Bulletin of the Comediantes

THE INTERRELATED DEVELOPMENT of Western lyric poetry, polities, and empires as illustrated by the recurring myth of Amphion is the subject of this book. Amphion, a demigod whose musical skills led Hermes to gift him the lyre, played so beautifully that rocks stacked themselves up to build the walls of Thebes, the city he ruled as king. He eventually loses his family and commits suicide, but it is his role as poet-builder, and what it says about poetry's relation to society, that Middlebrook interrogates through close-readings buttressed by historical context and theoretical insights. To that effect, she analyzes Amphion as an explicit allusion and a conceptual cipher for "a specific kind of poiesis, a generativity that encompasses both poems and the civic form that is the polity: community with a fixed architecture … governed either by a single ruler … or an oligarchy, and encircled by walls" (2).

The introduction proposes that the rhetorical figure of efficacia conveys the Amphionic disposition of poets as lawgivers and presiders of ritual who ruminate on the mysteries of verbal creation. The author reads Alciatus's emblem Foedera italorum (where political order is likened to the tuning of a zither) and engravings where Amphion appears playing a viol or a lute in conjunction with passages from George Puttenham's The Art of English Poesy (1589) on the need to apply poetry's rules to local vernacular concerns. She also quotes lines from the Inferno, where Dante longs for the Muses "who helped / Amphion enclose Thebes / so that word may not be different from the fact" (18), and the expression "Musa lyrae sollers" from Horace's Ars Poetica, which she renders as "songs of the lyric muse" (3), to highlight poetry's depiction as a politically invested, edifying artform. Woven throughout the book, these references shape its core argument: poetry's potential for achieving social cohesion and the inherent tensions of the task echo Amphion's raising of Thebe's walls and their subsequent collapse.

The discussion on "Musa lyrae sollers" emphasizes how Amphion completes a mythopoeic triad alongside Mercury and Orpheus. In contrast to their foundational musical attributes––Mercury, god of commerce and rhetoric, invented the lyre, while Orpheus domesticated nature and descended to the underworld––Amphion is a successor whose construction feat represents [End Page 159] poetry as a labor-intensive, quotidian phenomenon. As such, he stands for the idea of poetry as a series of skills and procedures that give meaning to political and cultural processes.

Chapter 1 delves into the repertoire that attests to the rise of centralized early-modern European nation-states. Poetic glosses, parodies, and translations build cultural capital for its practitioners and communicate shifts in power dynamics, while seeking the generous patronage of overlords. Alonso de Cervantes's glosses of Manrique's Coplas por la muerte de su padre (1501) "perform Amphion's art by building a Castilian world that has a place" (32) for its author, a banished letrado who writes from Portugal. Hernando de Acuña's translation of Olivier de La Marche's Le chevalier déliberé (1553) addresses the challenges of adapting to Spanish a French poem dear to Charles V, while laying bare the rivalries among courtiers vying for royal favor. In that sense, Acuña's parody of Garcilaso's Ode ad Florem Gnidi "De vuestra torpe lira," a tirade against Jerónimo de Urrea who also translated Le chevalier, reveals Acuña's knack for imitatio and ratifies a violent impulse in much of this repertoire by insinuating that Urrea engaged in sodomy.

Chapter 2 examines how translations of Joachim Du Bellay's 1558 Les Antiquitez du Rome articulate "the constellation of lyric phenomena, poetry-polis-self" (78) in relation to imperial claims. Edmund Spenser's The Ruines of Rome (1591), a direct translation of Du Bellay's sequence, shows how the latter's poetic feat of translatio imperii can be tailored to express England's political ambitions. Trevor Joyce's 2014 Rome's Wreck, a monolingual translation in octosyllables of The Ruines, in turn demystifies Spenserian high rhetoric exhibiting the continuities between imperialism and neoliberalism in Ireland. For Middlebrook, translating a poetic corpus whose claims to permanence are predicated upon iterations of Roman greatness involves tonal and deictic shifts that undermine said claims. Accordingly, Joyce's poetry describes ruins as debris: not so much objects of nostalgia or promise, but testimony to imperialism's lingering effects (65).

Chapter 3 explores how copia, "the practice of crafting passages of language using an abundance of words" (95), epitomizes poetry's straddling of community and power. Cervantes's Viaje del Parnaso (1614), the Knight of the Green Coat episode in Don Quijote, Parte 2 (1615), and lyrics produced for seventeenth-century Spanish poetry contests underscore how poetry as a collective pursuit can generate local pride and celebration while drawing boundaries and class distinctions. Multitudinous participation and patronage conform two sides of the same coin: a point made clear by Don Quijote's and Don Lorenzo's remarks on prizes in poetry contests, which inform a detailed discussion of poetic jousts in honor of Saint Teresa or a local Mallorcan saint.

