UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI PADOVA Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Anglo-Germaniche Scuola di Dottorato di Ricerca: Scienze Linguistiche, Filologiche e Letterarie Indirizzo: Anglistica Ciclo: XXII MICHAEL DRAYTON'S POLY-OLBION: A STUDY IN PERSPECTIVE Direttore della Scuola: Ch.ma Prof.ssa Paola Benincà Supervisore: Ch.mo Prof. Mario Melchionda Dottoranda: Sara Trevisan Abstract (English) This dissertation provides a study of Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612; 1622), a loco-descriptive poem divided into two parts consisting of eigh- teen and twelve Songs, respectively, each one being prefaced by an engraved map. The verse describes the topography of the English and Welsh counties and the historical feats that took place in the locations in question: the ”narrators” are local landscape features, such as woodlands, forests, mountains and valleys, but mainly rivers. In the first part only, each Song closes with a learned prose commentary by the antiquarian John Selden. The study’s purpose is to highlight the position Poly-Olbion held in the network of seventeenth-century and subsequent English literature and culture. It aims to bring together the fragmentary criticism and literary influence of the poem into a coherent view leading to a joint analysis of its contents and the history of its reception. It thus reveals, on the basis of a large amount of information, the interaction of synchronic and diachronic perspectives in order to discuss the poem’s matter in the light of contemporary and later criticism, and vice versa. The reasons for the many ever-shifting opinions on Poly-Olbion are related both to the times and modes of composition and to its content. The work is therefore first contextualised in Drayton’s life and times, as an essential milestone in the poet’s search for patronage and career, which also aims to provide an explanation of the difficulties the work may have encountered in the book market. An analysis of the two main topics dealt with in Poly-Olbion – the topography and the history of Britain – sheds some light on Drayton’s possible authorial intentions and his sources, as well as on the kind of readership he might have had in mind and the reasons for the work’s poor success (according to Drayton himself) in the book market. The use of topography is discussed as an organisational device for antiquarian matter, and is also connected with Drayton’s rhetorical de- scription of the land of Britain, fragmented among dozens of narrative voices belonging to the local landscape, and to the function of engraved maps prefacing each Song. A coherent picture emerges, uniting the map, the topographical content of each Song, and the single landscape features telling their stories, into an entity containing in itself space and time – connecting specific (present) places to specific (past) events, and unifying these two temporal dimensions. So, the single locality is at the same time historically separated from, but physically united with, the rest of Britain, a relationship that connects Drayton’s use of both topography and history. This issue is more likely connected with the almost contemporary debates on the Union of England (and Wales) and Scotland, a country which Drayton would have liked to describe, but never managed to. The role of Britain’s history in Poly-Olbion is first of all analysed in the context of the Drayton-Selden diatribe concerning the sources, methods and contents for the study of British history. Selden’s approach tends to dismantle centuries of Galfridian legends and stories, in order to restore the few reliable sources available for the study of a very fragmented and uncertain British history, while Drayton trusts the Old Welsh/British sources on which the Galfridian legends were based, which he saw as the remains of the knowledge the ancient Druids had orally committed to the song of Bards. A final, crucial point in the discussion, highlighting the issue of the union, or lack of it, of the kingdom is the analysis of the matter relating to the kingdom’s origins, especially with regard to the Saxons (English) and the British (Welsh) peoples. Drayton and Selden devote numerous lines to the ancestry of these peoples, as well as to that of the Danes and the Normans, demonstrating great knowledge of biblical, mythological, and fictional genealogies. What results from these networks of interrelations is a ”unified fragmentation” of the inhabitants of Britain, which also characterises its landscape. This amount of information on the Poly-Olbion matter is filtered through a survey of the large though uneven amount of criticism the poem has been exposed to through the centuries, as well as through an analysis of the work’s literary influence to date. Attention is brought on the ways in which the work was received: by being read in its own right, or subsumed under a specific socio-cultural label determining