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written permission from the JHU Press. The obvious debts to Homer and Virgil in Mil ton's Bee Simile were initially recorded in Patrick Hume's "Notes on Paradise Lost" (1695), though the extended comparison was argued nearly a generation ago as referring us obliquely to Shakespeare and Spenser. In the following essay, I shall briefly review arguments made by Harold Bloom and taken up most conspicuously by John Hollander and John Guillory, for two reasons. First I would like first to demonstrate that, as the Bee simile metamorphoses over nearly thirty lines, it also alludes to Renaissance and classical precedents hitherto unsounded. Secondly, I would like to breathe new life into the question: what is the difference between a source and an intertext? I have reservations about the validity of the latter as a concept supplanting the former term for literary critics, though my qualms are voiced from the inside, for in my analysis of Milton's passage I, too, hear echoes, but of Tasso. In conclusion, I argue that the strategies of the source-hunters and intertextualists on Milton are worth revisiting, not in order to reiterate that the difference hangs on a changed understanding of how language functions, but to suggest that our ability to recognize an intertext, as an extension of our ability to recognize a source, is a working out of an aesthetic response to literature.
Bloom dubbed the bravura gesture of Paradise Lost towards its literary past as transumptive, and, followed by Hollander and Guillory, he uses the rhetorical trope of transumption or metalepsis to discuss a Miltonic style. Although a study of trope as defined by the rhetorical treatises would not lead the aspiring orator to suspect it was more than a curiosity, the trope is far more important for literary critics. 1 Because it involves a doubling of figures, or denotes a way of referring to something by the omission of an [End Page 122] intermediate step, transumption has been linked with allusion in general, as opposed to a more direct kind of citation. Yet the intermediate, skipped-over step becomes a bone of contention in the attempt to identify the missing intertext: are the "Faerie Elves" of the Bee simile meant to put us in mind of The Faerie Queene or A Midsummer's Night Dream?
All three critics tacitly agree that the epic simile is the crucial site wherein to spot the operation of the rhetorical trope, which they employ as a hallmark for discussing the larger implications of a transumptive style. Bloom's Map of Misreading (1975) boldly attri butes to the Oedipal burden weighing on the Milton's shoulders the impetus behind his casting off or transuming Spenser. Hollander's Figure of Echo (1981) more prudently worries the differing varieties of literary echo in order to evoke the numerous resonances in Paradise Lost, not only of The Faerie Queene, but of Shakespearean drama as well. Guillory's Poetic Author ity (1983) inverts Bloom's formula in order to claim that Milton's transumption of his forebear represents an effort to draw himself closer to, rather than to distance himself from, Spenser, but at the expense of denying his obligations to Shakespeare.
On the one hand, their collective insight gives us pause over the explicit reference to Odyssean wanderings in Paradise Lost's voyage from Hell to Eden, for beneath the voice of Milton's Satan we also hear the undertones of another Odysseus. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare's Ulysses is pleased to espouse a universal chain of command so long as his position relative to Agamemnon is superior to that of Achilles: "The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre / Observe degree, priority, and place" (1.3.85-6). It suits Satan likewise, when addressing his inferiors, to remind them that "Orders and Degrees / Jar not with liberty" (5.792-3), though the point is promptly forgotten in the boast that he is "self-begot, self-raised" (5.860). Satan's plaint, furthermore, that the mind "Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n" (1.255) uncannily recalls not only the introspection of Faustus and Hamlet, but the twin pursuits of the lover and the beloved from A Midsummer's Night Dream: Helena's "That he hath turn'd a heaven unto a hell!" (1.1.207) and Hermia's "I'll follow thee and make a heaven of hell" (2.1.243).
On the other hand, the transumptive trope, because it invariably involves something omitted, tends toward fuzziness. How do we agree on what Milton is leaving out as a result of his allusiveness, or how exactly it is being omitted? Though Bloom, Hollander, and Guillory concur that it is by virtue of transumption that we hear echoes in Paradise Lost of other poetry, they are hardly in agreement about what to do with the echoes they hear. John Shawcross, moreover, suggests their hearing needs to be inspected, since "a historically critical assessment of Milton's debts to Shakespeare . . . [has] yet to be engaged" (Shawcross, Influence 30). In an earlier essay, however, Shawcross himself adduced the affinity between Milton's passage and analogues in Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, though the travelogue and natural history were brought forward, not on the assumption that texts refer only to other texts, but only as two additional sources, which, contributing to Milton's encyclopedic range of learning, "may have emerged" in the poem (Shawcross, "The Bee-Simile" 46). Ten years later, Shawcross more soberly reminds us that allusions are usually thought to be the result of a conscious effort "to evoke a remembrance from the reader," whereas echoes are "unconscious to the author when the author wrote" (Shawcross, Influence 32). Yet even sensible def initions such as these, not unlike those put forth by William Porter in his analysis of Milton's debts to Horace and Hesiod, do not altogether answer the question regarding with what certainty we can tell an allusion apart from echo (Porter, Reading the Classics, esp. 13-41).
