Charles d'Orléans' English Aesthetic: The Form, Poetics and Style of Fortunes Stabilnes 9781843845676, 9781787445949, 1843845679

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CHARLES D’ORLÉANS’ ENGLISH AESTHETIC

CHARLES D’ORLÉANS’ ENGLISH AESTHETIC The Form, Poetics, and Style of Fortunes Stabilnes

Edited by R. D. Perry Mary-Jo Arn

D. S. BREWER

© Contributors 2020 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2020 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978 1 84384 567 6 hardback ISBN 978 1 78744 594 9 ePDF   D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Cover image: Late medieval heart-shaped brooch in gold, with blue and white enamel, inscribed on reverse amid foliate sprays in white enamel: Je suy vostre sans de partier (‘I am yours forever’). From the Fishpool hoard (Nottinghamshire), hidden in 1464. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Cover design: Liron Gilenberg | ww.ironicitalics.com

This book is dedicated to Grady Mayne and Velma Olene Perry, both of whom passed away while it was in progress. R. D. Perry

In memory of Robert Steele, without whose edition I would never have known of Charles of Orleans, and John Fox, who laid the foundation for the establishment of the authorship of this work of English poetry. Mary-Jo Arn

Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations

ix x xi xii

Introduction R. D. Perry

1

1. The Two Dreams of Charles d’Orléans and the Structure of His English Book † J. A. Burrow

22

2. Charles d’Orléans’ Cross-Channel Poetics: The Choice of Ballade Form in Fortunes Stabilnes Elizaveta Strakhov

34

3. The English Roundel, Charles’s Jubilee, and Mimetic Form Jenni Nuttall 4. A Grieving Lover: The Work of Mourning in Charles’s First Ballade Sequence B. S. W. Barootes 5. Charles d’Orléans’ English Metrical Phonology Eric Weiskott 6. The English Poetry of a Frenchman: Stress and Idiomaticity in Charles d’Orléans Ad Putter 7. Verb Use in Charles d’Orléans’ English Richard Ingham

82

102 122

145 169

viii  Contents

8. Charles d’Orléans and His Finding of English Jeremy J. Smith

189

9. Aureation as Agon: Charles d'Orléans versus John Lydgate Andrea Denny-Brown

221

10. Charles d’Orléans, Harley 682, and the London Book-Trade Simon Horobin

245

11. The Form of the Whole Philip Knox

265

Select Publications, 2007–2020 Index

288 291



List of Illustrations 6. The English Poetry of a Frenchman: Stress and Idiomaticity in Charles d’Orléans, Ad Putter Fig. 1 Native speaker’s learning process

151

Fig. 2 Non-native speaker’s learning process

151

10. Charles d’Orléans, Harley 682, and the London Book-Trade, Simon Horobin Fig. 3 British Library MS Harley 682, f. 111v. By permission of the British Library

257

The editors, contributors and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and persons listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

List of Contributors B. S. W. Barootes, Leiden University † J. A. Burrow, University of Bristol Andrea Denny-Brown, University of California – Riverside Simon Horobin, University of Oxford Richard Ingham, University of Westminster Philip Knox, University of Cambridge Jenni Nuttall, University of Oxford Ad Putter, University of Bristol Jeremy J. Smith, University of Glasgow Elizaveta Strakhov, Marquette University Eric Weiskott, Boston College



Acknowledgements First and foremost, the editors would like to thank our contributors. We asked scholars, most of whom had never worked on Charles d’Orléans’ poetry, to apply the expertise they had demonstrated in work on other bodies of literature to this one. We were gratified that most were intrigued and eager to explore it. In the process, they have cast new light from many different angles on this understudied poem, and we are grateful to them all for it. We would also like to thank Caroline Palmer at Boydell and Brewer for her graciousness, clearsighted counsel, and patience. Several people offered advice and support for the project along the way and we owe them a debt of gratitude as well: David Lawton, Maura Nolan, James Simpson, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, and Boydell and Brewer’s anonymous reviewer.

Abbreviations Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes: Charles d’Orléans. Fortunes Stabilnes: Charles of Orleans’s English Book of Love, ed. Mary-Jo Arn. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 138. Binghamton: MRTS, 1994. Arn, ‘Two Manuscripts, One Mind’: Mary-Jo Arn. ‘Two Manuscripts, One Mind: Charles d’Orléans and the Production of Manuscripts in Two Languages (Paris, BN MS fr. 25458 and London, BL MS Harley 682)’. In Charles d’Orléans in England, 1415– 1440, ed. Mary-Jo Arn. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000, pp. 61–78. Rev. and trans. as ‘Manuscrit français, manuscrit anglais: De la ductilité du propos poétique’. In Lectures de Charles d’Orléans: Les ballades, ed. Denis Hüe. Didact Français. Rennes: PUR, 2010, pp. 19–41. Champion, ed., Poésies: Charles d’Orléans. Poésies, ed. Pierre Champion. Les classiques français du Moyen Âge 34 and 56. 2 vols. Paris: Champion, 1923, 1934. Charles d’Orléans in England, ed. Arn: Charles d’Orléans in England, 1415–1440, ed. Mary-Jo Arn. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. Fox and Arn, eds, Poetry of Charles d’Orléans and His Circle: Charles d’Orleans. Poetry of Charles d’Orléans and His Circle: A Critical Edition of BnF MS fr. 25458, Charles d’Orléans’ Personal Manuscript, ed. John Fox and Mary-Jo Arn, trans. R. Barton Palmer, with an excursus on literary context by Stephanie A. V. G. Kamath. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 383. Tempe: ACMRS; Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. Riverside Chaucer: Geoffrey Chaucer. The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987. Steele and Day, eds, The English Poems: The English Poems of Charles of Orléans, ed. Robert Steele. EETS o.s. 215, 1941, and with Mabel Day and bibliography by Cecily Clark. EETS o.s.

Abbreviations  xiii

220, 1946; reprinted in one vol., 1970. All references to the introduction and text are to the 1941 vol. AND Anglo-Norman Dictionary, William Rothwell et al. Publications of the Modern Humanities Research Association 17. London, 2005–. DIMEV The DIMEV: An Open-Access, Digital Edition of the Index of Middle English Verse [1943, 1965], Linne Mooney, Daniel W. Mosser, and Elizabeth Solopova DOST Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue: From the Twelfth Century to the End of the Seventeenth, Sir William A. Craigie et al. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1931–2002. eDMF Dictionnaire de Moyen Français: La Renaissance, Algirdas Julien Greimas and Teresa Mary Keane. Paris: Larousse, 1992. EETS Early English Text Society. London: Oxford Univ. Press. e.s. extra series o.s. original series s.s. supplementary series MED Middle English Dictionary, Hans Kurath, Sherman M. Kuhn, Robert E. Lewis, et al. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1952–2001. Online edition in Middle English Compendium, ed. Frances McSparran, et al. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2000–2018. . Accessed 23 December 2019. NIMEV A New Index of Middle English Verse, Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards London: The British Library, 2005. B English Ballade

xiv  Abbreviations

R English Roundel B French Ballade R French Rondeau Bal French ‘La Departie d'amours en balades’ Ch French Chançon



Introduction R. D. PERRY

A

fter the English victory at Agincourt in 1415 one of the greatest French poets of his generation would spend a number of years writing English poetry. Just under a month shy of his twenty-first birthday, Charles, duc d’Orléans, was captured by the English army, the highest-ranking prisoner they would take. He would spend the next twenty-five years as a captive in England, raising his own enormous ransom and that of his brother, Jean d’Angloulême, attempting to negotiate a peace between France and England, and composing poetry in both English and French. When he returned to France in 1440 at the age of forty-six years, a new marriage to Marie of Clèves, three children – including one who would become Louis XII, of France – and twenty-five more years of poetic creation and artistic patronage still lay ahead. Charles’s life is fascinating enough, full of romance and intrigue, and it is no wonder that it has been so appealing to biographers, historians, and literary critics. This volume, though, focuses on just one particular aspect of that life: the English poetry Charles left behind him when he returned to France, now largely extant in London, British Library MS Harley 682, with a few additional manuscript leaves and poems copied elsewhere. The contributions collected here reassess Charles’s work in relation to its fifteenth-century context and detail those qualities that make the work what it is: Charles’s use of English, his metrical play, his felicity with formes fixes lyrics, his innovative use of the dit structure and lyric sequences, and, finally, above all, his ability to write beautiful poetry. The chapters in this volume, moreover, attest to the fact that these qualities are related, that the aesthetic qualities of Charles’s poetry are precisely those features that demonstrate his importance to fifteenth-century English literature. Here I will detail that relationship briefly, outlining the important place Charles holds in fifteenth-century literary culture – considering why, despite that place, his work has not attracted as much scholarly attention as that of his contemporaries – describing what a focus on form can add to our understanding of him, and, finally, thinking through what his French origin might mean for his English work. The seemingly obvious fact that Charles’s poetry is fifteenth-century poetry actually provides useful insights into both certain salient features of his work and its critical reception. Along with the rest of the poetry of

2  R. D. Perry

the fifteenth century, and with a few notable exceptions, his work suffered from that same critical neglect that afflicted all literary work between Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, an attitude that the later twentieth century and early twenty-first century has worked to change. In an important corrective, David Lawton diagnosed one of the central critical mistakes that this long dismissal makes: it takes medieval authors at their word.1 When fifteenth-century writers claimed that they were inept and boring, for a long time scholars simply believed them. Charles’s poetry, after all, allows itself to be misread in such a way for those so inclined. Very early in the surviving English poetry the lover and narrator – ‘the duk that folkis calle / Of Orlyaunce’ (5–6) – receives a letter patent from Cupid, the God of Love, and addresses the god, as he should, by stressing his own inadequacy: Mi witt so dulle hyt ys and y vntaught That y kan not athanke yow as y aught, For to my will my tunge kan not suffise … (61–3)2

Never mind that Charles goes on to alter this modesty topos in a variety of fascinating ways; for any older critics approaching the work under the assumption that it would be poor poetry, this ‘confession’ would have been proof positive and justification for reading no further. Assume for a moment, though – as Lawton did and has convinced many others to do as well –that the modesty topos in fifteenth-century works is not honest self-appraisal, but is instead a sophisticated rhetorical move that accomplishes several different ends, and suddenly this passage looks very different – a knowing lesson on the difficulty of talking to princes – and the landscape between Chaucer and Shakespeare seems much altered. By and large it was the work of historicism to sweep away the damning aesthetic judgements under which fifteenth-century poetry laboured. Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate, once dismissed as lesser poets, mere imitators of Chaucer’s genius, benefited greatly from the attention that the historicism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries brought to them. Charles’s life was an exciting one, full of bloody family infighting in his early years – which saw his father assassinated, and the beginnings of the Armagnac–Burgundian conflict in France – followed by his capture, and his imprisonment in England at some of the most powerful and dynamic households of his day. His personality is also enchanting, with his well-attested charm and flirtatiousness clearly 1 2

David Lawton, ‘Dullness and the Fifteenth Century’, English Literary History 54 (1987), 761–99. All citations from Charles’s English work are parenthetical by line number from Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes.



Introduction  3

evident in his poetry. Given his life and personal allure, one might imagine that Charles’s poetry too was ripe for historicist recovery, full of the kind of much-desired anecdotes and the expressions of power that characterise the analytical concerns of at least one prominent brand of historicism.3 To take the early modesty topos from Fortunes Stabilnes as an example once again, the lover continues his supplicatory address to the God of Love: ‘Of that as loo hit likith yowre good grace Me to reward more then y am worthy, For which that y, while y haue lyvis space, Mi sely will shall shewe to do trewly Yowre plesore. Sely will? Nay, verily, Mi grettist will shall be forto deserue What ye haue doon, not now, but to y sterve. (70–76)

Charles is playing with the modesty topos here in ways that historicism should have found engaging. The address is deferential, but Charles revises its terms as he extends it. What was modest becomes glorified – ‘sely will’ becomes ‘grettist will’ – as modesty seems inadequate to match the exalted position of the God of Love. A god, after all, deserves the greatest of all possible servants. The modesty topos becomes instead an immodesty topos as the language twists and turns in order to maintain the glory afforded to the God of Love, in order, that is, for the lover to remain appropriately modest and to preserve the wide gap in power between speaker and addressee. Such are the transformations occasioned by political hierarchies, an experience Charles would have had ample opportunity to have in his position both as a member of the French royal family and as prisoner of war, both as recipient and as supplicant, in 3

Beginning an essay with an anecdote and understanding history as the documentation of power relations are typical stylistic and thematic concerns of work specifically associated with New Historicism. On the anecdote, see Joel Fineman, ‘The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction’, in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 49–76; on power relations, see Carolyn Porter, ‘Are We Being Historical Yet?’, South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (1988), 743–86. As Porter argues (esp. pp. 747–51), historicism and New Historicism are not synonymous. Certainly, English medieval studies had its own New Historicists, see most influentially Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1991), but English medieval studies also had its own home-grown brand of historicism, Robertsonian exegetical criticism, that interacted with the New Historicism in complex ways, on which see Steven Justice, ‘Who Stole Robertson?’ PMLA 124 (2009), 609–15.

4  R. D. Perry

short, as the embodiment of the alterations which language and power undergo in contact with one another. Such too are the kinds of analysis that are the stock in trade of historicism, and Charles’s work lends itself easily to that sort of criticism as well. One should not of course confuse poetic convention with Charles’s experience – this is a modesty topos after all – but, as John Burrow reminds us in regard to Hoccleve, just because something is conventional does not mean that it cannot accurately relate one’s biographical situation or express one’s deeply felt emotions.4 Conventions, after all, govern more than the laws of genre; they are also essential to the self-presentation and social performances that make up the life of the medieval courtier. As Susan Crane so definitively puts it, ‘the very distinction between performance and texts is specious’. ‘Literary characters’, she explains, ‘express chivalric commitment through the poetics of a genre’ while ‘historical knights are similarly engaged in a rhetoric of appearances’, but it is as ‘performance that historical and literary instances of chivalric behaviour meet and influence one another’.5 Charles provides us with a particularly robust version of this interaction of literature and life. He engages in a complex allegoresis of the self – allowing the ‘duk … Of Orlyaunce’ to interact with Venus, Cupid, Fortune, Yowth, and Age, among others – in order to explore the way that the vagaries of individual existence both promote and thwart the conventional expectations of life, love, and literature. Charles shows us that, if the self is constructed, it is often made out of what it found in books, and in this way life does not so much imitate art as it is simply made out of the same material: the conventions of performance, the expectations we learn from narrative and apply to our own experience, the thoughts that one is as likely to find in a literary life as a historical one. It is surprising, then, that Charles’s work did not fare as well as the work of his contemporaries under historicism and its aftermath.6 Historicism made Hoccleve and Lydgate canonical figures, and Lydgate in particular has thrived as criticism on him has continued to increase.7 4

5 6 7

Burrow, ‘Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages: The Case of Thomas Hoccleve’, Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1983), 389–412, esp. pp. 393– 95. This, in short, is a question of the ‘subjectivity’ at work in Charles’s poems, of which there has been a rich discussion. To this discussion, Philip Knox’s chapter 11 in this volume can be added. Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 2. This is not the case in the French critical tradition. A quick MLA bibliography search for the year 2018 showed that there were eleven articles substantially about Lydgate, which is, of course, nowhere near



Introduction  5

This is not to say that there was no historicist work on Charles. As its title implies, locating a specific historical time and place, some of the essays collected in Charles d’Orléans in England, 1415–1440, are often sterling examples of historicism, if not outright historical work.8 A. E. B. Coldiron’s work tackles the different historical situations – and the different versions of Charles that those produce – for Charles’s English and his French work as well as its reception.9 Charles is likewise discussed throughout James Simpson’s historicist-oriented volume on the history of English literature.10 However, Charles warrants only one exceedingly short mention (two paragraphs in length) in that monument of historicist criticism, The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature.11 And while important work on Charles in a historicist vein continues to the present, the dearth of his work in the Cambridge History is indicative of the more general scarcity of such historicist work. One can only speculate as to what is behind such a dearth, but two issues probably helped stymie Charles’s historicist revival. First, Charles’s authorship, like William Langland’s (but unlike Hoccleve’s or Lydgate’s), was challenged repeatedly in the last century.12 In the EETS edition of his text, Robert Steele staked a claim for Charles’s authorship of the poems in Harley 682, but nothing was conclusively settled until the later

8 9 10 11

12

the amount of criticism on Chaucer (which was ten times that) or William Langland (which was about five times that), but is still a respectable amount; that same year there were five articles about Hoccleve (some of which were also about Lydgate), and only one new article that focused on Charles’s English poetry: Jonathan Hsy, ‘Linguistic Entrapment’. For this (and two others the MLA missed) see the Select Publications in this volume. Charles d’Orléans in England, ed. Arn. Coldiron, Canon, Period, and the Poetry of Charles of Orleans: Found in Translation (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000). Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution: The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 2: 1350–1547 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002). See David Wallace, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999). Unsurprisingly, the mention of Charles comes from Susan Crane, ‘Anglo-Norman Cultures in England’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace, pp. 35–60, at 58–59. Crane has done her share of historicist work on Charles: see, for instance, the occasional discussions throughout The Performance of Self. See the discussion in Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes, pp. 33–37. Charles’s sense of verbal play in both his French and his English poetry is important to Arn’s ascription of authorship of the poems in Harley 682 to him and not some unknown translator; see also chapters here by Andrea Denny-Brown (chapter 9) and Jeremy J. Smith (chapter 8).

6  R. D. Perry

work of John Fox and Mary-Jo Arn.13 Even so, calling the matter concluded is overstating the case, as the position against Charles’s authorship still has its proponents.14 When Eleanor Hammond published her anthology, English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey, in 1927, she believed the poems of Harley 682 to be translations and expected that some future editor of the poems would ‘discuss various points indicating another than Charles as the author of the English versions’.15 When Derek Pearsall edited his anthology, Chaucer to Spenser, more than seventy years later and despite all of the work done on the issue, he wrote in reference to the authorship of the ‘English sequence’ that ‘it is plausible and convenient to ascribe [it] to Charles himself ’ – not exactly the strongest language in support of authorship.16 That Pearsall, who had himself written on Charles, still felt the need to hedge ever so slightly on the question of authorship is a testament to the protracted nature of the authorship controversy. Any ambiguity around authorship would certainly be anathema to any historicist revival of work on Charles, as historicism greatly prefers named authors with definitive and recoverable histories. Second, Charles’s work itself played into one powerful narrative about the fifteenth century. Paul Strohm famously described the fifteenth-century literature as a ‘narrowing of the “Chaucer Tradition”’, in which ‘Chaucer’s fifteenth-century followers neglect his mature works of greatest formal and thematic complexity, in favour of a comparatively narrow range of dits amoureux and visions in the manner of continental France’.17 Two issues might be seen in Strohm’s assessment. First, historicism tended to proceed along national lines (if not even more local ones), so Charles’s French identity was a particular stumbling block. Second, the late Middle Ages, in both England and France, was long understood as a time of lesser literary lights. Much of the recovery work on fifteenth-century authors 13

14 15

16 17

Steele and Day, eds, The English Poems; John Fox, ‘Charles d’Orléans, poète anglais?’, Romania 86 (1965), 433–62; and Mary-Jo Arn, ‘Charles of Orleans and the Poems of BL MS Harley 682’, English Studies 74 (1993), 222–35. In this volume, Richard Ingham (chapter 7) considers the matter unsettled enough to add more evidence in support of Charles’s authorship. Hammond, ed., English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1927; rpt. Folcroft, 1971), p. 214. How surprised she would have been when two subsequent editors both affirmed Charles’s authorship (although she might have been much more gratified that one of those editors is a woman, especially given the tradition of female editors of medieval texts). Derek Pearsall, ed., Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology of Writings in English, 1375–1575. Blackwell Anthologies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 378. Paul Strohm, ‘Chaucer’s Fifteenth-Century Audience and the Narrowing of the “Chaucer Tradition”’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 4 (1982), 3–32, at 5.



Introduction  7

has focused on how they are exceptions to this characterisation, how they are formally and thematically innovative in their own ways, whether it be Hoccleve’s experiments in autobiography or Lydgate’s in tragedy. By contrast, Charles’s work appears at first glance to fit Strohm’s characterisation perfectly, as a sort of French courtly poem in English under the influence of Chaucer, something in the vein of Lydgate’s Temple of Glas or Flour of Courtesy. As the contributions in this collection show, however, such a characterisation is woefully inaccurate, or at least in need of such thorough qualification that it becomes incoherent. Charles’s work holds an important place in fifteenth-century literature because it demonstrates that, even at the point where that literature is supposed to be the narrowest, the most uninteresting, ‘dits amoureux and visions in the manner of continental France’ can be complex and exciting. Like the reversal of opinion Lawton inspired on the modesty topos and the ‘dullness’ of the fifteenth century more generally, this volume shows that what in Charles’s work seems conventional is a ploy that hides something new, that Charles’s work is anything but a ‘narrowing’ of the Chaucer tradition into a courtly mode, but instead a formal experimentation in that mode of equivalent aesthetic value to the other fifteenth-century poetic innovations. As the chapters in this collection deal with Charles’s ‘English Aesthetic’, then, they will by necessity address questions of form. It is the form of the work of art, after all, that produces the experience of the aesthetic.18 But what do we talk about when we talk about form? Although it would be wrong to suggest that English literary studies was ever uninterested in form, Marjorie Levinson’s diagnosis of a ‘New Formalism’ has occasioned a great deal of new reflection on the matter.19 Levinson’s overview includes very few medievalists, but scholars of late medieval England have produced important theoretical work on form both before and after Levinson’s article. So much work has been produced, in fact, that it would be impossible to provide an overview or synthesis of it all here, so instead 18

19

For Immanuel Kant, who serves as the traditional starting point for all modern discussions of it, the aesthetic is the experience of the subject when confronted with the feelings and sensations produced by the form of an object that cannot be cognised under one of the concepts of the understanding. For the most succinct discussion of this point, see section 7 of the introduction to the second edition of Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 75–78. Levinson, ‘What Is New Formalism?’, PMLA 122 (2007) 558–69. Pitting formalism and historicism against one another is the overstated case made by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations 108 (2009), 1–21.

8  R. D. Perry

I will focus on the work that most directly bears on what Charles’s poetry does. Before moving on, though, I want to make one thing explicit: a formalism without any attendant historicism is to my mind neither particularly desirable nor, in practice, even possible to achieve.20 We are as conditioned by our own historical assumptions and expectations when it comes to aesthetics as Charles would have been by his own, and any successful formal analysis would do well to keep that in mind. As a case in point, medievalists who work on form would be quick to point out that the Middle Ages had its own theoretical language for talking about the aesthetic. Vance Smith exemplifies this, as he blends modern theories about the relationship between art and death with medieval theories about causes. Crystallising in the thirteenth century, there was a genre of medieval literary theory that analysed works of art by the four Aristotelian causes: ‘the material cause (plot, narrative, topic), the final cause (its purpose), the efficient cause (its author), and its formal cause’.21 The formal cause was further subdivided into ‘the forma tractatus, the work’s structure (ordinatio: chapters, prologue, and so forth), and the forma tractandi, its mode of proceeding (modus procedendi)’.22 It is these formae that come nearest to what today goes under the umbrella of form: The forma tractandi gradually came to include matters of style, rhetorical tropes, rationales for textual faults or disjunctions, and assignments of genre (comedic, lamentational, exhortative, songlike) … Forma tractandi was an elementary practical criticism, attending to style for its power to engage the emotions, and then the intellect. It was not discontinuous with forma tractatus.23 20

21

22 23

For medievalists pointing out the need for historicism and formalism to work in concert, see Maura Nolan, ‘Historicism after Historicism’, in The Post-Historical Middle Ages, ed. Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico. The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 62–86; and Jill Mann, ‘The Inescapability of Form’, in Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing, ed. Cristina Maria Cervone and D. Vance Smith (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), pp. 119–34. Smith, ‘Medieval Forma: The Logic of the Work’, in Reading for Form, ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 2006), pp. 66–79, at p. 70. See also the related discussions in Christopher Cannon, ‘Form’, in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm. Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 177–90, at pp. 179–83; and Seeta Chaganti, Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2018), pp. 65–68. More from Cannon and Chaganti in a moment. Smith, ‘Medieval Forma’, p. 70. Ibid., pp. 70–71.



Introduction  9

That is to say that the Middle Ages had a sense of the aesthetic that, like the one codified in modernity, was concerned with how the shape of the literary object produced effects (and affects) in the observer.24 Moreover, taken together, forma tractandi and forma tractatus provide us with a list of things that make up a work’s form: rhetorical tropes, considerations of genre, the way the narrative proceeds from chapter to chapter or book to book. Of particular note here is ‘matters of style’. Style is a part of form, but it is not synonymous with it; this distinction is behind Charles Muscatine’s dictum, ‘Style is not poetry. If it were, only one poem would theoretically be possible in any given style.’25 In addition, as Maura Nolan reminds us, style can mean what art historians tend to think of as a ‘period style’, like ‘Ricardian literature’ or ‘Lancastrian literature’ in the work of literary critics, and it can also mean a writer’s personal tendencies, those mechanical decisions that are the atomic building blocks of style and therefore form, such as metrical choice, syntactic construction, and diction – covered in this volume in chapters by Ad Putter (metre; chapter 6), Eric Weiskott (metre; chapter 5), Richard Ingham (syntax of verbs; chapter 7), and Jeremy Smith (diction; chapter 8).26 The personal aspects of style, in short, are not the poet’s effortless expression of identity – not the sprezzatura associated with style as a personal sense of fashion – but an aspect of the writer’s labour, the work that goes into the work.27 Using language drawn from Chaucer, Christopher Cannon explains that form ‘allows analysis to build a bridge between the immaterial and the material: “form” is necessarily the “werk” seen in terms of the “thoughte” behind it, the brute physicality of some thing as it is rooted in the realm of ideas conceived in some mind’.28 Both the ‘immaterial’ and the ‘brute physicality of some thing’ for Cannon include literature as it is expressed in words, orally and also certainly in writing. Form, then, is the wrought quality that speaks to the labour that is done as one tries to 24

25 26

27 28

On what medieval and modern aesthetics have in common, see Maura Nolan, ‘Making the Aesthetic Turn: Adorno, the Medieval, and the Future of the Past’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004), 549–75; and ‘Aesthetics’ in A Handbook of Middle English Studies, ed. Marion Turner (Hoboken: John Wiley, 2013), pp. 223–38. Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1957), p. 3. Nolan, ‘Style’, in Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, ed. Brian Cummings and James Simpson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 396–419, especially pp. 397–98. John David Rhodes, ‘Belabored: Style as Work’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 53 (2012), 47–64. Cannon, ‘Form’, p. 178.

10  R. D. Perry

express one’s ideas in things, whether they be lines of poetry or – to use an example derived from Karl Marx that Cannon discusses elsewhere – a table; as Cannon puts it succinctly: ‘form is that which thought and things have in common’.29 Thought here may refer, of course, to those intentional decisions made by an artist, but it means more than that: ‘the form of the thing may require careful description because the material out of which the table was hewn [or, the language out of which the poem was made] has soaked up, not only the designing thoughts of the maker, but the thoughts that maker unwittingly absorbed from his or her entire culture’.30 To return one last time to my earlier example, Charles’s modesty topos, which had ended in an unfolding process of revision that tried to balance the majesty of a god with the lowliness of his servant, continues in the next stanza by extending that process of revision: ‘Sterve? Fy, my speche hit squarith oft, For though y wolde, allas, hit may not be Deth to take, for hit suffisith nought, For of the deth ye haue revid me That in me now as nys ther lijf, parde, But even the self lijf ye haue me lent, This may y not deserue, in myn entent … (77–83)

At the opening Charles picks up where we last left him: ‘Sely will? Nay, verily, / Mi grettist will shall be forto deserue / What ye haue doon, now now, but to y sterve’ (74–76). One revision occasions another, as the promise to do service until the lover is made worthy from now until he dies is met with an exclamatory ‘die!’ and the acknowledgement that he has misspoken there, too. My earlier discussion of this passage focused on how much a rhetoric of revision made sense in Charles’s historical situation, but now I want to focus on what is happening here formally, as the pretext of misspeaking allows for ever more fine-grained and precise speech. In what must be a joke, though, the focus on correcting speech in the content of these two stanzas is belied by the rhyme scheme here at the beginning of the second stanza, as ‘oft’ is only a sort of near rhyme with ‘nought’. The dissonance caused by ‘nought’, though, foregrounds the resonance that word has to the stanza’s concern with life and death, seeming opposites brought into complex syntactic and conceptual relation here, an interplay between being and nothingness that also becomes important to latter parts of the 29

30

Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), p. 5. The example of the table recurs throughout the section ‘A Theory of Form’, pp. 3–10. Ibid., p. 6.



Introduction  11

work, as chapters 4 and 9 in this volume by B. S. W. Barootes and Andrea Denny-Brown, respectively, argue.31 What is more, the stanza picks up its concern with death from the end of the previous stanza, but that ending literalises an earlier qualification, that the lover’s ‘sely will’ will do service to the God of Love ‘while y haue lyvis space’. Such a qualification could be taken as a filler clause, something added to make the metre and rhyme work but that adds nothing to the concerns under discussion. However, good Queen Alceste tells Chaucer that he will serve the God of Love by writing the Legend of Good Women, ‘while that thou lyvest’, a reminder that perpetual service to the God of Love is an idea with a robust literary tradition behind it.32 So, Charles’s continual revision first gives what seems initially to be a throwaway qualification concrete stakes (by really talking about death), and then uses the final rhyme of one stanza, ‘deserue/sterve’ to bookend the following stanza’s intertwining of life and death, as those words reappear in the opening and closing lines of the stanza.33 Service to a god, like the need for correction, and the attempt to say the right thing, are all interminable tasks, beset with continual failure. These ruminations all occur in a narrative sequence of rhyme royal stanzas that exists only in the English version of Charles’s work, in the language where he is more likely to misspeak, even though he is comfortable enough in the language and one of its native forms that he can experiment with near rhyme and perform a rhetoric of revision that calls into question whether one can truly ever say exactly the right thing, even if one tries to do so, up until the moment of one’s death. As these stanzas that foreground a rhetoric of revision thematise, form mediates between thought and instantiation, but they likewise show that form mediates between self and community. Charles writes here in rhyme royal stanzas in English and out of a recognisable literary pedigree: broadly speaking, dream visions of what Strohm calls the dits amoureux type. This mediation between self and community brings me to a final theorist of form: Seeta Chaganti follows Mary Carruthers in exploring the medieval notion of ductus, which ‘casts the viewer’s experience of a work of art as a process through which one is led … Ductus acknowledges that the experi31

32 33

It is of course earlier formalist work on Charles that allows us to see the work as a whole and then to trace resonances throughout; see especially Mary-Jo Arn, ‘The Structure of the English Poems of Charles of Orleans’, Fifteenth-Century Studies 4 (1981), 17–23. On the work as a whole, see Philip Knox’s chapter 11 in this volume. Riverside Chaucer, F.481. That there is some scribal confusion surrounding ‘deserue’ and ‘sterve’ in this stanza actually speaks to how far they are conceptually (and visually) interrelated; see the notes in Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes, p. 439.

