"Ottavas" and Spenserians in 1820s Britain

Abstract

In July, 1820, The, Literary Gazette published an anonymous satirical divertissement entitled Ballydehob featuring a Parnassus of contemporary practitioners of the rima: ... Frere, or Byron, Cornwall or Will. Wastle / four great masters of the rima' ottava (Anon., Ballydehob 476). By this date the Italianate eight-line stanza of iambic pentameters with two triple rhymes and a punchy final couplet had become a fashionable yet ambivalent form. Such ambivalence and its disturbing potential discreetly peek through the Ballydehob couplet. Whether inserted by the author or by the type-setter, the incongruous apostrophe after is a graphic marker emphasizing cultural difference. A few lines later the author duly dubs this metrical form an kind of strain (476) and yet, according to the list, the masters of this allegedly foreign stanza are all British poets. First master, John Hookham Frere, had been responsible for the renewed interest in the by way of his ponderously titled Prospectus and Specimen of an Intended National Work, by William and Robert Whistlecraft (1817, 1818), a parody of the chivalric narrative poetry of the Italian Renaissance mixed with Francesco Berni's and Luigi Pulci's burlesque reinventions of it. Byron comes next thanks to the magisterial reinterpretations of the in his medley poems Beppo and Dan Juan. list then moves on to Barry Cornwall (Brian Waller Procter), the poet linked to the Cockney group who gave two performances in the rima in his 1820 verse narratives Diego de Montilla and Gyges. last of the masters in Ballydehob, William Wastle, was the pseudonym under which John Gibson Lockhart published his spirited and ultimately incomplete poem The Mad Banker of Amsterdam, or the Fate of the Brauns in Blackwood's Magazine between 1818 and 1819. implications of this versified roll call are several. Through this extremely compressed couplet the otherwise negligible Ballydehob offers some novel insights into the cultural status of a metrical form that caused a commotion in a post-Waterloo literary market shot through with a range of distinctively cosmopolitan overtures. To be sure, this phenomenon has been the object of seriously sustained critical attention in Byron studies. Yet Ballydehob intimates that there may be further issues at stake that still require attention. Significantly, the list accords Byron no exclusive or privileged position in the field of rima. It also testifies to the surprising speed with which this form and its related satirical mode infiltrated the British literary field. Its mini-Parnassus highlights the crucial fact that the was a foreign pattern which, a mere few years after the publication of Whistlecraft, could be vindicated as a fully Aught lied form associated with a roster of English-language poets. In other words, this occasional text throws light on the as a nexus of interferences. In terms of literary hierarchies, it seemed to abolish distinctions between major and minor authors, while, from an aesthetic and cultural point of view, it was at the centre of a lively debate about its historical development and formal qualities. In an ideological-political perspective, moreover, it might be linked with either conservative or anti-establishment positions. In the context of narratives of cultural identity, then, the brought with it a lexicon of naturalization which was keyed to the organic and botanical metaphors (such as acclimatization, transplanting or engrafting) typical of Romantic-era discourses of cultural translation and cross-cultural exchange. A number of poets. translators, and commentators saw this form as problematically associated with foreign traditions (mostly, though not exclusively, Italy) and with Byron's foreignized literaty practice and outlandishly immoral character. Yet, just as often, it was discussed as an integral part of the national literary tradition and as a distinctive feature of its current poetical burgeoning. …