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In Valentio Di’ Buondelmonte Professor Haig Khatchadourian gives today’s readers a sample of Elizabethan English and an example of a Renaissance tragedy; in doing so, he has produced an exemplar of illustration.

The words “sample,” “example,” and “exemplar” are all derived from the Latin exemplum, but they intimate a qualitative progression that advances beyond the “copy / original” distinction of exemplum / exemplaris. Generally, a sample is a partial representation, an example is a full or summary representation, and an exemplar is a prime meritorious representation. Aristotle, in his Poetics, provides samples (incidents in) and examples (summaries) of bad and good works of tragedy. For him, the exemplar of tragedy is Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannos, representing the sixfold acme of mythos (plot), ethos (character), dianoia (thought), lexis (diction), melopoeia (musical sonance), and opsis (visual attraction). Shakespeare’s Hamlet meets much of Aristotle’s complex criterion and may be considered an (if not the) exemplar of Elizabethan tragedy; but its elements of revenge, emotional conflict, Stoicism, and moralism betray its greater debt to Senecan rather than to Sophoclean tragedy. In his appropriation of Elizabethan diction and revenge-preoccupation, Professor Khatchadourian has produced a sampling of emotional excess (as opposed to Attic restraint), an example of Elizabethan mythos (plot that is oriented more from emotional vagaries than from peripeteia [reversal of expectations and circumstances] and anagnorisis [belated discovery], although inclusive of Attic pathos [suffering] ), and an exemplar of mimesis (melding Attic and Senecan imitations of praxis [action] in a literary scholar’s imitation of Elizabethan lexis and pathos. His subsequent translation of Valentio Di’Buondelmonte into modern English offers readers a means of measuring, in the context of melopoeia (including, in both versions: rhetorical figuration, such as alliteration and metaphor, and continuity in iambic pentameter), a variation of emotionalism between Elizabethan and current English.

Here is a slight but significant sample of his variation:

[Elizabethan] She is /A virgin rose but newly blown from the bud.

[Modern] She’s a virgin rose newly blown from the bud. . . .

The unilinear modern statement excludes ambiguity: “She’s a virgin rose” precludes a reading of “rose” as a verb. The Elizabethan statement invites such a reading: “She is,” set off from the following line and uncontracted, may be read as “She exists” and “A virgin rose [verb]”; it also retains the metaphor, “She is a rose . . . newly blown.” Moreover, “but” serves both as “only” or “just” and as an adversative. As a poet, Professor Khatchadourian knows that ambiguity adds applicable connotation to basic denotation and compounds the significance of a statement. As a philosopher, he appreciates the extended mental journeys that functional ambiguity initiates: movement in two different but complementary directions at the same time. Both Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger observe this variability as Language’s spiritual game. In the context of “tragedy,” then, the poet-philosopher shows us how Elizabethan English can enhance our experience of language. This answers the question, “Why write an Elizabethan tragedy today?” and establishes the nature of the composition.

A well-established basis for tragic drama is what Aristotle calls plots centering on some houses (μύθoυς . . . περ λίγας oκίας). By “houses” we may understand families or political entities—or economic classes, and, ultimately, ways of life. Aristotle mentions the houses (or families, or partisans) of Alcmaeon, Oedipus, Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes, and Telephus. Common among such plots of houses in conflict is that of a young man romantically attached to a young woman whose family stands in opposition to his own. For example, Alcmaeon, married to Phegeus’s daughter Alphesiboea, deserts his wife to consort with Achelous’s daughter Callirrhoë, for whom he strives to recover the magical necklace (of Harmonia) that he had given to Alphesiboea and is therein killed by Phegeus’s sons.The love of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet brings the houses of Montague and Capulet to similarly motivated bloodshed.

Professor Khatchadourian explains that Valentio Di’ Buondelmonte is “inspired by Shakespeare’s tragedies, which follow” classical Greek tragic themes. Valentio agrees to marry Beatrice of the Ameidei family as a means of resolving the hostility between that family and his. But his first sight of Livia di’ Donati compels him to break his engagement to Beatrice and devote his life and love to Livia, who fully requites his devotion. Beatrice, in her turn, loves and elopes with Uberto, a friend of Valentio. The familial feud is explosively exacerbated. Valentio is assassinated for his desertion of Beatrice. Uberto is killed in his attempt to avenge Valentio. Beatrice, like Shakespeare’s Juliet, commits suicide in her grief over the death of her beloved. Livia, bereft of Valentio, takes Beatrice’s knife and contemplates suicide, uttering a soliloquy reminiscent of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”; then, hearing the assassins calling for death to the Donati and Buondelmonti and specifically to her mother, who had engineered the attachment of herself and Valentio, Livia exits to end the drama.

