> I've been unable to find a gloss on Sidney's phrase "Herculea proles" at
> the end of the Defense of Poesy that explains the source of the phrase.
> Does anyone know where Sidney got it? I've also been unable to locate a
> reason for it in the Hercules myth(s). Why would a nobleman who supports
> poetry be described as a descendent of Hercules?
Ariosto uses the phrase in the introductory stanzas to the Orlando
Furioso, in the dedication to his sometime patron, Ippolito de'Este, son
of Ercole I d'Este:
Piacciavi, generosa Erculea prole,
ornamento e splendor del secol nostro,
Ippolito, aggradir questo che vuole
e darvi sol può l'umil servo vostro.
Quel ch'io vi debbo, posso di parole
pagare in parte e d'opera d'inchiostro;
né che poco io vi dia da imputar sono,
che quanto io posso dar, tutto vi dono.
(Generous offspring of Hercules, ornament and splendor of our age, may
it please you to accept this which your lowly servant would like to, and
alone is able to, give you. The debt I owe you I can partially repay
with words and with a work of ink; do not think that I give you too
little, for all that I can give, I give to you.)
Hercules is a favorite figure of courtier-poets in Ferrara because of
the pun on Ercole I and II d'Este, and he becomes a figure for the
subject both fashioned by a humanist education and fragmented by madness
(as in Seneca's Hercules Furens, echoed by Ariosto's title). Albert
Ascoli devotes a section of his Ariosto book to the figure of Hercules:
see Ariosto's Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian
Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 46–70.
As far as I remember, Sidney doesn't refer to Ariosto directly, so
perhaps Sidney and Ariosto are analogues from a common tradition.
Kathryn Evans
UC Berkeley
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