Revisiting Byron's Italian Style

Abstract

Much has been written about Byron's indebtedness to the Italian epic poets for the decisive turn in his verse and his fashioning of the new idiom, 'the half-serious rhyme' (Don Juan, IV, 6), that was inaugurated by Beppo and was to reach its fulfilment in Don Juan and the Vision of Judgement. Ariosto, Berni, Pulci, the contemporary satiric poet Casti, as well as an improvisational aesthetics that characterised the sensibility of post-Napoleonic Europe, are deemed formative literary influences on Byron.1 Byron drew heavily, though imaginatively, on the Italian ottava rima medley tradition that was comprised of mock-heroic and burlesque works. Though it is difficult to determine the poet's immediate models, it is commonly agreed that Ariosto's juxtapositions and disjunctions, Pulci's mocking of chivalric ideals and heavily colloquial style, and Casti's satiric writing on contemporary European politics contributed to the configuration of the much-celebrated English medley style of Don Juan. Nevertheless, Byron might not have ventured seriously into the ottava rima mode had it not been for John Hookham Frere's Whistlecraft (1817) and other attempts by English literati of his time to translate, emulate, adapt, re-write and naturalise the Italian medley style. All these precedents furnished the poet with significant clues as to what could be done in ottava rima in English, yet Byron quickly moved beyond the ways and methods of the Italianists of the Murray circle - such as John Herman Merivale, John Hookham Frere and William Stewart Rose2 - and used the 'new style of poetry very lately sprung up in England' to riskier and more startling effect.3 In point of fact, a closer look at the circumstances surrounding the transplantation of this kind of Italian 'desultory rhyme' (Don Juan, XV, 20) into English soil in the early nineteenth century, and especially Byron's controversial engagement with it, uncovers arenas of ideological conflict that reflect the troubled political and social climate of the time. Beginning with the assumption that the use of a stylistic idiom can be culturally engineered, and can be systematically employed in the articulation of political positions, literary critics such as William Keach and Caroline Franklin have already tried to answer some fundamental questions in this area. In what ways did the tense literary and social climate after 1815 impinge on the reception of Byron's Anglicised ottava rima? How did the Italian burlesque style come to serve the conflicting purposes of, on the one hand, the harmless, jovial parodies of contemporary English mores by the members of the Murray coterie and, on the other hand, Byron's libertine, freedomchampioning satire?4 I want to take this discussion further by bringing into focus a number of texts that I hope will elucidate even more the political stakes involved in Byron's appropriation of an Italian form and style and his acclimatisation of these to current English concerns. Let me begin with an article that welcomed English adaptations of the ottava rima and awakened further interest in the Italian digressive romance, Ugo Foscolo's 'Narrative and Romantic Poems of the Italians', translated by Francis Cohen and published in the Quarterly Review in 1819.5 As an authoritative account of what the nineteenthcentury English reader should expect from the Italian serio-comic form, Foscolo's article provides a crucial context for the publication of Byron's ottava rima poetry.6 The seventy-page essay is a review of Rose's Court and Parliament of Beasts (1816) - a verse adaptation of Casti's political satire Animali Parlanti (1802) - and Frere's Whistlecraft (1817), a mock-heroic imitation of Pulci's fifteenth-century digressive anti-romance Morgante Maggiore. Foscolo's article opens with favourable remarks about Rose's and Frere's handling of their Italian models. Their adaptations are deemed ameliorative, shrewd and ultimately necessary ('Mr. Rose has condensed his original. …