3 - Ventriloquized Lyric

Summary

Abstract

The capacity of the lyric voice to take on a life removed from the author's gender identity is nowhere clearer than in Petrarchism's rich tradition of ventriloquized verse. During the Italian Wars (1494–1559), men adopted women's voices, after the model of Ovid's Heroides, as a new way to explore the tragedies of battle. In the second half of the sixteenth century, literary giants such as Tasso and Guarini exchanged amorous verse in which one writer played the role of the female beloved. In the same decades, women writers assumed male personae as a means to experiment with erotic verse. Men's and women's engagement in poetic ventriloquism demonstrates the malleability of gendered lyricization and its usefulness in testing the boundaries of societal norms.

Keywords: Niccolo da Correggio; Vittoria Colonna; Giambattista Guarini; Torquato Tasso; Angelo Grillo; Niccolo Machiavelli; Barbara Salutati

Your Penelope sends this missive to you, O Ulysses, slow of return that you are—yet you write nothing back to me.

‒ Ovid, “Penelope to Ulysses”

Your Penelope cannot have waited longer nor with more expectation for her Ulysses than I did for you.

‒ Petrarch, “Letter to Homer”

The Heroides of Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE) is a collection of fifteen Latin verse epistles, written from the perspective of famous heroines of epic and myth. The titular heroines, commonly referred to as “abandoned women,” write to absent male lovers; the first letter in the collection, from Penelope to Ulysses, is quoted in the epigraph above. Other classical writers had composed ventriloquized literature before this, but Ovid's Heroides is unique on at least two counts: first, the letters are poetry rather than prose; and second, they are both very personal and very intimate. As Laurel Fulkerson writes, “the poems focus on such a small portion of human experience.” Classical scholars have written of the considerable rhetorical and selffashioning agency of Ovid's heroines, who seem to take on a life of their own.

Hugely popular in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Ovid's collection was published across Europe in the original Latin and in vernacular translations and was often accompanied by elaborate commentaries.