Political Innocence of Renaissance Drama

Veiling the Stage: The Politics of Innocence in Renaissance Drama
Author(s): Jane Tylus

Source: Theatre Journal, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Mar., 1989), pp. 16-29
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Veiling the Stage: The Politics of Innocence
in Renaissance Drama
Jane Tylus
At the heart of anti-theatrical sentiment in seventeenth-century Europe was a

concern with a theatre that masked its duplicitous and invasive nature beneath a
cloak of innocence and thereby attracted-and inevitably corrupted-its innocent
audience. Protesting the renewal of Aquinas's claim that theatre should be considered
a thing indifferent, the Jansenist Pierre Nicole asserted that the more careful a dram-
atist is to cover illicit passions with the veil of honesty, the more dangerous he makes
them, capable of ensnaring even the holiest and most virtuous spectator.' In a similar
vein, Pascal wrote in his Pensdes, "the more innocent [the love depicted in theatre]
seems to innocent souls, the more liable they are to be touched by it."2 In an interesting
reversal of earlier Renaissance debates over the open licentiousness of the stage,
Jane Tylus teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin in
Madison.
'The real danger, explains Nicole in his Traite' de la comidie, ed. G. Couton ([1653] Paris: Les Belles
Lettres, 1961), is the attempt by those such as St. Francis de Sales, in Introduction a la vie divote (1606),
and P. LeMoyne, in his La ddvotion aisee (1652), to convince others to "regarder la Comedie comme
une chose indifferent" (48). He goes on in a later document to complain, "Plus il a en soin de couvrir
d'une voile d'honnetete les passions criminelles qu'il y decrit, plus il les a rendues dangereuses, et
capable de surprendre et corrompre les ames saintes et innocentes," Les heresies imaginaires, Letter
XI, cited in M. Barras, The Stage Controversy in France from Corneille to Rousseau (New York: Institute
of French Studies, 1933), 77-78. This attack on "indifference" goes back, as Bossuet points out in
his Maximes et rflexions sur la comidie (ed. Charles Urbain and E. Levesque, in L'dglise et le theatre
[Paris: B. Grasset, 1930]), to Plato's Republic. See chap. 19, "Autre principe de Platon sur cette
matiere."
Not surprisingly, Nicole also attacked the Christian dramas of Corneille, believing that even when
a playwright wasn't deliberately out to jeopardize the "innocent," the qualities associated with a
true Christian life would suffer when represented onstage. Such a portrait of innocence, which
Corneille had attempted to create in Polyeucte and in his less successful Theodore, could only subvert
a Christian ethic firmly grounded in "silence, patience, moderation, wisdom, poverty, and humility":
such virtues, by definition, defied representation. The passage is from Traite de la comidie, 53. For
a general account of the attack on theatre in seventeenth-century Europe, particularly France, see
Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California, 1981), chapter 7.
2Blaise Pascal, Pensees, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 259. As Krail-
sheimer notes, there is a good possibility that this fragment on theatre was written by Mme. de
SablW, a close friend of Port Royal.
16
POLITICS OF INNOCENCE / 17
these concerned moralists now spoke of a theatre that concealed its corruption by
appropriating a vocabulary of purity for its own perverse ends. Innocence became
a veil that lured the unsuspecting into an arena where, as Nicole graphically described
it, "the heart is softened with pleasure and the spirit is completely preoccupied by
external objects, totally inebriated by the follies which it sees on the stage, and lured
outside of that state of Christian vigilance necessary to resist temptation."3
That such a protest was fueled by the state's decision, under Richelieu, to grant
actors immunity and to legitimize their trade suggests a connection between the
ideology of an innocent theatre and that of an emerging absolutism.4 This essay will
take as its starting point the moment in which this convergence first took place in
Europe. Strikingly, this moment had its roots in an anti-theatrical sentiment similar
to that shared by Nicole, Pascal, and later Bossuet. For a number of dramatists writing
in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Renaissance theatre with its
newly founded commedia dell'arte troupes and the revitalization of the Senecan
tradition, which had nothing more to offer, as one critic has baldly (if unfairly)
summarized, than "blood and lust, cruelty and frenzy,"5 was itself badly in need of
reform. More specifically, theatre needed to undergo a process of purification, which
would make it amenable to the noble audiences whose patronage and approval
playwrights such as the Italian Giambattista Guarini desperately sought. Guarini in
fact provides an interesting and influential-not to mention immodest-example of
the desire, shared by Giraldi Cinzio, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Corneille, Calder6n,
and others, to "purify the stage," and in the interests of so doing, he offered his
own play, his pastoral tragicomedy II Pastor Fido, as a timely solution.
Timely indeed, given that only thirteen years earlier a drama had appeared that
challenged the conflation of purity and nobility that the Pastor Fido strives so labo-
riously to enact. This is Torquato Tasso's Aminta, written for the Ferrarese court in
1573, and a duke whose benevolence Tasso would never entirely trust, and celebrated
as one of the most influential works in a pastoral tradition that had frequently
functioned as panegyric for a patron.6 Tasso's masterstroke, however, of which Guar-
ini and those dramatists who followed him seemed to be uneasily aware, was to
3Nicole, Traite' de la comidie, 44.

