The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  Renaissance poets also inherited and developed a series of linkages between Orpheus and other figures: he was seen as a prefigurement of Christ, he was associated with Pan, he was represented as a medieval knight. Particularly germane to my purposes here is the parallel sometimes made with David. The connection, indeed conflation, of the two becomes recurrent in the Renaissance; Anthony Cope’s 1547 treatise refers to the psalmist as “our celestial Orpheus.”6 This phrase gestures towards one of the principal arguments of this study, the centrality of psalms in the development of even secular lyric. Like so many other responses to lyric, this connection with David also works to check anxieties associated with that mode: if poetry is tainted with seductiveness, triviality, and many other dangers, if some of those threats are prominent in versions of the Orpheus legend itself, the pairing of that figure with David can sanctify the mode (although, as I argue in Chapter 2, David’s own reputation is ambiguous, which further complicates the connection of the two narratives). The relationship between Good Lyric and Evil Lyric, like so much else about the mode, is at times dynamic; it generally involves sedulously posited distinctions but may instead include conflations or a move from one to the other. Especially relevant to Renaissance commentaries on lyric is one reason for the pairing, even twinning, of Orpheus and David: their ability as healers links these figures, with David curing Saul and Orpheus, granted magical powers in some forms of the legend, curing snakebite. The makers of this version of the Orpheus myth had read their Derrida, for lyric is established as a pharmakon: contributing to the rabid disease of love sickness and other forms of melancholy, it also can physic illness, thereby testifying that it is not a trivial toy but a potent weapon with significant material effects. David’s status as a monarch is also germane, for Orpheus is sometimes associated with judicious government, thus again connecting Pindar’s mode to the public sphere.

  The potentialities of the legend are realized in telling ways in certain texts of especial interest to early modern writers. To begin with, Quintilian’s commentary in I.x.9–12 of Institutio Oratoria provides a textbook example of some recurrent patterns in versions of the story. Comparing Orpheus and the writer Linus, Quintilian observes that they united the roles of musician, poet, and philosopher; he proceeds to insist that, related as it is to the study of wisdom, music is necessary for an orator. Thus Orpheus provides yet another model for the connections among poetry, song, and eloquence that is so central to early modern representations of lyric. In particular, Quintilian’s account, again like many other statements about Orpheus, links suasive force and artistic pleasure, reminding us of the long history of connections between rhetorical ploys and aesthetic pleasure, the cornerstone of many materialist pronouncements on art.

  Widely read in both the original Latin and Golding’s famous translation, Ovid’s Metamorphoses offers what was probably the most influential version of the Orpheus legend in the Renaissance, in so doing emphasizing two nexuses of intertwined issues particularly germane to early modern lyric. First, it restructures the relationship between success and failure that centrally but variously recurs in the period.7 In the narrative in question, poetry is the site neither of unqualified power nor of impotence but rather of a dynamic in which extraordinary, indeed magical, power repeatedly confronts a threatened or realized blockage or truncation of itself, recalling Northrop Frye’s connection between lyric and blocking.8 In gendered terms, that mode is eventually emasculated or, in a related but different pattern, destroyed by the feminine. Success and failure are twinned and twined, as inextricably embracing each other as destruction and creation do in the legend of the god Shiva. And second, process is central in another sense as well: poetic achievement is one stage in a continuing saga of rivalry that involves battles between different writers, different instruments, and their differing views of art. Through forms of blockage the battles between rivals are staged.

  Both elements emerge in the story of the wedding. Hymen is successfully summoned by Orpheus, but his presence does not ensure good fortune: the poet’s achievement is limited, blocked, thus anticipating the movement from initial success to heartrending failure when he attempts to call Eurydice back from the dead—from the world tellingly evoked by the Australian poet Judith Wright as “clay corridors / below the reach of song” (“Eurydice in Hades,” 6–7).9 If Eurydice’s death is replicated (“gemina nece” [“double death”], X.64), so too is the poet’s failure: during his subsequent gig in the underworld, the man who moves stones succeeds in moving the spirits to tears and making Ixion’s wheel stop, but he fails to follow the directive about not looking at his wife, and so he embraces only air. This slippage between success and failure is, of course, also the signature of the Petrarchan lover, connected with Orpheus in more ways than one.

  Ovid’s rendition of Orpheus’s death also emphasizes both that slippage and its imbrication in three interrelated characteristics repeatedly associated with lyric, blocking, turning, and transgression; all three impel the often contradictory valuations of the mode and the guilt associated with it. Ovid’s lines emphasize the blockage of heterosexual desire—

  omnemque refugerat Orpheus

  femineam Venerem

  . . . . . . . .

  ille etiam Thracum populis fuit auctor amorem

  in teneros transferre mares citraque iuventam

  aetatis breve ver et primos carpere flores.