12  R. D. Perry

ence of the work engages the viewer’s participation, skill, habituation, and perception.’34 Form, then, mediates between the self and the community that is the work of art’s audience – those whom the artist will lead through the work of art – and it mediates between the self and the community of which the self is a part – the social expectation for participation and skill borne of habituation to certain forms of art, on the part both of the artist and of the audience.35 When Charles writes dream vision literature in rhyme royal stanzas for an English audience, both he and the audience will have a whole set of expectations in response to that writing – as chapters 10 and 9 here by Simon Horobin and Andrea Denny-Brown, respectively, both show. They will, first and foremost, be habituated enough to know what such a genre and such a style means: in this case that they are about to experience an allegorical narrative in the high style. But Charles’s form performs one final mediation here, between expectation and experimentation. Formal criticism of Charles’s work has long stressed either its quality as exemplary fifteenth-century poetry or its radically experimental nature: the truth is that both points are correct, as its traditional formal features allow its experimental ones to remain intelligible to an audience. So, while it is the case, following Hammond, that Charles’s English poems demonstrate ‘a good ear for rhythm’ because they were composed by ‘a good metrist’, the poems taken together are still hard to classify, becoming, in Arn’s words (about the French work but applicable to the English, too), ‘a sort of dit-inside-out’.36 This movement between normative expectations and radical experimentation is taken up in chapters 3 and 2 by Jenni Nuttall and Elizaveta Strakhov, respectively (both on the formes fixes lyrics), as well as by John Burrow and Philip Knox (both on narrative structure) in chapters 1 and 11, respectively, although that tension runs through every chapter in this collection. What Charles could expect of his audience and what forms they might have found intelligible brings me to one final consideration, which deals explicitly with the way history intersects with form: Charles was a French noble writing in English as a prisoner during the Hundred Years’ War. 34

35

36

Chaganti, Strange Footing, p. 43. See also Mary Carruthers, ‘The Concept of Ductus, or Journeying through a Work of Art’, in Rhetoric beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Carruthers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 190–213. The experience of art as a process of mediation is most fully theorised by Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Theory and History of Literature 88 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997). Hammond, ed., English Verse, p. 215; Mary-Jo Arn, The Poet’s Notebook: The Personal Manuscript of Charles d’Orléans (Paris, BnF, MS fr. 25458). Texts and Transitions 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), p. 60.



Introduction  13

What can this fact tell us about his poetry? First, and most obviously, Charles’s English writings speak to the persistence of the importance of French culture in fifteenth-century England. While the breadth and depth of knowledge of French in the fifteenth century is still debated – did the broader gentry know French still? how well? – one aspect of it is not: the extent to which fifteenth-century English poets continued to engage with and rely on French writing.37 In one of his earliest major works Hoccleve translated Christine de Pizan; Lydgate translated several French poets for poems like the Title and Pedigree of Henry VI and The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man and used French works as calques to help him with his Latin for the Troy Book and the Fall of Princes; apart from Charles, there were several other works of courtly, French-inspired dream visions, like the Floure and the Leafe or the Isle of Ladies. As Ardis Butterfield, Susan Crane, and others have demonstrated time and again since the 1990s, upper-class English culture was so thoroughly imbued with French culture that it might almost be considered one culture, just as the Hundred Years’ War was to a certain extent a family squabble. In terms of generic affiliations, Charles would have been very comfortable with the literary productions surrounding him in fifteenth-century England; after all, what they were writing was part of his cultural patrimony. The extent to which English and French culture remained close is important to Charles’s formal innovations because he could expect an audience (whether the nobility who were his wardens or the wealthier gentry among whom, Horobin’s chapter suggests, his work eventually would circulate) to be familiar with the tropes and genres he alters and moulds into something new. Successful experimentation requires a firm foundation of accepted knowledge and shared expectations. From such a foundation one can build all sorts of fantastic shapes, and this is what Charles does. As the chapters by Nuttall (3), Smith (8), Strakhov (2), and Weiskott (5) show, Charles is interested in the unusual: coterie lyric constructions, odd expressions that do not otherwise make it into the poetry of the period, rarely used stanza lengths, extreme varieties of line lengths. The narrative sections – although the classification is complex, as Knox explains in chapter 11 – are often in rhyme royal, typical for the English fifteenth century but surprising for a 37

The classic critical work that deals with the influence of French writing on Chaucer, and therefore those who wrote in his wake, is Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition; an important and wide-ranging assessment is James Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1991); a more recent synoptic work that includes Charles is Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009).

14  R. D. Perry

French poet. In addition to ballades of many different lengths and rhyme schemes, and the roundels (which Nuttall in chapter 3 shows are more atypical than normally thought), Charles works in a variety of different lyric forms. The opening of the surviving English poetry – an opening narrative has been lost, although it survives in Charles’s collection of his French poetry – is an epistle in the unusual verse form of quatrains of three ten-syllable lines and a final four-syllable line, rhymed AAAB BBBC and so on. The first lyric following the roundels is in an extremely unusual form – with three six-line stanzas of two syllables each, rhyming ABAAAB – which is then followed by an equally strange lyric – with three seizains of four-syllable lines, in the rhyme scheme AAABAAABBBBABBBA – one strange enough to confuse Charles’s scribe and first set of editors, who thought it was three different poems.38 In some ways, these forms are not atypical of the lyric innovations found in what Rossell Hope Robbins classified as ‘Courtly Love Lyrics’, a rubric under which he also places some of Charles’s poetry.39 What Robbins calls ‘A Heartless Mistress’ is in quatrains, albeit in a ABAB rhyme scheme, and what he calls ‘An Inconstant Mistress’ likewise contains four-syllable lines, although in octaves; Robbins’s ‘A Sovereign Mistress’ shows more internal stanza variation than even Charles is willing to undertake, containing a thirteen-line stanza, a couplet, two quatrains, and finally an octave.40 The point here is not that Charles’s lyric experimentation can be found elsewhere in fifteenth-century poetry, but that Charles undertakes all of those formal experiments, writing them himself, in a way that is unmatched until a modern editor brings them together from a wide variety of manuscript sources. The first stanza of the second post-roundels lyric encapsulates both the familiarity and the strangeness of Charles’s work: When that ye goo Then am y woo, But ye, swete foo, (For ought y playne) Ye sett not, no, 38 39

40

See the note to line 4505 in Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes, p. 504. Also see the discussion of these and related lyrics in chapter 3 by Jenny Nuttall. Robbins, ed., Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). The section ‘Courtly Love Lyrics’ makes up almost half of the collection, occupying pp. 120–226; Charles’s poetry, ascribed to him, can be found on pp. 182–85. All these can be found in Robbins, Secular Lyrics, pp. 138–43; one might also note that contained in these pages is a fourth poem, ‘A Pitiless Mistress’, mostly in the rhyme royal stanzas that were the workhorse of fifteenth-century English poetry, although it does vary the rhyme scheme occasionally.



Introduction  15 To sle me so, – Allas and lo! But whi, souerayne, Doon ye thus payne Vpon me rayne? Shall y be slayne Owt wordis mo? Wolde ye ben fayne To se me dayne? Now then, certayne, Yet do me slo! (4505–4520)

One can take the sentiments here as typical of ‘courtly love’ lyrics: the lady is the lover’s ruler; the beloved’s departure makes the lover feel like he is going to die; the lover’s response takes the form of a complaint. Once again, historicism might make much of the lady’s sovereignty and Charles’s supplication, and, once again, the language of death and love resonates with other more sombre poems elsewhere in the work. Both of these considerations, the formal and the historical, return us to the rich interplay that Charles stages between biography and convention. These expressions might be accurate descriptions of his emotional life, but they are also in the very conventional language of ‘courtly love’ poetry, here complicated because of the way the poet returns to them and by who the poet is. They are complicated, in short, by what we might imagine that Charles, the man, actually felt. Without worrying about the question of authorial intention or reducing the complexity of the poetry to the idiosyncrasies of an individual mind, we can note the ‘structures of feeling’ shared in the English and French literary traditions found in this poem.41 As Lauren Berlant explains, ‘the convention is not only a mere placeholder for what could be richer in an underdeveloped social imaginary, but it is also sometimes a profound placeholder that provides an affective confirmation of the idea of a shared confirming imaginary in advance of inhabiting a material world in which that feeling can be actually lived’.42 That is, conventions can provide us with an almost utopian vision of a world, one in which the emotions we share with others point toward a world in which those emotions would make sense. Berlant articulates this theoretical position as underpinning what she identifies as a nineteenth- and twentieth-century genre called ‘female complaint’. Charles’s poetry here makes use of what we might call the late medieval ‘male complaint’ to disclose a 41 42

The phrase is, of course, Raymond Williams’s; for the discussion of the concept see Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 128–35. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2008), p. 3.

16  R. D. Perry

similar relationship between convention and emotion: men complain that it is simply the love of a woman that makes for a life-and-death situation, rather than the experience of warfare. Conventional emotions, then, can express authentic social concerns, a principle implicit in the chapters of both Barootes (4) and Strakhov (2) especially. Charles’s poetry, though, also reminds us that these conventional affects, shared in English and French courtly poetry, can be expressed in unconventional ways, as he encodes these emotions in this unusual lyric form. It is useful to place Charles in the select company of someone like Joseph Conrad – as Ingham does in chapter 5 – someone who learned English later in life and mastered it so thoroughly that he could produce sophisticated literary works in it. Indeed, the use of ‘souerayne’ in this poem is one such instance of that achievement, as Charles knew English well enough to realise that a word that looks like it could stand on its own in a four-syllable line can in fact be compressed into two syllables.43 It is notable just how few of the words in this stanza are French-derived, but are instead the stuff of everyday English; the words with French etymologies largely, but not exclusively, make up the B rhymes. This easy mastery of the language allows Charles to experiment with a lyric form that pits an extremely short line against an extremely long stanza. The resulting interplay between metre, stress, and extended rhyme schemes anticipates experiments in form that John Skelton would make some fifty years later. In fact, taken as a whole, one can think of Fortunes Stabilnes as a laboratory of formal experimentation unseen in English again until the œuvres of Skelton or William Dunbar, whose poetic exercises in different formal constructions have made them both justifiably famous. In short, what this lyric shows in miniature is what this volume as a whole argues: that Charles’s work, far from narrowing the English literary tradition into simple French visions in the courtly mode, instead transforms that mode as he inherited it in English and in French into something exceedingly rich and strange.

———

The volume begins with reflections by John Burrow in chapter 1 that trace the events of the two dreams in Fortunes Stabilnes. Comparing the initial dream and the first half of the work to its French analogue, Burrow focuses on Age’s advice to the lover to give up amatory pursuits and to confine himself into the Castle of No Care, finding inspiration for such an outcome in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Turning then to the second dream and resulting ballade sequence, Burrow notes that this second love story does two things: it allows Charles to present two different versions 43

Putter’s chapter 6 likewise points out Charles’s facility with such ‘verse phonology’.



Introduction  17

of suffering for love – one caused by the lady’s death and one by the lady’s refusal – and it gives the work a symmetrical structure – ballades / first dream / roundels / second dream / ballades. For Burrow, while the second dream and ballade sequence might be more unusual, he also finds it ultimately unsatisfactory, and ends the chapter on a note of disappointment in the way the English book as we have it ends. While the ballades are an integral part of the work’s overall form, they are also, individually, a site of Charles’s various formal experimentations. In chapter 2 Elizaveta Strakhov presents a detailed overview of all the different ballade forms which Charles deploys and shows that the variety of the first ballade sequence – with a similar variety in the French analogues – is reduced in the second sequence to the seven- or eight-line decasyllabic stanzas, with new rhyme schemes in each stanza, that was popular in England but not in France. This difference, Strakhov contends, makes Fortunes Stabilnes a transitional work, as the formal experimentation in the dit tradition, mixing narrative with different lyric forms, gives way to a tradition that saves its experimentation for different iterations of one specific form, the ballade. The ballade form, then, allows Charles to explore formal possibilities in both English and French culture, allowing him to make a case for the ballade as the privileged form of that shared literary world. Strakhov’s chapter is augmented with an appendix that records the vast variety of ballade forms used in Fortunes Stabilnes and their French analogues. Shifting to the other lyric form used extensively in Fortunes Stabilnes, the roundel, in chapter 3, Jenni Nuttall asks us to reconsider what we actually know about roundels. She points out that the form is fairly rare in English, with only fifteen known instances outside of Charles’s sequence, including four previously unrecognised examples. Almost all of the roundels are related to the same circle of poets and producers, making them a coterie form associated with that group’s social and political capital. Understanding the roundels in this social context allows Nuttall to reassess their meaning within Fortunes Stabilnes, showing that their mimetic characterisation as a feast stems from their consumption as little delicacies, exquisitely wrought constructions in the style of soteltes – those special confectionery dishes, sculptures in sugar that provide entertainment at medieval feast – that Charles offers up for members of the coterie to consume. Instead of the individual lyric, in chapter 4, B. S. W. Barootes attends to the sequence. One of Charles’s greatest innovations is introducing into English the lyric sequence, whereby narrative progression occurs over the course of any number of lyrics. Barootes notes that Charles is able to draw out the form of the sequence from the combination of the English and French poetic traditions and that it is particularly well suited to the elegiac nature of English narrative poems with interpolated lyrics, like Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess. Paying close attention to the sequence of ballades that first announce the death of the beloved and confess his grief for her,

18  R. D. Perry

Barootes shows what the lyric sequence affords Charles: it allows him to explore the work of mourning, how it is characterised as a series of beginnings and ending, attempts to ‘move on’ combined with the inability to do so. But, as Barootes also demonstrates, grief does not truly dissipate as narrative progresses, and Charles’s mourning breaks the bounds of the ballade sequence to haunt the remainder of his work in different ways. While Strakhov and Nuttall both pay particular attention to stanza length and rhyme – two of the important formal strictures that ‘fix’ formes fixes poetry – Eric Weiskott (chapter 5) and Ad Putter (chapter 6) are concerned with the other stricture: metre. Weiskott emphasises Charles’s metrical choices and what those choices meant in his historical situation. Charles’s first important choice was to write, most of the time, using the pentameter line, a fairly new line in English introduced by Chaucer. This choice had important ramifications for the great number of subsequent choices Charles needed to make about metrical phonology, the way that a language interacts with metre and how a poet chooses to deploy metrical stress. Weiskott focuses on the historical -e, with whether or not it is expressed and how that changes the line’s metre. As he shows, Charles’s use of the historical -e functions as one would expect in his French poetry, but it is an outlier in his English poetry, making Charles an exceptional figure in the Chaucerian pentameter tradition. Weiskott goes on to posit that Charles’s pentameter line is what made his English poetry both suitable for the literary culture surrounding the English court and, paradoxically, something that seemed disposable in its novelty once he was set to return to France. Metrical stress also features prominently in Putter’s discussion of the different ways stress operates, or fails to operate, in English and French, that then shows how – even though his poetry is for the most part incredibly proficient at dealing with stress in English – there are certain moments in which Charles places a stress where no native speaker of English would, such as in adjective–noun phrases. In many other instances of metrical play with stress, though, Charles shows himself to be an exceptional pupil of Chaucer’s practice. Putter’s chapter also tackles idiomaticity, using models of language acquisition to show how Charles would have picked up and recognised unusual phrases as an English-language learner. Putter takes these two aspects of Charles’s poetry, a sensitivity to rhythm and to language, as clear indicators of his exceptional poetic talents. Of course, Charles’s English language acquisition – so important for his metre – influences his language use more generally. In chapter 7 Richard Ingham pays particular attention to Charles’s verbs in order to show that certain stylistic oddities of Charles’s work are not stylistic innovations but features of incomplete second-language acquisition. Ingham first tackles Charles’s frequent inversion of auxiliary and main verbs, and shows them to be a feature of what is known as ‘stylistic fronting’ of word order,



Introduction  19

common in this case of verbs in medieval French. He then turns to the question of whether certain verbs do or do not take an auxiliary verb and finds, once again, that medieval French practice can explain those cases where Charles differs from his English contemporaries. Taken together, these features suggest that a French speaker was behind the English poems in Harley 682, which Ingham rightly takes as further support of Charles’s authorship. Language acquisition likewise affects one’s facility with idioms. Jeremy Smith notes in chapter 8 that Charles, famous for his innovative use of English words, was living at a time when the language was being extended by writers in all kinds of directions. Smith measures Charles’s lexicon against John Lydgate’s and finds that Charles uses a much smaller vocabulary, but also that his vocabulary is similar to Chaucer’s poetic practice in a variety of ways. However, while Chaucer and Charles both show an affinity for words in the register of ‘courtly love’, Charles is much more insistent and regular in his invocation of this lexicon. Smith also considers words for which Fortunes Stabilnes is the only attestation, or one of the earliest ones, in the OED and MED – and his chapter includes an appendix detailing these – and finds that, while some can be explained as borrowings from French, the vast majority instead show the creativity with which Charles uses figurative and literary language. Smith ends by considering the unusual spelling of words in Harley 682 and finds that, as one might imagine from a Frenchman who had travelled around much of England, Charles allows himself a considerable amount of leeway in pronunciation and spelling, due in part to his encounter with different dialects of English on his travels and in part to the scarcity of rhyme a French poet must experience when working in English. Should Charles’s playfulness with the English language, and his tendency to be attuned to uncommon uses of it, be called an aureate poetics, something different from John Lydgate’s aureation, though equally creative? As part of an ongoing effort to redefine what ‘aureation’ means, in chapter 9, Andrea Denny-Brown describes it as the interaction of sonic and textual richness; her interest here is in the different ways the poetry of Lydgate and Charles ‘misbehaves’, that is, the provocative manner in which they each challenge the conventions of the English language and its literary sensibilities. Denny-Brown wants us to understand these idiosyncrasies as, instead, deliberate attempts at stylistic experimentation. Focusing on the repetitive sonic play of short words and the way Charles understands the role of Latin in the writing of love poetry, Denny-Brown uncovers a silent competition between Charles and Lydgate over different visions of what aureate love lyrics should be. The volume ends with two chapters that, in different ways, return us to considerations about Charles’s English work as a whole. The vast majority of Charles’s English poetry is instantiated in a single book, Harley

20  R. D. Perry

682, which has its own story to tell about his social relations and English reception. In chapter 10, Simon Horobin compares British Library MS Harley 682 to both the French manuscript of Charles’s work – Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS fr. 25458 – and the so-called ‘Oxbridge’ manuscript – two fragments from a single manuscript, one fragment now residing in Oxford and one in Cambridge. Based on the differences in layout and the irregularity of correction, he argues that the English manuscripts were not as closely connected to Charles as the French manuscript was – that is, while the French manuscript remained with him and contains material written in his hand, Horobin believes that the English manuscripts were copied at a remove, perhaps at Charles’s request, but perhaps not. Horobin surveys known associates of Charles with literary interests, such as William de la Pole and Thomas Cumberworth, but does not think it likely that they were the intended recipients of Harley 682. Instead, he considers the similarities between Harley 682 and such manuscripts as Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16, and its less expensive relatives Oxford Bodleian Library MSS Bodley 638 and Tanner 346, and suggests that it is likely that the manuscript was prepared for someone further down on the social scale, perhaps as a part of the burgeoning London book-trade meant to feed the rapidly growing appetite for English literature. Such a possibility suggests a wider audience for Charles’s work than has heretofore been imagined. Philip Knox’s chapter 11 is concerned with the coherence of Charles’s English poetry, both in terms of the way that the narrative and lyrics interact and in terms what kind of poetic subject (the sort of stable I ) the work produces. For Knox, Charles creates an interesting interplay between narrative and lyric that is indebted to but not identical with any of the dits amoureux that precede him. The work’s interplay is further complicated by Charles’s use of autobiographical elements, as well as fictional ones, in the narrator’s self-presentation. If this is a work that refuses to maintain strict divisions between narrative and lyrics, so too does it refuse to be either autobiography or pure fabrication. Such contradictory impulses shape the end of the work. The French manuscript of Charles’s poem opens up to community engagement by gathering poems by Charles and his circle of friends and correspondents. The poems in the English manuscript, in contrast, remain focused on an individual’s experience, self-consciously closed off from further community involvement.

———

The chapters collected here are intended to provide a firm foundation on which new work about Charles d’Orléans might be built, although they go about building that foundation in two different ways. Those chapters concerned with versification and language aim to give systematic accounts of the practices that they examine and so perform an almost pedagogical



Introduction  21

function, something akin to reference works. The chapters concerned with the structure of the work, the lyrics, the style, and the manuscript form all seek to inspire new conversations by opening up new avenues of enquiry. They demonstrate just how fruitful putting Charles’s work in conversation with his predecessors and contemporaries can be and will, hopefully, inspire future work locating the place of Charles’s poetry in the broader English context. What is more, they also ask us to further question the way we understand the division between the fictive and autobiographical, and the way that such a division might shape our understanding of how individual parts of a literary work interact with the whole. What the chapters in this volume all have in common is that they view Charles as engaged in an extensive conversation with his fifteenth-century peers, one carried out through the poetry. But the timber of that conversation should be understood as excitement over the modes and persistence of formal experimentation. An appreciation of Charles’s achievements in Fortunes Stabilnes allows for a new perspective on fifteenth-century English poetry as a whole, what it takes from Chaucer, Gower, and its fourteenth-century French forebears, and what new directions it sets off in. More than that, Fortunes Stabilnes shows Charles to be one of the great formal innovators of English poetry, a poet creating as sophisticated and unusual productions as anyone else between Chaucer and Edmund Spenser, the equal of such figures already appreciated for their talent and variety as Dunbar or Skelton. In short, Charles writes beautiful and fascinating poetry, as valuable for the way it alters our understanding of literary history as for how it shows us new ways to express ourselves in English verse. The chapters collected in this volume demonstrate just how richly rewarding close attention to Charles’s work can be, and I hope that they will inspire others to find out what Charles d’Orléans’ English poetry has to offer.

1 The Two Dreams of Charles d’Orléans and the Structure of his English Book † J. A. BURROW

[Editors’ Note: We were very pleased that John Burrow was able to contribute a chapter to this volume, one that he had written but never published. That he had a serious, ongoing interest in Charles’s work is evidenced by his 2017 article in The Chaucer Review (see Select Publications). Sadly, John passed away very early in the editing process. We have included the chapter he gave us with minimal editorial intervention.]

T

he French prince Charles d’Orléans composed his English Book of Love (Fortunes Stabilnes) in the course of the twenty-five years in England that followed his capture at Agincourt in 1415.1 This sequence of love narratives and lyrics falls into three parts, clearly marked off from each other by two dreams. The first part concerns the poet’s love for a lady referred to as ‘Beauty’ and concludes with ballades lamenting that lady’s untimely death. There follows the first of the two dreams (2540–2635), in which Charles encounters Age. Age persuades him to give up all thought of further loving, and accordingly Charles retires to his manor ‘No Care’, where he marks his retirement from love by composing for the benefit of others a set of little love poems in the form of roundels. The results of this exercise make up the middle part of the Book. In the ensuing second dream (4736–5190) Charles encounters Venus and Fortune, a vision that prompts him to resume his own life as a lover; and the whole work ends with a further sequence of ballades addressed to his new lady. 1

The work is known only from London, British Library MS Harley 682: edited as The English Poems, by Robert Steele and Mabel Day, and as Fortunes Stabilnes, by Mary-Jo Arn. I cite from Arn’s edition by line or item (B 6 for the sixth ballade, R 6 for the sixth roundel). [Burrow tended to refer to the work as either Charles d’Orléans’ ‘English Book’ or as ‘the Book’, and we have retained that use. –Ed.]



The Two Dreams of Charles d'Orléans  23

When Charles at last returned to France, in 1440, he evidently left these English writings behind, but he took with him his personal copy of the poems that he wrote in French during his captivity. The first part of this French manuscript (pages 1 to 121) corresponds closely to the first part of the English one, including also the dream of Age and the poet’s consequent retirement to No Care, ‘Nonchaloir’ in the French.2 Comparison between them shows that the English poems are versions made from the French, as if Charles amused himself during his captivity by rendering verses first composed in his native language into the language of his captors.3 However, the French work has nothing like the tripartite structure of the English. It does include, much later on in the manuscript, a group of chansons (pp. 204–35) which correspond to the first fifty-two roundels in the middle part of the English (R 1–52), but these have no connection with the dream of Age, as they do in the English; nor does the French poetry have anything corresponding to the English poet’s subsequent dream of Venus and Fortune or the new love affair that follows. 2

3

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale MS fr. 25458, edited by Pierre Champion, Charles d’Orléans: Poésies. I cite from this edition, either by item (B 6 for the sixth ballade) or, in the ‘Retenue d’Amours’ and the ‘Songe en Complainte’, by line. See the study of this manuscript by Pierre Champion, Le manuscrit autograph des poésies de Charles d’Orléans. Bibliothèque du XV siècle 3 (Paris: Champion, 1907; rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1975). Of the ballade on p. 121, he writes: ‘Avec cette pièce se termine la série d’écriture uniforme où nous reconnaisons le fonds primitif du manuscrit’ (p. 20). Probably this ‘fonds primitif ’ was copied for the poet at a time when he was still in England composing the English poems to which it corresponds. [See Hans H. Meier, ‘Middle English Styles in Translation: The Case of Chaucer and Charles’, in So meny people longages and tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediaeval English Presented to Angus McIntosh, ed. Michael Benskin and M. L. Samuels (Edinburgh: Benskin and Samuels, 1981), pp. 367–76. For commentary on the purpose and quality of Charles’s translation, see Ardis Butterfield, ‘Rough Translation: Charles d’Orléans, Lydgate and Hoccleve’, in Rethinking Medieval Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory, ed. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), pp. 204–25; Susan Crane, ‘Charles of Orleans: Self-Translation’, in The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, ed. Rosalynn Voaden, René Tixier, et al. The Medieval Translator 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 169–77; and the chapters by Andrea Denny-Brown (chapter 9) and Jeremy J. Smith (chapter 8) in this volume. For accounts of how the Hundred Years’ War influenced Charles’s poetry, see Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009); and chapter 2 by Elizaveta Strakhov in this volume. –Ed.]

24  J. A. Burrow

Both books open with a scene at the court of Cupid where Charles first falls in love with the lady Beauty,4 and this is followed by the long sequence of ballades addressed to her, ending with the news of her death. That bereavement prompts the poet’s dream of Age (in the French, ‘Songe’, lines 1–96; in the English 2540–2635). Age explains that he is the very same who, long ago at the very beginning of the Book, brought a message from Dame Nature ordering Childhood to hand over its tutelage of Charles to Youth.5 This makes it clear that ‘Age’ represents not old age (‘Vieillesse’ in the French, in the English ‘Elde’) but the natural passage in an individual’s lifetime from one age to another. Time is passing. Charles may still be ‘young’, but he is not as young as he was, and Age warns him to take thought now for what is surely to come with the onset of Elde (2568–2572, ‘Songe’ lines 29–33). In particular, now that he has lost his lady, should he not take that unhappy opportunity to put all such youthful passions behind him? What remains of the first dream is taken up with the arguments presented by Age in favour of this conclusion. Charles, he says, will in any case be obliged to renounce love when he grows old, since ‘Love and Elde are falle at gret debate’ (2576, ‘Songe’ line 37), and elderly lovers are rightly objects of ridicule to the young. But if Charles will only give up love now, while he is not yet old, he may retire with dignity and honour, for it will be evident to all that he does so not because his ‘puissance’ is on the wane but solely out of loyalty to the memory of his dead mistress (2588–2595, ‘Songe’ lines 49–56). For the same reason, Charles will be able to withdraw with honour from his contract with the God of Love, entered into at the beginning of the Book when he paid hommage to Cupid. In the French: ‘… lors gracieusement Departirés de son gouvernement, A grant honneur, comme loyal et sage.’ (‘Then you will depart with grace from his service, honoured as man of loyalty and wisdom.’ ‘Songe’ 62–64)

However, although Charles may no longer serve Cupid directly as a lover himself, he can still perform humble service for the lovers who do (2610–2611). He may enrol himself, that is, among those who ‘serve the servants of the God of Love’ by writing poetry about their experiences, 4

5

The sole surviving English copy has lost its first quire and therefore lacks its opening (‘Retenue’, lines 1–400 in the French). Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes, pp. 133–35 summarises the missing matter. Enfance and Jennesse in the French (‘Retenue’, 11–20).



The Two Dreams of Charles d'Orléans  25

as Geoffrey Chaucer claimed to do at the beginning of his Troilus.6 This advice Charles is to follow in the middle part of his English Book. In what remains of the dream, Age warns Charles against Fortune (2615–2635, ‘Songe’ lines 76–96). ‘Trust not Fortune’, for this deceitful goddess will promise to treat him better next time if he will only consent to resume his life as a lover. She ‘woll flatir to brynge thee fresshe in smert’, that is, inveigle him into suffering once more the pains of love. The remedy, according to Age, is for Charles to take refuge in No Care. Taking this advice after waking up, Charles renounces love, makes his peace with Cupid, receives back his heart wrapped in a piece of black silk, and retires to No Care, the old manor house in which he lived as a child – before, that is, he passed into the tempestuous age of Youth. It is a potent bit of symbolic action: a man carrying his heart swathed in black back to his old childhood home. The name of this home in the French, Nonchaloir, derives from the verb chaloir, originally ‘to be warm’ (Latin calere), which came to be used impersonally as in Modern French ‘peu m’en chaut’, ‘it matters little to me’. So ‘Nonchaloir’ denotes, with just a trace of princely nonchalance (‘Songe’ line 50), Charles’s newly achieved detachment from any personal experience of love. The English equivalent, ‘No Care’, matches the construction of the French word, while admitting by its use of the word ‘care’ another not incompatible reference, to love as a source of anxiety and sorrow. The idea of a dream inspiring such an outcome may well have been suggested to Charles by an episode towards the end of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, a poem quite widely read in the circles among whom the poet spent his years of captivity. Unlike Charles, Gower’s Amans does not have the option of an honourably early renunciation of love, for he has already suffered his loss of ‘puissance’ in old age; but Venus tells him that it is still not too late for him to make a ‘beau retret’, an honourable withdrawal, from love, and she urges him to ‘tak hom thin herte ayein’ (8.2416, 2421).7 Amans then falls into a swoon and dreams that Cupid pulls out the arrow with which he wounded him, and that Venus applies a healing ointment to the wound (8.2449–2859). So when the lover wakens from his dream, 6

7

Riverside Chaucer, Troilus 1.15. All citations from Chaucer come from the Riverside and will be by book or fragment and line number or simply by line number where appropriate. Gower, Confessio Amantis, in The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, vol. 2 (EETS e.s. 82. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1901). I cite from this edition by book and line number. The earlier discussion in J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 182–88, refers also to the dream in Froissart’s Joli buisson de Jonece, ed. Anthime Fourrier. Textes littéraires français 222 (Geneva: Droz, 1975), pp. 40–42.