4In 1641, Richelieu passed a proclamation that would protect actors, claiming "nous voulons que
leur exercise, qui peut innocemment divertir nos peoples de diverses occupations mauvaises, ne puissent
leur etre a blame, ni prejudice a leur reputation dans le commerce public"; cited in Barras, The Stage
Controversy in France, 63 (italics mine).
5"La tragedia quale si era venuta organizzando, sotto 1'influsso del teatro di Seneca . . . con la
ricerca ostentata delle scene di orrore e dei motivi di volutta e sangue, di crudelta e di frenesia
S . . era diventata la sede autorizzata di cotesti luoghi fantastici improntati di una sentimentalita
turbata, di un'inquieta aspirazione all'esotico, di un gusto tetro e morboso," Giovanni Getto, Mal-
inconia di Torquato Tasso (Naples: Liguori, 1979), 188. For a much different version of the Senecan
influence on Renaissance drama, see Gordon Braden's admirable work, Renaissance Tragedy and the
Senecan Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
6For the Aminta's importance in France, see J. Marsan, La pastoral dramatique en France d la fin du
XVe et au debut du XVII siecle (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969); Joyce Simpson, Le tasse et la littirature
et l'arte baroques en France (Paris: Nizet, 1962); and Isida Cremona, L'influence de I'Aminta sur la pastorale
dramatique franpaise (Paris: Vrin, 1977).
18 / Jane Tylus
have revealed the bad faith inherent in the attempt to reform theatre so that it might
become the mirror of its noble audience. If Guarini, as will be seen, looks toward a
theatre of transparency in which presiding "deities" are assured of their purity as
well as of their power, Tasso deconstructed that gesture from the start by insisting
on the unreliability of the mimetic process and the essential opacity of the theatrical
medium. Like the fervent Jansenists of seventeenth-century France but in far more
subtle fashion, Tasso revealed the extent to which ideological "purity" becomes a
cover for and a distraction from the blatantly impure measures of those in power.
To the "veil" of honesty and its theatrical implications I now wish to turn.
II
Imitatio vitate, speculum consuetudinis, imago veritatis. Thus did classical antiquity
and Renaissance humanists, following Cicero's eloquent defense of oratory and po-
etry in republican Rome, depict theatre as a mirror, as speculum, which revealed man's
vices.' Yet by the late sixteenth century, this didactic program for theatre had been
increasingly challenged by another view of drama as primarily entertainment; Ho-
ratian "sweetness," that is, was fast outweighing Horatian usefulness. Along with
this decline of drama's specifically didactic function went a reassessment of Aris-
totelian catharsis. While at least one group of playwrights, those associated with the
Jesuit order, would continue to insist on the centrality of drama's purgative role,
other, more influential theorists such as Guarini and Corneille would note the nec-
essary demise of theatre's utilitarianism: "what need have we in our day," Guarini
almost indignantly asked in response to one critic of his play, "of purging pity and
terror with tragic sights, since we have the holiest precepts of our religion which are
taught us through the evangelical word?"' In Bernard Weinberg's phrase, "the time
of tragedy has passed;"' at least it had for Guarini, who ironically seemed more
willing than the Jesuits themselves to credit the Mass with a didactic function.
But if the time for tragedy was over, the time for tragicomedy had just begun; and
if the stage no longer functioned as a mirror for vices, it could certainly function as
a mirror for virtue. The theatre that Guarini's elaborate commentary was destined
7Typical is Leon Battista Alberti, who defines comedy as "un quadro della vita," which will enable
men to "correggere, attraverso il riso, i costumi"; cited in Antonio Stauble, La commedia amunistica
del Quattrocento (Florence: Istituto Palazzo Strozzi, 1968), 220.
8Guarini, Compendio della poesia tragicomica (1602), in Opere (Verona, 1737-88), III, 420. Guarini's
assertion will be echoed in seventeenth-century France with Honore d'Urfe's preface to his Sylvanaire,
published in 1627: "Mais nous qui par la grace de Dieu sommes en un si&cle si riche de Predicateurs,
qui enseignent si assiduellement les hommes de toute qualitY, les retirent du vice et les poussent A
la vertu, nostre Poesie infailliblement demeureroit inutile, si elle faisoit seulement profession d'in-
struire, et le Poete qui n'auroit que ce dessein, en nos iours se travailleroit inutilement"; cited in
Daniela Dalla Valle, Pastorale Barocca: Forme e contenuti dal Pastor Fido al dramma pastorale francese
(Ravenna: Longo, n.d.), 61. For an excellent account of varying attitudes toward catharsis in France,
see Henry Phillips, The Theatre and its Critics in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1980).
'A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961),
II, 1079.
to celebrate was a theatre of courtly compliment, in which its royal and noble spec-
tators might watch themselves not only perform sublime actions onstage but redeem
theatre from itself, from the "excesses," which Guarini felt characterized modern
comedy and tragedy. With the help of such an audience, the process of catharsis
might be turned inward to the medium of theatre, a reflexivity that was particularly
suited to the genre of tragicomedy. According to the extensive commentary Guarini
produced for his Pastor Fido over a period of fifteen years, his play avoids-or more
precisely, blunts (rintuzzare)-the dangerous extremes of both tragedy and comedy:
it neither offers a representation of "atrocious events, blood, and deaths, which are
horrible to see and inhuman; nor does it make us so unrestrained in laughter that
we sin against modesty."10 In order to effect this reflexive purgation, Guarini wrote
a play that moves inexorably toward a climax designed to incorporate the necessarily
noble spectator into its domain, at once complimenting that spectator and redeeming
theatre by enabling it to become the faithful mirror of its honest audience."1
Such "redemption," as it were, occurs in the course of two central moments toward
the end of the Pastor Fido, moments that will be conflated again and again in the
course of the next fifty years in numerous Italian and French dramas.12 First, as the
play's title suggests, the play's penultimate action concerns the "faithful shepherd"
Mirtillo, who is moved by a pieta that far surpasses the pity crucial to Aristotelian
catharsis to offer his life in exchange for that of the woman he loves. This annihilating
gesture in turn leads to the play's final revelation, when the blind seer modeled on
Sophocles' Tiresias reinterprets an oracle that demands an annual human sacrifice
and effectively cancels the harsh, Oedipal dynamics that have operated so far in the
play. Such cancellation saves Mirtillo from the death he has sought and allows the
drama to end with his marriage and Arcadia's "purgation," suggesting that real power
in the pastoral world belongs to those who, on the one hand, are capable of acting
'oll Verato secondo ovvero replica dell'Attizzato Accademico ferrarese in difesa del Pastor Fido . . . (1593),
Opere, III, 198-99.
"See Timothy Murray's suggestive discussion in "Theatrical Legitimation: Forms of French Pa-
tronage and Portraiture," PMLA 98 (1983): 170-82 (and its extension in Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories
of Genius in Seventeenth-Century England and France [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987]) on
Richelieu's strategies encouraging theatre to function as a mirror that would serve to legitimize both
the patron and the stage. Erica Harth makes the interesting point in Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth-
Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983) that the verisimilitude of both French classical
and pastoral theatre must be seen as mediation rather than mirror: "It allows the reader to validate
the work in terms of the reigning ideology and to validate the ideology in terms of the work" (48).
It is, I think, crucial to see the emphasis on vraisemblance and "decorum" in seventeenth-century
France as emerging from the engagement of a number of playwrights in the 1620s and 1630s in the
pastoral genre, of which Jean Mairet's Sylvanaire is but one example. For the connection, see both
Marsan, La pastorale dramatique en France (and his elegiac account of pastoral's "deathblow" as the
result of this new-found attachment to "les regles") and Henry Carrington Lancaster, French Dramatic
Literature in the Seventeenth Century (rep. New York: Gordian Press, 1969), Part I, Volume II, 371-
449.
12See Dalla Valle, Pastorale Barocca, for a study of Guarini's impact on late sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century French drama.
20 / Jane Tylus
"purely" and selflessly-the antithesis of a Machiavellian ethic13- and those, on the

