Baldassare Castiglione's Love and Ideal Conduct

Chapter 1

Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER: Love and Ideal Conduct

Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier was quite possibly the single most popular secular book in sixteenth century Europe, published in dozens of editions in all major European languages. The Courtier is a complex text that has many reasons for its vast popularity. Over the years it has been read as a guide to courtly conduct, a meditation on the nature of service, a celebration of an elite community, a reflection on power and subjection, a manual on self- fashioning, and much else besides. But The Courtier must also be seen as a book about love. The debates about love in The Courtier are not tangential to the main concerns of the text; they are fundamental to it. To understand the impact of The Courtier on discourses of love, one must place the text’s debates about love in the context of the Platonic ideas promulgated by Ficino, Bembo, and others, as well as the practical realities of sexual and identity politics in early modern European society. Castiglione’s dialogue attempts to define the perfect Courtier, but this ideal figure of masculine self-control is threatened by the instability of romantic love. Castiglione has Pietro Bembo end the book’s debates with a praise of Platonic love that attempts to redefine love as empowering rather than debasing, a practice of self-fulfillment rather than subjection. Castiglione’s Bembo defines love as a solitary pursuit, and rejects the social in favor of the individual. His speech is also, in subtle ways, a rejection of women, and the threat of male debasement perceived

I. F. Moulton, Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century © Ian Frederick Moulton 2014 28 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century to be inherent in the love of women. The Neoplatonic theory of love outlined by Bembo was already fashionable in elite intellectual circles when Castiglione wrote The Courtier.1 But with the volume’s dissemination throughout Europe, The Courtier spread the Neoplatonic idealization of love to a much broader demographic than Marsilio Ficino, Castiglione himself, or the actual Pietro Bembo could have imagined.

The Uses of Renaissance Platonism Let us begin with one of the many products of that dissemination. In 1596, almost 70 years after the initial 1528 publication of The Courtier, Edmund Spenser published a collection of philosophical poems on the topic of love and beauty called the Fowre Hymnes. The Hymnes are paired; the first two, the Hymne to Love and the Hymne to Beauty, are based primarily on Classical philosophy and poetry. They deal with physical or earthly love and the beauty that is its object. The second two, overtly Christian poems, deal with the love of God and the beauty of Heaven.2 The first of the four poems, the Hymne to Love, provides an elegant summary of the conflicting notions about romantic love circulating in the sixteenth century, combining elements of Classical and Medieval poetic traditions with concepts from Classical philosophy and Christian theology. The first six stanzas of the poem introduce Love as a martial, tyran- nical figure, a characterization found most influentially in Ovid’s Amores3 and elaborated in Petrarch’s Triumph of Love and elsewhere.

LOVE, that long since hast to thy mighty powre Perforce subdude my poore captived hart, And raging now therein with restlesse stowre, Doest tyrannize in everie weaker part, Faine would I seeke to ease my bitter smart By any service I might do to thee, Or ought that else might to thee pleasing bee. (lines 1–7)4

As in Ovid, the speaker is a helpless captive, subdued and wounded by the mighty god of love. Paradoxically, the poet is grateful for his suffering, and his hymn of praise is an attempt to placate his master (lines 8–10). The hymn the poet sings blends elements of various classical accounts of Love’s genealogy and powers. There is little effort to reconcile these often conflicting versions. The poem simply runs them together and ignores the contradictions. For example, drawing on Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER 29

Diotima’s account in Plato’s Symposium (203b–d), Spenser asserts that Love is the child of Plenty and Penury (line 53), but whereas Plato insists Love is not a god (202a–e), Spenser begins his paean by calling Love, “Great God of might” (line 43). Spenser’s Love is not only a martial conqueror, but also a cosmic force of harmony; it is at once a principle of concord and a destructive flame of desire. Spenser attempts to separate the divine fire of love from the earthly flame of lust, but the distinction is weak: lust desires pleasure; love desires “to enlarge his lasting progenie” (line 105). But the two desires remain intimately connected. Spenser also tries to unite the desire for “lasting progenie” to the contemplation of beauty. Plato argued that earthly beauty could entice a wise man to contemplation of a higher, heavenly or ideal beauty. But once that mystical transition had been made, for Plato the body became irrelevant. Spenser, on the other hand, needs the body, for “progenie,” if not for pleasure. In another contradiction of Plato’s account, Spenser’s Love is characterized as an “imperious boy” with “sharp, empoisoned darts”—the capricious and destructive figure of Cupid, 5 not the divine radiance that Plato associates with the ecstatic contemplation of Beauty. Such paradoxes are ubiquitous in sixteenth-century writing about love. Spenser is well aware of these contradictions, and the speaker of the poem calls attention to them: Why does he honor a tyrant who abuses him and hardens his mistress’s heart against him? How can this brutal and capricious tyrant be “the worlds great parent, the most kind preserver / Of living wights, the soveraine lord of all” (156–157)? Is Love a child or an adult? A loving parent or a cruel tormentor? A force of desire that tears people apart or a source of concord bringing them together? Does Love subjugate or reconcile? Spenser finds ostensible answers to all these questions in Neoplatonism. A way of idealizing physical desire, Neoplatonic theories of love have their beginnings in Plato’s Symposium. The Symposium presents a series of speeches praising love given by a group of male friends enjoying a drinking party, or symposium. Socrates’s friend Phaedrus opens the dialogue by praising Love as the oldest and most glorious of the gods. Pausanias, a young man, beloved of Agathon, the ban- quet’s host, then makes a distinction between earthly love (physical attraction to boys or women) and heavenly love (a spiritual and sexual mentoring relationship between an adult man and a male youth). Erxyimachus, a physician, makes the third speech, praising love as a principle of universal harmony, active in the material world. Then 30 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century

Aristophanes the comedian recounts a fanciful myth explaining that in ancient times the original eight-limbed human beings were pun- ished by Zeus by being split in two, and so now people want to have sex to rejoin themselves to their lost halves. Next comes Socrates, who in his usual fashion turns the entire preceding conversation on its head by redefining the terms of the argument. Drawing on the teachings of a wise woman named Diotima, Socrates posits that love is a transcendent spiritual experience that can lead the soul to a contemplation of beauty and truth. And finally Alcibiades the aristocratic general reels drunkenly in and gives a speech praising Socrates as the perfect lover because he is both wise and possessed of superhuman self-control. From this summary it seems self-evident that the Symposium puts forth various competing and contradictory ideas about love. Based on the order of the speeches, their philosophic content, and the general rhetoric of the dialogue, it would seem that Plato endorses Socrates’s speech, and that it is intended as an implicit refutation of all the others. Early modern interpreters of Plato, on the other hand, tended to assume that despite their contradictions, all seven speeches, from Pausanias’s windy panegyric to Aristophanes’s joking myth, repre- sented the unified thought of Plato on the subject of love. Ficino’s famous commentary, De Amore, takes this approach, treating each of the seven speeches with equal respect. While this snycretic approach is characteristic of Ficino, who believed Platonic thought could be reconciled both with Christian theology and Aristotelianism,6 his attempt to unify the many discordant voices of the Symposium made early modern Neoplatonic theory even more complicated and abstruse than it would otherwise have been. This eclectic approach underpins the confusions about love, both Neoplatonic and otherwise, that characterize Spenser’s Hymne to Love and many similar texts from the period. All the same, the core doctrine of Neoplatonic love is based primarily on Socrates’s speech. He reports the wise words he was told by a woman named Diotima, “deeply versed in [love] and many other fields of knowledge” (201d). Diotima tells him that love cannot be a god, for love desires beauty. You can only desire something if you lack it, and no god could lack beauty; therefore love must not be a god, but rather an intermediary being. Love is neither good nor bad, ugly nor beautiful. After this syllogistic opening, Diotima shifts to mythology and allegory, saying that love is the child of Resource and Need (Spenser’s Plenty and Penury), begotten on the same day Aphrodite was born, and thus devoted to her service (203b–d). Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER 31

