Comparative LiteratureGoldwin Smith HallCornell UniversityIthaca NY 14853wjk3@cornell.edu

Petrarch as “Homo Economicus”: Interest, Growth, “Rime sparse,” and the Futures of

Later Petrarchism in Ronsard and Shakespeare

William J. Kennedy

Spanning the first three-quarters of the fourteenth century, the life of Francesco

Petrarch (1304-74) unfolded in an era of unprecedented economic change.1 A general

monetization of land rents at the end of the preceding century had already prompted a

widespread commercialization of goods and services throughout Europe.2 A mercantile

revolution in northern Italy gave rise to sophisticated accounting practices, multi-

branched trading and share-holding companies, local and international banking

procedures, risk-taking insurance providers, and wholly new divisions of labor among

merchants, brokers, carriers, and their agents. The Hundred Years War, which began in

1337, saw rapid shifts of wealth and impoverishment across different areas of northern

Europe. Finally the Black Death of 1348 brought an upheaval of demographics,

occupations, social distinctions, and cultural practices, with (unsurprisingly, though

ghoulishly) an actual increase in per capita wealth owing to the sudden decline in

population.3 Petrarch’s vernacular poetry was an event in this economic climate, an event

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that sixteenth-century poets in France and England reissued under different economic

conditions.

Petrarch’s economic climate gave rise to the figure of homo economicus in a new

commercial setting. This figure epitomizes those isolated, self-interested, rational human

beings who adapt to a dynamic marketplace in the name of maximizing their own profit.

To their best advantage, such individuals manage and manipulate the parameters of

symbolic exchange, fluctuating value, and the potential for growth through accrued

interest, and they do so by cultivating functional skills, entrepreneurial techniques, and an

expansive vision of professional capabilities. In his own humanist undertaking, Petrarch

sketched the outlines of an enterprising and efficient literary career.4 He carefully shaped

his persona as a homo litterarum, not just as a poet in Latin where he had staked lasting

fame on his epic Africa, enhanced by his Bucolicum carmen, or in the vernacular, where

despite his denials he acquired his greatest reputation, but as a public intellectual who had

authored such treatises and critiques as De vita solitaria and De remediis utriusque

fortune, his confessional Secretum, and hundreds of personal letters. These texts present

him as an independent agent forging his own identity, a writer outside the bounds of

conventional patronage systems and outside the standard institutions of church, school,

and the emerging secular state. They present him as a “man–in-the-middle,” channeling

his sense of an autonomous selfhood against a late-medieval current of corporate loyalties

and interlocking affiliations. I am going to argue that Petrarch’s persona of the homo

litterarum overlaps with that of the homo economicus, and that their convergence informs

his conception of poetry, his role as a vernacular poet, and his deployment of figurations

of economic transaction and exchange in his Rime sparse. This convergence also inflects

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the work of such later poets as Pierre de Ronsard in France and William Shakespeare in

England, whose careers develop from premises that are embedded in this persona and

elaborated by commentators on Petrarch’s poetry in the sixteenth century.

I. The Economy of Petrarchan Aesthetics

From the start a tension between two views of poetry animates Petrarch’s Rime

sparse, and each relates differently to economic issues figured in the text. One view

associates poetry with inspiration, intuition, and a representation of transcendent reality;

the other associates it with rhetorical technique, verbal play, and the vocalic manipulation

of language’s material elements. In literary and rhetorical theory two centuries later, these

views would come to represent the dominant principles of a divergent Platonic aesthetics

(focused on the power of visionary furor) and Aristotelian poetics (focused on the art or

craft of writing poetry). In Petrarch’s time however, the coordinates for such formulations

seem only barely emergent, while their economic implications appear still rooted in

medieval theological assumptions. On the one hand, the Platonic formulation would

correspond to an earlier, largely Augustinian view in which art, like wealth, reflects

God’s plenitude and abundance as a gift to humankind, and is therefore a good, though

not the highest good, but one that should be enjoyed as a means toward loving God. The

artist’s visionary furor consequently reflects the natural inequality of human beings

whom God endows with a variety of economic gifts and talents that are highly developed

in some and less so in others, imposing on their recipients the moral obligation to use

them toward productive ends. On the other hand, the Aristotelian formulation would

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correspond to a later, largely Scholastic view in which art consists of a particular skill or

mechanical handiwork that might be exercised for profit in proportion to the amount of

labor expended on it or to the degree of satisfaction or utility value inherent in it. The

artist’s skill consequently reflects training, specialization, and accomplishment,

suggesting habits of thought and rational analysis deployed for purposeful gain in the

public marketplace.

These aesthetic coordinates for Petrarchan poetics come into focus two centuries

later with a different set of economic implications. Their development then occurs in a

theological context of Reformationist and Counter-Reformationist disputes about

salvation by faith, the nature of grace, and the power of the will, and this context inflects

and is inflected by pragmatic concerns arising from the expansion of transport and trade

routes, New World colonization, and fluctuations and cyclical movements in the price

revolution of early modern Europe. One barometer of such concerns and their impact on

the reception and imitation of Petrarch’s poetry can be found in commentaries appended

to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century printed editions of Rime sparse and Trionfi.5 These

commentaries gloss the text, offer interpretive materials, and re-contextualize their

achievement in a wholly new framework for an early modern readership. They range

from the earliest ones by Antonio da Tempo (Verona, 1420s?), Francesco Filelfo (Milan,

mid-1440s), and Hieronimo Squarzafico (Padua, 1484) written under the auspices of

despotic rulers in northern Italy and celebrating Petrarch as a champion of Ghibelline

absolutism. They include the most widely circulated sixteenth-century text of Petrarch’s

Rime edited by Alessandro Vellutello (Venice, 1525) and sequentially rearranged into a

new narrative that that follows known events in the poet’s life. They reach a high point

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with the detailed rhetorical analyses and classical source studies of Giovanni Andrea

Gesualdo (Naples, 1533), Sylvano da Venafro (Naples, 1533), and Bernardino Daniello

(Venice, 1541, 1549). And they accommodate Lutheran Reformist readings and

Scriptural source studies by Fausto da Longiano (Modena, 1532), Antonio Brucioli

(Ferrara, 1548), and Lodovico Castelvetro (Basel, 1582). Here the gulf between

Petrarch’s late medieval world and the early modern world of his commentators and

successive imitators appears palpable.

With Petrarch, I want to locate my argument with one particularly symptomatic

sixteenth-century commentary on sonnets 77 and 78 in his Rime sparse, fairly precocious

examples of the poet’s thoughts about poetry dating from 1336-37 or earlier in the

manuscript of his working papers known as Vat. Lat. 3196, where they appear on Folio

7r. In 1548 Giovan Battista Gelli (d. 1563) delivered a lecture at the Florentine Academy

on these poems in which he argued for them as expressions of a Platonic and an

Aristotelian aesthetics respectively. The author of several witty and parodic dialogues

(notably La Circe, 1549), of a commentary on the first twenty-six cantos of Dante’s

Inferno, and of seven academic lectures on Petrarch’s rime, Gelli pursues as his recurrent

theme the idea of an unresolved tension between opposites that generates productively

hybrid, mutable forms.6 In sixteenth-century economic terms, these forms enact the

material consequences of symbolic exchange, fluctuations of value, and approbation of

earned interest in the commerce of this period. In Petrarch’s time, however, they enact an

economics of Augustinian plenitude and abundance on the one hand, and of scholastic

labor and utility value on the other.

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The two poems that Gelli lectures on concern Simone Martini’s miniature

portrait of Laura. The first argues that Simone must have been transported to heaven

when he began Laura’s portrait.

Per mirar Policleto a prova fiso

con gli altri ch' ebber fama di quell'arte,

mill' anni non vedrian la minor parte

della beltà che m'àve il cor conquiso.

Ma certo il mio Simon fu in Paradiso

onde questa gentil donna si parte;

ivi la vide, et la ritrasse in carte

per far fede qua giù del suo bel viso.

L'opra fu ben di quelle che nel cielo

si ponno imaginar, non qui tra noi,

ove le membra fanno a l’alma velo;

cortesia fe', né la potea far poi

che fu disceso a provar caldo et gielo

et del mortal sentiron gli occhi suoi.

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Even if Polyclitus could have been transfixed upon looking in

competition with all the others who were famous in that art, never in a

thousand years would they see the smallest part of the beauty that has

conquered my heart. But certainly my Simon was in paradise, whence

comes this noble lady; there he saw her face and portrayed her on paper,

to attest down here to her lovely face.

The work is one of those which can be imagined only in heaven,

not here among us, where the body is a veil to the soul; it was a gracious

act, nor could he have done it after he came down to feel heat and cold

and his eyes took on mortality.

According to Gelli, this poem articulates a Platonic aesthetics in which terrestrial

images counterfeit the form of beauty that exists in God’s mind, “il proprio e il vero

loro essere” ‘their proper and true being.’7 If the earth-bound Greek sculptor Polyclitus

had fixed his eyes on Laura’s body as the model for a statue, he would have seen only

her earthly image. But Simone has drawn her likeness from a divine original that holds

no imperfections. The agent for incorporating his perception into art is fantasy, defined

by Gelli as a concrete, particular intuition of truth, goodness, and beauty. This faculty

takes images from the sensate, material world and directs them to the intellect in a

moment of furor or inspired madness (signalled retrospectively in the ninth and tenth

lines of Petrarch’s poem by “L'opra fu ben di quelle che nel cielo / si ponno imaginar,

non qui tra noi” ‘The work is one of those which can be imagined only in heaven, not

here among us‘) when the artist becomes a medium for divine illumination. 8 In the

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poem’s economic scenario, this experience privileges Simone and his art as

exceptional, to be valued above that of his peers.

A corresponding emphasis on the material form and function of art, and

specifically on the mastery of craft, skill, and specialized technique, alternatively

announces a sixteenth-century Aristotelian aesthetics and an economic scenario based

on the quantifiable labor and utility value of the artist’s work. Petrarch’s sonnet 78

presages this emphasis as it elaborates what happened after Simone took his stile ‘pen,

stylus’ to draw Laura’s picture.

Quando giunse a Simon l'alto concetto

ch' a mio nome gli pose in man to stile,

s' avesse dato a 1'opera gentile

colla figura voce ed intelletto,

di sospir molti mi sgombrava il petto

che ciò ch' altri à più caro a me fan vile.

Però che 'n vista ella si monstra umile,

promettendomi pace ne 1'aspetto,

ma poi ch' i' vengo a ragionar con lei,

benignamente assai par che m'ascolte:

se risponder savesse a' detti miei!

8

Pigmaliòn, quanto lodar ti dei

de 1'imagine tua, se mille volte

n’avesti quel ch' i' sol una vorrei!