other, who can reinterpret and thereby purify the past in its relationship to the
present. This latter action is precisely what the seer Tirenio has performed, in a
manner that will be imitated by Corneille's Don Fernand at the end of Le Cid when
he absolves Don Rodrigue of murder, claiming that "Time has repeatedly legitimized /
What seemed at first could not be without crime."
This representation of the innocent spectator who appropriates time's power to

legitimize and purify the present enables the welcome purgation of drama's chief
excesses-a purgation, one might add, that the first critics of Le Cid resisted when
protesting Don Rodrigue's "hasty" marriage to Chimene, which implicitly followed
the scene of the pardon.14 With this ultimate transferal of the power of purgation to
a presiding hermeneutician who has remained offstage for the better part of the play,
it is perhaps apparent, to return to Guarini's tragicomedy, why Sir Richard Fanshawe
should have dedicated his English translation of the Pastor Fido in 1647 to the soon-
to-be Charles II, exiled in France during the Interregnum, in the hopes that he too
might preside over and effect the transition from tragedy to tragicomedy.'5 Tragi-
comedy becomes explicitly dependent upon right reading-a reading increasingly
performed not by blind prophets but by sovereigns such as Corneille's Auguste,
whose notorious clemency combines both the "selfless" gesture of Mirtillo and the
hermeneutics of cancellation practiced with such success by Tirenio.
That Guarini should have situated such an exercise in cancellation in the pastoral
domain in order to cleanse the Renaissance stage and provide a mirror for his priv-
ileged spectator should come as no surprise. At least since Virgil's first Eclogue, the
dialogue between Meliboeus and the fortunate Tityrus, who has been given his small
plot of land by Octavian, the pastoral had been used to celebrate royal generosity,
and throughout the sixteenth century it was frequently invoked for purposes of
courtly entertainment.16 The pastoral setting furnished precisely that innocent "sub-
text" Guarini sought for the double purpose of complimenting his audience and
purifying the stage. The Venetian publisher of Tasso's slender pastoral, Aldo Ma-
nuzio, wrote in 1583 that he was proud to be the first to "awaken in readers' hearts
the desire for this most virtuous subject and one who is worthy of great fortune,
13To use Jerry Palmer's phrase describing the classicism of French tragedy: "Providence can only
operate in a world where someone is prepared to make an exceptional effort; to be good is not
enough." From "Merit and Destiny: Ideology and Narrative in French Classicism," in 1642: Literature
and Power in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Francis Barker et al. (Essex: University of Essex, 1981), 123.
14t was in response to this criticism that Corneille later revised the ending, now making Rodrigue
wait a year to "win" his bride.
'"See the comments of one French translator of Tasso's Aminta, who dedicates the work to Louis
XIV. In the preface, he writes: "A qui donc pouvois-je mieux addresser un Berger qui soupire et qui
se plaint, qu'a Vostre Majeste, qui soulage les malheureux, et qui peut faire la f6licit6 de tout le
monde," L'Aminta, traduite de l'Italien en Franpais (La Haye, 1681), a5r. In France as in England, one
of the marks of sovereignty thus becomes the ability to transform tragedy into tragicomedy.
16For a sensitive and stimulating reading of the "politics" of Virgil's first Eclogue and its resonance
throughout literary history, see Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988).
although he enjoys peace with such steadfastness of heart that he envies not the
state of great princes."" By 1625, in an essay on theatrical reform interestingly entitled
Lo specchio, G. B. Andreini would speak of pastoral as a vision of the golden age and
a locus of "sylvan innocence."'18 These characterizations of pastoral purity could and
did provide both a fitting mirror for a prince who, in the words of d'Aubignac, should
always be portrayed as "par tout innocens," and a convincing demonstration of his
power, as the case of Ben Jonson's masques more than amply suggests.19 But more
importantly, the location of the courtly ethos in a pastoral sphere tended to natu-
ralize-and eventually neutralize--the ruling ideology; the "natural perspective" of
the privileged spectator, to cite the phrase Northrop Frye uses in connection with
Shakespeare's late plays, ideally becomes associated with "nature" itself.20
The invocation of a pastoral golden age, which Guarini himself defined as a state
in which we behold "our almost virginal nature, free of those artifices and false
appearances that are vices characteristic of the city,"21 finds its culmination in the
words Dominique Bouhours would use in 1671 to praise his monarch, Louis XIV:
Those who receive the honor of approaching him, are astonished by the clarity and the
precision with which he expresses himself. That free and easy manner of which we have
spoken so much, enters all he says: all his terms are right and well-chosen (propres et bien
choisis), though they are not at all affected; all his expressions are simple and natural; but
the turn he gives them is the most delicate and the noblest in the world.22
Nature, the French language, and the king all come together as if by magic in this
breathless paean to absolutism. What is critical to note, however, is that the French
"Aminta di Torquato Tasso ([1583] Paris, 1584), 3.