26  J. A. Burrow

he finds himself entirely cured of his passion, and he walks quietly home, carrying with him not his heart wrapped in black but a set of black beads, a rosary given him by Venus (8.2904–2908, 2958–2961). Spelled out in gold letters on these beads are the words ‘Por reposer’, a motto that sums up the outcome of his vision.8 Henceforth he is to pray for a continual rest and peace, that inner tranquillity which he could never enjoy as an old man in love. It is a somewhat more positive version of the detachment taught to Charles in his first dream. Once he has retired to No Care, Charles occupies his time, as a servant of the servants of love, with composing for the benefit of young lovers a set of poems about the joys and sorrows that they will experience. This middle section of the Book consists of 103 roundels, represented as a banquet of little delicacies that Charles serves up for lovers to eat. By comparison with the two ballade sequences, therefore, these roundels stand at one further remove from any experience of the author himself, so it is appropriate that they should be smaller than other poems in the book, with a slight stereoscopic effect as if set back in a recess. This feast, Charles explains, consists of ‘birdis smale’ – quails, larks, and the like (B 84). Here the first-person speaker is no more than a generic lover, not to be identified even with the man who speaks in the ballades, and it is only in the last two roundels, R 102 and R 103, that Charles begins to reassume his own voice, referring again to the death of his lady and wishing his audience of lovers better fortune.9 Charles’s second dream, which follows in the English Book, like the first (and like Gower’s), mysteriously heralds a change of life – in this case, the poet’s renewal as a lover and his subjection again to the vagaries of Fortune. Unlike the first dream, however, the second has no French version, nor is there any reason to think that there ever was one. Evidently Charles is here composing directly in English, with no French original. This may help to explain why his second vision is so much wilder than the first. Its setting, for one thing, is not at all what one might expect in a dit amoureux. After completing his banquet of poetic tit-bits, Charles is asked by another lover to compose for him a ballade on his sufferings at the hands of Fortune. He agrees to do so, collects pen and paper, and – Forth bi my silf thus went y me alone Toward the see, where nygh my bidyng was To y come to an high huge Rokke of stone That to biholde hit glemshid bright as glas. (4666–4669) 8 9

The ten letters of the motto are perhaps to be thought of as distributed over the ten beads that represent on a rosary a decade of Ave Marias. [On the way Charles plays with the autobiographical elements of his poetry in general, see chapter 11 by Philip Knox in this volume. –Ed.]



The Two Dreams of Charles d'Orléans  27

It is here on this sea-cliff that he sits down and, having completed his acquaintance’s commission, falls asleep on the spot and dreams. Perhaps this unusual setting was suggested by the white cliffs of Dover, for it was at Dover that Charles spent some time in 1433, composing his French Ballade 75 in which he looked across the Channel, longing for his return to France: En regardant vers le pais de France, Un jour m’avint, a Dovre sur la mer, Qu’il ne souvint de la doulce plaisance Que souloye oudit pays trouver.10 (Looking towards the land of France one day at Dover-on-Sea, I happened to recall the sweet pleasures that I used to enjoy in that country.)

Poems such as Charles’s Book were under no obligation to respect the distinction between waking and sleeping experience, so Charles can carry over into his dream the whole of the setting in which he fell asleep. He dreams that he looks down from the same sea-cliff, sees a woman floating towards him over the waves, and makes his way down to the shore, just as if he were still awake (4768–4770). It is on this beach that he encounters Venus and Fortune. Such a Dover setting (if it can be called that) bodes no good for the second love affair that is to ensue; for, though the English valued the Channel as one of their nation’s defences, for Charles it has figured in the first sequence of ballades as an obstacle cutting him off both from ‘le pais de France’ and from his lady. In Ballade 28 he imagined despatching a message of comfort across the ‘Sea of Fortune’ to his mistress in France, and in Ballade 39 he sent sighs and wishes across the ‘foamy ocean waves’ to his sovereign lady – in both cases probably referring to his young wife, Bonne d’Armagnac, whom he had married five years before Agincourt.11 So the sea has associations with the separation of lovers and also more generally, with the Sea of Fortune, with all the uncertainties to which love and life are subject.

10 11

B 75, lines 1–4. See Champion’s note, p. 557, and Arn, ed., p. 25. There is no English version. Bonne is said to have died between 1430 and 1435: Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes, p. 25. The two English ballades mentioned correspond to B 28 and B 29 in the French. In his edition, Champion identifies the lady in both as Bonne (notes on pp. 553 and 554), and there seems no reason to doubt this. Elsewhere she is described as ‘la nompareille de France’ (B 27 and B 44), as ‘la plus belle de France’ (B 35 and B 50), and in the English as ‘the best and fayrist eek of Fraunce’ (B 50).

28  J. A. Burrow

It is, however, not Fortune but Venus who first occupies the dream. Venus has so far played almost no part in the Book,12 so she is introduced afresh here with a set description, as A lady nakid all thing saue hir here, And on hir hed lijk as a crowne she were Of dowfis white, and many a thousand payre Hie ouyr hir gan fletter in the ayre. Abowt hir wast a kercher of plesaunce, And on hir hond an Owle y sigh sittyng. Vpon the wawes, owt more suffisaunce, Me thought afer she came to me fletyng. (4760–4767)

Charles here certainly recalls Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, where a naked Venus is seen ‘fletynge in the large see’ with her doves ‘flykerynge’ above her head;13 but his Venus has two more unusual attributes, her kerchief and her owl. This enigmatic owl can hardly signify wisdom, as it does when carried by Pallas Athena, so perhaps here it has its more popular signification as a bird of ill omen, a ‘prophete … of wo and of myschaunce’, suggesting trouble in future for Charles as a lover.14 The ‘kercher of plesaunce’ is properly a head-covering of a fine fabric; but here it is wrapped round the naked goddess’s waist, recalling another Chaucerian Venus; for in the Parliament of Fowls (269–273) she covers her lower half with nothing but a ‘subtyl coverchef of Valence’. This Venus, unlike that in the Knight’s Tale, is directly associated with sexual pleasure (Priapus has a place of honour in her temple), and the same is evidently to be understood of the goddess in Charles’s dream. A. C. Spearing takes her to represent ‘the universal sexual instinct at work in and on Charles’.15 Having reached the sea-shore, Venus engages Charles in a conversation which suggests how the ‘universal sexual instinct’ is beginning to reassert itself in the poet after his period of retirement in No Care. Unlike Gower’s 12

13 14

15

As when he encountered Age earlier, Charles realises that he has seen her before, but cannot think when. Venus was silently present in the opening scene of the French text (‘Retenue’, 118–120), but otherwise figures only in B 70 (B 63), a ballade that partially anticipates the second dream. Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, I.1955–1962. Compare also Chaucer, House of Fame, 131–137. Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, 2254. On owls, see Jill Mann, From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 156–60. Spearing contrasts her with the moral Venus of The Kingis Quair: ‘Dreams in The Kingis Quair and the Duke’s Book’, in Charles d’Orléans in England, ed. Arn, pp. 123–44, at p. 138.



The Two Dreams of Charles d'Orléans  29

Amans, he has evidently not been cured for good. Questioned by Venus about his present life in his manor, Charles gives a distinctly gloomy account of how he has been continually harking back to his happier times as a lover (4802–4864); and this prompts Venus to condemn his retirement from love as an act against Nature. Since the lady is dead, he must now look for a new one: ‘For, though ye take a lady in yowre arme, God wot, as now hit doth hir litill harme!’ (4881–4882)

In the dispute that follows, Charles raises a variety of objections to this shocking advice: he has sworn to be faithful forever to the dead lady; and if he were to choose a new mistress, he would be afraid that she too might die; and anyway he is now such a wreck that no woman would look at him, even supposing he were still capable of making the right approaches. This battery of arguments, along with the account of his miserable life in No Care, clearly suggests that Charles is already conceding at least the possibility of something better than his present condition. Venus makes a show of answering him, but her decisive argument is reserved for the last. Whatever Charles may think or intend, she concludes, the sight of a new beauty will settle the matter for him: ‘For when ye se that that ye nevir saw It may wel happe yow thynke ye neuyr thought.’ (4962–4963)

It is just as Venus makes this prophecy, most appropriately, that Charles first catches sight of Fortune approaching through the air in her chariot, for Fortune represents the kind of change that Venus anticipates – not the orderly natural change represented by Age earlier, but change as it happens to happen. Accordingly, the long, ensuing description of the goddess (4974–5039) takes every opportunity to indicate her bewildering changefulness: her surcoat, decorated with laughing and weeping eyes, looks blue from one angle and purple from another, and she wears round her neck a strange collar of tumbling dice. She also, of course, has her customary wheel, and it is there, riding high upon it, that Charles sees what he takes to be the beloved lady that he thought dead: So inly fayre, so full of goodlynes, So wel ensewrid bothe of port and chere, That this bithought me lo dowtles, How that it was myn owen self lady dere. (5051–5054)

Venus has failed to notice the arrival of Fortune because she has her back turned, and when Charles draws it to her attention she becomes agitated: what will people think, finding her alone with a man? Charles reassures

30  J. A. Burrow

her: the only person among those on the wheel who might disapprove will be his own lady when she sees him in conversation with a beautiful stranger.16 But Venus corrects him: the lady on the wheel is not, as he thinks, his former mistress at all but, rather, another woman ‘fayre and wel vnto hir lijk’ (5112). This discovery, remarkably enough, does nothing to disturb Charles’s passionate response to what he has just seen, prompting Venus to joke that he is like a merchant ‘engrossing’ goods wholesale. To this Charles can only reply that the new lady is so very like the old that he cannot be blamed for loving her too. So Venus acquits him of promiscuity and offers to help his cause: ‘Hange hir vpon my kercher of plesaunce, And y shal brynge thee vp to hir aloft.’ (5170–5171)

There follows one of those abrupt dream endings that medieval poets liked to invent. Hanging on to the kerchief, Charles is carried by Venus high in the air towards the lady on the wheel; but this so frightens him that he cries aloud and wakens himself up. The allegorical action here recalls what Age said in the earlier dream about the dangers for Charles of resuming his life as a lover: ‘Trust not Fortune’. Lured on by the prospect of amorous ‘plesaunce’, Charles is to expose himself once more to the vagaries of Fortune when he devotes himself to a new lady who sits (for the moment, at least) high on Fortune’s turning wheel. When Charles wakens, he finds himself back on his cliff-top still grasping a piece of Venus’s kerchief, and this he puts in his bosom as a ‘remembraunce’ – like the black rosary that John Gower receives from the same goddess, but with a quite opposite significance. Charles has now been inveigled back to that lover’s life over which fickle Fortune has control. It is therefore appropriate that his first waking encounter with the new lady should occur when, playing a game of pursuit, Post and Pillar, he succeeds in replacing another young man as her partner ‘as the corse thus droue me here & there’ (5240).17 Charles is now once more to be subject to the falls of Fortune’s dice, as he was in his affair with Beauty, and that mostly to his detriment. Although in the first ballade sequence Fortune is said to be ‘now my frend and now my fo’ (1343), she is represented there chiefly as a cruel and deceitful adversary, as in Ballade 40 (‘O Fortune, dost thou my deth conspyre?’). Charles complains of ‘the sotilnes / Of seytfull Fortune, 16

17

‘Why, gef thei doo, what kan thei thynk on þis, / Owttsepte my lady? Clene y them defy!’ (5095–5096). So punctuated (not following Arn’s edition) the lines say that no one, with the sole exception of his lady, could have cause to take what they see amiss. On the game, see Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes, pp. 60–62, with a manuscript illustration, p. 334.



The Two Dreams of Charles d'Orléans  31

with hir dowbil chere’ (2128–2129), and again: ‘To lyue in pees y kan in no degre, / Fortune on me so pleyeth the tyran’ (1397–1398).18 Similarly, in the second ballade sequence, Ballade 118, he complains to Fortune: Now wolde y say þou haddist þee wel borne Me to deseyve bi sleight or trechery, Which do revolue at eve or morne The dowbill turnys of thi iuparty. (6436–6369)

However, Fortune’s ‘double turns’ cause the lover in the two ballade sequences different kinds of pain. In the first, Charles suffers chiefly from a distant separation from his lady, as Fortune brings it about that ‘y so longe dwelle fro my lady dere’ (B 40, 1432). In Ballades 10 and 11 he laments his enforced absence from her, a ‘long abood’ away, the reason for which, he says, she knows (540, 571). He longs to see and speak with her again, but in the meantime he can only hope for the best and exchange letters. The lady herself bears no responsibility for the ‘absent payne’ he suffers (1896). On the contrary, she is his ‘good and kynde princes’ (1816), who has granted him her love (B 47) and exchanged her heart for his (810–813). Although he was daunted when he first set eyes on her at the court of Cupid, flanked there by Disdayn and Daunger (165–167), the ensuing sequence proves her to be neither disdainful nor standoffish. The term ‘Daunger’ does occur quite frequently there, but it never, after the initial sight of her, denotes an obstacle presented by the lady herself. Rather, it does duty for any of the frustrating circumstances that stand in the way, externally, of the lovers’ happiness. So in Ballade 28 (1071–1072) Charles sends a message across the Sea of Fortune to France in which he applauds her resistance against Daunger and ‘the false conspere / Of suche as haue with Daunger allyaunce’ (cf. B 50); and in Ballade 44 it is Daunger that has obliged him to ‘dwelle thus from the good princesse’ (1554). Both he and his lady alike are to stand firm against the circumstances and powers – unspecified, as is the way in such courtly verse – that keep them apart. There is no such prolonged separation from a ‘princesse lointaine’ in the second sequence of ballades.19 Although, when Charles first encounters his new lady during the game of Post and Pillar, he regrets that ‘fer from yow y dwel’, the lady responds with a simple invitation to ‘come and se vs lo sum othir day’, and Charles expresses the hope that he may indeed do so no later than ‘this weke’ (5312–5339). These lovers are perfectly able to meet face to face, on occasions such as those recalled in the poet’s Epistle to the lady (5696–5739) and celebrated in Ballade 98. The obstacles that Charles 18 19

Compare lines 363, 1485, 1513, 1645 (Fortune’s dice), 1947, 1952, 2114, 2399. On Bonne as ‘princesse lointaine’, see John Fox, ‘Glanures’, in Charles d’Orléans in England, ed. Arn, pp. 89–108.

32  J. A. Burrow

here encounters are presented, rather, by the new lady herself, for she, unlike Beauty, causes him to suffer chiefly by her own behaviour. Ballades 87 to 95 in particular attribute to her a whole battery of unwelcome responses. It is now the lady who confronts Charles with daunger: ‘putt away / Yowre daunger and mystrust þat grevith me’ (5456–5457), and again, ‘Yowre crewel daunger, good dere hert, restrayne’ (5485). Her heart has not a drop of that pity for which he pleads (5410, 5430, 5441, 5657); her disdain is killing him (B 89); and she is as hard as stone, like Pygmalion’s statue before it came alive (B 90). These hostile attributes are summed up in the penultimate ballade of the whole Book, Ballade 120, where Charles laments their presence in someone otherwise so admirable: So fresshe bewte, so moche goodlynes, So skace of grace, so large of crewelte, So moche vertew and so moche gantilnes, So long this straunge, so bareyne of pite, So lusty yowthe, so replete of bounte, So litil mercy and so gret disdayne – (6476–6481)

This contrast between the two ballade sequences – muted though it is by features that they have in common – suggests that Charles may have conceived the first and last parts of his Book as forming a kind of diptych, representing two of the main sorrows that a lover might suffer: separation from a mistress who is kind, or proximity to one who is not. Mary-Jo Arn, proposing such an interpretation, suggests that Charles perhaps had Guillaume de Machaut in mind: ‘Charles may have intended them [the two sequences] as contrasting accounts of two types of love affairs such as are, for instance, represented by Machaut in his Judgment of the King of Bohemia, in which a lady who has lost her love to death contends that she sorrows more than the lover whose lady is unfaithful to him, and vice versa.’20 Be this as it may, the presence of the second ballade sequence produces for the whole of the English Book a symmetrical structure, ABA, that is quite lacking in the French: first ballade sequence / dream of Age / banquet of roundels / dream of Venus and Fortune / second ballade sequence. What the second sequence does not succeed in doing, however, is to bring the English Book to a satisfactory conclusion. After Ballade 120, from which I quoted above, there remains only Ballade 121. This opens with a flourish of farewells: As for farewel! farewel! farewel! farewel! And of farewel more þen a þousand skore Haue ye fare wel! – or more, had y to dele, For forto say þis partyng doth me sore – (6504–6507) 20

Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes, p. 73.



The Two Dreams of Charles d'Orléans  33

That certainly sounds like an ending; but there has been no previous suggestion that Charles is about to abandon his second lady, and the ballade in fact goes on to make it clear that this parting is not to be final, when it speaks of seeing the lady again ‘as sone as þat ye may’ (6517). In a discussion about types of ending in his Ars Versificatoria, Matthew of Vendôme included what he calls the terminatio, a type where the poet is prevented by circumstances (Matthew instances death) from finishing his work;21 and it may be that the ending of Charles’s Book should be understood as just such a termination. Perhaps the poet, hearing that he could now make his long-awaited return to France, simply set his English Book aside, leaving it with nothing better than a stop-gap ending.22 However this may be, Ballade 121 cannot be said to bring the Book to a satisfactory conclusio. It is one thing for a poem such as Piers Plowman to end on an inconclusive note, looking forward to the future of its as yet unfinished business, but it is quite another for Charles to leave his second love affair hanging in the air, with no more than a passing reference to future meetings. His Book has a strong opening, but it lacks an ending that would, in Chaucer’s words, ‘knytte up’ the whole.23

21

22

23

Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria, in Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle: Recherches et documents sur la technique littéraire du Moyen Âge, ed. Edmond Faral. Bibliothèque de l’École des hautes études. Sciences historique et philologique 238 (Paris: Champion, 1924; rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1958), 4.50, p. 192. See John Burrow, ‘Poems without Endings’, The Biennial Chaucer Lecture. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991), 17–37, at 18. In her edition, Mary-Jo Arn writes that ‘it is unclear what the poet’s intentions were for ending the work, if indeed he intended to add anything more’, observing that the last two folios of the manuscript are ruled but contain no text, Fortunes Stabilnes, p. 9. [For different interpretations about the ending of the English work, see the chapter 11 by Philip Knox and chapter 10 by Simon Horobin in this volume. –Ed.] Canterbury Tales, X.28.

2 Charles d’Orléans’ Cross-Channel Poetics: The Choice of Ballade Form in Fortunes Stabilnes ELIZAVETA STRAKHOV

I

n René d’Anjou’s Livre d’amours du cœur espris (The Book of the Love-Smitten Heart) (1457) the dream vision’s protagonist finds himself at a cemetery of famous lovers. At its entrance is a hall hung with the shields and coats of arms of historical and fictional figures such as Julius Caesar, Aeneas, Lancelot, etc., and prominent French aristocracy, such as Jean de Berry (1340–1416), Gaston IV de Foix (1422–1472), and others. The verses painted on the shield of Charles d’Orléans recount the following about the imprisoned poet: … prins fuz des Anglois et mené en servaige.

… I was taken by the English and led into bondage.

Par lequel fus acoint de dame belle et saige

By means of which I grew close to a beautiful and virtuous lady

Et tant y demouray qu’en aprins le langaige

Et d’elle si espris qu’a Amours fis hommaige,

Dont mains beaux dits dictié bien prisez davantaige … (lines 1465–1469)1

And I spent so long there that I learned the language, And was so taken with her that I pledged fealty to Love,

About which I composed beautiful dits that were all the more praised …

According to these verses, Charles’s acquisition of English in captivity led to an acquaintance with a lady, as a result of which he fell in love and composed highly lauded poetry. Although René does not specify that 1

Text edited in René d’Anjou, Le livre du cœur d’amour épris, ed. and trans. Florence Bouchet. Lettres gothiques (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2003); this and all other translations from French are my own.



Charles d'Orléans' Cross-Channel Poetics   35

the poetry itself was composed in English, the causal construction of the clause implies that learning English was the ultimate point of origin for Charles’s literary endeavours: had he not learned English, he would not have met the lady, and had he not met the lady, he would not have entered Love’s service and composed beautiful poetry. In monumentalising Charles through his bilingualism, René – Charles’s contemporary, friend, and a fellow poet himself – seems to posit Charles’s English as central not just to the duke’s biography, but to his enduring literary legacy. Despite René’s emphasis on Charles’s English, the duke remains far more studied for his French, rather than for his English compositions.2 This is due in no small part to a long-standing conviction, finally put to rest, that Fortunes Stabilnes had to be an inferior anonymous translation of his French poetry.3 Close comparison of Charles’s French and English verse, however, betrays no linguistic deficiency but, on the contrary, remarkable attunement to linguistic difference, such as his well-known refrain, rendered in French as ‘Tout enroillié de Nonchaloir’ (‘all rusted with Indifference’; B 72, line 11) and, in English, as ‘rollid in No Care’ (B 83, 3081).4 Charles hardly mistranslates or even loosely translates here: instead, he deploys ‘false friends’ to produce two vastly different and equally vivid metaphors. As Mary-Jo Arn, among others, has trenchantly argued, the individual pieces collected in Fortunes Stabilnes are not so much translations as alternative versions – or, as I prefer to call them,

2

3 4

For representative studies, see, among others, Daniel Poirion, Le poète et le prince: L’évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d’Orléans. Publications de la Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines (Grenoble) 35 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965; rpt. Geneva: Slatkine 1978); Alice Planche, Charles d’Orléans ou la recherche d’un langage (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1975); Claudio Galderisi, Charles d’Orléans, une poésie des présents: En regardant vers le païs de France. Medievalia 59 (Orléans: Paradigme, 2007); and Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, Charles d’Orléans, un lyrisme entre Moyen Âge et modernité. Recherches littéraires médievales 3 (Paris: Éditions Classique Garnier, 2010). On the Charles-shaped lacuna in both French and English literary canons, see, in particular, A. E. B. Coldiron, Canon, Period, and the Poetry of Charles of Orleans: Found in Translation (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000), pp. 40–76. See Mary-Jo Arn’s summary of these older arguments, with relevant bibliography, in her introduction to Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes, pp. 32–37. Text of Charles’s French verse will come from Fox and Arn, eds, Poetry of Charles d’Orléans and His Circle, and the English from Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes. The edition of Fortunes Stabilnes has continuously numbered lines, while the edition of the French poetry restarts line numbers with each new work.

36  Elizaveta Strakhov

analogues – of Charles’s French verse.5 Ardis Butterfield reads Charles’s English poetry as evidence of a self-conscious linguistic experiment that she terms ‘rough’ translation. Like other post-Chaucerian fifteenthcentury poets, she argues, Charles is negotiating the vexed dynamics of England’s early fifteenth-century political supremacy yet cultural subjection to its familiar enemy.6 A. E. B. Coldiron draws attention to Charles’s unusual decision to translate French poetry into English for a Francophone and Francophile audience. Given its choice of vernaculars, this project fits neither into a replicative model of translatio studii nor a displacement model of translatio imperii. Emphasising Charles’s penchant for syntactic play between the French and English versions of his poems, she suggests that Charles practises a ‘translatio poesis – that is, to bring across a lyric poetics meant to instruct and a heritage of lyric practice meant to delight’.7 In this piece, I would like to build on Coldiron’s characterisation of Charles’s project as a translatio poesis by drawing our attention to a noted but under-studied dimension of Charles’s work: his choice of ballade form throughout Fortunes Stabilnes. It is well known that Charles’s English work contains both English ballades that have analogues in his French verse and ballades composed only in English and found only in London, British Library MS Harley 682. Moreover, as Arn points out in her edition of the English cycle, although Charles employs a variety of ballade forms in the English ballades with French analogues, the English ballades without French analogues all have the same structure: eight- (occasionally seven-) line decasyllabic stanzas with, in many cases, a new set of rhymes per stanza. This specific type of ballade was the form most overwhelmingly popular 5

6

7

Arn, ‘Charles of Orléans: Translator?’, in The Medieval Translator 4, ed. Roger Ellis and Ruth Evans (Exeter: Univ. of Exeter Press; Binghamton: MRTS, 1994), pp. 125–35. See also Susan Crane, ‘Charles of Orleans: Self-Translation’, in The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, ed. Rosalynn Voaden, René Tixier, Teresa Sanchez Roura, and Jenny Rebecca Rytting. The Medieval Translator/Traduire au Moyen Age 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 169–77. Butterfield, ‘Rough Translation: Charles d’Orléans, Lydgate and Hoccleve’, in Rethinking Medieval Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory, ed. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), pp. 204–25; and Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 304–7. Coldiron, Canon, Period, p. 22. On translation as replication vs. displacement, see further Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 11 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), introduced pp. 35–36, but discussed throughout.



Charles d'Orléans' Cross-Channel Poetics   37

in England, as opposed to the Francophone Continent where poets wrote in a wide variety of ballade types.8 In moving between French and English, then, Charles also seems to be moving between French and English ballade form. It might be tempting to dismiss this pattern as motivated purely by some desire for simplicity. While the English ballade form restricts its user in terms of stanza length and rhyme scheme, it does allow for a new set of rhymes in each stanza, thus freeing the user in other ways. I contend, however, that far more than simplicity or compositional freedom is at stake in Charles’s project. As Arn has shown, Charles had a specific literary aim for Fortunes Stabilnes. Towards the very end of his lengthy captivity in England, around 1439–1440, the duke had collections of his verse copied into two manuscripts – his French verse into Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS fr. 25458, and the English into London, British Library MS Harley 682. The two lyric collections start identically, with an opening in narrative verse detailing the entry of the lover into the service of the God of Love. In both versions this lover is an avatar for Charles himself: ‘duk … Of Orlyaunce’ (5–6) in Fortunes Stabilnes and ‘Charles, duc d’Orlians’ (line 114) in fr. 25458. This is followed by a ballade sequence about a love affair that culminates in the lady’s death and the lover’s retirement to the Castle of No Care. At this point, the verse collected in the autograph French manuscript sheds its narrative element and the manuscript becomes a miscellany organised by lyric form, with numerous blank pages added already in 1440; as is well known, this manuscript ended up with Charles at his estate in Blois, where it turned into a collective poetry album for the duke’s extensive social circle.9 Harley 682, however, continues the story by shifting back into narrative verse and a sequence of roundels to describe the lover’s retirement from love, followed by a dream vision, and a second, shorter sequence of ballades relating the lover’s second affair.10 As Arn puts it elsewhere, ‘BN fr. 25458 was a living album, whereas Harley 682 was, from the moment of its creation, a

8 9

10

See Helen Louise Cohen, The Ballade (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1915; rpt. Folcroft, 1971), pp. 222–23, and Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. Arn, p. 76. On the French manuscript, see Mary-Jo Arn, The Poet’s Notebook: The Personal Manuscript of Charles d’Orléans (Paris, BnF MS fr. 25458). Texts and Transitions 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008); on Charles’s coterie poetics, see Jane H. M. Taylor, ‘Preserved as in a Violl: Charles d’Orléans’ Circle and His Personal Manuscript’, in The Making of Poetry: Late-Medieval French Poetic Anthologies. Texts and Transitions 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 83–145. On the insertion of rondeaux and their characterisation as a ‘feast’, see Jenni Nuttall’s contribution to this volume.

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souvenir’.11 Otherwise put, Fortunes Stabilnes is ‘a sort of dit-inside-out’.12 Fruitful work has been done on the narrative interlude’s significance to the plot of Fortunes Stabilnes, specifically on the complexity of its narrative persona.13 However, less attention has been paid to Charles’s formal choice to coax Fortunes Stabilnes into a dit-like structure.14 As numerous scholars have shown, the dit was the site of some of the most concerted poetic experimentation of the late medieval period. Guillaume de Machaut’s earliest dit, Remede de Fortune (c. 1340), features a lover coached by Esperance into writing poetry in a meticulously organised catalogue of contemporary lyric forms that, as Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot have shown, offer consolation through their particular formal arrangement and the progression in the dit.15 Machaut’s engagement with mixed forms reached its apogee with his Livre du voir dit (1363–1365), in which an ageing poet and his young lover, fan, and fellow poet exchange poetry and metatextually discuss their compilation of (the reader eventually realises) the Livre du voir dit itself.16 England saw similar experi11 12

13

14 15

16

Arn, ‘Two Manuscripts, One Mind’, at p. 78. Arn, Poet’s Notebook, p. 60; cf. Mary-Jo Arn, ‘Poetic Form as a Mirror of Meaning in the English Poems of Charles of Orleans’, Philological Quarterly 69 (1990), 13–29, esp. 13. See Arn, ‘Poetic Form’; A. C. Spearing, ‘Prison, Writing, Absence: Representing the Subject in the English Poems of Charles d’Orléans’, Modern Language Quarterly 53 (1992), 83–100, and Spearing, ‘Dreams in The Kingis Quair and the Duke’s Book’, in Arn, ed., Charles d’Orléans in England, pp. 123–44; and, most recently, Gabriel Haley, ‘A Story about Song: Narrative Ethics versus Lyric Isolation in Charles d’Orléans’s English Lyrics’, Essays in Medieval Studies 31 (2016), 11–24. This is admirably changing: see the contributions of John Burrow and Philip Knox in this volume. Kevin Brownlee, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune: The Lyric Anthology as Narrative Progression’, in The Ladder of High Design: Structure and Interpretation of the French Lyric Sequence, ed. Doranne Fenoaltea and David Lee Rubin (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1991), pp. 1–25; and Sylvia Huot, ‘Guillaume de Machaut and the Consolation of Poetry’, Modern Philology 100 (2002), 169–95. See, in particular, Kevin Brownlee, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Jacqueline Cerquiglini, ‘Le clerc et l’écriture: Le Voir dit de Guillaume de Machaut et la définition du dit’, in Comme mon cœur désire: Guillaume de Machaut, ‘Le livre du voir dit’, ed. Denis Hüe. Medievalia 38 (Orléans: Paradigme, 2001), pp. 133–56 [rpt. from Literatur in der Gesellschaft des Spätmittelalters, vol. 1, ed. H. U. Gumbricht. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1980, pp. 151–68]; Cerquiglini-Toulet, Guillaume de Machaut, ‘Le livre



Charles d'Orléans' Cross-Channel Poetics   39

ments with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess (1369–1372), in which inserted lyrics on the French dit model are a central point of tension for Chaucer’s longer narrative: the Duchess centres on the Dreamer’s eavesdropping on a bereaved knight who is declaiming poetry.17 The very end of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, however, saw a shift away from the mixed-form narrative into, instead, lengthy ballade sequences with narrative elements, such as in the Livre de cent ballades of Jean le Seneschal d’Eu (1389–1390) and Christine de Pizan’s Cent ballades d’amant et de dame (completed in 1411).18 As Philip Knox has recently argued, while similar in structure, these works manifest opposing narrative strategies: Christine’s text suggests the outline of the story of a relationship through the contents of sequenced ballades, while Jean’s Livre features instead ‘narrative enjambment’ and relates a coherent narrative that is formally partitioned into individual ballades.19 In so doing, both authors shift the focus of experimentation with the ballade as interpolated into narrative onto the ballade as a narrative structural unit in itself.

