{"title":"Rhetorical Swordfighting and Satire in Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia","authors":"K. Bennett","doi":"10.1163/23526963-04801001","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n Thomas Watson’s critics have suggested that The Hekatompathia, Or Passionate Centurie of Love ambitiously aspired to be a pedagogical text, but if this work is designed to teach, then this essay suggests Watson’s manipulations of genre, style, and intertexts combine to offer a pedagogy for poets, a compilation of rhetorical postures one may employ to simultaneously deliver and disguise socio-political satire in Elizabethan England. This essay first discusses how Hekatompathia additionally signals its satirical aims by participating in the pasquinade tradition, and positioning a “pasquine piller” at the volta of this sequence of one hundred passions. Next, it shows how Watson’s “passions” intertextually recall Pierre de Ronsard’s Discours des Misères de ce Temps, a collection of lyrics satirizing the French factionalism that has led to civil war, as well as Thomas Jeney’s later English translation that turns a mirror to princes toward Queen Elizabeth. Upon recognizing the Ronsardian subtexts of courtly factionalism and civil unrest associated with Watson’s “passions,” one may see how they are compounded as the poet sets them forth in the “pathetical style” of Seneca and Lucan. The civil wars of ancient Rome and subsequent imperial tyranny are frequently held up as a cautionary tales for early modern English and European rulers, but Watson’s simultaneous translation of the French Wars of Religion relocates these civil broils in England, implicating Elizabethan court dissidence and hypocrisy.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2022-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-04801001","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Thomas Watson’s critics have suggested that The Hekatompathia, Or Passionate Centurie of Love ambitiously aspired to be a pedagogical text, but if this work is designed to teach, then this essay suggests Watson’s manipulations of genre, style, and intertexts combine to offer a pedagogy for poets, a compilation of rhetorical postures one may employ to simultaneously deliver and disguise socio-political satire in Elizabethan England. This essay first discusses how Hekatompathia additionally signals its satirical aims by participating in the pasquinade tradition, and positioning a “pasquine piller” at the volta of this sequence of one hundred passions. Next, it shows how Watson’s “passions” intertextually recall Pierre de Ronsard’s Discours des Misères de ce Temps, a collection of lyrics satirizing the French factionalism that has led to civil war, as well as Thomas Jeney’s later English translation that turns a mirror to princes toward Queen Elizabeth. Upon recognizing the Ronsardian subtexts of courtly factionalism and civil unrest associated with Watson’s “passions,” one may see how they are compounded as the poet sets them forth in the “pathetical style” of Seneca and Lucan. The civil wars of ancient Rome and subsequent imperial tyranny are frequently held up as a cautionary tales for early modern English and European rulers, but Watson’s simultaneous translation of the French Wars of Religion relocates these civil broils in England, implicating Elizabethan court dissidence and hypocrisy.
托马斯·沃森的批评者认为,《爱的激情世纪》雄心勃勃地渴望成为一部教学文本,但如果这部作品是为了教学而设计的,那么这篇文章就表明,沃森对体裁、风格和互文的操纵结合起来,为诗人提供了一种教学方法,一种修辞姿势的集合,人们可以同时使用它来传递和掩饰伊丽莎白时代英国的社会政治讽刺。这篇文章首先讨论了Hekatompathia是如何通过参与pasquinade传统,并在这一百种激情序列的伏特上定位一个“pasquine piller”,来表达它的讽刺目的的。接下来,它展示了沃森的“激情”是如何让人联想到皮埃尔·德·朗萨尔(Pierre de Ronsard)的《diss des misires de ce Temps》,这是一部讽刺导致法国内战的派系主义的歌词集,以及托马斯·詹尼(Thomas Jeney)后来的英文翻译,把镜子从王子转向了女王伊丽莎白。在认识到朗萨迪式的宫廷派系主义和内乱的潜台词与沃森的“激情”联系在一起之后,人们就可以看到,当诗人以塞内加和卢坎的“悲情风格”将这些情感表达出来时,它们是如何混合在一起的。古罗马的内战和随后的帝国暴政经常被认为是早期现代英国和欧洲统治者的警世故事,但沃森的《法国宗教战争》的同声翻译将这些内战转移到了英国,暗示了伊丽莎白时代的宫廷异见和虚伪。