18"Scendiamo alle Pastorali. Hor non ti fai punto a quella boschereccia innocenza ch'altro non ti
rappresenta con atti, e con parole che dell'Oro quella primeria felicita," in Lo specchio, composizione
sacra e poetica (Paris, 1625), 5. One of the most vocal supporters of a "theatre of absolutism," H. Pilet
de la Mesnardiere, would approve of pastoral drama at least in theory as a suitably "pure" mirror
for its noble spectators--"cette condition 6toit la plus advantageuse et la plus spirituelle de celles
de ce pais-la devant le siecle des Fables"--but he dislikes Guarini's mixture of "sentiments abjects"
with elevated discourse. See La Poetique ([1640] Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1972), 301-10.
19On d'Aubignac, see his Dissertation, 32, cited in Henry Phillips, The Theatre and its Critics in
Seventeenth-Century France, 62: Subjects must believe that kings are "par tout innocens, et que per-
sonne n'a droit de les estimer coupables"; for de la Mesnardisre, see his concern in La poetique with
putting a play such as Oedipus onstage, although he is ready to defend Oedipus' essential innocence:
"Et cependant nous y voyons une innocence si claire, au moins pour la volunte, en ce miserable
Prince" (84). Stephen Orgel's work, especially The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English
Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), has stressed the importance of reading
Jonson's masques as emblematic of the political ideology of James I and Charles I.
20Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965). On the "invention" of perspective and its implication in
an ideology of "neutralization," see Alfonso Procaccini's stimulating "Alberti and the 'Framing' of
Perspective," in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 40:1 (1981): 29-39.
2111 Verrato ovvero difesa di quanto ha scritto Messer Jason Denores contra le tragicommedie e le pastorali
... (1588), in Opere, II, 231.
"Quoted in Timothy Reiss, "Power, Poetry, and the Resemblance of Nature," in Mimesis: From
Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, ed. John Lyons and Stephen Nichols (Hanover: University
Press of New England, 1982), 229.
22 / Jane Tylus
language is only naturalized by passing through the mouth of the king: "Kings must
learn from him how to rule, but peoples must learn from him how to speak," en-
thusiastically summarizes Bouhours.
In this classic instance of the episteme of transparency, which Michel Foucault has
documented as characteristic of the seventeenth century, the hermeneutician is re-
vealed as a figure whose own meanings and motives are paradoxically hidden. There
is a subtle strategy of power operative in Louis XIV's pursuit of the simplicity of
shepherds: if his discourse is capable of being perceived as "natural," then no one
should have any reason to scrutinize his motives. And in a play such as Guarini's
tragicomedy, in which this movement might be properly said to begin, such scrutiny
is indeed discouraged. Mirtillo offers himself as a sacrifice in complete disinterest of
self, and Tirenio's proclamations are sanctioned by heaven and an almost Platonic
inversion of the realms of darkness and light as the blind seer truly begins to "see":
"Oh blindness of mortal minds! In such a profound night, in such a mist of errors
our souls are immersed when you, oh great sun, fail to illuminate them!23 In this
final movement toward transcendence, the opaque medium of theatre itself is almost
obliterated.24 If the vision of the common man is no longer valorized, if the "natural"
relationship between the "cielo" and noble actors such as Mirtillo or hermeneuticians
such as Tirenio is unquestionably sanctioned, then the Renaissance stage itself is at
once destroyed and-by virtue of its ability to point toward its own transcendence-
redeemed. Such a finale goes a long way toward validating Richard Cody's statement
regarding the affinity of the Renaissance court for what by the end of the sixteenth
century had become the doctrine of pastoral innocence: "both the courtly myth and
the myth of the shepherd imply a communion of the pure."25
Yet Cody's remark was made apropos of a play far different from Guarini's, one
that challenges rather than tacitly demonstrates this neat equation between aristocratic
and pastoral communities. This is Tasso's Aminta, a work which initially might seem
to partake in Guarini's project to ennoble theatre and spectators alike. Guarini himself,
however, recognized the chasm separating Tasso's slender pastoral from his own,
more complicated play, and nowhere more demonstrably than in the Pastor Fido's
fourth chorus, in which he transforms the Aminta's apparent affirmation of the
pleasure principle-the wishful slogan of the wished-for golden age, "s'ei piace, ei
lice" (if it's pleasing, it is lawful)-into a validation of the presiding absolutist's law:
"s'ei lice, ei piace" (if it's lawful, it's pleasing). But Guarini's only half-playful attempt
to include Tasso's immensely popular play in the canon he was both condemning
and seeking to "redeem" overlooks Tasso's own preoccupations, in life as well as in
art, with purity.
23Battista Guarini, II Pastor Fido, ed. Luigi Fasso (Torino: Einaudi, 1976), Act V, 1039-1043; p. 207.
For the argument that Guarini is in fact parodying neo-Platonism, see Nicolas J. Perella's intriguing
article, "Fate, Blindness, and Illusion in the Pastor Fido," Romanic Review 49 (1958): 252-68.
24See Abby Zanger's suggestive article on "Acting as Counter-acting," Theater Journal 38 (1986):
180-95, in which she argues that Molibre stages The Impromptu of Versailles in such a way as to prevent
the obliteration of "performing realities even in the quest of the perfect presentation" (195).
25The Landscape of the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 60.
In dozens of letters to friends, in his compulsive confessions to authorities of the