When Simon received the high idea which, for my sake, put his

hand to his stylus, if he had given to his noble work voice and intellect

along with form, he would have lightened my breast of many sighs that

make vile to me what others prize most. For in appearance she seems

humble, and her expression promises peace;

then, when I come to speak to her, she seems to listen most

kindly: if she could only reply to my words! Pygmalion, how glad you

should be of your own statue, if you have received a thousand times what

I yearn to have just once.

Gelli’s argument traces Aristotle’s schema of the four causes that transform one sort of

matter into another. The material cause of Simone’s picture is the pen, ink, and paper

that constitute its physical substance; in Petrarch’s poetry, it is the acoustic stratum of

words with pitch, stress, juncture, rhythm, rhyme, potential puns, and semantic

exchanges of meaning. The efficient cause is the agent who works upon this component

matter: in Simone’s case, the artist who draws the picture; in Petrarch’s case, the poet

who fashions the words. The final cause is the purpose or goal toward which the agent

works: for both Simone and Petrarch, it is to instantiate Laura’s beauty by way of copy

or imitation. Animating all is the final cause that defines the structure, shape, design,

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and compositional properties of the art work, “perchè ogni agente . . . opera per il fine”

‘because every agent works toward its intended goal’ (269).

Sonnet 78 nonetheless records the picture’s failure to satisfy the speaker. Its

silence disappoints him when he seeks a response from the life-like image, so that in

line 6 he disparages the picture “ch' altri à più caro” ‘which others prize most.’ In

Gelli’s account, Aristotelian categories explain why. Because art replicates the

appearance of nature deprived of its motion, Laura’s portrait can only seem to listen to

the viewer’s words in lines 9-10 without actually replying: “Benignamente assai par che

m'ascolte: / se risponder savesse a' detti miei!” ‘She seems to listen most kindly; if only

she could reply to my words.’ Not coincidently, Simone’s rival artists—Polyclitus in

sonnet 77 and Pygmalion in sonnet 78—were sculptors rather than painters, and they

shaped their masterpieces out of mute stone, petra, the etymological root of the poet’s

name. In Petrarch’s case, Laura is his work of art, one shaped parthenogenically out of

the material supplied by his imagination. Or, to say the same thing, Petrarch constitutes

the matter of his art out of sounds and syllables as both the inventor of Laura and the

subject of his own poetry. But the final lines of sonnet 78 imply an unsettling effect

with their complaint that Pygmalion obtained a pleasure from his statue which Petrarch

has been denied: “Mille volte / n’avesti quel ch' i' sol una vorrei!” ‘You have received a

thousand times what I yearn to have just once.’ The work of art has an economic value

to the extent that it satisfies such longing. In the absence of this satisfaction, the work

becomes just another standardized commodity, worth no more than the materials that

constitute it and the amount of time spent fashioning it.

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For the economic figurations inscribed in these poems, perhaps the most

important fourteenth-century stimulus was the idea of construing money as a liquid

medium of exchange with fiat value.9 The key document in this event appeared in

1355, two years after Petrarch left Vaucluse for permanent residence in Italy. It was

a treatise written in French and eventually titled De moneta (when it was expanded

1 For an overview of developments discussed in this paper, see Harry A. Miskimin, The Economy of Early Renaissance Europe, 1300-1460 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969) and Miskimin, The Economy of Later Renaissance Europe, 1460-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). For economic theory in the period, see Henry William Spiegel, The Growth of Economic Thought (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 47-118; and Murray N. Rothbard, Economic Thought before Adam Smith, vol. I of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995), pp. 65-210 and 275-306. For a survey of historiography and bibliography, see Peter Musgrave, The Early Modern European Economy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).2 This monetization followed upon the discovery and exploitation of silver mines near Freiberg in 1168, Salzburg in 1200, on the border of Bohemia and Moravia in 1220, and at Kutná Hora in Bohemia 1298, and of gold mines at Kremnica in Slovakia in 1320, which filled Europe's coffers in plentiful ways, again unrivalled until the colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth century, and its purred the beginning of an interdependent European monetary system. See Peter Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 187-263.3 A series of natural disasters in the early fourteenth century leading up to the Black death alsohad a decisive economic impact upon society, culture, and politics. Beginning in 1316 repeated crop failures from overcultivated land, and then between 1310-60 a major climactic change effecting a mini-ice-age brought famine and impoverishment to western Europe. See H.H. Lamb, Climate: Past, Present, and Future, 2 vols. (London: Methuen, 1977). For economic consequences of the Black Death, see Norman A. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World that It Made (New York: Free Press, 2002), David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), and George Huppert, After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).4 See William J. Kennedy, "Versions of a Career: Petrarch and Early Modern Commentators," in European Literary Careers, ed. Patrick Cheney and Frederick de Armas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp. 146-64, and “Mercator inops litterarum: The Economy of Invective in De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia,” in Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi, eds, The Complete Petrarch, forthcoming.5 See William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).6 For chronology, see Armand De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy (Florence: Olschki, 1976); for this theme in La Circe, see Marilyn Migiel, “The Dignity of Man: A Feminist Perspective,” in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 211-32.7 Citations refer to Giovan Battista Gelli, Lezioni petrarchesche, ed. Carlo Negroni (Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1884), with the lezione on sonnets 77 and 78 on pp. 223-82, quoted from p. 256.8 Later conceptions of furor drew upon translations of Phaedrus and Gorgias by Leonardo Bruni and especially upon Marsilio Ficino’s translation of Platio’s complete works with accompanying commentary (1463-70), influencing the vernacular work of the French Pléiade, especially Pierre de Ronsard.

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and translated into Latin in 1358) by Nicholas Oresme (c. 1320-82). 10 The specific

crisis that it addresses concerns the debasement of French coin that successive

Valois monarchs had ordered to replenish their wartime coffers. Oresme accepts the

premises of this debasement, but he denies that the king has authority to command

it. Shifting the latter’s authority to a consistory representing the nobility, he argues

that “money is a balancing instrument for the exchange of natural wealth

[instrumentum equiualens permutandi diuicias naturales) . . . [and] is therefore the

property of those who possess such wealth,” so that “coinage is the property of the

community . . . [which] can dispose of it as it pleases.”11 This refiguring of money

from a hoard of treasure to an adjustable standard of value reflects a subtle, nuanced

act of the will. It is one that Petrarch demonstrates in his poetry through multiple

drafts and strategic revision, whose evidence of labor and subjective satisfaction

increases the value of his final product. The text, like money, is less a permanent store

9 Contributing to and flowing from this idea was the (eventually rampant) practice of debasing coins by royal decree, with consequent waves of inflation or deflation in various sectors of society (with inflation generally good for those who sold services or imported goods, and bad for those who exported goods or received rents at fixed rates; and vice versa for deflation). Such debasements with wage and price regulations to offset imbalances occurred notably in France. There Philip IV declared major debasements in 1295 and 1311, with a series of minor debasements through 1337, resumed on a major scale by Philip VI in 1342 to help finance the Hundred Years’ War, and continuing until 1358. See Spufford, Money and Its Use, pp. 289-318. Because of the expenses of minting and of a seigneurage surtax levied on each coin by the king or ruler, custom moreover acknowledged less value in a coin than in its equivalent bullion. See Thomas J. Sargent and François R. Velde, The Big Problem of Small Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 69-120. For an exponentially growing concern with issues of measurement, quantification, and verbal definitions of quality, with their effects upon modes of figuration and tropological exchange in rhetorical expression, see Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 163-99.10 It is possible, though not probable, that Petrarch knew him. Oresme is designated suppositiously as the translator of selections from De remediis utriusque fortunae into French in 1378, an attribution more likely to be made to Jehan Deudin as named in two manuscripts; see Mary Fowler, Cornell University Catalogue of the Petrarch Collection Bequeathed by Willard Fiske (London: Oxford University Press, 1916), p. 18. On Christmas Day 1363 Oresme delivered a sermon before Pope Urban V denouncing the corruption of the Avignon Church. Johann Huizinga speculates without proof that Petrarch had met Oresme at Avignon; see Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. F. Hopman (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1954), p. 325.11 Nicholas Oresme, De moneta, trans. Charles Johnson (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1956), pp. 10 and 35.

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of unchanging value than a flexible container of shifting values, a floating unit of account

whose speculative meanings increase or diminish in different contexts.

As it happens, Petrarch is one of the earliest poets for whom we have datable

manuscripts of his work in various stages of its composition, in some cases providing

fragments or sketches that the poet never completed, in other cases whole poems that he

discarded or variants that he cancelled, added to, or otherwise changed over his long

career.12 Petrarch’s systematic attention to revision concurs with the rising sense of

professionalism and specialization in new urban trades and occupations. His editing and

reediting of the text become professional responsibilities, and what is gained or lost in

these specialized tasks has economic consequences.13 A glimpse into Petrarch’s

manuscript workshop shows Petrarch’s attention to the craft and techniques of poetry, but

also to the circumstances of its production in an economic environment. It is almost as

though Petrarch, in his meticulous attention to copying, revising, reissuing new versions

of his old poems, and keeping a firm hand on their circulation, had construed himself as a

12 In English, the classic study of Petrarch’s revision is the collection of essays by Ernest Hatch Wilkins in his The Making of the “Canzoniere” and Other Petrarchan Essays (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1951), whose conclusions been modified by many later scholars, notably Marco Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima: Storia e racconto nel Canzoniere del Petrarca (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992). The superb editions of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, ed. Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori, 1996) and Trionfi, rime estravaganti, codice degli abbozzi, ed. Vincinio Pacca and Laura Paolini, intro. Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori, 1996) offer detailed commentary on the surviving manuscripts. Estimates about the total number of fragments and excluded poems of course vary. In Trionfi, rime estravaganti, codice degli abbozzi, ed. Vincinio Pacca and Laura Paolino, a section of five fragments (one of them fusing two separate parts of an incomplete poem) and twenty-one rime estravaganti is edited by Paolino and appears on pp. 627-754; four fragments and seven rime estravaganti recur in the codice degli abbozzi (Vat. Lat. 3196) edited by Paolino on pp. 755-889. Nearly a century ago, Angelo Solerti included two other fragments (subsequently shown to be drafts of lines in canzone 268) and three more poems supposed to be Petrarch’s in his Rime disperse di Francesco Petrarca o a lui attribute (Florence: Sansoni, 1909).13 Poems revised particularly in the aftermath of the Black Death portend economic developments in northern Italy during the 1350s and 1360s. This period of crisis is characterized by the innovative use of credit lending to make up for the breakdown of economic structures and institutions in the wake of the plague, for which use the rise of the Medici family is exemplary. For the origins of its rise as a banking firm founded around 1370 by Pieri di Cambrio de’ Medici (1323-95), a distant cousin of Giovanni di Bicci, and partnered by the latter’s older brother Francesco in 1382-91, see Raymond de Roover, Business, Banking, and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 260-72.