17

18

19

du voir dit’: Un art d’aimer, un art d’écrire. Agrégations de lettres (Paris: Sedes, 2001); Paul Imbs, Le ‘Voir-dit’ de Guillaume de Machaut: Étude littéraire (Paris: Klincksieck, 1991); and Deborah L. McGrady, Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and His Late Medieval Audience. Studies in Book and Print Culture (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2006). See, in particular, James Wimsatt, Chaucer and the French Love Poets: The Literary Background of the ‘Book of the Duchess’ (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1968); William Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England. University of Toronto Romance Series (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 284–88; and Ardis Butterfield, ‘Lyric and Elegy in the Book of the Duchess’, Medium Ævum 60 (1991), 33–60. For Chaucer’s work, see the Riverside Chaucer. On the similarities of Jean le Seneschal’s and Christine’s works, see Jacqueline Cerquiglini, ‘Le lyrisme en mouvement’, Perspectives médiévales 6 (1980), 75– 86, at 81–82; on Christine, see Barbara K. Altmann, ‘Last Words: Reflections on a “Lay mortel” and the Poetics of Lyric Sequences’, in Christine de Pizan and Medieval French Lyric, ed. Earl Jeffrey Richards (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 83–102; and James C. Laidlaw, ‘Les Cent ballades d’amant et de dame de Christine de Pizan’, L’analisi linguistica et letteraria 8 (2000), 49–63. Knox, ‘Circularity and Linearity: The Idea of the Lyric and the Idea of the Book in the Cent ballades of Jean le Seneschal’, New Medieval Literatures 16 (2016), 213–49, at 239–40. See further his discussion in this volume of the ways in which readers can also project narrative into the interstices of ballade sequences (pp. 267–74). On Charles’s ballade sequences, see B. S. W. Barootes’s contribution in this volume.

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The intent behind this overview is to suggest that Charles inherits an almost century-old legacy of poetic experimentation that became increasingly centred on the ballade. Fortunes Stabilnes consists of two individually coherent and, as we shall see, formally distinct ballade sequences that together form a loose narrative. It is thus somewhere between the proper dit of the mid- to late fourteenth century and a narrative ballade sequence of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. I suggest that Charles’s Fortunes Stabilnes partakes of both the earlier dit and the later ballade sequence and thus represents a new, transitional contribution to this longer legacy of mixed-form poetic experimentation. Charles’s virtuosic treatment of ballade form speaks to the parallel investigations of the formal possibilities for the ballade in the work of Jean le Seneschal and that of Christine de Pizan. But Charles’s literary project, I contend, goes beyond these immediate literary models. If Christine and Jean simply explore the formal elasticity of the ballade as a structural unit, then Charles goes a step further in commingling French and English ballade forms to unite the poetic practices regional to both sides of the Channel. That this is a conscious choice on his part is revealed, I contend in the second half of this piece, by his engagement with Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and Machaut’s Fonteinne amoureuse. These allusions betray not only Charles’s deep engagement with the legacy of the dit as a whole but a particular awareness and appreciation of its cross-Channel quality. Put otherwise, as René d’Anjou’s description of the duke attests, Charles’s knowledge of English poetry was not just a curious fact of his biography but an integral feature of his cultural self-expression. Charles’s Choice of Ballade Form Fortunes Stabilnes has dit-like elements in its lengthy narrative opening and interlude, but it is comprised mainly of two discrete ballade sequences. As I have said, this organisation assimilates it structurally to the post-Machauldian works composed in long ballade sequences of Charles’s more immediate predecessors, namely those of Jean le Seneschal and Christine de Pizan. Beyond organisational similarity, the three works share other rough outlines. Like Charles, Christine also relates the story of a love affair through a ballade cycle. Meanwhile, Jean’s popular Livre de cent ballades explores whether a lover should remain loyal to his lady or pursue relationships with numerous ladies at once.20 This operative question resonates with the central concern of the dream vision knitting together Charles’s two ballade sequences, in which Venus pressures the 20

See Jane H. M. Taylor, ‘Inescapable Rose: Jean le Seneschal’s Cent ballades and the Art of Cheerful Paradox’, Medium Ævum 67 (1998), 60–84.



Charles d'Orléans' Cross-Channel Poetics   41

lover to forego lifelong loyalty to his dead lady and seek out a new object for his affections, a suggestion that throws him into a protracted agony of indecision until he eventually succumbs to her suggestions.21 The Livre de cent ballades further presents itself as a communally authored or designed work, to which a subsequent coterie of real-life noblemen added ballades and chants royaux with their take on the central question, one of them being Charles’s own father, Louis d’Orléans.22 Charles similarly transformed the French manuscript of his verse into an enormous coterie poetry album for the noblemen and poets of his far-flung literary circle in Blois. But Fortunes Stabilnes also resonates with Christine’s and Jean’s ballade cycles in one very concrete manner: all three of these works home in on the structural unit of the ballade and explore it to its fullest formal potential. The Livre de cent ballades employs seven major ballade forms (differentiated by stanza length, isometric vs. heterometric stanza construction, and rhyme scheme), each used four times in a row, and then reappearing after each of the other ballade forms have been cycled through.23 Christine’s Cent ballades d’amant et de dame exhibits even more stunning formal diversity: she uses no less than twenty-four separate ballade forms, with stanza lengths varying from seven to twelve lines, line lengths ranging from seven to ten syllables, three styles of refrains, and a predilection for the ballade layée, or heterometric ballade (in which individual lines have different lengths following a set pattern, as opposed to isometric verse, in which all lines have identical syllable counts).24 The formal richness of these ballade sequences is one key context in which to understand Charles’s own intricate formal experimentation with the sequences of his Fortunes Stabilnes. However, as we are about to see, Charles’s overt negotiations between French and English ballade forms offer Fortunes Stabilnes further possibilities for exploring the role of the ballade as a structural unit.

21 22

23

24

Arn, ‘Poetic Form’. Jean le Seneschal, Les cent ballades: Poème du XIVe siècle, ed. Gaston Raynaud (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1905), pp. lvi–lxx; and Knox, ‘Circularity and Linearity’, 241–49, who draws useful attention to the ambiguity of the work’s presentation of its co-authored status. Les cent ballades, ed. Raynaud, pp. xxv–xxix; see further James C. Laidlaw, who notes that, if minor variations are included, the total number of ballade forms rises to eleven (‘The Cent ballades: The Marriage of Content and Form,’ in Christine de Pizan and Medieval French Lyric, ed. Earl Jeffrey Richards. [Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1998], pp. 53–82, at pp. 60–61). Laidlaw, ‘The Cent ballades’, pp. 64–66.

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Ballade Forms in Works with French Analogues A survey of the diversity of ballades employed by the duke reveals that form organises the English cycle on a variety of levels. Fortunes Stabilnes contains 121 ballades, of which 81 have analogues to Charles’s French verse, as we can see from the following table:25 Plot the first love affair

English ballade numbering

French ballade numbering

58–60

no French (but no. 59 corresponds to Christine’s Seulete sui)

1–57

1–17, 19, 20, 18, 21–57

61

58

62

63–73 retirement from Love’s service to the Castle of No Care second love affair

74

75–81 82, 83 84

85–100 101

102–106 107

108–112 113

114–121

no French

59–62, 69, 70, 64, 63, 65, 66, 71 no French

Ballades 1–7 of La Departie d’amours en balades 73, 72

no French no French 68

no French 67

no French 130

no French

Fortunes Stabilnes has a roughly tripartite structure. English B 1–74 and French B 1–71 detail the lover’s first love affair, his lady’s death, and his bereavement. This section is almost identical in content between Harley 682 and fr. 25458 with some rearrangement of individual ballades, although, as we can see, English B 58, B 60, B 62 and B 74 have no French analogues, 25

Scholars have historically considered B 111 in Fortunes Stabilnes to be an analogue of B 129 in BnF fr. 25458, a ballade addressed by Charles to Philippe le Bon, duke of Burgundy; in a moment, I will explain my reasons for excluding this pair.



Charles d'Orléans' Cross-Channel Poetics   43

and B 59 is an English version of Christine de Pizan’s ‘Seulete sui’. After English B 74 and French B 71 comes the mixed-form sequence that sees the lover, in both English and French verse, retire from Love’s service to the Castle of No Care/Nonchaloir. This retirement is detailed, in both versions, via a brief opening dream vision in the form of a complainte, a petition to exit Love’s service, and a self-contained narrative suite of seven ballades, known as ‘La Departie d’amours en balades’ in the French version that corresponds to English B 75–81. At this point, both French and English sequences switch to analogous narrative verse, followed by two ballades, in English B 82 and B 83, and in French B 73 and B 72. From here, fr. 25458 and Harley 682 diverge: the French manuscript turns into a lyric miscellany, while Harley 682 continues its narrative lyric cycle. In English B 84 the lover announces his retirement feast and introduces a long sequence of roundels and several carols. After this ‘feast’/sequence concludes, the lover exits his retirement, composes a ballade ‘frto biwayle fortunes stabilnes’ (4660), and experiences a lengthy dream vision in which Venus urges the lover to find a new object for his affections. Finally agreeing, the lover wakens, meets a new lady, and pens a new cycle of thirty-six ballades relating his second love affair. This second cycle contains only three analogues with Charles’s French poetry. If the English poems take linguistic liberties with respect to the French analogues as numerous scholars before me have observed, if they twist language into novel combinations both morphologically and syntactically, they betray a surprisingly close adherence to form. Of the individual ballades that appear in both Harley 682 and fr. 25458, all eighty-one have, with respect to their linguistic analogues, identical stanza lengths, stanza numbers and, perhaps most remarkably, in an overwhelming number of cases, identical rhyme schemes (see Appendix for a cumulative table). Indeed, the English and French analogues’ perfect formal mirroring of each other highlights the degree to which Charles was a consummate versifier in two morphologically distinct languages.26 This exact formal replication across languages is especially striking, given the diversity of ballade forms employed by Charles, especially in comparison to the practice of Charles’s Francophone contemporaries.27 Within the English ballades of Fortunes 26

27

Cf. W. A. Davenport, who comments that ‘the metrical pattern … forms the fixed element in the act of translation’ (‘Ballades, French and English, and Chaucer’s “Scarcity of Rhyme”’, Parergon 18 [2000], 181–201, at 195). On the development and prosody of the Continental ballade, see Cohen, Ballade, pp. 32–153; Ernest Hoepffner, ‘Virelais et ballades dans le Chansonnier d’Oxford (Douce 308)’, Archivium romanicum 4 (1920), 20–40; Poirion, Le poète et le prince, pp. 374–99; and Marc-René Jung, ‘La naissance de la ballade dans la première moitié du XIV siècle, de Jean Acart à Jean de Le Mote et à Guil-

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Stabilnes and their French analogues, Charles composes in a wide range of stanza lengths, ranging from seven to fifteen lines, but he prefers by far the eight- and nine-line stanza (accounting for ninety-seven of the English ballades and sixty of the French analogues). In this, he diverges from most of his immediate French contemporaries who had, by that point, adopted longer stanzas.28 The shorter seven- and eight-line stanza was especially favoured by Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377), who composed primarily in seven-, eight-, and nine-line stanzas, lengths that neatly fit the musical styles of the period. Coming one generation later, the extremely prolific Eustache Deschamps (1346–1406/7) represents a transitional period between shorter and longer stanzas, with approximately half of his œuvre in shorter and half in longer forms. Jean de Garencières (c. 1340–1415) and Guillebert de Lannoy (1386–1462), on the other hand, overwhelmingly favour the longer ten-, eleven- and twelve-line stanza, as does the Livre de cent ballades coterie. Christine de Pizan (1365–c. 1430), however, reverts to the earlier Machauldian shorter structure of six- to nine-line stanzas.29 In terms of his close contemporaries, then, Charles falls closest to Christine’s reversion to the shorter form. Charles’s adherence to Christine’s model over that of others highlights her potential influence on his work, an influence further registered by her being the only other poet translated by him into English. Charles also included an envoy of four to eight lines for every one of the English analogues (except for the ballades corresponding to ‘La departie d’amours en balades’), whereas nineteen of the French analogues lack envoys.30 Deschamps prescribes the envoy as a new component

28

29 30

laume de Machaut’, L’analisi linguistica e letteraria 8 (2000), 7–29. On parallel cross-Channel developments of the ballade, see Nigel Wilkins, ‘“En regardant vers le païs de France”: The Ballade and the Rondeau, a Cross-Channel History’, in Nigel Wilkins, Words and Music in Medieval Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 298–323 [photog. rpt. from England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1985 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. W. M. Ormrod. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986]. The following information is drawn from the table in Poirion, Le poète et le prince, pp. 385–87, still the most comprehensive source on French ballade prosody. See also Laidlaw, ‘The Cent ballades’, esp. pp. 58–61, and his ‘L’innovation métrique chez Deschamps’, in Autour d’Eustache Deschamps: Actes du colloque du Centre d’études médiévales de l’Université de Picardie-Jules Verne, Amiens, 5–8 Novembre 1998, ed. Danielle Buschinger (Amiens: Presses du ‘Centre d’études médiévales’, Université de Picardie-Jules Verne, 1999), pp. 127–40. See Laidlaw, ‘The Cent ballades’, pp. 65–66. Additionally, both she and Charles favour, as does Machaut, the longer decasyllabic line. French B 67 is left unfinished in its unica copy in BnF fr. 25458, so it is unclear if it had an envoy.



Charles d'Orléans' Cross-Channel Poetics   45

feature of the ballade in the Art de dictier not practised by older poets; indeed, envoys are not found in Machaut’s ballades but emerge in the poetry of Deschamps and his immediate contemporaries working in the final decades of the fourteenth century.31 By Charles’s period, the envoy was a standard feature, so his decision to omit it for some of his French ballades contributes to the sense of his project being partly, like that of Christine, a formal throwback to Machauldian verse. Charles’s careful attention to form is further heightened by his insistence on not simply mirroring stanza lengths between his French and English analogues but fully matching rhyme schemes between analogues. If we consider that Charles employs no less than twenty distinct rhyme schemes in his verse, this seems like an especially daunting task. Nevertheless, Charles matches rhyme schemes perfectly between analogues in a staggering seventyfour cases, regardless of stanzaic length or complexity of the rhyme scheme, as we can see in English/French B 28: Hoffa howe, myn hert! the schepe off Freche Teydyng

En la nef de Bonne Nouvelle

To cary to the fayrist borne lyvyng,

Pour l’amener de par la belle

And if he may attayne the ioyfull port

A joye puist venir au port

The See of Fortune playn to his plesere,

La mer de Fortune, trouver

Hope hath afresht with lusty Recomfort

Espoir a chargié Reconfort

Which is myn hertis lady and cheef resort,

Vers mon cueur qui l’ayme si fort.

(In self passage, y mene, to his desere),

De Desir, et pour tost passer

A ioly wynd als blowyng into Fraunce

Un plaisant vent venant de France,

Which is the swete of all my remembraunce

Qui est ma doulce souvenance

Where now abidyng is my sovl maystres

And hool tresoure of my worldly gladnes … (1037–47)

31

Ou est a present ma maistresse,

Et le tresor de ma lÿesse …

Eustache Deschamps, L’art de dictier, ed. and trans. Deborah Sinnreich-Levy (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1994), p. 78. Cf. Laidlaw, ‘L’innovation’, p. 137.

46  Elizaveta Strakhov

Despite some lexical difference here – most famously, in the prepositions between these versions (the wind blowing ‘into France’ in the English version, and ‘from France’ in the French version) – and the line lengths (decasyllabic versus octosyllabic), these sizeable stanzas are both in ABABBCCDEDE. Furthermore, in this pair even the rhymes themselves are almost identical, with only the A rhyme being different: -yng, -ort, -ere, -aunce, and -es for the English, and -elle, -ort, -er, -ance, and -esse for the French. This kind of fidelity of form across languages is stringently maintained throughout Fortunes Stabilnes. In the only seven analogues with differing rhyme schemes, furthermore, the changes are hardly drastic.32 I would characterise them as entailing a reduction in the number of rhymes used in the poem overall, for a slightly simplified structure: French ballade no.

Rhyme scheme

Rhyme scheme

5

9

ABABBCDCD

ABABBBCBC

13

ABABBCDDC AAAAABCBC

ABABBCDCD

15

21

23

72

ABABBAAB

ABABBCCDCD ABABBABA

ABABBCCDEED

ABABBCBBC ABABBCCB

ABABBCCBCB ABABBCBC

ABABBCCDCCD

English ballade no. 5

9

13 15

21

23

83

When we consider which rhyme schemes Charles uses in his French and English verse in comparison with his contemporaries, we again discover profound idiosyncrasies in the duke’s selections:

32

In addition to these seven, Ballade 4 of the ‘Departie d’amours en balades’ offers an oddly irregular scheme of ABCBBABA in stanza 1, then CBCBBABA for the second and third stanzas, which does not correspond to any known rhyme scheme encountered by me. It is also all but unheard of to have rhyme schemes change between stanzas. Charles is either being radically experimental here, or – what I suspect is more likely – he is treating his A rhyme (-oy) and his C rhyme (-ay) as interchangeable, making the rhyme scheme here actually ABABBABA. This would make it match its English analogue, B 78. B 4 is not included in the count for the table above, due to its irregularity, but is listed in the Appendix.



Charles d'Orléans' Cross-Channel Poetics   47 Stanza lengths

Rhyme scheme

French

English

7

ABABBCC

2

5

8

ABABBAAB

2

1

8

ABABBABA

8

ABABBCBC

1

29

1

66

8

ABABBCCB

5

6

9

AAAAABCBC

1

0

9

ABABABABA

9

ABABBBCBC

9

ABABBCAAC

9

ABABBCBBC

9

ABABBCCDD

9

ABABBCDCD

9

ABABBCDDC

1

0

1

0

1

14

4

1

1

1

1

1

14

3

9

ABABCCDDC

1

1

10

ABABBCCBCB

0

1

10

ABABBCCDCD

9

8

11

ABABBCCDCCD

0

1

11

ABABBCCDEDE

4

4

11

ABABBCCDEED

4

3

15

ABABBCCDDEEFGFG

1

1

For the following information I draw from Daniel Poirion’s table of Continental French ballade rhyme schemes found in the œuvres of Machaut, Jean Froissart, Wenceslas du Brabant, Deschamps, Oton de Granson, Jean’s Livre de cent ballades and its responses, Lannoy, Garencières, Christine, Alain Chartier, and Charles.33 Comparing the duke to his predecessors 33

Poirion, Le poète et le prince, pp. 385–87. Poirion’s findings are consistent with the earlier conclusions of Henri Chatelain, whose wider sample further includes later fifteenth-century poets such as Martial d’Auvergne, Georges

48  Elizaveta Strakhov

and contemporaries, we note that Charles’s seven-line stanza ballades are in their uniformly most popular rhyme scheme from Machaut onwards, including among those late medieval poets who rarely employ the seven-line stanza. Of the four different rhyme schemes that Charles uses for his eight-line stanza, his favourite, ABABBCBC, is also listed as the most popular in Poirion’s table, with Deschamps, for example, using it 495 times alone, while Christine has 64 occurrences. Charles’s second mostused rhyme scheme, ABABBCCB, however, is found five times each for Machaut and Granson, but in no one else on Poirion’s list. Another of the rhyme schemes in Charles’s eight-line stanza, ABABBABA, is otherwise attested by Poirion only once with Machaut and twice with Christine, suggesting Charles’s interest in less common ballade forms. A glance at Charles’s nine-line stanza, his second most-preferred stanza length, offers a similar image of a poet with an individualistic approach to ballade forms. Charles, for example, eschews the nine-line stanza rhyme scheme most popular with his contemporaries (ABABCCDCD). His own preferred nine-line stanza rhyme scheme, ABABBCDCD, is otherwise mainly popular with Christine, who uses it nineteen times, again suggesting a formal relationship between their poetry. Notably, three rhyme schemes in Poirion’s table are attested exclusively with the duke – ABABBAAB for the eight-line stanza and ABABABABA and ABABBCBBC for the nine-line stanza. Furthermore, five of Charles’s rhyme schemes are not listed in Poirion’s table at all, which means that they are completely unattested in Poirion’s extensive sample of late-medieval French poets. These are: AAAAABCBC, ABABBBCBC, ABABBCAAC, ABABBCDDC, and ABABBCCBCB. Two of them, incidentally, are found uniquely among Charles’s English analogues (B 5 and B 21). These, we may recall, are poems whose English rhyme scheme differs from their French analogue by one less rhyme. This pattern suggests that, in simplifying rhymes between analogues, Charles was also, whether Chastellain, and François Villon: Recherches sur les vers français au XVe siècle: Rimes, mètres et strophes (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1907; rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1974), pp. 167–79. See also Cohen, Ballade, pp. 209–16, where she usefully condenses the rhyme scheme prescriptions of the so-called traités de rhétoriques; or a cluster of late medieval artes poeticae devoted to formes fixes versification: namely, Deschamps’s L’art de dictier; Jacques Le Grand, Des rimes; Les règles de la seconde rhétorique; Baudet Herenc’s Doctrinal de la seconde rhétorique; Traité de l’art de rhétorique; Jean Molinet’s Art de rhétorique, and L’Infortuné’s Instructif de seconde rhétorique. For editions, see Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique, ed. E. Langlois. Documents inedits sur l’histoire de France (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1902); and Le jardin de plaisance et fleur de réthorique, ed. É. Droz and A. Piaget. Reproduction en fac-simile. 2 vols (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1910).



Charles d'Orléans' Cross-Channel Poetics   49

intentionally or accidentally, producing brand new ballade forms in his dual-language project. The fact that we find unattested rhyme schemes in both his French and English compositions underscores the highly experimental quality of his body of work overall and his readiness to innovate in both of his languages equally. Fortunes Stabilnes thus constitutes a unique project that is simultaneously retrospective in its awareness of the transformations to stanza length in the post-Machauldian era and yet also novel in its ballade forms. In this way, the prosodic features of his ballades mirror the transitional quality of his dit as a whole. Ballade Forms in Works without French Analogues Given Charles’s careful engagement with form, his formal choices with regard to his English-only ballades are all the more deserving of our attention. Of the thirty-nine English ballades with no French analogues, thirty-six are in eight-line stanzas with the rhyme scheme ABABBCBC, also known, in English prosody, as the ‘Monk’s Tale stanza’ since it is used by Chaucer in his Monk’s Tale. The remaining three are in seven-line stanzas with the rhyme scheme ABABBCC, also known as rhyme royal, most famously used by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde. As I have just shown, these two rhyme schemes for the seven- and eight-line stanza were the most popular with Charles’s contemporaries on the Continent, but they were also the two main forms used by those of Charles’s prominent English contemporaries who wrote ballades in the French style. Chaucer, John Gower, Robert de Quixley (in his English translation of Gower’s Traitié),34 John Lydgate, and the anonymous fifteenth-century author(s) of the socalled ‘Fairfax sequence’ in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16 (fols. 318r–29r) and of the Isle of Ladies (which ends with a ballade) all employed only these two rhyme schemes for ballades.35 One striking exception is 34

35

See John Gower, The French Ballades, ed. and trans. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011), Appendix 1: A Translation of the Traitié (Quixley), pp. 153–73. See Cohen’s overview of the Middle English ballade in Ballade, pp. 222–99, as well as Julia Boffey, ‘The Reputation and Circulation of Chaucer’s Lyrics in the Fifteenth Century’, Chaucer Review 28 (1993), 23–40. Interestingly, the ‘Fairfax sequence’ includes, on fol. 321r–321v, an English ballade also found on p. 313 of BnF fr. 25458 as B 144, which Henry MacCracken took as support for his now disproved theory that William de la Pole, one of Charles’s keepers, was the author of the Fairfax sequence and translator of Charles’s poetry into English, in ‘An English Friend of Charles of Orléans’, PMLA 26 (1911), 142–80. See further The ‘Suffolk’ Poems: An Edition of the Love Lyrics in Fairfax 16 Attributed to William de la Pole, ed. J. P. M. Jansen (Groningen: Rijksuniversiteit,

50  Elizaveta Strakhov

Chaucer’s Complaint of Venus, which perfectly matches the rhyme scheme of its source, Oton de Granson’s Cinq balades ensievans (ABABBCCB), just as Charles does with his English analogues. Furthermore, in twenty-nine of the English-only poems Charles changes rhymes with every stanza. This means that, while the rhyme scheme itself is stable from stanza to stanza, the individual rhymes change throughout, as in English B 85 (emphasis added): Of fayre most fayre, as verry sorse & welle From yow me cometh, as brefly to expres, Such loue þat y ne may it from yow helle All shulde y die – God take y to witnes! Desire me takith with such a ferventnes That y must nedis put me at yowre will Wherso ye lust, of rigoure or kyndenes, Me forto saue or do me payne or spill. I wot my gilt it hath deservid deth That y was bold to sett so high myn hert, But, in good feith, while þat me lastith breth, For payne or woo y may it not astert; As forto take yow nere me then my shert, To bridill loue y kan no bettir skile But bynde me hool to yow for payne or smert Me forto saue or do me payne or spill … (5352–5367)

Here, as we can see, the first stanza rhymes on -elle, -es, and -ill, while the second stanza maintains the same scheme, but the first two rhymes of the second stanza are now on -eth and -ert. This is a feature found only in the Middle English ballade, such as, for example, in the ballade concluding the Isle of Ladies and ballades nos. 1, 4, and 8 of the ‘Fairfax sequence’.36 We have just seen in the English analogues to Charles’s French poems that the duke could write English poetry in a staggering variety of stanza lengths and rhyme schemes. Nevertheless, for all of his English ballades without French analogues, sans exception, he consistently chooses only two stanza lengths and rhyme schemes that are also the most popular in England, as well as a peculiarly English rhyming feature for three-quarters

36

1989), pp. 14–28; and Mariana Neilly, ‘The “Fairfax Sequence” Reconsidered: Charles d’Orléans, William De la Pole, and the Anonymous Poems of Bodleian MS Fairfax 16’, Fifteenth Century Studies 36 (2011), 127–36. Cohen, Ballade, pp. 223–24; and W. A. Davenport, ‘Ballades, French and English’. For the Isle of Ladies, see The Floure and the Leafe; The Assembly of Ladies; The Isle of Ladies, ed. Derek Pearsall (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990).



Charles d'Orléans' Cross-Channel Poetics   51

of them. Charles did not simply move between languages in his poetry – he also moved, clearly deliberately, between French and English forms.37 Those forms, as we recall, are also concentrated in specific sections of Fortunes Stabilnes. There are four English-only ballades in the longer opening ballade sequence detailing the lover’s first love affair ending in his bereavement, whereas the lover’s second affair is retold in a ballade sequence containing, instead, all English-only ballades with only three ballades with French analogues. These formal differences between sequences could be explicable by simple chronology of composition and influence of literary milieu; that is to say, Charles wrote in increasingly English forms the longer he spent time in England. But, strikingly, these differences also map directly onto key differences between the narrative trajectory of the two love affairs, offering Fortunes Stabilnes a thematically symmetrical (dare I say, stable) structure.38 In the first sequence, the speaker’s love is joyfully requited and celebrated, and the pain of his and his beloved’s interactions stems from the circumstances of their geographical distance from one another. This first sequence culminates in the lady’s tragic death, for which the lover grieves in some of the most vivid and affective ballades in the entire cycle. The second sequence, by contrast, details a stubbornly unrequited affair in which the lover complains repeatedly, insistently, of the lady’s obdurate disinterest: she ‘straunges’ him (B 87, 5415), her ‘mystrust’ is unalterable (B 88, 5443), her heart is of marble (B 89, 5486; B 90, 5516), she retreats from him as if he is a ‘Gobelyne’ (B 92, 5560), she disdains him (B 94, 5611), he is worse off than a walled-in anchorite (B 97, 5784), love is a disease (B 99, 5847), people spread gossip (B 100, 5875), he is a moth to her flame (B 104, 5988), his service is repaid with scorn (B 106, 6052–6053), she yells at him (B 115, 6342–6343), etc. Any respites and promises he receives from the lady (B 98, B 109) are quickly overturned, and the sequence ends with him unwillingly bidding her farewell (B 121). This striking difference between the two love affairs is enhanced by their being polar opposites formally: the requited first sequence, mostly containing works with French analogues, is composed in that vast diversity of ballade forms discussed earlier. The second unrequited love affair, by contrast, is in that English-only form of all seven- to eight-line stanzas with only two rhyme schemes. The opposition on the level of diegesis thus concomitantly plays out as an opposition of form, which is itself, of course, an opposition of regional lyric practices, French versus English. In this way, the choice of regional forms further 37

38

As Eric Weiskott argues in this volume, Charles also deliberately altered contemporary English pentameter conventions, demonstrating a no less keen sensitivity to metre. Cf. Nuttall’s concept of ‘mimetic form’ in her contribution to this volume.

52  Elizaveta Strakhov

neatly coincides with the geographies of the lover’s two ladies: his first beloved resided in France as we learn from B 28 (1044–1045), while his second is, presumably, of English origin or at least resides in England, since he bids her farewell in the final ballade. The lover’s inability to progress in this new English relationship and the repetitive quality of his pleas are further mirrored formally on a localised level by a reliance on anaphora in the second ballade sequence. Thus, B 120 begins every line but the refrain and envoy with ‘so’. B 98 is structured around increasingly complex anaphora, with ‘welcome’ in the first stanza, ‘right’, ‘even’, and ‘a’ in the second stanza, and ‘now’/‘how’ and ‘for’/‘welcome’ chiastically alternating in the third stanza. B 100, meanwhile, also contains a short anaphora (‘but/not maugre’ and ‘not only’) in its third stanza, but its second stanza does something even more formally elaborate: Who is the cause herof then? is hit ye? Ye? nay, it is my freel hert! Hert? nay, my fonnyd loue, parde! Loue? nay, my rakill lookis stert! Lokis? nay, for this y may aduert … (5876–5880, emphasis added)

This structure, in which Charles repeats the last or penultimate word as the first word of the next line, recalls a type of ballade that Deschamps names a ballade ‘equivoque [et] retrograde’ in his Art de dictier (emphasis added): Lasse, lasse, malereuse et dolente, Lente me voy, fors de souspirs et plains.

