Lord Berners's sixteenth-century The Castell of Love is difficult to categorize. It is part romance, part conduct book, part rhetorical manual, a translation and part English work of fiction. The Castell is the product of several generations of authors and readers who sought to impose their interpretations upon a strange and absorbing prose romance that first appeared in the last years of the fifteenth century in Spanish called Cárcel de amor, by Diego de San Pedro, author of another popular prose romance, the Tractado de los amores de Arnalte y Lucenda, as well as of various poetic works. Cárcel de amor was translated into Catalan, Italian, French, and English in the sixteenth century and into German in the seventeenth. It also circulated in Spanish with a continuation by Nicolás Núñez, which effected a substantial revision to the plot of the original. The plot and form of Cárcel are complex: the young noble Leriano is trapped in the eponymous allegorical prison of love, held captive by his passion for the princess of Macedonia, Laureola. With the help of the Auctor, a combination of go-between, narrator, and author figure, Leriano succeeds in establishing an exchange of letters with the princess and eventually visits her, causing the jealous courtier Persio to accuse the pair of an illicit union. The princess is then imprisoned and condemned to death by her tyrannical father. A battle between Leriano and Persio to determine Laureola's innocence ensues, but its outcome is not respected by the king and Leriano rescues Laureola by getting up an army and mounting a full-scale attack against him. Even after the rescue, Laureola maintains her reserve and refuses Leriano's advances in order to preserve her honor. Leriano, still afflicted with lovesickness, consumes her letters and dies after debating the woman question with a friend who seeks to cure him through misogyny. In Núñez's continuation, Laureola is shown to have been in love with Leriano and his death the result of her insincerity and mercilessness. Cárcel features numerous narrative forms, including allegory, epistles, debate, declamation, and lament, but the characters never engage in direct dialog.
Despite its international popularity and the three English editions that appeared in the middle of the sixteenth century, The Castell has been somewhat overlooked as a work of Tudor literature due to its status as a translation rather than an "original" piece of pre-Shakespearean English literature. Boro's edition seeks to redress this marginalization of The Castell, providing a fairly conservative edition based upon the 1548 London printing, but incorporating the verses and editorial additions of Andrew Spigurnell from the 1552 and 1555 editions in the main body of the text. Although these three editions are available on Early English Books Online (http://eebo.chadwyck.com), the new edition renders the text more manageable, especially for non-specialist scholars and students, by noting the textual variants in footnotes and including two useful appendices: linguistic notes and commentary, and a glossary of terms that may be unfamiliar to modern readers. The edition is accompanied by a monograph-length study that seeks to contextualize The Castell in sixteenth-century English and Continental letters, analyzes Berners's translation methods, and discusses The Castell in relation to critical responses to Diego de San Pedro's Cárcel. Both the edition and study are based upon Boro's doctoral thesis (Oxford University 2002).
John Bourchier, Lord Berners (b. 1467) had a colorful literary and political career. He held multiple diplomatic posts, traveling to Spain and also serving as Henry VIII's deputy to Calais. He also produced many translations from French and Spanish into English, including Froissart's Chronicles, Arthur of Lytell Brytayne, Huon of Burdeux, and The Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius. Boro's study offers a more thorough analysis of Berners's translation methods than previous scholarship on his work. She reveals that although the title page of The Castell asserts that he "translated out of Spanishe," Berners used both a Spanish edition of Cárcel that contained the continuation by Nicolás Núñez and a French translation, Prison d'amour, at times preferring the one version to the other. As a result The Castell is a "highly creative" text that often well conveys the sense of the original Spanish but also offers "a novel English reading" (45). In addition to the detailed description of Berners's use of both sources in the introduction, Boro's copious notes on the text allow readers to see how the translator chose to use the Spanish and French texts from which he worked.
Berners's most innovative move as a translator is his inclusion of Núñez's continuation, which was reproduced with Cárcel in all the Spanish printings from 1496 on, but was not translated into Catalan, Italian or French. In The Castell the continuation is presented not as an addendum, but as an integral part of the novel and its conclusion. Berners chose not to include any of the material from the Spanish editions that points to a change in authorship or perspective. Since the continuation radically changes Laureola's role in the story by asserting that she did really love Leriano, where Diego de San Pedro left Laureola's feelings ambiguous, the assimilation of the Núñez's continuation indicates a particular interpretive stance on Berners's part. Thus, Berners provided "English readers with a gendered re-writing of Cárcel" which may have made the text "more palatable" (24). Indeed, Andrew Spigurnell's stern introductory verses about cruel and disdainful ladies would seem to indicate such an interpretation: "But to the intent that women in generall / by theyr disdayn and lacke of pytie / Shal note, what inconvenience mai come and fal / To lovers that be tormented crewly" (93-4). Spigurnell's assessment of the book echoes other Early Modern readers' responses to Cárcel and The Castell, both branded by moralists as licentious, as well as responses to San Pedro's Arnalte y Lucenda, which was also widely translated and is thought to be in some sense a first draft of the more complex Cárcel de amor.
The final section of the introductory study addresses genre, which has been something of a vexed issue in scholarship on Cárcel and the other late medieval Spanish novels categorized as "Sentimental Romances." Rightly advocating open-mindedness and an appreciation for the multiple generic influences clearly at play in both Cárcel and The Castell, Boro introduces this scholarly debate in order to discuss the intertwining of the sentimental romances and counsel literature in The Castell and to argue that the theme of taking and giving good counsel would have been all the more resonant in the context of Tudor literary and political culture.
The introduction contains some inaccuracies and omissions that are indicative of the pitfalls awaiting scholars wishing to address the complex avenues of transmission traveled by an Early Modern international "best-seller" like Cárcel de amor. For example, in her survey of the other European versions of Cárcel, Boro asserts that there are only four known French manuscripts, when in fact there are nine. One of the five she does not cite is Bodleian Rawl. D 591, a richly illuminated manuscript titled Le livre de Leriano et de la Dame Laureolle, which may indicate continued interest in the work in England. Moreover, while Boro duly notes that Berners dedicated his translation to his niece Elizabeth Carew, and that The Castell was "the first secular English translation made for a woman that does not claim to be didactic" (73), she does not relate this to (or even mention) the fact that, in contrast to the original dedication of Cárcel to a man, two of the other sixteenth-century European translations were also dedicated to women. Lelio Manfredi's Italian translation, Carcer d'amore, was dedicated to Isabella d'Este, duchess of Mantua, and Franois d'Assy's French Prison d'amour to Jacquette de Lansac. Berners's choice to provide his intended audience with a gendered revision is all the more interesting in this light. Boro's review of criticism on gender and genre of Cárcel is somewhat dated and, although The Castell has indeed been marginalized in Early Moden literary history, she does not take some of the earlier scholarship into account, such as Margaret Schlauch's Antecedents of the English Novel and Dale Randall's The Golden Tapestry.
These issues aside, this edition should appeal to a broad audience of scholars due to the intersections of English, French, Italian, and Spanish literary studies that The Castell represents. Lord Berners's The Castell of Love is worthy of scholarly attention because it is a version of the novel that everyone who was anyone in sixteenth-century Europe--from the Castilian nobility, to the cultural circles of the Borgia and the d'Este, to the courts of Francis I and Henry VIII--was reading. Boro's edition will help to bring The Castell and its continental antecedents the recognition they deserve.
Works Cited
Schlauch, Margaret M. Antecedents of the English Novel 1400-1600; from Chaucer to Deloney. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.
Randall, Dale B. J. The Golden Tapestry: A Critical Survey of Non- Chivalric Spanish Fiction in English Translation, 1543-1657. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1963.