Dante on drugs

Barbara Reynolds
DANTE
The poet, the political thinker, the man
488pp. I. B. Tauris. £20.
1 845 11161 3

Prue Shaw, editor

DVD. Scholarly Digital Editions, 7/26 Wheeley's Lane, Edgbaston B15 2DX. www.sd-editions.com. Individuals, £50; institutions £120.

In many ways, we think we know where we are with Dante. As a writer who is eager to give his readers a moral education, he spells out intelligibly and forcefully what he thinks about a whole range of issues – human responsibility, the proper relations between Church and State, what is wrong with contemporary society, and so on. Nor has he any hesitations about telling us about himself – his love for Beatrice, his feelings at being exiled from Florence, his friends and enemies, his aims as a writer. The works and the personality may be rich and complex, and there is an obvious chasm between the early fourteenth century and the early twenty-first, but on the whole we feel that we are reading him right, or at least that with appropriate efforts on our part we should be able to do so.

Then we reach a limit and the picture begins to crumble. Dante keeps coming back to his own life story, but he rewrites some events as and when he feels like it, and leaves a host of important things out altogether: parents, wife and children, for instance, not to mention where he actually went during a good deal of his exile. Modern readers are likely to believe that his Beatrice has some factual foundation. If so, she has moved a long way from the Bice Portinari who died a young married woman, probably a mother, in Florence in 1290. As for the other female figures who appear as love-objects in his poetry, we are never sure of the degree to which they are fictive or allegorical, though Dante seems to encourage us to think that the question is an important one.

The closer we look, the less clear other important questions become. He didn’t call the Comedy divine, but did he think of it as a comedy? Maybe, but if so in what sense? And in what sense is it allegorical? Suppose Beatrice, for instance, is an allegory of theology, why does Dante present his encounter with her in the Earthly Paradise in such erotic terms? But whether she is Theology or a beautiful Florentine girl, or both of these, or even much else besides, as Barbara Reynolds thinks, why does Dante have her say some of the things she says? Why does she go on about moonspots in Canto II of Paradise? What on earth is she really talking about?

Going back to the Inferno, does Dante really think that Ulysses shouldn’t have sailed off heroically to his death in the southern seas? He has God put him in the depths of hell for false counsel, but doesn’t he really admire him when you get down to it, much as we want to do? We can, of course, choose to forget about questions like these, and sit back and enjoy the poetry. But, since the whole poem is structured around the idea of judgement, doesn’t that mean leaving out something crucial?

The commentators who began work six or seven years after Dante’s death in 1321 provide a lot of more or less reliable factual and linguistic information, but they don’t solve basic interpretative questions, at least not to our satisfaction. They may not believe that Dante actually went on a journey through the other world any more than we do, but they tend to force the poem into allegorical straitjackets. Dante himself seems to have thought in similar terms outside the Comedy, but as a poet he refuses to be held down by conventional schemes of inter-pretation, modern as well as medieval.

Commentators are not that much help, either, with the gaps and uncertainties in Dante’s life. Nor are early biographers. Boccaccio, writing around forty years after Dante’s death and able to consult Dante’s daughter (or one of them if there were two), launched the story of Dante’s ghost returning to tell his sons where the missing final cantos of Paradiso were hidden, as well as various other stories that we find it difficult to take literally. Boccaccio also says that Dante’s extraordinary treatise on language and poetry, the De vulgari eloquentia, belonged to his last years and was left unfinished on his death, and that the Monarchy, his principal political statement outside the Comedy, was written around the time of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII’s disastrous expedition into Italy in 1312, on which we know from his letters Dante pinned his personal and political hopes.

The De vulgari eloquentia has long been relocated with good reason to the early years of Dante’s exile. On the other hand the Monarchy has recently been moved closer to the end of his life, on grounds of an otherwise inexplicable back-reference to the Paradiso. That may send us scrabbling around looking for reasons why Dante should have produced such a treatise late in his career. But Prue Shaw writes that the phrase “as I have already said in Paradiso in the Comedy” appears in all manuscripts, and there is absolutely no reason for rejecting it as an interpolation. All of which has troubling implications for anyone who believes that readers close to Dante in time and place are more likely to have been better informed about his life than we are, and to have had a better sense of what his works are about.

Over the past 150 years Dante scholars have done their utmost to find secure paths through the minefields and to clear away all the mines they can. Whatever the successes (the redating of the Monarchy is one), modern academic writing on Dante tends to be self-referential and exclusive, weighed down by the mass of material which it has itself generated, and which any new contribution justifiably feels that it must take into account. Books aimed at a student or general readership cut back on the notes and bibliographies, but tend understandably to opt for temperate syntheses of accepted views, and careful assessments of the state of play in current controversies. Few indeed are the critics (Patrick Boyde is one outstanding example) who have urgent things to say about Dante and say them in ways that the non-specialist can readily understand.

