In the words of Lucius in Book 11 of The Golden Ass,

I approached nere vnto Hell, euen to the gates of Proserpina, & after that I was rauished throughout all the Elementes, I returned to my proper place. Aboute midnight I sawe the Sunne shine, I saw likewise the Goddes celestial, and Goddes infernall, before whome I presented myselfe and woorshipped them.⁴²

Such liminal experiences are sufficient to reform the inner world of a human being.

9. THE ART OF DRAMATIC POETRY

Finally, the ninth characteristic of Renaissance tragicomedy is a deep concern with the art of dramatic poetry itself. As Kirsch reminds us,

a basic impulse of coterie drama was to make the dramatist's art a subject of his art. In some instances this artistic narcissism led to structures that are significantly similar to Shakespeare's: Malevole's control of the action in The Malcontent, for example, is very close to Prospero's role in The Tempest; at one point, Malevole, like Prospero, is even explicitly associated with a Providential beneficence. Shakespeare's exploitation of artistic self-consciousness in the last plays is particularly rich, drawing upon the central Renaissance paradox of nature and art and dramatizing, in Northrop Frye's words, “the sense of nature as comprising not merely an order but a power, at once supernatural and connatural, … and controlled either by benevolent human magic or by a divine will.”⁴³

The three tragicomedies we are examining here seem especially concerned with the problems for the artist of transforming sense into intelligence or images into Platonic Ideas. As I see it, there are three common means for transforming perceptions from the world of the senses into ideas: (1) religious rituals such as the Eucharist, (2) the operations of the imagination, which result in works of art, music, and poetry, and (3) the action of love as caritas, which leads us from outer nature to inner divinity, from time to eternity. In each case passion and reason must work together for a true metamorphosis to occur—this is to say that we must both feel intensely and understand correctly the meaning of what we feel through an imaginative inner reconciliation of Apollo and Dionysos.

Tasso's tragicomedy implies that the poet must love beauty so completely and hopelessly that he is willing to die for it, just as Orpheus finally accepted a sacrificial death in order to “know” beauty intellectually and spiritually, that is, in order to have metaphorical intercourse with true Beauty. As Orpheus could only possess the real Eurydice in another world, so Aminta can only possess all of Sylvia by momentarily dying for love to this world of shadows. Thus for Tasso, love alone can “enable sense to know the intelligence and provide us with the “sense” or meaning of experience. Guarini agrees that love as Anteros is that

Raro mostro e mirabile, d'umano
e di divino aspetto;
di veder cieco e di saver insano;
di senso e d'intelletto,
di ragion e desio confuso affetto!

(Guarini 246)

(Rare miracle of humane and divine aspectes,
(That blind) dost see, and Wisedom (mad) corrects,
Of sence and vnderstanding intellects,
Of reason and desire confus'd affects.)

(Dymock sig. K2)

Indeed human love can provide us with what Wordsworth later called “intimations of immortality,” but only—according to the Renaissance—if we combine desire with reason and remember that reason as the logical intuition of true relationships operates beyond the five senses.

Since the satyr Marsyas had to suffer physically and emotionally for his arrogance toward reason or the god Apollo, there is also much talk of both “sense” and “feeling” in Cymbeline—a play that celebrates the ritual of Marsyas as much as it celebrates the death of Orpheus. Shakespeare often puns on the word “sense” to include both Apollo and Dionysos. For example, Posthumus places Imogen's diamond ring on his finger with the words, “Remain, remain thou here, / While sense can keep it on” (1.2.48-50), although he is soon to wager away the ring through a failure of basic common sense. Imogen attempts to calm the rage of her father by telling him, “I am senseless of your wrath; a touch more rare / Subdues all pangs, all fears” (1.2.66-67). At this point she can feel only love and grief for the banishment of her new husband. The Queen orders Cloten to pursue Imogen and to be “senseless” or unhearing toward the refusal of the princess to permit his courtship. Cloten, however, understands the word to mean “without reason” and responds huffily, “Senseless? not so” (2.3.53). But he also demands sensory experience, which appears to be all he really understands. Later Imogen loses all her five senses in a counterfeit sleep of death symbolizing her complete descent into the dark Dionysian world of unconsciousness that is as much a part of mortality as is reason. Posthumus undergoes a similar sleep of atonement that ends with a celestial vision. The eyes of his mind at last awaken when the eyes of his body are in darkness, but the result is at first one of confusion between the world of the senses and the world of the intellect:

'Tis still a dream: or else such stuff as madmen
Tongue and brain not: either both, or nothing,
Or senseless speaking, or a speaking such
As sense cannot untie.