Inquisition, Tasso displayed an obsession with retrieving a lost state of innocence-
a state defined not solely in orthodox, Christian terms, but as a lack of self-con-
sciousness, a condition of transparency in which no mediators exist between intention
and act, act and consequence. This fascination with innocence and transparency
emerges most vividly in his careful revisions of the Gerusalemme Liberata, which, as
Margaret Ferguson has suggested, aim at effacing the romantic clutter of the epic in
order to make its heroes transparent vehicles of their earthly authority, Goffredo,
and their heavenly authority, God.26 But it is in Tasso's pastoral drama, the Aminta,
and his extensive lyric production that he most brilliantly meditates on the ultimate
failure of his art--and perhaps his life--to avert a fall into consciousness, and the
inability, especially of those in power, to attain the posture of innocent spectators.
For in his play Tasso refuses to give what Guarini and those who followed him needed
the most: an innocent actor untainted by a consciousness of his theatricality and an
honest interpreter who stands safely outside of the play proper. The Aminta, as will
be shown, becomes a prescient attack on the dynamics of the baroque stage and a
clever and oblique anticipation of the arguments of the virulent Nicoles who refused
to believe in theatre's ability to "purify" its most impure and convoluted dynamics,
symptomatic as they were of a fallen age.
III
Perhaps the most salient example of the problematics outlined above is the recurr
motif in both Tasso's early lyrics and the Aminta of the young woman who is gazin
into her mirror or the trembling waters of a pond.27 In one poem to his regrettab
chaste mistress, entitled "He returns to show the mirror to his lady and descr
her beauty and the pleasure she has while gazing at herself," Tasso imagines la
donna enraptured by the image in which he takes such pleasure describing. As
gazes into the mirror "she seems to be saying to herself, how well do I see my grea
glory and rare beauty that kindles the fire with such sweet glances!"2s But it is prec
the word "seems" (parea) that calls attention to the uncertainty of Tasso's ac
representation and suggests that the poem's capacity to undermine-let alone
certain--"innocence" is severely questioned. Similarly, in Act II of the Amint
cynical Dafne who has been in and out of love countless times before describes
chaste, wild Silvia as a young woman who surprisingly reflects the growing corrupt
of the age. While talking to Tirsi, another jaded figure who emerges as a double
Tasso himself, Dafne at first warmly defends Silvia's innocence - "She is," she claim
"without art"-but then goes on immediately to add, "Yet I am no longer sur
26Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defences of Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), cha
3.
27For the relationship between Tasso's youthful lyrics and the Aminta, see Claudio Varese's brief
but informed discussion in Torquato Tasso: Epos, parola, scena (Florence: Messina, 1976), 171-74; and
for a brilliant discussion of the "specular" poetics of Tasso's lyrics, Antonio Daniele, Capitoli Tassiani
(Padua: Antenore, 1983), chap. 3, "Le meliche del Tasso."
28Torquato Tasso Aminta e Rime, ed. Francesco Flora (Torino: Ricciardi, 1976), I, 95-96. All citations
from Tasso will be from this edition of his selected works; translations are my own.
24 / Jane Tylus
Silvia is as innocent as her words and actions make her out to be" (II. ii. 128-130).
Dafne then describes a recent incident in which she watched Silvia watch herself in
a nearby lake: "She bent, and it appeared (parea) as though she was in love with
herself, and sought counsel from the water as to how she should arrange her hair,
and above her hair her veil, and above her veil her flowers" (135-140), and so forth.
This act of self-consciousness Dafne describes -the attempt to negotiate appearance
and thus deliberately (rather than unconsciously) tease and tempt her would-be lover,
Aminta--might seem to furnish convincing proof of Silvia's self-awareness, her con-
sciousness of the manipulative effects her seemingly chaste words and gaze have
on others. And yet the incident is related through the medium of the voyeuristic
messenger on whom the play comes increasingly to depend, a messenger, moreover,
who is none other than the (scaltra) cunning Dafne. The spectator cannot know
whether Dafne's own intentions shade and even shape Silvia's poisoning act of self-
consciousness or whether the event "happened" exactly as it is recounted. If Dafne's
intrusiveness, like that of the poet himself, makes objective knowledge of the lyric
object impossible, the viewer nevertheless is wary of Silvia when she next appears
onstage.29
The phenomenon of mirroring, and by extension, of mimesis, is thus rendered

