PENN STATE ROMANCE STUDIES m i d d l e b r o Present scholarly conversations about early European and global modernity o k have yet to acknowledge fully the significance of Spain and Spanish cultural production. Poetry and ideology in early modern Spain form the backdrop for I Imperial Lyric, which seeks to address this shortcoming. Based on readings of M representative poems by eight Peninsular writers, Imperial Lyric demonstrates P that the lyric was a crucial site for the negotiation of masculine identity as E R Spain’s noblemen were alternately cajoled and coerced into abandoning their I A IMPERIAL LYRIC identifications with images of the medieval hero and assuming instead the pos- ture of subjects. The book thus demonstrates the importance of Peninsular let- L ters to our understanding of shifting ideologies of the self, language, and the L Y state that mark watersheds for European and American modernity. At the same R New Poetry and New Subjects in time, this book aims to complicate the historicizing turn we have taken in the I field of early modern studies by considering a threshold of modernity that was C Early Modern Spain specific to poetry, one that was inscribed in Spanish culture when the genre of N i n e E lyric poetry attained a certain kind of prestige at the expense of epic. Imperial w a P r l y Lyric breaks striking new ground in the field of early modern studies. o e M t r y o d a e n r d Leah Middlebrook is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and n N S p e a w Associate Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon. i n S u b j e c t s leah middlebrook penn state romance studies series isbn: 978-0-271-03518-5 the pennsylvania state university press 90000 university park, pennsylvania www.psupress.org penn 9 780271 035185 state press ImperIal lyrIc PENN STATE ROMANCE STUDIES EDITORS Robert Blue (Spanish) Kathryn M. Grossman (French) Thomas A. Hale (French/Comparative Literature) Djelal Kadir (Comparative Literature) Norris J. Lacy (French) John M. Lipski (Spanish) Sherry L. Roush (Italian) Allan Stoekl (French/Comparative Literature) ADVISORY BOARD Theodore J. Cachey Jr. (University of Notre Dame) Priscilla Ferguson (Columbia University) Hazel Gold (Emory University) Cathy L. Jrade (Vanderbilt University) William Kennedy (Cornell University) Gwen Kirkpatrick (Georgetown University) Rosemary Lloyd (Indiana University) Gerald Prince (University of Pennsylvania) Joseph T. Snow (Michigan State University) Ronald W. Tobin (University of California at Santa Barbara) Noël Valis (Yale University) ImperIal lyrIc New Poetry and New Subjects in Early Modern Spain leah middlebrook the pennsylvania state university press university park, pennsylvania library of congress cataloging-in-publication data middlebrook, leah, 1966– Imperial lyric : new poetry and new subjects in early modern Spain / leah middlebrook. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “examines poetry and ideology in early modern Spain. Includes eight representative peninsular writers and one poet from the americas to demonstrate the shifting ideologies of the self, language and the state that mark watersheds for european and american modernity” —provided by publisher. isbn 978-0-271-03517-8 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-271-03518-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Ballads, Spanish—History and criticism. I. Title. pQ6081.m53 2009 861’.0440903—dc22 2008045779 copyright © 2009 The pennsylvania State University all rights reserved printed in the United States of america published by The pennsylvania State University press, University park, PA 16802-1003 It is the policy of The pennsylvania State University press to use acid-free paper. publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of american National Standard for Information Sciences—permanence of paper for printed library material, ansi z 39.48–1992. This book can be viewed at http://publications.libraries.psu.edu/eresources/978-0-271-03517-8 contents d Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1 Sonnetization: acuña, Boscán, castillejo, and the politics of Form 14 2 Otro tiempo lloré y ahora canto: Juan Boscán courtierizes Song 59 3 Imperial pastoral: Gutierre de cetina Writes the Home empire 103 4 Heroic lyric 138 coda: The Tomb of poetry 175 Bibliography 181 Index 189 acknowledgments d in quoting poetry in this book I have consulted modern critical editions as noted, modernizing some of the spelling. