上海新东方精英英语JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS✦JULY2011
left to the attentions of literary critics,who,however,have pasd it over in a stony silence for the last veral decades.Even the few who have thoughtfully commented on early modern poetic theory have often done so with the aim of showing that their historical actors were not very Aristote-lian at all.2In other words,now that the middle twentieth century’s interest in actively redeploying Aristotle’s literary ideas is long past,the Poetics sits entombed in the intimidating and rapidly aging standard works that survey its sixteenth-century adherents and detractors,nearly always from the rela-tively limited viewpoint of doctrines such as the three unities and catharsis.3 At the same time,this older literature did already hint strongly that early modern poetic theory embodied significantly varied respons to Aristotle, that this dynamicfield constituted a narrative taken within its own terms.
But did readers of the Poetics in fact do anything worth noting in the wider story of the early modern Aristotle?In at least one ca,the answer is discernibly yes,and not merely becau tho readers recapitulated the history of the study of Aristotle on a smaller scale.When a certain group of Italian philologists took up the Poetics,they examined it in a way to which Aristotle’s other texts usually were not amenable:as a vital but difficult historical source.In other words—at specific moments,at any rate—they sought in the Poetics neither prescriptive doctrines nor scientific statements suppod to appl
y to the prent day,but specifically historical information, which,however,proved almost incredibly elusive.The most signal histori-
(1956;repr.,Rome:Edizioni di storia e letteratura,1969),17–31at23;‘‘Un codice pado-vano di Aristotele postillato da Francesco ed Ermolao Barbaro,’’in Studies,337–53at 338–39;‘‘The Aristotelian Tradition,’’in his Renaissance Thought:The Classic,Scholas-tic,and Humanist Strains(New York:Harper,1961),40;and Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance(Stanford:Stanford University Press,1964),114;E.N.Tigerstedt,‘‘Obrvations on the Reception of the Aristotelian Poetics in the Latin West,’’Studies in the Renaissance15(1968):7–24.
brigade2Luc Deitz,‘‘‘Aristoteles ’?J.C.Scaliger and Aristotle on Poetic Theory,’’International Journal of the Classical Tradition2(1995):54–67and Iulius Caesar Scaliger,Poetices libri ptem,ed.Luc Deitz and Gregor Vogt-Spira,5vols.(Stutt-gart and Bad Cannstatt:Frommann-Holzboog,1994–2003).Older discussions of anti-Aristotelian poetic theorists:B.Weinberg,‘‘Scaliger versus Aristotle on Poetics,’’Modern Philology39(1942):337–60;and G.Zonta,‘‘Rinascimento aristotelismo e barocco,’’Giornale storico della letteratura italiana54(1934):1–63,185–240.
3Bernard Weinberg,A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance,2vols. (Chicago:Univers
ity of Chicago Press,1961);and‘‘Robortello on the Poetics,1548’’(319–48)and‘‘Castelvetro’s Theory of Poetics’’(349–71)in R.S.Crane,ed.,Critics and Criticism:Ancient and Modern(Chicago:University of Chicago Press,1952);Baxter Hathaway,The Age of Criticism:The Late Renaissance in Italy(Ithaca:Cornell Univer-sity Press,1962);Joel Elias Spingarn,A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, 2nd ed.(1908;rept.,New York:Columbia University Press,1924).
Haugen✦Humanism and Literary History
cal subject raid by the Poetics concerned the birth of tragedy.What was the tragedy’s early form,at what point could one say that the drama had become the tragedy properly speaking,and above all,how was the tragedy performed in Aristotle’s own time?Aristotle himlf suggested all of the questions but offered scant guidance for answering them.As an eyewitness to performances of the tragedy,he evidently took for granted that his read-ers knew what tho performances were like—an assumption that ems to have been as maddening to sixteenth-century readers as it remains today. This difficulty,and its allure,motivated a humanist literary history that could complete or amplify Aristotle’s meaning through a arching u of alternative sources.Aristotle’s story,in other words,appeared as a kind of heroic fragment,a damaged part of a lost whole like the remnants of ancient statuary that sixteenth-century humanists so eagerly excavated and named.4First origins in
general were a favorite humanist subject,for which the many ancient and modern sources ranged from the elder Pliny’s Natural History to Polydore Vergil’s On Discovery(De inventoribus rerum).5But the early history of the drama was at once fascinating to humanists and exceedingly poorly attested:to study it was to leap directly into the‘‘ship-wreck of antiquity,’’the naufragium antiquitatis long lamented by human-ists in general.Nonetheless,a certain sort of humanist could be captivated by such questions,precily becau the evidence was so slender and the need for imaginative reconstruction so manifest.