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merchant of poetry, managing a business whose chief product was a progressively

improved text. The question is, just how much of Petrarch’s hybridized Platonic and

Aristotelian aesthetics overlaps with contending claims of late Scholastic economics?

II. The Economy of Petrarchan Revisions

Possible answers might turn up in three poems that figure Laura as Medusa. Two

of them were composed early, likely before 1336-38 (in roughly the same period as the

sonnets about Simone Martini) if we judge from their placement as poems 48 and 57 in

Vat. Lat. 3196.14 One of them, sonnet 179, was revised and, after May 1368, on the

evidence of differently colored ink used on it, was inserted into the definitive autograph

manuscript of the Rime sparse known as Vat. Lat. 3195.15 The second poem, now

numbered as RE 4, was not included in the final sequence. It is as though Petrarch had

14 The Vatican Library’s manuscript codex known as Vat. Lat. 3196 consists of sixteen folio pages that comprise passages from the Triumph of Love III and the Triumph of Eternity, fifty-four poems later revised for the Rime sparse (three of them in two versions), seven poems excluded from the Rime sparse (one in two versions), four eventually abandoned fragments, and four response poems sent to Petrarch by other poets acknowledging his poems sent to them. Eighteen poems in Vat. Lat. 3196 have dated annotations ranging from 1336 to 1369, with whole sections clustered in distinct periods, chiefly 1336-38, 1359-60, and 1366-68, and with a date at the end of the codex reading 12 February 1374. There is another manuscript in the Vatican Library, known as Chigi L. V. 176, datable from 1359-62/63, consisting of 215 poems in a discernible order, giving evidence of sustained revision and an attempt to arrange the poems into a structure resembling that of the definitive Rime sparse. It includes one ballata subsequently left out of the final sequence. The Chigi exemplar itself generated several copies, of which seven have survived in testimony to the early circulation of Petrarch’s poems. A further pre-Chigi form has been deduced as a collection of some 170 poems transcribed in 1356-58 for Azzo da Correggio. This form has been deduced from the Chigi manuscript in the way that poems 145-78 disregard the ordering principles of poems 1-142, which implies that at some earlier point the latter must have constituted a sequence in its own right. The seven poems of Vat. Lat. 3196 excluded from the Rime sparse as well as one likewise excluded ballata in the Chigi manuscript join some thirteen poems and two fragments (fused as one) drawn from various fifteenth-century manuscripts, which scholars accept as Petrarch’s. Of the latter, two ballatas and two fragments appear in a fifteenth-century copy in the Casanatense Library, known as C 294. Marco Santagata’s recent edition of Petrarch’s vernacular poetry includes these fragments and classifies them as Rime estravaganti, a title that I adopt and abbreviate as RE in the following pages.15 The Vatican manuscript known as Vat. Lat. 1395, dated from 1366-74, consists of all 366 poems of the Rime sparse in their definitive form. In it the space separating sonnets 178 and 180 is unusually large, suggesting that Petrarch had deliberately left it vacant until he decided which poem to use in it. Santagata speculates that Petrarch composed sonnet 179 before RE 4 and earlier than 1336.

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been holding both poems in abeyance as variations on each other, until he decided which

one better fit the arc of his canzoniere. The third poem, sonnet 197, was composed

perhaps as late as 1368.16 Its cancellations and additions in Vat. Lat. 3196, where it

appears as poem 14, suggest that Petrarch had drafted and revised the poem with heated

intensity in a concentrated period of time, as though working with eleventh-hour

determination to confer on it a sign of his special competence.

Petrarch’s choice of sonnet 179 over RE 4 bears some implications for the

economic environment activated in the Rime sparse. In RE 4 the speaker describes how

he forsakes his customary humility in order to rebuke Laura for her cruelty: “Quando

talor, da giusta ira commosso, / de l’usata umiltà pur mi disarmo” ‘When from time to

time, moved with a just anger, I put aside my accustomed humility.’ She responds with

her Medusan gaze (“Ratto mi giugne una più forte adosso / per far di me, volgendo gli

occhi, un marmo” ‘Swiftly one who is stronger comes against me, to turn me with a

glance into a piece of marble’’), but as soon as he regains his usual composure (“ritorna

al volto il suo primo colore” ‘my face regains its former pallor’), then Laura shows mercy

and retreats from her attack: “Onde’ ella per vergogna si riteme” ‘Therefore she for

shame withdraws.’ The resurgence of Petrarch’s efficacious “usata umiltà” in RE 4

comes into view as timely, inspired, and fortuitous, a valuable resource that empowers

him in crisis. But it is not a product of Petrarch’s own skill. It is instead the sign of a

transcendent, divinely bestowed favor that enables him to act adventitiously.

16 The poem appears as part of the fourth and last additions to Vat. Lat. 3196 on Folio 2r, datable bvetween 1366-68. In its late stages, Vat. Lat. 1395 incorporating both sonnets 179 and 197, generated two other collections of Petrarch’s poems up to that point; they are known as the Malatesta form, prepared for Pandolfo Malatesta before January 1373, and the Quiriniano prepared in 1373; for the first of these, thirty-six copies survive; for the second, ten copies survive.

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Sonnet 179 is different. Petrarch’s calculated decision to use it rather than RE 4 in

the finished Rime sparse appears grounded in a competitive environment. It incorporates

a specific address to the poet’s Florentine friend, Geri Gianfigliazzi, which heightens its

gender-charged energy as a masculine vaunt.17 On the one hand, the speaker positions

himself with Geri on the side of using a deliberate strategy against Laura’s Medusan

assault. On the other, he positions himself against Geri as he turns his declaration into a

swaggering display of his own superiority. The speaker boasts that he can control Laura’s

unruly behavior by submitting to her with a demeanor “pien d’umiltà sì vera”:

Ovunque ella sdegnando gli occhi gira,

che di luce privar mia vita spera,

le mostro i miei pien d’umiltà sì vera

ch’ a forza ogni suo sdegno indietro tira

17 The sonnet is one among forty-six poems in the Rime sparse and Rime estravananti addressed to male recipients. Thirteen out of the twenty-one Rime estravaganti in Santagata’s edition share in this androcentric economy through their address to male friends: RE 1 to Jacopo da Imola; RE 3a to Pietro Dietisalvi; RE 10, 11, and 12 to Sennuccio del Bene (complementing Rime sparse 108, 112, 113, 143, 144, 266, 268, and 287, which are addressed to or associated with the same recipient); RE 13a, 14a, 15, and 16a to Antonio Beccari da Ferrara (complementing sonnet 120 in the Rime sparse addressed to him), and RE 17a to Ricciardo da Battifolla. Several of these poems seem sketches for or first drafts of poems later included in the Rime sparse. To judge from their relative frequency in the Rime estravaganti and Vat. Lat. 3196 (nineteen out of eighty-three poems, or 22.9% in the latter, as compared with thirty-three out of 366 poems, or 8.8%, in the finished Rime sparse), it would appear that much of Petrarch’s vernacular poetry originated as androcentric verses exchanged between friends in the author’s male dominated world; that nearly all of them predate 1343 (the major periods of their composition appear to be 1327-33 (7, 8, 27, 28, 103), 1337-41 (9, 10, 38, 39, 40, 53, 58, 76, 98, 166, 179), 1342-43 (91, 99, 108, 112, 113, 114, 120, 143, 144), and 1345-50 (68, 104, 139, 266, 268), as proposed by Santagata in his notes to individual poems in his edition); and that some of them (notably 38, 39, 76, 108, 112, 113, 143, 144, and 179) express the speaker’s tribulations about his love for Laura, but most of them reflect upon broader social, cultural, and political issues.

16

Whenever she angrily turns her eyes, who hopes to deprive my life of light, I

show her mine full of such true humility that she necessarily draws back all her

anger.

Here Petrarch’s irony in modifying umiltà with vera counts for everything: the adjective

implies a direct correlation between the affect and its display, but the speaker’s off-

handed assurance (“E ciò non fusse”) suggests that his umiltà is only a feigned

contrivance:

E ciò non fusse, andrei non altramente

a veder lei che ‘l volto di Medusa,

che facea marmo diventar la gente.

And if that were not so, I would not go to see her otherwise than to see the face of

Medusa, which made people become marble.

In this case his assurance is a sign of superior skill and it proclaims his tactical mastery of

the situation. Though the poem situates Petrarch as a potential victim of Laura’s

domination, and though it records his momentary submission to her, it finally represents

him as the winner in a contest of wills. It also challenges Geri to match the author’s

success in a presumptive reply, pressuring the latter to respond on poetic grounds that

Petrarch already occupies. In this exchange, “umiltà sì vera” works as much to derogate,

even humiliate Geri’s poetic talent as it does to opprobriate Laura’s stare.

17

The difference between RE 4 and sonnet 179 suggests an evolution away from the

economy of divine favor as envisioned by St. Augustine toward an economy of secular

competition grounded in the Scholastic thinking of Petrarch’s contemporaries. Still

within the orbit of Augustinian thought about the unequal distribution of talent among

human beings, the speaker’s assessment of his own superior achievement now exalts him

in the eyes of the person to whom he sends his poem. As a sonnet addressed to Geri, the

poem imposes upon the latter a counter-obligation to reply. The speaker can only hope or

expect that Geri’s response will not measure up to the elegance and wit of his own

contribution. In this rivalrous turn, sonnet 179 shows itself as much a display of

masculine competition in an androcentric environment as it does a display of animus

against Laura in a misogynist environment. It seems calculated to valorize the poet’s

insight and intuition as a special talent, a sign of favor from God in theological terms, and

in secular terms as a reserve of cultural capital and preferment that sets him apart from

women (Laura) and other men (Geri) whom he surpasses in his intellectual skill.

The tenor of such androcentric poems revised and later included in the Rime

sparse inclines toward a display of poetic rivalry and competition, calculation and

measurement, in an increasingly aggressive economic environment. But not at once and

not completely. In each of these revisions, Petrarch can judge his extraordinary talent

only by inexact standards of value. One standard is the measurement of his labor value

calculated by the amount of time he spends on fashioning his poetry as a polished artifact,

together with some evidence of the difficulty or complexity shown in its final execution.

