Ben Jonson

This chapter shows that Ben Jonson’s practice in imitating classical poetry was far more deeply indebted to the kinds of ‘formal’ imitation described in Chapter 6 than Jonson himself would have wished to admit. The epigrams of Martial in particular were not in a simple sense ‘sources’ of material for Jonson’s poetry: rather he sought to imitate the rhetorical figurations and manner of Martial and other authors. The chapter argues Jonson’s own (highly derivative) remarks on imitation in the Discoveries should not be simply taken as guides to his practice. It argues for strong affinities between Jonson’s work as a translator and his practice as an imitator. As both an imitator and as a translator Jonson responded not just to the vocabulary and sense of his originals but also to what Cicero in De Optimo Genere Oratorum had termed their ‘figura’, or rhetorical shape. The chapter concludes by showing how Jonson’s mode of ‘formal’ imitation enabled him to create a style which subsequent imitators—both of his works and of classical poetry—could imitate, and how Thomas Randolph, Robert Herrick, and others imitated Jonson’s style and practice.

Petrarchan Transformations

This chapter explores how Petrarch responded to earlier arguments about imitatio, and how that relates to his unfinished epic Africa. It begins by showing how the metaphors used to describe imitation in the rhetorical tradition were deployed in the self-representations of humanist scholars who rediscovered a complete text of Quintilian. Petrarch’s own richly metaphorical discussions of imitatio are then connected with his concerns about verbal appropriation, and it is argued that Petrarch’s self-representations as a heroic rediscoverer of lost texts should not be taken at face value. He was adept at borrowing from late antique sources—Macrobius in particular—and at occluding those debts. His incomplete epic poem Africa shows how he sought to imitate without borrowing phrases longer than two words from an earlier work. Petrarch’s concerns about plagiarism led him to ‘imitate’ texts which were known about but lost, such as Ennius’s Annales. Imitating such texts—termed here ‘the lost imitand’—was a powerful means of establishing a distinction between imitation and textual appropriation, since a text which was lost could be reimagined, but it could not be plagiarized.

Dreamitation

This chapter turns from the theory to the practice of imitating authors, which it explores in relation to Latin epic in particular. It shows how the metaphors used in the rhetorical tradition to describe the process of imitating authors also ran through the practice of imitation. The chapter begins with a discussion of the passages in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura which consider imitatio, and shows how Lucretius’s concept of a simulacrum, or a thin film of atoms which flowed from the surface of a perceivable object, became an element within the wider language used to describe the imitation of authors. Virgil’s Aeneid played a significant part in this by associating dreams and simulacral resemblances with imitations of earlier authors, including Homer, Ennius, and Lucretius. Ghosts and dreams in the Aeneid have a particular significance: those with substantial bodily presence, such as the appearance to Aeneas of the ghost of Hector, may be associated both with ethical value and with successful imitation, while simulacral resemblances are associated with moral fallibility, and are often presented as female. The metaphors used to describe the imitation of one author by another thus also became part of the practice of imitating.

Introduction

The introduction sets out the argument of the book. It suggests that the imitation of authors (imitatio) is not primarily a matter of verbal appropriation but of learning practices from earlier texts. That process is intrinsically hard to describe, and as a result discussions of the topic in the rhetorical tradition relied on a rich store of metaphors. These were themselves to become part of the practice of imitation. The introduction describes the various kinds of imitatio which developed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries: ‘adaptive’ imitation, in which an earlier text is made ‘apt’ to new times, and ‘formal imitation’, in which an author imitates not the exact words, but the favoured rhetorical structures of an earlier writer. It explains how the word ‘model’ came to be used of an imitated text, and explores the relationship between imitation, plagiarism, and ideas about intellectual property. It explains how regarding an ‘author’ as a potentially open-ended series of texts distinguished by their style and form connects early modern theories of imitation with contemporary interests in artificial intelligence. It briefly suggests some implications of the subject for writing outside Europe, and explains how this book departs from earlier studies of the topic in its scope and argument.

Imitation in the Age of Literary Property

This chapter shows how arguments about intellectual property in the eighteenth century changed attitudes towards imitatio, and explores the emergence of romantic poetics from earlier arguments about imitation. It begins by considering Alexander Pope’s Dunciad and its distinction between ‘parodies’ of vernacular authors on the one hand and ‘imitations’ of classical texts on the other. It then shows how John Locke’s theories of property and early eighteenth-century legislation about copyright complicated that distinction between classical and vernacular texts. Through an analysis of William Lauder’s accusations that Milton was a plagiarist it demonstrates both how the reception of Paradise Lost became central to arguments about intellectual property in the period, and also how the Lauder affair led to changes in the ways theorists wrote about imitatio. Milton came to be regarded as both a common good which could be imitated freely, and as the most authoritative example of proprietorial vernacular author. That influenced how he was in turn imitated by later vernacular writers. William Wordsworth in particular frequently associated Milton with landscapes and areas such as public rights of way, which were simultaneously common goods and private property. Wordsworth consequently transformed the ancient metaphor of the imitator following in the footsteps of an earlier author into a representation of the poet ranging freely over a land which is partly a common good, and partly what is still called a literary ‘estate’.