Barbara Reynolds is probably best known for completing the translation of the Divine Comedy which her friend Dorothy L. Sayers left off, two-thirds of the way through Paradiso, when she died. Reynolds has continued to work on Dante since then, as well as editing Sayers’s letters, writing her biography, translating Ariosto and editing the Cambridge Italian Dictionary. At the age of ninety-two, she has now published a large-scale study of Dante of a quite arresting kind. She explains, on the first page of her Dante: The poet, the political thinker, the man, that what she tried to do when she began was to cast aside as much as she could of the baggage that afflicts the professional Dantist and reread all the works with an independent mind. So there is no bibliography, precious few notes and a crisp, enjoyable style of exposition that avoids both familiar pieties and scholarly obscurity.

Reynolds is probably in tune with more contemporary academic thinking about Dante than she would care to admit, but she is anything but restricted by it. She announces on her first page that she is offering “a portrait of Dante, the poet, the political thinker and the man, which has not been seen before. Almost every chapter contains new ideas and fresh insights, some of them radical, many controversial”. The shape is familiar – a chronological survey of Dante’s life and career, with ample exposition of all the important works, and with an emphasis on their autobiographical implications. But the novelties come thick and fast, beginning (so far as I was concerned) with the suggestion on page 10 that Dante and other poets he associated with in Florence as a young man might have given their visionary and dreamlike imaginings a boost with the stimulus of love-potions. These herbal stimulants, cannabis perhaps, may, it turns out later, be what Dante is referring to in the comparison, near the start of Paradiso, between his own “trans-human” experience and what Glaucus felt “on tasting of the herb” (nel gustar dell’erba) which made him into a sea-god. As Reynolds explains at greater length when she comes to the final vision of the Godhead, mystics did often use drugs of one kind or another in conjunction with fasting and meditation in their pursuit of visionary illumination. There is no reason, she argues, why Dante should not have done so too.

Dante as a substance abuser? It is not a key argument and Reynolds may be being provocative, even mischievous. She herself gives much more importance to her decoding of the two prophecies that have always been a problem for Dante commentators. Virgil says, in the first canto of the Comedy, that a hound (Veltro) will be coming to chase away the ever-hungry she-wolf that is afflicting Italy. Reynolds goes along with the standard view that Dante is talking of a new, righteous Emperor, but argues that the real interest lies in the puzzling phrase “tra feltro e feltro” (between felt and felt), which she sees as an allusion to the use of felt in contemporary paper-manufacture; Dante, she argues, is referring to the new power of written texts, and specifically to the imminent imposition of the rule of canon and civil law. And then there is the prophecy which Beatrice makes at the very end of the Purgatorio. She speaks of the coming of a mysterious 515, which in Latin is DXV, and hence perhaps an anagram of “dux” (leader). Reynolds accepts that various interpretations are possible and may coexist, but proposes that the best is that the number can actually be read as 105 and that it is a back-reference to Inferno 1 line 105, where the “veltro”, appears, and a further reference to the coming rule of law and learning. Far-fetched? Perhaps, but just about possible philologically, and no more implausible than many another numerological reading of Dante.

One of the new twists that Reynolds gives to the larger story regards the genesis of the Comedy. She posits that the De vulgari eloquentia was originally a lecture delivered at the University of Bologna. The Convivio, she argues, had a similar genesis. Being a philosophical treatise in Italian based around Dante’s readings of some of his own poems, it could not be part of a formal course for registered university students, and was originally a set of what we might call extramural lectures. In their written-up form, the lectures became the first serious bid by Dante for a literary success which he desperately needed in his financially straitened exile. Unfortunately he misjudged his readership, which was not sympathetic to his idiosyncratic mix of poetry and philosophy. In view of falling sales of those parts of the Convivio he had written and released, he rethought his position, abandoning the work after finishing just four books out of a projected fifteen, and opting for a complete change of genre. He took the verse-quest narrative, which had definite popular appeal, and incorporated into it the same sort of learning as he had attempted to present more directly in the Convivio. The result was the Divine Comedy, a work that drew its readers in, and entertained them, in the very process of offering them a wealth of material to absorb and reflect on.

Reynolds herself is not really interested in the ideas as such. Her emphasis is more on Dante as poet, dramatist and, at times, comedian. Her Dante created “the most famous double-act in literature” in his representation of himself and Virgil journeying through Hell and Purgatory, produces in the Comedy “a vast sermon with visual aids and sound effects”, and is above all a showman, a writer who manipulates his readers as he wants and achieves his most powerful effects at moments such as the encounter with Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise. Not that he always gets it right. For Reynolds, Beatrice as she appears in the Paradiso loses coherence as a character when she launches into her denunciations of earthly corruption and becomes a mere mouthpiece for Dante’s moral and political outrage. In fact, Reynolds sees Paradiso, as a whole, as the least interesting and effective of the three cantiche, declaring the final cantos to be often little more than versifications of texts that Dante had read.