Another is its utility or subjective value calculated by the pleasure or satisfaction that it

allows beyond any direct instrumental value. Sonnet 197 provides an example. Its major

18

redactions, based largely on an effort to retain the rhyme words of its original draft

despite changes in its content, represent a tour de force of technical skill.18 With

cancellations in nearly every line (only lines 4, 9, and 14 remain largely untouched) and

with radical rewriting in the second quatrain and most of the sestet, these revisions show

Petrarch working with great intensity to confer on the poem a sign of his unequalled

craftsmanship and its consequent utility value.

In this poem the speaker’s submission to Laura is governed by an economic

figuration that shifts pointedly over the course of rewriting. Here’s the original version of

its second quatrain:

Et fu in me tal qual in quel vecchio mauro

Medusa quando in petra transformollo:

gli occhi et le chiome diermi horribil crollo,

dove ‘l sol perde, non pur l’ambra et l’auro.

And she was upon me as Medusa was upon that old Moor when she turned him

into stone: her eyes and hair dealt me a horrible blow, where the sun is surpassed,

not to say amber and gold.

As part of the phrase “diermi horribil crollo,” the noun crollo literally means ‘fall,

collapse.’ In commercial economic usage, however, it also means ‘monetary slump,

financial crash,’ and in the specific context of “dove ‘l sol perde” in the quatrain’s final 18 The single substitution of a rhyme word in revision appears in line 13 where, as noted below, the verb depinge becomes tinge. Otherwise it is as though the poem’s fixity of rhyme parodies the marmoreal effect that its speaker attributes to Laura’s Medusan stare. This feat displays in an extreme form Petrarch’s emphasis on style as a value in itself.

19

line, the phrase activates just such a charged meaning. Its speaker tries to diminish, but

cannot, the power of Laura’s eyes and hair, whose worth exceeds that of the sun as well

as of precious amber and gold.

The revisions that follow underscore the precarious balance of this assessment. In

the poem’s second draft, the lover willingly submits to her allure:

Quel fa di me, che del gran vecchio mauro

Medusa quando in petra transformollo:

non posso dal bel laccio omai dar crollo,

là ‘ve ‘l sol perde, non pur l’ambra et l’auro.

She makes of me what Medusa made of the old Moorish giant when she turned

him into stone: I could not budge an inch from that lovely snare where the sun is

surpassed, not to say amber and gold.

Here the connective “et fu in me” becomes the predicative “quel fa di me,” intensifying

Laura’s active power to turn Petrarch into something else, while the speaker’s assumption

of his own negative agency in “non posso . . . dar crollo” ‘I could not budge an inch’

(now evoking Inferno 25.9 in which the serpents so entrap Vanni Fucci “che non potea

con esse dare un crollo” ‘that he could not budge an inch with them’) heightens her

dominion. The noun petra, resonating with Petrarch’s name, repeats from the quatrain’s

original draft the perception that, through the beloved’s impact on him, the poet has at

last become himself, Petrarch, even and perhaps especially by virtue of its proximity to

20

the Dantesque echo in the following line. By serving as the object of his desire and of his

verse, Laura has helped Petrarch to become the vernacular poet that he now is, surpassing

all forerunners in the lytic field. But the speaker is still not comfortable with the

limitations imposed on his agency, and so he submits the lines to yet further revision.

The quatrain’s third version version begins by intensifying Laura’s strength.

Replacing “quel fa di me” with “po quello in me,” the modal verb po assumes a full

transitive force that uniquely empowers Laura:

Po quello in me che nel gran vecchio mauro

Medusa quando in selce transformollo;

né posso dal bel nodo omai dar crollo,

là ‘ve ‘l sol perde, non pur l’ambra o l’auro.

She has the power over me that Medusa had over the old Moorish giant when she

turned him to flint; nor can I budge an inch from that lovely knot where the sun is

surpassed, not to say amber or gold.

By replacing petra with selce, Petrarch mutes the resonance of his own name in the

earlier version while introducing a learned reference to victims in Ovid’s

Metamorphoses, “in silicem ex ipsis visa conversa Medusa” ‘changed by the sight of

Medusa from their true selves into stone’ (4.781). In conjunction with the reference to

Dante in “dar crollo,” this classical echo locates Petrarch upon a map of literary history

that extends backwards to antiquity and affirms his professional standing. Poets echo

21

poets as they recycle and reuse textual materials from the past. Petrarch shows himself to

be a master of such technique. His effort to advertise his literary debt folds into his

insistence upon maintaining the integrity of his own rhyme. For all the semantic and even

substantive changes in this poem, the rhyme words of its quatrain remain untouched.

The final draft’s single instance of a completely changed rhyme word occurs with

the replacement of depinge by tinge in line 13, a substitution that definitively alters the

poem’s representation of its own aesthetic value. In the original draft, fear turns the

speaker’s heart to ice and drains his face of color:

Pur a l’ombra da llunge il cor fa un ghiaccio

paura extrema, e ‘l volto mi depinge,

ma gli occhi ànno vertù fi farlo un marmo.

Yet in her shadow from afar, extreme fear makes my heart a piece of ice, and it

discolors my face, but her eyes have the power to turn them to marble.

Petrarch’s use of depinge traces a precise etymological history. Derived from early Latin

pingere, pictum, the verb means ‘to weave colored threads to form a pattern’; in a later

transferred sense, it means ‘to shape a likeness, to make a picture,’ whereupon it blurs

into synomy with the Aristotelian mimesis ‘fashioning, shaping, imitation,

representation.’19 But as Petrarch uses the word with the prefix de- to convey removal or

separation, the verb now means ‘to unweave the threads, to undo the image, to drain of

19 A. Ernout and A. Meillet, Dictionnnaire étymoloqique de la langue latine (Paris: Klinksieck, 1932), pp. 732-33.

22

color.’ In this anti-representational sense, the verb suggests that Laura has thwarted his

mimetic intentions, prompting him to a different aesthetic goal implied by tinge:

L’ombra sua sola fa ‘l mio cor un ghiaccio

et di bianca paura il viso tinge,

ma gli occhi ànno vertù fi farlo un marmo.

Her very shadow turns my heart to ice, and tinges my face with white fear, but her

eyes have the power to turn them to marble.

Derived from Latin tingere ‘to temper a hot substance and as a result to change its color,’

this verb brings an influx of shading and impressionistic nuance to Petrarch’s art.20 Its

play of color, light, and shadow, of intensity, hue, and tone, and of oral-aural effect now

conveys a mediated expression of mood and attitude. Its impact is to figure the artist as

one who conserves as well as exploits the resources of his art. For Petrarch these

resources mean the thematic topoi and stylistic devices of his poetry as well as their

precedents in classical, Christian, and late medieval models; the physical, mental, and

emotional capabilities of deploying these materials in productive new ways; and the

cultural capital that enables him to promote and distribute his art as a productive, savvy,

professional poet. His entrepreneureal skills as homo economicus litterarum enable him

to manage these resources, to recognize opportunities that enhance them, and to strategize

his approach to maximizing their possibilities.

20 Ernout and Meillet, 998.

23

III. Ronsard and the Economics of Petrarchan Revision

What might this aesthetic mean for such sixteenth-century successors of Petrarch

as Pierre de Ronsard in France and William Shakespeare in England? One suggestion

emerges from Ronsard’s “Ode à Michel de L’Hospital, Chancelier de France,” published

in his first edition of Les Amours on 30 September 1552 and subsequently featured as his

longest poem in the second and later editions of Les Odes (1553).21 The ode is important

for its spirited affirmation of furor as the catalyst of great poetry. Its dedication

acknowledges L’Hospital’s defence of the young Ronsard against attacks on him by

Mellin de Saint-Gelais and followers of Clément Marot when the first edition of Les Odes

appeared in January 1550. Its argument presents Ronsard as an inspired visionary who

has risen above the mere technical skills of his critics.22 It uses exactly the same terms of

furor and skill that Gelli deploys to contrast Platonic and Arisotelian poetics in his lecture

on Petrarch’s sonnets 77 and 78, now reinforced by decades of Humanist enterprise in

articulating such classical concerns.23 Jupiter promises Calliope that the mestier ‘craft’ of

poetry inspired by the muses “les autres mestiers passera, / D’autant qu’esclave il ne

sera / De l’art aux Muses inutile” ‘will surpass other crafts, inasmuch as it will not be the

slave of technical skill, which is of no use to the Muses’ (396-98). The pejorative noun

l’art refers to the mechanical precision of meter and rhyme at the expense of any 21 Quotations that follow refer to Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin, 2 vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). I owe my translation of the ode to Ronsard, Selected Poems, trans. Malcolm Quainton and Elizabeth Vinestock (London: Penguin, 2002).22 Jupiter dismisses such technical skills as the work of ordinary ouvriers: “Par art se font les ouvriers” ‘Through art, craftsmen learn their trade” (404). He instead proposes to endow the poets whom he favors with a divine fureur that will confer infused wisdom, so that “ma sainte fureur / Polira vostre science” ‘my divine fury will burnish what you know’ (407-408). Here it is worth noting that Ronsard’s ode appeared in print as a supremely self-conscious and highly crafted work accompanied with a musical setting composed by Claude Goudimel (1520-72), displaying every sign of metrical competence for which the poet would become famous. 23 See note 6 above.

24

thoughtful engagement with moral, philosophical, theological, or ideological substance,

and it accuses Saint-Gelais and Marot’s followers of wasting their talent on trivial and

mundane topics.24 But far from disparaging technical skill as Jupiter does when he

promises to send divine inspiration--“Sans art, sans sueur ne sans paine” ‘without

technical skill, without sweat and without struggle’ (454)--the poet surreptitiously

embraces it. No poet of his generation would prove more fastidious about polishing his

technique and revising his art than Ronsard, and no poet of his time expended more sueur

and paine than he did to enhance his professional reputation.