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. One important exception is petrarch; the trans- lations are Durling’s and are used by permission. parts of chapter 3 were published in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 78, no. 3 ( July 2001). I am grate- ful to the comparative literature program and the romance languages Department at the University of Oregon for granting me leaves to work on this book in 2003 and 2006, and to the Oregon Humanities center for a research fellowship in 2005. In addition to this valuable material support, this book has benefited from a rich intellectual climate. I extend my thanks to Barbara altmann, Juan Barja, John Bender, emilie l. Bergmann, anthony J. ­ascardi, David castillo, marsha collins, ­licia colombí-monguió, rob- ert Davis, carl Djerassi, cecilia enjuto rangel, leonard Feldman, Karen Jackson Ford, Dian Fox, lisa myobun Freinkel, edward Friedman, pedro García caro, leonardo García pabón, lynn Glaser, roland Greene, Timo- thy Hampton, elise Hansen, Gina Herrmann, Jill Kuger-robbins, Herb lau, Herbie ­indenberger, emily Taylor meyers, Sophia middlebrook, Keely muscatell, michole Nicholson, amanda powell, max rayneard, erin rokita, Daniel rosenberg, laura Schattschneider, Jill Stauffer, michael Stern, and David Wacks. The membership of the Society for renaissance and Baroque Hispanic poetry provided helpful feedback on parts of this project presented at meetings in 2003 and 2005. The University of Oregon emods gave stiff readings and crucial advice over many extended evenings. Thomas Dolack and Ignacio Navarrete each provided useful suggestions about translating some of the thornier passages quoted in the book. any remaining tangled syntax is the result of my own slow-mindedness. anony- mous readers for the pennsylvania State University press gave thoughtful readings and incisive feedback on the first draft of the manuscript, and I am grateful to the press and series editors for steering the book to completion. viii d acknowledgments Special thanks are due to a number of people whose careful reading, tact, support, and cheer extended far beyond what anyone should be allowed to ask, although this did not keep me from asking, or from receiving . and receiving. I owe great debts to Nathalie Hester and to Fabienne moore as readers and as friends, and to my husband, Norio Sugano, for support and patience. Diane Wood middlebrook read, considered, and talked over sentences, pages, and chapters of this book, patiently and at all hours. The book will stand as a testament to the emotional and intellectual generosity she extended me during the closing months of her life, as well as during the forty or so years that preceded it. Jonathan middlebrook, his hands full with other matters, set down his framing hammer and picked up his pen to address himself to the manuscript’s final complete draft. To each of my parents, then: Escrito ‘sta en mi alma vuestro gesto. This book is dedicated to my family—all of them. introductiond line-forms, and verse forms in general, are fundamentally discussable as mediations of relationships, as rules and orders of polities —Allen Grossman, The Sighted Singer, 283 This is a book about poetry and ideology in early modern Spain. Set in the era when Spain was developing from a peninsular monarchy to the seat of a pan-European and global empire (roughly 1526–1600), this book addresses a curious phenomenon in early modern studies: despite the fact that in the 1990s and the early 2000s the humanities began to move beyond the traditional focus on Europe to develop a global reach, and the role of imperial Spain in the Renaissance became central to our reinvention of cultural history, the scholarly conversation about early European and global modernity has yet to fully “place” the significance of Spain and Spanish cultural production.1 Imperial Lyric demonstrates the importance of penin- sular letters to our understanding of shifting ideologies of the self, language, and the state that mark watersheds for European and American modernity. As a second but not insignificant point, this book also aims to complicate the historicizing turn we have taken in the field of early modern studies by considering a threshold of modernity that was specific to poetry, one that I believe was inscribed in Spanish culture when the genre of lyric poetry attained a certain kind of prestige at the expense of the epic. The terms new poetry, new art, and new lyric refer primarily, in the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, to erudite sonnets and songs that were based on Italian models but composed in Castilian. In the pages that follow, I take up the conundrum that emerged when this new kind of poetry, composed 1. One recent and suggestive exception is Helgerson’s 2007 study of Garcilaso, Boscán, and the idea of poetry and empire, A Sonnet from Carthage. d imperial lyric in the “minor” genre that was the lyric in the sixteenth century, became synecdochic with the courtly Spanish elites. Until the early modern era, poetic prestige had been determined either in accordance with the ideas set forth in Aristotle’s Poetics, which privileged epic and tragedy, or through a discourse of plenitude of the type framed by Dante when, in the De vulgari eloquentia, he elevated the canzone over all other poetry on the grounds that only that form could capture “all that has flowed from the heads of the illustrious poetic minds, down to their lips” (2.3.41).2 Whether a given writer followed Aristotle, Dante, or various combinations of the two, poetic excellence was judged based on a given form’s abilities to preserve and transmit the traditions of a culture from its origins in the native past to the present moment of utterance.