immediately suspect because of its narcissistic overtones; self-knowledge and the
mimetic process that emerges from it would seem to be always and inevitably tainted
because they bring with them a consciousness of their own theatricality. But this
suspicion in itself separates the reader or spectator from the putatively innocent
character, whose own interiority is rendered, finally, inaccessible. Such inaccessibility
is highlighted in a series of lyrics in which Tasso plays on the "coming into con-
sciousness" of the feminine subject. In one lyric, written several years after the Aminta,
Tasso, using his pastoral voice of Tirsi, invites his ninfa selvaggia e fera to use him as
her mirror so that she might see her "true" self: "I hope to become a fountain from
weeping; so that you will see in me how beautiful and cruel you really are."30 Similarly,
in a madrigal addressed to one of Leonora d'Este's ladies-in-waiting, the poet asks
Amore to reveal at last to the lady her lover's sorrows in the wounds she has perhaps
unwittingly caused: "Oh beautiful and innocent murderess, it is time that love show
you now in your wounds our great suffering."31 But Tasso's donna can only achieve
such anagnorisis if she believes what love shows her in the first place-if she believes,
that is, in the mimetic value of the representations Tasso himself openly mistrusts,
which, moreover, he has led his reader to mistrust. This innocent belief in surfaces
and images, in turn, will lead to the inevitable end of such innocence-an end the
poem nevertheless refuses to enact, culminating only in the poet's request that Amore
29At stake in the scene is the dynamic Diderot would articulate in his Salons apropos of the painting
Susannah and the Elders: "C'est la diff6rence d'une femme qu'on voit et d'une femme qui se montre";
cited in Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980),
94. Fried's discussion of the "detheatricalization" of beholding in eighteenth-century French painting
has been critical for this essay.
30Tasso, Aminte e Rime, I, 168.
31Tasso, Aminte e Rime, II, 215.
show the woman (si mostri) the spectacle of others' misfortunes. Tasso leaves his
readers in the lyric suspension that is so characteristic of his verse, a suspension that
both allows the donna to remain in her putative innocence and leaves the reader
doubting as to the authenticity of her purity. And it is precisely this doubt that defines
the reader as cynical rather than innocent, a Dafne rather than a Silvia, who openly
mistrusts the veracity of representation.
Tasso's madrigal thus traps both reader and poet within the hermeneutic circle,
while mercifully banishing the pargoletta herself to its outskirts. But if the poetry
refuses to enact the fall into consciousness of the lyric object, the Aminta does enact
such a fall, and in so doing exposes the paradox at the heart of both the baroque
problematic and the response of the anti-theatrical writers to that problematic: the
only "proof" of the innocence which Nicole wished to protect and with which Guarini
hoped to redeem theatre is an unquestioning belief in theatrical representation itself.
Theatre thus becomes the testing ground for the posture of "naturalness" idealized
by Guarini and others. Far from desiring to transcend it, the true innocent remains
tantalizingly within the theatrical space. It is this ability to remain "within" and to
be moved by theatre's "signs" -particularly, as will be seen, by its stage props, which
double as a metaphor for the opacity of theatre itself--that distinguishes the Aminta's
eponymous character and his own, resistant ninfa selvaggia from the sophisticated
audiences both on and off the stage.
The plot of Tasso's drama is deceptively simple: the young shepherd Aminta is in
love with Silvia, who flees from any thoughts of romance and reduces the shepherd
to a melancholic, potential suicide. Finally, Tirsi and Dafne, who have been to court
and in love many times before, decide to intervene on Aminta's behalf, and lead the
unwilling shepherd to a pond where Silvia usually bathes after hunting. On this
particular day, however, Silvia has been seized by a satyr, and Aminta discovers her
nude, bound to a tree by her own hair. After being untied by her gallant rescuer,
an ungrateful and embarrassed Silvia rushes off to hunt; a tearful Nerina, however,
following Silvia's failure to return, rushes onstage holding a bloody handkerchief
and a (false) account of Silvia's probable death at the jaws of a wolf. The Pyramus
and Thisbe story emerges in full as Aminta hastens to his own death-he throws
himself from a cliff into the valley below-and Silvia returns unharmed from her
sojourn, only to hear of Aminta's suicide and to be transformed, finally, out of pity,
from a stern enemy of Amore to its impassioned devotee. She hurries to Aminta's
side to learn with relief that the shepherd is still alive, and the play ends with an
account by the elderly Elpino of the miraculous "resurrection" of Aminta and the
lovers' pledge of marriage.
This moving climax is possible only if Silvia's journey into "self-consciousness"