Chapter 4 scrutinizes Amphion's legacy in colonial and contemporary Latin America. Middlebrook views the rhetorical patterns of Hernán Cortés's Cartas de Relación (1519–26), Bernardo de Balbuena's description of Cortés as a "new Amphion" in the Grandeza Mexicana's preface (1604), and Amarilis's Epístola a Belardo, first published in Lope de Vega's La Filomena (1621), as replicating Amphion's work by chronicling the destruction of an indigenous world at the hands of the Spanish empire while edifying new stylistic and ideological parameters. In one subsection she uncovers the strategies in Raúl [End Page 160] Zurita's poetry that interrogate the legacy of economic and political forms of oppression. A case in point is her reading of Zurita's "Las espejeantes playas," published in Anteparaíso (1982), as foregrounding the violence inherent to naming: an act that evokes both the renaming of the country's geography by Spanish colonizers, and civilian disappearances in Chile during Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship (1973–90). Likewise, Middlebrook sees the Chilean poet's engagement with the work of Dante through typographical and metaphorical experiments as an attempt to make sense of the void left by the disappearance and death of loved ones. Middlebrook concludes this chapter by commenting how living Mapuche poets' use of Amphionic procedures (translation, gloss, and literary quotation) displaces Eurocentric writing practices and offers novel perspectives. In a poem by Maribel Mora Curriao (b. 1970), the speaker watches a bird watching her, which leads to the realization that her physical enclosure is the object of the bird's pity. As a coda, Middlebrook writes a stirring gloss on Amphion, the sculpture by Henri (1885–1954) located at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (Caracas), as a testament to the open-ended and periodically renewed promise of a myth that symbolizes poetry's purported civilizing force.

Thought-provoking and compellingly written, Amphion is a capacious book that merits close attention. Authors and issues treated in any given chapter dovetail nicely with others, accomplishing an impressive sense of coherence across the material covered. Moreover, its probing analyses led this reader to reassess Morisco poetry, read more of Trevor Joyce's rewritings of Spenser, and think about how empires still impose on colonized peoples a sense of time and political organization through a logic of disruption and deferral. Given Amphion's range, some interpretations are bound to persuade more than others. Middlebrook's assertion that "the questions that literary criticism trains us to ask are not helpful" (104) when examining literary contest lyrics will draw some skepticism. Asking about a poem's rhetorical prowess, genre, or whether it's good or bad, which she dismisses, may in fact encourage critical judgements that can explain an outmoded repertoire's reception. It allows us, for example, to distinguish Gabriel Bocángel's (1603–58) court poetry from so much hackwork. Middlebrook's own skillful close-reading of the prosodic patterns and puns of a poem advertising a contest in honor of Saint Vincent Ferrer demonstrate both its quality and that studying lyric need not be a zero-sum game.

Similarly, the interpretation of the anonymous sonnet "Dios, que a los suyos padeciendo mira" in Chapter 1 will not convince everyone. Written by a Morisco (a Spanish of Muslim heritage), the poem describes King Philip III's 1609 decree of expulsion of the Moriscos as a providential punishment that befell them for having forsaken Islam. Its main conceit renders the plight of the Moriscos as that of the Jews in Exodus. The decree is thus interpreted as an opportunity to migrate and return to the true religion of their ancestors, not unlike Pharaoh allowing the Jews to leave Egypt. According to Middlebrook, line 9, "Del Faraón de España ablanda el pecho," casts Phillip III as a Christlike intermediary between God and the Moriscos (61). From a typological standpoint, this reading would have been more plausible had the monarch been compared to Moses. But the poem's tortuous syntax allows for another [End Page 161] interpretation: God placates his wrath with a display of mercy that manifests in the king's decision to allow the Moriscos to cross safely the sea.

Reservations notwithstanding, Amphion's accomplishments far outweigh any moments that might give pause. This book expands on scholarly consensus on how early modern lyric in England and Spain is thoroughly mediated by material and political processes, social conventions, and artistic performances. Its hermeneutic method recalls The New Science by Giambattista Vico (1725), whose interpretations of ancient myths sought to explain the development of cultural mores and institutions. In showing how the myths of the past illuminate poetry's lingering fixation on creation, destruction, and renewal, Middlebrook herself has torn down the disciplinary walls between old and contemporary texts, and laid the foundation for future approaches to the discussion of poetry. [End Page 162]