Contemporizing antiquity: TheHypneroomachiaand its afterlife in France

Abstract

Possibly the most influential recent redrawing of our picture of the Early Modern veneration for literary antiquity comes from Thomas M. Greene's The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. In it the usual textbook premise remains undisturbed that writers from Petrarch through Ben Jonson participated in the new, historically accurate appreciation of the remoteness of the superior classical literary culture which they admired. Beyond this, however, in Greene's view the disciplined empathy by which these writers believed they might vault over an aeon and profitably imitate the artifacts of that culture was, more frequently than is usually supposed, interrupted by discouragement or even palpitant despair. A Renaissance poet, Greene reminds us, could hope to recuperate what he needed of the integrally lost mundus significans of antiquity only by participating, as part of a disorderly literary and cultural continuity, in perilously long strands of successive ‘etiological’ decisions about the significance of every constituent of an antique text. Each of these decisions, coloured as it was by a mundus significans alien to the ancient one, was likely to be inane. We know this; Greene's claim is that Renaissance poets also intuited it, and that it bothered them. A strength of Greene's theory is that it is consonant with (and partly derived from) the modern poststructuralist principle of semantic instability in the transmision of all texts. Inversely, imputing this kind of intermittent despair over the recovery of antiquity to Renaissance figures lends diachronic sanction to the modern principle. (Greene supposed the Early Modern sense of isolation from antiquity to have ended only with the arrival of an eighteenth-century, neo-classical [and self-deluding?] sense of submergence in, and continuity with, classical literature.)

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