(5.4.146-49)

Finally, when Cymbeline learns of the wickedness of his queen, he stubbornly defends the truth of his senses, which told him that she was beautiful, that her flattering words were pleasant, and that even his “heart thought her like her seeming” (5.5.65). He also knows that Imogen has suffered as a result of his pathetic inability to distinguish between appearance and reality: “O my daughter, / That it was folly in me, thou mayst say, / And prove it in thy feeling. Heaven mend all!” (5.5.66-68). Here the Dionysian mode of feeling or suffering the truth, instead of the Apollonian mode of reasoning it through, reveals the truth at last.

Keeping in mind the above nine specific characteristics shared by Aminta, Il pastor fido, and Cymbeline in dramatic practice, we should now examine the general theoretical definition of tragicomedy by Guarini as a blend between tragedy and comedy. The tragicomic writer, he says,

takes from tragedy its great persons but not its great action, its verisimilar plot but not its true one, its movement of the feelings but not its disturbance of them, its pleasure but not its sadness, its danger but not its death; from comedy it takes laughter that is not excessive, modest amusement, feigned difficulty, happy reversal, and above all the comic order.⁴⁴

But why does tragicomedy borrow such elements from opposing genres? Cody insists that these dramas (at least the pastorals) are really initiation rites (1969, 60), which are always serious but cannot end in real death and which must offer the world a reborn and changed initiate. I am certain that the same is true of primitivist tragicomedies. All require a grave and paradoxical conflict in the plot, such as the desire to know in conflict with injunctions not to profane that which is sacred, the desire to love in conflict with the ideal of chastity, natural law in conflict with divine law, etc., or such religious paradoxes as the need to die physically in order to achieve eternal life for the spirit. Various philosophies and religions offer happy solutions for all these conflicts to an initiate who is willing to prepare himself from within for a psychological and spiritual metamorphosis to a new and mature approach to reality, but Renaissance tragicomedy offers a combination of Neoplatonism, Orphism, and Christianity in particular to its coterie audience.

In Cymbeline, for example, the jealous and possessive attitude of Posthumus, Cloten, and even Cymbeline toward Imogen as a reflection of Ideal Beauty must cease, or they become incapable of recognizing her when she dons a disguise or changes her form. Similarly, Imogen, as a human character rather than a desired abstraction, must see her heroic husband as an ordinary man like any other, as a man involved in a tedious life and capable of making serious errors in judgment. Renaissance tragicomic lovers must ultimately accept their beloveds as they are—imperfect—and the same holds true for fathers and daughters. The painful process of letting the ideal imaginary “other” die and of accepting the flawed human “other” with compassion, love, and a sense of humor is an important adolescent initiation rite leading to maturity, a rite present also in Shakespeare's comedies, according to Edward Berry.⁴⁵ Generically speaking, imagined or real lapses from the ideal can cause tragedy and the dramatic celebration of a sacrificial death. An unnatural distortion of ideals applied to a real world often generates comedy. In tragicomedy, on the other hand, the imaginative celebration of a communal blood ritual of death and resurrection as a spiritual initiation rite (a rite beyond the adolescent initiation to sexuality and tribal identity) finally reconciles the reality of material needs and sexual desire (Eros) to the intellectual ideals of chastity and the spiritual love of God (Anteros). This ritual may include a reconciliation of Venus to Diana and of Dionysos to Apollo. The result is concord, a tempered scale of values or a harmony between opposites, which brings delight to the audience and which appears to be the final goal of the tragicomic form.⁴⁶

Notes

1. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967), 68-126.

2. Ernst Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972), 5.

3. Quoted by J. M. Nosworthy in his Introduction to the Arden edition of Cymbeline (London: Methuen & Company Ltd., 1955), xl.

4. Arthur C. Kirsch, “Cymbeline and Coterie Dramaturgy,” English Literary History 34 (1967): 294.

5. Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 172-73.