Plains sont mes jours d’ennuy et de tourmente. Mente qui veult, car mes cuers est certains …39

Wretched, wretched, unhappy and sorrowful,

Weary I see myself, pained by sighs and complaints. My days are full of anguish and torment.

Let him lie who will, for my heart is true …

The verbal play showcased in this type of ballade is patently easier in a language as rich in homonyms as French, hence the English poem’s mere repetition of words at the ends and beginnings of lines. I suspect, nevertheless, that, like Charles’s experimentation with new rhyme schemes, B 100 represents another instance of the duke’s attempt to fuse French and English ballade forms into an ‘Englished’ ballade equivoque et retrograde, unattested, to my knowledge, in English versification.

39

Deschamps, Dictier, pp. 74–76.



Charles d'Orléans' Cross-Channel Poetics   53

Together, this ‘Englished’ ballade equivoque et retrograde, along with the works built around anaphora, further enact visually and sonically for the reader the theme of relentless repetition and lack of progress that characterises the lover’s second affair. The second sequence, with its English-only ballades all in the same form and with its engagement with anaphora, thus formally reinforces the static quality of its content, namely the narrator’s reiterated pleas to be heard and loved by a stonily unyielding object of affection. Through its repetitive quality, the English form of this second sequence magnifies the sense of the speaker’s increasing isolation and despair, as if he were trapped not just in his unhappy circumstances, not just in England, but in the English ballade form itself. Before progressing to the larger stakes behind Charles’s virtuosic formal play explored in the second part of this chapter, a final point about the oddly meticulous organisation of Fortunes Stabilnes is requisite. Going back to the first table charting the French and English analogues, we notice that the entirety of the English cycle contains analogues only to Ballades 1 to 73 of the French ballades, along with ‘La departie d’amours en ballades’, with but one outlier, French B 130 (which corresponds to English B 113). All of these are also found in the first scribal stint of fr. 25458, which Arn has shown to have been copied in England towards the end of the duke’s captivity, but French B 130 occurs in a separate section of the French manuscript rubricated ‘Balades de plusieurs propos’ (Ballades on various subjects). Furthermore, this ballade is not by Charles but, rather, by Philippe le Bon of Burgundy, responding to an earlier missive in ballade form from Charles. The English analogue is famously different from the French. Whereas French B 130 is an overtly political work – Philippe urges Charles to remember ‘[l]’estat et le gouvernement / De la noble maison de France / Qui se maintient piteusement’ (The state and government of the royal house of France, which bears itself poorly; lines 11–13) and expresses hope that Charles’s release from prison will bring about peace (lines 19–22) – its English counterpart is an apolitical love poem addressed to a lady. Coldiron and Susan Crane have further argued that English B 111, also a love poem, is the analogue to French B 129, the first volley of the exchange between Charles and Philippe: the refrain of French B 129 is, in fact, the incipit of French B 130. The apolitical quality of the English ballades vis-à-vis their French analogues is explained by Coldiron as a result of a self-consciously apolitical quality to Harley 682 as a whole, which contains none of Charles’s political verse.40 Crane suggests that the 40

A. E. B. Coldiron, ‘Towards a Comparative New Historicism: Land Tenures and Some Fifteenth-Century Poems’, Comparative Literature 53 (2001), 97–115. On the apolitical cast of Fortunes Stabilnes, see also Robert Epstein,

54  Elizaveta Strakhov

confluence of affective and political language speaks to the commingling of the homosocial language of political service with the language of love representative of late-medieval courtly ideals as a whole.41 I fully agree with their analyses of English B 113 and French B 130 as strange bedfellows but analogues nonetheless; a glance at the opening stanzas suffices to demonstrate the close relationship between them, despite the pronounced change in theme (emphasis added): French B 130

English B 113

Vous mercie treshumblement

I thanke yow, swete – or more, if more may be –

De cueur, de corps et de puissance

De vostre bonne souvenance

Qu’avez de moy soingneusement. Or povez faire entierement

De moy, en tout bien et honneur Comme vostre cueur le propose, Et de mon vouloir soyez seur, Quoy que nul die ne deppose. (lines 1–9)

With hert, body, and my hool puysshaunce,

Of yowre goodly remembraunce

The which ye oft han shewid me. So doon with me in eche degre

What yow good lust in any thing at all,

For in no poynt excepte y nought, Nor to my deth y neuyr shall, Whatsoeuyr be seid or thought. (6283–6291)

As we can see from the italicised portions, the two ballades reproduce a number of the same phrases, despite their stark differences in tone and addressee. English B 111 and French B 129, however, are completely unlike each other, both in content and, even more significantly to my mind, given Charles’s otherwise astonishingly consistent patterns, in form. In French B 129 Charles discusses his imminent crossing of the Channel (lines 1–11), promises to send Philippe a discreet message (lines 13–17), asks Philippe to do his part for France in return (lines 18–20), pledges him his heart ‘en gage’ as a guarantee (line 25) and his loyalty (lines 30–32), and claims

41

‘Prisoners of Reflection: The Fifteenth-Century Poetry of Exile and Imprisonment’, Exemplaria 15 (2003), 159–98, esp. 178–79; and Rory G. Critten, ‘The Political Valence of Charles d’Orléans’s English Poetry’, Modern Philology 111 (2014), 339–64. Crane, ‘Self-Translation’. Cf. Taylor’s similar argument about the confluence of political with amorous service in Jean le Seneschal’s Livre de cent ballades in ‘Inescapable Rose’.



Charles d'Orléans' Cross-Channel Poetics   55

himself to be ‘tout Bourgongnon’ (line 38: ‘all Burgundian’), a powerful statement, given the particularly bad blood between their houses.42 English B 111, by contrast, wishes all good upon its addressee (6227–6231), pledges the speaker’s love (6232–6234), asks to be a tenant of a dwelling inside her heart (6238–6239), encourages her to punish him if his request offends her (6246–6247), and promises that he is entirely ‘yowre’ (6253). If B 113 and B 130 manifestly share parallels on the level of individual phrases, as we see here, B 111 does not share any images or turns of phrase with B 129: even the heart imagery is inverted from imagining the heart as a small, graspable material object into conceptualising it as having a vast interior. Furthermore, the refrain of B 129, ‘De cueur, de corps et de puissance’, serves as the incipit of B 130. But the pattern does not hold true for their purported analogues: the refrain of B 111, ‘With hert, body, my litill good, and all’, is not the incipit of B 113, which reads: ‘With hert, body, and my hool puysshaunce’ (a far closer analogue, we note, to the French refrain/incipit). Finally, if English B 111 is an analogue to French B 129, then it is the only poem in Fortunes Stabilnes to break Charles’s otherwise completely consistent formal pattern. English B 113 is a perfect formal match for French B 130: both are nine-line stanzas in ABABBCDCD. But while French B 129 has an eleven-line stanza in ABABBCCDEED, English B 111 has an eight-line stanza in the by now familiar ABABBCBC scheme, with new rhymes in every stanza. In other words, it is a ballade in the form that is found only in England and reserved by Charles exclusively for his English-only ballades in all other instances. Thus, I do not believe English B 111 and French B 129 are a pair; instead, I range B 111 with the other English-only ballades of Fortunes Stabilnes. This determination does leave us with the puzzle of why Charles would choose Philippe’s ballade as the only work outside of his narrative dit and Christine’s ‘Seuletté sui’ to include in Fortunes Stabilnes. I suspect the answer lies in Philippe’s instrumental role in securing Charles’s release from captivity. As Nigel Wilkins points out, the new-found rapport between Orléans and Burgundy was a crucial diplomatic coup for France, given the history between those houses.43 By including poetry that alludes to his impending release into his English verse, the duke actively draws attention to 42

43

Coldiron has discussed the significance of the term ‘en gage’ in ‘Towards a Comparative New Historicism’, 106–8. On the assassination of Charles’s father by Philippe’s father, Jean Sans Peur and the role of the ensuing Burgundian– Armagnac civil war in setting up France for its disastrous loss at Agincourt, where Charles was captured, see, in particular, Bernard Guenée, Un meurtre, une société: L’assassinat du duc d’Orléans, 23 novembre 1407. Bibliothèque des histoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). Wilkins, ‘En regardant’, p. 311.

56  Elizaveta Strakhov

the liminality of his cross-Channel position. In cleverly transmuting this political and autobiographical work into a love poem, however, Charles underscores the intricacy and virtuosity of his English literary enterprise. In this way, the liminality of his real life as French captive on English soil becomes absorbed into the self-consciously liminal pose of the Anglo-French poet forging a new cross-Channel poetics in English. The Debt of  Fortunes Stabilnes to the Formal Experimentation of Machaut’s and Chaucer’s Dits As we recall, however, Fortunes Stabilnes is not exclusively a ballade sequence like Christine’s Cent ballades d’amant et de dame and Jean le Seneschal’s Livre de cent ballades. It also contains dit-like elements, due to the narrative verse interludes that loosely encase the ballade sequences. In being a sort of dit, Charles’s English collection brings still more to the table in terms of its emphatically cross-Channel poetic experimentation. As Arn, in particular, has shown, the narrative interlude set between the two ballade sequences is fertile intertextual ground for Charles and reveals an especial debt to the work of Chaucer and other English poets.44 Charles also registers a debt to Machaut.45 The duke’s investment in the formally experimental dit of his French and English predecessors helps to contextualise the careful admixture of French and English ballade forms 44

45

Arn, ‘The English Poetry of Charles of Orleans’, Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters 8 (1978), 108–21, and Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. Arn, pp. 39–45; also Julia Boffey, ‘Charles of Orleans Reading Chaucer’s Dream Visions’, in Medievalitas: Reading the Middle Ages, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti. The J. A. W. Bennett Memorial Lectures, Ninth Series, Perugia, 1995 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), pp. 43–62. There is also an unremarked and fascinating set of parallels for one of Charles’s most memorable lines, found in one of the English-only ballades mourning his first lady’s death: ‘Me thynkith right as a syphir now I serue, / That nombre makith and is him silf noon’ (2042–2043). This haunting phrase parallels a description of the king’s royal household in Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love: ‘Althoughe a sypher in augrym have no might in signifycacion of it selve, yet he yeveth power in signifycacion to other …’ (2.674–675), quoted from Usk, The Testament of Love, ed. R. Allen Shoaf (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998); and a description of ineffective members of Parliament in Richard the Redeless: ‘Than satte summe as siphre doth in awgrym, / That noteth a place, and no thing availeth …’ (4.53– 54), quoted from ‘Richard the Redeless’ and ‘Mum and the Sothsegger’, ed. James M. Dean (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000). I thank Brantley Bryant, Tekla Bude, and Erika Harman for drawing my attention to these. Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. Arn, p. 46; Spearing, ‘Prison, Writing,’ p. 98, n. 22.



Charles d'Orléans' Cross-Channel Poetics   57

throughout Fortunes Stabilnes. If Charles’s work with the ballade suggests a fascination with intricate formal innovation, as we just saw, then his reliance on Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and Machaut’s Fonteinne amoureuse further illuminates the highly self-conscious nature of this poetic enterprise. The Influence of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess

Perhaps Charles’s most prominent intertext is the Book of the Duchess. When Venus asks the lover how he has led his life, he replies, ‘As an ancre, Madame, in clothis blake’ (4802), which recalls the exchange between the Dreamer and the Black Knight. This intertext comes up in other places: in B 9 the lover describes his lady as the ‘sovl fenyx of Araby’ (471), a direct citation of the Black Knight’s description of Blaunche as the ‘soleyn fenix of Arabye’ (982), and in B 62, the lover compares his lady in the refrain to the ‘fenyx’ who ‘lyveth withouten ayre [heir]’ (2148). In the ballade immediately preceding, he finds himself playing chess with Danger, who is aided by Fortune in unfairly winning the game, when Fortune takes away the lover’s lady (2110–2116), which reminds us of the way the Black Knight loses his ‘fers’ to Fortune with ‘hir false draughtes dyvers’ in a game of chess (653–654). The parallels between the lover and the Black Knight are further echoed by the lover’s proclamation: ‘For Sorow ys y and y am he’ (5858), recalling, of course, the Black Knight’s ‘For y am sorwe, and sorwe ys y!’ (597). Charles’s lover’s channelling of the Black Knight makes obvious sense in the context of their mutual bereavement and in the significant role of Fortune to both works. But these direct citations also underscore Charles’s remarkably close knowledge and repeated reliance on a work itself occupying a very special place in Chaucer’s own œuvre. As is well known, the Book of the Duchess contains borrowings and allusions from a dizzying array of French sources, including Machaut’s Jugement du roi de Behaingne (before 1342), the Remede de Fortune and the Fonteinne amoureuse; the anonymous Songe vert (c. 1348); Jean Froissart’s Paradys d’amour (1361–1362), Le dit du Bleu Chevalier (1364), and Espinette amoureuse (c. 1369); and Oton de Granson’s Complainte de l’an nouvel (late fourteenth century). The duke is thus foregrounding his reliance on a particularly Anglo-French work within the literary career of an earlier poet famously invested in plumbing the possibilities of English poetry vis-à-vis its Continental Francophone models.46 46

For the classic studies, see Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1957); James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1991); Calin, French Tradition; and Butterfield, Familiar Enemy. We note also that the Book of the Duchess sur-

58  Elizaveta Strakhov

In addition to its complex engagement with contemporary Francophone poetry, the Duchess is itself a highly experimental, loose dit, and its diegetic action crystallises with especial force around its interpolated lyrics.47 The dream vision opens with the Dreamer’s overhearing but, famously and bafflingly, misapprehending the cause of the Black Knight’s grief, even though the knight plainly says in his lyric, ‘my lady bright … / Is fro me ded and ys agoon’ (477–479). The rest of the dream vision follows the Dreamer’s comic attempts to offer the Knight consolation for a source of grief that he does not understand until the conclusion of the work.48 Much fruitful work has been done on Chaucer’s decision to have the plot hinge on an interpolated lyric in imitation of the Machauldian dit, although, as Butterfield has noted, the inset lyric does not actually follow any known Continental Francophone lyric form.49 For the purposes of this argument, however, I want to highlight a particular feature

47

48

49

vives only in the so-called Oxford manuscript group (Oxford, Bodleian Library MSS Fairfax 16, Bodley 638, and Tanner 346), which contains a substantial number of other French-derived and French-inspired works by Chaucer and others. On the interpolated lyric, see, in particular, Jane H. M. Taylor, ‘The Lyric Insertion: Towards a Functional Model’, in Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, ed. Keith Busby and Erik Kooper. Selected papers from the 5th Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, Dalfsen, The Netherlands, 9–16 August, 1986. Utrecht Publications in General and Comparative Literature 25 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990), pp. 539–48; and Maureen Barry McCann Boulton, The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200–1400 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). See, among others, Helen Phillips, ‘Structure and Consolation in the Book of the Duchess’, Chaucer Review 16 (1981), 107–18; A. C. Spearing, ‘Literal and Figurative in The Book of the Duchess’, in Studies in the Age of Chaucer: Proceedings No. 1, 1984, ed. Paul Strohm and Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1984), pp. 165–71; Arthur W. Bahr, ‘The Rhetorical Construction of Narrator and Narrative in Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess’, Chaucer Review 35 (2000), 43–59; and Peter Travis, ‘White’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000), 1–66. Ardis Butterfield, ‘Lyric and Elegy’, 37–38. Butterfield further suggests that the Dreamer’s difficulty with the Black Knight’s lyric lies in its departure from the norms of Continental Francophone lyric discourse, wherein the lyric offers consolation precisely because it veils true feeling in conventional and hence aesthetically pleasing artifice (49–50). See also Steven Davis on the poem as addressing the limitations of conventional Frenchified discourse: ‘Guillaume de Machaut, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, and the Chaucer Tradition’, Chaucer Review 36 (2002), 391–405.



Charles d'Orléans' Cross-Channel Poetics   59

of the Duchess’s engagement with the interpolated lyric that may have drawn Charles to this work. Chaucer makes a pointed formal distinction between the Black Knight’s two interpolated lyrics. The first lyric overheard by the Dreamer is emphasised as having been composed by the Knight ‘to hymselve’ (464) as ‘a maner song, / Withoute noote, withoute song’ (471–472). By contrast, the Knight introduces his second lyric, occurring towards the end of the text, as the ‘altherferste’ (1173) of the numerous songs that he has composed for his lady and has sung to her and in her praise (1155–1170). Chaucer thus draws attention to two very different modes of versification: lyrics not set to music and associated with privacy and performance exclusively for the self versus lyrics set to music and intended for public performance to an addressee. This distinction makes sense within the plot of the Duchess (the Dreamer eavesdrops on the first lyric, while the second lyric is intentionally performed for him by the Knight), but it also speaks directly to Deschamps’s influential theoretical distinction between ‘musique naturele’ and ‘musique artificiele’ in his Art de dictier. The latter, Deschamps explains, is what we traditionally refer to as music: ‘par ses vj notes, qui sont appellees us, re, my, fa, sol, la, l’en puet aprandre a chanter …’ (by those six notes, which are called us, re, my, fa, sol, la, one can learn to sing).50 The former, meanwhile, ‘est une musique de bouche en proferant paroules metrifiees, aucunefoiz en laiz, autrefoiz en ballades, autrefoiz en rondeaulx …’ (an oral music producing words in metre, sometimes in lays, other times in ballades, other times in rondeaux), or, in other words, the formes fixes poetry of Machaut, Froissart, Christine, etc.51 Deschamps goes on to explain that the two types of music are intimately related to one another, functioning like two halves of a broader practice: ‘Et aussi ces deux musiques sont si consonans l’une aveques l’autre, que chascune puet bien estre appellee musique …’ (And also these two types of music are so consonant with one another that either may be called music).52 That being said, particular occasions may sometimes call for the use of one of the two ‘musiques’ over the other; specifically, Deschamps notes: et aussis les diz des chançons se puent souventefoiz recorder en pluseurs lieux ou ilz sont moult voulentiers ois, ou le chant de la musique artificiele n’aroit pas tousjours lieu, comme entre seigneurs et dames estans a leur privé et secretement, ou la musique naturele se puet dire et recorder par un homme seul, de bouche …53 50 51 52 53

Deschamps, Dictier, p. 60. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., pp. 64–66.

60  Elizaveta Strakhov

(and also the words of these songs can often be recited in various places where they are most willingly heard, where the song of artificial music would not necessarily take place, such as between lords and ladies in private and in discrete conversation, or when ‘musique naturele’ is said and recited out loud by a man who is by himself …)

Although Deschamps’s Art de dictier was written two decades after Chaucer’s Duchess, the Black Knight’s performances of his two lyrics track with Deschamps’s prescriptions.54 The second lyric is an intentionally composed and performed song for a specific audience, and the Knight enthusiastically regales the Dreamer with it. The first interpolated lyric, by contrast, is emphasised as being not set to music, declaimed rather than sung, and performed, as the Knight believes, in private, purely for himself. Thus, while there are only two interpolated lyrics in the Duchess, Chaucer carefully contextualises their performance to showcase the two polar extremes of formal lyric possibility as theorised by Deschamps’s Dictier. Chaucer thus does not simply write any Frenchified dit, but a particularly self-conscious one: brimming with allusions to contemporary French poetry, it is also centred on interpreting interpolated lyrics and, most importantly, on reflecting contemporary theoretical attitudes towards and treatments of lyric forms. If Charles’s most immediate predecessors, such as Christine de Pizan and Jean le Seneschal, are invested in the formal elasticity of the ballade as structural units, then Chaucer is theorising here the function and expressibility of the interpolated lyric itself. By repeatedly alluding to Chaucer’s Duchess, then, Charles demonstrates the influence of an earlier English work with an especial interest in experimenting with contemporary Francophone influences and with the lyric’s formal properties in relation to narrative. The Influence of Machaut’s Fonteinne amoureuse

It is in Charles’s relationship to Machaut, however, that the fullness of his engagement with the formally experimental poetry of his predecessors becomes visible. The significance of Machaut’s influence on Charles has already been suggested to us by the formal proximity of Charles’s preferred ballade forms to Machaut’s own, as we have seen. Although Charles’s poetry registers a formal debt to Machaut in terms of its stanza and line lengths and rhyme schemes, Charles’s literary debts to Machaut are comparatively less explicit than those to Chaucer. Nevertheless, one particular allusion deserves our careful attention. The dream vision, we recall, occurs when 54

Cf. also Knox’s fascinating discussion of Évrart de Conty’s translation of Aristotle’s Problemata, composed some time towards the end of the fourteenth century, in which, as Knox argues, Évrart similarly associates the formes fixes with private aristocratic consumption: ‘Circularity and Linearity’, pp. 224–28.



Charles d'Orléans' Cross-Channel Poetics   61

the lover, living at the Castle of No Care after the death of his first love, wanders down to the sea-shore to compose a ballade, falls asleep, and experiences a dream vision in which Venus, whom he initially misrecognises, appears before him. As Arn has noted, the sea-shore setting is highly unusual for contemporary French and English dream poetry, although it does recall Aeneas’s misrecognition of his mother, Venus, at the opening of the Aeneid, when he is shipwrecked on the shores of Carthage.55 Towards the very end of his dream vision, the lover is comically borne up towards Fortune’s wheel as he dangles from the ‘kercher of plesaunce’ (4764) wrapped around Venus’s waist, in an evident allusion to Chaucer’s reluctant ride in the eagle’s talons in House of Fame.56 Charles’s lover cries out so loudly in fear that he wakes himself up to discover that he is still clutching a piece of Venus’s loincloth (5185–5191). This moment is obviously amusing – the lover has held on so grimly that he yanked the cloth across the borders of dreamland – but it also gestures towards a key moment in Machaut’s Fonteinne amoureuse. The Fonteinne explores the social structures of poet–patron relations through an elaborate conceit centred on questions of form. The work opens with the sleepless Guillaume, a poet, in a guesthouse, overhearing a man in the next room lament, in the lyric form of the complainte, his impending departure and hence separation from his lady. Guillaume spontaneously decides to copy the complainte down, and this inset lyric kicks off the rest of the Fonteinne’s plot, in which Guillaume develops a friendship with his mystery neighbour, who turns out to be Jean, duc de Berry, and secures a relationship of patronage with him.57 This complainte that clinches the deal, as it were, is no ordinary complainte. Interpolated into the narrative, it runs to an impressive fifty stanzas, and the nobleman points out that the complainte contains no less than one hundred different rhymes (1019–1022). At this point we move back to narrative verse to follow Guillaume’s actions: he finishes copying the complainte, rereads it for any ‘redite’ (1048: 55

56 57

Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. Arn, pp. 49–51. See also Burrow’s suggestion in his contribution to this volume that the seaside setting with its glassy cliff alludes to the white cliffs of Dover, where Charles set French B 75. Cf. Boffey, ‘Charles of Orléans’, p. 55. The duke’s identity is revealed to the reader in an anagram, located at lines 40–41, with the solution explained at lines 45–51, which can be solved to read ‘Guillaume de Machaut Jehans duc de Berry et d’Overngne’. See Guillaume de Machaut, Œuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, ed. Ernest Hoepffner. SATF (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1921), 3.xxvi–xxvii (text of FA on pp. 143–244); see also Laurence de Looze, ‘“Mon nom trouveras”: A New Look at the Anagrams of Guillaume de Machaut – The Enigmas, Responses and Solutions’, Romanic Review 79 (1988), 537–57.

62  Elizaveta Strakhov

‘repetitions’ or ‘infelicities’), and marvels anew at the one hundred separate rhymes (1050–1052). Thus the reader is made aware that the interpolated lyric, which ultimately gives rise to the ideal poet–patron relationship, is a feat of formal ingenuity. In this way, Machaut enshrines technical virtuosity as vital to the social life of verse. In the Fonteinne’s second half the close relationship between Guillaume and the nobleman, produced by this overheard lyric, is replayed on the symbolic level when the two fall asleep beside a fountain, and Guillaume experiences a dream vision (1565). In the vision Guillaume is awake at the fountain, with the nobleman sleeping on his lap throughout (1611–1612, 2145), and they are joined by Venus and the nobleman’s lady. Like Charles’s lover, Guillaume also fails to recognise Venus until she reveals her identity, 138 lines into the dream vision (1707). At Venus’s insistence, the lady offers the still-sleeping nobleman words of comfort, again in complainte form. This second complainte is formally distinct from the preceding narrative verse, which is in octosyllabic couplets. It is, instead, in sixteen-line heterometric stanzas with a four-syllable line following every three octosyllabic lines, and is voiced by the lady to the sleeping nobleman. However, although the lady’s speech is introduced in the octosyllabic couplets of the narrative verse, and her speech is presented as an interpolated lyric, the end of her speech does not mark the end of the lyric. Instead, without reverting to octosyllabic couplets but staying within the complainte’s form, the narration of the inset dream vision picks up again: in the complainte’s antepenultimate stanza the lady kisses the sleeping nobleman and exchanges his diamond ring for her ruby ring (2495–2510). The final stanza of the lady’s complainte deserves citation in full to demonstrate what precisely Machaut does with form and diegesis here: Adont Venus qui la conseille Dist: ‘Cils amans encor sommeille.

Partons nous, einsois qu’il s’esveille.’ Et lors les dames,

Et leur grant biauté nompareille A qui nulle ne s’appareille

Perdi dou tout, dont a merveille Nous effraiames,

Car en l’eure nous esveillames

Et tous deus un songe songames,

Ensi com nous le nous comptames,

At that point Venus, who was advising [the lady], Said: ‘That lover is still asleep. Let’s go before he wakes up.’

And then I fully lost sight of the ladies

And their great unparalleled beauty, To which no woman can compare, At which we

Were terribly afraid,

For we immediately woke up,

And we both dreamt the same dream, As we recounted it for each other.



Charles d'Orléans' Cross-Channel Poetics   63 Si s’en merveille,

And he was amazed,

Et le rubis que moult prisames,

And the ruby, which we prized greatly,

Car l’annel en son doy trouvames, Dont plus de cent fois nous seingnames De la merveille.

Quant nous fumes bien desdormi, Bien esveillié, bien destumi, Il se seingna, puis se leva;

Son visage et se mains lava … (2511–2530)

For we found the ring upon his finger, Over which we crossed ourselves over one hundred times From the wonder of it.

When we were fully awake, Fully roused, fully alert,

He crossed himself, then got up;

He washed his face and hands… .

Noting that the nobleman is still asleep, Venus departs with the lady, at which point Guillaume and the nobleman both wake up and learn that they were dreaming the same dream, even though Venus has just reminded us that the nobleman was asleep inside Guillaume’s own dream. Furthermore, the nobleman wakes up with the lady’s ruby ring, given in the shared dream, still on his finger. This hopeless blurring of diegetic levels is additionally complicated formally by the fact that the two wake up still inside the lady’s complainte, even though she is gone, and the dream is over. Elegantly, Machaut reverts to octosyllabic couplets only after the two men have fully awakened, as if, in shaking off the last remnants of somnolence, they shook the complainte off themselves too. This conceit resonates with the static second sequence of Fortunes Stabilnes, in which the rigidity of the ballade form mirrors the obduracy of the second lady’s response to the lover and his sense of being stuck in an impossible situation. Given that Charles’s own project is, at its core, an investigation into the linguistic and formal boundaries between French and English versification, his inclusion of the detail that his lover wakens still clutching an item from dreamland is significant. Charles is alluding to this famous literary moment in Machaut in which boundaries – between events in dreams and events in waking life, between diegetic levels, between characters’ subjectivities, and between lyric and narrative – are being challenged with especial force. The Fonteinne itself fittingly ends with the evocation of yet another boundary and thus neatly parallels the unusual sea-shore setting of Charles’s dream vision in perhaps more ways than one. After the dream vision, Guillaume accompanies the nobleman to his port of departure and watches him as he ‘s’en ala par mer nagent, / Venus, lui, s’image et sa gent / Et son rubis …’ (‘went off sailing on the sea, Venus, him, his image and his retinue, And his ruby …’; 2841–2843). The nobleman leaves, Guillaume tells us, with thoughts of his lady (‘s’image’ refers to a preceding discussion of retaining

64  Elizaveta Strakhov

her image in his mind while he is away), his retinue, the ruby ring from the dream and, oddly, Venus, who is otherwise not mentioned outside the dream vision. Thus, we find Machaut’s nobleman with an object taken across the borders of dreamland, in the company of Venus, sailing from a sea-shore. This scene cannot but remind us of Charles’s lover, talking on the sea-shore with Venus, before waking up, clutching her garment. This parallel is only further strengthened by the historical circumstances in which the Fonteinne appears to have been written. In the poem, Machaut’s nobleman laments his imminent ‘servage’ and ‘essil’ (‘bondage’ and ‘exile’; 1471), which will take him away from his lady, and in her interpolated words of comfort the lady alludes to his fear of never being able to return to France again (2319–2322). We also learn from her that he is headed to a ‘païs sauvage’ (‘alien land’; 2248) where people speak an ‘estrange langage’ (‘foreign language’; 2249). The Treaty of Brétigny in 1360 stipulated that the imprisoned Jean II of France, captured at the fall of Poitiers in 1356, would be released in exchange for several high-profile hostages from his own family, namely his brother Philippe d’Orléans and two of his sons: Louis d’Anjou and Jean de Berry.58 Thus, in October 1360, according to Jean Froissart’s Chroniques, Jean and his relatives assembled at Calais and sailed, with Edward III, for England to become prisoners of war.59 The city from which the nobleman leaves, Machaut specifies, is ‘sus la mer’ (2808: ‘on the coast’), a small town ‘[d]e barat pleinne et de riote. / Or la nommez, se vous voulez, / Car il y a moult avolez’ (‘chaotic and riotous. Now name it, if you wish, for it has many transients’; 2810–2812), clearly a bitter evocation of the political unrest in English-occupied Calais that he coyly, or resignedly, refuses to name.60 Charles himself spent June to October 1439 in Calais to negotiate his release from captivity, in the months directly before he is thought to have commissioned the two manuscripts of his French and English work once back in England.61 This startling coincidence suggests that the Fonteinne is additionally a powerful intertext for Charles because of his own particular life story and the role that Calais, and the idea of departure, played in it while he 58

59 60

61

Œuvres, ed. Hoeppffner, 3.xxvii–xxx; for more on the Treaty of Brétigny and the captives’ eventual release, see Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War, 2: Trial by Fire (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 445–54, 493–503. Jean Froissart, Œuvres de Froissart: Chroniques, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove (Bruxelles, 1868), 6.299. Scholars are in agreement that the city being described here is, in fact, Calais: see Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries, pp. 82–83; and Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, p. 175. Enid McLeod, Charles of Orleans: Prince and Poet (New York: Viking, 1969), pp. 227–33; Arn, Poet’s Notebook, pp. 55–68.