Socrates then raises an important question: What use is love to human beings (204c)? This question, which may seem disingenuous, lies behind much sixteenth-century discourse about love. Is there any benefit to being in love, or is it simply something we must suf- fer because we are physical beings? Diotima answers that, because love is an intermediate creature, hovering between ignorance and knowledge, it is an ideal conduit for ignorant mortal humans seeking enlightenment. She explains how this process would work in an argument characterized by a series of bold and reductive redefinitions. She begins by redefining sexual desire as a desire not for pleasure, but for progeny, a deeply problematic move, since sexual desire throughout the Symposium is presumed to be that of adult men for adolescent boys, and thus fundamentally non-procreative in any commonly understood sense of the term. Diotima gets around this obstacle by redefining desire for progeny as the desire for immortality—the only reason we want children, apparently, is so that some bit of us can live forever (assuming our children also go on to have more children). Thus reconfigured, “Love is a longing for immortality” (207a). But any notion of immortality based on the body must be illusory, because all bodies die. So Diotima posits that the only true immortality must be spiritual. She goes on to explain that the spiritual bonds between friends are much more significant than the (primarily physical?) bonds between parents and children. According to Diotima, true fatherhood consists in the spiritual bond between an adult man and the adolescent boy he loves (209c). This loving, mentoring, relationship is the true meaning of “progeny.” Rather than generating new bodies of physical children by having intercourse with women, the loving man generates new ideas in the mind of his adolescent male companion by educating him (209a–c). Despite the male-centered nature of Athenian society, Diotima’s misogynistic assumption that women’s attractiveness is merely physical whereas males can be both physically and intellectually attractive is remarkable. Not only is it reductive of human experience and explicitly denied elsewhere in Plato’s writings, the wise woman Diotima would seem to refute it by the very fact that she is both wise and a woman. In the Republic Socrates insists that women have the same intellectual potential as men (454d–e). But in the Symposium the cul- turally powerful notion that women are physical creatures and men intellectual ones is not questioned. The realm of true (spiritual) love thus becomes an entirely masculine one. Diotima’s argument proceeds: Ideally, what is beloved is not a particular beautiful body or beautiful soul, but Beauty itself. Love ought 32 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century to focus not on one person but on the contemplation of all manifesta- tions of Beauty. Spiritual beauty is superior to physical beauty, and intellectual beauty, the beauty of knowledge itself, is superior to the beauty of any one spirit (210d). From the beauty of ideas, one may come to the contemplation of Beauty itself, “an everlasting loveliness which neither comes nor goes, which neither flowers nor fades” (211a). And since truth is necessarily beautiful, the soul of Beauty must also be the soul of Truth, and therefore of Virtue—goodness itself. Thus, through this Platonic “ladder” of love (known as the scala in Italian), sexual desire is adroitly transformed into spiritual enlightenment. The physical becomes spiritual; sexual desire for transient bodily pleasure becomes a spiritual longing for the infinite. Rather than seeking sexual pleasure, “love longs for the good to be its own forever” (206b). Though logic is employed at various stages, this is not a logical argument. Diotima’s theory of love is rooted in sexual desire, but sexual pleasure, or simple physical gratification, has no part in her theory of sexuality. In her narrative, desire is never for pleasure; it is always for something else: beautiful bodies, beautiful friendships, transcen- dence. Her theory of sexuality explains the desire for intercourse, but not the desire for orgasm. For Diotima, sex is a desire to possess the beauty of others. What precisely “possession” means in this context is never clearly defined—Is it physical penetration? Social dominance? Intellectual mastery? Ownership? As already noted, Diotima’s discussion of procreation is particularly fraught—if sexual desire is merely desire for procreation, why would anyone be attracted to a person with whom they cannot engender children—as all the men in the Symposium are? And if “procreation” means engendering beautiful ideas, why is sexual desire necessary in the first place? Even in fifth- century Athens it was possible to educate someone without wanting to have intercourse with them. Then there are the many contradictions around the issue of gender. Despite being attributed to a wise woman, the entire discussion assumes that only adult men have sexual desires—this despite the fact that women, not men, are characterized as being the more physical of the sexes. Desire here is the desire to physically penetrate, or dominate, or nurture, or cherish a subordinate—someone younger, less wise, less powerful. Given the social circumstances that gave rise to the Platonic dialogue, this privileging of masculinity is not particularly surprising. It is the logical product of an aristocratic society of leisured and intellectual men whose strongest emotional bonds are to other men and whose preferred sexual partners are attractive and submissive younger males. Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER 33

Although its logic is often hazy, the argument’s aspirations are obvious; it is an attempt to idealize physical sexuality out of existence; it values the male over the female, the mind over the body, the ideal over the actual, and the enlightened individual over the hedonistic community. Socrates participates in the drinking party, but transcends it; this is the point of Alcibiades’s panegyric of Socrates that concludes the dialogue (215a–222b). Whatever use love may be, the Platonic love described by Diotima is useful as a way of idealizing and morally purifying sexual desire—in particular male homoerotic sexual desire for beautiful youths. So what is all this doing in Spenser? Theories that might seem relatively unproblematic in the homosocial and pre-Christian world of fifth-century Athens can seem very strange indeed when trans- planted to the court of Elizabeth I, a female, Christian monarch in sixteenth-century England.7 How can this homoerotic and mystical discourse be accommodated to heterosexual notions of courtly love, or the Ovidian idea that love is primarily experienced as physical suffering, or to the Petrarchan notion that the lover is the subordinate one, not the dominant? These contradictions do not admit of easy resolution. But the new market for printed books gave ample scope for them to be elaborated, debated, and explored. Plato’s Symposium was rediscovered and its ideas reinvigorated by Marsilio Ficino in the fifteenth century. Ficino’s De Amore, a detailed and extensive Latin commentary on the Symposium, circulated in manuscript in 1469, was published in 1484, and appeared in two Italian editions in 1544. It gave rise to a host of vernacular dialogues exploring similar issues. In the hundred years from Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Commento in 1486 to Giordano Bruno’s Degli Eroici furori in 1585, over a dozen major treatises dealing with Neoplatonic love appeared in Italy alone. They were written not only by humanist philosophers like Ficino, but also by churchmen like Pietro Bembo, and courtiers like Castiglione, as well as by Jewish intellectuals like Judah Abrabanel (Leo Hebreo), poligrafi like Giuseppe Betussi, and courtesans like Tullia d’Aragona.8 In the course of the sixteenth century, Abrabanel’s Dialoghi d’amore (c. 1502) appeared in 11 Italian editions; Bembo’s Asolani (1505) in 22;9 and Mario Equicola’s De Natura d’amore (1495) in 14.10 And these texts soon circulated beyond Italy as well. Bembo’s treatise was translated into Spanish and French, and Equicola’s appeared in two separate French translations.11 In her influential 1935 study of Italian Neoplatonism, Nesca Robb asked the relevant question: “Why did the Neoplatonic ‘trattato 34 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century d’amore’ become so immensely popular in the early part of the sixteenth century?”12 Robb’s answer is somewhat condescending: She contends that the trattati were the sixteenth century equivalent of tabloid newspapers and paperback fiction; they “combined a certain more or less superficial discussion of abstract questions with pictures of contemporary life and . . . exploited the fashionable philosophy much as our modern newspapers exploit psycho-analysis or the theory of relativity.”13 While Robb’s disdain for popular culture is fairly clear, her central insight remains valuable. She is right to point out that a philosophy that “emerged almost inevitably from that peculiar interplay of social and literary life” at Italian Renaissance courts was effectively popularized in the course of the sixteenth century, and was disseminated far more broadly and successfully than might have been imagined. The most basic answer to the question of why treatises on Neoplatonic love were so popular is simply the fact of the bookmar- ket. These texts became popular among the reading public because they could be published and purchased and read in vernacular languages in large numbers. Why texts on this particular subject? That is a more difficult question, but one may speculate. One thing such texts did was make elite conversations and debates about love, sexual attraction, and nobility of feeling accessible to a wide public. Did the trattati function as conduct books? Castiglione’s Courtier certainly fuses the two genres to great effect. Of course, however many books were printed, sold, and read, Neoplatonism was never a “popular” idea, if by popular we mean “widely believed to be true” or “broadly familiar across a wide range of social and economic groups,” let alone “commonly practiced.” Neoplatonic love was always a notion rather than a practice. I know of no evidence that anyone ever actually tried to follow the Platonic scala in any sustained and systematic way. The same cannot be said for the Imitatio Christi, the Spritual Excercises of Ignatius Loyola, or other early modern spiritual techniques and disciplines. In Neoplatonic writing, accounts of the progression from sexual desire to transcendent insight tend to be related at several removes. In the Symposium itself, this distancing is especially elaborate: We hear about the theory from Apollodorus, who says he was not present at the actual symposium, which occurred decades earlier. Apollodorus heard the story from Aristodemus of Cydathenaeum, an obscure follower of Socrates who was present, but did not participate (173a–b). So to recap: Diotima told Socrates, who told the banqueters, one of whom many years later told Appolodorus, who some time later related the conversation first to Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER 35

Glaucon, and then the next day to an unnamed friend (this last is the version recorded in the text). This is fourth-hand information at best, and indeed, it is never explicitly asserted that either Diotima or Socrates has actually experienced the vision of ideal Beauty she describes. Neoplatonic theory provided an attractive or interesting or eccen- tric idea of a way that sexual desire and spiritual fulfillment could be reconciled. It was not a technique that could followed in any practical way by any substantial number of people. Nonetheless it was an idea that originated among an intellectual and courtly elite that then circulated to a much broader reading public. And it influenced thinking about love and sexuality even if it was not followed as a discipline or broadly believed to be true.