can be convincingly demonstrated, and, as has already been suggested, Dafne's
somber message of Silvia's narcissistic corruption leads the audience to suspect the
intentions of the ninfa selvaggia efera early on in the play. But just as suspicion operates
in divisive fashion in Tasso's lyrics, so it operates here; for in entertaining such doubt,
the spectator automatically steps outside of the realm of pastoral "purity." The entire
Aminta, in fact, might be said to unfold as an expose of the noble audience's aistance
26 / Jane Tylus
from an Edenic innocence.32 This expose relentlessly begins when the first character
comes onstage: Cupid, who presents the prologue, is disguised as a shepherd and
seeks the audience's complicity in hiding him from his domineering mother, Venus.
But the audience's complicity extends beyond the tacit agreement to acknowledge
Cupid as a dio nascosto--a hidden god, the term Lucien Goldmann would use to such
stunning effect in his suggestive writings on French theatre. For Cupid announces
that his real mission in the woods is to invade the hard heart of Diana's chastest
follower by adopting as his vehicle the very mechanisms of theatre: he will wait for
pieta to weaken her rigorous vow of "honesty and virginal abstinence," and "in that
point which is made softest" he will hurl his poisonous dart, cleverly disguised
a shepherd's arrow (Prologue, 62-67). This language, at once suggestively sexual
and violent, approximates the language of theatre's future opponents, who woul
assert the power of drama to enervate and relax one's defenses. Moreover, it is i
the guise of a shepherd, who has his powerful torch transformed into a rustic staff,
that Cupid portends to mingle, unnoticed and unsuspected, among the rejoicin
shepherds while they celebrate their feast days like the good citizens of Rousseau
idyllic Geneva. Tasso's Cupid thus cloaks himself in the "veil of honesty" against
which Nicole would warn: the allure of a theatre that attempts to negate its ow
theatricality becomes much more dangerous than a theatre that openly admits i
invasive potential.
And yet, of course, Cupid does admit his intrusive stance, although only to an
audience that becomes tacitly implicated in his furtive acts. The prologue unfolds
dichotomy that will resonate throughout the Aminta between those who can "rea
and therefore mistrust the signs of theatre and those who cannot -a dialectic between
characters such as Dafne and Tirsi, who are associated with the court, and those
such as Silvia and Aminta, who are not. Thus, despite the fact that only the audience
witnesses Cupid's intervention into the pastoral world, Tirsi and the members of the
chorus, who close each act with an often cynical commentary on the events that
have just taken place, reveal themselves to be fully cognizant of the means of dis-
simulation Cupid practices. It is a practice, moreover, which the chorus in its famous
lines following Act I recognizes as completely essential in a "fallen" world dominated
by the tyrant onore, or Honor. For in this passage, which precedes the disquieting
observations of one more "fallen" reader, the Satyr, the chorus sings an elegy for a
32This view is in direct contrast with that of Gianni Venturi, who maintains in Le scene dell'Eden:
Teatro, arte, giardini nella letteratura italiana (Ferrara: Bovolenta, 1979), 115, that the "idyll" of Silvia
and Aminta occurs in a space that "non e la corte ma e in vista della corte." But given the numerous
"messages" that dominate the play -the audience only hears of Silvia's rescue by Aminta, his plunge
from the cliff, and the final reunion--the point would seem to be precisely the opposite from that
which Venturi makes: the "idyll" is, in fact, never seen by the court, which is prohibited from
witnessing the most pastoral scene of the play. Two readings of the play that are more in line with
my own are those of Alain Godard, "La premiere representation de l'Aminta: La Cour de Ferrare et
son double," in Andre Rochon, Ville et campagne dans la litterature Italienne de la Renaissance (Paris:
Sorbonne, 1977), II; and Giulio Ferroni, II Testo e la scena: Saggi sul teatro del Cinquecento (Rome:
Bulzoni, 1980), who convincingly notes that "il mondo di Silvia e Aminta e completamente 'altro'
respetto a quello di Dafne e Tirsi"; (35).
golden age when theatricality and its mediating signs were nonexistent. One crucial
mediator is introduced into the first chorus, which will become particularly central
to the remainder of the play: the veil, a cursed obstruction that prevents modern
shepherds from glimpsing the fruit of their desires: "Then [in the golden age], the
nude, young virgin would display her fresh roses that now a veil conceals" (I. 598-
601).
For the drama's resolution is effected and the dialectic between complicitous spec-
tators and innocent protagonists developed largely through several encounters with
precisely these mediating objects-which double as comments on the fallen nature
of representation itself--Silvia's veil and the bit of torn cloth that Aminta leaves
behind when he leaps from the cliff. By the end of Act I, the audience has already
been disabused by the courtly members of the chorus as to the duplicitous, coquettish
nature of a woman's veil; the modern tyrant onore has managed to "veil the fountains
of delight, teaching beautiful eyes to gaze downward, and gathering in snares beau-
tiful hair once tossed to the wind" (I. 604-611). Yet if the cynical chorus expresses
an impatience with garments that insinuate themselves between one's gaze and
another's body, the play's innocent protagonists exhibit a fascination with the veil
and all it suggests as a result of their failure to perceive its mediating status. When
in Act III, the shepherdess Nerina brings onstage the torn veil of a Silvia whom she
incorrectly believes has been devoured by wolves, the garment will become for
lovesick Aminta the convincing sign of Silvia's death, beyond which he has no desire
to look: "Nymph," he cries, "give me, I beg you, this veil which is the only, pitiful
remnant of her I have left, so that she may accompany me for this brief space of life
that remains to me; so that its presence might increase my suffering" (III. 263-268).
Symbolic of a false message-and thus of theatre itself--the veil nonetheless con-
vinces Aminta to end his own life. More importantly, when another messenger arrives
with news of Aminta's "death," he bears the torn belt which he grasped in an attempt
to prevent Aminta's suicidal plunge. For the believing Silvia, overcome by a pieta
that the cynical chorus claims deceives only the semplici--the simple-minded -this
torn cloth demonstrates her own innocent belief in theatre's signs as absolute, or
more precisely, as fetish: "Unhappy belt of an even more unhappy master, the only
fate that remains to you now is to serve as an instrument of his revenge and my
torment" (IV. 287-292). Having realized, in short, her effect on another through what
love has mostrato, or shown, Silvia at once demonstrates her innocence as a reader
and unknowingly precipitates her own fall into self-consciousness. Upon reaching
Aminta's body, which only seems to be a corpse, Silvia reveals theatre's complete
power over her - for, presumably, the last time-as she is said to weep like a bacchante
(V. 102).
But for those already on the far side of a self-consciousness consistently described
in Tasso's play in cynical, jaded terms, the spectacle can have no power, can effect
