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Abstract
Francisco de Aldana has been called a ‘forgotten poet’ of Spain's Golden Age perhaps owing to poems, such as ‘Medoro y Angélica’, which continue to challenge attempts at definition and categorization. These difficulties could be attributed to the tension between the poem's inherent sensuality juxtaposed against the legacies of Petrarch and Neoplatonism that are also clearly present. This article examines Aldana's focus on Angélica: his reshaping of common descriptive tropes to produce a hybrid text that seemingly acts as a means to pass off material perhaps considered too risqué by the reader, while it introduces the idea of a successful and loving physical relationship between the lovers. This is made possible by the use of techniques that engender distance between the reader and any perceived erotic content, such as linguistic play and theatricality. The result is the presentation of a hybridized uncanonical vision of love by Aldana that sits in opposition to the ideals of contemporary love lyric.
Notes
1 For more on the posthumous print history of Aldana's poetry, see José Lara Garrido, ‘Las ediciones de Francisco de Aldana: hipótesis sobre un problema bibliográfico’, Revista de Estudios Extremeños, 42:3 (1986), 541–83.
2 On the disputed fragmentary nature of the poem, see D. Gareth Walters, ‘On the Text, Source and Significance of Aldana's “Medoro y Angélica” ’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 20 (1984), 17–29 (pp. 17–18).
3 José Manuel Blecua, Cancionero de 1628: edición y estudio del cancionero 250-2 de la biblioteca universitaria de Zaragoza (Madrid: CSIC, 1945), 326–29.
4 D. Gareth Walters, The Poetry of Francisco de Aldana (London: Tamesis, 1988), 54.
5 Walters, ‘On the Text’, 17.
6 In this article Aldana's female protagonist will be referred to as Angélica to avoid confusion with Ariosto's version of Angelica.
7 Dolores González Martínez, La poesía de Francisco de Aldana (1537–1578): introducción al estudio de la imagen (Lleida: Edicions de la Univ. de Lleida, 1995), 172.
8 Walters, The Poetry of Francisco de Aldana, 54.
9 Joseph G. Fucilla, Estudios sobre el petrarquismo en España (Madrid: Ograma, 1960), 97.
10 William Melczer, ‘Neoplatonism and Petrarchism: Familiar or Estranged Bedfellows in the High Renaissance’, Neohelicon, 3:1–2 (1975), 9–27 (p. 13).
11 See Plato, The Symposium, trans., with an intro. and notes, by Christopher Gill (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 10, 178c.
12 Elizabeth Cropper, ‘On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular Style’, The Art Bulletin, 58:3 (1976), 374–94 (p. 390).
13 F. Guiseppe Mazzota, ‘The “Canzoniere” and the Language of the Self’, Studies in Philology, 75 (1978), 271–96 (p. 272). For the criticism upon which Mazzota makes this observation, see Robert M. Durling, ‘Petrarch's “Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro” ’, Modern Languages Notes, 86 (1981), 1–20; and John Freccero, ‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics’, Diacritics, 5 (1975), 34–40.
14 I believe it is this return to Petrarch that Fox observes in her article on Aldana. See Diana Fox, ‘ “Frente a frente”: Francisco de Aldana and Sublimations of Desire’, Calíope, 11:1 (2005), 65–86: ‘Aldana did not write much of the kind of poetry that we would call Petrarchan love lyric; although thanks to his formation in the Florentine court, he certainly had the opportunity to assimilate Petrarch's influence’ (69).
15 On the differences between the canone breve and canone lungo traditions, see Patrizia Bettella, The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2005), 84 and 134.
16 Line references appear as in Francisco de Aldana, Poesías castellanas completas, ed., intro. and notes by José Lara Garrido (Madrid: Cátedra, 2000 [1st ed. 1985]), 493–97.