The Uses of THE COURTIER The most widely disseminated text dealing with Neoplatonic love was surely Castiglione’s Courtier. In the sixteenth century the Courtier appeared in 62 editions in Italian alone,14 and it was translated into Spanish, German, French, Latin, and English as well. In London in 1588 John Wolfe printed a multilingual edition with parallel text in Italian, French, and English15 that one can imagine was used to build its readers’ skills in translation as well as to spread the text to as broad an audience as possible. There were also two bilingual editions in Italian and French.16 One thing Shakespeare’s treatment of romantic love in Two Gentlemen of Verona and elsewhere makes abundantly clear is that in early modern culture the Lover is always a scripted part—a role a young man or woman plays at certain times and in certain situations—a cliché complete with a costume, catch phrases, and habitual gestures. Castiglione teaches this, but his text also constitutes a fundamental reevaluation of the role of the lover in society. We are back to Socrates’s question to Diotima: What is love good for? How can its chaotic energies be made socially safe? What is the connection between love and self-fashioning? What is the relation of love to masculinity, and to power? The Courtier addresses all these questions in complex, ambiguous, contradictory, and at times disturbing ways. An incident, described in section 2.47 of the Courtier, is in many ways emblematic of the book as a whole and the social world it describes and negotiates. A close reading of the passage will allow us to identify several key principles underlying Castiglione’s worldview. A poor beggar approaches a lady, standing in Church after the Mass has ended. He asks her for money. She ignores him. He asks 36 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century again, and again, weeping and crying out. She does not look at him. Three gentlemen witness the interaction. One, who is in love with the woman, looks at her, and says to his friends:

You see what I can expect from my lady, who is so cruel that she not only gives no alms to that poor naked wretch who is dying of hunger and is begging of her so eagerly and so repeatedly, but she doesn’t even send him away: so much does she enjoy seeing a man languish in misery before her and implore her favor in vain. One of his two friends replied: “That is not cruelty; it is this lady’s tacit way of teaching you that she is never pleased with an importunate suitor.” The other answered: “Nay, it is a warning to signify that even though she does not give what is asked of her, she still likes to be begged for it.” There you see how the fact that the lady did not send the poor man away gave rise to words of severe censure, modest praise, and of cutting satire. (2.47)17

Several observations can be made: First: The story stresses the overwhelming importance of interpretation. The meaning of the lady’s response is determined not by the lady herself, but by the three gentleman watching. Second: There is no obvious correct interpretation. Different observers interpret differently, and their differing opinions are not reconciled. Third: The interpretations are subjective and tend to be self-serving. For the man in love, the lady’s actions are important primarily as they relate to his desire for her. Fourth: For all three gentlemen, the lady’s action is read primarily in terms of her response not to poverty but to love and pleasure. These aristocratic observers take a scene of social confrontation based on status, wealth, and class, and transform it into a discussion of love and courtship. Put another way, they see gender relations as more important than class relations. Fifth: For a man, love involves debasement. Because of his love for the lady, an aristocrat sees himself as analogous to a naked beggar. The other gentlemen do not question or contest this analogy, though they draw differing conclusions from it. It goes without saying that the Courtier is focused on social p erformance—and all performance is ultimately evaluated by an audience. The open-ended nature of the dialogue is also fairly apparent, even though many readers and editors over the years have ignored it in their Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER 37 search for identifiable precepts for successful social performance. 18 Even more than the Symposium, the Courtier is a multivoiced work that has a history of being read as an ideological unity. The Courtier is a record of four fictional conversations, held on successive evenings in the actual Ducal court of Urbino. Castiglione was a member of the court, but the conversations are imagined to have been held during a period when he was absent on a diplomatic mission to England, so he does not appear in the dialogue. Though the dialogues are fictional, the participants are all actual members of the Court, and the volume serves in part as a memorial of a particular group of people at a specific time and place. The four conversations that make up the four books are all part of an after-dinner game among the members of the court—to see if any of them can define the perfect courtier. The group involved in the discussion is large, and though one or two people hold the floor at any one time, many others contribute. The tone is subtle and sophisticated, and it is often quite difficult to ascertain what Castiglione’s own opinions are on a topic, given that speakers both for and against particular ideas make good points and express themselves in depth. The social setting of the dialogue is fraught, and the usual lines of authority that structure a Renaissance court are in disarray. The Duke, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, the sickly heir to a powerful father, is ill, and thus the court is without its leader. In the Duke’s place is the Duchess, Elisabetta Gonzaga, and so in contradiction of the usual gender hierarchy, the most powerful person in the room is female. The Duchess gives authority to Lady Emilia Pio to direct the conversation, but also decrees that the women should be silent and let the men do the talking. This creates an ambiguous social dynamic, in which men appear to have all the power, and yet are constantly being judged by their silent female audience. The topics and speakers change each night. In Book 1, Lodovico di Canossa, a Veronese nobleman, outlines the qualities needed by an ideal courtier, most famously, sprezzatura, the art of concealing one’s own abilities, so that difficult achievements are made to seem easy. In Book 2, Federico Fregoso tries to describe how the precepts outlined in Book 1 might be put into practice. This tails off into a lengthy discussion of wit and humor, in which Bernardo Bibbiena, the Cardinal and comic dramatist, gives various examples of jokes. The evening ends with a debate over jokes that impugn women’s chastity and morals. This leads to the topic of Book 3, the role of the court lady. Giuliano di Medici defends the status and abilities of women against a group of misogynist detractors, especially the young 38 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century and outspoken Gaspare Pallavicino. In early drafts, this is where the text ended, but the final version includes a fourth Book, in which the discussion moves to evaluate the place and function of the courtier in the world. Ottaviano Fregoso argues that the courtier needs to be wise and moral, so that he can advise and support his Prince. The discussion then concludes with the philosopher Pietro Bembo’s praise of Platonic love. As this brief summary suggests, the range of topics touched on in the ebb and flow of discussion in the Courtier is extremely broad. What has been underestimated is the extent to which various discourses of love underpin the dialogue throughout.19 Bembo’s praise of Platonic love in Book 4 of the Courtier has often been read as an attempt to change the subject, to escape the limitations of a courtier’s existence by retreating from the active to the contemplative life.20 The fourth evening’s conversation begins with Ottaviano’s attempt to define the Courtier as a wise man, a philosopher whose highest calling is to educate his master, the Prince. Ottaviano’s argument runs into difficulty on several grounds, the most serious of which is the Courtier’s subordinate status. The assumption that a subordinate knows better than his master goes against most of the justification for monarchy in the first place. Why assume the Courtier is wiser than the Prince? If the Courtier is a better leader, why should he not become Prince himself? And if he is not, why should the Prince listen to a word he says? Rather than grapple with these major issues, the conversation turns on a minor contradiction. A wise courtier is likely to be an old man, but the previous discussion has tended to define the Courtier as a young man, strong in battle and good at dancing. If the Courtier is not young, how can he be in love? This paradox leads Bembo to defend the notion that a wise old man can also be a lover. He elaborates a theory of idealized Neoplatonic love that has often been read as providing a shrewd way out of the impasse of the previous discussion: If the Courtier is ultimately subordinate to the Prince and has no real power to effect political change, he can nonetheless contemplate beauty and meditate on goodness. He can reject the social world for the personal one, and choose a private, contemplative life over an active, public one. But rather than changing the subject, Bembo’s speech is only one manifestation of an ongoing debate about love that runs like a coun- terpoint throughout the text. It is an attempt to have the last word in that debate, redefining love as empowering rather than debasing, a practice of self-fulfillment rather than subjection. In doing so, Bembo Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER 39 defines love as a solitary pursuit, and rejects the social in favor of the individual. His speech is also, in subtle ways, a rejection of women, and the threat of male debasement inherent in the love of women. Bembo’s speech turns on the relation of love to masculinity. To understand what is at stake in this relationship, one must look not just at Bembo’s speech, but the volume as a whole. Castiglione’s Courtier is a book that tries to define the indefinable, to put in writing things impossible to speak about clearly: grace, sprezzatura, honor, love. All these qualities benefit from being discussed, but not defined. Being a courtier, or a lover, or simply a successful, admired person, is not a matter of precepts. The dialogue form is essential to this enter- prise, because only the give and take of conversation can express the subtlety of the analysis.