Certainly Ronsard’s publication of this poetic manifesto as an appendage to his

first volume of Les Amours accentuates his transition from the classical ode to the

Petrarchan sonnet.25 In the “Avis au Lecteur” of his 1550 Odes, the poet declared his

24 Significantly Ronsard’s verse evinces its own self-conscious violation of normative concerns. In lines 425-28, for example, the exact rhyme of parts/ parts expresses Jupiter’s disdain for the ordinary skills of versification. The true poet soars above them: “Cest art penible et miserable / S’eslongnera de toutes parts / De vostre mestier honorable / Desmembré en diverses parts” ‘This laborious, miserable technical skill will be far removed from all parts of your honorable craft, which is divided into diverse parts.’ Part of Petrarch’s wit is that the word parts refers to two structurally distinct components of art. The first refers to the formal components of meter, rhyme, syntax, and other technical or stylistic features that the speaker disparages as “mere art.” The second, however, refers to the component of representational matter, and specifically to the thematic materials associated with particular genres, apportioned “En Prophetie, en Poësies, / En mysteres et en amour” ‘into the prophetic mode, the mythic mode, the mode of religious mystery, and the mode of love’ (429-30). These four modes echo those discussed by Socrates in reference to furor in Plato’s Phaedrus 244a-245b, but when applied to literary genres as they are here, they also evoke the Aristotelian classifications of lyric, epic, tragic, and comic modes. It would seem, then, that the equivocal word parts accommodates poetic form to poetic matter, as well as the lofty aspiration of Platonic aesthetics to the schematic categories of Aristotelian craft.25 In 1550 Ronsard had published Les Quatre Premiers Livres des Odes with only limited patronage from the Cardinal de Guise and Marguerite de France and with abundant negative criticism of its diction and meter from Mellin de Saint-Gelais and Bartélemy Aneau. Meanwhile his friend Joachim Du Bellay and his Lyonnais acquaintance Pontus de Tyard had each published a well-received volume of Petrarchan sonnets, the former’s Olive (April 1549, in tandem with his Deffence et illustration, augmented in October 1550) and the latter’s Erreurs amoureuses I (November 1549). These volumes appeared in the context of several efforts to translate Petrarch’s poetry for an elite French readership, beginning with Clément Marot’s renderings of canzone 323 (dedicated to King Francis I, published in La suite de l’adolescence Clementine in 1534) and of six sonnets (numbers 1, 161, 248, 338, 346, and 348, published in in opuscule by Giles Corrozet in 1539). To honor the accession to the throne of Henri II with his Medici wife, Jacques Peletier du Mans published his translation of twelve sonnets (numbers 2, 71, 75, 132, 134, 163, 164, 267, 274, 276, 305, and 314) in his Oeuvres poétiques in 1547, and Vasquin Philieul published his translation of the entire Rime sparse in 1547-55. Their ambitions were high when they approached Petrarch’s Rime sparse, but Ronsard’s were even higher. See Site of Petrarchism, pp. 106-14.

25

scorn for “rimeurs courtizans” who “n’admirent qu’un petit sonnet petrarquizé”

(Pléiade ed., 1.996) Now in Les Amours the ambitious singer of Pindaric and Horatian

odes has joined their company. The poet is willing to eat his words and play the fool in

love if this tactic will expand his readership and secure future patronage. The

successive extensively revised editions of Les Amours over the next thirty-seven years

bear direct economic implications. One reflects Ronsard’s entrepreneurial effort to

capture a share of the bookvendors’ market by re-issuing his work in revised and

augmented form for repeated sales. But another evokes the poet’s social, cultural, and

political economy. The dominant implication is that courtly audiences have come to

favor Petrarchan forms, thanks to the cumulative efforts of Saint Gelais, Marot, Jacques

Pelletier du Mans, Joachim Du Bellay, and Pontus de Tyard to introduce them to

France. But Ronsard moves a step further than they did when he represents himself not

as a poet in debt to Petrarchan forms, but rather vice versa as one to whom these forms

are in debt.

In economic terms, Ronsard asserts that he has given up his time and talent to

Petrarchism, to whose fame he has become creditor. In compensation, he deserves to earn

whatever figurative interest might accrue from it. In 1546, the question of the legitimacy

of earned interest took on an important discursive life with the publication of Charles

Dumoulin’s Treatise on Contracts and Usury, a text that contributed to the Counter

Reformation’s canonical justification for its standard practice.26 Its author, a controversial

Parisian jurist and royal Gallican advisor, had argued on Scriptural grounds that Divine

Law approves of, and even urges, the principle of paying interest on commercial loans:

“Should you say that the creditor, if unable to prove his claim to his profit from so much

26

that might intervene (tanti sua intersit), cannot lawfully contract for or receive such usury

without injury to the debtor?”27 The term that Dumoulin uses is the Latin verb intersit in

the sense of a potential gain that the lender might forego while the borrowed makes use

of his money: “I see no harm in this, nothing contrary to divine or natural law; since

nothing is done in it contrary to charity, but rather from mutual charity. It is plain that one

grants the favor of a loan from his property; the other remunerates his benefactor with a

part of the gain derived therefrom, without suffering any loss” (15/106). Ronsard

construes the debt of Petrarchism to him in exactly these terms. He has lent his talent to

that fashionable mode at a time when he might more profitably have invested it in some

more exalted project that could have earned him a greater reward. Petrarchism owes a

debt to him for having foregone the possible gain.

An example is sonnet 1 of Les Amours, whose opening line and argument (“Qui

voudra voyr comme un Dieu me surmonte”) echo Petrarch’s sonnet 248, “Chi vuol veder

quantunque pò Natura” ‘Whoever wishes to see how much Nature.’28 Ronsard’s

reworking of Petrarch’s sonnet calls attention not to the beloved, as his model and its

French imitators had done, nor to a cohort of talented friends and associates as Du

Bellay’s poem had done, but simply and unapologetically to the author himself:29

Qui voudra voyr comme un Dieu me surmonte,

Comme il m’assault, comme il se fait vainqueur,

Comme il r’enflamme & r’englace mon cuoeur,

Comme il reçoit un honneur de ma honte,

Qui voudra voir une jeunesse prompte

27

A suyvre en vain l’object de mon malheur,

Me vienne voir: il voirra ma douleur,

Et la rigueur de l’Archer qui me donte.

Whoever wishes to see how a god overwhelms me as he attacks me, how he

makes himself a vanquisher, how he ignites and freezes my heart again and again,

how he derives honor from my shame; whoever wishes to see a youthfulness

ready to follow in vain the object of my undoing, should come see me: he will see

my suffering and the rigor of the archer who tames me.

On one level, the poet represents himself as a victim of love. On another level, he

emerges as an unabashed homo economicus who displays himself to advantage even if he

must compromise his own high standards. He is transacting his own identity into a fiction

that represents him as a Petrarchan lover, woes and all. That he does this for the delight

and entertainment of his readership emerges from a latent pun in the poem’s third word,

voir ‘see,’ pronounced in the sixteenth-century as vε:r, derived from Latin vedere, but

26 This justification came in Gaspare Caballino’s expanison and detailed annotation of Du Moulin’s Tractatus commerciorum et usurarum redituumque pecunia constitutorum et monetarum, published at Venice in 1576, cited below. In 1271, Henry of Suza justified interest as the profit that a lender would have made if he had kept his money and used it in his own trade; the borrower is therefore obliged to the lender’s mediating presence for the profit that has accrued between the loan and its repayment (inter-esse). The rationalizing of principles for paying interest, for speculating in commercial insurance-risk policies, and for establishing an interlocking, supra-territorial banking system followed in turn.Bernardno of Siena later reasoned that money had a productive character that we call capital when we distinguish between consumption loans in the name of charity and investment loans in the name of commerce. See Spufford, Money and Its Use, pp. 260-61. See Spufford, Money and Its Use, pp. 240-63, especially pp. 260-61, and Power and Profit, pp. 43-46. For Henry of Suza, known as Hostensius after he became Cardina Bishop of Ostia, see Barry Gordon, Economic Analysis before Adam Smith (London: Barnes and Noble, 1975), p. 157. For the doctrine of usury, see John T. Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957).27 Quotations refer to the incorporation of Du Moulin’s Tractatus on the facsimile edition of Gaspare Caballino’s text (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1972), p. 15; translation by Arthur Eli Monroe, ed., Early Economic Thought: Selections from Economic Literature prior to Adam Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924), p. 106

28

homophonic with French vers ‘verse, poetry.’ Whoever would like some poetry in the

newly fashionable Petrarchan mode will find it in these sonnets of Les Amours.

The first version of the poem’s sestet admits as much in a playful way:

Il cognoistra combien la raison peult

Contre son arc, quand une foys il veult

Que nostre cuoeur son esclave demeure:

Et si voirra que je suis trop heureux,

D’avoir au flanc l’aiguillon amoureux,

Plein du venin dont il faut que je meure.

He will know how much reason can prevail against his bow, when once he

decrees that that our heart should languish as his slave; and so he will see that I

28 Petrarch’s poem had generated in France a series of distinguished imitations before Ronsard approached it. It was one of six sonnets by Petrarch that Clément Marot translated to gain the king’s favor in 1539 (“Qui vouldra veoir tout ce que peult Nature”), and it quickly found echoes in poems by Maurice Scève (“Qui veult scauoir par commune euidence,” Délie 278 [1544]) and Pontus de Tyard (“Qui veult savoir en quante et quelle sorte,” Erreurs amoureuses 2 [1549]). Du Bellay offers a particularly striking imitation of Petrarch’s poem in sonnet 61 of his augmented Olive (1550), “Qui voudra voir le plus miracle arbre” ‘Whoever would like to see the most precious tree.’ Here, conflating it with a figuration of place names drawn from the sonnet that precedes it in the Rime sparse, “Parrà forse ad alcun che ‘n lodar quella” ‘It will perhaps seem to someone that in my praise of her’ (sonnet 247), Du Bellay articulates a poetic manifesto for his own literary endeavors. See Site of Petrarchism, pp. 115-40.29 In his poem, Petrarch had argued that whoever would see the perfection of excellence should gaze upon Laura: “sì dirà ben: ‘Quello ove questi aspira / è cosa da stancare Atene, Arpino, /Mantova et Smirna, et l’una et l’altra lira” ‘Then he will say, “What this man aspires to would exhaust Athens, Arpinum, Mantua, and Smyrna, and the one and the other lyre.”’ Du Bellay argues that such a person should gaze upon Olive, “Un digne object de Florence et Mantoüe, / De Smyrne encor’, de Thebes et Calabre” ‘an object worthy of Florence and Mantua, and moreover of Smyrna, Thebes, and Calabria,’ where the place names designate the birthplaces of Petrarch, Virgil, Homer, Pindar, and Horace. To these, the poet adds the birthplaces of his contemporaries Antoine Héroët, Mellin de Saint-Gelais, and Maurice Scève (“Encor’ dira que la Touvre, et la Seine, / Avec’ la Saone arriveroient à peine / A la moitié d’un si divin ouvrage” ‘And he will say that the Touvre and the Seine together with the Saône would hardly happen upon half such a divine handiwork’), and he concludes by referring to his friend Ronsard, whose Odes surpass those of Pindar and Horace: “Le vieil honneur de l’une et l’autre lire” ‘The old honor of the one and the other lyre.’ In his poem, Du Bellay is establishing a canon of French poets who compete for glory against Petrarch and the ancients, implicitly situating himself as primus inter pares among the five French moderns who equal the five classical ancients.

29

am too happy to bear in my side the amorous spur, full of the poison from which I

must perish.