Though once current in its coinage, the term transumption has failed to sustain a fixed value on the volatile Milton market. And I expect that many a reader, half-annoyed and half-intrigued, has wondered whether anyone could explain unmistakably what transumption has to do with Paradise Lost. While the rhetoricians agree the trope denotes a way of referring to something by way of omission, its function for literary critics is muddier, and although a lot of ink has been spilled on the subject, we still seem to be in the woods. Transumption has something to do with a poem's allusiveness for the intertextualist, and maybe it is necessarily the case that the connection between a semantic transference and a literary reference is spelled out in monstrously conflicted ways. In the following close reading of the Bee Simile, I am [End Page 123] working under the assumption that transumption is a form of irony whereby Milton invokes his literary past in a manner different, for example, from Spenser. For when I wrote that much ink had been spilled on the subject but that we were still in the woods, I was hoping the reader, half-annoyed and half-intrigued, would think of the Spenser's Woods of Error. If my allusion worked, it was because I reduced the complexity of an episode from The Faerie Queene to a manageable size by leaving out whatever didn't fit. I was able to quip--referring to the contentions between Bloom, Hollander, and Guillory as "muddy" and "monstrous"--only because I treated the polysemous serpent in Spenser as if it meant something in particular: that is, as if it were not allegorical. Of course, if the allusion failed, maybe I left out too much. That is, irony and allegory may not be simple opposites; perhaps both are declensions from the elliptical, the enigmatic being a shade off from the perfect circularity of myth in the direction of parable and hyperbole.
The Bee simile takes flight when the hellish fiends "Thick swarm'd, both on the ground and in the air, / Brusht with the hiss of rustling wings"; they are next likened to bees:
In spring time, when the Sun with Taurus rides,
Pour forth thir populous youth about the Hive
In clusters; they among fresh dews and flowers
Flie to and fro, or on the smoothed Plank,
The suburb of thir Straw-built Cittadel,
New rub'd with Baum, expatiate and confer
Thir State affairs. So thick the aerie crowd
Swarm'd and were strait'n'd; till the Signal giv'n.
(1.768-76)
Milton describes the feverish congregation of demonic builders in the manner that the busy Carthaginians were described in the Aeneid:
Such is their toil and such their busy pains,
As exercise the bees in flowery plains,
When winter past and summer scarce begun
Invites them forth to labor in the sun:
Some lead their youth abroad, while some condense
Their liquid store, and some in cells dispense:
Some at the gate stand ready to receive
The golden burden and their friends relieve.
All with united force combine to drive
The lazy drones from the laborious hive.
With envy stung, they view each other's deeds;
The fragrant work with diligence proceeds.
(1.598-609)
The coda of Virgil's simile is momentarily complicated by the subsequent interjection: "Thrice happy you whose walls already rise" (1.610). Though we learn it is the voice of Aeneas speaking rather than the Virgilian narrator, it is not immediately evident whose "fragrant work" is being talked about in the end-line of the simile. Because "fragrant work" can be attributed to the figurative bees or read as qualifying the city dwellers, the words of Aeneas and those of the Virgilian narrator merge for an instant. The former praises the Carthaginians in the narrative, while the latter is praising the industry of the insects in a poetic image; Milton adapts the blurring of distinctions in the end frame of his simile, "So thick the aerie crowd / Swarm'd and were strait'n'd." The Virgilian trick is mimicked when Milton makes it hard to keep separate in the mind's eye the already winged, rustling demons and that to which they were being compared. The congregated "crowd" in Paradise Lost, on the verge of shrinking, equivocally refers either to the demons or to the bees of Homer and Virgil.
Two other changes that Milton makes to Virgil are licensed by the same authority whereby Virgil alters his Homeric model. In Virgil, the bees make vivid the smallness of the city's inhabitants as seen from the point of view of Aeneas. In the first epic simile of the Iliad, the swarming horde seen by a shepherd is juxtaposed against the narrative moment in which the Achaians assemble to hear the council of Agamemnon:
As from some Rocky Clift the Shepherd sees
Clust'ring in Heaps on Heaps the driving Bees,
Rolling, and black'ning, Swarms succeeding Swarms,
With deeper Murmurs and more hoarse Alarms;
Dusky they spread a close-embody'd Crowd
And o'er the Vale descends the living Cloud. [End Page 124]
So, from the Tents and ships, a length'ning Train . . . .
(2.111-17)
Virgil gets rid of Homer's shepherd and organizes the insects issuing, as Pope notes, "helter-skelter" from Homer's rocky cleft in order to give them the semblance of human activity (Pope, Iliad 110). Because Homer's "tumultuous dispersion" is given the shape of constructive labor, Virgil's simile is, for Pope, more apt. And because the potential fusion of the insect and human worlds implicit in Virgil is given formal habitation in the "Straw-built Cittadel" of Pandemonium, Milton's simile, Pope might have added, appears apter yet. 2
Milton responds, furthermore, to the shift to very early summer in Virgil's version of Homer--as Dryden puts it, just past the midpoint between winter and summer--which translation goes beyond an exact metaphrase of Homer's time of year. Virgil's change from spring to early summer emphasizes the earliness of his bees over those of Homer, while at the same time recognizing his own belatedness. Virgil's simile, though dependent on that of Homer, offers him a back-handed compliment, for the very first epic simile of the Iliad is relegated to not even second place in the Aeneid. Milton likewise judiciously follows Virgil by launching his bees in the zodiacal sign midway between spring (at the start of Aries) and summer (at the beginning of Cancer); yet Milton restores special prominence to the comparison by locating it at the conclusion of the book richest in epic similes.
In his use of the "Cittadel" and the time of year, Milton follows the changes made by Virgil to Homer, and in the lines following as well. Carthage is initially seen through the eyes of Aeneas and Achates, who, clouded in mist when Venus ascends to the heavens, climb a hill overlooking the city to observe the work in progress. The end of the Virgil's simile momentarily obscures distinctions between Aeneas and the narrator, either of whom remarks his admiration of the work in progress:
The fragrant work with diligence proceeds.
