Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare

Jason Powell, William T. Rossiter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317177036
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A detailed examination of the relationship between the discourses and practices of authority and diplomacy in the late medieval and early modern periods, Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare interrogates the persistent duality of the roles of author and ambassador. The volume approaches its subject from a literary-historical perspective, drawing upon late medieval and early modern ideas and discourses of diplomacy and authority, and examining how they are manifested within different forms of writing: drama, poetry, diplomatic correspondence, peace treaties, and household accounts. Contributors focus on major literary figures from different cultures, including Dante, Petrarch, and Tasso from Italy; and from England, Chaucer, Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. In addition, the book moves between and across literary-historical periods, tracing the development of concepts and discourses of authority and diplomacy from the late medieval to the early modern period. Taken together, these essays forge a broader argument for the centrality of diplomacy and diplomatic concepts in the literature and culture of late medieval and early modern England, and for the importance of diplomacy in current studies of English literature before 1603.

1 The Art of Saying Exile

Elisa Brilli¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781315568430-1

1 This chapter is a translation of an abbreviated and revised version of the article ‘L’arte del dire l’esilio’, which appeared in Bollettino di Italianistica, n.s., 8/2 (2011): 17–41. We are grateful for permission to republish it. I quote the works of Dante according to the following editions and English translations: Rime, ed. D. De Robertis (Florence, 2005) and trans. by K. Foster and P. Boyde (Oxford, 1967); De vulgari eloquentia, ed. M. Tavoni (Milan, 2011) and trans. by S. Botterill (Cambridge, 1996); Convivio, ed. F. Brambilla Ageno (Rome, 1995) and trans. by R. Lansing (New York, 1990); Monarchia, ed. and trans. P. Shaw (Cambridge, UK, 1995); Epistolae, ed. E. Pistelli (Florence, 1960) and trans. by P. Toynbee (Oxford, 1920). The Inferno and Purgatorio are quoted from the edition by G. Inglese (Rome, 2007 and 2011), the Paradiso from the edition by G. Petrocchi (Milan, 1966–1967); the translation is by R. and J. Hollander (New York, 2000–2007).

The importance of Dante’s exile is self-evident. Dante’s commentators have provided innumerable examinations of the passages in which Dante discusses his banishment and his changing perspective upon it.² Thanks to this critical tradition, the present chapter can refrain from retracing all of these passages and instead try to develop, within the limits of the available space, an argument centred around a few of the critical issues that Dante’s exile continues to raise. However, concentrating on these issues does not mean that we can offer convenient answers. If the following discussion enables the reader to perceive that what appears to be self-evident is in fact a historical-critical problem that is still partly open, it will have achieved its objective.

2 See J. Goudet, ‘La parte per se stesso e l’impegno politico di Dante’, in Nuove letture dantesche, 7 (1974): 289–316; P. Brezzi, Letture dantesche di argomento storicopolitico (Naples, 1983), pp. 79–102; G. Mazzotta, ‘Dante and the Virtues of Exile’, Poetics Today, 5/3 (1984): 645–67; G. Holmes, Florence, Rome and the Origin of the Renaissance (Oxford, 1986), pp. 233–63; V. Russo, ‘Dante exul immeritus: variazioni compositive sul/dal tema’, in G. Ulysse (ed.), L’exil et l’exclusion dans la culture italienne (Aix-en-Provence, 1991), pp. 13–24; A.M. Chiavacci Leonardi, ‘Il tema biblico dell’esilio nella Divina Commedia’, in F. Stella (ed.), La scrittura infinita: Bibbia e poesia in età medievale e umanistica (Florence, 2001), pp. 177–85; M. Miglio, ‘Snodi della biografia dantesca’, in “Per correr miglior acque …”: Bilanci e prospettive degli studi danteschi alle soglie del nuovo millennio. Atti del convegno di Verona-Ravenna 25–29 ottobre 1999 (Rome, 2001), vol. 1, pp. 41–5; C. Ossola, ‘Esilio e “peregrinatio” nel Purgatorio’, in Dante poeta cristiano (Florence, 2001), pp. 85–97; E. Pasquini, Dante e le figure del vero: La fabbrica della Commedia (Milan, 2001), pp. 122–48; G. De Marco, ‘L’esperienza di Dante “exul immeritus” quale autobiografia universale’, in Annali d’Italianistica, 20 (2002): 21–54 and G.P. Raffa, ‘Dante’s Poetics of Exile’, in ibid., pp. 73–87; U. Carpi, La nobiltà di Dante, 2 vols (Florence, 2004); C. Guimbard, Une lecture de Dante (Paris, 2004), pp. 15–35; M. Picone, ‘Esilio e “peregrinatio”: dalla Vita Nova alla canzone montanina’, in J. Varela-Portas de Orduña (ed.), Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute (Madrid, 2007), pp. 27–50; A. Tartaro, ‘Momenti autobiografici e definizioni della Commedia’, in Esperienze Letterarie, 32/2 (2007): 3–19; M. Picone, ‘Dante e la poesia dell’esilio’, in P. Grossi (ed.), Le Rime di Dante: Atti della giornata di studi (16 novembre 2007) (Paris, 2008), pp. 53–73, whilst less useful is G. Albini, ‘Politica ed esilio nell’età di Dante’, in B. Peroni (ed.), Leggere e rileggere la Commedia dantesca (Milan, 2009), pp. 175–95.

