| In Tears for Dido, I argue that Renaissance poets explored an alternative conception of poetry, and its effects on readers, in their representations of suffering women. Traditional accounts of Renaissance literature often tell us that a poet's persona was fashioned by identification with figures of magisterial action such as Apollo or Orpheus; this image of the poet as maker, builder, and conqueror crafts a Renaissance poetics of virtuous exemplarity, propagated through a masculine lineage. Tears for Dido recovers a counternarrative of Renaissance poets who figure poetic production through identification with the suffering heroines of classical history and myth. Philomela, Lucrece, Dido, and Hecuba offer tales of silencing, subjection, and woe, and their suffering transforms the standard mode of identifying with a text---emulation---into something quite different: sympathy. The suffering of these women places a new strain on inherited poetic resources, and poets seize upon such moments to stage acts of poetic innovation through sympathetic identification with that suffering. In this way, the suffering woman's pathos grounds the origin of poetic creation in the poet's own affective response.;Through readings of the dramatic and poetic works of Shakespeare, the lyrics of Sidney and Gascoigne, Renaissance poetic theory, numerous minor poets, and the classical texts these writers imitate, my study examines the possibilities, as well as the risks, of such experiments in composing poetic identity out of another's suffering. Sometimes poetry gets made from assuming such unexpected identities; sometimes, contrarily, from the welter of speculation about a figure who seems so alien and inscrutable. The problem of sympathy---is it possible to know another's suffering?---thus provided poets with a new way of understanding their own poetic identity. Thus Dido demonstrates how passionate identification provokes a poetics of passion, beyond the confines of exemplarity, whereas Philomela's woeful song---depicted as incomprehensible---serves as a figure for the way that lyric emerges from the illegibility of suffering; Lucretia's suicide becomes as an unlikely figure for authorship, and Hecuba, gazing on the atrocity of Troy's fall, becomes a "mirror of woe" for Shakespeare's conception of tragedy. |