6. See, for example, Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965); Barbara A. Mowat, The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976); Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972); and Douglas L. Peterson, Time, Tide, and Tempest: A Study of Shakespeare's Romances (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1973). Some studies insisting on the term “tragicomedy” for the new form include Marvin T. Herrick, Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France, and England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1955), and Frank Humphrey Ristine, English Tragicomedy: Its Origin and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1910).

7. Caesarea Abartis, The Tragicomic Construction of “Cymbeline” and “The Winter's Tale” (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sparche und Literatur Universität Salzburg, 1977), 18.

8. See Joan Hartwig, Shakespeare's Tragicomic Vision (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 3-33, and 61-103. Hartwig summarizes tragicomedy as follows: “The pattern of Shakespeare's tragicomic action, in the simplest terms, is to dislocate settled perceptions through adversity and then to liberate perception through unexpected prosperity. The expanded perceptions of each character reveal a world that is no longer confined by his own limitations. He has confronted a world constituted upon ‘nothing,’ and from this ‘nothing’ meaning grows. The reduction is a necessary prelude, as it is in the tragedies, to the realization that correspondences do exist between appearance and reality and between divine and human action, and that the characters may confidently rely upon them” (32-33).

9. See Giambattista Guarini, The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, in Literary Criticism from Plato to Dryden, ed. Allan H. Gilbert (New York: American Book Company, 1940), 523; and Joseph Loewenstein, “Guarini and the Presence of Genre,” in Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics, ed. Nancy Klein Maguire (New York: AMS Press, 1987), 33-35.

10. See Gail Kern Paster, “‘To Starve with Feeding’: The City in Coriolanus,” Shakespeare Studies 11 (1978): 124 and 142; and Barbara Bono, Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 4.

11. See Mimi Still Dixon, “Tragicomic Recognitions: Medieval Miracles and Shakespearean Romance,” in Renaissance Tragicomedy, 56-79.

12. On Shakespearean tragicomedy, the morality plays, and Christian homilies, see Robert Grams Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965).

13. Richard Cody, The Landscape of the Mind: Pastoralism and Platonic Theory in Tasso's “Aminta” and Shakespeare's Early Comedies (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969), 29. See also “Poliziano's Orfeo,” trans. Elizabeth Bassett Welles, La Fusta 4 (Spring-Fall 1979): 100-20. For various interpretations of the myth of Orpheus, see Charles Segal, Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); John Warden, ed., Orpheus: The Metamorphoses of a Myth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982); and C. M. Bowra, “Orpheus and Eurydice,” The Classical Quarterly n.s. 2 (1952): 113-26.

14. Cody, Landscape, 33.

15. See Louise George Clubb, “The making of the pastoral play: Italian experiments between 1573 and 1590,” in Petrarch to Pirandello, ed. Julius A. Molinaro (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 46-72. For further generic comments on tragicomedy, see Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare's Time (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 153-87.

16. Margery Corbett and R. W. Lightbown, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-page in England, 1550-1660 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 147. For another reading of the Jonson title-page, see Eugene M. Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 45-47. Further references to Waith's important study will be noted parenthetically in my text.

17. For discussions of the Wild Man topos, see Peggy Muñoz Simonds, “The Iconography of Primitivism in Cymbeline,” Renaissance Drama 16 (1985): 95-120; G. M. Pinciss, “The Savage Man in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Renaissance English Drama,” The Elizabethan Theatre 8, ed. George R. Hibbard (Port Credit, Ont.: P. D. Meany, 1982), 69-89; Timothy Husband, The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980); Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952); and Eugene Waith “Satyr and Shepherd,” in Pattern of Tragicomedy, 43-85.

18. See Simonds, “The Iconography of Primitivism,” 97.

19. See Katherine Basford, The Green Man (Ipswich: D. S. Brewer Ltd., 1978).

20. For the Italian text of Tasso's Aminta, I have used the Folger Shakespeare Library's early London edition (STC 12414), which is bound together with Giambattista Guarini's Il pastor fido. See Torquato Tasso, Aminta: Fávola Boschereccia (London: Giovanni Volfeo, 1591). The English translation of Aminta (Amyntas) is by Leigh Hunt and can be found in The Genius of the Italian Theater, ed. Eric Bentley (New York: Mentor Books, 1964). It will be cited in my text as Hunt.

21. Battista Guarini, Il pastor fido, ed. J. H. Whitfield (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976). The Italian lines will be cited in my text as Guarini.