Here the speaker quantifies his powers (“combien la raison peut”) in a negative estimate

that depicts his association with Cupid as an esclave ‘slave’ to his master. And to this

relationship the speaker assents (“je suis hereux”) as long as it brings a readership. The

overlap of audiences, drawing upon the poet’s beloved, his potential patrons, influential

courtly readers, the greater public, and finally posterity, contrasts oddly with the

speaker’s retreat from his public vatic posture in the odes to his private confessional

posture in the sonnets. His role as an indentured lover now suggests that his quest for

patronage has invited a troubling self-exposure. The poem’s first draft implies that the

economic system motivating it is exploitative.

Ronsard seeks an equilibrium when he revises the poem’s sestet for the fifth

edition of his Oeuvres in 1578. Its dominant claim is that among his competitors

clamoring for recognition, Ronsard alone has managed a professional career above the

fray and he now deserves to be ranked among the best. In economic terms, an abundance

of poetry in print has flooded the market and has pressured the writer’s reputation. His

response is to revise his earlier production, reissue it, and make up in the quantity of

reprint for the loss of an earlier visibility. In the previous decade, such questions of

general market inflation had generated public debate about profit-making causes and

remedies. In 1568, the Toulousian jurist, humanist scholar, and politique advocate Jean

Bodin (1530?-76) had offered an explanation in his Reply to the Paradoxes of M.

Melestroit, at once a celebration of the abundance bestowed upon France by God and

30

nature and an appeal to the French sovereign to regulate public finance. Here Bodin

argued a rudimentary quantity theory of money, whereby an increase in the availability of

specie generates a proportional increase in price levels: “The principal reason which

raises the price of everything, whereever one may be, is . . . the abundance of gold &

silver, which causes the depreciation [mespris] of these & the dearness of the things

priced [prisees].”30 Abundance begets abundance as it spurs consumers to resist hoarding

money, and to spend what they have, thereby enhancing the economy. Bodin’s

convictions about such commerce subtend the fifth book of his Six Books of the

Commowealth (1576), where the author evolves his celebrated theory of the climate as an

influence upon social and political temperaments. Nations located in a temperate climate

(by this, he means chiefly France) are best disposed to prosper and advance through

commerce, trade, business transactions, and monetary exchange: “The northern races are

ordained to labour and the mechanical arts, and the people of the middle regions to

bargain [negocier], trade [traffiquer], judge [juger], persuade [haranguer], command,

establish commonwealths, and make laws and ordinances for the other races. The

northern peoples from lack of prudence are not apt for this, neither are southern

peoples.”31 For Bodin, the talent for turning an economic profit seems a matter of Gallic

instinct.

Ronsard’s edition of 1578 introduces, among other poems, three recent collections

of sonnets—Sur la mort de Marie, Sonets et madrigals pour l’Astrée, and Le premier et

le second livre des sonets pour Hélène—each with a distinctive approach to the fourteen-

line form. The controlling fiction is that the Queen Mother Catherine de’ Medici has 30 Quotations refer to Monroe, ed., Early Economic Thought, p. 127.31 Quotations refer to Les six livres de la république (Paris: Jacques du Puis, 1583; Facsimile edition: Darmstadt: Scientia Aalen, 1961), p. 690; translation by M.J. Tooley, Six Books of the Commonwealth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955), p. 154.

31

prevailed upon him to return to Petrarchism after a hiatus of twenty-two years.32 During

this time he has expanded his odes, has written his epyllionic hymns and his two

Discours sur les misères de ces temps, and has worked and reworked the ambitious

design of his epic Franciade in order to please three successive kings, but none of these

endeavors has beguiled his potential patrons as much as his sonnets have done. Hence the

revised sestet of Ronsard’s liminal poem now depicts his relationship to Amour as a

transformative one that enhances his professional worth:

Il cognoistra que foible est la raison

Contre son trait quand sa douce poison

Corrompt le sang, tant le mal nous enchante

Et connoistra, que je suis trop heureux

D’estre en mourant nouveau Cygne amoureux

Qui son obseque à soy mesme se chante.

He will know that reason is weak against his arrow when its sweet poison corrupts

his blood, so much does its evil enchant us. And he will know that I am too happy

to be, while dying, a new swan in love, who sings to himself his own obsequies.

In gratitude to his exalted readership, the poet now represents his continued labor on this

sonnet as a kind of disinterested activity that conceals his own economic motivation. He

displaces the latter onto a site of gracefulness and decorum free from any apparent

32 Between 1553-56, Ronsard had added 162 sonnets to the 185 sonnets of the first Les Amours (1552). After 1556, he restricted his copmposition of sonnets to some sixty occasional poems largely unrelated to Les Amours. See the Pléiade edition, ed. Céard et al., 1.1219-23.

32

obligation or calculation. As the revised sestet further implies, it is a site of classical

allusion that imports from Horace’s ode 2.20 the figure of the poet as a swan whose final

and most elevated song transports him beyond ordinary mortality. The poet reinforces

this point with a latent pun on the word Cygne ‘swan’ which evokes the homophonic

signe ‘sign.’ This play on words transmits a sign of what the speaker has become across

the long arc of his poetic development, inviting us to see him sui generis as the unfading

product of his own distinguished career.

Ronsard’s final revision, published posthumously in the seventh edition of 1587,

at once retrieves some of the moral valence at the end of Petrarch’s sonnet 1 (“Che

quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno” ‘that whatever pleases in the world is a brief

dream’) and recasts the speaker’s relationship to Amour with witty self-deprecation:

Et cognoistra que l’homme se deçoit

Quand plein d’erreur un aveugle il reçoit

Pour sa conduite, un enfant pour son maistre.

And he will know that a person succumbs to self-deception upon engaging full of

error a blind boy for safe conduct, a child for one’s master.

As the speaker reverts to a transaction between himself and Amour, he represents himself

no longer as an esclave ‘slave’ to love, but rather as an unwary client who has taken on a

blind boy for a guide. By ceding mastery to a minor in his employ, he appears to have

foundered. But paradoxically as he does so, he earns prosperity and fame. He has

33

indentured himself to a poetic style (however varied) in the Petrarchan mode that, as a

young author of ambitious Odes, he had simply disdained. His career has now come full

circle, and the choices that he made when he inaugurated his Les Amours have stayed

with him. Through successive revisions of the first Les Amours, the Petrarchan mode has

enabled Ronsard to figure himself as something more than a hapless poet. He is a teller of

tales who will entertain readers at his own expense, an artist who identifies with his

poetry as a sign of its special worth, and a prodigy who confers prestige on those who

have helped him, including the Queen Mother.

IV. Shakespeare and the Economy of Petrarchan Aesthetics

In 1587 the press of Gabriel Buon in Paris issued the seventh and final

posthumous edition of Ronsard’s Oeuvres . . . reveuës, corrigés et augmentées par

l’Autheur peu avant son trepas. It is probable that at least a few copies reached England,

where Ronsard’s political reputation as Catholic partisan and Valois propagandist

competed with his literary reputation as “prince des poètes” and “poète des princes.”33 By

the early 1580s, Thomas Watson had already translated four of Ronsard’s poems in the

Hekatompathia (1582), John Swoothern had translated fifteen of them in Pandora

(1584), and Sir Arthur Gorges had translated two in his unpublished Vannetyes and Toyes

of Yowth.34 Concurrently, Philip Sidney had written his Astrophil and Stella (1581-82,

33 He was proclaimed as such by Maclou de la Haye in 1553 upon the publication of the second edition of Les Amours; see Fernand Desonay, Ronsard, poète de l’amour, 3 vols. (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1952), 1.72; for Ronsard’s reputation in England, see Anne Lake Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 76-131.34 See Watson, Hekatompathia, facsimile of 1582 edition, intro. S.K. Heninger, Jr. (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1964); Swoothern, Pandora, facsimile of 1584 edition, intro. George G. Parks (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938); and Gorges, Works, ed. Helen Estabrook Sandeson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953).

34

published piratedly in 1591) and his friend Fulke Greville composed most of his Caelica

(published in 1633). Before the publication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 1609, twenty-

eight new English sonnet sequences would appear in print, including Thomas Lodge’s

Phillis (1593), Michael Drayton’s Idea (1594), and Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti (1595).35

Into this milieu William Shakespeare ventured after his arrival in London. Few

twenty-first-century scholars want to revisit the question of Shakespeare’s access to

continental texts and their European vernaculars.36 But the facts are these: Among

probable sources for his plays, at least nine appear in Italian, French, and Spanish

narratives for which no known English translations survive.37 The Quarto and Folio

editions of the plays display considerable use of these languages for dramatic effect,

chiefly in French and Italian, but also in Spanish, Dutch, and a vague Portuguese.38

According to the census of 1593, some 5,450 Huguenot refugees from France and the

Low countries and several hundred merchants from Italy and Spain lived and worked as

resident aliens in the City, Westminster, and Southwark, composing about 5% of the

population, and with a constant stream of visitors from abroad, they provided casual

opportunities for both amateur and professional poets to hear, learn, read, and speak

various European vernaculars and to exchange ideas about cultural production.39 Finally,

in Fall 1604 and possibly earlier and later, Shakespeare had lodged at the home of a

French Huguenot refugee and luxury artisan of ornamental headdresses, M. Christophe

Montjoy, in the alien community of Cripplegate ward near the northwest corner of the

city’s walls.40 Shakespeare’s Sonnets took shape in this “mobile and culturally pressured

35 For a list of these publications drawn from the Short Title Catalogue, see Thomas P. Roche, Jr., Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS, 1989), pp. 518-22; the complete list up to 1647 includes seven sequences after Shakespeare’s, thirty-five reprints of earlier sequences by Sidney, Daniel, Constable, Drayton, Breton, and I.C., and thirty-seven collections of non-sequential songs and sonnets (such as John Donne’s posthumously published Poems, 1633.