Charles d'Orléans' Cross-Channel Poetics   65

was putting Fortunes Stabilnes together. It is perhaps all the more significant, in this regard, that Machaut has the nobleman sing one more interpolated lyric as he boards the ship bound for England: En païs ou ma dame maint

To the region where my lady dwells

Se j’ay heü peinne et mal maint,

If I have felt pain and many woes,

Pri Dieu qu’a joie m’i remaint.

I pray God that He restore me.

En païs ou ma dame maint,

Espoir ay qu’en aucun temps m’aint, S’en dit mes cuers qui siens remaint: En païs ou ma dame maint

Pri Dieu qu’a joie m’i remaint. (2825–32)

In the region where my lady dwells, I have hope that at some point she will love me,

My heart, which remains hers, tells itself this:

To the region where my lady dwells I pray God that He restore me.

The nobleman’s mournful leave-taking of the woman he loves and is forced to leave behind in France speaks to the entire content of Charles’s first ballade sequence, in which he is separated by the Channel and by his captivity from his beloved.62 Machaut thus offers Charles a rich model of the elastic potential of lyric interpolated into narrative. This model is, furthermore, centred on the slippage between formal borders while set within the larger historical context of Jean de Berry’s actual crossing of the Channel into captivity, as Charles himself would do fifty-five years later. Machaut’s adaptation of a specific Hundred Years’ War context into a story of love and longing also helps to explain Charles’s choice to recast the ballade missive from Philippe le Bon, the only poem alluding to his real-life captivity, into a poem about love, for his English dit.

———

Charles’s engagement with Chaucer’s Duchess and Machaut’s Fonteinne reveal him to be a deep reader of cross-Channel formal experiments with the possibilities of sequenced and interpolated lyric. His own negotiations with English and French ballade forms thus need to be understood as emerging from this crucial literary context. Indeed, Charles’s contribution to this longer history of late-medieval poetics is significant precisely because his brand of ballade experimentation at once follows his recent 62

It is interesting to note also Machaut’s evocation of the conversational heart as separate from the lover’s self, which is such a prominent theme in Charles’s own poetry: see, in particular, Lucas Wood, ‘Charles d’Orléans’s Heart and Its Books’, Medium Ævum 87 (2018), 343–67.

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predecessors, Christine de Pizan and Jean le Seneschal, in its attention to playing with the structural unit of the ballade, but also reaches behind them, back to Chaucer and Machaut. Charles derives from Christine and Jean a demonstration that the individual ballade is infinitely formally rich. From Chaucer, he receives a cross-Channel take on contemporary Continental theorisations of lyric form, while Machaut models for him the lyric’s formal ability to blur narrative boundaries while highlighting the historical role of the Channel – as border but also, importantly, as waterway – in the Hundred Years’ War. That said, although he borrows from the poets before him, Charles’s cross-Channel poetics is remarkable precisely because its methods transcend its models. Chaucer’s Duchess is a deeply Anglo-French work in its literary debts to Francophone predecessors, but its engagement with the formal properties of lyric is not linked to a plot that explicitly casts its characters as Anglo-French or as having cross-Channel situations or encounters. Meanwhile, Machaut’s Fonteinne experiments with the formal properties of interpolated lyric and narrative against a Hundred Years’ War-related backdrop, but its formal experimentation is largely separated from that deeper historical context, which emerges most clearly only at the very end of the poem. Charles, on the other hand, commingles English and French ballade forms within a loose narrative that foregrounds the lover’s distance from his beloved in France, the theme of ships and sea voyages, and the idea of imminent departure. In this way, unlike Machaut and Chaucer, he links his investigation into the regional differences between ballade forms directly to diegetic content that highlights the liminal position of his protagonist, who is, we remember, himself. The attentive formal patterning of his prosody enshrines his attitude towards his captivity, towards his transitional status as a Francophone poet in England, and towards his intermediate position between two regions, locked in bitter political struggle even as they share a language and a culture. By thus shuttling between English and French ballade forms and mapping those forms onto narrative sequences revolving around issues of border-crossing, geographic distance, and latent politics, Charles demonstrates more than just the elastic formal potential of the ballade. Instead he makes form – rather than content – the integer of his bid for a transregional poetics. In the process, he invites us, his modern readers, to continue re-evaluating our understanding of form in the work of late-medieval French and English poets as far more than simple ornament. Charles makes the case that prosodic form has cultural and political force in late-medieval poetry. His own experiment with the radical Anglo-Frenchness of the ballade speaks across centuries to Susan Wolfson’s claim that ‘formal choices and actions are enmeshed in, and even exercise agency within, networks of



Charles d'Orléans' Cross-Channel Poetics   67

social and historical conditions’.63 Charles’s poetry reminds us that, even as we continue to think about the importance of linguistic translation in transregional poetics, we need to redouble our attention to form, especially lyric form, as the other major site of sociopolitical engagement by poets in this period. In other words, Charles’s work reveals that the combination of translation studies with New Formalism will advance immeasurably our understanding of late-medieval Francophone poetry’s relationship to and reflection of its historical moment.64

63

64

Susan Wolfson, ‘Reading for Form’, Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000), 1–16, at 7. Cf. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2015), pp. 3–17. See further Marjorie Levinson, ‘What Is New Formalism?’, PMLA 122 (2007), 558–69. I am indebted to Philip Knox and Jenni Nuttall for their excellent suggestions on an earlier draft of this piece.

Appendix

3

8

8

10

7 9

9

9

1

2

3

4 5

6

7

3

3

3 3

3

3

Number of stanzas

English Lines ballades per stanza

4

4

4 4

5

4

4

Envoy

N

N

N N

N

N

N

Rhyme changes ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABABB CCDCD ABABBCC ABABB BCBC ABABB CDCD ABABB CDCD

Rhyme scheme ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABABB CCDCD ABABBCC ABABB CDCD ABABB CDCD ABABB CDCD

Rhyme scheme

N 4

N

N N

5

4

N

Envoy

N

N N

N

N

N

Rhyme changes

3

3

3 3

3

3

3

9

9

7 9

10

8

8

7

6

4 5

3

2

1

Number Lines per French stanza analogues of stanzas

Cumulative Table of Ballade Forms Used by Charles d’Orléans in Fortunes Stabilness and Its French Analogues

68  Elizaveta Strakhov

3

8

9

8

10

8

9

9

8

8

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

5

Number of stanzas

English Lines ballades per stanza

5

4

4

6

5

4

4

6

4

Envoy

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

Rhyme changes

ABABB CDCD ABAB BCCB ABAB BCBC

ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBBC ABAB BCBC ABABB CCDCD ABAB BCBC ABABB CDCD

Rhyme scheme



ABABB CDCD ABAB BAAB ABAB BCBC

ABAB BCBC ABAB BCDDC ABAB BCBC ABABB CCDCD ABAB BCBC AAAAA BCBC

Rhyme scheme

4 N 5

N N N

6

5

N N

N

N

6

4

Envoy

N

N

N

N

Rhyme changes

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

5

3

8

8

9

9

8

10

8

9

8

16

15

14

13

12

11

10

9

8

Number Lines per French stanza analogues of stanzas

Appendix  69

3

9

8

8

10

10

8

8

8

8

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

Number of stanzas

English Lines ballades per stanza

70  Elizaveta Strakhov

5

4

5

5

4

4

4

4

4

Envoy

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

Rhyme changes

ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABABB CCDCD ABABB CCBCB ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BAAB

ABABB CDCD

Rhyme scheme

ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABABB CCDCD ABABB CCDCD ABAB BCBC ABAB BABA ABAB BCBC ABAB BAAB

ABABB CDCD

Rhyme scheme

N

5

4

5

N N

5

4

N

N

4

4

Envoy

N

N

N

N

N

N

Rhyme changes

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

8

8

8

8

10

10

8

8

9

26

24

23

22

21

18

20

19

17

Number Lines per French stanza analogues of stanzas

3

9

9

11

8

9

8

8

9

8

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

Number of stanzas

English Lines ballades per stanza

4

4

4

4

4

4

6

6

4

Envoy

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

Rhyme changes ABABB CDCD ABABB CAAC ABABBC CDEDE ABAB BCBC ABABB CCDD ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABABB CDCD ABAB BCBC

Rhyme scheme



ABABB CDCD ABABB CAAC ABABBC CDEDE ABAB BCBC ABABB CCDD ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABABB CDCD ABAB BCBC

Rhyme scheme

4 4 N 4

N N N

4

N N

4

6

6

N

Envoy

N

N

N

N

Rhyme changes

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

8

9

8

8

9

8

11

9

9

34

33

32

31

30

29

28

25

27

Number Lines per French stanza analogues of stanzas

Appendix  71

3

9

8

9

11

9

10

8

11

11

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

Number of stanzas

English Lines ballades per stanza

72  Elizaveta Strakhov

4

6

4

4

4

6

4

4

4

Envoy

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

Rhyme changes ABABB CDCD ABABB CCB ABABB CDCD ABABBC CDEED ABABB CDCD ABABB CCDCD ABAB BCBC ABABB CCDEDE ABABB CCDEDE

Rhyme scheme ABABB CDCD ABABB CCB ABABB CDCD ABABBC CDEED ABABB CDCD ABABB CCDCD ABAB BCBC ABABB CCDEDE ABABB CCDEDE

Rhyme scheme

4 6 4

N N N

4

N

N N

6

4

N

N

Envoy

N

N

N

N

Rhyme changes

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

11

11

8

10

9

11

9

8

9

43

42

41

40

39

38

37

36

35

Number Lines per French stanza analogues of stanzas

3

15

8

8

9

8

8

8

10

9

8

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

Number of stanzas

English Lines ballades per stanza

5

6

5

5

5

5

4

5

4

8

Envoy

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

Rhyme changes ABABB CCDDEE FGFG ABAB BCBC ABAB BCCB ABABB CDCD ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABABB CCDCD ABABB CDCD ABAB BCBC

Rhyme scheme



5

N

N 6 5

N N N

5

5

N

N

4

5

N

N

4

N

N

ABABB CCDDEE FGFG ABAB BCBC ABAB BCCB ABABB CDCD ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABABB CCDCD ABABB CDCD ABAB BCBC N

Envoy

Rhyme changes

Rhyme scheme

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

8

9

10

8

8

8

9

8

8

15

53

52

51

50

49

48

47

46

45

44

Number Lines per French stanza analogues of stanzas

Appendix  73

5

10

9

10

9

8

8

8

9

8

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

Number of stanzas

English Lines ballades per stanza

74  Elizaveta Strakhov

4

4

4

4

4

5

4

5

5

Envoy

Y

N

Y

N

Y

N

N

N

N

Rhyme changes ABABB CCDCD ABAB CCDDC ABABB CCDCD ABABB CDDC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABABB CDDC ABAB BCBC

Rhyme scheme

ABABB CDDC

ABABB CCDCD ABAB CCDDC ABABB CCDCD ABABB CDDC

Rhyme scheme

N

N

N

N

N

Rhyme changes

N

5

4

5

5

Envoy

3

3

3

3

5

9

9

10

9

10

58

(Christine)

57

56

55

54

Number Lines per French stanza analogues of stanzas

3

8

8

11

10

11

9

8

8

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

Number of stanzas

English Lines ballades per stanza

5

4

6

4

4

4

4

5

Envoy

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

Rhyme changes



ABAB BCBC ABAB BCCB ABABB CCDEED ABABB CCDCD ABABB CCDEED ABABB CDCD ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC

Rhyme scheme ABAB BCBC ABAB BCCB ABABB CCDEED ABABB CCDCD ABABB CCDEED ABABB CDCD ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC

Rhyme scheme

6 4 5

N N

4

N N

4

4

4

5

Envoy

N

N

N

N

Rhyme changes

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

8

8

9

11

10

11

8

8

63

64

70

69

62

61

60

59

Number Lines per French stanza analogues of stanzas

Appendix  75

3

9

8

9

7 8

8

8

8

8

8

71

72

73

74 75

76

77

78

79

80

3

3

3

3

3

3 3

3

3

Number of stanzas

English Lines ballades per stanza

76  Elizaveta Strakhov

N

N

N

N

N

4 N

5

4

4

Envoy

N

N

N

N

N

Y N

N

N

N

Rhyme changes ABABB CDDC ABAB BCCB ABABA BABA ABABBCC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BABA ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC

Rhyme scheme

ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC

ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC irreg.

ABABB CDDC ABAB BCCB ABABA BABA

Rhyme scheme

N

N

irreg.

N

N

N

N

N

N

Rhyme changes

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

4

N

Envoy

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

8

8

8

8

8

8

9

8

9

Bal 6

Bal 5

Bal 4

Bal 3

Bal 2

Bal 1

71

66

65

Number Lines per French stanza analogues of stanzas

3

8

7 11

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

81

82 83

84

85

86

87

88

89

90

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3 3

Number of stanzas

English Lines ballades per stanza

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4 6

N

Envoy

Y

Y

N

N

Y

Y

Y

N N

N

Rhyme changes ABAB BCBC ABABBCC ABABB CCDCCD ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC

Rhyme scheme



Rhyme changes

ABAB N BCBC ABABBCC N ABABB N CCDEED

Rhyme scheme

4 6

N

Envoy

3 3

3

7 11

8

73 72

Bal 7

Number Lines per French stanza analogues of stanzas

Appendix  77

3

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

Number of stanzas

English Lines ballades per stanza

78  Elizaveta Strakhov

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

Envoy

Y

Y

Y

Y

N

Y

N

Y

Y

Rhyme changes ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC

Rhyme scheme

Rhyme scheme

Rhyme changes

Envoy

Number Lines per French stanza analogues of stanzas

3

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

11

8

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

Number of stanzas

English Lines ballades per stanza

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

Envoy

Y

N

N

Y

N

N

Y

N

Y

Rhyme changes



ABAB BCBC ABAB BCCB ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABABB CCDEDE ABAB BCBC

Rhyme scheme

ABABB CCDEDE

ABAB BCCB

Rhyme scheme

N

N

Rhyme changes

n/a

4

Envoy

3

3

11

8

67

68

Number Lines per French stanza analogues of stanzas

Appendix  79

3

8

8

8

8

9

8

7 8

7 8

109

110

111

112

113

114

115 116

117 118

3 3

3 3

3

3

3

3

3

Number of stanzas

English Lines ballades per stanza

80  Elizaveta Strakhov

4 4

4 4

4

4

4

4

4

4

Envoy

Y N

Y Y

Y

N

N

Y

Y

N

Rhyme changes

Rhyme scheme

ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABABB ABABB CDCD CDCD ABAB BCBC ABABBCC ABAB BCBC ABABBCC ABAB BCBC

Rhyme scheme

N

Rhyme changes

4

Envoy

3

9

130

Number Lines per French stanza analogues of stanzas

3

8

8

8

119

120

121

3

3

Number of stanzas

English Lines ballades per stanza

4

4

4

Envoy

Y

Y

Y

Rhyme changes ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC ABAB BCBC

Rhyme scheme



Rhyme scheme

Rhyme changes

Envoy

Number Lines per French stanza analogues of stanzas

Appendix  81

3 The English Roundel, Charles’s Jubilee, and Mimetic Form JENNI NUTTALL

C

harles’s English and French narratives end differently, their paths diverging just before Fortunes Stabilnes presents its second series of lyrics, a set of short poems called roundels in English. The speaker (referred to as Charles, the duke of Orleans, in both texts and thus identifiable to some degree with the real-world author) having withdrawn from the service of Love after the death of his lady, the French narrative ceases without a fully articulated end or closing frame.1 The chansons (as roundels are known in French) are separate from the lyric-narrative sequence and placed later in Charles’s personal manuscript.2 Fortunes Stabilnes continues beyond the point at which the French halts, first presenting 103 roundels (of which 96 are extant, the first 52 having equivalents which appear in the chanson section of the French volume) and then, following a dream-vision encounter with Venus and Fortune which leads the narrator to the pursuit of a new woman, a second sequence of ballades. Both ballade series are epistolary, 1

2

On the speaker’s identity, see Mary-Jo Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes, pp. 137 (5– 6), 234 (2720), 245 (3044), 317 (4788). All quotations from Fortunes Stabilnes are given from this edition, cited hereafter parenthetically by line number in the text. The French narrative ends with Ballades 72 and 73 (which appear in reverse order in Fortunes Stabilnes), followed by two complaints and then another group of ballades not connected explicitly with the Livre de la Prison: Fox and Arn, eds, Poetry of Charles d’Orléans and His Circle, pp. 172–84. On the assembling of Charles’s personal manuscript of his French verse, see Mary-Jo Arn, The Poet’s Notebook: The Personal Manuscript of Charles d’Orléans (Paris, BnF, MS fr. 25458). Texts and Transitions 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008). Jane H. M. Taylor has reappraised the structure of the Livre de la prison in The Making of Poetry: Late-Medieval French Poetic Anthologies. Texts and Transitions 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 92–97.



Charles's Jubilee  83

lyrics sent from the lover to his lady.3 Yet the roundels, contrastingly, are dishes in a metaphorical feast, a jubilee hosted by the first-person speaker for his audience of ‘yow louers all’ (3134). Why did Charles embed the roundels within the English sequence, yet separate the chansons from the French narrative? This difference in treatment suggests that roundels possessed an identity different from their equivalent chansons, distinctions which this chapter reconstructs through a micro-history of the form. Middle English roundels (excepting Charles’s examples) are rare, though this chapter adds four more to the total.4 Moreover, what is particular about their rarity has been overlooked: they are not scattered in time and place but, rather, cluster in a particular historical moment and a particular social milieu within which Charles’s roundels sit at the centre. Their currency and social cachet explain what motivated Charles to include them within Fortunes Stabilnes. Inclusion within Charles’s English book necessitates a distinctive mode of literary representation for the jubilee, one which presents verse-form mimetically as an event enacted for readers. The roundels are thus not, as has been suggested, trivial, insincere, or, in the case of the lyrics in various forms which follow the roundels, miscellaneous and with little purpose. Furthermore, recognising these characteristic features of Charles’s poetics – the use of roundels, non-narrative lyric sequence, and mimetic form – allows us to trace his influence on English verse to venues which have hitherto escaped notice. The Chanson and the Roundel ‘Any literary translation’, A. E. B. Coldiron reminds us, ‘is a point of contact between two languages, two cultures, two literary systems, and two literary histories.’5 Such contact zones, especially for a writer like Charles 3

4

5

For discussion of the structure of Fortunes Stabilnes and the qualities of its different constituent parts, see Mary-Jo Arn, ‘The Structure of the English Poems of Charles of Orleans’, Fifteenth Century Studies 4 (1981), 17–23; Mary-Jo Arn, ‘Poetic Form as a Mirror of Meaning in the English Poems of Charles of Orleans’, Philological Quarterly 69 (1990), 13–29; and A. C. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyric (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 225–47. Rossell Hope Robbins lists only twelve examples outside of those in manuscripts connected with Charles and notes the roundel’s ‘rare occurrence’ in Middle English: ‘The Burden in Carols’, Modern Language Notes 57 (1942), 16–22, at 20–21, n. 17. Robbins’s item 11 is not in fact a roundel (see my discussion of Shirley’s copying of this item, pp. 89–91 below). Coldiron, Canon, Period, and the Poetry of Charles of Orleans: Found in Translation (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 188.

84  Jenni Nuttall

who translated his own verse from one language to another, reveal not only what is shared between the two systems but also what can stand equivalent from one language to another and what is fundamentally different or incompatible.6 Of all of the forms and genres shared by French and English literature in the late Middle Ages, the related forms variously named as the rondeau, rondel, chanson, and roundel might register some of the biggest differences.7 In French poetry the rondeau/rondel/chanson was a well-established fixed form written in considerable quantities on a variety of subjects.8 Eustache Deschamps, for example, wrote 173 rondeaux of which fewer than half were love lyrics.9 Yet, simultaneously and conversely, the form was rare and unfamiliar for the anglophone readership for whom Charles was writing in Fortunes Stabilnes. At the end of the fourteenth century, at least on the basis of the surviving evidence, the roundel existed more as a name than as a functioning form in English writing. The term roundel appears in English verse in lists of lyric forms written by stereotypical lover-poets, for example Vainglory and Amans in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (‘Rondeal, balade, and virelai’, 1.2709, 2727) and Aurelius in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale (‘many layes, / Songes, compleyntes, roundels, virelayes’, V.947–948).10 Alceste, in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, names the form in her list of the 6 7

8

9

10

Elizaveta Strakhov’s contribution to the present volume tracks in detail Charles’s negotiations between French and English ballade forms. John Fox notes that, in the case of Charles’s French lyrics, the ‘differences between chançon form and rondel form are more apparent than real’: Fox and Arn, eds, Poetry of Charles d’Orléans and His Circle, p. lix. Charles, for example, wrote more than four hundred rondeaux. Leonard W. Johnson briefly discusses the formal challenges posed by the rondeau in his Poets as Players: Theme and Variation in Late Medieval French Poetry (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 17–21. On the intrinsic variability and subsequent evolution of this form, see Daniel Calvez, ‘La structure du rondeau: Mise au point’, The French Review 55 (1982), 461–70; and Howard Garey, ‘The Fifteenth Century Rondeau as Aleatory Polytext’, Le Moyen Français 5 (1980), 193–236. Ian S. Laurie and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, eds, Eustache Deschamps: Selected Poems, trans. David Curzon and Jeffrey Fiskin (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 20, 22. Deschamps gives examples of various versions of the rondeau in his L’art de dictier but does not analyse or describe the form: Eustache Deschamps: L’art de dictier, ed. and trans. Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi. Medieval Texts and Studies 13 (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1994), pp. 88–95. John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck, with Latin translations by Andrew Galloway, vol. 1 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), p. 174. All quotations from Chaucer are from the Riverside Chaucer.



Charles's Jubilee  85

hymns of praise supposedly written by Chaucer for the God of Love’s holy days (‘balades, roundels, virelayes’, F423, G411). In their plurality they sound plentiful, but they are in truth generic lists, transliterating similar collocations of lyric forms in French verse.11 In some of Chaucer’s works, the roundel escapes this collocative listing, but does not necessarily achieve fully fledged exemplification. Arcite in ‘The Knight’s Tale’ sings a roundel in praise of May, but Chaucer does not insert a full example, as a French poet might, giving instead only three lines rhyming abb, the most he can supply without disrupting his rhyming couplets (I.1509–1512, 1528–1529). In the Parliament of Fowls, the birds gather each year on Valentine’s Day, customarily sing a ‘roundel’ (675) before their departure. The dreamer notes that the tune of the roundel ‘imaked was in Fraunce’ (677) and promises the words of the roundel in the next line. But the evidence of manuscript witnesses suggests that Chaucer probably never supplied the promised lyric.12 The text as given in editions of the poem at lines 680–692 is reconstructed from lines added to the poem in the mid-fifteenth century, likely from a separately circulating roundel. Scribes who attempted to supply what was clearly missing did not insert or reconstruct the entire roundel but adapted and abbreviated its lines to other rhyme schemes that they knew. One manuscript (copied 1440–50) has a five-line stanza, one an eight-line stanza which was added to a manuscript produced c. 1420–30 by a hand dating to 1460–70 or later, and one (copied in the 1480s) a six-line stanza. Other copyists of the Parliament had, as Ralph Hanna drily notes, ‘no earthly idea’ what form a roundel might have, merely leaving space for an additional stanza of the same length as the surrounding verse.13 Readers who encountered the Parliament in the fifteenth century were likely none the wiser as to what the promised roundel might be, unless their own knowledge could supply the missing information. The mystery here – why promise a roundel but not provide one? – plays out in miniature the larger puzzle of the rondeau’s scarcity in England. Why did Chaucer and Gower not write roundels when both poets would 11

12

13

For example, Guillaume de Machaut, ‘Le jugement du roy de Behaigne’ and ‘Remede de fortune’, ed. and trans. James I. Wimsatt and William W. Kibler. The Chaucer Library (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 188 (lines 403– 405). The information in this paragraph is taken from Ralph Hanna, ‘Presenting Chaucer as Author’, in Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts. Figurae (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 174–94 and 309–12, at pp. 185–90; rpt. from Medieval Literature: Texts and Interpretation, ed. Tim William Machan. MRTS 79 (Binghamton: MRTS, 1991), pp. 17–40. Ibid., p. 188.

86  Jenni Nuttall

have encountered the form in abundance in their reading of French verse? The ballade migrated successfully across the Channel both into the French of England and into English itself in considerable numbers, but the roundel made notably fewer inroads.14 Only Merciles Beaute, a triple roundel surviving uniquely in Part II of Cambridge, Magdalene Library MS Pepys 2006, has been attributed to Chaucer both because of its language and style and on the basis of its placing as the final item in a quire of Chaucer’s lyrics.15 It may indeed be Chaucer’s, but it cannot provide secure evidence of roundel writing pre-1400, given that the manuscript dates to the second half of the fifteenth century.16 The earliest securely datable roundels in English are thus those of the Privy Seal clerk Thomas Hoccleve from the first decades of the fifteenth century. Hoccleve writes four roundels, one a complaint to Lady Money, another her response to this complaint, one a mock-praise of a lady’s beauty, and one a ‘rowndel’ made in affectionate praise of Henry Somer, under-treasurer of the Exchequer, which follows a ballade petitioning in good humour for the payment of Hoccleve’s own wages and those of three other clerks.17 In some ways, Hoccleve’s roundels provide a successful example of French literary culture crossing the Channel. Hoccleve assumes some formal knowledge on the part of whoever might see these anthologies of his verse: all four roundels have their repeated sections abbreviated to a word or phrase (often followed by et cetera), requiring the reader to reconstruct the form. The roundel for Somer follows the standard French model and could be sung to a rondeau tune, its syntax allowing for the repetition of lines 1–2 in the middle of the poem and lines 1–3 at its end. Yet, in other 14

15

16

17

On the ballade’s entry into English literature, see Helen Cohen’s classic study, The Ballade. Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1915; rpt. Folcroft Library Editions, 1971). George B. Pace and Alfred David, eds, Geoffrey Chaucer: The Minor Poems, Part 1. A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer 5 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1982), pp. 175–78. A. S. G. Edwards, intro., Manuscript Pepys 2006: A Facsimile: Magdalene College, Cambridge. The Facsimile Series of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer 6 (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1985), pp. 390–91. Edwards dates this part of the manuscript to the ‘very late fifteenth century’ (p. xxiii). Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall and I. Gollancz; rev. Jerome Mitchell and A. I. Doyle. EETS e.s. 61 and 73 (1970), pp. 60, 309–12. The texts of the roundels in Hoccleve’s own hand can be seen in Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile of the Autograph Verse Manuscripts, intro. J. A. Burrow and A. I. Doyle. EETS s.s. 19 (2002), as article 14 in Huntington Library MS 114 and articles 9 (a), (b), and (c) in Huntington Library MS 744.



Charles's Jubilee  87

ways Hoccleve’s roundels evolve beyond the French fixed form. Hoccleve’s three roundels, surviving solely in San Marino, Huntington Library MS HM 744, could not have been performed to a conventional rondeau tune (at least not without some sort of musical accommodation) because their syntax twice requires the repetition of all of the first four lines in their entirety mid-poem as well as at its end. The musical rondeau’s structure (which can be represented as A|B a|A a|b A|B, where capital letters represent the repetition of both words and music and lower-case letters represent the repetition of the same music but with different words) has a characteristic ‘elegant irregularity’, its second unit postponing the re-entry of the b element.18 The rhyme and verbal repetition of the literary rondeau preserve this fundamentally asymmetric structure. Hoccleve disrupts this pattern, moving toward the symmetrical burden and verse structure of the carol (that is, rhyming ABBA abABBA abABBA abba ABBA). While fifteenth-century French poets develop the rondeau by contraction, reducing the medial and final refrains to a single line, half-line, phrase, or word, Hoccleve moves in the opposite direction.19 Given the very limited circulation of Hoccleve’s minor poems, it is perhaps not surprising that his roundels were not the beginning of a flourishing tradition but a temporary dead end. When the form does resurface, examples are notably localised in time and social context, suggesting particular triggers for renewed interest in this form. In the years either side of 1430 the roundel re-emerges in the hands of the Benedictine poet John Lydgate as a vessel for political propaganda. London, British Library MS Harley 7333 preserves a short poem headed ‘A Roundell of him [Henry VI, referred to in the previous rubric] ayens / his coronacioun made by lydegate daun John’ which addresses both the nations of France and England and the young king himself in celebration of the Dual Monarchy.20 If the headnote is correct, the roundel was made shortly before November 1429, when Henry was crowned at Westminster, or before December 1431, when he was crowned king of France in Paris. As it appears on the page, the poem is eleven lines long, but it can be reconstructed as a roundel by projecting repetitions after line 6 and line 11. Lydgate’s choice of the roundel for this occasional poem indicates that this French form brought with it prestige and novelty. The form’s elevated status is shown by a second roundel which appears in Lydgate’s ver18

19 20

David Fallows, ‘Polyphonic Song’, in Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music, ed. Tess Knighton and David Fallows (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 123–26, at p. 124. Fox and Arn, eds, Poetry of Charles d’Orléans and His Circle, p. lvi. Lydgate, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken. EETS o.s. 192 (1934), 2.622.

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sified memorialisation of Henry’s 1432 royal entry to London following his two-year stay in France.21 Lydgate’s souvenir is based on a Latin letter by John Carpenter, Common Clerk of the City of London, supplemented by Lydgate’s own eye-witness observations.22 Carpenter records the original form of the song of the seven virgins at London Bridge: a tail-rhyme lyric rhyming aaabaaab ccccbcccb laid out in graphic tail-rhyme format with the b-rhymes in a column on the right braced to each group of three lines.23 Preceding and following the tail-rhyme stanzas are the same pair of braced lines (‘Soveraign lord to your cite / With alle reverence welcome ye be’). While there are no cues for repetition in Carpenter’s letter, the pair of lines, which share the b-rhyme, may have been sung between each four-line or eight-line group in the manner of a carol. Lydgate, in his memorialisation, replaces this version with ‘This same roundell, which I shall now specyfye’ (line 210). The surviving witnesses do not present the roundel in full, but, as with the coronation lyric, the original form of the poem can be reconstructed by projecting repetition at lines 217 and 222.24 Given the self-imposed constraints of courtly verse, which eschewed native verse-forms in favour of alternatives derived from French poetry, the roundel offered Lydgate a higher-status alternative with which to upgrade 21 22

23

24

Lydgate, Mummings and Entertainments, ed. Claire Sponsler (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010), pp. 29–42. The roundel begins at line 211. Henry Noble MacCracken, ‘King Henry’s Triumphal Entry into London, Lydgate’s Poem, and Carpenter’s Letter’, Archiv für das Stadium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 126 (1911), 75–102; Gordon Kipling, ‘Lydgate: The Poet as Deviser’, in Chaucer and the Challenges of Medievalism: Studies in Honor of H. A. Kelly, ed. Donka Minkova and Theresa Tinkle. Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 73–101, at pp. 87–89. Transforming the carol into a roundel might be compared to Lydgate’s insertion of poetic devices and embellishments elsewhere in the Verses, additions which create ‘a spectacle in which all viewers are addressed in a poetic idiom – a new form of public discourse’: Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), p. 238. The layout of the carol is discussed and its text transcribed in Kristin Bourassa, ‘The Royal Entries of Henry VI in a London Civic Manuscript’, Journal of Medieval History 42 (2016), 479–93, at 485–86. See Bourassa’s fig. 1 (p. 484) for an image showing Carpenter’s presentation of the carol. Gustav Schleich first reconstructed the form of this roundel, suggesting that ‘Sovereyne Lorde, welcome, welcome ye be’ (line 217) originally read ‘Sovereyne Lorde, welcome to your citee’ (i.e. line 1, the first line of the repeated refrain): ‘Ein mittelenglische Rondel’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 96 (1896), 191–94.