Castiglione and Machiavelli The subtlety of the Courtier is especially striking in comparison to its more forceful contemporary, Machiavelli’s Prince. Although Machiavelli’s book and Castiglione’s are very different, stressing their similarities provides a useful reminder of the political context of Castiglione’s project. Where the Prince is all precept and can seem dogmatic, the Courtier is all example and can seem indecisive. The Prince is written in the imperative mode; the Courtier in the subjunctive. In part because of this rhetorical difference, the two texts have traditionally been seen as polar opposites.21 But in terms of the issues they face and the solutions they consider, the two books have more in common than one might think.22 Both are grappling with the loss of Italian political independence, and the fact that Italy’s great wealth and cultural sophistication have not protected it from foreign armies. The observation that, “many things that are evil appear at first sight to be good, and many appear evil and yet are good,” seems typically Machiavellian, but it comes from the Courtier, as does its chilling elaboration:

When serving one’s masters it is sometimes permitted to kill not just one man but ten thousand men, and do many other things that might seem evil to a man who did not look upon them as one ought. (2.23)

Indeed, this passage was Machiavellian enough to be marked for expur- gation by Sebastiano de Aiello, a late sixteenth-century Neapolitan censor of the Courtier.23 40 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century

Though the Courtier dances around difficult issues, it does not ignore them. When Ottaviano argues that no one ever consciously chooses to do wrong, Gaspare insists “there are . . . many who know well they are doing evil, and yet do it” (4.14); Cesare Gonzaga rails against old men, “some of the priesthood,” who use their power and prestige to sexually abuse their subordinates (3.40); and Ottaviano himself admits that among their “many faults,” princes are often ignorant and conceited (4.5). Perhaps the most ominous moment comes in a discussion of whether the Courtier should follow orders to the letter or make necessary changes to ensure a project’s success. Federico Fregoso tells the story of an Athenian engineer who was beaten to death for giving his master the materials he needed, rather than those he specifically asked for (2.24). At this point, the conversation adroitly turns to “how the Courtier ought to dress” (2.26). This decorousness has often been read as cowardice. All the same, like the Prince, the Courtier is a guide for living in a dangerous social and political world.24 The Courtier may be structured as a game, but it is not a trivial book. There is not just sadness, but desperation beneath the elegant surface. Surface is a key term. Like the Prince, the Courtier is concerned, above all, with the importance of surfaces: both insist that in political and social interaction appearance is often more important than reality. This insistence on the importance of appearance has caused Machiavelli to be accused of cynicism25 and Castiglione of s uperficiality,26 but whatever its morality, the insight that surface is often more socially significant than depth is resonant and particularly modern. Courtiers in Urbino would rather talk about dressing for success than contemplate a resourceful servant being beaten to death. But power relations are never far from their minds, and their discussion of fashion soon returns to questions of political and cultural dominance:

Italy does not have, as she used to have, a manner of dress recognized to be Italian. . . . Our having changed our Italian dress for that of foreigners strikes me as meaning that all those for whose dress we have exchanged our own are going to conquer us: which has proved all too true, for by now there is no nation that has not made us its prey. (2.26)

Even at the most seemingly trivial moments, the Courtier is concerned with the relations between social performance and political power. More specifically, Castiglione combines a meditation on political power with a debate about love, and by doing so, displaces social Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER 41 anxieties into gender anxieties. Both Machiavelli and Castiglione read power in terms of gender. Though Machiavelli is not usually thought of as a gender theorist, throughout the Prince he conceives of the world as an endless struggle between the masculine principle of virtù (individual will) and the feminine one of fortuna (events beyond individual control). He famously concludes that, while it is impossible for virtù to withstand the force of fortuna, one can nonetheless prepare for the inevitable catastrophe, and that “it is better to be impetuous than cautious, for fortune is a lady, and it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and dash her. And one sees that she lets herself be won more by these men, than by those who proceed coldly. For this reason, as a lady, she is always the friend of the young, because they are less cautious, more ferocious, and they command her with more audacity” (25).27 This brutal image brings together power, sexuality, and violence in a particularly disturbing way. For it suggests that power is ultimately sexual, and that sexuality is fundamentally violent.

Gender Dynamics Castiglione, of course, is much more overtly concerned with gender issues than Machiavelli, particularly with power relations between men and women. Indeed the very conditions of discussion in the Courtier accentuate the differing power of women and men. Since the Duke is sick and absent, the highest ranking person present is the Duchess, but she chooses not to participate actively in the discussion, preferring the role of spectator and auditor. Although her friend Emilia moderates the discussion, the Duchess asks all the women to be silent, and thus the speakers are all men. These arrangements, simple on the surface, create a complex and ambiguous power dynamic throughout the conversation. The absence of the Duke allows a fantasy of courtly autonomy, in which the male courtiers can speak in relative freedom, as if what they said mattered. The silence of the Duchess and the ladies allows a parallel fantasy of male autonomy, in which the men can speak in relative freedom, as if they were not answerable to women. But both these fantasies are negated from the start, for though the Duke is absent, his wife in present, and despite their silence, the ladies are listening. Like the woman importuned by the beggar in the church, the male courtiers are constantly being observed and judged. The presence of the ladies does not stop the men from speaking about women, or from speaking harshly of them. Throughout the 42 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century dialogue, Gaspare Pallavicino, an audacious young man who bears some similarity to the one described by Machiavelli, denigrates women so obsessively that at times he almost appears comic. Other men rise to women’s defence, and the third book is entirely devoted to a debate on the role of women in court society. These arrangements, and their implications for the status of courtly women, have been the subject of much critical debate, some arguing that women’s voices are stifled in the text, others that by the standards of the time, Castiglione is generous toward them.28 Whatever the power of women in the text, at no point in the Courtier is there any question of gender equality: the women simply do not participate on the same terms as the men. To understand the cultural valence of the dialogue’s gender dynamics, it is worth comparing the Courtier with the situation in Bembo’s dialogue Asolani (1505), one of Castiglione’s most influential models. In Bembo’s dialogue three young men pontificate about love as three women listen. Unlike Castiglione, Bembo feels compelled to defend his decision to have women present at all, even at a dialogue dealing primarily with the traditionally feminine sphere of love.

There are many who will blame me because I have asked women to participate in these investigations, since women should confine themselves to womanly duties rather than searching into these things. But they don’t convince me. For unless they deny that women have been given souls just as men have, I don’t know why women should be forbidden any more than we are to find out what sort of a thing they are or what one should avoid or pursue (3.1).29

The women in the Asolani do not always like what they hear. The speech of Gismondo, who argues for the sensual pleasures of love, is deeply undercut by the fact that, while praising the joys of a man’s love for a woman, he alienates and offends all his female auditors. Here, as in the Courtier, the fact that women are in the audience changes the nature of the conversation. By staging a conversation with women present, both Bembo and Castiglione ensure that even a solitary male reader of their texts will have to think of the impact of the discussion on women. This is a long way from having women speak on an equal footing with men, and the “women” are, after all, female characters in a male-authored text. But given the cultural norms of humanist discourse in early modern Italy, imagining women present at an intellectual discussion of politics, philosophy, and social behavior marks a modest move toward gender inclusiveness. It is more Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER 43 than either Ficino or Machiavelli would have done, and is a long way from the Symposium.

Speaking of Love It is only fitting that women should make up a large part of the audience for the discussions of the Courtier, for the conversation is rooted in the supposedly feminine sphere of sexuality and love as much as in the masculine sphere of war and politics. It is seldom remarked that the Courtier begins not as a discussion of ideal courtly behavior, but of gender relations, specifically relations of love and sexuality.30 At the opening of the volume, the nobles gather to choose a game for their evening’s entertainment.31 All of their options draw on the tradition of “dubbi amorosi”—fashionable questions about love.32 The first to propose a pastime is Gaspare, who suggests that everyone should tell the group a virtue and vice they would desire in their beloved (1.7). Unico Aretino flirtatiously proposes that everyone should guess the significance of an “s” shaped jewel the Duchess is wearing on her forehead (1.9). Ottaviano says that, since lovers’ quarrels are inevitable, everyone should say for what reason they would want their beloved angry with them (1.10). Bembo elaborates on this, asking each person to say whether it is worse to displease one’s beloved or to be displeased by her (1.11). The only proposal not dealing directly with love is Cesare Gonzaga’s suggestion that everyone should say what sort of folly they would choose to show in public, but even in this case one of the group pipes up and says, “I am already a fool in love” (1.8). Love, it seems, is all these people want to discuss. And love is assumed to be ubiquitous (at least at court): everyone, it seems, has a “beloved” to talk about. The group also see love as something that occurs only between men and women, although in early modern Italy sexual relations between men were common33—a fact that would have been obvious to all the actual members of the court of Urbino, but which is almost never alluded to in the Courtier.34 In the third book, Giuliano de Medici argues that women are the motive for all masculine cultural activity, the cause of dancing, music, poetry—“of all the graceful activities that delight the world” (3.52).35 He not only claims that all vernacular poetry expresses “sentiments inspired by women,” he also makes the astonishing claim that the same is true of Classical poetry in Greek and Latin. These characteriza- tions are an implicit denial of a homoerotic masculine world, both actual and literary, which was a major fact of cultural and social life 44 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century in sixteenth-century Italy. The elision of same-sex love is particularly significant in the closing sections of the text, when Bembo puts forth his theory of Neoplatonic, idealized love.36 But its absence resonates throughout. There are two powerful, complementary, and familiar fictions at work here: that heterosexual love is universal and that homosexual love does not exist. But in Castiglione, love is not a paradise from which the homoerotic has been cast out. It is instead, a site of bitter conflict. All the suggested games depend on the notion that love is primarily a source of strife, frustration, and embarrassment. The beloved is bound to have faults; quarrels are inevitable; relationships inevitably lead to disappointment and displeasure. The exclusion of homoeroticism insures that love is defined as a site of gender conflict— not least because it is the fundamental ground for communication between the sexes. Despite the relatively benign rule of the Duchess and Emilia, relations between men and women are assumed, throughout the text, to be primarily sexual and founded on conflict. This is not far from Machiavelli’s troubling suggestion that power is sexual and sexuality is violent. So when Federico Fregoso suggests that the group turn from the sad spectacle of gender conflict to an idealistic—and self-c ongratulatory— discussion of courtly perfection, everyone is delighted. And for a time it seems as if the masculine self-fashioning involved in striving to be a perfect courtier offers an escape from the folly, strife, and debasement of love. But the same issues soon arise in different forms. As the discussion grows and evolves through the first two evenings, it becomes increasingly apparent that discussing the male courtier will entail discussing the female courtier as well. And given the governing fictions accepted by the group, a discussion of the female courtier will necessarily entail discussing love. This in turn will force the dialogue to confront limitations on the condition of the male courtier. These limitations, taken up in Book 3, lead to the troubling questions of Book 4.37 Joan Kelly-Gadol and Carla Freccero have both read the discussion of women in Book 3 of the Courtier as a sublimation, a way for the male courtiers to safely displace the anxieties inherent in their subordination to the Prince.38 Instead of discussing the limitations on their own freedom, the courtiers debate the extent to which women are subordinate to them. Freccero and Kelly-Gadol are surely right about the displacement, but I question its “safety.” In the Courtier, the discussion of women is never far from the discussion of love, and love is not a safe place for men or women. Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER 45