  (“and Orpheus had shunned all love of womankind

  … He set the example for the peoples of Thrace

  of giving his love to tender boys, and enjoying the

  springtime and first flower of their youth”)

  (X.79–80, 83–85)

  From one perspective, the death of Eurydice blocks other heterosexual relationships; from another, explored by Mario DiGangi and a few other critics, the homoerotic blocks marital heterosexuality.10 Tracing the effects of Orpheus’s defense of homoerotic desires on the polymorphous sexuality of Elizabethan poetry, Jonathan Bate aptly observes that “Orpheus is the patron saint of homosexuality, or, more specifically, of pederasty.”11 To put it differently, the exemplar of verse performs a turning in sexualities, his loss of Eurydice generating an interest in homoerotic relationships instead. Thus lyric is yet again associated with turning and transforming. This turn is presented as transgressive in Golding’s version, which tellingly supplements the pastoral imagery that implicitly justifies Orpheus’s choice with a reference to that antipastoral site of corruption and disease the brothels: “He also taught the Thracian folke a stewes of Males too make / And of the flowring pryme of boayes the pleasure for to take” (X.90–91). In yet another version of the contagiousness of lyric, that icon of the mode inspires homoerotic love in others.

  As with so many other issues concerning sexualities, the responses of commentators and writers of the early modern period to Orpheus’s homoeroticism have been varied and inconsistent. George Sandys’s version of Ovid, unlike Golding’s, flirts with blocking Orpheus’s blockage of heterosexuality through an expurgated translation and a marginal note: “Not rendering the Latin fully; of purpose omitted.”12 Might not fears about the poetic expression of heterosexual love, overtly present in the work of Sidney and so many of his compatriots, conceal comparable fears of the relationship of the mode to the love that dare not speak its name?

  The contrasting sexualities central to legends about Orpheus’s death also involve textbook examples of the putative contrasts between Good Lyric and Evil Lyric, a distinction related in these stories to two other elements germane to lyric in the early modern period: blocked agency and rival music. As we have seen, according to some versions of his murder, including the one in Ovid, Orpheus pays for his shunning of women with his life. Whatever its cause, the attack on him is not successful at first precisely because Orpheus himself is: respecting him as they do, the stones refuse to hit him. And after that the assault would have been harmless (“cunctaque tela forent cantu mollita” [“And all their weapons would have b
een harmless under the spell of song]” [X.15])—except that his lyre, whose magical song protected him, is drowned by sounds from flutes, horns, drums, and the howlings of the maddened maenads. In other words, the women who resent their rival, Eurydice, are associated with rival instruments—not the stringed lute but wind instruments, a contrast that recurs in various forms throughout the history of lyric. By listing the breastbeating and howlings of the women with the rival instruments, Ovid denigrates the music from them: they seem less musical performances than outpourings of emotion.

  Orpheus speaks, Ovid tells his readers, but for the first time in his life his words are not heeded; again, his power, associated with eloquence here as in Quintilian’s text, is tragically impeded. The potency of lyric initially blocks the stones, then is itself blocked. Thus the mode that pivots on loss has as its originary legend the narrative in which its own powers are lost. Here, as in many other texts, lyric is repeatedly associated not only with many types of turning but also with motion that is stirred, though often only to be blocked. From this perspective, it is also telling that the exponent of a mode often seen as in motion itself and exciting motion in others moves through the water even after death.

  Although Orpheus and David, who is discussed in Chapter 2, were probably the most significant exemplars of lyric in the early modern period, some other myths deserve more attention than they have received from recent students of the Renaissance, contributing as they did to perceptions of that mode. Husband of the ill-fated Niobe, Amphion shares Orpheus’s ability to appeal even to inaninimate objects: according to one legend about the founding of Thebes, the stones used in its construction move of their own accord in response to his music. Thus, as Scott Newstok points out in his study of epitaphs, because of its association with the suasive power of rhetoric, the legend of Amphion gestures as well towards how the epitaphic speech on tombstones moves.13 This connection anticipates the floral tropes that represent lyric in terms of both evanescent flowers and inscriptions in stone.

  Arion was apparently a historical figure, credited with creating the dithyramb, a choric hymn.14 Transformed into a mythic being, this character again draws attention to the potency so often associated with lyric. Though the narratives about him, like the stories of Orpheus, take significantly different forms, in the version in Herodotus, sailors carrying him home attempt to kill him for his money. They accede, however, to his suggestion that he sing one final song, in his full ceremonial costume. Then he plunges into the sea. His swan song turns out to be a dolphin song, however, for one of those creatures carries him safely to shore, where he is eventually revenged on his would-be assassins. Like the story of Orpheus, then, this tale emphasizes the power of lyric by suggesting that it can woo even the inhabitants of the deep. But, unlike the story of Orpheus, Arion’s curriculum vitae is an unqualified success story; it provides a palinode to the darker implications about the Muse’s “enchanting son” (Milton, “Lycidas,” 59), demonstrating an instance where lyric rescues the singer rather than being blocked in its palliative effects or even contributing to his ruin.