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the tail-rhyme carol. In both instances, the roundel plays its part in the promulgation of the dual monarchy, a French form put obediently to the service and celebration of an English king. The prestige of this form at this particular moment in time contextualises Lydgate’s otherwise unexpected description of ‘Orpheus with heos stringes sharpe’ singing ‘a roundell with his temperd herpe’ (lines 104–105) at the end of the Mumming at Bishopwood (which may date to May 1430 or later in the decade).25 This image celebrates Lydgate’s own role as supplier of roundels, a form embodying harmony both poetic and political in celebration of the dual monarchy. We might wonder what or who brought roundels to Lydgate’s attention in the years either side of 1430. Lydgate was in Paris in 1426, and so, like Chaucer and Gower before him, he must have encountered the chanson/ rondeau directly as a French lyric form.26 But what in particular impelled him to adopt the form into his own repertoire when writing for an English audience? The catalyst may have been the earl of Suffolk, third husband of Alice Chaucer, who herself was one of Lydgate’s patrons alongside her father and her second husband.27 Suffolk’s interest in French lyric may have developed during his imprisonment (by Charles’s half-brother Dunois) in France from June 1429 until the spring of 1430 after his capture at Jargeau. In Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.20, a volume copied during the early 1430s and completed around the end of 1432, the anthologiser John Shirley connects seven French poems, five rondeaux and two ballades, to the earl.28 One of the rondeaux attributed to Suffolk is in fact by Alain Chartier and one ballade by Deschamps is said, without attribution, to be a poem which ‘þeorlle mich alloweþe in his wittes’ (that is, the earl has a par-

25 26 27

28

Lydgate, Mummings and Entertainments, pp. 55, 107. Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-Bibliography. English Literary Studies Monograph Series 71 (Victoria: Univ. of Victoria, 1997), pp. 25–88. Carol M. Meale, ‘Reading Women’s Culture in Fifteenth-Century England: The Case of Alice Chaucer’, in Mediaevalitas: Reading the Middle Ages, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti. J. A. W. Bennett Memorial Lectures, Ninth Series, Perugia, 1995 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), pp. 81–101 plus 11 plates, at pp. 92–93. Margaret Connolly and Yolanda Plumley, ‘Crossing the Channel: John Shirley and the Circulation of French Lyric Poetry in England in the Early Fifteenth Century’, in Patrons, Authors and Workshops: Books and Book Production in Paris around 1400, ed. Godfried Croenen and Peter Ainsworth. Synthema 4 (Louvain: Peeters, 2006), pp. 311–32. On the construction and dating of the Trinity volume, once part of a larger codex, see Margaret Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 69–101.

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ticularly high opinion of it).29 Shirley’s attributions have thus been doubted, but whether the earl wrote these French poems or simply brought the poetry of others back to England, these lyrics supply a new and fashionable influence into English versification.30 Shirley’s handling of these rondeaux demonstrates uncertainty about the presentation of this fixed form despite its ubiquity in French lyric poetry and its sudden currency in England. The first rondeau (p. 25) has lost a line of its opening refrain and does not have either of its points of repetition marked. The remaining four (pp. 32, 33 (two), 36) have their final refrain cued by the repetition of a word or phrase, but none has a medial cue. Having one cue but not the other argues for Shirley’s unfamiliarity with the form rather than confidence that his audience can reconstruct the form by themselves. Moreover, Shirley’s grasp of the form dissipates as he continued to assemble the volume. Neither repetition is signalled in another rondeau, copied later in the manuscript on page 89, headed ‘Roundell’. On the final page of the manuscript Shirley copies another lyric which he also heads ‘Roundell’ (DIMEV 1453; NIMEV 870), a poem of eight lines divided into two stanzas rhyming aabb bcbc. Shirley gives a cue for a repeated refrain at its end (the first phrase of the lyric followed by the abbreviation for et cetera), but, even allowing for the variation to which the fixed forms were prone, these lines cannot be satisfactorily expanded into a recognisable rondeau form. By the final pages of this volume ‘roundel’ is more a fashionable label than an accurate descriptor, evoking the elite world of aristocratic francophile versification but not necessarily fully conversant with its particularities.31 29

30

31

For what may lie behind Shirley’s attributions of the poems by Chartier and Deschamps, see R. D. Perry, ‘The Earl of Suffolk’s French Poems and Shirley’s Virtual Coteries’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38 (2016), 299–308. These new arrivals influenced both poets and composers: David Fallows collects together the evidence for English rondeau settings in his article ‘English Song Repertories of the Mid-Fifteenth Century’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 103 (1976), 61–79, at 70–76. Fallows notes that these settings remain ‘thoroughly French’ and ‘separate’ from other kinds of English song (p. 74). This combination of drawing on the prestige of French versification while being uncertain about or uninterested in the particularities of one of its fixed forms can also be seen in a piece of French verse copied in London, British Library MS Harley 7333, a manuscript derived in part from John Shirley’s manuscript anthologies, which is headed ‘Balade made by the duc of Orlience’, that is, by Charles. In fact the poem is formed from two French rondeaux which have been adapted, their repetitions suppressed, to make a sixteen-line poem with stanzas rhyming abba (David Fallows, ‘Review of Julia Boffey, Manuscripts



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In Shirley’s anthology we see some of the contradictory identities of this lyric form which Charles must have comprehended. In French verse the form was commonplace, while in England the form was both suddenly prestigious in the years around 1430 and yet still rare and precariously understood. Thanks to the cross-Channel cultural exchange occasioned by the dual monarchy, the rondeau became fashionable in England, chosen for Lydgate’s celebration of Henry VI’s sovereignty. This increased visibility, as well as Suffolk’s own close relationship with Charles which developed through the 1430s, illuminates the inclusion of the roundels in Charles’s English narrative. The earl requested the custody of Charles in July 1432 and the duke remained with Alice Chaucer and her husband until May 1436.32 For Mary-Jo Arn, the provision of the roundels within the narrative’s fiction is an imposition: Charles, though retired from love, ‘is expected to continue writing’ in Ballade 83 and ‘agrees to do so’ in Ballade 84.33 But there is no sense of obligation in the text: Charles spontaneously returns to writing lyrics and offers them freely in his jubilee (‘Here is my fest, if hit plese yow to fong [partake]’, line 3135). Roundels, newly fashionable and full of social cachet but still rare and little known, are supplied with generosity for Charles’s anticipated readership, whether that be his friends the earl and countess of Suffolk or the larger ‘virtual coterie’ of English literati like Lydgate and Shirley.34 Virtual coteries, in R. D. Perry’s formulation, transcend social hierarchies and the limits of time, place, and social contacts, being created by ‘rhetorical performances’ which bring together poets, patrons, literary predecessors, and sources of inspiration.35 Such virtual coteries can also, I would suggest, be signalled by shared uses of particular verse-forms, especially the choice of a new or niche form such as the roundel. Mimetic Form Having decided to incorporate his roundels within Fortunes Stabilnes, Charles must have contemplated various formal possibilities. He did not want to mix lyric forms, interleaving the roundels, for example, with either the first or

32 33 34 35

of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 112 (1987), 132–38, at 133–36). The poem is printed by Henry Noble MacCracken, ‘An English Friend of Charles of Orléans’, PMLA 26 (1911), 142–80, at 145. On MS Harley 7333’s use of Shirleian exemplars, see Connolly, John Shirley, pp. 173–75. Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. Arn, p. 25. Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. Arn, p. 484, note to lines 3071–3109. The phrase is that of R. D. Perry: ‘Lydgate’s Virtual Coteries: Chaucer’s Family and Gower’s Pacifism in the Fifteenth Century’, Speculum 93 (2018), 669–98. Ibid., p. 671.

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second ballade sequences. To do so would disrupt formal categories and associate the roundels unambiguously with one or other of the fictional courtships.36 Instead, he creates the alternative framing of the jubilee, one which entrenches the roundels firmly as part of the larger poem and yet complicates their status. In the absence of a fictional courtship to give the roundels an identifiable recipient and purpose, how do we evaluate these lyrics? What state of mind is represented by the allegory of the Castle of No Care and what truth-claims can the love lyrics served up therein in his jubilee make? No Care, translating Nonchaloir in the French poems, might mean indifference, unconcern, negligence, or forgetfulness, and yet also is the place where he lived as a child and which (we realise later as he talks with Venus in lines 4821–4854) is full of memories of life with his first love.37 Is this a place of apathetic indifference, diversion which only distracts Charles from grief at the death of his lady, or of continuing grief and memory, or a place of healing as its figuration as a plaster (3046) intimates? The castle is governed by a personification named both ‘Tyme Apast’ (line 2959), that is Charles’s own past, and also ‘Passid-Tyme’ (line 2979), meaning ‘pastime’, something one does as time passes. No Care is also thus uncertain in time: Charles, now too old to be a lover (according to Age, who visits him in a dream vision and encourages him to leave Love’s service in lines 2548–2651) returns to a place of innocence and play, an ‘auncient, oold manar / Wherein long y had in childhod lay’ (lines 2939– 2940), which is also a place of memory and of the present time passing. Charles thus creates and tolerates a considerable amount of ambivalence in the fictional setting in which he hosts his jubilee. The two ballades which precede his feast look forward and backward, uncertain about whether they are ending or beginning.38 In Ballade 82 he is cured of love but his eyes still rove about looking at attractive women; in Ballade 83 we find rhetorical strategies reminiscent of ‘go little book’ valedictions at the same time that he recommences writing love poetry. All these uncertainties might lead us to wonder about the status of the roundels served up at No Care. The roundels have indeed appeared to some as vicarious or insincere, even as their qualities as lyrics are celebrated.39 If, as this line of thinking goes, Charles has retired from love and is self-declaredly cured from lovesickness and grief – however unconvincingly – he writes not as a lover but as a 36 37

38 39

On Charles’s categorisation of his lyrics, see Arn, Poet’s Notebook, pp. 63–64. Cecily Clark teases out some of the ‘deep ambivalence’ of the concept of Nonchaloir in her ‘Review of Shigemi Sasaki’s Sur le thème de Nonchaloir dans la poésie de Charles d’Orléans’, Medium Ævum 45 (1976), 229–31, at 229. This is to be expected, given that what forms an end in the French version becomes a transition in Fortunes Stabilnes. Arn, ‘Structure of the English Poems’, pp. 18–19.



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servant of the servants of the God of Love.40 In such a reading the roundels have been claimed therefore to ‘titillate’, being ‘mildly perverse’, in toto a meditation on love which is ‘superficial, random’, an ‘empty imagining’, ‘unfocused and confusing’, and a ‘voyeuristic entertainment’ for his audience.41 The effect on the reader is, supposedly, one of distancing and lack of involvement.42 If we evaluate the roundels in their narrative context they may therefore be found wanting, although their presence, it is argued, is a purposeful deployment of the characteristics of this form. The roundels embody, in their circularity, Charles’s inability to move on from grief until his encounters with Venus and Fortune.43 Yet we must not forget that ‘lyric is, essentially, a social and inclusive act’.44 However suspicious the ambivalence of the narrative frame might make us, roundels are – as their framing as a banquet makes so very clear – also collective and mutual.45 Jane H. M. Taylor’s study of French verse as a communal, shared practice provides many instances of feasts both fictional and actual at which lyrics, often rondeaux, were performed and exchanged.46 These creative exchanges see lyrics valued for reasons other than their notional authenticity or sincerity. Lyrics are repurposed and recycled (just as Charles does when he translates 40 41 42 43 44 45

46

Arn, ‘Poetic Form as a Mirror of Meaning’, pp. 17–18; Spearing, Textual Subjectivity, pp. 228–29. These judgements are taken from Arn, ‘Structure of the English Poems’, pp. 18–19; and Arn, ‘Poetic Form as a Mirror of Meaning’, pp. 16–19. Arn, ‘Poetic Form as a Mirror of Meaning’, p. 17. Arn, ‘Structure of the English Poems’, p. 19. Taylor, The Making of Poetry, p. 3. Gabriel Haley has recently suggested that the roundels might be understood as an experiment in ‘autonomous formal practice’ (p. 14) and ‘unaffiliated aestheticism’ (p. 18), in which Charles ‘grapples with the potential for lyric to withdraw from all social obligations’ (p. 12): ‘A Story about Song: Narrative Ethics versus Lyric Isolation in Charles d’Orléans’s English Lyrics’, Essays in Medieval Studies 31 (2016), 11–23. This may be true if the roundels are contrasted with other narrative elements of Fortunes Stabilnes, but does not take account of the particular cultural saliency of the roundel form for Charles’s readers and the imagined community created in the jubilee section. See especially the examples given in the introduction and chapter 1 of Taylor, The Making of Poetry. More virtually, see the networks of citation and allusion traced between French and English poets by Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), chapter 7: ‘Lingua franca: The International Language of Love’. Philip Knox’s chapter 11 in this volume points out that the jubilee marks the moment at which a community of readers is imagined in Fortunes Stabilnes.

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and adapts one of Christine de Pisan’s ballades or translates and transforms a ballade written by Philip, duke of Burgundy into an English love lyric).47 Some lyrics share the same first line or refrain, written for the admiration of friends rather than composed for a lady. In his jubilee Charles creates a fictive version of such an evening of communal literary activity. The jubilee itself is designed to remind us to read without narrative specificity, to consume each roundel on its own terms. In presenting the roundels in this way, Charles shifts dramatically away from conventional modes of representation. In the jubilee, verse-form functions mimetically to show rather than tell. The jubilee is not recounted diegetically as a feast attended by a narrating first-person; rather, it is created by an ‘I’ for the second-person ‘yow’: ‘Instede of mete, ye fede yow shall with song’ (line 3115).48 It is not something that happens to an ‘I’ but something that an ‘I’ offers for us to experience.49 At first, the celebration is conjured up by figurative comparison, for just as diners often prefer a ‘deynte’ (line 3110), rich delicacies, and tit-bits in small dishes to ‘grose mete’ (line 3111) – that is a joint from a larger animal or bird – so small lyric forms are sweeter than larger ones. As the ‘I’ reminds us, the sweetest meat is found in the flesh of small birds such as larks and ‘quaylis rounde’ (line 3121). The plump roundness of the roast birds is thus a figure for the nature and name of his chosen form, ‘rundell’ (line 3119), whose circular form has closing lines which repeat its opening. The word roundel describes not only a lyric form but also things of a circular or spherical shape, and so the lyrics are also imagined as ‘disshis’ (line 3125) in which sweetmeats sit. Lovers, who, as popular opinion has it, live on glances, wishes, and fancies and so can easily be sustained by such dish- and bird-like songs, are instructed to ‘loke wherto ye haue yowre appetit / And seke hem in this disshis forthe among’ (lines 3124–3125), to find the poem that suits their mood among the buffet of roundel-dishes. The roundels are unmistakably not a series to be read in order but a pick-and-mix arrangement from which to make your own selection. 47 48

49

Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. Arn, pp. 209–10 (2054–2081 and notes), pp. 371–72 (6283–6314). Diane Marks explores what underpins these metaphors of poetry as food in both Charles’s jubilee and Dante’s Convivio: ‘Food for Thought’, in Medieval Food and Drink, ed. Mary-Jo Arn. ACTA 21 (Binghamton: CEMERS, 1995), pp. 85–97. One might compare Ardis Butterfield’s comment on the form of Gower’s Cinkante Balades: ‘His purpose is not narrative, but a kind of symposium of diegetic exchanges, compressed into one principal formal unit’ (‘Afterwords: Forms of Death’, Exemplaria 27 [2015], 167–82, at 178. [Special issue: Medieval Genre]).



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Charles also represents the post-feast rituals of grace, handwashing, dancing, wine, and spices by mimetic means. The grace and the washing are represented by subject matter alone, although Charles continues to sidestep diegesis (that is, he does not narrate these rituals as events which occurred in a fictional narrative). Grace takes the form of a short poem of ten rhyme royal stanzas praying to the God of Love on behalf of lovers, while a second rhyme royal lyric offers not washing but, semi-punningly, wishing in the form of a list of twenty lover’s wishes. The post-dinner dancing, drinking, and spices are previewed in the final stanza of this second lyric (lines 4480–4486), the host inviting his guests ‘to asay this sympil on’ (line 4481), to evaluate the next very minimalist lyric. Assaien means both the tasting of food or drink and the process of examining or exploring.50 The readers are thus enticed to use their formal knowledge to test out and to savour which parts of post-prandial hospitality and entertainment each lyric represents. The first lyric following is of three stanzas rhyming abaaab with very short lines of two syllables laid out on the page in three parallel columns, the next of three dimeter seizains, the next in decasyllabic lines, and the final three in the form of carols. The three caroles have French equivalents and are probably inserted here to represent the after-dinner dancing.51 The abaaab rhyme scheme and very short lines of the first miniature lyric are rare novelties rather than familiar forms.52 Charles here may be inspired by Christine de Pisan’s experimental rondeaux, two of four-syllable lines, two of two-syllable lines, and a final rondeau in which each line is a single-syllable word.53 Several of the fifteenth-century treatises on versification of the Seconde Rhetorique give examples of two-syllable miniature rondeaux as instances of novel technical challenges to be attempted by versifiers.54 In its miniaturised novelty form, Charles’s three-column lyric 50 51 52

53 54

MED ‘assaien’ (v.) 1a. and 1b. On the history of the carole and its long associations with dancing, see Robert Mullally, The Carole: A Study of a Medieval Dance (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). A search of Henri Chatelain, Recherches sur le vers français au XVe siècle: Rimes, mètres et strophes (Paris: Champion, 1908), finds only one example of the scheme abaaab, in a mystery play dated to 1485 (p. 121), suggesting it was not a standard literary form earlier in the century, and, as regards lyrics in two-syllable lines, only the examples by Christine de Pisan and those found in the seconde rhétorique treatises (pp. 202, 234–35) referred to in n. 54 below. Oeuvres poétiques de Christine de Pisan, ed. Maurice Roy. Société des anciens textes français 1 (Paris, 1886), pp. 183–85. Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique, ed. Ernest Langlois. Collection de documents inédits sur l’histoire de France (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1902), pp. 203, 227, 263, 285.

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might represent the exotic ‘spise’ (line 4483), small sweetmeats, little treats, and breath-freshening spices to chew, which accompanied the after-dinner wine. The lyric in dimeter seizains resembles the rhyme schemes used for French complainte, later adopted into English, forms which often survive with musical settings.55 This lament might be conceived as a song performed by one of the guests or by professional musicians at this imaginary feast. The following decasyllabic lyric begins with a speaker pledging his devotion to a ‘pece of tyre’ (line 4553). Arn glosses this as a piece of silk cloth from the city of Tyre in Lebanon, interpreting the poem as describing a souvenir or gift from a lover’s lady. Pece, however, here means a drinking vessel or wine cup and tyre a type of sweet wine imported from that city.56 This poem thus offers the comic monologue of a guest in his cups, praising the virtues of his wine.57 What is important to note is that no headings or link passages join together these little poems, no titles or rubrics give readers easily interpretable clues, and no elements of these after-dinner ceremonies are directly narrated. The reader must get to grips with the game of matching the lyrics’ content and form to the elements of social ritual which they might expect at a courtly feast. Charles anticipates a sophisticated readership cognisant of both French and English versification as well as musical forms. His imagined hospitality invites connoisseurs of music, literature, food, and courtly entertainment to join with him in the creation of this banquet. Although hosted by Charles, it is a feast which cannot be consumed without readerly perception and intuition. The jubilee cannot fully exist on the page, but must come alive in the mind of the knowledgeable reader, an aficionado who recognises and appreciates Charles’s generosity. Charles’s Legacy Although the roundels and the after-dinner lyrics have garnered less critical attention than the rest of Fortunes Stabilnes, they are given a privileged status in London, British Library MS Harley 682. Each roundel is copied at the foot of the page with space left above it, a layout shared by Charles’s personal copy of his French poems (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS fr. 25458) and by the fragments that remain of a second copy

55

56 57

On these lyrics, see Jenni Nuttall, ‘The Vanishing English Virelai: French Complainte in English in the Fifteenth Century’, Medium Ævum 85 (2016), 59–76, at 68–69. MED ‘pece’, entry 4b (a), and MED ‘tire’ (n.[3]), entry (c). Thus ‘draught’ and ‘formasid’ should be read literally rather than figuratively (see Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. Arn, note to line 4559, p. 505).



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of Fortunes Stabilnes.58 This space was not left for musical notation or for illustration: its purpose is unclear.59 The majority of these voids cluster in the jubilee section, with spaces before both the roundels and the after-dinner lyrics. Whatever may have been intended for these spaces, the voids set off and emphasise the roundels and post-prandial lyrics, suggesting that some further engagement of the audience was planned or expected. Charles’s personal manuscript also shows that the roundel form continued to be important for Charles and his English friends and readers.60 Of the nine English poems in Charles’s French manuscript which are not present in Fortunes Stabilnes, eight are roundels.61 One of the Blois English roundels has an acrostic naming ANNE MOLINS, who may have been a relative either of Adam Molyns, bishop of Chichester, or of Alice Chaucer’s father, Thomas.62 Molyns was part of the English delegation, headed by the earl and countess of Suffolk, which visited Charles at Blois in 1444 as it accompanied Margaret of Anjou on her journey to England to marry Henry VI. It is not clear whether these English lyrics were written by Charles or by English men and women of his acquaintance, but, if the six roundels and one ballade in English on pages 310–13 were, as has been suggested, copied by an English scribe in attendance on Suffolk’s party in 1444, they represent poetic commemoration of friendship renewed and of socialising during the Suffolks’ visit. Looking beyond the English verse in Charles’s own French manuscript to the literary legacy he left behind in England, it has been said that Fortunes Stabilnes’s influence on English verse is limited, perhaps only traceable to the Assembly of Ladies and Richard Roos’s translation of Chartier’s

58

59 60

61

62

Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. Arn, pp. 106–9, 121. This space is fully ruled in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS fr. 25458, and in the surviving ‘Oxbridge’ fragments but not in MS Harley 682. The scribe of MS Harley 682 also leaves space before the first sequence of ballades and at the start of the second dream vision. Taylor, Making of Poetry, pp. 86–87. The rondeaux were also preferred by those composers looking for lyrics to set to music. All of the eight lyrics by Charles which were given musical settings are rondeaux/roundels: David Fallows, A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415–1480 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 731–32. These poems are edited in Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. Arn, pp. 381–89. London, British Library MS Royal 16 F.ii, the collection of Charles’s French verse assembled initially for Edward IV, has three English poems which do not appear in Fortunes Stabilnes, all three roundels. One of these lyrics also appears in BnF fr. 25458, p. 310. The details in this paragraph are taken from Arn, Poet’s Notebook, pp. 136–44.

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La belle dame sans merci.63 Yet tracking the English roundel allows us to observe heretofore unnoticed influences of Charles’s roundels and his experiments in mimetic form on mid-century poetry. Among its various songs and lyrics, the Findern manuscript (Cambridge, Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.6, third quarter of the fifteenth century) has one roundel with its form presented accurately on the page, with medial and final repetition cued.64 The same manuscript also preserves a sequence of four further roundels, hitherto unrecognised because they do not have their medial and final refrains signalled.65 They are among the lyrics which may have been written by women; their supposedly atypical form (stanzas of five, three, and five lines) perhaps taken for granted, without further scrutiny, because of assumptions that these poems express untrammelled feelings rather than emotion refined through technical expertise.66 The majority of Fortunes Stabilnes’s roundels have a first unit of four lines, but there are nine with a five-line first unit which, if written without their medial and final repetitions, take exactly this 5/3/5 form (Roundels 9, 15, 17, 39, 41, 44, 45, 55, 56). The syntax of the four Findern lyrics allows for the repetition of some or all of the refrain (the first five lines of the poem) following the eighth and thirteenth lines, as is required by the roundel form. The four lyrics are spoken by a woman separated from her male lover: one welcoming the man’s return, one articulating her desire for his homecoming, and two pleading for his mercy in the light of her distress. The Barratt and Pearsall editions of these lyrics reorder the sequence in order to create a happy ending, placing the first lyric welcoming the lover’s return as the conclusion.67 Recognising them as roundels allows us to see them as something more akin, at least on a small scale, to Charles’s jubilee lyrics, 63 64

65 66

67

Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. Arn, pp. 38–39. The Findern Manuscript: Cambridge University Library MS Ff.I.6, ed. Richard Beadle and A. E. B. Owen (London: Scolar Press, 1977), fol. 53v (DIMEV 6309 = NIMEV 3948). Findern Manuscript, fols. 135r–136r (DIMEV 1044, treated as a single item; NIMEV 3878, in a different order, see following note). Arguments for female authorship of some of the Findern lyrics are made by Sarah McNamer, ‘Female Authors, Provincial Setting: The Re-versing of Courtly Love in the Findern Manuscript’, Viator 22 (1991), 279–310. Recent anthologisers of these lyrics note their ‘unusual’ form but offer no explanation for it: Derek Pearsall, ed., Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology of Writings in English, 1375–1575. Blackwell Anthologies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 404; Alexandra Barratt, ed., Women’s Writing in Middle English, 2nd edn. Longman Annotated Texts (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2010), pp. 290–93. Barratt edits these poems as a continuous sequence of stanzas of varying lengths, obliterating any sense of these four poems as a lyric sequence.



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where narrative coherence or sequence is not expected or desired. These five Findern roundels testify, as do other elements of the volume, to the dispersal of elite culture to the gentry families who assembled the manuscript. Other texts in the manuscript also respond to Charles’s poetry, so, while there may not be direct connections between the duke of Orléans and these Derbyshire families, the manuscript shows mid-fifteenth-century poets absorbing the new influences, both formal and conceptual, which Charles brought to English verse.68 Tracking the roundel post-Charles leads us to other authors who responded to his experiments in sequence and mimesis. The Oxbridge fragments of a copy made of MS Harley 682 indicate that Fortunes Stabilnes was of some interest to English readers.69 Booklet V of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16 contains first a sequence of lyrics now called The Lovers’ Mass, one of which is a roundel, and second the sequence of twenty lyrics which have been attributed to Suffolk.70 Unlike the rest of the volume, which was put together from booklets held by commercial book producers, the exemplar for these quires may have been provided directly by the commissioner of the manuscript, John Stanley, who was Suffolk’s custodian in early 1450 following his fall from grace.71 None of the latter group of lyrics is a roundel – which might argue against an association with the Suffolk circle – but one of the ballades is the ninth of the English poems which appear in Charles’s French manuscript and which may be linked to the visit of the earl and countess of Suffolk to Blois in 1444.72 Setting aside the question of their authorship, Pearsall emphasises the innovation and artistry of these poems as a ‘continuous sequence’ of lyrics purposefully put together by a single author, a literary form which suggests imitation of Charles’s poetic sequences.73 This observation can be extended 68

69 70

71 72 73

See Seth Lerer, ‘“The Tongue”: Chaucer, Lydgate, Charles d’Orléans, and the Making of a Late Medieval Lyric’, Chaucer Review, 49 (2015), 474–98, at 485– 94. Horobin’s chapter 10 in this volume points to the potential for a wider circulation of Charles’s poetry than we currently assume. Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes, pp. 122–23. For the text of the Lovers’ Mass, see The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Selection, ed. Kathleen Forni (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005), pp. 93– 100. For the Suffolk lyrics, see The ‘Suffolk’ Poems: An Edition of the Love Lyrics in Fairfax 16 Attributed to William de la Pole, ed. J. P. M. Jansen (Groningen: Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 1989). John Norton-Smith, intro., Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16 (London: Scolar Press, 1979), p. xiii. Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. Arn, pp. 385–86. Derek Pearsall, ‘The Literary Milieu of Charles of Orléans and the Duke of Suffolk, and the Authorship of the Fairfax Sequence’, in Charles d’Orléans in

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to the preceding text in the booklet, The Lovers’ Mass, which also builds lyrics (plus one piece of prose) into a linked series. Just as Charles hosts the feast for his second-person readers, so the first-person speaker of The Lovers’ Mass acts as the priest who creates this ritual for us, his readers. Moreover, as Charles uses mimetic form in his jubilee to represent elements of hospitality and feasting, so this text likewise proposes analogies between different types of love poetry and the first elements of the Mass. Unlike Charles’s jubilee, The Lovers’ Mass uses rubrics to assist its readers in relating literary form to liturgical structure. In the first three elements, subject matter, working in concert with these headings, creates the correlations between Christian ritual and the imagined lovers’ Mass.74 The Introibo, the words of the priest spoken as he approaches the altar, records the lover’s intention to worship and serve the God of Love. The Confiteor, usually the confession of the priest and servers, is the lover’s admission of his youthful inexperience in love, which he sorely repents. The Misereatur, the call to God to remit one’s sins, is a statement of the God of Love’s clemency to repentant lovers, given under the warrant of Venus and her ‘bisshop’ Genius (56). These first three elements are in tetrameter couplets, representing the ritual speech of the lover-priest as he recites the words of the Penitential Rite, more private preparation than communal worship. Couplets are, of course, a common narrative form, but here perhaps chosen by association with the inner world of the dream vision or dit, autographic writing in which a first-person voice speaks directly to a reader.75 In contrast to the three opening segments, more complex stanza-forms mark the shift to communal and musical elements of the Mass, beginning with the entrance hymn, the Officium. The Officium is represented by a roundel, a form which the scribe of MS Fairfax 16 handled accurately, correctly supplying the first few words of lines 1–2 medially and finally to indicate the refrain.76 The refrain’s reappearances approximate the repetitions of the antiphon in the introit proper. Given the narrow dispersal of the rondeau in England, the choice of the roundel suggests further association with the Orleans/Suffolk circle. The Kyrie, the first sung prayer appealing for divine mercy (but here a lament of lovesick despair), is represented by

74

75

76

England, ed. Arn, pp. 145–56, at pp. 155–56. For the elements of the Mass, see the introduction to Matthew Cheung Salisbury, ed., Medieval Latin Liturgy in English Translation. Documents of Practice Series (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017). On the dit, ‘a nonlyrical poetic discourse in the first person’, see A. C. Spearing, Medieval Autographies: The ‘I’ of the Text. The Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies, 2008 (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2012), pp. 55–64 (quoting from p. 55). Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16, fols. 314v–315r.