35

milieu,” where continental texts found an English readership among overlapping social

worlds inhabited by writers, scholars, lawyers, professional people, courtiers, and state

bureaucrats surging within the economy of London.41

I take it as likely that, in composing his sonnets, Shakespeare paused (sometimes

for long stretches), periodically revised what he had written (as did other poets of his

time, such as Daniel, Constable, and Drayton), and shifted his attitudes at different stages

in the process. A recent statistical study of the sonnets’ rare words concludes that at an

early date (before 1594) Shakespeare had composed sonnets 1-60 and that he revised

them before their publication in 1609; that at an early date he also composed sonnets 61-

103 and sonnets 127-54, but left them largely unaltered for publication; and that he

composed the remaining sonnets 104-26 around the turn of the century.42 Such a

chronology would distribute Sonnets over various phases of the poet’s career so that the

early unrevised poems evoke a period in 1592-94 when Shakespeare, in his late twenties,

had begun to stake out his careerist fortune in literary London.43 Simultaneously the

university-educated Thomas Lodge and Thomas Nashe, following the precedent of John

Lyly, George Peele, Robert Greene (d. 1592), and Christopher Marlowe (d. 1594), were

bolstering their own careerist reputations with shows of worldly wit and precocious

sophistication.44 Shakespeare’s sonnets about the Rival Poet and the Dark Lady would

derive from this period. His subsequent compositions and revisions (especially of the

Procreation and Eternizing sonnets) correspond to a period some six to eight years later

(around 1599-1601) when the poet-playwright faced the challenges of a new generation

of satiric writers led by Ben Jonson. In response to the latter’s classicizing impulses,

Shakespeare reverted in his plays to older, popular forms of festive comedy and revenge

36

tragedy and, in his poetry, to the earlier cognoscenti’s now out-of-favor sonnet form.45

The moral earnestness of sonnets 104-26 might well address Jonson’s critical

explorations of social behavior. In this scenario, Shakespeare’s motivations for reshaping

his poetry coincide at least to some degree (to a very high degree, some might say) with

his commercial prospects. 46 The economic figurations inscribed in his sonnets call

attention to the dynamics of measurement and quantification inscribed in them.

An example is sonnet 17, the last of the Procreation sonnets. The poem echoes

the topos of Petrarch’s sonnet 248, “Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura,” reworked

by Ronsard in sonnet 1 of Les Amours. The poem’s first words summon an

increduolous bystander who needs direct contact with the speaker’s object of praise in

order to concur with his estimation: “Who will believe my verse in time to come / If it

were filled with your most high deserts?” Here the object is the Young Man’s deserts, a

word that etymologically evokes his net worth in terms of service to the speaker

(desert, from ‘serve’ ‘deserve’). As a conveyor of this worth, the speaker’s poetry

appears unequal to the task. In quantitative terms, it “shows not half your parts,”

evoking not only a potentially obscene pun but also Ronsard’s metacritical discourse of

literary parts in his “Ode à Michel de L’Hospital.” In the second quatrain he directs

evidence for this claim in hypermetric lines. Exactly where he depicts his skill in

“numbering” the numbers of his meter, he adds an extra syllable to the line (“And in

fresh numbers number all your graces”) and he repeats this gesture in the rhyming verse

where a critical readership might accuse him of hyperbole: “Such heav’nly touches

ne’er touched earthly faces.” In line 12, he adds an extra syllable by accenting

“stretchèd” in order to extend the measure to ten syllables: “And stretchèd meter of an

37

antique song.” Here he is warding off the criticism of readers who might think the

Young Man’s “true rights” are nothing more than the hyperbolic result of a “poet’s

rage,” calling upon the concept of poetic furor adumbrated by Petrarch, elucidated by

Gelli, and embraced by Ronsard. At this very moment when the speaker is devaluing

his own achievement, he is in fact displaying his artistry by linking it to continental

36 Hyder Edward Rollins, for example, surveys the scholarship on foreign sources for Sonnets, but dismisses them as “accidental” “incidental,” and “based on Renaissance commonplace” in A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Sonnets, 2 vols (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1944), pp. 125-32 and passim. Sympathetic general assessments of Shakespeare’s familiarity with Italian culture appear in Murray J. Levith, Shakespeare’s Italian Settings and Plays (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), pp. 87-90; Robin Kirkpatrick, English and Italian Literature from Dante to Shakespeare (New York: Longman, 1995), pp. 277-310; Alistair Fox, The English Renaissance: Identity and Representation in Elizabethan England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 83-91 and 180-217; and Jack D’Amico, Shakespeare and Italy (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), pp. 14-20. Speculation about Shakespeare’s familiarity with French culture appear in Sidney Lee, The French Renaissance in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), pp. and Hugh M. Richmond, Puritans and Libertines: Anglo-French Literary Relations in the Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).37 These include Two Gentlemen of Verona from Montemayor’s Diana enamorada (translated by B. Yonge around 1582 but not published until 1598, rather late for Shakespeare’s use of it); Merchant of Venice from story 4.1 of Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone (1558) or possibly story 14 of Masuccio di Salerno’s Il Novellino (1476); Merry Wives of Windsor from story 1.2 of Il Pecorone; Hamlet from Belleforest’s Histories tragiques 5.3; Twelfth Night from the Sienese play Gl’Ingannati (1538, translated into French as Les Abusez by Charles Estienne in 1548; see Robert C. Melzi, “Gl’Ingannati and Its French Translation,” Kentucky Foreign Language Quarterly 12 [1965]: 180-90), used for a novella by Bandello, the latter translated into French by Belleforest; Othello from story 3.7 of Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (1566); and Cymbeline from story 2.9 of Boccaccio’s Decameron (translated into French by Antoine Le Maçon in 1545). The lost Cardenio perhaps evokes Cervantes’s Don Quixote (translated by Skelton in 1612). Measure for Measure may refer to Gabriel Chappuys’s French translation (1584) of story 8.5 from Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi.38 The chief (admittedly inconclusive) passages include the following, with all references to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974): From Taming of the Shrew: Sly’s “paucas pallabris [pocas palabras]” and “sessa [cesa]” (Induction, 1.5-6), Tranio’s “mi perdonato” (1.1.25), Lucentio’s “Basta” (1.1.198), Petruchio’s and Hortensio’s Italian greeting (1.2.24-26, 280), and Gremio’sappropriate renaming of Lucentio as Cambio (1.2.83). From 1 Henry VI: Pucelle’s “la pauvre gens de France” (3.2.13-14). From 2 Henry VI: Clifford’s “villagio” (4.8.46). From Titus Andronicus: Titus’s “bon jour” (1.1.495). From Love’s Labor’s Lost: Armado’s florid Mediterranean-style syntax (especially 1.2.1-185 and 4.1.60-87) and “fortuna de la guerra” (5.2.530); Holofernes’s Italian proverb (4.2.97-98), “bien venuto” (4.2.257), and “sans question” (5.1.86); and Berowne’s “allons!” (4.3.380) and “sans ‘sans’” (5.2.416). From Romeo and Juliet: Mercutio’s “punto reverso” and “bon jour” (2.4.26, 44), and his “alla stoccata” (3.1.73). From Richard II: York’s “pardonne moy” (5.3.119). From King John: King Lewis’s “Vive le roy” (5.2.104). From 1 Henry IV: Hotspur’s “Esperance” (5.2.96). From 2 Henry IV: Pistol’s two versions of “Si fortune me tormente/Si fortuna me tormenta” (2.4.181, 5.5.96). From Merry Wives of Windsor: Pistol’s “fico” (1.3.30), Caius’s franglais (1.4.45-87), Falstaff’s “Via!” (2.2.153), and Mistress Quickly’s “Honi soit” (5.5.76). From Much Ado About Nothing: Dogberry’s “palabras” (3.5.16). From Henry V: Pistol’s “couple a gorge” (2.1.71), Katherine’s long English lesson (3.4), the French Constable’s “dieu de battailles” (3.5.15), Pistol’s “figo” (3.6.57), the Dolphin’s “cheval volant” and “Le chien est retourné” (3.7.14-15, 165), the Dolphin’s call for his horse (4.2.2-6), Pistol’s encounter with the French soldier and the boy-interpreter (4.4), the outbreak of disorder among French troops (4.5.1-5), and Henry’s

38

estimations of poetic value and by manipulating its formal components to full mimetic

effect. Such an estimation displays his professional worth as a literary craftsman.

This poem belongs to a group of sonnets possibly revised in the first decade of the

seventeenth century, but other poems on the passage of time from an earlier and probably

unrevised group also develop the theme through figures of economic measurement and

quantification. In the context of their economic climate, they recall the pervasive

wooing of Katherine (5.2.98-342). From As You Like It: Jaques’s “stanzo” (2.5.18) and Jaques’s “sans . . . sans . . . sans” (2.7.166). From Twelfth Night: Toby’s “Castiliano vulgo” and “pourquoi” (1.3.42, 90) and Andrew’s and Viola’s French greeting (3.1.71-72). From Troilus and Cressida: Pandarus’s “capocchia” (4.2.31). From Othello: Iago’s “diablo” (2.3.161). From All’s Well That Ends Well: the Clown’s pun on “Charbon [chair bonne]” for ‘Puritan’ and “Poysam [poisson]” for Papist’ (1.3.52), Lafeu’s “Lustik!” and Parolles’s “mort du vinaigre” (2.3.41, 44), “capriccio” (2.3.293), and “coraggio” (2.5.93). From King Lear: Edgar’s “Esperance” (4.1.3). From Pericles: Thaisa’s “piu per dolcera” (2.2.27). From The Tempest: Stephano’s “coraggio” (5.1.257). From Henry VIII: Lovell’s “oui” (1.3.34).39 See Irene Scouludi, “Alien Immigration into and Alien Communities in London, 1558-1640,” Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London 16 (1937): 27-50, and Scouludi, “The Stranger Community in London,” Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London 24 (1987): 434-42. Thomas Wyatt, “Aliens in England before the Huguenots,” Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London 19 (1953): 74-94, points out that the majority of aliens were French. The statistics for these studies are derived from Returns of Aliens Dwelling in the City and Suburbs of London from the Reign of Henry VIII to That of James I, ed. R.E.G. Kirk and Ernest F. Kirk, in The Publications of the Huguenot Society of London, volume 10, numbers 2 (for the years 1571-97) and 3 (for the years 1598-1625) (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1902-07). For patterns of immigration, see Laura Hunt Yungblut, Strangers Here Amongst Us: Policies, Perceptions, and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 29-35 and 51-60. For the Huguenot’s growing economic power and increased social prestige from their work in such crafts and trades as textiles, printing, and goldsmithing and in such professions as education and the arts and sciences, see Robin D. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of the Huguenots in Britain, second edition (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001), pp. 74-117. For the dominance among them of the merchant elite and their contacts with international Calvinism, see Ole Peter Grell, Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 98-119. For contemporary complaints against “beastly” Belgians, “drunken” Flemings, and “fraudulent” Frenchmen in April-May 1593, which led to a search for libelous authorship by Thomas Kyd, who implicated Christopher Marlowe shortly before the latter’s death, see The Elizabethan Journals, ed. G.B. Harrison, 2 vols. (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1965), 1.188-96; for the riots of apprentices in June 1595, see 1. 301-04. For the leaps-and-bounds growth of London, see Roger Finlay, Population and Metropolis: The Demography of London, 1580-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 50-69. For a close study of the population of Southwark in the same period, see Jeremy Boulton, Neighborhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), with reference to resident aliens on pp. 60-73. 40 See the spirited account of this biographical discovery in Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, New Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 464-72, with analysis of Shakespeare’s match-making efforts to recruit Montjoy’s son-in-law in Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 260-64. The complete documentation appears in E.K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 2.87-95.41 I owe the term and formulation to Anne Lake Prescott, Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), vii-viii. Prescott speculates about Rabelaisian analogues in Love’s Labor’s Lost, All’s Well That Ends Well, and King Lear on pp. 58-59, 99-100, and 136-38.