  The Prologue of Gower’s Confessio Amantis culminates in a tribute to Arion, associating him with many powers more commonly attributed to Orpheus, notably the ability to tame beasts and bring accord to human beings as well. Nor were the stories of Amphion and Arion neglected by early modern poets, and the appearance of Arion in the Kenilworth entertainments probably intensified interest in him.15 Amphion is mentioned in Thomas Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque, while references to Arion may be found in the published works of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Thomas Watson and in the manuscripts of Robert Sidney and John Ramsey.16 (That latter-day Spenserian Byron alludes to Arion as well, and he and his dolphin are represented on a ceiling of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.) Yet the fact remains that Orpheus indubitably appears in far more early modern texts than either of these siblings.

  Analogue to or even twin of Orpheus, Pan is another singer who was associated with lyric in the early modern period, and his story is similarly varied in its implications. Within Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender alone the reader encounters, for example, the “rude Pan” of the shepherds (January eclogue, 67), the “great Pan” (May eclogue, 54) who is closer to the Christian god than a pastoral deity, and the architect of theological and marital Pandemonium who fathers the Eliza of the April eclogue. Most relevant to my arguments, however, is Pan’s relationship to the bifurcation of lyric that I have been tracing. Repeatedly associated with wind instruments, his legend contributes their connection with the erotically and musically unruly, with the destructiveness of the maenads rather than the curative powers of their victim’s magical lyre. In an intriguing woodcut by the seventeenth-century Italian Jiulio Bonasone, the sirens are socializing with Circe; in Milton’s “At a Solemn Music,” they are “Sphere-born harmonious Sisters” (2), who, rather than leading men to their destruction, inspire them to imitate heavenly harmony. Yet another myth, in short, expresses and encourages divided responses to song in ways very germane to lyric. Renaissance poets variously explore each side of the narrative; Herrick’s “To Musick. A Song,” for example emphasizes the connection between the sirens and the spheres. And in Milton’s Comus, I will demonstrate in my conclusion, the opposing readings of this choir uneasily coexist. In any event, in all these variants on the myth, it involves a choral union, not a soloist: once again, music is seen as communal and public, not individual.

  The more negative versions of the myth of the sirens, emphasized in an emblem in Geoffrey Whitney’s 1586 collection, Choice of Emblems, and in numerous literary texts, are germane to lyric from several perspectives.17 First, their song is associated with temptation; its evil is manifest in how it can draw out the potential for evil in the listener, much as Milton represents Comus’s ability to build on his audience’s propensity for being deceived. That temptation is gendered, as are so many other aspects of lyric.18 Permitting poets to deflect their own guilt about writing lyric, women tempt men in this myth; they become the singers, allowing that would-be singer the poet to identify through gender with the victims. More specifically, the sirens tempt their listeners into effeminization in the sense that they abandon their roles as warriors for a passive self-indulgence; so, anticipating the connections that I will explore shortly between the lyric mode and the air that transmits plague, this myth in effect enacts a kind of contagion. From another perspective, the linearity of the epic journey is blocked. To put it yet another way, as Stephen Owen points out, the sirens represent a variant of the myth of a stonelike woman who causes men to melt.19 The ability in effect to turn men into women clearly speaks to the instrumental power encountered throughout this chapter in the ideologies, mythologies, and etymologies of lyric and its kin and invites one to think further about its relationship to gender, an issue that arises in some of the commentaries to which I will turn in the final two sections of this chapter.

  More to my purposes now, however, even this brief review of myths directly or indirectly associated with lyric explicates the prominence of Orpheus. Whereas his popularity is overdetermined, two reasons for it relate to the central arguments of this chapter. First, this legend explores gender and masculinity, especially the connections of masculinity with power and impotence and with what we today call sexual preferences, in ways that interested readers in early modern England, as the sonnet tradition and so many plays repeatedly remind us. In so doing, the legend of Orpheus connects writing lyric to assuming multiple and shifting gender positions. And second, that myth both substantiates and explicates the very paradoxes that are, as this chapter is arguing, central to many other representations of lyric in early modern England, notably the slippages between agency and its tragic absence, as well as between success and failure. In this the story of Orpheus resembles the tales of Pan, the sirens, and David the psalmist and thus may help us to understand the popularity of such figures as well, and in this it differs significantly from the narratives associated with those rival p
oets Arion and Amphion. Whereas narratives about Arion and Amphion generally stress their agency and achievements, the story of Orpheus includes both the celebration of lyric and the doubts about its ethical stance and its efficacy so characteristic of early modern culture.

  The paradoxes manifest in the myths associated with lyric recur in its tropes as well; in particular, the valences of turning involve virtuous action and virtuosity on the one hand, deceit and defeat on the other. Lyric once more emerges as both disease and cure and as both substantial and evanescent. A study of those tropes also reveals recurrent responses to those threats, notably the guilt, whether potential or realized, of its writers and readers, as well as the genderings of the text itself that are often either source of or antidote to that guilt. But the diversity of early modern lyric encourages a more capacious study of its tropes, not merely a winnowing designed to focus on a few issues already established in this chapter. Some of the patterns that emerge substantiate longstanding assumptions about lyric, while others are likely to surprise—even startle—students of early modern literature. In particular, this broader analysis reveals a range of additional paradoxes that will reappear in subsequent chapters, such as the association of lyric with divergent social statuses and with both a small unit and a collection.