‘Fruition was the Question in Debate’: Pro and Contra the Renaissance Orgasm

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)Whilst the existence of 'a minor genre' of poems 'arguing against fruition'2 has been acknowledged for several decades,3 that genre (and its complementary antithesis) has received little serious and no comprehensive attention, despite its interest both for scholars concerned with the renewed exploitation of classical texts in the Renaissance and for those concerned with the representation of sexuality in times of uneasily shifting social mores. In both these areas, a clearer understanding can be derived from a comprehensive view of a generic field which has hitherto never been fully mapped.It was Dryden who said of Ben Jonson's relationship to the Ancients that 'you track him every where in their snow';4 in this essay, I shall be tracking the many travellers across the snow of a single first-century Latin text, the 'Fragment' attributed to Petronius Arbiter. I shall explore the shifting sexual politics of this text's intertexts as they represent or re-present their differing sociopolitical contexts and shall also examine the gender role-play of their protagonist voices, both male and female (and neuter). In Boileau's appropriately phallic metaphor for textual imitation, I hope to demonstrate how each contrives 'jouter contre son original'.5The Latin text was first printed in 1579 and fathered upon [Gaius] Petronius Arbiter, courtier of Nero, presumably because of his reputation as author of the Satyricon, first printed (in abridged extracts) in 1482, with further editions in 1499, 1520, 1565 and (in superior texts) 1575 and 1577.6 Amongst other sensationally explicit sexual adventures, Satyricon describes regrettable male sexual inadequacy; the ashamed Encolpius addresses his recalcitrant organ (I quote from William Burnaby's 1694 translation):At what time, raising myself on the Bed, in this or like manner, I reproacht the sullen impotent: With what face can you look up, thou shame of Heaven and Man? that can'st not be seriously mention'd. Have I deserv'd from you, when rais'd within sight of Heavens of Joys, to be struck down to the lowest Hell? To have a scandal fixt on the very prime and vigour of my years, and to be reduc'd to the weakness of an Old Man?, I beseech you, Sir, give me an Epitaph on my departed vigour; tho' in a great heat I had thus said,He still continu'd looking on the ground,Nor more, at this had rais'd his guilty Head,Than th'drooping Poppy on its tender stalk.7This exhortatory form combined with a parallel in Ovid's Elegies 3.7.13-148 to become a conventional trope, with English instances in Nashe's Choise of Valentines, Richard Head's The English Rogue, and 'Imperfect Enjoyment' poems by Etherege, 'Sir C.B.', Mulgrave, Rochester and Aphra Behn.9 Petronius's notoriety as the frankest apologist of unwilling failure of consummation may have made him seem the appropriate candidate for paternity of a fragment celebrating consummation voluntarily eschewed:...Carnal pleasure is brief and nasty, and the thing once done disgusts. So let's not rush blind and headlong at it like beasts on heat, for love flickers, its flame dies down; let's instead play like this endlessly, like this, lying lip to lip. There's no work nor shame in this; pleasure is and was and will long be here, where nothing fails and we are always just beginning. (My translation)The fully inflected Latin text offers us a plural ungendered speaker - 'irruamus iaceamus' (4, 7) - sexual forepleasure is presented as total gender fluidity (like the multiplicitously various couplings of Satyricon) in a timeless present ('sic sic sine fine' [6]) where there is no need to 'carpe diem', because foreplay brings no climax and therefore no Ovidian post-climactic sadness; the poem indeed professes a grammar of eternal delight - 'iuvit, iuvat et iuvabit' (9).The fragment found its first English translator in that dedicated classicist Ben Jonson:10. …