no catharsis. Thus, when the final, courtly messenger of the play, Elpino, modeled
on the court propagandist Giovan Battista Pigna, reports in Act V that he watched
a man hurl himself from a precipice, he is also careful to describe Aminta's fall as
only una dolente imagine di morte-a painful image of death (V. 40). Halfway through
his descent, Aminta is stopped by quasi un tessuto, un fascio grande-literally, by a
28 / Jane Tylus
cloth or bundle of leaves and branches, which breaks his plunge and prevents his
death: "this restraint took so much impetus from his fall that it was not fatal" (V.
72-78). In recognizing in the tessuto or cloth its mediating role, Elpino locates himself
firmly outside of a realm where theatre has the power to persuade and move the
innocent: "We stood mute with pity and amazement from this improvised spectacle,
but"-an important but-""knowing that he was not dead, and that he was not even
about to die, we check our grief" (V. 81-85). Such foreknowledge and ability to
mitigate pity and theatre's potential invasiveness finally separates Elpino, and with
him, Dafne, the chorus, the courtly audience, and Tirsi (thus Tasso himself) from a
Silvia and an Aminta who are drawn together by their shared belief in the veil of
honesty.
This dichotomy is illustrated nowhere more clearly than in the scene where Aminta
rescues Silvia from the lecherous Satyr. The latter's flight creates what Tirsi, who
gives an account of the near-rape and heroic rescue, calls a spazio di mirare-a space
in which to gaze freely at Silvia's nude body. Faced with the possibility of viewing
Silvia's body untouched by a veil and thus by the mediations required by society in
an age of regrettable onore, Aminta nonetheless "does not raise his eyes to look at
her, denying to himself his pleasure as though to save Silvia the trouble of denying
it to him" (III. 110-112). Tirsi, meanwhile, carefully hidden behind a tree, "saw and
heard all" (III. 114). The invasive gaze of the courtier who earlier praised the Este
family becomes the voyeurism of the court itself, gathered not to avert its glance,
along with Aminta, but to penetrate a veil it knows as a nuisance, as a source of
obfuscation and delay.33 And the result of such "penetration" is a failure of catharsis,
the inability to become engaged in and by theatre's signs and the climaxes they
effect.34
Rather than facilitating an identification between courtiers and actors, between the
space of the court and the space of pastoral "innocence" described in Aldo Manuzio's
preface to the 1583 Aminta, Tasso challenges the prerogative of the court to invade
that space and appropriate it as its own. Tasso's theatre thus firmly and implicitly
rejects an analogy between an innocent audience and innocent characters, between
purity offstage and purity onstage. The final union of Silvia and Aminta takes place,
like so much else in the play, behind the metaphorical curtain, for news of it is only
brought to the stage by the messenger and elder statesman, Elpino. Like Dafne
watching Silvia watch herself, the audience is reduced to being uncomfortable and,
in this last case, frustrated voyeurs. Far from being part of the only real drama that
takes place-the gradual capitulation of Silvia-the courtly spectator of Tasso's
33In Act I, scene ii, Tirsi gives an extended account of the splendors of the Este court, which
includes this passage, of particular interest to the argument advanced above: "Oh, what did I hear
then? what did I see? I saw celestial gods, graceful and beautiful nymphs, new Linuses and Or-
pheuses; and even more, I saw the Virgin Dawn free of veils or clouds (senza vel, senza nube) as she
appears to the immortals, scattering rays and dew of silver and gold."
'Riccardo Scrivano points to this absence of catharsis in La norma e lo scarto (Rome: Bonacci, 1980),
226, although for entirely different reasons; he sees the Aminta as only "una minaccia di catastrofe"
which is never realized.
Aminta, like the white spectator of Jean Genet's Blacks, is barred from the central
action, while being made acutely conscious of its distance from an "innocent" state
of affairs and the invasiveness associated with the desire to witness, like Tirsi, that
innocence. At the same time, by placing his courtly audience in the posture of "good
readers," Tasso may also have been crediting it with the ability to understand and
interpret the manner in which a monarch - or a duke such as Alfonso II of Ferrara -
might seem to empower himself by manipulating the dynamics of the stage, by
placing himself in the role of a "natural" hermeneutician. Silvia in particular emerges
as the character most unable to protect herself from theatre's invasiveness, and on
a certain level the play finally reveals itself (or cagily refuses to reveal itself) as not
so much a consummation as a rape.
Yet Tasso's careful critique of what would become the baroque's desire to sanction
the link between nobility and a hermeneutics of innocence would be silenced in the
course of the seventeenth century. In 1632, Pierre de Rayssiguier would undo it when
he adapted the Aminta for a production at court, in which everything that Tasso had
consigned to the mediating role of a messenger was now displayed onstage: the
Satyr's attempted rape of Silvia and Silvia's rescue by Aminta, Aminta's suicidal
plunge from the cliff, and the final resolution in which the two lovers are brought
together. As Rayssiguier transforms Tasso's drama of veils and mediations into a
theatre of full disclosure, the charge of voyeurism subtly leveled against the Este
court is silenced, and the uneasy coexistence of pastoral and courtly spaces no longer
challenged. In this baroque version of the play, Rayssiguier subjects his courtly
audience to the very pieta which invaded the innocent Silvia, and at the same time
he makes that audience the privileged subject.35 He thus willfully ignores Tasso's
quiet insistence that within the ideology of power-an ideology which of necessity
must include the prince and his court-there is no such thing as innocence. And in
so doing, he sets the stage for the cry of a Pascal that certain kinds of theatre procure
too easy an entrance into the hearts of the true "innocents": those furthest from
centers of power and propaganda, such as, perhaps, Silvia and Aminta themselves.
35See Claudio Varese's disdainful remark on Rayssiguier in Torquato Tasso: Epos, parola, scena:
"[Rayssiguier] forzava il testo e tradiva il Tasso" in his failure to realize the extent to which the
Aminta depends on the play and exchange of two completely different levels of representation (184).

Political Innocence of Renaissance Drama

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Political Innocence of Renaissance Drama

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Veiling the Stage: The Politics of Innocence in Renaissance Drama

Author(s): Jane Tylus

At the heart of anti-theatrical sentiment in seventeenth-century Europe was a

3Nicole, Traite' de la comidie, 44.

"purely" and selflessly-the antithesis of a Machiavellian ethic13- and those, on the

This representation of the innocent spectator who appropriates time's power to

"Aminta di Torquato Tasso ([1583] Paris, 1584), 3.

In dozens of letters to friends, in his compulsive confessions to authorities of the

The phenomenon of mirroring, and by extension, of mimesis, is thus rendered

This moving climax is possible only if Silvia's journey into "self-consciousness"

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