39

pessimism of English writing about price inflation that began around 1540 and continued

through the reign of Elizabeth I.47 In a five-character dialogue titled A Discourse of the

Commonweal of this Realm of England, written in 1549 but not published until 1581, the

likely author Sir Thomas Smith (1513-77), one time Principal Secretary to Edward VII

and Elizabeth, inveighs against debasements of coinage, the spread of land enclosures,

and an unequal balance of international trade. Smith’s forward-looking contribution

stems from his dynamic view of the social process in which an individual’s self-interest,

equitably managed, might contribute to the general prosperity and national well-being. In

a long passage added to the manuscript before its publication, the author’s spokesperson

echoes Bodin’s rhetoric of abundance when he points to “the great store and plenty of

treasure which is walking in these parts of the world, far more in these our days than ever

our forefathers have seen.”48 Consequently Smith celebrates the opportunities that await

those who put this plenty into circulation at ever increasing rates of velocity, so that

England’s money reserves might turn over and over toward greater prosperity.

In 1601, a Huguenot immigré merchant named Gerard de Malynes (1586-1641)

argued in his Treatise of the Canker of England’s Common Wealth that most of the

blame for curbing this velocity falls upon bankers who restrict the flow of money:

“Hereupon I say it is an easie matter for these bankers with the money to rule the same

at their pleasure, from place to place, causing (as it were) ebbings and flowings.” 49 In

Malynes’s calculus, money functions as a symbolic mechanism of circulation and

exchange, analyzable only through verbal definition: “You might as well say, the matter

of exchange is but by bils, which are but paper and inke, there can be no hurt done by

them, whereas if you consider how the selling and buying of commodities is ruled

40

according to the price of exchanges contained in the bils, you shall find the matter

before spoken of” (p. 63).50 Economic value amounts to an infinite play of definition

and deferral that continually postpones the possibility of declaring any single, central,

stable reference of value. The economic figurations of Shakespeare’s sonnets dramatize

this rhetoric of calculus and abundance in complex ways.

In sonnet 64, for example, the extravagant creations of a worn-out past fall

victims to decay, metonymized by the word cost in a figure of monetary value: “When I

have seen by time’s fell hand defaced / The rich proud cost of outworn buried age.” In

line 4, the rhyming word rage insinuates the Platonic idea of poetic furor, but

immediately subverts it by evoking a debased society whose values are tainted by crass

commercialization. In the second quatrain, the encroachment of sea upon shore figures

natural decay, first in terms of a commercial transaction where one party profits at the

42 A. Kent Hieatt, Charles W. Hieatt, and Anne Lake Prescott, “When Did Shakespeare Write Sonnets 1609?” Studies in Philology 88 (1991): 69-109. See refinements to this schema by Colin Burrow, ed., William Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 103-11, and MacDonald P. Jackson, “Vocabulary and Chronology: The Case of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” RES.43 For Shakespeare’s self-conscious shaping of his career in relation to Spenser’s as a poet and Marlowe’s as a dramatist, see Patrick Cheney “’O Let My Books Be Dumb Presagers’: Poetry and Theater in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Shakespeare Quarterly (2001): 222-54. For evidence that Shakespeare wrote plays not just for the theater but also for the printed book and sought a reputation as a “literary” author, see Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 56-77.44 See the characterization of them in Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004) and in George K. Hunter, English Drama, 1586-1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 22-39; for the aspirations of Lyly in particular, see George K. Hunter, John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 89-158. For anecdotes about Shakespeare’s arrival in London and his association with the University Wits, see Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 5-26.45 See James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), especially pp. 105-33 on As You Like It and Sonnets as Shakespeare’s attempts to shape his literary reputation by answering Jonson’s challenge. For Jonson’s response as recorded in his prefaces, prologues, inductions, and critical prose, see James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 133-90.46 He would confirm this enterprise a decade-and-a-half later by purchasing shares in his theatrical company, amassing substantial real estate at Stratford, and gentrifying himself with an approved coat-of-arms. See Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life (London: Thomson Learning, 2001). For a review of such practical considerations impinging upon Shakespeare’s publication of his plays, see David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 71-92.

41

expense of the other (“When I have seen the hungry ocean gain / Advantage on the

kingdom of the shore,” in which “hungry” might project the greed of a moneylender

charging exorbitant interest on a loan, and in which the enjambment “gain / Advantage”

metrically enacts the overtaking of the debtor by the creditor); and second, in terms of a

business investment where the merchant enjoys a profit to the extent that he sells off his

inventory, and suffers a loss to the extent that he stockpiles it, ”Increasing store with

loss, and loss with store.” In this “interchange of state” at the beginning of the sestet,

the key to making a profit is continual exchange and increasing velocity, even at the

expense (where “confounded” means “spent”) of retaining a permanent grasp on one’s

material possessions.

Near the sequence’s unrevised mid-point, sonnets 71 to 74 reverse the terms of

the Procreation and Eternizing poems that lament the Young Man’s temporal

vulnerability. Here it is the speaker who, in advancing age (hyperbolized if these poems

date from 1594 when Shakespeare turned thirty), approaches decay. In sonnet 73, “That

time of year thou mayst in me behold,” the iterated “In me thou seest” and “This thou

47 For documents concerning agriculture, industry, immigration, colonization, trade, credit, taxation, usury, and poverty in relation to high prices, see R.H. Tawney and Eileen Power, eds., Tudor Economic Documents, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1924). For a survey of social and economic consequences, see D.M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth (London: Longman, 1992), especially pp. 111-86.48 Quotations refer to A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England, ed. Mary Dewar (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969), p. 145; the editor argues that its authorship, sometimes attributed to John Hayles, is traceable to Sir Thomas Smith, whose stylistic fingerprints mark every page; Smith, she argues, refrained from publishing the text under his name because of its criticism of Tudor financial policies (pp. ix-xxvi).49 Quotations refer to Gerard Malynes, A Treatise of the Canker of England’s Common Wealth (London: Richard Field, 1601), p. 28. The printer, Stratford-born Richard Field, was also the printer and publisher of Shakespeare’s debut publications, Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594). It would be good to know the extent of Malynes’s involvement with the Huguenot community to which Shakespeare’s landlord Mountjoy belonged in these years, as well as the consensus of this community about the international trade and finance in which it participated.50 In a later treatise, England’s View in the Vnmasking of Two Paradoxes (London: Richard Field, 1603), Malynes responds directly to Bodin’s rhetoric of abundance by celebrating the natural richness of England’s resources and trades as superior to those of France: “England is able to hold out with any kingdome in Europe” (p. 134).

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perceivest” carry faint traces of Petrarch’s “Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura,”

now directing the bystander’s gaze toward the poem’s speaker, as Ronsard’s version of

the latter had done. For Ronsard, the revision of Petrarch’s model had amounted to an

act of self-advertising and poetic promotion that exposes a gap between the poet’s

independence and the patron’s economic support. For Shakespeare the shift of focus to

the speaker betokens an effort to compete substantively and emotionally with

obligations imposed by friendship and patronage, and to reclaim the moral worth of

one’s spent self from the ravages of time. The argument is again saturated in economic

figuration.

Sonnet 74, for example, resumes the preceding sonnet with the conjunctive But,

measuring the value of its transaction in further economic figuration: “But be contented

when that fell arrest / Without all bail shall carry me away.” Here the word bail, a

material security given (French bailler ‘give’) to guarantee the trust of someone or

something, has the effect of endowing legal status on the speaker’s transfer of his verse to

the Young Man. Such verse is the fruit of his labor, a product of his profession, and it

provides him with the economic power to buy goods or exchange services. It amounts,

that is, to legal tender, and has served up to now to purchase for the speaker and the

Young Man a kind of immortality through poetic fame. Death no longer accepts this

security when it takes the speaker into final custody. His verse nonetheless retains its

surplus value as something more than an artful commodity. In economic terms, the poem

has earned an interest that accrues between its material components (its ornamented

language) and the estimation that it acquires in the Young Man’s understanding (its

heightened meaning): “My life hath in this line some interest.”51 Its ideational substance,

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however, is not tangible. The poet’s bodily matter is due ‘owed’ to the earth at burial, but

his spiritual endowment (“spirit,” with an aural pun on the name of Shakespeare) might

accede to the Young Man: “The earth can have but earth, which is his due; / My spirit is

thine, the better part of me.” His spirit in fact sustains a greater value than any of his

material components. The latter are “Too base of thee to be rememb’red,” registered in a

hypometric line that mimes its own deflation of value. At this point, the speaker affirms

the value of spirit in a play of pronominal antecedents that appear to bleed into one

another (three “that’s” and two “this,” where the first that refers to the body while the

second and third refer to the soul or spirit even as they seem to exchange places): “The

worth of that is that which it contains, / And that is this, and this with thee remains.” On

the threshold of introducing the Rival Poet sonnets that commence five poems later, the

speaker is affirming his own professional worth in the competitive marketplace of literary

production. The economic dialectic of Petrarch’s Rime sparse since its revisions in the

1340s invites this figuration.

Petrarch’s approach to the vernacular confounds divergent tendencies of form and

matter, inspiration and labor. The poet avows skepticism about the worth of his

vernacular poetry, bedeviled by an anxiety that his texts would generate mere surface

reflections with no genuine truth value. The mathematical proportions of the sonnet,

sestina, and canzone forms, and of the finished sequence of Rime sparse seem to elude

the rate of return promised by their interplay. As Petrarch’s sixteenth-century imitators

recognized, however, exactly when this poetry appears most gratuitously playful, most

randomly dispersive, most technically brilliant, it also penetrates to complex truths about

51 Recent commentators frame the word “interest” in a legal context. See Booth: “(1) shares, (2) legal right of possession, title” (p. 261); Vendler: “’joint being’” (p. 339); Duncan-Jones: “some right of possession or continued residence” (p. 258); Burrow: “some right of ownership or title” (p. 528).

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human consciousness, personal identity, social interaction, and economic exchange. For

Ronsard and Shakespeare, the craft invested in its composition yields an impressive rate

of return secured by the reciprocity between its formal and material values. Like Petrarch,

they too situate their poetry at an intersection of matter and form where forms come to

matter most when they most transact their material components—their oral-aural sound

patterns, their grammatical structures, their figurative arrangements, and their

tropological turns—into poetic expressions of meaning.

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