"Thrice happy you whose walls already rise,"
Aeneas said, and viewed with lifted eyes
Their lofty towers; then entering at the gate,
Concealed in clouds (prodigious to relate),
He mixed unmarked among the busy throng . . . .
(1.611-14)
The disappearance of Aeneas is not without precedent in Homer: Paris is wafted away in mist from battle by Aphrodite, just as in the return to his homeland Odysseus is disguised from his countrymen by Athena at the same time that the goddess conceals Ithaca from the hero's vision. Homer represents man as capable of being rendered invisible on account of the action of a god, whose agency at other times is responsible for screening the world from mortal sight. This theme is developed in the Bee simile of the Aeneid when the invisibility of the narrator is suddenly represented in the invisibility of his character, Virgil's words being absorbed into those of Aeneas, whose disguise in the opening scene at Carthage acts out the absence of Virgil from the events at Troy and Ithaca. The art of the Virgilian narrator in this instance becomes a trick substituting for the role of divine agency in Homer, a feat that is "prodigious to relate."
But not more prodigious to relate than the "wonder" we "Behold" in Paradise Lost:
till the Signal giv'n.
Behold a wonder! they but now who seemd
In bigness to surpass Earths Giant Sons
Now less than smallest Dwarfs, in narrow room
Throng numberless, like that Pigmean Race
Beyond the Indian Mount, or Faery Elves,
Whose midnight Revels, by a Forest side
Or Fountain some belated Peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while over-head the Moon
Sits Arbitress, and nearer to the Earth
Wheels her pale course; they on thir mirth and dance
Intent, with jocund Music charm his ear;
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.
(1.776-88)
The narrator of Paradise Lost, unlike that of the Aeneid, does not momentarily confound his speech with one of his characters. The Virgilian narrator metamorphoses into Aeneas, but Milton's demons become indistinguishable from the bees to which they [End Page 125] were compared in the end frame of the simile, "So thick the aery crowd." The demons are like bees in their activity, but it is no accident that bees also happen to figure a convenient image for smallness. Bloom is right to maintain that in the extended comparison's shift "we, Milton's readers, see the giant demons shrink in size" (Bloom, Map 141). Yet Milton also ambiguates the antecedent of "aerie crowd" not merely to imitate Virgil's surprise, I think, but so that the referent of the pronoun, "they but now who seem'd / In bigness to surpass Earth's Giant Sons," can be taken to be not the demons, but Homer and Virgil.
As gigantic Homer and Virgil metamorphose into creatures as small as bees, they also begin to fuse with a motley assortment of extraneous figures from outside the poem. The Dwarfs, Pigmies, Faerie Elves, and the belated Peasant and divine Arbitress have generated profound wonderment on the behalf of readers trying to second-guess the motives of the author. Bloom traces the shift from Virgil to the new imagery to a return to Virgil in the expression "sees, / or dreams he sees . . . the Moon." Bloom's thesis is that the double turn, from bees to faeries to moon, brings Dido to us from afar by skipping over associations with Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream (Bloom 142). Yet the elfin race never appears in Shakespeare's play in a comparison made by a character, but as dramatic personae; nor is Bottom the weaver, nor any of the other mechanics, ever called a "peasant" or "belated." That the words "bela ted Peasant" are not imported directly from Shake speare's romantic comedy is not Bloom's point. Or rather, it is his point precisely, I am supposing, if he means to say that Milton captures the feel or the style of the play--Shakespeare's meaning and not his name--instead of making a direct reference or cita tion. 3
That Milton's adaptation of Virgil is intended to echo Shakespeare is a plausible though hardly provable assertion. More important for our immediate purposes, the simile's transumption can identified solely by the rhetorical definition of the term: the Bee simile gives over to the Faery simile; therefore, Milton tropes upon a trope. The key to the transumption is in the ambiguous referent for the "aery crowd" at the end of the first part of the simile-- which purports to describe an aspect of the narrative moment in terms of quality. The "crowd" provides the link to the next part of the simile--describing a different quality. 4 The description of manner turns into to a description of size, or one trope succeeds another and the intermediary step falls away from importance, so that the busy-ness of Homer's and Virgil's bees ceases to have significance.
But while he has caused his epic precedents to vanish, Milton is not yet through with us. The vulgar sprites appear to mutate for the purpose of fixing the mob's kingpins:
Thus incorporeal Spirits to smallest forms
Reduc'd thir shapes immense, and were at large,
Though without number still amidst the Hall
Of that infernal Court. But far within
And in thir own dimensions like themselves
The great Seraphic Lords and Cherubim
In close recess and secret conclave sat
A thousand Demy-Gods on golden seats,
Frequent and full.
(1.789-92)
Some fiends dwindle to crowd themselves into their newly built council hall, while others--the ones who do the talking in Book Two?--stayed unchanged in stature. Why? That some wander about "at large" amuses, but that others remain "in thir own di mensions like themselves" tends to exasperate. Joseph Addison argues that the demonic size-changing is sublime because its admixture of marvelous elements with verisimilitude (Addison, Spectator 3:88). But the same passage strikes Voltaire as mock-epic because of the gratuitous nature of the shrinkage (Voltaire 114). But maybe Addison and Voltaire are both right, if the step we take to go from the sublime to the ridiculous is smaller than we had imagined. For if the shrinking demons are as unnecessary as they are poetic, surely it is doubly gratuitous--and doubly poetic?--to sustain the chieftains stable in their dimensions. 5
I claim that the Bee simile in its final turn, "in thir own dimensions like themselves," represents an echo of exactly the same kind that is found in Tasso. Edward Fairfax translates the way in which Tasso's evil underworld sprites muster their forces to bear upon the Christian knights: [End Page 126]
The Peers of Pluto's realm assembled been
Amid the palace of their angry king,
In hideous forms and shapes 'tofore unseen,
That fear, death, terror, and amazement bring;
With ugly paws some trample on the green,
Some gnaw the snakes that on their shoulders hing,
And some their forked tails stretch forth on high,
And tear the twinkling stars from trembling sky.
