LEAH WHITTINGTON. Renaissance Suppliants: Poetry, Antiquity, Reconciliation

Abstract

This splendidly provocative book offers the biography of a topos. It treats supplication, a surprisingly ubiquitous master-genre in early modern literature, as a site of both reciprocity and instability—a fragile discourse that offers a medium for reconciliation between unequal partners but just as easily threatens to open up new disparities between its participants. Whittington traces the genesis and evolution of supplication as both a social practice and literary event from Graeco-Roman antiquity to Milton. Renaissance Suppliants demonstrates, through close readings of Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Milton, how this literary topos (which transcends the status of mere literary topos) is transformed in its several iterations: supplicatory discourse in Renaissance literature is shaped by the legacy of past instantiations but is sufficiently malleable to engender unexpected recalibrations and twists. In Whittington’s conception, supplication represents a set piece, both paradigmatic and, in its uses and reuses, versatile. It negotiates asymmetry; it stages humiliation and abjection; and it reroutes the expected vectors of sympathy in unfamiliar directions. In each of its principal chapters, this study contextualizes the idea of supplication within illuminating cultural, political, and religious frameworks, and locates this presiding trope within discrete literary genres. Whittington is, avowedly, most interested in analysing deviations and abrogations from the Platonic paradigm of supplication: having carefully established the grammar of supplicatory discourse in the opening chapters, Whittington then dwells on the aesthetic and political implications that arise from the manipulation of that underlying grammar by three major writers: Petrarch, in his erotic poetry, in which supplicatory scenarios figure abjection and loss; Shakespeare’s dramas, primarily Richard II and Coriolanus, which detail the political and emotional costs borne by those who are supplicated; and Milton’s epic, whose vertical image systems, invested with Homeric subtexts and responding to seventeenth-century debates about religious kneeling, rethink hierarchy and foster, unexpectedly, the conditions for reconciliation. As the apotheosis of the supplicatory tradition, Paradise Lost finally makes irrelevant certain hierarchical distinctions through the paradox of God’s promise, in Book III, that ‘humiliation shall exalt’.