17 On the presence of erotic content in the sonnet form, see Paul N. Siegel, ‘The Petrarchan Sonneteers and Neoplatonic Love’, Studies in Philology, 42 (1949), 164–82 (p. 173). With regard to the field of eroticism in the burlesque more generally, see Adrienne Laskier Martín, An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., 2008); and José Ignacio Díez Fernández, La poesía erótica de los Siglos de Oro (Madrid: Laberinto, 2003), 122.
18 Rodrigo Cacho Casal, ‘El ingenio del arte: introducción a la poesía burlesca del Siglo de Oro’, Criticón, 100 (2007), 9–26 (p. 15).
19 Burlesque humour as a basis for Aldana's lyric has been discounted previously; see Díez Fernández, La poesía erótica, 152.
20 Quintillian, Institutio oratoria, Books VI–VIII, trans. H. F. Butler (London: Heinemann, 1921), 450.
21 Cacho Casal, ‘El ingenio del arte’, 15.
22 Carmen González Vázquez, ‘Aproximación a la definición, origen y función de la risa en la comedia latina’, Minerva: Revista de Filología Clásica, 16 (2002–03), 77–86 (p. 78).
23 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting’, in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. by John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 91–92.
24 Kim M. Philips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540 (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 2003), 46. Philips’ interpretation of the hair motif also appears in an Italian text on the artistry of gesture from 1616. See Giovanni Bonifaccio, L'arte dè cenni con la quale formandosi favella visible, si tratta della muta eloquenza che non è altro che un facondo silentio (Venezia: Apprello F. Grossi, 1616): ‘Crini sciolti: Il portare i crini sciolti era segno d'esser vergine e fanciulla: E però Virgilio di Venere, che fingea d'esser Cinthia, disse: Namque humeris de more habilem suspenderat arcum Venatrix, dederatque comas diffundere ventis [Aen 1.318 f.]’ (84).
25 Garcilaso de la Vega, Obras poéticas y textos en prosa, ed., with prologue and notes, by Bienvenido Morros (Barcelona: Crítica, 1995), pp. 116–17, ll. 5–8.
26 Margit Frenk, Symbolism in Old Spanish Folk Songs, The Kate Elder Lecture 4 (London: Dept of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, 1993), 2.
27 Frenk, Symbolism in Old Spanish Folk Songs, 9. For further proof of wind as a poetic symbol for the female experience of love, see Alan Deyermond, ‘Pero Meogo's Stags and Fountains: Symbol and Anecdote in the Traditional Lyric’, Romance Philology, 33 (1979–80), 265–83 (p. 278).
28 Lope de Vega, Arcadia, ed., intro. and notes by Edwin S. Morby (Madrid: Castalia, 1975), 295–96: ‘Por las ondas del mar de unos cabellos / un barco de marfil pasaba un día / que, humillando sus olas, deshacía / los crespos lazos que formaban de ellos’; Francisco de Quevedo, Antología poética, ed., intro. and notes by José María Pozuelo Yvancos (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1999), 271–72. It should be noted that Quevedo's ‘En crespa tempestad’ is but one example of this trope.
29 Felipe Valencia, ‘ “Acoged blandamente mi suspiro”: el beso de almas en la poesía petrarquista española del siglo XVI’, Dicenda, 26 (2008), 259–90 (pp. 275–76). For more on Bembo and the kiss, see Nicholas J. Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane: An Interpretative History of Kiss Symbolism and Related Religio-Erotic Themes (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969). Lara Garrido has also observed that the kiss, part of ‘la literatura orlándica’, stems from two much-imitated models: Boiardo (Inamorato, I, XIX, 62) and Ariosto (Furioso, VII, 29) with Aldana more closely following the first of these. For more on this topic, see Aldana, Poesías castellanas completas, ed. Lara Garrido, 495.
