Adaptive Imitation

This chapter explores how the debates about the imitation of Cicero in the early sixteenth century influenced the theory and practice of imitatio. It concentrates on two works published in 1528: Erasmus’s dialogue Ciceronianus and Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. It shows how both texts developed a view of the imitator not as a verbal replicator but as someone who learnt an ability to speak aptly to any occasion—hence the term ‘adaptive’ imitation. This concept is explored in relation to the theory and practice of epic and romance poetry in the sixteenth century, from Boiardo and Ariosto, through Tasso, to Spenser. Adaptive imitation created acute stress between two senses of ‘imitation’ in the epic tradition: was an imitator to imitate the ethics and behaviour of a heroic character, or to adapt both heroic values and past writing to the present times? That question is developed in relation to Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in which an imitator who directly replicates the actions of a prior figure becomes increasingly unapt to his own times, and subsequently encounters simulacral imitations of himself. That key text in the emergence of the new genre of the novel grows in part from the complex arguments about imitatio in the early sixteenth century.