Effeminacy and Subordination A perfect courtier is not simply a perfect warrior. He is in some ways a perfect servant. He is, in some ways, feminine. Learning to be a perfect courtier involves self-abasement as well as self-fulfillment. In fact, it defines fulfillment in terms of abasement. As such, it is not so different from being in love. And in the gender economy of early modern Europe, love itself is frequently seen as a fundamentally feminine activity.39 One of the Lady Emilia’s few actual contributions to the conversation is her definition of proper conduct for male lovers:

He who begins to love must also begin to please his beloved and to comply entirely with her wishes, and by hers govern his own; and he must see to it that his own desires serve her, and that his soul is like an obedient handmaid. (3.63)

The Courtier whose first concern is the profession of arms should have the soul of a female servant. Indeed, throughout the dialogue, the male Courtier is systemati- cally defined in feminine terms. At the very outset of the discussion it is quickly established that “the principal and true profession of the Courtier must be that of arms” (1.17). And yet, his martial role is immediately defined not in traditionally masculine terms of physical strength or valor, but on the feminine ground of reputation:

Just as among women the name of purity, once stained, is never restored, so the reputation of a gentleman whose profession is arms, if ever in the least way he sullies himself through cowardice or other disgrace, always remains defiled before the world and covered with ignominy. (1.17)

For all his purported martial skill, the Courtier is like a maiden safeguarding her virginity, or a matron defending her good name. The notion that a Courtier’s martial skill is primarily a matter of reputation is, to say the least, problematic. Ludovico immediately worries that some courtiers may build their reputations for valor “in small things rather than great.” And though he insists that the true Courtier will show courage under all circumstances, this stress on reputation leads logically to the infamous passage in Book 2 where the Courtier is advised to fight primarily where he will be seen to best advantage by his prince (2.8). Although this tactic might gain the Courtier some favor, it is definitely not a formula for delivering Italy from the barbarians. 46 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century

In any case, the Courtier’s warlike aspect must be subordinated to feminine standards of behavior, and military display is to be confined to the battlefield. “We do not wish him to make a show of being so fierce that he is forever swaggering in his speech, declaring that he has wedded his cuirass,” Ludovico says (1.17)—and the matrimonial metaphor is worth remarking. He proceeds to tell the story of a dour Courtier who refuses to dance and boasts to a lady his profession is fighting. The lady promptly humiliates him in front of the entire assembly, comparing him to a rusty suit of armor. This anecdote leads to the contradictory advice that the Courtier must be “exceedingly fierce, harsh, and always among the first, wherever the enemy is; and in every other place, humane, modest, reserved.” (1.17). In terms of impossible social performance, this rivals the famously oxymoronic precept that the Court Lady should participate in bawdy conversation so as not to seem coy, but carefully avoid any implication that she is herself lewd (3.5). The subordination of the male Courtier to the female, and his status as a servant could not be in greater contrast to the gender relations expressed in another of Castiglione’s acknowledged models, Cicero’s De oratore.40 Both the Courtier and De oratore are dialogues about power and self-presentation, and both share an elegiac tone. But the conversations in De oratore are exclusively masculine. Women are not present, and are barely mentioned. Though the dialogue is grounded on the friendship and mutual respect of the interlocutors, there is no overt discussion of anything approaching love or sexuality. The concept that women are the wellspring of all civilized male action is utterly alien to De oratore. The other key difference, of course, is that Cicero’s orators are freemen. Their very leisure to have a lengthy theoretical discussion is a mark of their free status. Courtiers, on the other hand, are subjected to their masters. It is an easy step to parallel the actual subjection of the Courtier to the Prince to his putative subjection to women. And this is exactly the dynamic that Castiglione is exploring throughout. He has taken the serious discussion of masculine power and self- fashioning as he finds it in Cicero, and placed it in the incongruous setting of a gathering of sophisticated men and women eager to talk of love. The model here, clearly is the brigata of the Decameron, a text in which nominal sovereignty is given to women, where the fictional audience is said to be female, and where love and gender relations are the central topic of discussion. One need only imagine the ghost of Cicero sitting between Fiammetta and Pampinea in the garden of the Decameron to see Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER 47 the incongruities and stresses underlying the urbane surface of the Courtier. I am not arguing that the subordination of violent, aggressive behavior is a bad thing, or that masculinity is somehow inherently violent—any more than femininity is inherently sexual. But these are the confused and conflicting ways that the most popular conduct book of the sixteenth century formulates gender identity. The feminization of masculine behavior is especially remarkable because the subordination of the male to the female is in many ways more rhetorical than actual. But in The Courtier, rhetoric matters. The world of the court, as we have seen, turns on representation and interpretation. Seen in this light, the precepts of the Courtier seem more and more Machiavellian. In the Prince, Machiavelli sees gender relations as crude and obvious, (Fortune loves aggressive young men) whereas political relations between men are marked by deception and social performance.41 Castiglione extends this Machiavellian notion of social performance to the sphere of gender relations. In the Courtier, both men and women are being asked to conform to their putative nature (men must be aggressive, women sensual), but at the same time, they must hide these “natural” tendencies. Women must be sensuous but chaste; men must be violent but civil. These paradoxes are at the heart of the debate about love in Book 3 of the Courtier: “Love” is only possible because of the social masking of men’s “natural” tendency toward violence and women’s “natural” tendency to sensuousness. If men do not temper their aggression, there is no love, only rape. If women do not temper their sensuality, there is no love, only promis- cuous sexual pleasure. Love, then, is built on a double contradiction, and involves complex and contradictory gender performance from both men and women. It is precarious, and fraught, and although desirable, it is a source of endless anxiety, uncertainty, and debate. In the course of the dialogue the feminization of the male Courtier is constantly urged, but never wholly accepted. It functions both as an ideal of social behavior and as a source of anxiety. As a servant, the Courtier may be analogous to a woman, but he must be careful that the analogy never become too apparent. Throughout the discussion the relationship is debated, affirmed, and denied. Certainly a rejection of this way of thinking underlies much of Gaspare’s misogynist bluster, as well as his attachment to the nostalgic notion of the Courtier as a valiant and honorable warrior. Since the Courtier is, after all, a debate about elite, rather than normative behavior, this anxiety about effeminacy is also related to issues of class and status. Ideal courtly masculinity is not just defined 48 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century against femininity, but also against lower-class, overly “masculine” behavior. This dynamic comes out particularly clearly in Federico Fregoso’s remarks on the way the Courtier should speak. He says that ideally the Courtier should have “a good voice, not too thin or soft, like a woman’s or stern and rough like a peasant’s, but sonorous, clear, smooth, and well constituted” (1.33).42 When defining proper masculine behavior, the extremes to be avoided are femina and rustico. The Courtier must find a via media between soft feminine delicacy and rough, animal masculinity. As Ottaviano’s discourse on the differing forms of rule makes clear, a distinction between upper-class rational men, capable of rule, and lower-class, naturally servile men, is crucial to the Courtier’s identity (4.21–22). In the Courtier, then, masculinity is seen not just as a performance— what Valeria Finucci has aptly termed the “manly masquerade”—but as an exercise in Aristotelian temperance. This was clear to the first English translator Thomas Hoby: When translating a passage describing temperance as the source of “true strength,” Hoby, generally a very close translator,43 translates “la vera fortezza” [true strength] as “true manliness” and gives it a marginal gloss for emphasis (4.18). Oddly, this “true manliness” attempts to take masculinity beyond gender itself—differentiating elite male behavior both from feminine sensuality and masculine violence. To make this work, “true manliness” must deal with love—the sublimated battleground between men and women, between violence and sensuality.