There were Sileno's foul and loathsome rout,
There Sphinxes, Centaurs, there were Gorgons fell,
There howling Scyllas yawling round about,
There serpents hiss, there seven-mouthed Hydras yell,
Chimera there spews fire and brimstone out,
And Polyphemus blind supporteth hell;
Besides ten thousand monsters therein dwells,
Mishap'd, unlike themselves, and like naught else.
(4.4-5, my emphasis)
For the lines with which I am principally concerned (at the beginning of the fourth and the end of the fifth stanza), the accuracy of Fairfax's translation must be answered, to which question must be replied: "Not very." 6 A "thousand" in Tasso yields to "ten thousand" in Fairfax, and the wording of the key expression "unlike themselves" puts a slight twist on the original. Nevertheless, wouldn't we agree that when diversity is no longer seen as manifold and is blended into one, it ceases to be like itself?
Milton appears to have ended his extended Bee simile by inverting Tasso with a perverse play on words. The only reason I can offer is complicated by two considerations: first, the association of bees with ideas about poetic authority in the Renaissance; secondly, those associations, by contrast, used to figure forth an egregious departure from accepted models of imitation. The following pages argue that Milton's Bee simile, though it begins by modeling itself on a convention for authority, ends by concealing its indebtedness to Error.
The activity of bees had been used in antiquity to emblematize the act of writing poetry, and, before the word plagiarism was coined to label literary theft at the end of the sixteenth century, bees were a commonplace figure for invoking the poet of authority as distinct from the poetaster. 7 The good poet, unlike the lazy drone, was thought to go from flower to flower, eclectically gathering material to be magically transmuted into wax and honey. The poetaster, conversely, was often figured in the ape, the crow with its purloined plumage, or the spider manufacturing cobwebs out of its own filth. In the Aeneid, the Bee simile turns upon a comparison of Carthaginians in order to identify the Virgilian narrator with Aeneas, the narrator's invisibility omitting the role of divine agency in Homer. But what makes Virgil associate bees with an idea about poetry in the first place?
In Homer, the Achaians and the bees are clearly separable in a way that the voice of the narrator and his character in Virgil's poem, and that the image of the bees and the demons in Milton's, are not divisible:
As from some rocky cleft the shepherd sees
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
So, from the tents and ships, a length'ning train
Spreads all the beach, and wide o'ershades the plain:
Along the region runs a deaf'ning sound;
Beneath their footsteps groans the trembling ground.
Fame flies before, the messenger of Jove,
And shining soars, and claps her wings above.
(2.111-21, my emphasis)
While the Achaians do not, strictly speaking, become Fame in the way that Aeneas becomes invisible or that Milton's demons shrink to bee-like stature, Fame is able to herald the sound of the assembling troops only by passing through the intermediate step of the simile. Homer's Bee simile is from the start linked to an idea of poetic authority by the personification of Fame, which in its Latin incarnation as lying Rumor presages an alternate set of associations.
Virgil's Rumor provides an important transition from Homer to Ovid and to the sorts of personifications encountered in Spenser and Milton:
The loud report through Libyan cities goes.
Fame, the great ill, from small beginnings grows:
Swift from the first, and every moment brings
New vigor to her flight, new pinions to her wings. [End Page 127]
Soon grows the pigmy to gigantic size,
Her feet on earth, her forehead in the skies.
Enraged against the gods, revengeful Earth
Produced her, last of the Titanian birth.
Swift is her walk, more swift her winged haste,
A monstrous phantom, horrible and vast.
As many plumes as raise her lofty flight,
So many piercing eyes enlarge her sight.
Millions of opening mouths to Fame belong,
And every mouth is furnished with a tongue,
And round with listening ears the flying plague is hung.
She fills the peaceful universe with cries;
No slumbers ever close her wakeful eyes.
By day from lofty towers her head she shews,
And spreads through trembling crowds disastrous new;
With court informers haunts, and royal spies;
Things done relates, not done she feigns, and mingles truth with lies.
(4.251-71)
Rumor is portrayed as a powerful god, but also with a degree of self-consciousness that weaves a streak of rational doubt into the fabric of the Aeneid, just as Sin and Death ultimately were to be thought theologically indecorous by early readers of Paradise Lost. "Fame tells a tale, and Victory hovers over a general or perches on a standard; but Fame and Victory can do no more," observed Samuel Johnson, wishing Milton's personifications had been as ornamental as those of Homer, which, in contrast to those of Virgil, are specifically human inventions distinguishable from divine agency. 8
Virgil's Rumor cynically prompts us to ask whether divine agency is nothing more than a rationale for human behavior. She shares, furthermore, a striking parallel with the misshapen and deformed creatures found in Ovid's Flood:
The pregnant Seeds, as from their Mothers wombe,
From quickning Earth both growth and forme assume.
So, when seven chanel'd Nile forsakes the Playne,
When ancient bounds retyring streames contayne,
And late-left slime aethereall fervours burne,
Men various creatures with the gleabe up-turne:
Of those, some in their very time of birth;
Some lame; and others halfe alive, halfe earth.
For, Heat and Moysture, when they temperate grow,
Forth-with conceive; and life on things bestow.
