Ecrivez-moi de Rome ...: Le mythe romain au fil du temps.
Kennedy, William J.
Arnaud Tripet. Ecrivez-moi de Rome ...: Le mythe romain au fil du
temps.
Etudes et essais sur la Renaissance 68. Paris: Honore Champion
Editeur, 2006. 538 pp. index, illus. tbls. bibl. [euro]51. ISBN:
2-7453-1386-X.
Arnaud Tripet's book ranges widely across literary
representations of Rome from antiquity to the present, analyzing major
texts, from Virgil and Horace to Alberto Moravia and Michel Butor, as
symptomatic expressions of contemporary attitudes toward the Eternal
City. As might be expected from the author of earlier studies on
Petrarch, Montaigne, and humanism, the book's dominant chapters
address Renaissance views of Rome. They do so in an engaging,
idiosyncratic way. Possessing enormous erudition that spans Western
culture, Tripet dispenses with the usual trappings of scholarly
footnotes in favor of a (highly) selective bibliography appended to the
end of the volume. He likewise dispenses with any effort to pursue a
single thesis as he offers, in separate chapters, variously detailed
readings of complex lyric, narrative, and dramatic texts. These readings
provide intelligent, supple, consistently illuminating insights into
each author's evolving relationship with the highly charged, highly
mobile myth of Rome. The sum, it turns out, equals the best of its
parts, and they are many.
Tripet's consideration of the Renaissance begins with a
chapter on authors at the beginning and near the end of the period:
Petrarch and Montaigne. Both writers sought a retreat from public life:
Petrarch at Vaucluse and Arqua, where he contemplated ancient values as
a refuge from, and a solution to, clerical abuses in papal Avignon;
Montaigne at his chateau on the Dordogne, where he greeted many of these
ancient values with skepticism but allowed his sense of their historical
distance to clarify his response to the crisis of the French Wars of
Religion. The next chapter offers the book's lengthiest treatment
of a single author with its focus on Du Bellay's Antiquites de Rome
and Les Regrets. Perhaps for its detailed focus, I value it as the
highlight of the volume. Tripet makes a genuine contribution toward
explicating many unappreciated subtleties of Du Bellay's poetry, as
he analyzes the tensions that it sustains between suggesting visual
images of past and present Rome, while yet offering a sophisticated
critique of the latter through elusive imitations of classical verse and
contemporaneous satire. Tripet's examination of Du Bellay's
thematic structure in these sequences and of its relationship to the
author's ideas about literary purposiveness, as already sketched in
his Deffence et illustration, is particularly valuable.
Shakespeare's representation of Rome in Julius Caesar, Antony
and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus occupies the book's fourth chapter.
Against the sheer volume of scholarship and criticism on these plays,
Tripet's unfettered approach allows his argument to find a new
direction. Each play dramatizes a turning point in ancient Roman
history, but in each play this point redirects its historical players
back to a status ante quem. In Julius Caesar, the forces that march
against tyranny wind up accelerating tyranny as civil war marks the end
of the Roman Republic. In Antony and Cleopatra, the ascendant Roman
Empire demolishes the world order envisioned by its hero in a
countervailing form of extravagance. In Coriolanus, strategically
reverting to the dawn of the Republic, the hero manages to oppose the
mediocrity of the new order to itself and, thereby, to undo the gains
that he had fought so hard to achieve.
Two subchapters on the Roman tragedies of Corneille and Racine
offer contrasting analogues to Shakespeare's treatment of history.
In Horace, Cinna, and Polyeucte, Corneille dramatizes the impact of
sacrifice and self-sacrifice upon the collective state. Taking his cue
from a Jesuit culture of rhetoric that privileged ancient Rome as a
model of heroism and magnanimity, the playwright represents the ordeal
of the Horatii at the foundational birth of the republic, the pardoning
of Cinna upon the birth of the empire, and the martyrdom of Polyeucte
upon the rise of Christianity. Conversely, Racine dramatizes problems
that issue from the concentration of power and domination in the hands
of a single ruler during Rome's imperial age. In Britannicus, Rome
is compromised when young Nero takes every opportunity to reinforce his
personal control and self-control. In Berenice, Rome compromises Titus
when it bends him to its laws and customs, destroying his personal
ambitions and his love for the heroine.
The nearly three hundred pages of this book that address topics in
the Italian, French, and English Renaissance present fresh insights,
arresting comparisons, and illuminating close readings. Grounding his
analysis in scholarship, though not belaboring his own research, and
refusing to construct a metanarrative that neatly resolves differences
among its key players, Tripet offers us a long, sometimes provocative
view of a long, always provocative history.
WILLIAM J. KENNEDY
Cornell University