Usually every word of the Comedy is discussed reverentially, as though it were indeed a sacred text, a real “poema sacro”, as Dante calls it at one point high in the heavens, while the other works are treated with scarcely less awe. Reynolds is refreshingly demystifying and forthright, and argues directly from the texts for hypotheses that have considerable explanatory power and always have the virtues of simplicity and coherence with respect to the evidence available. She thinks she has solved the enigmas of the Veltro and the DXV, but on the whole, formally at least, she is more cautious, usually hedging her proposals with “perhaps”, “it may be” and other qualifiers. But she gives a strong impression that she herself has made her choice, and she wants her readers to be either with her or against her. Like Virgil dismissing the spineless souls in the vestibule of hell, ultimately she has no time for fence-sitters. The Dante who wrote that episode would have approved, of course. The one who has Virgil in Purgatory tell the human race to remain content with the available facts, and not to probe what cannot be known rationally in this life, might have had reservations.

The main problem is the largeness of the gaps. Reynolds’s readings generally personalize Dante’s motives, and augment the impression of urgency and force that most readers form of his personality, of his being an author who voices the pressures of lived experience as well as the dictates of transcendental love. But in many cases there is simply not the evidence to prove her right or wrong. Dante may have taken drugs. He may have had homosexual experiences. If genuine, the early sonnets exchanged with Forese Donati might point in that direction. He may have killed Buonconte da Montefeltro (whose soul he meets in Purgatory) at the Battle of Campaldino in 1289, or at least he may have seen him die. As Reynolds says, we know Dante was there on the opposite side and he does seem strangely well-informed about the details of Buonconte’s death. And many other episodes may have the foundation in personal experience that Reynolds suggests is there just below the surface.

Dante’s writing career in exile may similarly have followed the trajectory Reynolds traces out, though we might feel that some of her solutions create more problems than they solve. If the De vulgari eloquentia and the Convivio began as lectures of some sort, what role did Dante have at Bologna University and who was he talking to? If he had some sort of degree and became some sort of cleric (as we would expect of a university teacher of the time), then we are going to have to rethink our picture of him in some fundamental ways. Reynolds is much more approachable and stimulating than many other scholars who have put their faith in biographical explanation and narrative cohesion. But the fence-sitters, though they may scratch their heads, are likely to remain where they were for the most part.

Prue Shaw’s DVD-ROM of Dante’s “Monarchia” comes from the opposite extreme of the scholarly spectrum. We have a bewildering number of manuscripts of most of Dante’s works, some of them dating to the years immediately following his death, but nothing in his own hand. Scholars now think that the old aspiration to a perfect critical edition of Dante or almost any other medieval poet is a mirage. The most that can be achieved are closer and closer approximations to the original final version of the text in question, if such a thing ever existed. But even the best critical edition will allow for the fact that, with due provisos, different manuscripts may all have valid things to tell us. Given that perspective, it has become increasingly necessary to find alternatives to the standard picture of a genealogical tree going back to some lost Adamitic original.

Shaw’s work on the text of the Monarchy over the past thirty years led to an acclaimed critical edition that was published by Cambridge University Press in 1995. The DVD-ROM takes things a good many steps further forwards, using new procedures of a highly technical and sophisticated kind developed by Shaw in conjunction with Peter Robinson of Warwick University. It contains the “working hypothesis”, as she terms it, of the critical edition, with its accompanying English translation. It also contains digital reproductions of the nineteen surviving manuscripts and the first printed edition of 1559, plus all the necessary programming for comparing and assessing variant readings, with clear instructions for uninitiated users. In effect, the user is put in the position of an editor. He or she is able to zoom in easily on portions of text and make comparisons between different versions, helped in this by “uprooted phylograms”: that is, precisely calibrated diagrams which represent non-genetic relationships between different readings. Users will almost inevitably be specialists within the already restricted group of Monarchy readers. No matter. This is cutting-edge Dante scholarship, which revises and adds to previous knowledge through a combination of philological expertise and advanced computerization. It is research with rigorously defined aims and procedures, though it is actually much more approachable than research in, say, physics or statistics. It is a world away from Barbara Reynolds, though the redating of the Monarchy does underpin her account of Dante’s later years.

There are no definitive solutions in Dante studies, nor is there any escape for a serious reader from engaging with the puzzles. Ernst Robert Curtius once let drop that he thought Dante a great mystifier. That may be so, but, with only a slight adjustment of vision, we could also see him as endlessly productive and absorbing, rather like the eternal fountain of the Godhead to which Beatrice turns her gaze when she and Dante finally part in the empyrean heaven. If that analogy itself immediately throws up problems, it is only par for the course.