willbethenewageofgold,theimperium, liberation from a past of political
strife.^13 If this can sound unintentionally comic, we should nonetheless not
ignore these poets’fascination with the transfiguring power of language.
Their poems can, to be sure, be read as rehearsals of an exhausted political
syncretism; but they are also exercisesin risk, their enjoyment deeply vested
in the precariousness of a rhetoric that allusively splits and reduplicates the
present moment in acts of memory andanticipation. Such writing itself
serves an imperial desireto engulf time and subordinate it to local meaning.
The very strenuousness of these Roman identifications, and the poets’
identification with regalpotestasthrough so culturally unfamiliar a medium,
produce some startling libidinal narratives, in which the erotics of patronage
takes unexpected paths. These turn on the symbolic weight the poet has to
bear as the speaker of a genealogy that must both fulfill and break with the
past. I address here two particular instances. One involves a characteristic act
of invocation, in which a poet’s word takes on a problematic relationship to
the body of the queen in the poems on Arthur’s birth. The other suggests the
tensions that arise when such atemporal moments of hortatory and panegyric
address are forced, in André’sVita, to adjust to the requirements of historical
narrative.
Giovanni Gigli wrote three poems for Prince Arthur’s birth, two epi-
grams and a longerGenethliacon. TheEpigramma in natalem principis
begins as follows:
Henricûm suboles, dudum promissa Britannis,
E celo veniens, nascere, magne puer;
Tolle moras; tenere vexas cur membra parentis? ( 1 – 3 )[Offspring of Henries, for a long time now promised to the Britons, coming from
heaven, be born, great youth; have done with delays; why do you tenderly trouble
your mother’s body?]
The“tenere”(mildly, gently) has an unsettling ambiguity. Does Gigli
suggest that the yet unborn Arthur’s courteous“gentleness”demands to
be realized in his historical person? Or that Arthur is“troubling”the
mother’s bodytoogently, and should subject it to the active violence
(“vexas”) of birth? The queen’s body is a familiar site of danger, of transition
and becoming,^14 and Elizabeth of York, who holds the desired end of a
divided past, bears an especially fraught real and symbolic burden. Gigli’s
response is to endow his own word with begetting force, a disciplined frenzy
of symbolic mediation; passing through her body to call forth a son in a
formal annunciation, it eliminates the time of waiting (“Tolle moras”).“Be
Beginnings: André and Dunbar 23