As a starting point, we will consider whether, from a historical point of view, Dante’s banishment bears any characteristics which make it unusual as a form of political punishment, and the consequences of this for Dante’s diplomatic position within the communal context of the late Duecento/early Trecento. Dante uses multiple diplomatic strategies in his attempts at reintegration into Florence – for example, as the spokesman of the group of Florentines exiled in 1302–1304 (see Ep. I), then as a supporter of the emperor Henry VII in 1310–1313 (see Ep. V–VII). Because of the failure of these strategies, his engagement gradually shifts from the diplomatic dimension to the literary one. Yet one should not consider the diplomatic and the literary as being opposed in Dante’s thought. On the contrary, certain of Dante’s significant literary innovations bear the mark of his diplomatic experience as a banished Florentine. This chapter will then consider Dante’s elaboration upon, and ultimately his refutation of previous literary models as well as the so-called prophetism of the Commedia in order to show how the diplomatic impasse suffered by Dante led him to re-negotiate and redefine a new horizon of the sayable in the vernacular literary tradition.

History and Discourse

An initial problem concerns the interaction between history and discourse, in this case literary discourse. For a long time commentators wanted to view Dante’s exile as a pre-condition of his literary production. In the last few years we have instead begun to question this assumption, and to insist, instead, that the singularity of Dante’s exile is not evident in the historical data itself but rather in the resulting discourse and in the re-reading of that history proposed by Dante. In short: can Dante’s banishment be considered as an event characterized by some specificity or uniqueness?

When one disregards Dante’s statements about his going wandering and begging, then the historian’s hands retain nothing but a biographical iter and a political practice current in the decades between the thirteenth and fourteenth century in northern central Italy. Back in the 1990s, Corrado Calenda drew our attention to Dante’s extraordinary reworking of a condition which was, in truth, not out of the ordinary.³ New stimuli in this regard come today from the history of political and legal institutions and of the historical sociology of intellectual groups. While Fabrizio Ricciardelli invites us to see in the condition of the exile a structural component of Florentine civic identity between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,⁴ Emanuele Coccia and Sylvain Piron appeal to the dantisti – with deliberate provocation – to free themselves from the monolithic solipsism of Dante’s exile in order to concentrate on the generation of intellectuals to which Dante belonged, and which appears to be characterized by a similar mobility.⁵ In a different way, Giuliano Milani has recently addressed the issue of the historical specificity of Dante’s exile, arguing for the innovative elements of the 1301–1302 convictions as compared to the usual modes of political exclusion in the previous conflict between the Guelphs and Ghibellines. In Milani’s opinion, these new elements required innovative diplomatic strategies of response; thus Dante as an individual tried to respond in a progressively different manner.⁶

3 C. Calenda, ‘L’esilio e l’esclusione tra biografismo e mentalità collettiva: Guittone d’Arezzo, Brunetto Latini e Guido Cavalcanti’, in G. Ulysse (ed.), L’exil et l’exclusion dans la culture italienne, pp. 41–8. 4 See F. Ricciardelli, ‘Exile as evidence of civic identity in Florence in the time of Dante: some examples’, in Reti Medievali Rivista, 5/1 (2004): 1–15 and his The Politics of Exclusion in Early Renaissance Florence (Turnhout, 2007). On the Florentine context see also C. Guimbard, ‘Exil et institutions du Commune à Florence dans la seconde moitié du XIII^e siècle’, in J. Heers and C. Bec (eds), Exil et civilisation en Italie (XIII^e-XIV^e siècles) (Nancy, 1990), pp. 21–32, and especially A. Zorzi, La trasformazione di un quadro politico: ricerche su politica e giustizia a Firenze dal comune allo stato territoriale (Florence, 1995). In relation to Bologna see G. Milani, L’esclusione dal Comune: Conflitti e bandi politici a Bologna e in altre città italiane tra XII e XIV secolo (Rome, 2003). For the juridical aspect, in addition to C. Ghisalberti’s classic, ‘La condanna al bando nel diritto comune’, in Archivio giuridico “Filippo Serafini”, s. VI, 27 (1960): 3–75, see now E. Maffei, Dal reato alla sentenza: Il processo criminale in età comunale (Rome, 2005). On exile in its communal context see R. Starn, Contrary Commonwealth: The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Berkeley, CA, 1982), and on the fifteenth century C. Shaw, The Politics of Exile in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 2000). For a more general overview see the first three chapters of H. Zaremska, Le bannis au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1996). The historiographic investigation of the figure of the exile is structurally linked to the more general enquiry into mobility in the medieval West, on which see Des sociétés en mouvement: Migrations et mobilité au Moyen Âge. XL^e Congrès de la SHMESP (Nice, 4–7 juin 2009) (Paris, 2010). 5 E. Coccia and S. Piron, ‘Poésie, Sciences et politique. Une génération d’intellectuels italiens (1290–1330)’ in Revue de Synthèse, 129/4 (2008): 549–86. This approach can be integrated through reference to certain classic socio-literary studies, such as R. Antonelli and S. Bianchini, ‘Dal Clericus al poeta’, in A. Asor Rosa (ed.), Letteratura Italiana II: Produzione e consumoconsumo (Turin, 1983), pp. 171–227. 6 For the most recent study see G. Milani, ‘Appunti per una riconsiderazione del bando di Dante’, Bollettino di Italianistica, n.s., 8/2 (2011): 42–70.

