Ovid, Heroides, Metamorphoses, Art of Love, Petrarch, Canzoniere, acrostics, Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier
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153
Such exchanges often self-consciously share a mediating influence that acts as a nexus between them. This might be an intertext (often Ovid’s Heroides, Metamorphoses or Art of Love, or Petrarch’s Canzoniere), a subtext (such as when a second level of communication is exchanged via acrostics) or even what might be deemed a metatext or paratext in the familiar verse epistles exchanged between John Donne and his correspondents, where there exists a conceit that correspondents’ respective muses mediate between them, and imbue them with creative energy derived from the transaction. Such mediating influences provide a point of orientation from which members of social groups might display their like-mindedness and performatively demonstrate their intellectual and ethical solidarity.
What further distinguishes this group of verses from the vituperative and exuberant excesses of antisocial verse is the stress which they place upon moderation and temperance as means of maintaining good social relations, whether between husband and wife, groups of friends, or in discourses where the context is courtly and/or amorous. In Castiglione’s courtly dialogue, The Book of the Courtier, the participants in the conversation guide one another towards moderate speech and behaviour and by common assent agree that such an equilibrium of temperament both is knowable and attainable. This has a defensive purpose as well as offering a model for good living. To repeat an earlier quotation:
The surest way in the world is, for a man in his living and conversation to governe himselfe alwaies with a certaine honest meane, which (no doubt) is a great and most sure shield against envie. (II. p.133)
And in the case of the courtly lady Castiglione’s Lord Julian stipulates that,
Accompanying with sober and quiet manners, and with the honestie that must alwaies be a stay to her deedes, a readie livelinesse of wit, whereby she may declare her selfe far wide from all dulnesse: but with such a kinde of goodnesse,
In these exchanges the subject of the mean is particularly prominent whether in verses
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