From striving Fire and Water all proceede;
Discording Concord everapt to breede.
So, Earth by that late Deluge muddy growne,
When on her lap reflecting Titan shone,
Produc't a World of formes; restor'd the late:
And other unknowne Monsters did create.
(p. 37, my emphasis)
The Nile simile is an emblem for the restoration of animal and plant life after a mythic Flood, when the sun's warming action on the moisture left by the retreating waters gives birth to "unknowne Mon sters." The annual abiogenesis of the river describes a proverbial fertility that generates creatures half lame, half live, half earth. Thus, Virgil's Rumor has its counterpart in Ovid's Flood: just as double-edged Rumor mixes lies with the truth, the unheard-of creatures left by the retreating waters of the earth are monstrously biform.
The images of Virgil's Rumor and Ovid's Flood --in contrast to the Bee simile--fictively extend the hypothesis of Euhemerus that the gods of myth were men merely famous for their deeds. Both images extend euhermerist doubt to its logical conclusion by insinuating--not that the poet is divinely inspired --but that the divine is itself a function of the words of men. 9 The Metamorphoses is without an extended comparison to bees, as The Faerie Queene is without one, though in both poems the proverbial fertility of the Nile emblematizes the same theme as Virgil's invention of Rumor. Indeed, Spenser's redaction of Ovid begins to clarify the reason that Milton chooses to conclude his Bee simile with an echo of Tasso.
Error in The Faerie Queene regurgitates books and papers in a moment parallel to the Metamorphoses, the narrator pausing to describe the mess of "Her filthy parbreake":
As when old father Nilus gins to swell
With timely pride aboue the Aegyptian vale,
His fattie vaues do fertile slime outwell, [End Page 128]
And ouerflow each plaine and lowly dale:
But when his later spring gins to auale,
Huge heapes of mudd he leaues, wherein there breed
Ten thousand kindes of creatures, partly male
And partly female of his fruitfull seed;
Such vgly monstrous shapes elsewhere may no man reed. (1.1.21)
The Faerie Queene's book-vomiting dragon is con quered by Redcrosse, even though infant toads manage to creep away, just as Python emerging from the sodden mess in the Metamorphoses is slain by Apollo. In retaining the fecundity of Ovid's maculate conception, Spenser records his debts with a clear conscience at the same time that his translation changes the aberration to mutations of male and female.
Spenser immediately clarifies Fairfax's mistranslation by showing Ovid lying at the root of Tasso's hellfiends. Filling in the space between Ovid and Tasso, Spenser combines Ovid's "unknowne mon sters" and Tasso's boast of "'tofore unseen" creatures by showing something in The Faerie Queene that "elsewhere may no man reed." Spenser supplies a number in excess of Tasso's, which figure accounts for Fairfax's number, though he also genders what in Ovid is neuter. The precedent for Spenser's hermaphroditization, however, is the final key unlocking the puzzling line of transmission from Ovid to Tasso to Milton. Spenser pumps back into Tasso that which Tasso removed from Ovid: the Inferno.
Accompanied by the shade of Virgil, Dante comes across three spirits in the circle of thieves in the Inferno, one of whom calls out for a companion who has been transformed into a six-legged serpent. Thence ensues the first of three marvels: the human shade of Agnello de' Brunelleschi blends with that of the serpentine form of Cianfa de Donatis. The narrator's diction modelled on the Ovidian episode recounting the merging of the youth Hermaphroditus with the nymph Salmacis (4.373-79), Dante testifies of his own mutant result that "neither the one nor the other now seemed what it was at first" (25.63). Agnello's companions exclaim the vision is "already neither two nor one" (25.69) and the narrator reiterates that "the perverse image seemed both and neither"(25.77), before the snake-shade crawls away.
The first marvelous transformation is succeeded by another. Buoso--the second of the three human shades encountered--and the snaky figure of Francesco Guercio de' Cavalcanti exchange appearances rather than blend into one. That is, the figure of the man becomes a snake as the snake becomes a man. This even more amazing mutation provokes the narrator's vaunt:
Let Lucan now be silent, where he tells of the wretched Sabellus and of Nasidius, and let him wait to hear what now comes forth. Concerning Cadmus and Arethusa, let Ovid be silent, for if he, poetizing, converts the one into a serpent and the other into a fountain, I envy him not; for two natures front to front he never so transmuted that both forms were prompt to exchange their substance.
(25.94-102, my emphasis)
This second metamorphosis explicitly names scenes from Lucan's Pharsalia and Ovid's Metamorphoses in which, respectively, Cadmus was punished by being changed into a serpent (4.476-89) and Arethusa merged with the river god Alpheus (5.572-641).
On the one hand, Dante explicitly names Cadmus and Arethusa--the transformations of snakes and rivers--but only his choice of words, on the other, conjures up the episode of the Hermaphrodite--the transformation of male into female. In other words, Dante effectually expands Ovidian material by linking together for the first time diverse episodes in a monstrous transformation, to which Tasso is silently indebted for the vaunt of his shapes "tofore unseen." Dante's reliance on Ovid is, thus, both explicit and implicit, whereas Tasso's silent debt to them both is revealed only in Spenser. In The Faerie Queene's Nile simile, Ovid's emblem of erroneous fertility is amplified by giving out the creatures in the Nile mud to be half male and half female.