its meaning a priori – that is to say, the layers of meanings it acquired, or failed to acquire, in the course of time, because of changing literary vogues. Indeed, taking the years of Poly-Olbion’s publication as a starting point, this study is retroactive in its consideration of the sources, matter, and literary background, but also proactive, in its observation of the subsequent criticism on and literary influence of the poem, bearing in mind Drayton’s possible authorial intentions. In turn, the use of contemporary criticism and its approaches cannot but lead to a global retroactive view of Poly- Olbion – of the ways it should have been, would be, and actually was read and studied. The issue of a varied and discordant reception is actually one of the main problems Poly-Olbion has had to face. After a long gestation, the poem was published in two parts in the course of ten momentous years, and was believed to have been ”anachronistic” as early as the publication of the first edition in 1612, even by the poet himself. The ”perspectival” view this dissertation presents has therefore been part of Poly-Olbion’s story all along. Paradoxically, the criticism and literary influence of the poem from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century – what has been written on it, and the ways in which it has been understood – can be extremely helpful in order to study Drayton’s work and pin down its strong relationship with the passing of literary and cultural vogues. The dissertation contends inter alia that the analysis of the Poly-Olbion matter as filtered by its literary influence points at the poem’s importance as the model and apex of a literary genre – the topo-chorographical depiction of the land of Britain, whether in verse or prose – which, though deemed secondary, proves to have survived to date, especially via the contamination with seventeenth-century river and country-house poetry, as well as later loco-descriptive literature. These subgenres, in turn, testify, together with Poly-Olbion criticism, to Drayton’s views of the political and socio-cultural nature of Great Britain, and the ways in which they were read, understood, and elaborated upon by critics and authors in the course of four centuries. Abstract (Italian) Il Poly-Olbion (1612; 1622) di Michael Drayton e` un poema loco-descrittivo suddiviso in due parti costituite, rispettivamente, da diciotto e dodici Canti, ciascuno dei quali preceduto da una mappa. I versi descrivono la topografia delle contee dell’Inghilterra e del Galles, e i fatti storici che accaddero nelle localita` in questione. La voce narrante si alterna tra vari elementi paesaggistici, come foreste, montagne, valli, ma sopratutto fiumi. Nella prima parte del poema ciascun Canto si conclude con un commento dell’antiquario John Selden. Questo studio si propone di evidenziare il ruolo del Poly-Olbion nel quadro della letteratura e della cultura inglese dal Seicento a oggi. Mira anche a unificare la vasta e frammentaria critica e i dati sull’influsso letterario del poema in una visione coerente finalizzata a un’analisi con- giunta dei contenuti e della storia della sua ricezione. Esso fa inoltre uso dell’interazione tra prospettive sincroniche e diacroniche al fine di trattare della materia del poema alla luce della critica secentesca, fino a quella dei giorni nostri. Le motivazioni alla base delle varie e mutevoli opinioni sul Poly- Olbion sono collegate sia ai tempi sia alle modalita` della composizione e del contenuto. L’opera viene innanzi tutto contestualizzata all’interno dell’epoca e della vita di Drayton, in quanto pietra miliare della sua carri- era e della sua reputazione presso i mecenati. Questi dati si propongono anche di fornire una spiegazione alle difficolta` che il poema potrebbe aver incontrato nel mercato librario, difficolta` denunciate dallo stesso poeta. L’analisi dei due principali argomenti del Poly-Olbion – la topografia e la storia della Gran Bretagna – getta luce sulle possibili intenzioni autorali di Drayton e sulle sue fonti, come pure sul tipo di lettori che potrebbe aver avuto in mente e sulle ragioni alla base della scarsa commercializzazione dell’opera. L’uso della topografia in quanto stratagemma organizzativo per la materia antiquaria viene discusso e messo in relazione alla descrizione retorica della terra di Gran Bretagna, frammentata in dozzine di voci narranti, appartenenti al paesaggio locale, nonche´ al ruolo delle mappe che aprono ciascun Canto. Emerge cos`ı un quadro coerente che unisce mappa, materia topografica e singole localita` narranti in un’entita` che contiene in se´ spazio e tempo, collegando specifici luoghi (del presente) a specifici eventi (del passato), unificando cos`ı nel luogo queste dimensioni temporali. La singola localita` e` nel contempo storicamente divisa e fisicamente unita al resto della Gran Bretagna: relazione, questa, che collega l’uso draytoniano della topografia e della storia.