3.5. The Early 17th Century
3.5.1. George Chapman (1559-1634)
Of Chapman's work we shall mention his prefaces to The Complete Works of Homer translated by himself (1616). Chapman makes some remarks on the art of translation which show the developing conceptions of this art in the Renaissance. Translation in the Middle Ages was often not clearly distinct from commentary and imitation. Renaissance translation aims at fidelity. Chapman notes that a translator must determine the true meaning of the original, but his aim is to translate not only the sense but also the style. This is impossible in word for word translation, and Chapman defends a freer style of translation which uses periphrasis to explain strange meanings.
Besides, Chapman defends Homer in interesting terms. Scaliger and most Renaissance critics preferred Virgil to Homer. Chapman argues that Homer is greatest; he is powerfully original, while Virgil is a courly, painstaking imitator. Virgil is "gilt and embroidered silver", Homer is "plain massive gold." He also presents the traditional view that all the arts and learning are compiled or contained in Homer's works.
3.5.2. Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Bacon we may consider to be the first thinker in that line of English empiricist philosophers which includes Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume. In his Advancement of Learning (1605), Bacon presents us with some observations on poetry which, in spite of their being sketchy, foreshadow some future empiricist views of poetry. Poetry is definable in one sense as a kind of style (verse compositions) and in another as a kind of subject matter: "feigned history." Insomuch as it is feigned history, poetry gives satisfaction to man where nature denies it. Bacon links poetry to imagination and desire, and opposes it to reason; reason leads us to reality, poetry away from it, towards an imaginary fulfilment of unsatisfied desires --a view which will be much developed by Freud in our century. That poetry is purely imaginary and without correspondence to truth does not mean that poetry is inconsequential for Bacon: whatever has to do with desire has to do with morality, and so poetry has a moral responsibility.
Poetry may be of three kinds: narrative, dramatic and allusive or "parabolical" (allegorical, from "parable"). Bacon makes a difference between that allegorical sense which is used to explain something and that which is used to make something obscure. "Parables were before arguments," Bacon believes. But he opposes excessive subtlety in interpretation, which tends to find allegorical senses where the author did not intend them to be:
(38) in many the like encounters, I do rather think that the fable was first and the exposition devised than the moral was first and thereupon the fable framed. (194)
So, he accepts parabolical meanings when they are clearly intended to be there by the author. Again we find the concept of authorial intention as a humanist criterion of interpretation. But, Bacon says, we may also interpret these myths as a way of primitive thought --of thought which is not fully formed, and therefore not really "hidden" behind a fable. This idea refers us back to Strabo and forward to Vico. The critique of the allegorical theory is significant as a step further away from medieval views.
Bacon is also the first writer of essays in English, and the first to comment on the essay form, which he defined as "dispersed meditations."
3.5.3. Henry Reynolds (fl. 1632)
If Bacon looks upon allegorical readings with some suspicion, Reynolds is all for allegory, and he strongly opposes Bacon's disparagement of allegorical readings. We have seen that the allegorical view of poetry had not died out since the Middle Ages. Sir John Harington's Apology of Poetry prefixed to his translation of Orlando furioso (1591) still relies on the medieval doctrine of several senses or levels of interpretation, and of secret meanings hidden from vulgar minds, and so does Chapman. Reynolds presents allegory as the essential element in making poetry a thing of the mind, a way of knowledge, against those who believe it to be "a superficial mere outside of sense, or gay bark only (without the body) of reason." Formal questions such as metre, genres, etc., are accidental in poetry: what is essential is that the poets are teachers, they are philosophers in verse. Reynolds holds a neo-Platonic view of beauty and poetic inspiration (he follows Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) on Plato); it is significant that as late as this a learned critic can ignore the Aristotelian line of defense and indeed 16th-century Italian criticism as a whole. He believes in a tradition of secret learning which started with the Egyptian hieroglyphics and goes on with the Greek philosophers and the classical poets. Their writings are "enigmas and mystical riddles," conveyed with the clothing of allegory to protect learning from the ignorant multitude. He acknowledges, however, that even though Virgil was fully conscious of his allegorical meanings, Ovid does not seem to fully understand them. And this tradition of secret knowledge is lost in modern poetry, which is the work of ignorants. Reynolds is not content with a moral reading of epic and myth: he insists that the Ancients conveyed a knowledge of the secrets of nature through their allegories, that their poetry was science, real knowledge, while the moderns (the Metaphysical poets, at the moment) are satisfied with trifling stories of love. He makes some interesting allegorical interpretations of the myths of Demeter and Bacchus which are interesting as a missing link between medieval allegorism and modern myth criticism. The Ancients, he argues, could even attain to some indirect knowledge of sacred truths: their myth of the Golden Age is a glimpse of the tale of Eden such as it is told in the Bible. Virgil understood his prophecies, but Ovid only had dim glimpses of his own meaning. But of course they are far below the inspiration of Moses, who wrote under the direct dictation of God and is therefore superior to them. Reynolds' ideas on intention are somewhat confused themselves. This treatise is the last statement of the most extreme allegorical views of poetry.