Dante's second transformation is labeled by Curtius as an example of the "outdoing" topos, a place in the narrative wherein the narrator's experiences are purported to surpass the stories related by his predecessors (Curtius 165). But Curtius neglects to mention that the "outdoing" topos is followed in the [End Page 129] canto of thieves by that which Curtius elsewhere locates as the "inexpressibility" topos (Curtius 159). The description of the last of the three shades met by Dante and Virgil is acknowledged by the narrator to be a kind of error:
Here let the novelty be my excuse, if my pen goes aught astray. And though my eyes were somewhat confused and my mind bewildered, these could not flee so covertly but that I clearly distinguished Puccio Sciancato, and it was he alone, of the three companions that came first, who was not changed . . . .
(25.143-50)
The self-proclaimed originality of the "outdoing" topos collapses into the apology of an "inexpress ibility" topos. The metamorphosis in attitude of Dante's narrator from boast to recantation, as contrasted with the fixity of his subject matter, is the missing link in a line of transmission extending backwards to Ovid, Virgil, and Homer, and forwards to Tasso, Spenser, and Milton. Milton's "in the thir own dimensions like themselves" puts a cap on the Bee simile, which points in one direction, like hoof-prints of the cattle stolen by Cacus, but the wrong direction. Though it appears to echo Shakespeare, Milton's Bee simile ends by inverting Tasso's unacknowledged theft of Dante in order to hide Milton's own unacknowledged theft of Tasso. Milton's vaunt of overgoing Homer and Virgil by turning their bees into Faeries and Elves is discovered in the end to be an inexpressibility topos in disguise.
The Bee and Nile similes, images for immortal Fame and lying Error, appear to have been passed down from antiquity to the Renaissance in a series of successive dilations and contractions, each generation alternately expanding and shrinking that which they received, in order to afford a place within narrative poetry for representing conflicting ideas about poetic authority. During the Renaissance, the concept of secretive stealing in conjunction with a more open-handed borrowing from precedents becomes crucial in understanding how to write poetry at the same time that the credibility of reading divine inspiration into pagan texts begins to be dismantled. Vida's prescription of a judicious balance between acknowledged and unacknowledged thefts was but a step on the way to the treatises of subsequent critics. Renaissance critics, as opposed to the allegorical interpreters of Homer and Virgil, sought to educe a heroic code of values from the epic tradition, while resurrecting a modified version of euhemerism by transferring to the poet the power of generating lasting fame on earth. 10
Yet fame on earth is a reward that the narrator of Paradise Lost expressly wishes to avoid. Milton's nar rator rejects the continuing good reports among men in order to espouse a heavenly vocation, which all the same cannot prevent his dismemberment at the hands of his auditors. His inspiration pretends to transcend the parameters defined by borrowing and dissimulation, but the conclusion of the Bee simile--with its ties to precedents conspicuous by their absence-- suggests the narrator's originality to be indistinguishable from a private obsession. Invoking the classical paradigm for the good poet, Milton goes on to cut Homer and Virgil down to size before his echo of Tasso makes a different point about imitation. By severely reducing the same image that Spenser expanded to figure the erroneous and overly imitative side of poetic borrowing, Milton represents his originality as an inspired refusal to reveal his human sources. 11
Paradise Lost stands at the cusp of new ideas about wit and originality in the critical vocabulary, but these ideas would be illustrated in a tour de force if the triumph of Milton's extended comparison lies in the concealment of its debts. Milton's version would best be described as sublimely parodic, if the final cause for its intricate word play was an attempt to interrogate the way a poet assimilates sources, in which case, our disagreements about what constitutes these sources would be paradoxically insignificant. The originality of the expression "Like themselves" is that it seems to refer to nothing, as it simultaneously puts a cap on the fountains feeding the tributaries of Renaissance poetry.
Having erected an elaborate scaffolding on which to support an incorporeal echo, I conclude that Milton's Bee simile is ironic insofar as it drains meaning away from the poems on which it relies. Milton is hell-bent on overgoing his literary past in consistently denying that the characters, places, and events of Paradise Lost have any precedents, though he [End Page 130] can not help but bring those mythological associations to our mind. These echoes, I agree with Harold Bloom, can be analyzed as the product of transumption, but the idea of transumption will always work better in the abstract than in practice, since, having adopted Bloom's intuition, I have not arrived at his conclusions. Yet what would it mean if every reader of the Bee simile heard a different set of echoes? Or, conversely, if every reader agreed that Milton's Peasant referred obliquely to A Midsummer's Night Dream? In that case, we would need restate under what terms its source relationship differed from the one characterizing Milton's use of Homer and Virgil. An echo of Shakespeare suppresses a direct quotation or citation, but the greater certainty with which we all heard the same echo would perversely undercut the amount of suppression or omission going on. That is, it would cease being transumptive.
The academic predilection for exhuming sources is condemned by Bloom as a kind of carrion hunting, the better to distinguish it from his own brand of necromancy. Yet source-hunting is still source-hunting, if of a more esoteric order, when it is called intertextuality. The notion that poems exist only to refer to other poems does not satisfactorily account for the way the telescope creeps into Paradise Lost, nor does it explain how Milton manages to avoid rewriting the same poem that Spenser wrote, except by calling that difference transumptive, thereby displacing the problem onto a new terminology. Intertextualists have perhaps only subsumed the same problems once confronted by the allegorists-- explaining whether poetry afforded an insight into the divine or was a distortion of it--by reconfiguring those issues in terms of the author's unconscious mind. Yet the problem in its new guise is equally intractable: How can a reader choose between fathoming the depths underlying an inadvertent echo and ascribing to the author a diabolical complexity of intent?
