Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.3 (2003) 493-496 [Access article in PDF] Piero Boitani. The Genius to Improve an Invention: Literary Transitions. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. xiv + 151 pp. Cloth, $35; paper, $18. This is an English-language revision of Boitani's Il genio di migliorare un'invenzione (Bologna 1999), which was itself originally composed in English; as Boitani engagingly puts it, "I do not quite know in what language I am writing" (xiv). The book's "linguistic vicissitudes" are intriguingly appropriate to its topic, which is the (mostly) translingual commerce between literary texts in which the difference evident in imitation can be understood as an inspired "improvement." That terminology comes from Dryden's somewhat hangdog comment on the relative unoriginality of English writers: "the Genius of our Countrymen in general," he writes in the preface to his Fables, is "rather to improve an Invention, than to invent themselves" (cited by Boitani, 74). Boitani is more celebratory about the process in question, which he takes to be an important motor of both literary creation and literary history; "improvement" for him suggests "that species of literary transmission which comes somewhere between T. S. Eliot's notion of tradition and the individual talent and Harold Bloom's 'anxiety of influence.' 'Improving' means kicking against ancestorly traces... but it also means accepting our predecessors, taking them on in a nonbelligerent sense—indeed, positively loving them with filial devotion: a relationship which will inevitably be (as Bloom argues) Oedipal-Freudian but also a special one of affection and 'moving beyond'" (ix). This is not so much a theory as an enlightened disposition to give both piety and competitiveness their due in assessing authorial relations across gaps of time and language; most of the book's trim length is taken up with a series of handsomely mounted case studies.The central three chapters, all dealing with English engagements with classic Italian poetry, are, I think, the most rewarding. Boitani's inwardness with the Italian material gives the discussions a confidence and specificity—at times a passion—not often met with in anglophone scholarship on the subjects he takes up. Chaucer's recasting of Boccaccio's Filostrato as Troilus and Criseyde is in effect a stilnovist recasting, making the story truer to the spirit of Boccaccio's own Italian predecessors. In a passage of otherwise close translation from Filostrato, Chaucer substitutes his version of the incipit of a famous canzone of Guido Guinizelli's on the nature of love ("Al cor gentile rempaira sempre amore"; "In gentil hertes ay redy to repaire"). Boitani offers a brief but compelling reading of Guinizelli's poem itself, which seems to him "the fascinating dramatization of a whole culture" (53), and then traces Dante's involvement with it, most significantly in his portrait of Francesca in Inferno 5, where illicit love is treated with a compassion that readers continue to find surprising. The English Criseyde is, as it were, an extension of the same line of thought: "Chaucer seems to understand the analogies of Guinizelli's canzone and to interpret them as a sequence that sketches in a double—downward and upward—movement in a Dantean perspective. Francesca may yet lead to Beatrice" (68). Along the way [End Page 493] Dante is imagined saluting the work of his successor: "Well done, Dante would say, enough is kept, enough is changed. The invention is properly improved" (64). The result is a welcome if mostly implicit rebuke to the sterner, less romantic understandings of Chaucer's poem that have tended to dominate in the last several decades.In the chapter that gives its title to the book as a whole, a more linear sequence of revision is traced from Boccaccio's Teseida through Chaucer's Knight's Tale to Shakespeare's and Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen and Dryden's Palamon and Arcite. Within this succession, Shakespeare and Fletcher strain the outlines of Boitani's own model; they "have... not just 'improved' an 'invention.' They have radically revolutionized the story, and perhaps their 'anxiety of influence' toward Chaucer [in their...