22. See J. P. Brockbank, “History and Historionics in Cymbeline,” Shakespeare Survey 11 (1958): 42-49; Robin Moffet, “Cymbeline and the Nativity,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 207-18; Homer D. Swander, “Cymbeline: Religious Ideas and Dramatic Design,” Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, ed. Waldo McNeir and Thelma N. Greenfield (Eugene: University of Oregon Books, 1966), 248-62; and Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance, 181.

23. See R. E. S., “‘Landscape with Sylvia and Satyrs’—Domenichino,” in The Age of Correggio and the Carraci: Emilian Painting of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1986), 436-37.

24. All English translations from Il pastor fido will be from John Dymock, trans., Il pastor fido: or the Faithful Shepherd (London: Simon Waterson, 1602) and will be cited in my text as Dymock.

25. See “Introduction” to Guarini, Il pastor fido, 32-33.

26. James J. Yoch, Jr., “The Renaissance Dramatization of Temperance: The Italian Revival of Tragicomedy and The Faithful Shepherdess,” in Renaissance Tragicomedy, 126; cited hereafter parenthetically. In this excellent discussion of the genre, Yoch argues that “Renaissance tragicomedies illustrated for their audiences right rule of the self, and, by implication, of the body politic” (116).

27. See John Speed, The History of Great Britaine (London: William Hall and John Beale, 1611), 124.

28. See Ficino, Ficino's Commentary on Plato's “Symposium”, trans, Sears R. Jayne (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1944) 203-4; and Andrea Alciati, Emblemata cum commentariis (Padua, 1621), 457 and 461.

29. Emblem 111 has been translated by Virginia W. Callahan as follows:

    Nemesis has painted a winged Eros, hostile to a winged Eros, taming bow with bow, and fires with fire, in order that he might suffer what he does to others. But this boy, formerly brandishing his arrows fearlessly, is wretchedly weeping. Three times he spits into the depths of his bosom: a wondrous thing, fire is consumed by fire, Eros hates the passion of Eros.

    See Peter M. Daly, Virginia W. Callahan, and Simon Cuttler, eds., Index Embelmaticus: Andreas Alciatus, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 1: Emblem III.

30. Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (1963; reprint New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), 563.

31. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols, ed. Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975), 1, 182.

32. Ibid., 175-76.

33. The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, 747-50.

34. See Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 2nd ed., rev. and enl. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1968). Further references to this work will be noted parenthetically in my text.

35. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (New York: Penguin Books, 1955), 247.

36. See Ovid, 144-45, and Sydney Freedberg, “Titian and Marsyas,” FMR 1 (1984): 51-67.

37. Ovid, 145.

38. For a Marxist discussion of La vida es sueño as tragicomedy, see Walter Cohen, “The Politics of Golden Age Spanish Tragicomedy,” Renaissance Tragicomedy, ed. Maguire, 155-176. For a Renaissance and thus much more convincing and useful analysis of the tragicomedy, see Frederick A. De Armas, The Return of Astraea: An Astral-Imperial Myth in Calderón (Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 88-138.

39. Frye, A Natural Perspective, 147.

40. See Peggy Ann Knapp, “The Orphic Vision of Pericles,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15 (1973-74): 615-26; and David Armitage, “The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Mythic Elements in Shakespeare's Romances,” Shakespeare Survey 39 (1986): 123-33.

41. Warden, “Orpheus and Ficino,” in Orpheus, 101.

42. See Lucius Apuleius, The XI Bookes of the “Golden Asse” conteigning the Metamorphosie of Lucius Apuleius, trans. William Adlington (London: William How, 1571), 120.

43. Kirsch, “Coterie Dramaturgy,” 303.

44. Guarini, Compendium, in Literary Criticism from Plato to Dryden, ed. Allan H. Gilbert, 511.45.

45. See Edward Berry, Shakespeare's Comic Rites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 16-49.

46. James J. Yoch, Jr., has identified this concord as Plato's idealization of “temperance … [which] extends to the whole [state], and runs through all the notes of the scale, and produces a harmony of the weaker and the stronger and the middleclass (4.432).” See “The Renaissance Dramatization of Temperance,” 115-16. For a similar interpretation of Tasso's Aminta, see Yoch, “The Limits of Sensuality: Pastoral Wildernesses, Tasso's Aminta and the Gardens of Ferrara,” Forum Italicum (Spring-Fall 1982): 60-81.