典范英语官网bernadette petersThe protagonists of this sixteenth-century discussion included such humanist luminaries as Angelo Poliziano,Francesco Robortello,Piero Vet-tori,and Francesco Patrizi da Cherso.Much was at stake,in retrospect, becau of the claims that surrounded the emergence of the earliest operas around1600:the Greek tragedy had been sung from beginning to end, asrtedfigures such as Girolamo Mei and Vincenzo Galilei,and the new form of musical drama meant the tragedy’s direct revival.6But in fact,this identification of the opera with the Greek tragedy constituted a position in an already well-known conversation;the Florentine Camerata’s view was 4On sculptural fragments,Leonard Barkan,Unearthing the Past:Archaeology and Aes-thetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture(New Haven:Yale University Press,1999), 120–28,174–87,205–7.This reference was suggested to me by an anonymous reader for the JHI.
5Polydore Vergil,On Discovery,tr.Brian P.Copenhaver(Cambridge,Mass.:Harvard University Press,2002).例如
takecareof
6Barbara Russano Hanning,Of Poetry and Music’s Power:Humanism and the Creation of Opera(Ann Arbor:UMI Rearch Press,1980),esp.1–19;Claude Palisca,Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought(New Haven:Yale University Press,1985), 408–28.
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS✦JULY2011
no arbitrary or spontaneous guess.7The tradition from which the Camera-ta’s discussions aro was distinctive as a mode of scholarship and likewi distinctive as a mode of literary study.In thefirst place,humanist literary history of this kind dealt neither in entire extant texts nor in unbridled, theory-driven polemics.In the respects it stood apart from other kinds of early modern literary study more often discusd today.The past thirty years have taught us greatly about humanist textual criticism and about the humanist exegesis of poetry,bothfields in which novel and clearly identifi-able developments began in the latefifteenth century.8We also,of cour, have ample documentation of the ri of neoclassical literary theory out of(and sometimes against)its sources in Aristotle and Horace.9Humanist literary history,however,differed notably from the,as also from the nine-teenth-c
entury German scholarship that shared the humanists’predilection for the fragmentary and the lost.From Poliziano onward,the literary histo-rians were willing to combine Greek and Roman sources in their arch for the early drama.Even more disconcertingly to readers of Friedrich Nietz-sche’s Birth of Tragedy(1872),they hesitated to draw a sharp distinction between the comedy and the tragedy at all.Rather,they came with open minds to the question of origins and to the puzzle of how the extant tragedy had been performed.Literary history,in other words,was a well-defined and innovative enterpri that derves our attention as a part of humanist scholarship.As an encounter with Aristotle,finally,this episode shows how rious scholars approached a decidedly unusual situation:here the philos-opher,far from appearing as copious,massive,and unwieldy,was mani-festly inadequate.While Aristotle demanded to be treated as the primary source for the early drama,if for no other reason than his proximity to the
7Cf.Nino Pirrotta,‘‘Trage´die et comedie dans la Camerataflorentina,’’in Musique et poe´sie au XVIe sie`cle(Paris:E´ditions du C.N.R.S.,1954),287–97,esp.295;and‘‘Early Opera and Aria,’’in New Looks at Italian Opera:Essays in Honor of Donald J.Grout, ed.William W.Austin(Ithaca:Cornell University Press,1968),39–107,esp.80–81;and, for a more measured argument,Danilo Aguzzi-Barbagli,‘‘Francesco Patrizi e l’umanes-imo musicale del Cinquecento,’’in L’umanesimo in Istria,eds.V.Branca and S.Graciotti (Florence:Olschki,1983),63–90,esp.67–68,82–84.
8A lection of works in English:Anthony Grafton,‘‘On the Scholarship of Poliziano and Its Context,’’Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes40(1977):150–88; and Joph Scaliger:A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship,2vols.(Oxford: Clarendon Press,1983–93),9–70;Craig Kallendorf,‘‘From Virgil to Vida:The Poeta Theologus in Italian Renaissance Commentary,’’Journal of the History of Ideas56 (1995):41–62;and The Other Virgil:‘Pessimistic’Readings of the Aeneid in Early Mod-ern Culture(Oxford:Oxford University Press,2007);William J.Kennedy,Authorizing Petrarch(Ithaca:Cornell University Press,1994).
tid9See the literature in note3above.
Haugen✦Humanism and Literary History
events,he also needed to be read in imaginative,decisive ways that were nonetheless grounded in sources rather than in undirected speculation.The resulting competition,so to speak,between Aristotle and later sources was managed in different ways by different scholars.In this situation,even the best-qualified historical scholars were obliged to deal with Aristotle by boldly supplementing him;one could not calmly explicate what was not there to start with.We e in the ca of the literary historians,then,a moment of departure from Aristotle in order to fulfill his purpos,perhaps even a moment of frustration with the ordinarily verbo philosopher who had suddenly turned mute.botswana
That the humanist literary historians were distinctive could be demon-strated on the basis of two ntences alone,namely,the perplexing passage in Aristotle’s Poetics that animated the entire argument of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and which sixteenth-century scholars were apt to take rather differently.The reason is that this passage posits two things at once:in the first place,a very broad common origin for the tragedy and comedy in extemporaneous performance,but in the cond place,clearly defined pre-cursor genres that(as Nietzsche saw it)drove comedy in one direction, tragedy in another.Here is Aristotle:
So,at the beginning,tragedy was extemporaneous and so was
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comedy;tragedy came from tho who led the dithyramb;comedy
came from the singers of phallic vers,which even today are still
performed by chorus in many cities.So tragedy,bit by bit,grew
up out of its predecessors,until it reached its true magnitude.(I.4) Nietzsche,as we know,took the alleged precursor forms very riously indeed,as it was customary to do in the nineteenth century.10But sixteenth-century readers had different interpretive habits.To begin with this puzzling p
assage itlf,the humanists viewed Aristotle’s references to the phallic ver and the dithyramb as vague,not well motivated,and lacking in explanatory power.Julius Caesar Scaliger,in a treati published in1561, tried valiantly to imagine what Aristotle could really have meant by saying such a thing:Scaliger’s best guess was that the earlier ver forms had been compod in very short lines of ver(such as ieˆpaian,a dithyrambic line with only four syllables),while the mature comedy and tragedy had
10Ju¨rgen Leonhardt,Phalloslied und Dithyrambos.Aristoteles u¨ber den Ursprung des griechischen Dramas(Heidelberg:C.Winter,1991).
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS✦JULY2011
much longer lines of ver.11He thus took a jarringly literal approach to Aristotle’s words‘‘and so the tragedy grew with respect to its predecessors until it reached its prent magnitude.’’So,although a few sixteenth-cen-tury scholars did dutifully collect what little was known about the dithy-ramb and the phallic song,as attempts to show at least what Aristotle was referring to,they regarded it very much as an open question how the genres could possibly be relevant.
In that ca,what did humanist readers e in Aristotle’s cryptic lines about the birth of tragedy?The l
中英翻译在线iterary historians focud,quite univer-sally,on the opening part of the passage,where we are told that‘‘at the beginning,tragedy was extemporaneous(autoschediastikeˆ),and so was comedy.’’They saw two implications here.First,that tragedy and comedy were esntially similar;there was no radical difference in their origin and no radical difference in their natures.Secondly,that the real birth of tragedy and comedy should be looked for,so they usually inferred,in the dozens of extemporaneous(or at least unwritten)communal songs that were known to have been sung especially in civic and religious festivals.Scholars with a completist bent,like Julius Caesar Scaliger and Francesco Patrizi,luxuri-ated in the long lists they compiled of abstru and poorly known song forms like the rhapsody,the threnos,and the hyporchema.
In answer to the question about the origins of tragedy and comedy, then,the scholars pointed not to a definite genealogy but to a kind of poetic primordial soup of extemporaneous performance(often glosd as song),which had given ri simply to‘‘the drama,’’in Latin fabula.Mean-while,that assumption about song in early poetry raid the very large sub-ject of music:did tragedy and comedy incorporate song,in the chorus or perhaps throughout?Both of the orientations were arguably influenced by Italian drama of the sixteenth century.That drama often failed to corre-spond well with either comedy or tragedy—we might think of Poliziano’s Orfeo,of the plays of Giovanni Batti
sta Giraldi,or indeed of thefirst thor-ough-compod opera,Rinuccini’s Dafne.And sixteenth-century entertain-ments often included music,especially in the form of intermedi,which featured allegorical characters,dancing,and dumbshows.So Julius Caesar Scaliger went on to suggest,as an explanation for why Aristotle derived comedy from the phallic song,‘‘I think the phallic song was like a mime (mimus),and the mime most likely rembled comedy becau they proba-bly acted parts.’’12The scholar speaking here is surely Scaliger the spectator of courtly entertainments.
11Julius Caesar Scaliger,Poetics(1561),357.
12Scaliger,Poetics,18.