The historical investigation into the context of Florentine exile cannot but prove valuable, especially in relation to a critical tradition that, insofar as it constitutes the portrait of the exiled Dante, is conditioned both by Dante’s mythography and by that developed by the critics of the Risorgimento. However, it seems to me that a precise historical comprehension of Dante’s case requires that we expand the sample under examination and, at the same time, multiply the variables considered. Among these, Dante’s family ties and more general links to the consortium, on the one hand, and his professional expertise on the other, probably had a decisive influence on the definition of his individual itinerary, the precise extent of which remains to be determined by historical investigation. Thus, if exile is not an unusual measure in itself, perhaps in Dante’s case it became so because this condition was combined with a family with limited economic resources and visibility intra and extra moenia, and with a profession that ill-accorded with the job market of the early fourteenth century, and which enabled him at best to act as a diplomatic intermediary in the pay of local potentates (one thinks of the service he provided for the Malaspina as diplomat to the Bishop of Luni). In short, Dante’s social and economic eccentricity, which made the brilliant 30-year-old stand out in the Cavalcanti circle, his opaque cursus of study (certainly not concluded), and his only formal enrolment at the Arte dei medici e degli speziali, perhaps made the banishment experienced by Dante significantly different from that of others who might have been able to rely on family networks and much more solid professional links. All of this, of course, is posed hypothetically and is subject to historical verification. A significant addition to our knowledge, and a means of better understanding the supposedly unique nature of Dante’s exile, would thus come from a comparative analysis of it in relation to the itinera of the Tuscans banished between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, taking into account the aforementioned variables as well as others that are deemed to be relevant.⁷

7 For an early attempt in this regard, motivated by a local historical impetus, see C. de Franceschi, ‘Esuli fiorentini della compagnia di Dante: Mercanti e prestatori a Trieste e in Istria’, in Archivio Veneto, 24 (1939): 83–178. More recently, see E. Cristiani’s brief, ‘I fuoriusciti toscani di parte “bianca” tra il XIII e il XIV’, in J. Heers and C. Bec (eds), Exil et civilisation en Italie, pp. 61–6. Comparison with certain case studies is valuable, for example with the Avignonese phase, such as that by B. Bombi, Il registro di Andrea Sapiti, procuratore fiorentino presso la curia papale nei primi decenni del XIV secolo (Rome, 2007).

The Horizon of the Sayable and the Insufficiency of Eros

Whether the historical singularity of Dante’s exile was actual or only perceived, the fact remains that it became unusual because of the role it played in his literary production. I am not referring so much here to the importance and the productivity of the condition of being banished for the purpose of Dante’s intellectual iter, which is frequently and rightly invoked, but rather to the importance and the performativity of this condition in Dantean discourse or, more precisely, in Dantean discourses. The somewhat ordinary historical fact of political exile corresponds to a textual output which is without parallel in medieval Europe, and which is at the origin of the definition of an authorial persona destined for a significant literary afterlife. From this point of view, the question of Dante’s exile present...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction—Jason Powell and William T. Rossiter
• 1 The Art of Saying Exile—Elisa Brilli
• 2 Petrarch and the Venetian-Genoese War of 1350–1355—Alexander Lee
• 3 William de la Pole’s Poetic ‘Parlement’: The Political Lyrics of Bodleian MS Fairfax 16—Mariana Neilly
• 4 ‘I beseik thy Maiestie serene’: Difficulties of Diplomacy in Sir David Lyndsay’s Dreme—Kate Ash
• 5 ‘Not Cardinal but King’: Thomas Wolsey and the Henrician Diplomatic Imagination—Bradley J. Irish
• 6 In Spayne: Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Poetics of Embassy—William T. Rossiter
• 7 Licence and Lutheranism: Diplomatic Gossip, Religious Identity, and the Earl of Surrey—Mike Rodman Jones
• 8 Tasso at the French Embassy: Epic, Diplomacy, and the Law of Nations—Diego Pirillo
• 9 The 1559 Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis: Print, Marriages of State, and the Expansion of Diplomatic Literacy—John Watkins
• 10 Astrophil the Orator: Diplomacy and Diplomats in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella—Jason Powell
• 11 Public Diplomacy and the Comedy of State: Chapman’s Monsieur D’Olive—Mark Netzloff
• 12 Shakespeare’s Kingmaking Ambassadors—Joanna Craigwood
• Bibliography
• Index