In sum, my intent is not to discredit an intertextual approach to literature, but to ask again its difference from source-hunting. Was the difference between the two ever crystal clear? Patrick Hume's edition of Milton points us to Virgil, but not to the Bee simile in Book One of Aeneid, nor that in Book Six. Instead, Hume adduces the hive imagery developed at length in the Georgics, which is not a comparison at all, but a detail fleshing out Virgil's mythological account of bee-keeping (Hume 50). By failing to distinguish between a simile and an image, Milton's first source cataloger appears to have been less level-headed than detractors of intertextuality might have wished him to be.
Shawcross's skepticism is a tonic for superstition, but his challenge to prove "historically" an echo in Paradise Lost of Shakespeare--who wrote no long narrative poem--is as unanswerable a taunt as asking to prove the existence of a ghost. It will always be easier to demonstrate that ghosts do not exist, though it is also true that ghosts, like the free-will or the aesthetic response, retain their credibility for the more impressionable among us. And what else do we read literature for, but to be impressed? If no real difference exists between a source and an intertext, our ability to hear echoes--the ghosts of departed texts--helps justify the reason that poetry affords some readers with something akin to a spiritual experience. Both intertextualists and source-hunters, though they often lose sight of the fact, can only ever bring forth for one poem, another of which they happen to be reminded, their remembrance of things past being an aesthetic response to poetry.
Lehman College
1. The rhetorical definitions of the term are handily gathered together in the appendix to Hollander's Figure of Echo (133-49).
2. Pope's desire to regularize Homeric similes is arguably a result of his reading of Paradise Lost. For Milton's influence on Pope, see Reuben Arthur Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Clarendon: Oxford, 1959) and H. A. Mason, To Homer Through Pope: An Introduction to Homer's Iliad and Pope's Translation (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). Yet aptness as a criterion for evaluating Virgil's comparisons as superior to Homer's appears to have been a struggle in the Neoclassical mind. Pope quibbles with Scaliger, as Chapman had, over the superiority of Virgil's similes: "when he succeeds best in them he is to be commended but as an improver" (109). Yet Pope cannot resist improving Homer himself, for he, unlike Chapman, refuses to admit the time of year--spring--into his version of the simile. Does Pope think that the additional information is digressive and sheds no light on the narrative proceedings?
For Chapman's rendition of the line in questions, see
Chapman's Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey, and the Lesser Homerica, ed.
Allardyce Nicoll, 2 vols. (NY: Pantheon-Bollingen, 1956) 1:48. Whether or not
Pope and Chapman relied on the same texts is outside my ken, though Pope
certainly had access to the achievements of Ogilby, Hobbes, and Chapman, and
their rendition of the word given in the Loeb as 
.
See Homer: The Iliad, trans. A. T. Murray, 2 vols. (1924, Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1976) 1:56.
3. Guillory argues that the "Peasant," signifying the narrator of Paradise Lost, distances himself from the Shakespearean drama by echoing the aloofness of Oberon from the midnight revels of Titania (141).
4. The first part of the extended comparison re sembles other metamorphic comparisons in Paradise Lost, such as Raphael's heavenly descent, in which the angel first is likened to the Phoenix but then resumes his shape. The second part of the extended comparison falls into the category of "errant," "feigned," and "fabulous" comparisons in Paradise Lost, as when, for example, the characters of Milton are likened to Deucalion and Pyrrha or the Libyan Jove, all of whom are expressly labelled to be imaginary. For this reason, all the speculation about the Dwarfs, Pigmies, and Elves seems to me so much barking up the wrong tree--individually they function less as specific references than together they represent a group of fabled instances.
5. A sampling, before and after Paradise Lost, of the reflexive pronoun used as a substantive offers a scale of tonalities wheron to sound Milton's tenor. Antony and Cleopatra brims over with the exact same expression, which Shakespeare employes to describe whether or not the plays' principals are behaving in accord with their nature (e.g., 1.1.57; 2.2.4. 78; 2.7.42; 3.3.186; and 4.14.14). Shakespeare's use of the reflexive as a noun is serious in mood, but the expression in An Essay on Criticism feels more facetious than earnest. Pope superficially appears to praise Longinus, "whose own Example strengthens all his Laws, / And Is himself that great Sublime he draws" (3.679-80), but Pope's Peri Bathous makes the concept of the sublime out to be a hoax.
6. The "diversi aspetti in un confusi e misti," describing the demonic throng in Torquato Tasso: Poesie, ed. Francesco Flora (Milano: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1952) p. 82, is more faithfully rendered by Ralph Nash's modern prose translation of Jerusalem Delivered (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1987):
Straightway the deities of the Abyss in various troops come running from all sides to the lofty portals. Oh how strange, oh how horrible the shapes! how much of terror and death is in their eyes! Some print the earth with beastly tracks, and on a human head have twining snakes for hair; and behind them writhes an immense tail that like a whip coils and uncoils itself.
Here might you see a thousand filthy Harpies and a thousand Centaurs and Sphinxes and pale Gorgons; a myriad ravenous Scyllas howling and Hydras hooting and Pythons hissing and Chimaeras belching forth black flames; and horrible Polyphemuses and Geryons; and in strange monstrosities, no elsewhere known or seen, diverse appearances confused and blended into one. (69-70, my emphasis)
7. Still useful on bee symbolism is Harold Ogden White's Plagiarism and Imitation during the English Renaissance: A Study in Critical Distinctions (1935, New York: Octagon, 1965) and G. W. Pigman III's "Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance," RQ23 (1980): 1-32. See, for example, Seneca's quote of the Aeneid's Bee simile to illustrate how writers get their material, in Ad lucilium epistulae morales, trans. Richard M. Gummere, 3 vols (1920; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1970) 2:84.3-6; Petrarch's letter in Rerum familiarium libri: I-VIII, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, 3 vols. (Albany: New York State UP, 1975) 1:8; sonnet no. 90 in Sindey's Astrophil and Stella, ed. Max Putzel (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1967); "Satyr II" in The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C.A. Patrides (London: Dent, 1985); and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, eds. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1927) 19-20.
