Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival: Seven Sacred Plays

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 1998 by Constance Jordan

I conclude with a final word about a tricky matter - the question of intentionality. This arises particularly when a writer deploys figures that suggest facetiousness, as do Agrippa and Fonte. Rabil, Agrippa's editor, asks whether the Declamation can be counted a serious work, a question asked by earlier critics - Emile Telle, Marc Angenot, Ian Maclean, Linda Woodbridge and myself, among others. He concludes, correctly I think, that despite its paradoxical quality, the treatise has "serious and seriously intended" consequences (32). They derive, I have suggested above, from Agrippa's entertainment of a parity between the sexes in social, political, and legal spheres. Cox, Fonte's editor, who focuses on "sincerity" as well as "seriousness," takes the view that in general defenses of women are not always "sincere" (that is, I assume, without irony): "'Sincerity,' in the sense of a personal commitment on the author's part to the ideas expressed, should certainly not be assumed in Renaissance defenses of women. We are on safer ground with 'courtesy,"ingenuity,' or 'eloquence,' the qualities contemporary readers most frequently praised in such works . . . . The Worth of Women is certainly far from 'sincerity' in the sense of 'earnestness,' and its tone, like that of other defenses of women, is best defined by the contemporary notion of 'serious play'" (serio ludere [15-16]). Cox goes on to note, and I would agree, that Fonte, working within the convention of serio ludere, engages both humor and critique and that to ignore either is a mistake. What I think may benefit from further comment are Cox's distinctions between sincere and insincere, and serious and non-serious discourse.

Here I would keep two considerations in mind. First, as literary expression is governed by the generic conventions exemplified by a text or the rules of the language game a writer has chosen to play, so is all such expression intended to be taken seriously: a writer wants to persuade a reader of the merit of his or her work, to play as good a game as he or she can. What critical readers need to assess are how deftly a writer exploits the resources of language to rhetorical effect and a logical check-mate. Second, a writer's sincerity has, in my view, a limited bearing on the cultural meaning of a literary text, which may be intended but not necessarily received as ironic. Reception theory is replete with instances of such reinterpreted texts. As Quentin Skinner has observed, intentionality has two aspects: a writer intends to write a text, he or she also intends to persuade an audience.(1) The first intention is realized in the completed work, the second is notoriously open-ended. While a writer may be insincere or ironic in his representations, his or her readers, free in any case to reconceive the rules of the game for their own purposes, may become sincerely affected by them or choose strategically to promote them as their sincere beliefs. In such instances, while it is important to recognize that a writer is being ironic, it is also important to consider how his or her readers are responding. The point is especially worth keeping in mind when a discourse is as culturally charged as early modern literature on the nature and status of women. Readers of this literature should find appropriate contexts in which its cultural meanings may be assessed by analyzing evidence of institutional (especially legal and economic) changes affecting women during the long early modern period.