from the current Sunday Times (London) online, two paras of Paul Bailey's review
of Barbara Reynolds new book on Dante:
It is Reynolds’s contention that Dante was not only a skilled public speaker but
also a persuasive public reader of his own verse. Paper was scarce and few books
were published, so poets took themselves into the market place, reading their
work to artisans and anyone else who would listen to them. This makes sense,
given the fact that many of the sublimest passages in the Commedia are dramatic
in tone, calling out to be recited at least. His characters, both good and bad,
“are so vividly realised that an actor would require no further directions in
order to represent them on the stage. Such is their animation that Dante must
have heard them speaking as he wrote”. One is tempted to imagine how it must
have felt to be in the audience when Dante first read from La Vita Nuova (The
New Life), hearing a new, revitalised Italian, the precursor of the language
that continues to be spoken in the 21st century.
The Beatrice of legend, Reynolds convincingly argues, was a married woman of 24
when she died suddenly (probably in childbirth) and not the lasting source of
Dante’s unrequited love. The poet had a wife of his own, Gemma, who could not
have been pleased at the sight of her husband shedding gallons of tears over the
death of his muse. Dante, in exile after Florence was sacked by Corso Donati and
his Black supporters, most likely found sexual relief with women lost to
history, and it is arguable that he was of a more secular cast of mind than his
Catholic admirers would care to countenance. It is possible, too, that he smoked
cannabis, or something similar, to transport him into regions of inspiration
later writers discovered with the aid of alcohol.
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