30 This physical manifestation of a spiritual union also runs contrary to Tullia d'Aragona's Dialogo della infinità d'amore (1547); see Tullia d'Aragona, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, ed. and trans. by Rinaldina Russell & Bruce Merry, intro. and notes by Rinaldina Russell (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997): ‘As this transformation can only take place on a spiritual plane, so in this kind of love, the principal part is played by the “spiritual” senses, those of sight and hearing and, above all, because it is closest to the spiritual, the imagination. But, in truth, as it is the lover's wish to achieve a corporeal union besides the spiritual one, in order to effect a total identification with the beloved, and since this corporeal unity can never be attained, because it is not possible for human bodies to be physically merged into one another, the lover can never achieve this longing of his, and so will never satisfy his desire’ (89–90).
31 Miguel Ángel García, ‘Sin que la muerte al ojo estorbo sea’: nueva lectura crítica de Francisco de Aldana (Mérida: Editoria Regional de Extremadura, 2010), 80.
32 See Plato, The Symposium, trans. Gill, pp. 25–26, 192d–e.
33 A potentially intentional ambigutas of the sun image has been noted previously. For more, see Walters, ‘On the Text’, 23.
34 Garcilaso de la Vega, Obras poéticas, ed. Morros, 27 (ll. 9–11).
35 María Pilar Manero Sorolla, ‘La configuración imaginística de la dama en la lírica española del Renacimiento. La tradición pertrarquista’, Boletín de la Biblioteca de Menéndez y Pelayo, 68 (1992), 5–71 (p. 19).
36 For more on the significance of the Icarus myth in Spain, see John H. Turner, The Myth of Icarus in Spanish Renaissance Poetry (London: Tamesis, 1976).
37 Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's ‘Symposium on Love', trans. Jayne Sears (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985), 41.
38 Agostino Nifo, Sobre la belleza y el amor, trans. Francisco Socas, Colección de Bolsillo, 103 (Sevilla: Publicaciones de la Univ. de Sevilla, 1990), 190.
39 On the lack of fulfilment, see Alexander A. Parker, The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature 1480–1680 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1985), 16. On the difficulties faced in separating the courtly love tradition from Neoplatonic spirituality and the legacy of Petrarchism within Spanish Renaissance poetry, see Alfredo Mateos Paramio, ‘Francisco de Aldana: ¿un neoplatónico del amor humano?, in Estado actual de los estudios sobre el Siglo de Oro. Actas del II Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas del Siglo de Oro, ed. Manuel García Martín, 2 vols (Salamanca: Ediciones Univ. de Salamanca, 1993), I, 657–62: ‘La obra de Aldana se escribe en la segunda mitad del s. XVI. En esta época son dos las corrientes que mezclan sus aguas en la retórica del Eros: una, la tradición cortés; otra, el neoplatonismo amoroso que, cuajado en los tratatti d'amore (Ficino, Bembo, Castiglione y Hebreo), además de conceptos platónicos, neoplatónicos y aristotélicos integra muchos elementos del amor cortés. Por ello se hace difícil separar ambos caudales, que tan entrelazados discurren, por ejemplo, en Herrera y Garcilaso, ordenando sus pasiones’ (p. 657).
40 For more on the figure of Cupid in the Renaissance, see Jane Kingsley-Smith, Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2010).
41 Note that Amor is not present in Ariosto's original text. His addition may evidence Aldana's indebtedness to Ovid, particularly the Odes, and Pseudo-Ovid's Elegia de pulice. English translation of Elegia de pulice as per David H. Brumble III, ‘John Donne's “The Flea”: Some Implications of the Encyclopedic and Poetic Tradition’, Critical Quarterly, 15 (1973), 147–54 (pp. 148–49); original Latin text attributed to Ofilii Sergianii, Poetae Latini Minores, ed. Nicholas Eloi LeMaire (Paris: LeMaire, 1826), VII, 275–78.
42 Anthony Colin Spearing, The Medieval Poet As Voyeur (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1993), 24.
43 Spearing, The Medieval Poet As Voyeur, 17.
44 Kenneth Clark, The Nude, Bollingen Series 35.2 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), 119.
45 For further elaboration, see Mark Taylor, ‘Voyeurism and Aposiopesis in Renaissance Poetry’, Exemplaria, 4 (1992), 267–94.
