Valentio Di’ Buondelmonte
A Tragedy in Five Acts
Haig Khatchadourian
With a Foreword by Roy Arthur Swanson
Valentio Di’ Buondelmonte
A Tragedy in Five Acts
Copyright © 2014 Haig Khatchadourian. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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isbn 13: 978-1-62564-212-7
eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-272-4
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To Arpiné
I come, Great Friend, fearful yet rich in hope,
To place upon the Altar of thy heart
This humble wreathe of daisies wild, gathered
From the untrodden fields of my lone soul,
Woven by unskilled fingers rude, albeit
Fain would I have them be of roses proud.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
O if the random notes of my wild song,
Swept on my heart’s frail strings but newly strung,
Strike discords harsh upon they dainty ear,
I know thou wilt not scorn my faltering art,
Since they will be to thee Symbol and Sign
Of my tongue-less (save Silence) esteem for thee:
For when the notes are done and dead, Silence
And silent looks become articulate.
Foreword
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