Rob, this is wonderful. It's all the more wonderful, I think, because of
what your colleagues Joe Black and Allen Carroll published recently in
Spenser Studies, that invaluable journal: a poem, you recall, signed 1588
and commending the Faerie Queene in a poem that calls the author a poor
forswonke shepherd who "Pan is Hee." I had completely forgotten about the
Pan and Hercules bit at the end of the Sidney. Joe thinks the author is
Thomas Watson. Anyway, something to ponder. I got one of those amazing
messages from Jim Nohrnberg who in a reversal of the usual reminder about
charity can receive but not give (e-mails). I can't do e-stuff very well
but I will try to forward it to the list, so if you receive a mysterious
message about mounts of contemplation, that is Jim Nohnrberg. Anne P.
> Anne Prescott's suggestion seems neither wild nor crazy; in fact, it's a
> wonderful point to have in mind for reading that very difficult, very
> contentious ending to Sidney's Lady of May--a fiction almost everyone
> agrees
> has "something" to do with Elizabeth's proposed marriage to Alencon,
> whatever
> that "something" might be.
>
> At the end of the masque in lines of admitted defeat, Therion the forester
> adopts the voice of Pan and takes consolation in the fact that he's been
> defeated by Hercules:
>
> 'Poor Pan,' he said, 'although thou beaten be,
> It is no shame since Hercules was he.'
>
> Could Pan/Therion's admission of defeat--defeat at the hands of
> Hercules--in a
> marriage contest decided by Elizabeth have resonated ironically with the
> contemporary debate about the Queen's "impending" marriage to
> Francois-Hercule, duc d'Alencon? I think so. And partly what's interesting
> about the ironies at stake is that they work nicely whether Therion's
> speech
> (more likely scripted in advance of the Queen's decision for Espilus the
> shepherd than for Therion the forester, I'd argue) wound up in his mouth
> or
> his rival's. In either instance, the reference to Hercule/Hercules looks
> satirically barbed, but a reading that gives that speech by design to
> Espilus
> appears all the more attractive in light of the apparent allusion to
> Alencon.
> Sidney's story about Pan's embarrassment and shame refers to the god's
> humiliation upon discovering that he's bed-hopped with Hercules rather
> than
> Omphale--poor hopes for progeny, indeed.
>
>>===== Original Message From Sidney-Spenser Discussion List
> <[log in to unmask]> =====
>>this is a wild and probably crazy and irrelevant idea, but another guy
>>named "hercules" was Francois-Hercule, duc d'Alencon and then d'Anjou
>>(sorry--I can't do accents). French court flatterers were to call Henri
>>III "Hercules" and, much more often and with a damnsight more
>> credibility,
>>Henri IV a Hercules too--and not just a Gallic one who can chain ears but
>>the original monster-slayer. From Sidney's point of view, as from
>>Spenser's, the problem was the off-chance that young Francois-Hercule, if
>>he married Elizabeth, might possibly produce offspring. Yes, a real
>>stretch, but I did want to mention Elizabeth's very own French Hercules.
>> I
>>don't think Sidney could have known about Hercule Poirot, though. Anne P.
>>
>>>> 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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