Bembo’s Speech The notion that ideal, elite masculinity is a form of temperance, almost beyond gender, finds its fullest elaboration in Bembo’s speech on Neoplatonic love.44 Bembo’s speech attempts to make love safe by purifying it, removing the taint of feminine sensuality and lower-class aggression to formulate an empowering love free of sex and violence. This is the opposite of Machiavelli’s notion that power is ultimately sexual, and that sexuality is fundamentally violent. When the Duchess commands Bembo to speak, she says that “a love so happy that it brings with it neither blame nor displeasure . . . could well be one of the most important and useful conditions that have yet been attributed to [the Courtier]” (4.50). How is love useful? As previously noted, Bembo’s speech marks a shift in the dialogue from a debate about how the Courtier can best advise the Prince to a discussion of how he can cultivate his awareness of divine beauty. Philosophically, Bembo’s speech reworks the familiar Neoplatonic Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER 49 theory of love originating with Diotima’s speech in the Symposium and recently elaborated by Ficino and in the actual Bembo’s own Asolani.45 My interest is not in what Castiglione adds to Neoplatonic theory, but how he deploys it rhetorically in relation to gender identity. Seen in this context, Bembo’s redefinition of love is marked by three related ideas: He attempts to separate love from the idea of subordination. He attempts to move love from the public to the private sphere. And he attempts to make love ideally masculine by having it transcend both feminine sensuality and lower-class masculine aggression. As the sun peeks through the windows at the end of the dialogue the success of these attempts remains uncertain, but their motivation is clear enough. The courtly love tradition, which the courtiers of Urbino inherit, already defined love as inherently noble and upper-class. Only a wellborn person would have the nobility of spirit to express their sexual desires through the civilized discourse of love. This courtly notion that love is beyond the capacity of common people comes through strongly in Bembo’s praise of Neoplatonic love: In the words of Hoby’s translation, Bembo wants to teach the Courtier to love, “contrarye to the wonted maner of the commune ignorant sort” (4.61) and to “shonn throughlye all filthinesse of commune love” (4.62).46 This idealization of love separates sexual attraction from physicality and from bestial or “lower” social orders. It is a way for the Courtier to show that although he is subjected to love, he is not a “bondeman” (Hoby 4.21), much less a handmaid. Bembo begins by defining love as “a certain desire to enjoy beauty” (4.51).47 This definition could encompass sexual as well as spiritual love, but Bembo quickly moves to sever love from sexuality by assert- ing that beauty is a spiritual rather than material quality, consisting of proportion and harmony rather than flesh and blood (4.52).48 Though one may disagree with his premises, Bembo’s discussion of beauty is relatively logical and precise. But he makes no similarly rig- orous attempt to define the other key term of his definition: “enjoy.” [fruir]. As we shall see, much turns on the ambiguity of this term. “Fruir” has an obvious sexual connotation, suggesting progeny and offspring as well as physical pleasure. Its root meaning stresses ownership: the Latin “fruor,” from which “fruir” is derived, means to have something at one’s disposal, to enjoy the use or profit of it. It is a word often used abstractly, but also has a very material derivative: fruit— something grown in the earth, plucked by the hand, and eaten. The sensuality (even practicality) suggested by “fruir” is in marked contrast to Bembo’s insistence that beauty consists not in attractive 50 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century bodies, but in proportion and harmony. As such, Bembo asserts that beauty can only be perceived by sight and hearing—the two least tactile senses. Therefore there is no such thing as a beautiful texture, or scent, or taste.49 It is worth stating outright that, traditional as this definition may be, it is nonetheless ridiculous. All human beings experience beauty with their senses of touch, taste, and smell. To claim otherwise flies in the face of commonsense (some would say this was a common feature of Platonic thought).50 In Ficino and elsewhere this argument is established not by logic, but by assertion in order to separate sensuous pleasure from love of beauty. Pleasure is mere stimulus. Beauty is moral. This line of argument soon leads Bembo to the ludicrous and untenable claim that ugly people are wicked and beautiful people are good (4.58). (In another universe Machiavelli rolls on the floor in a fit of convulsive laughter.) When the obvious objections are raised, Bembo can do nothing but insist he is right and forbid anyone to disagree: “You must not believe that beauty is not always good” (4.56). To judge by the way Bembo’s speech was strengthened and elaborated in the process of the Courtier’s revision, it seems clear that Castiglione sympathized with Bembo’s spiritualization of love.51 Nonetheless he always reminds the reader that it contradicts common experience. As Bembo makes his case, he is frequently opposed by the more cynical members of the company, especially the elderly Morello, who interrupt with commonsense objections: How can beauty exist without a body? Hasn’t everyone encountered attractive people who are cruel or unpleasant? (4.55). Isn’t sex the fundamental fact of gender relations? (4.63). As a cranky old man, Morello is a figure of fun throughout the dialogue, and rhetorically and intellectually he is no match for Bembo. But that does not mean that his objections are foolish in themselves. Bembo begins his discussion by restating the terms of servitude common to the courtly love paradigm debated in Book 3: “Let [the Courtier] obey, please, and honor his Lady with all reverence, and hold her dearer than himself, and put her convenience and pleasure before his own, and love in her the beauty of her mind no less than that of her body” (4.62). But, paralleling the arguments advanced by Ottaviano in the earlier discussion, Bembo immediately redefines the erotic servant as a moral teacher. The Courtier should “take care therefore not to allow [his Lady] to fall into any error, but through admonishment and good precepts let him always seek to lead her to modesty, temperance, and true chastity, and see to it that no thoughts arise in her except those that are pure and free of all blemish of vice” Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER 51

(4.62). This is a remarkable transformation, and we might wonder who in the worldly court of Urbino would believe that a lover’s dear- est wish is to strengthen his beloved’s chastity and modesty. But Bembo moves quickly on. In the same sentence he adds that the Courtier “thus, by sowing virtue in the garden of her fair mind, he will gather fruits of the most beautiful behavior and will taste them with wondrous delight.” The loaded term “fruir” has reappeared— this time in its homely derivative, “fruit” [frutti di bellissimi costumi]. The metaphor is significant: In a breathtakingly brief passage, the Courtier has moved from being imagined as a servant, then a teacher, then a gardener—a landowner. His Lady has shifted from being his ruler, to his pupil, to land that he will cultivate for his own benefit (“he will gather fruits . . . and will taste them”). The frantic, burning courtly lover is rhetorically transformed into a contemplative gentleman enjoying [fruir again] his garden. Sex has become husbandry.52 It is no surprise that the elderly cynic Morello quickly brings the discussion back to earth by insisting that relations between men and women are primarily sexual (4.63). But Bembo’s point has been made, and there is now no stopping him. After playfully allowing his chaste lovers to kiss (because kissing mingles the breath of the lovers, and thus is “a joining of souls rather than bodies” [4.64]), Bembo goes on to reject human interaction altogether. For Bembo love becomes a spiritual discipline—a sign of rational and spiritual self-control rather than the helpless hurt confu- sion that marks the erotic lover pierced by love’s poisoned arrows. Such discipline is by its definition not available to ordinary men, “whose actions pertain only to the body . . . [and] therefore are naturally slaves” (4.21). If sexual desire subjugates Courtiers, spiritual love makes them capable of rule. But since they cannot, in fact, rule (only the Prince can do that), the Courtier’s spiritual purification is marked by a move from the public to the private sphere. Contemplative love removes love from the sphere of human interaction—it becomes profoundly solitary, even antisocial. The image moves from gardening to hoarding: “He will always carry his precious treasure with him, shut up in his heart” (4.66). This is an odd conclusion for a book on ideal social interaction that began with playful talk of love. The treasure that Bembo hoards has nothing to do with bodies— let alone women’s bodies. The spiritual lover, he says, will soon feel constricted by contemplating “the beauty of one body only” and will go on to “form a universal concept . . . of that single beauty which sheds itself on human nature generally.” That is, he will reject the 52 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century person he initially loved and “will feel little esteem for what at first he so greatly prized” (4.67). This abstraction and universalizing of beauty allows Bembo to remove the feminine from love. The sexually attractive beauty of female bodies becomes little esteemed, as does the individual beauty of a woman’s character or virtue. Like the ideal masculinity formulated for the Courtier, the disembodied, spiritual Beauty that Bembo’s lover contemplates transcends both feminine sensuality and lower-class masculine aggression. It is refined, spiritual, and calm. There is some question as to whether women are capable of perceiving it (4.72–73). Bembo’s idealization of love, removing the taint of materiality from it, is also a way to masculinize it. It thus offers the courtiers a way out of the troubling contradictions of their existence as talented and ambitious servants. Love need not mean subjection to women, or a surrender to violent, “lower” passions. But in masculinizing love, Bembo has to also keep it from becoming homoerotic, and he does this by rewriting the Platonic tradition to make it heterosexual. This is, of course, a large departure from Ficino, Castiglione’s most important source, and from Plato himself. In Ficino’s De amore 6.14, men’s physical love of boys is specifically acknowledged and largely equated with men’s physical love of women:

Since the reproductive drive of the soul, being without cognition, makes no distinction between the sexes, nevertheless, it is naturally aroused for copulation whenever we judge any body to be beautiful; and it often happens that those who associate with males, in order to satisfy the demands of the genital part, copulate with them.53

Throughout Bembo’s speech it is assumed that beauty is female, and that its contemplator is male. Socrates’s love of male beauty has no place here, nor does Diotima, the woman who allegedly taught Socrates how to transform his sexual desires to a contemplation of abstract beauty.54 How successful is Bembo’s speech? Typically, although Castiglione’s sympathy with Bembo is evident, he leaves the question open. It is clear from Bembo’s rapture at the end of his speech that he is utterly sincere in his beliefs. It is equally clear that the less idealistic participants in the discussion, like Morello and Gaspare, remain uncon- vinced. When Bembo seems rapt in ecstatic contemplation, Lady Emilia teases him out of it by pulling gently on his robe and “shak- ing him a little, [saying]: ‘Take care, messer Pietro, that with these thoughts your soul too, does not forsake your body.’” (4.71) Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER 53

Castiglione may yearn for a life of transcendent contemplation, but he also knows that such a life is not compatible with what courtiers really do.55 This is a painful realization, and it is not polite to stress the painful aspects of life. Another of Bibbiena’s jokes makes the point:

We must take care, using our words, . . . to avoid those . . . that are too cutting. As where several had gathered in the house of one of their friends who was blind in one eye, and when the blind man invited the company to stay to dinner, all took their leave except one who said, “I will stay with you because I see you have an empty place for one”; and so saying he pointed with his finger to the empty socket. You see this is too bitter and rude, for it wounded the man without any reason, nor had the speaker first been wounded himself. (2.59)

Bembo may not be blind, but “keeping his eyes toward heaven, as if in a daze,” he is no longer looking at the world around him (4.71). Such a man does not deserve cutting words. So he is not refuted, only teased.

The Dissemination of THE COURTIER We have already alluded more than once to the enormous popularity and success of the Courtier as a printed book. Peter Burke’s Fortunes of the Courtier (Penn State, 1995) provides a detailed introduction to the topic of the text’s dissemination throughout Europe and the wider world. Given the vast number of editions,56 generalizing about the text’s reception is difficult, but it is broadly true that the more widely the Courtier circulated, the more it came to be seen as a reference work rather than a philosophical dialogue. This process was facilitated by various forms of textual apparatus, including indexes, printed marginal notes highlighting certain passages, epistles to the reader, and handy lists of qualities courtiers and court ladies should possess.57 With this editorial assistance, readers could ignore Castiglione’s subtleties and go straight for the practical advice. They could read the Courtier as if it were the Prince: as rules for success in a game of power politics. Examination of editorial apparatus cannot tell us with certainty how readers read a particular volume, but it can reveal what editors and printers wanted to emphasize, and what they thought would appeal to the book-buying public. Given the plethora of editions of the Courtier in the sixteenth century, there is no space here for exhaustive analysis, but some key trends can nonetheless be noted. 54 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century

Although Bembo’s speech concludes the volume, and Castiglione clearly took care to give him the last word, the text’s various editors did not tend to stress this portion of the text. If anything, Bembo’s speech receives fewer marginal annotations and index entries than other portions, and tends to be slighted in tables of contents and summaries of the volume. This may be because it does not directly and explicitly address the social concerns that made the text so popular; it gives no practical advice on how to dress and talk and act, and, as noted above, in many ways it constitutes a rejection of the highly social world that is the volume’s main focus. If Castiglione intended Bembo’s speech as a strong conclusion to the volume indi- cating the best way forward for a Courtier wishing to perfect himself, that intention was thwarted by the ways the text tended to be printed, edited, and annotated. In general, it seems, readers of the Courtier were not interested in learning how to renounce the world and contemplate abstract beauty. Bembo’s Neoplatonism was also rejected by Counter-reformation censors, who were disturbed both by its pagan origins and its argument that sexual desire could be spiritualized and purified. The one portion of Bembo’s text that reliably gets a marginal note is his description of the spiritual significance of kissing:

The Lady may in reason and without blame go even so far as to kiss. . . . The rational lover sees that, although the mouth is part of the body, nevertheless it emits words, which are the interpreters of the soul, and that inward breath which itself is even called soul. Hence a man delights in joining his mouth to that of his beloved in a kiss, not in order to bring himself to any unseemly desire, but because he feels that that bond is the opening of mutual access to their souls. . . . Hence a kiss may be said to be a joining of souls rather than bodies. (4.64)

The playful and ironic eroticism of this description is remarkable, coming as it does in the midst of a serious and philosophical passage arguing for the rejection of the physical world. It is not surprising that editors chose to draw attention to it, though it has little to do with Bembo’s overall argument. Many Italian editions of The Courtier incorporated editorial apparatus introduced in the 1540s and 1550s by that tireless editor Lodovico Dolce. The Giolito edition of 1546 (Burke 42) began the process by featuring a five page table of contents preceding the text. This table is reprinted in several subsequent editions.58 The 1556 Giolito edition adds an introductory epistle from Dolce to Nicolosa Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER 55

Losca, a noblewoman from Vicenza,59 followed by a 22-page index.60 The index items reappear as printed marginal annotations throughout the text. This expanded apparatus also appeared in subsequent editions.61 In Dolce’s table of contents, Bembo’s discussion of Platonic love in Book 4 is summarized as follows:

Whether an older Courtier ought to be in love What fortunate love is, that is blameless and brings no displeasure What love is and what happiness lovers may possess What beauty is What evil lovers run into when they impose their dishonorable desires on their beloved ladies Conditions that suit lovers Things that result from beauty and ugliness Whether women’s beauty causes as much evil as it is said to do Whether beautiful or ugly women are more chaste What ways young lovers need to govern their love to escape dangers Kisses as a union of spirit and body Whence come lovers tears, sighs, and gasps A subtle contemplation and argument concerning physical love and beauty and divine love and beauty and union with the nature of angels The effects of divine love Whether women are capable of divine love, as men are.62

Clearly, the table is a list of topics rather than a summary of the argument. It is a list of questions that tracks the subject of the conversation, but not the conclusions. For answers, the reader must consult the text itself; the table of contents thus serves as an enticement to read. Although this list focuses at times on some of the less promi- nent portions of the argument, it is nonetheless a fairly comprehensive review of the issues discussed. Drawing, perhaps, on the discussion of the Court Lady in Book 3, there is a marked emphasis on noting differences between men and women. By contrast, the 1581 Spanish edition, published in Salamanca, opens with a table of contents in which Bembo’s praise of Platonic love is summarized in much less detail than in Dolce’s edition:

Chapter 6: Tells how the courtier, being old, can love without hindrance. Chapter 7: Tells how the perfect courtier can love very differently than the common people do.63 56 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century