46 For Taylor's own example of this technique in action in Ovid's Amores I.5 (see Taylor, ‘Voyeurism and Aposiopesis’, 271–72).
47 For a useful comparative example to illustrate the inability of the plastic arts to reproduce narrative aposiopesis it is useful to consider Peter Paul Rubens, The Little Fur (Helen Fourment), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, c.1638.
48 Cropper, ‘On Beautiful Women’, 386.
49 Taylor, ‘Voyeurism and Aposiopesis’, 274.
50 Spearing observes a similar frustration of the voyeur's arousal in Tristan and Isolde (see Spearing, The Medieval Poet As Voyeur, 87 [and more generally pp. 64 and 71]).
51 Manero Sorolla, ‘La configuración imaginística’, 34–35.
52 Parker, The Philosophy of Love, 62. For more on the importance of colour in the canone breve, see Bettella, The Ugly Woman, 84.
53 Garcilaso de la Vega, Obras poéticas, ed. Morros: ‘coged de vuestra alegre primavera / el dulce fruto, antes que'l tiempo airado / cubra de nieve la hermosa cumbre’ (p. 43, ll. 9–11).
54 Siegel, ‘The Petrarchan Sonneteers’, 172.
55 On the sleeping male nude as a Platonic figure, see Maria Ruvoldt, ‘The Sleep of Reason’, in her The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration: Metaphors of Sex, Sleep, and Dreams (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2004), 6–39 (p. 7).
56 Darlene C. Greenhalgh, ‘Love, Chastity and Women's Erotic Power: Greek Romance in Elizabethan and Jacobean Contexts’, in Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570–1640, ed. Constance C. Relihan & Goran V. Stanivukovic (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 15–42 (p. 20); Thomas Hyde, The Poetic Theology of Love: Cupid in Renaissance Literature (London: Associated University Presses, 1986), 80.
57 Plato, The Symposium, trans. Gill, pp. 21–27, 189–93.
58 Ovid, Metamorphoses. Books 1–8, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. by G. P. Goold, 3rd ed. (London: Harvard U. P., 1977), 196–204.
59 Plato, The Symposium, trans Gill, pp. 23–24, 190c & 191c.
60 Sergius Kodera, ‘Renaissance Readings of Aristophanes’ Myth from Plato's Symposium (189C–193D)’, in his Disreputable Bodies: Magic, Medicine and Gender in Renaissance Natural Philosophy (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010), 213–49 (pp. 216–17).
61 Ecclesiastes 3:1: ‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven’.
62 Kodera goes so far as to label Ficino's interpretation of Plato ‘a textbook case of deliberate misreading’ (see Kodera, ‘Renaissance Readings’, 213).
63 ‘The erotic significance of the cave as a symbol of the vagina is likewise suggested in Aldana's poem. Other mythological allusions add to the sexual symbolism: the reference to flowers being scattered as the red traces of dawn become discernible in the sky is realised through the verbs “abriendo” and “derramaba”, both of which have clear sexual overtones’ (Walters, ‘On the Text’, 21–22).
64 Women had long been recognized as physically colder than their male counterparts (see Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck [London: Heinemann, 1943], 458). For more on the relationship between women, bodily temperature, moisture, and the humours in the Middle Ages, see Joan Cadden, The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1995), 33 and 184 in particular.
65 Homer, Odyssey, I, 52–54; English translation as per Homer, The Odyssey, trans., intro. and commentary by A. T. Murray (London: Heinemann, 1919), 7.
66 Jenny March, Dictionary of Classical Mythology (London: Cassell, 1998), 69.
67 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Miller, 34–42.
68 Whinnying horses have been noted as a common symbol of sexual virility, perhaps most notably in Góngora's Polifemo (see Walters, ‘On the Text’, 22).
69 Manero Sorolla, ‘La configuración imaginística’, 14–16.