8. Johnson, Milton, 421. Virgilian personifications such as Rumor, Sleep, and Alecto are more active than those of Homer. Rumor falsely induces Dido to believe the liasion arranged by Venus and Juno is a marriage, while also prompting Iarbus's jealousy at her illicit union with Aeneas. Yet her presence in the poem is redolent of the impiety towards the Olympic pantheon expressed more explicitly by Nisus in Book 9. Such impiety has a Homeric precedent in the speech of Glaucus in Book 6 of the Iliad and that of Achilles in Book 11 of the Odyssey. In addition, the fable of Discord, told by Agamemnon in Iliad 19, appears to have been contrived solely to account for his reckless behavior towards Achilles, since the tale contrasts sharply with quarrel between the princes narrated in the opening books. The discrepancy between what the Homeric narrator tells us and what his character says is taken up with a twist by Virgil when the underworld shade of Palinurus explains his failure of having fallen overboard, the narrator in the previous book having pictured him as having been pushed by the god of Sleep. Finally Allelcto, though we see her inflaming Turnus with contention, has not nearly the same presence and power for us as a Juno, of whom Allecto appears to be a mere emanation since she is worshipped by no one.
In The Allegory of Love: A Study in the Medieval Tradition (1936, Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), C.S. Lewis points out that "the twilight of the gods" in Latin poetry becomes "the mid-morning of the per sonifications" (52). In Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996), Gordon Teskey supplements Lewis by claiming that "the personified abstractions of medieval allegory secretly absorbed, from the psychological power of a decaying polytheism, the narrative power of agency" (33). I would go further by adding that the indeterminacy between divine agency and human rationalization is of a shifting nature from antiquity to the middle ages. Virgil's Rumor, Sleep, and Allecto, ask us to differentiate their agency from the intervention of the gods, whereas Spenser's Despair and Furor ask us the difference between a personification and a concept. Milton's creations of Sin and Death, because they converse only with Satan, appear less like Spenserian personifications, on the one hand, and more like Virgil's Rumor. But on the other hand, they also prompt us to dally with a new surmise; for in building a bridge between Hell and Paradise, Sin and Death also ask us to distinguish between the conceptual and the historical.
Johnson deplored "the confusion of spirit and matter" permeating Paradise Lost (420), but the idea that thought is action is arguably the poem's strong suit.
9. Invaluable on the subject are two sourcebooks for the transmission of pagan allegoresis into the Renaissance: Jean Seznac's The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (1940; 3rd ed., New York: Harper, 1961) 11-36; and D.C. Allen's Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1970), 53-61. The kernel of the argument of Euhemerus's Sacred History is that the gods were once men worshipped for the gifts they bestowed on mankind. The lost translation by Ennius and commentary by Varro on Euhemerus's utopian fiction are preserved piecemeal by Plutarch and Cicero, both of whom condemn the author for his atheism, and, more centrally, in Diodurus Siculus. The euhemeristic position survives in Christian apologists such as Tertullian, Arnobius, and Eusebius, and, is given prominence by Lactantius and Augustine, who set the stage for the anthropological impulse guiding the interests of the medieval encyclopediasts. As Seznac says, "The human origin of the gods ceases to be a weapon to be used against them, a source of rejection and contempt. Instead, it gives them a certain protection, even granting them a right to survive. In the end it forms, as it were, their patent of nobility" (13).
Charles Lemmi, in "Monster-Spawning Nile-Mud in Spenser" (MLN 41 [1926]: 243-38) suggests Diodorus's Bibliothecha historica for Spenser's description of the toads and frogs. Italian and English translations of Diodorus's euhemerist-influenced treatise were immensely popular in the Renaissance, but I think it would be more useful to know whether Spenser, who was familiar with Plutarch's Moralia through his use of the legends surrounding Isis and Osiris, was also acquainted with the work mistakenly ascribed to Plutarch, De placitis philosophorum, which reports an epigram of Callimachus castigating Euhemerus as "vomiting impious books" (quoted in Allen 56).
10. See The "De arte poetica" of Marco Girolamo Vida, trans. Ralph Williams (New York: Columbia UP, 1976) 99. Sidney still preserves in his definition of the poet the vatic element foregrounded by the allegorical interpreters of literature and missing from Jonson's definition. Compare "The Defence of Poesy" in Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. Robert Kimbrough (1969; 2nd ed. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1983) 106, with "Timber, or, Discoveries" in The Oxford Authors: Ben Jonson, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford UP: 1985) 582.
11. The narrator of The Faerie Queene, by way of contrast, makes himself out to be more worried than the speaker of the Commedia that his efforts will be misconstrued as erroneous, though Spenser himself suffered less persecution during his Irish sojourn than exiled Ovid, and displayed not a trace during his life of the paranoia plaguing the author of the Gerusa lemme. Moreover, the narrator of The Faerie Queene seems quite incapable of justifying how a poet improves upon the servile imitation of his betters, except by positing the dangers of a dissimulation that threatens to pervert the natural. By drawing our attention to his recycling of the past within the context of the vomiting Dragon, Spenser intimates that purely human claims to poetic authority are a form of necessary error in the world, and implies a doubt that the praise of poetry ultimately works against praise of the divine.
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/milton_quarterly/v032/32.4moeck.html