Milton

This chapter considers the role played by imitatio in John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. It shows how the traditional opposition between a ‘living’ imitation of a past text and a mere simulacral resemblance of it shapes the way Milton represents the imitated world of hell. It goes on to contextualize Milton’s understanding of imitatio. Milton was influenced by changing ways of presenting localized allusions or ‘imitations’ in editions of classical texts, by the educational thinking of the circle around Samuel Hartlib, and by the ways in which his friend Francis Junius interpreted Quintilian’s Institutio. Paradise Lost was composed in a period during which the word ‘imitation’ came to be used in new ways. It could be applied to translations which adapted classical texts to the manners of the present, and also to pastiches in the vernacular of another author’s style. Milton both resisted and responded to these developments. The chapter then shows how Milton was among the earliest writers to treat classical texts as (in a rather literal sense) ‘models’, which provide not words or images for a later writer but scalar templates for future works. The history of that word is explored, as is Milton’s use of the dizzying effects of scale which follow from an imitator regarding the texts which he imitates as ‘models’ in this sense. The chapter concludes with a discussion of such scalar effects in relation to the representations of both Rome and the Temple at Jerusalem in Paradise Regained.

Formal Imitation

This chapter returns to the debate about the imitation of Cicero between Pietro Bembo and Gianfrancesco Pico in the early sixteenth century, and shows how these two writers’ different approaches to imitatio encouraged subsequent authors to imitate the ‘form’ of earlier texts. This could be a quasi-Platonic abstract idea of an earlier author, or it could encompass the structures of sentences or arguments. This theme was developed by later sixteenth-century Northern European writers on imitatio, principally Philipp Melanchthon and Johannes Sturm. They encouraged imitating authors to attend to the rhetorical structure of the works that they imitated, rather than borrowing their language. Through Roger Ascham these German rhetoricians had a profound influence on later sixteenth-century English writing. The chapter concludes by arguing that their thinking encouraged imitating authors in that period to engage in what is here called ‘stylism’. Many later Elizabethan authors sought not only to imitate a distinctive ‘form’ of an earlier author, but also to establish that they had a ‘form’ or style of their own, which could be identified by their readers, and which subsequent authors might imitate.

Adaptive Imitation

This chapter explores how the debates about the imitation of Cicero in the early sixteenth century influenced the theory and practice of imitatio. It concentrates on two works published in 1528: Erasmus’s dialogue Ciceronianus and Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. It shows how both texts developed a view of the imitator not as a verbal replicator but as someone who learnt an ability to speak aptly to any occasion—hence the term ‘adaptive’ imitation. This concept is explored in relation to the theory and practice of epic and romance poetry in the sixteenth century, from Boiardo and Ariosto, through Tasso, to Spenser. Adaptive imitation created acute stress between two senses of ‘imitation’ in the epic tradition: was an imitator to imitate the ethics and behaviour of a heroic character, or to adapt both heroic values and past writing to the present times? That question is developed in relation to Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in which an imitator who directly replicates the actions of a prior figure becomes increasingly unapt to his own times, and subsequently encounters simulacral imitations of himself. That key text in the emergence of the new genre of the novel grows in part from the complex arguments about imitatio in the early sixteenth century.

Posthuman Postscript

The Postscript asks whether a machine could in the future successfully imitate a human poet. It discusses the history of artificially generated poems from early schoolroom manuals through John Clark’s ‘Eureka Machine’ of 1845 to the age of the computer. It relates Alan Turing’s ‘Imitation Game’, in which a computer mimics the linguistic behaviour of a human being, to a wider mid-twentieth-century tendency to see poetry as the ultimate challenge for an electronic imitator of human behaviour. The chapter argues that a computer which depended on statistical modelling of prior poetic corpuses would not be able to replicate the actions of a human imitator, because imitating authors imitate not simply words but practices, and those are not simply codifiable. Imitators do not simply follow the rules implicit in earlier texts, but might imitate an earlier author’s willingness to break those rules. The chapter shows that a pervasive opposition between biological and digital systems runs through writing about the possibility of artificially imitating human consciousness, which is the latest manifestation of the opposition between a ‘living’ recreation of a past author and a simulacrum. It concludes by discussing the Xenotext by the Canadian experimental poet Christian Bök, which seeks to create a perpetually living poetry engine embedded in the DNA of a permanently durable microbe. This takes the long-standing metaphor of a ‘living’ imitation to the cellular level, and makes of imitatio an unending biological process of transformation.

Building Bodies

This chapter discusses what Roman rhetoricians said about the imitation of authors. After a brief discussion of Dionysius of Halicarnassus it moves on to consider the central texts of the rhetorical tradition: the Ad Herennium, Cicero’s various discussions of the topic, Seneca’s 84th Epistle, (centrally) Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, and finally the Peri Hypsōs ascribed to Longinus. The chapter shows how these discussions of imitatio rely heavily on metaphors—of biological reproduction, or digestion, or the development of an active body—to describe the successful imitation of one author by another, and frequently oppose those metaphors to their negative images—mere pictorial representations or simulacra. The chapter explains why these metaphors, which were to have an extensive afterlife, were used. It is intrinsically hard to describe how one person acquires a skill from another, and Latin lacked a technical vocabulary in which to do so. Roman rhetoricians transferred the direct and personal exemplary relationship between a trainee orator and his master to textual relationships. As a result they were prone to represent the process by which a pupil assimilated his reading in bodily terms. Quintilian in particular stressed aspects of earlier writers which were products of an ingenium or natural talent that was inimitable. This combination of conceptual fuzziness and metaphorical richness made imitatio a potent literary resource, and indeed later concepts of poetic genius are adumbrated by the ‘inimitable’ qualities of the exemplary orator.