Professor Khatchadourian’s drama, with its Shakespearean echoes, carries forth the lexis and melopoeia of Elizabethan tragedy. By way of example, a citizen says, “This sound is new to my ears”; a second citizen says, “Lend them to me, then . . .”; and we are reminded of Antony’s speech to the citizens in Julius Caesar. Uberto’s “For lo! The betraying streaks / Of day from yonder Orient gates of Heaven / Do rend the velvet folds of friendly night” is consonant with Horatio’s “But, look, the morn in russet mantle clad, / Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill” (Hamlet I.1.166–7). The fury of Elizabethan tragedy reflects humankind’s incompatibility with its own species and the failure of love as a force to neutralize or contain violence. In Valentio, Uberto points to a statue of Mars as “this grim idol / Of fire and fury”; and “idol” is understood both as “false god” and “object of adoration,” just as the bloodshed of Elizabethan tragedy is both harrowing and entertaining.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth (V.5.26–8) contains the titular speaker’s lament that life is “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /Signifying nothing.” Elizabethan tragedy, filled with sound and fury, signifies that idiocy is a form of self-centered orientation alien to altruism (Greek idios means “one’s own self”; Latin alter means “other”).To this effect, Beatrice’s long pre-suicidal lament, brilliantly wrought in Valentio, is inescapably Elizabethan, including the following: “. . . Love, Lord of the Soul, before / Whose sovereignty Friendship should bend the knee / Of homage meek, hath risen in rash rebellion, / His throne usurping, claiming obedience low / Of him who knows how to receive, but not / To give. . . .” Idiocy, self-induced blindness to the Other, is, in fact, the gene of obsession.

Virginia Woolf, to whom this idiocy is manifest in her phrase (from A Room of One’s Own) “Milton’s bogey,” catches this note of human antithesis in Orlando. The comic novel opens with young Orlando entertaining himself by “slicing at the head of a [slain] Moor which hung from the rafters.” The cultural setting of the first part of the novel is Elizabethan England, in which Shakespeare’s plays (especially Othello) are very popular. Orlando, engaged to marry Lady Margaret, deserts her and falls wholly in love with Marousha (“Sasha”), a Russian princess, in much the same way that Valentio falls in love with Livia. “Sasha” requites his love but arbitrarily deserts him. The force of Orlando’s love-at-first-sight is a kind of violence; it is, indeed, quite similar to Valentio’s obsessive love of Livia at first sight and to his consequent desertion of Beatrice. Obsession is a violent emotion, a willful blocking of one’s vision from all but the immediate object of one’s desire; and it is akin to hostility. Woolf seems to see a resolution of love and war only in fantasy, the pursuit of which can lead to the essence of reality in the exercise of the imagination. For her, Elizabethan tragedy records a failure of imagination, a failure from which, significantly, we can learn.

Obsession in Elizabethan tragedy ranges from culturally conflicted emotions (the wars of houses) to individually self-centered emotions, including those “che sono vili” (“that are villainous”), as Professor Khatchadourian observes in Il tragico e l’irrazionale [Rivista di Estetica, XII.1, Jan.–Apr. 1967, p. 73], like the ambition of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Obsession is never benign; and in Elizabethan tragedy love is measured on the scales of obsession.

It is important to learn that to be obsessed is to be possessed by the notion of what one wants to possess. The lover, requited or unrequited in desire, wants to possess the wherewithal to secure her or his beloved. Star-crossed lovers want to possess the freedom to consummate their love. Families want to possess their integrity securely by keeping their integers within the strictly defined familial unit. Lovers and families provide the context for the sound and fury of Elizabethan tragedy. With individuals, it is love (or what is taken to be love: a receipt of satisfaction more than a giving of it). With families, it is feuds. With nations, it is wars. From the star-crossed lovers (Valentio and Livia; Uberto and Beatrice) in Professor Khatchadourian’s tragedy we proceed to the feud between the Ameidei and the Buondelmonti. And then, as we learn from his introduction, there would be the Guelf and Ghibelline factions, “and long after the original cause of enmity had ceased, they continued to steep all Italy in blood.”

As Virginia Woolf and Haig Khatchadourian intimate effectively, the trail from love to war is blazed by obsession. Love is, not a unilateral donation of the self to the other, but an uncompromising need to be satisfied by possession of the other. That Aphrodite and Ares should embrace and produce Harmonia is a product of the imagination. According to Woolf, the essence of reality is to be found in the imagination. Khatchadourian thus fires his imagination by shaping historical shadows into Elizabethan tragic poetry. He restates and adumbrates an answer to the question that Woolf has promulgated in Orlando. Woolf has playfully parodied Elizabethan culture and imaginatively equated the sexes by changing her male Orlando into a female Orlando in mid-story. Khatchadourian evokes Elizabethan culture by recapturing its music and force and tracing the genesis of its dramatic creativity to ancient Greece. Both enable us inspiritedly to exercise the imagination in coping with the phenomenon of idiocy. That, one may conclude, is in accordance with what is exemplary.

Roy Arthur Swanson

Emeritus Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee