Why have Heloise and Abelard captured the public imagination for nearly 900 years? Although any single explanation is certainly insufficient, a likely reason is that their story is so amenable to differing interpretations. At least from the time that the anonymous poet wrote of Abelard reaching out in death to embrace his beloved as she was interred next to him, only about four decades after Heloise’s death, poets have been preoccupied by their tragic yet enduring love. The great medieval poet Jean de Meun was so taken with the letters of Heloise and Abelard that he translated them from Latin into French and inserted them into his continuation of the Romance of the Rose. In 1717, the English poet Alexander Pope published a poem titled “Eloisa to Abelard.” Written as a letter from Heloise to Abelard after his castration and their separation, Pope’s intent was to give voice to Heloise’s torment over her love for Abelard that could no longer be expressed. Her dreams of their lost love haunt her, and in her anguish, she pleads not for forgiveness but to forget.
Lines 207-10 of Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” are quoted in the 2004 film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, from a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, and the title itself comes from line 209. In 1999, Kaufman had also borrowed Pope’s poem for the film Being John Malkovich, this time as a puppet show featuring the two lovers. Other film adaptations from literature include Stealing Heaven (1988), based on Marion Meade’s book of the same title. Directed by Clive Donner, the film is clearly produced for modern sensibilities: it is packed with erotic scenes. It is no surprise that the film is largely devoted to Abelard’s first Parisian period, when he met and seduced Heloise. The book also served as a model for the 2002 opera by Stephen Paulus, with a libretto by Frank Corsaro, that was commissioned by the Juilliard School in New York.
The tragic love story of Heloise and Abelard has also made the transition from novels to stage play. Irish scholar Helen Waddell’s novel Peter Abelard (1933) was used as the basis for Ronald Millar’s play Heloise and Abelard (1970). The book enjoyed considerable success and brought a balanced presentation of the lovers’ story to a general audience. The play based on the book was produced first in a small London staging in 1969, starring Diana Rigg and Keith Mitchell, and then on Broadway in 1971 in a larger production.
On the operatic stage, the New York Opera Repertory Theatre put on a 1984 production of an opera titled Abelard and Heloise, scored by Robert Ward and with a libretto by Jan Hartman. Enrico Garzilli’s Rage of the Heart is a musical play based on the Heloise-Abelard love story, with a symphonic score and lyrical songs (copyrighted 1971-95). It was produced in 1997 in Providence, Rhode Island, and, according to the official website (Http://www. Rageoftheheart. com/index. php), a new production is being planned in Germany. An 11-track CD is available, and the lyrics are given on the website.
Incidental cultural references to Heloise and Abelard are far too numerous to relate here, but they range from Mark Twain, Robertson Davies, Henry Miller, J. D. Salinger, and Leonard Cohen to a 2004 episode of the TV series The Sopranos (“A Sentimental Education”). The endless fascination with the lovers stems in part from their tragic love, yet the full story is more complex than the merely sensational. On the eve of the emergence of medieval universities, their lives intersected with some of the towering figures of their day: the indomitable Bernard of Clairvaux; Peter the Venerable, abbot of the influential monastery of Cluny; scholar and diplomat John of Salisbury. Furthermore, Abelard’s innovative philosophical ideas on universals, the application of dialectic to the study of theology, his willingness to use propositions to sort out contradictions, and his conviction that language was the chief concern of logic were startling in their originality. With Heloise, he articulated an ethical system that placed the moral value of actions on the intention of the individual, rather than on the outcome. Heloise was renowned for her learning, and her knowledge of languages and letters is demonstrated in her correspondence. Therefore, to reduce the lives of Heloise and Abelard simply to their love affair may trivialize their contributions as mirrors of the twelfth-century renaissance, but it remains central to the fascination that they have produced over the centuries in the popular imagination.
World History