A comparison of the two tables reveals distinctly different approaches to reading Bembo’s speech. Not only is the list of topics in the Spanish edition much shorter, but the emphasis is all on social privilege—an older courtier is apparently free to act as he wishes, and courtiers are clearly distinguished from common people. An item that in Dolce’s table appears as an ethical question, “Whether an older Courtier ought to be in love” here becomes an assertion of a social preroga- tive: an older courtier can “love without hindrance.” In the Spanish table, the philosophical idealism of Bembo’s speech is entirely absent and what is stressed instead is patriarchal and aristocratic entitlement. Love is the province of elderly elite men, and is a source of liberty and distinction. Women are never mentioned. Whereas Dolce’s annotation is primarily designed to open the text up to readers by encour- aging them to engage with it, this edition closes the text down by providing a comprehensive interpretation. And while this interpretation is no doubt reductive, it does not fundamentally misrepresent the text; consciously or not, the Spanish table of contents highlights the ideological work of the Bembo’s speech—making love elite, safe, and masculine. In Venice in 1584 Bernardo Basa published the first officially expurgated edition of The Courtier, featuring an emended and annotated text that endeavored to bring Castiglione’s treatise in line with the dictates of the Tridentine reforms of the Counter-Reformation. Most of the passages expurgated in this and other censored editions consisted of irreverant or disparaging references to clergy or to scrip- ture. For example, a copy of a 1531 edition of The Courtier in the British Library contains extensive annotations by G. Rosati, “Revisor to the Inquisition in Florence,” that change the second book’s many jokes about friars to jokes about Jews by simply crossing out the word “friar” and putting “Jew” in its place.64 Besides policing disrespect to the Church, the censor of the 1584 volume, Antonio Ciccarelli da Fuligni, was also clearly uncomfortable with Bembo’s Platonism. In his introductory epistle Cicciarelli has the awkward task of simultaneously praising the volume to the skies and explaining why some passages have had to be censored. After comparing Castiglione to Cicero and Xenophon, and conceding that the Courtier has often been translated, and is read “with incredible eagerness”65 by all sorts of people, he comes to the point: Since “no earthly thing is so good that it does not carry some risk,” there are regrettably some passages in the work that “could give some occa- sion to take too much license and to use less respect than they ought, completely contrary to the intentions of that most virtuous Cavalier Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER 57

[Castiglione]” (A2v–A3r). So by ostensibly removing “stain[s]” from the Courtier’s “purity” (A3r), Cicciarelli is both saving Castiglione from himself and fulfilling the author’s own intentions. This patron- izing approach is picked up in Cicciarelli’s treatment of Bembo’s speech in Book 4—he simply asserts that Castiglione himself had no sympathy with Bembo’s argument: “In the margins of the Fourth Book those passages have been annotated in which the Author reasons according to the Platonic School rather than following his own opinion.”66 Cicciarelli does not cut anything from Bembo’s speech, but his annotations clearly indicate that he is leery of its pre-Christian approach to the divine, and is troubled that Bembo presents physical love as an acceptable entry point to spiritual love. Some of the marginal notes he adds to Bembo’s speech are merely informational, but others strongly augment Bembo’s critique of sensual or physical love. Bembo’s praise of kissing cited above is explicitly glossed as a “scherzo”—a joke, lest anyone mistakenly think that kisses were actually being praised.67 Ciccarelli also insists, as Bembo does not, that heavenly beauty is completely separate from the wretched physicality of human existence: It is, he says, “sincere, pure, whole, simple, not contaminated by flesh or anything human, nor stained by any other kind of mortal filth.”68 Glossing Bembo’s description of the miseries of sexual desire in section 4.52, Cicciarelli cites Boccaccio’s misogynist treatise Corbaccio or Labyrinth of Love, to amplify Bembo’s critique of physical attraction. This particular marginal note is considerably longer than most of the others in the volume, taking up almost all the available space on the margins of the page:

Here sensual love is attacked with effective words, as is the case in many parts of this Dialogue. The same concept was explained by Giovanni Boccaccio in his labyrinth, saying you will see, therefore, that love is a blinding passion that waylays the spirit, dulls the intel- lect, starves the memory, dissipates the sensual faculties, wastes the body’s strength. It is the enemy of youth and the death of old age, generates vice, and dwells in empty breasts, a thing without reason or order, lacking all stability, the vice of an unhealthy mind, that drowns human liberty. Consult both ancient histories and modern accounts, and see how much death, disgrace, ruin, and extermination this dam- nable passion has caused.69

This sort of selective and biased annotation is potentially an extremely effective way of controlling a reader’s path through a subtle and 58 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century multivalent text like the Courtier, where many opposing views are presented by different speakers, and there is no one character who reliably and consistently puts forward the views of the author. In the absence of a strong authorial voice, the interpretation of the text can be relatively easily dictated by an authoritative editor using marginal glosses. Passages like this make clear that from the point of view of the Counter-reformation Church, Bembo’s attempt to purify love from taints of effeminacy and subordination was simply untenable. For Cicciarelli, sexual desire and physical attraction are not worth transmuting or debating—they are just filth to be wiped clean. The index of Cicciarelli’s volume follows Dolce’s closely, but whereas in unexpurgated editions the printed marginal notes corre- spond precisely to the index entries, this is not the case for many of Cicciarelli’s lengthy annotations in Book 4—they are printed in the margins of the text, but do not appear in the volume’s index. Thus while “correcting” the text’s heretical Platonism in the volume’s margins, Cicciarelli takes care not to draw attention to it in his index. The Courtier first appeared in English in a 1561 translation by Sir Thomas Hoby. Compared to the multitude of Italian and French editions, Hoby’s English translation had a relatively modest print history. It was reprinted in 1588 as part of John Wolfe’s polyglot edition, and again in 1603.70 But the Courtier also circulated in England in a Latin edition translated by Bartholomew Clerke, first published in 1571 with subsequent editions in 1577 (twice), 1585, 1593, 1603, and 1612.71 Hoby’s English edition has neither a table of contents, nor an index, but it does have printed marginal notes. Bembo’s speech in Book 4 is fairly lightly annotated, and certainly the annotations do not call attention to anything unorthodox or provocative in the passage. Like many early modern printed marginal annotations, they point to curiosities or passages of general knowledge in the text rather than marking the development of an argument. The brief passage from Bembo’s speech describing the solar system (4.58), for example, gets the following notes in quick succession: “The worlde; The heaven; The earth; The sonne; The moone; The planettes.” The following passage, in which Bembo elaborates on the notion that human beings are a microcosm reflecting the larger universal structures of the mac- rocosm is glossed as follows: “Man; Aristot. 8 Phisic; Foules; Trees; Shippes; Buildinges; The rouffe [roof] of houses.” These notes call attention to things mentioned in the text, but a reader scanning the marginal notes would have no idea of the philosophical idea being advanced—that beauty in everything from the solar system to a house Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER 59 depends on the harmonious and functional union of necessary parts. Thus, though Hoby notes, in a particularly striking phrase, that “Beawtye severed from the body is most perfect,” he is equally likely to draw attention to the passing mention of “a mounteign betweene Thessalia and Macedonia where is the sepulchre of Hercules.” And pages and pages go by with no annotation whatsoever. As we shall see in the next chapter’s discussion of Mario Equicola’s De Natura d’amore, such seemingly random annotation was not uncommon in the early modern period. In addition to printed marginalia, Hoby also provides lists at the end of the volume of “The chiefe conditions and qualities in a Courtier” and “in a Wayting Gentylwoman.” The points made in Bembo’s speech receive little emphasis in either. In the list of the Courtier’s qualities, Hoby does state that

[the Courtier’s] love towarde women, not to be sensuall or fleshlie, but honest and godlye, and more ruled with reason, then appetyte: and to love better the beawtie of the minde, then of the bodie.” (371)

But in general these are lists of precepts to be followed, rather than a summary of philosophical points. Bartholomew Clerke’s Latin edition is lightly annotated compared both to Hoby and to most late sixteenth-century Italian editions. It has no index or table of contents, let alone lists of desirable qualities for courtiers and their ladies. There are sporadic printed marginalia throughout the volume, including a note on Bembo’s praise of kissing: “Osculum quanta virtutis” [How much power is in a kiss].72 Most of the prefatory material deals with questions of appropriate Latin translations for contemporary terms (Clerke defends translating Castiglione’s “burlas” and Hoby’s “mery pranckes” with the Latin “ludicra,” for example.)73 He is also understandably nervous that in dedicating his translation to Queen Elizabeth he might be suspected of presumptuously trying to give her lessons in deportment. The influence of the Courtier on the court culture of the Elizabethan period has been much debated, and although the text’s impact has at times been exaggerated, it was still a significant publication.74 Roger Ascham, tutor to Elizabeth I, praised Hoby’s translation in his tract The Scholemaster (written 1563–1564).75 Documented English readers of the Courtier include Francis Bacon, Nicholas Breton, Robert Burton, Sir John Cheke, Thomas Coryate, Thomas Dekker, William Drummond of Hawthornden, Elizabeth I, John Florio, Sir John Harington, Gabriel Harvey, Henry Howard, 60 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century

Earl of Northampton, James I, Ben Jonson, Mary, Queen of Scots, Thomas Nashe, George Puttenham, Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset, Edward Vere, Earl of Oxford, and John Webster.76 Given his interest in theories of both love and courtesy, Edmund Spenser was certainly familiar with Castiglione, though when composing his own account of Neoplatonic love in the Fowre Hymnes he seems to have drawn on a wide variety of writers on the subject, including Ficino, Judah Abrabanel, and Bembo himself.77 There is no definite proof that Shakespeare read Castiglione, though some have argued that he did.78 In any case, whatever Shakespeare did or did not read, by the late sixteenth century, ideas about love and courtly behavior similar to those espoused by Castiglione were a fundamental part of elite Elizabethan cultural discourse. Indeed, they were a part of common cultural discourse throughout literate Europe.