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internal rhyme dividing each line into three, these triple structures gesturing at the tripartite kyrie eleison, christe eleison, kyrie eleison. The Gloria or hymn of praise is composed in ten-line anisometric stanzas rhyming aabbcddeec, with the c-lines shorter (usually two-stress) and the other lines mostly four-stress. These stanzas are not in a recognisable literary rhyme scheme, so perhaps its form may be a pattern used in songs, appropriate here to evoke the Gloria’s musicality.77 Following this comes the ‘Oryson’ (the collect), an eight-line stanza rhyming ababbcbc in four-stress lines whose syntax shadows the familiar formulae of this type of prayer. The rhyme scheme of the ‘Oryson’, familiar as Chaucer’s ‘Monk’s Tale’ stanza, is a more recognisably literary form, often associated with moral exposition in fifteenth-century poetry and here embodying the return to prayer. The Lovers’ Mass stops short of representing the full liturgy, ending with an ‘Epystel in Prose’, the equivalent of the first Scripture reading. This epistle cites various of Chaucer’s works, allusions which have led to the work being treated somewhat dismissively as Chaucerian apocrypha (for example in the title of the volume in which it most recently appears). Yet, to label it thus is to overlook the affiliations which connect it with mid-century formal experimentation. It shares its mimetic mode of representation with Charles’s jubilee, exploiting the knowledgeable, communal pleasures of expertise and recognition. The Lovers’ Mass, the ‘Suffolk’ lyric sequence in Fairfax 16, the five roundels in the Findern manuscript, and Charles’s jubilee composed of roundels and other lyrics display, in various combinations, features which were novel and experimental in English versification. Even as English poetry consolidated its own distinctively Chaucerian and Lydgatian traditions, mid-century poets and readers continued to absorb new influences and to experiment with these fresh materials. Alongside the cultural exchanges facilitated by the dual monarchy, Charles’s long captivity in England played its part in fifteenth-century literary taste and fashion. In choosing in his jubilee feast to supply his audience with roundels in abundance, a choice reflecting this lyric’s currency and appeal in a particular time and place, he offered English poets new possibilities of form and representation.

77

I have not found a directly comparable verse form via searches in the Digital Index of Middle English Verse () and in Chatelain, Recherches sur le vers français au XVe siècle (1908).

4 A Grieving Lover: The Work of Mourning in Charles’s First Ballade Sequence B. S. W. BAROOTES

F

 ortunes Stabilnes is an emotional poem.1 It is a love poem that deals with the sorrows of the courtly lover. It is also the work of a poet who experienced protracted imprisonment and exile, an ordeal that manifests itself in the poem at various levels. Borrowing tropes from the two well-established traditions, the poet frequently blurs the experiences of the lover and the prisoner, showing the former to be shackled by his devotion to the lady, the latter to be ever so often half-in-love with enclosure.2 But Fortunes Stabilnes is also a poem formed around death, mourning, and the considerable labour of moving beyond grief. The poetic persona’s (first) beloved dies in the middle of the first ballade sequence, and the majority of the subsequent narrative is driven by, or responds in some degree to, that death. The speaker’s ensuing ‘Dream of Age’ and withdrawal from his service to the God of Love are direct consequences of the sorrow he feels due to his loss. Some, though not all, of the roundels that Charles produces at the Castle of No Care deal with his grief, too. The ‘Dream of Venus’ and its inset ‘Vision of Fortune’ are both prompted by Charles’s protracted mourning. Even the second ballade sequence that ostensibly chronicles his courtship of a second lady, which should be indicative of the Charles-persona having moved on, is haunted by the mourning series in the first ballade sequence.

1 2

All citations will be to Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes. The duke of Orléans is not alone in combining this pair of conceits with the dream vision. A contemporary prisoner of the English, James I of Scotland, also presented a prisoner-lover as dreamer in his Kingis Quair (c. 1430). On these two works, see A. C. Spearing, ‘Dreams in The Kingis Quair and the Duke’s Book’, in Charles d’Orléans in England, ed. Arn, pp. 123–44.



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Fortunes Stabilnes is not unique among English dream poems as a work concerned with mourning.3 Indeed, the insular adoption of the dream vision takes a particular interest in matters elegiac. An early Middle English dream vision, which bears the modern editorial title Somer Soneday, is intimately concerned with lamenting the death of a fallen king.4 The first datable dream poem written on English soil, Li regret Guillaume (c. 1339), is decidedly elegiac, having been commissioned from the court poet Jean de le Mote by Queen Philippa for her recently deceased father.5 Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess was written to memorialise Blanche of Lancaster, wife of John of Gaunt (d. 1368). The West Midlands Pearl, whether written in response to an actual death or no, is deeply invested in the human struggle for consolation in the wake of a traumatic death. John Lydgate’s Complaynte of the Lovers Lyfe (The Complaint of the Black Knight) is also concerned with the melancholy arising from loss. The English dream vision may depart from the French in several ways, but one of the principal thematic aspects of this difference is the prevalence of death and mourning in these poems. The insular dream poems use the oneiric vision to explore the effects of grief and the means by which men and women can process sorrow 3

4

5

Not all critics accept the whole of Fortunes Stabilnes as a dream vision. For instance, Spearing claims there are only two dreams in Charles’s English book, the ‘Dream of Age’ that begins at line 2540 and the ‘Dream of Venus’ that starts at line 4736 (‘Dreams’, p. 134); John Burrow claims the same thing in his contribution to this volume. The poet’s borrowing of key imagery from Guillaume de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, Guillaume de Machaut’s Voir dit, and Oton de Granson’s Songe saint Valentin in the opening scene suggests to me, however, that Charles intended his work to be read in the love-vision tradition. For instance, following the ‘wake-up call’ from Jeunesse and a brief debate, the speaker rises and dresses so that the two companions can journey to Love’s manor, blurring the distinction between waking and dreaming. See Fox and Arn, eds, Poetry of Charles d’Orléans and His Circle, lines 21–50 and 91–100. The poem is found uniquely in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 108, fol. 237r–237v. I accept the early dating of the poem, which takes the lament to be for the deceased Edward II rather than seeing it as a later poem intended for the deposed Richard II. The Bodleian’s online catalogue notes that the hand of Scribe D dates to the third quarter of the fourteenth century at the latest: . For a modern edition of the poem, see Rossell Hope Robbins, ed., Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 98–102. Jean de la Mote, Li regret Guillaume, comte de Hainault: Poëme inédit du XIVe siècle, ed. Auguste Scheler (Louvain: J. Lefever, 1882).

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productively. One of the methods that English poets often adopt is to draw parallels between the liminal states found in the dream-vision narratives – dreaming proper, but also half-waking or half-sleeping as well as insomnia – and the mourning experience; successful mourning or the arrival at consolation is thus presented as an awakening or ‘getting up’ after a long dark night of the soul. The Book of the Duchess provides a concise example. The Chaucerian narrator, suffering from an eight-year gloom stemming from the loss of a lady, presents himself as an incurable, listless, and unproductive insomniac (1–40).6 In the dream, the miserable Man in Black, the narrator’s counterpart, is so caught up in sorrow over the deceased Lady White that he has devolved into a near-catatonic state; after he utters a brief lament, his head droops again as he falls back into the dark silence of his grief (460–462, 475–498). Both melancholy men also exist in liminal states, muddling life and death, joy and sorrow, day and night. The dreamer-narrator reports that his ‘Defaute of slep and hevynesse / Hath sleyn [his] spirit of quyknesse’, and likewise that he cannot distinguish between the bright morning and the dark of night, for ‘al is ylyche … to [him]’ (25– 26, 9). The Man in Black, too, is twisted up in his grief and a dweller on several thresholds. The bereaved lover of Fortunes Stabilnes embodies these in-between qualities throughout his long suffering. For instance, while speaking to the goddess Venus he claims that he lives now ‘[a]s an ancre … in clothis blake’ (4802), enclosed religious commonly having been said to have ‘died to’ the world. He also qualifies his existence as ‘wandir[ing] vp & downe / Musyng in [his] wakyng dremys sad’ (4639–4640), a statement that combines both his lack of direction and his sense of living in two states simultaneously. Similarly, once he has lost his lady, he repeatedly questions whether he himself is now among the living or the dead (B 58, 2034; B 60, 2098). Nevertheless, Charles’s work takes the English (elegiac) dream vision that he inherits in new, formal directions. The duke came to the English tradition at least two decades after its foremost renovators left it forever changed: Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess dates to forty years before Agincourt at the latest, for instance; and Lydgate’s Black Knight started complaining sometime around the turn of the fifteenth century. But Charles is also a French poet emerging from a rich, parallel literary culture that continued to shape the dream vision on its own terms as the English genre developed simultaneously. He had probably read his de Lorris and de Meun, Machaut, and Froissart, as well as his Granson, Deschamps, de Mézières, and de Pizan before he ever found himself under the English lock and key. Then, once in Lancastrian captivity, Charles was exposed to the literary visions of Chaucer, his peers, and his early inheritors. Consequently, much 6

All Chaucer references are to the Riverside Chaucer.



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of Charles’s work can be thought of as a fusion, or perhaps what can best be described as an infusion, of the French tradition into the separately developed English (elegiac) dream vision. A Sudden Loss and an Attempt at Recovery: Ballade 57 Charles’s innovations are many – not least in the explicit, occasional blurring of the poet’s biography and the action of the poem – but several of his important contributions to the renovated genre are formal. One of the broadest strokes of his formal ingenuity comes in the overall structure of Fortunes Stabilnes, which demonstrates his ability to fuse the Continental and insular traditions while simultaneously moving both in a new direction. Several critics have read the dream narratives in Continental dits amoureux as mere scaffolding for the more artistically intricate lyrics: the dreamer-narrators (as agents of the poets) ‘envisage situations and attitudes which provide a context for inset lyrics’.7 In de la Mote’s Regret Guillaume, a very thin dream serves to introduce a procession of more than thirty lyrics by female mourners for the late Count William of Hainault. Machaut, too, often makes narrative structurally subservient to the lyrics enclosed therein. Some later French poets are more tempered in their mixing of modes. For instance, Froissart’s Paradis d’amour leaves plenty of space for lyric, but he also interweaves his narrative with his lyrics, using the latter to elaborate the development of his protagonist’s progress.8 English dream visions, by contrast, minimise the role of embedded lyrics. Three of Chaucer’s four dream visions contain short lyrics, but these intercalated poems are by no means dominant. The ballade in the prologue to the Legend of Good Women serves as something of an introductory flourish for the approaching court, while the roundel at the close of Parliament of Fowls functions as the birds’ climactic closing number. Lyric plays a more important narrative role in Book of the Duchess, where the Man in Black’s 7

8

W. A. Davenport, Chaucer: Complaint and Narrative. Chaucer Studies 14 (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1988), p. 61. See also James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 55–58. Keith Busby has suggested that Froissart uses his dits to investigate the tensions at play between the narrative and lyric modes; he claims that the two modes are engaged in a direct struggle: ‘lyric may be seen as trying to escape from the prison of narrative, or occasionally, … narrative may be struggling to impose discipline on an underlying lyric form’. See Busby, ‘Froissart’s Poetic Prison: Enclosure as Image and Structure in the Narrative Poetry’, in Froissart across the Genres, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 81–100, at p. 83.

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sorrow and his attachment to Lady White are exemplified through his two short lyrics.9 Later English dream-vision poets follow Chaucer’s lead, many foregoing inset lyrics altogether.10 Others maintain a lyric or two but show little to no interest in formes fixes or other formal experimentation. For example, The Kingis Quair includes a nightingale’s hymn to May, one stanza in length, but does not break from the rhyme royal stanza form in which the rest of the poem is written.11 The structure of Fortunes Stabilnes distinguishes it from both the French and the English dream-poem traditions. Unlike poems in the English tradition, the work includes a great number of formes fixes lyrics: 121 ballades, 103 roundels (originally), and a series of other poems in a variety of shapes. Unlike the French works under discussion, it makes sustained use of intercalated lyrics to advance narrative – particularly in the first ballade sequence. While Charles deploys ballades to create an overall sense of narrative, these lyrics do not always work in a strictly linear manner. Even the eighteen ballades that progress from the moment the lover learns of the lady’s sudden death (B 57), through an indeterminate period of grief (B 58–B 74), to the cusp of the ‘Dream of Age’ (the end of B 74) do not follow an orderly, step-by-step process of grief. There is indeed a narrative structure to the mourning ballades – just as there is an obvious story to the whole ballade sequence charting initial contact, the ebbs and flows of courtship, and loss – but its shape should be imagined as parabolic or gyral rather than linear. Where clear or ‘straight’ narrative shapes can be best discerned is in shorter suites of ballades within the sequence, two, three, or even five lyrics in length. The suite of Ballades 57–60 shows how Charles uses formal experimentation and innovation to open new ways for his 9

10

11

See Ardis Butterfield, ‘Lyric and Elegy in The Book of the Duchess’, Medium Ævum 60 (1991), 33–60. As Butterfield notes, the first lyric introduces the subject of White’s death and so reveals ‘the poem’s true function: elegy’ (p. 33); the lyric is thus ‘of vital importance to the poem’s consolatory structure and function’ (p. 34). The structure of the Man in Black’s first lyric, which departs from the regular couplets of the poem, indicates the cycle of grief in which the knight is trapped. Among the poems to omit lyrics from their dream narratives are John Clanvowe’s Book of Cupid, the anonymous Assembly of Ladies, and the Scottish Quare of Jalusy. The Flower and the Leaf makes passing reference to roundels through the quotation of two refrains, but does not include full lyrics. James I of Scotland, The Kingis Quair, in The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems, ed. Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005), pp. 31–79, lines 232–238. In the lone extant manuscript of the poem (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden B.24), the word cantus is written in the left margin next to the first line of the ‘lyric’ stanza.



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dream vision to interrogate and advance the work of mourning. I focus on the first four mourning lyrics in part because of the strong narrative drive that springs from the beloved’s death announced at the opening of Ballade 57. This initial narrative impulse may be seen as an immediate reaction to the severe disruption to, even the abrupt halt of, the love narrative that the loss of the lady brings. With his anticipated story in shambles, the newly minted non-lover tries to weave a new narrative. However, as the speaker’s verbal and poetic efforts unfold, doubt creeps in, and he suspects that these textual attempts at consolation may unravel. Ballades 58–60 consequently present a narrative that examines an alternate response to grief and the emptiness and loneliness that the elegiac speaker often confronts. In so doing, the poet expands the elegiac aspects of his poem, which heretofore had concerned matters of love and exile while worrying only about potential crises; now, with the loss of the lady, the poem moves from being more aligned with the Continental dit amoureux tradition toward the funereal, elegiac motifs that characterise insular dream visions. That Charles is conscious of such a move may be indicated by the opening of the mourning lyrics suite, given that the first lines of Ballade 57 deliberately echo the lament of the Man in Black in the Book of the Duchess (475–486).12 The unexpectedly bereaved lover calls upon the immediate source of his sorrow, seeking some answers: Allas, Deth, who made thee so hardy To take awey the most nobill princesse, Which comfort was of my lijf and body Mi wele, my ioy, my plesere and ricchesse? (1994–1997)

The world that Charles now inhabits is a world transformed, and he would rather die ‘[t]han langwysshe in þis karfull tragedy / In payne, sorowe, and woofull aventure’ (2001–2002). Each condition in which the mourning lover now dwells contrasts directly with the list of virtues that Charles identifies with his ‘most nobill princesse’ at the beginning of the lament: his wele is become payne, his ioy, sorowe, and the surety of his plesere and ricchesse has given way to woofull aventure. The lady was taken before her due time (2003–2004, 2007–2009), and for Charles her death likewise functions as a break from his past. In the third stanza he draws a clear distinction between the time, a ‘then’, when he 12

Like the Chaucerian Black Knight in his lyric and his protracted mourning speeches, Charles calls for his own demise (1998–2000). On the ‘Frenchness’ of Chaucer’s Duchess, see Ardis Butterfield’s chapter, ‘The English Subject’, in The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 269–307; for Charles’s specific inheritance, see especially pp. 304–7.

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served the living lady, and the ‘Now [when] is the loue partid twix yow and me’ (2014, emphasis mine). He likewise marks a spatial separation between his prior experience with his beloved and his present, solitary existence, when he promises to mourn her to the end of his days: ‘Here serue yow, ded, while my lijf may endure’ (2017, emphasis mine). The use of Here reinforces the sense of isolation that Charles feels at the opening of the third stanza – ‘Allas! alone am y out compane. / Fare well, my lady! fare well, my gladnes!’ (2012–2013) – for it stresses that the beloved is no longer in this world, the space where life and the grieving lover endure. This distance is graphically underscored further by enclosing her corpse, ‘ded,’ near the centre of the line: ‘Here serue yow, ded, while my lijf may endure’. The line also emphasises the textual nature of Charles’s prior devotion to his living lady and his avowed dedication to her memory. Here is not only the living world but also poetic space, where he proclaimed his love, where he worked through his amorous anxieties, and where he will, in the ensuing lyrics, preserve his beloved’s good name and perform the work of mourning. In these lines, these stanzas, and these forms, he will craft an appropriate monument to her even as he strives to create a structured process for his grief. And, to a certain extent, Ballade 57 encloses a model of effective, even successful mourning. Each of the stanzas of the ballade, from the opening apostrophe to the closing prayer, attends to a separate phase of the mourner’s response to the loss of his beloved. The first stanza, with its vocative address to a personified (but ultimately unresponsive) Death, exemplifies the shock and grasping helplessness of the suddenly bereaved. It also starkly presents the fact of death, appearing as it does so suddenly after two ballades in which, first, the lady’s illness has apparently abated and, second, Charles and his heart make repeated prayers to St Gabriel for further news of her recovery. The second stanza, while still superficially addressed to Death, shifts its focus to deal with the deceased herself, concentrating on, and beginning to mourn, her now lost youth and vigour, even imagining what might have been, had she lived to a ‘fair’ age. In the third and final stanza of the ballade the speaker ceases to speak to Death and instead addresses the dearly departed directly. The final stanza also reorients itself and concentrates on the surviving mourner and his vow to treasure her memory actively in mind and word. We thus are presented with a trajectory from the moment of death, to a lament for the departed and what has been suddenly lost, to a final farewell and promise to remember. While separately dedicated to a distinct phase of the mourning process, each of the stanzas in fact contains an element of the three movements. Stanza one, focused on the fact of death, begins with that fact but also includes an evaluation of the maiden’s virtues as well as a woeful plaint about Charles’s own relict status. In stanza two we likewise find that while the mourner begins with the beloved’s ‘eche good thing [in] plente’ (2003),



A Grieving Lover  109

he shifts to Death’s theft of her, before turning to his own piteous state. Death’s intrusion is demonstrated formally as well. In lines 2006 and 2008 a renewed address to Death ‘answers’ the rhetorical question about the lady’s blossoming perfection.13 The third stanza follows suit, although it begins with the said solitary state, before swiftly jumping back to the death of the lady and the ideal she embodied, and then leaping forward to his memorial promise before finally circling around to his ‘weypyng … / In payne, sorow, and wofull avenure’ (2019–2020).14 The envoy moves beyond this trajectory to complete the mourning process in terms of late medieval piety.15 Where each of the three main stanzas of Ballade 57 begins with an anaphoric statement of regret and complaint – Allas – in the envoy the speaker turns to address God (the Father in Heaven rather than sublunary Cupid). He prays that the lady be judged fairly and received into grace, so that her good sowle ‘now not ly / In payne, sorow, and wofull aventure’ (2024–2025). The divine apostrophe counters the initial, fruitless plea to Death: within the prevailing faith system of late medieval England and France there is no reason to doubt that this prayer would be heard and granted. Thus, by the envoy Charles has found some initial source of solace. The optimism of a successful prayer, once the lady rests in God’s grace, suppresses the doubt of language that the unanswered requests to St Gabriel and to Death spurred.16 Not only does the lover now imagine that his beloved will repose in celestial bliss, but he may hope that his own ‘prayers … of gret larges’ (2016) will not be empty words seen only by a ‘weypyng ey’ (2019).17 It is worth noting further that the refrain of the 13

14 15 16

17

The B rhymes, which had heretofore been strictly associated with her virtues (as indeed they are thereafter linked to Charles’s vow to celebrate the same), here mark the ‘rudenes’ (2006) of taking the lady ‘hastily’ (2009), instead of at an appropriate state of infirm old age (vnweldynes; 2007). On the play between linear and cyclical forces and temporalities in the lyrics, see Philip Knox’s contribution to this collection. On Charles’s devotion, see Gilbert Ouy, ‘Un poème mystique de Charles d’Orléans: Le Canticum amoris’, Studi francesi 3 (1959), 64–84. On the elegiac speaker’s doubts in the power of language to bring consolation, see, for instance, Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985), pp. xii–xiii; W. David Shaw, Elegy and Paradox: Testing the Conventions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 50–55; and Ann Chalmers Watts, ‘Pearl, Inexpressibility and Poems of Human Loss’, PMLA 99 (1984), 26–40. It is likely, I think, that line-end -ey is working as an enjambed, zeugmatic pun, serving as both the literal weeping eye of the mourner ‘[b]iwaylyng’ the lady’s death (2019) and looking ahead past the line break to the subject who – as witness to the lady’s life and (first) reader of the poetry to come in memoriam

110  B. S. W. Barootes

envoy (‘In payne, sorow, and wofull aventure’) marks the elegiac speaker’s development in two ways. First, this is the only instance where the refrain and lines leading into it do not concern Charles and his sorry state. In fact, with the exception of his implied presence as speaker, Charles (and his self-concern) is absent from the envoy. Second, and closely related, the envoy refrain is uniquely presented in the negative; that is, the speaker requests that his lady not be subject to pain, sorrow, and woeful circumstance. He has thus progressed to a state of grief that is not wholly caught up in the emotional turmoil and potential solipsism of the bereaved. In terms of both elegiac dream visions on the one hand and lessons about ineffective versus proper mourning on the other, we might compare the closing scene of Pearl, where the reawakened and re-educated dreamer commits his pearl-daughter to the Lamb’s keeping.18 Unfortunately, the pattern modelled here is not carried out consistently and clearly in the ballades that follow. Like all mourners who at first appear to collect themselves and seem strong, Charles falters time and again. The English Aftermath: Ballades 58, 59, 60 Despite the seeming closure of Charles’s commitment of the lady to God’s judgment and grace in the envoy of Ballade 57, the grief-stricken lover does not remain at ease for long. Each of the seventeen ballades that round out the first sequence explores the work of mourning from different perspectives, but Ballades 58, 59, and 60, are particularly revealing within the context of the larger work, for they have no French equivalents and thus identify the English book as the more overtly elegiac undertaking.19 These lyrics, which Arn describes as ‘exceptionally well-crafted’, demonstrate the nuance of the poet’s skill and the lover’s carefully plotted experience of grief as Charles experiments with the lyric sequence, pitting narrative progress against formal and thematic stasis.20 In this suite of three ballades Charles traces the progress from his immediate shock after Ballade 57 to a descent into emptiness, a sense of near-total isolation, and then a desire for silence in the wake of his inability to find absolute solace in words. Ballade 58 finds Charles unable to take joy from, or even participate in, any pastime:

18 19

20

– will persist and commemorate her; that is, ‘[I] / In payne, sorow, and wofull aventure’ (2015–2020). Pearl, ed. E. V. Gordon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), lines 1185–1212. In Charles’s French book, Ballade 57 is followed, quite logically enough, by Ballade 58, which in the English book is numbered Ballade 61 (‘Toforne Loue haue y pleyd at the chesse’). Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes, note to line 2026.



A Grieving Lover  111 In slepe ben leyd all song, daunce, or disport, Also prays of bewte, bote, or gentilesse Now Deth, allas, hath, to my discomfort, Enrayfid me my lady and maystres. (2026–2029)

Although he promised to maintain the memory of his lady in verse, Charles has (symbolically) set aside ‘all song’, but also ‘prays of bewte’ (her allegorical name), ‘bote, or gentilesse’ (2026–2027), and his dereliction is emphasised by carrying over the B rhymes (-es) from stanzas 1–3 of Ballade 57, rhymes predominantly linked to the lady. The sorrow of the ‘woofull hert … kan not cesse’ (2030), but the end of joyful activities causes the end of poetry as Charles once knew it: the songs in praise of beauty, nobility, and the boons of life. Poetry continues in the form of the mourning ballades themselves (we are reading one, after all), but the differences in theme, tone, and imagery emphasise the stark changes and underscore the loss. The association of sleep and death, an important trope in a poem dotted with visionary experiences and battles with insomnia, establishes sleep as a metaphor for the nullifying effects of grief. This nullification continues in the second stanza, where, anticipating Ballade 60, Charles ponders the absence he experiences: … what am y, quyk or deed? Nay, certis, deed, this am y verry sewre, For, fele y plesere, ioy, nor lustihed? Wo worthe the fate of my mysaventure! (2034–2037)

The rhyme and the metre of the first and third lines of this stanza combine to exemplify the mourner’s liminal state: his lack of ‘lustihed’ parallels the possibility that he is ‘deed’ and the regular, iambic metre of the query (‘quyk or deed?’: / u /) likewise matches this most vital of lover’s qualities (‘lustihed’: / u /), now unattainable. As Charles voids himself of all emotions beyond sorrow, he becomes detached from community and reduced to a veritable nothing: ‘[I] fynde my silf an outcast creature / For without hir of nought now lyve y here’ (2040–2041). Not only have his social links dissolved through the end of daunce and disport but the death of his lady has broken down the most important and central compact.21 Indeed, as Charles concludes in the third stanza, without his counterpart he moves further toward nothingness: ‘Me thynkith right as a syphir now 21

The mortuary slumber of ‘all song, daunce, or disport’ offers a sombre echo of the lady’s own blithe activity in the first chanson royal: ‘So well bicometh the nobill, good princes / To synge or daunce in all disport, trewly, / That of such thing she may be callid maystres’ (B 9, 449–451).

112  B. S. W. Barootes

y serue, / That nombre makith and is him silf noon’ (2042–2043). Like the zero, Charles now carries no value in and of himself and only gains significance when paired with another numeral – such as the on that he has lost (2152).22 The emptying out of Charles’s feeling and identity has an isolating effect, and this solipsism is explored in the subsequent ballade. While there is no equivalent to Ballade 59 in Charles d’Orléans’ French poems, there is one elsewhere in late medieval French poetry, for this lyric is a partial translation and reworking Christine de Pizan’s eleventh entry in her Cent ballades (‘Seulete suy et seulete vueil estre’).23 The ballade expands upon the images of Charles all alone (2012) and as ‘an outcast creature’ (2040) given in the previous two ballades.24 Each of the poem’s twenty-eight lines begins Alone. The first line repeats the word twice, at the head and tail of the line, putting an extreme and formal emphasis on the isolation of the speaker by enclosing him with loneliness. As Arn notes, ‘The Alone which stands at the beginning of each line does not simply function syntactically as a recurring adverb. It sometimes stands completely outside the syntactical structure and, like the tolling of a bell, punctuates rhythmically the lamentations of the poet.’25 The anaphoric repetition of the word is as much a reminder for the speaker himself as it is an insistent message for readers of the poem: the frequent utterance of alone comes to fill the space of the lyric where few other

22

23 24

25

See chapter 2 in this volume, p. 56, n. 44. A. C. Spearing, ‘Prison, Writing, Absence: Representing the Subject in the English Poems of Charles d’Orléans’, Modern Language Quarterly 53 (1992), 83–99, at 95–96. Arn observes how the Charles-as-zero image ‘echoes the nought of the refrain’ (Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes, note to lines 2041–2042). Robert Epstein sees a return of the cipher in the apostrophic ‘O’ that appears so frequently in the Ballade 60 (‘Prisoners of Reflection: The Fifteenth-Century Poetry of Exile and Imprisonment’, Exemplaria [2003], 159–98, at 175–76, n. 31). See Kenneth Urwin, ‘The 59th English Ballade of Charles of Orleans’, Modern Language Review 38 (1943), 129–32. See chapter 11 in this volume, pp. 277–78. The refrain of Ballade 59, ‘Alone y lyue, an ofcast creature’, offers a variation of line 2040. It also anticipates the use of the of the phrase in Roundel 94 (4285), which discusses Charles’s departure from Fortune’s favour. In the third part of the work, Charles likewise tells Venus that, for all her insistence that he is and should be a man, ‘A wrecche am y, an ofcast creature’ (4891). Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes, note to lines 2054–2081. She also points out that the scribe has offered graphic emphasis of the word by placing virgules after each instance of Alone.



A Grieving Lover  113

sounds are heard and acquires an oppressive weight as the repetitions build through three stanzas and an envoy.26 Whereas Ballades 57 and 58 chart some development over the course of the lyrics, Ballade 59 conveys little action; it is, rather, a meditative account of Charles’s ongoing duress, part complaint, part (ineffective) prayer for release. Several of the verbs pertain to degrees of existence – being (2054, 2062), living (refrain and 2072), and enduring (2059) – with a few exceptions, such as ‘Alone of woo y haue take such excesse’ (2078), which add dramatic detail to Charles’s lonely survival. Elsewhere, Charles characterises his mourning as a form of exile: he is ‘forlost in paynfull wildirnes’ (2063) where he ‘wandir[s] … in heuynes’ (2066). A considerable number of the verbs in the ‘Alone poem’ concern speaking or otherwise voicing sorrow. Throughout the course of his lamentation, Charles sighs and groans (2056), wails (2057), and curses his foul fate (2059). He rages (2068). And much of the third stanza is a by-now-familiar apostrophe to Death. However, in each instance the utterance is in vain. Along with the other hardships of enduring his plight, Charles is ‘withouten whom to make my mone’ (2064), which is a particular trial, we are told, since, without an auditor, he is unable to ‘redresse’ his ‘wrecchid case’ (2065), and thus is doomed to ‘wandir … in heuynes’ (2066). His only invoked interlocutor, Death, ‘most welcome Deth’ (2073), once again gives no indication of heeding his pleas.27 In short, he has no one to whom he can complain, and so catharsis eludes him. Charles despondently continues to speak, believing that empty, undirected, and ultimately unheard words may offer some form of solace: ‘Alone to rage, this thynkith me swetnes, / Alone y lyue, an ofcast creature’ (2068–2069). The ballade shows Charles as yet another voice crying hopelessly in the wilderness of grief, and the next lyric sees him moving toward abandoning all speech as a response to loss. Ballade 60 combines the tropes of Ballades 58 and 59 and rounds out the suite of poems that document the lover’s early reaction to the lady’s death. Picking up from the failing voice of the mourner in Ballade 59, this poem advances Charles toward a total embrace of silence. The ballade plays upon the paradoxes and inversions that confront the typical courtly lover and recasts them for the lover-as-mourner:

26

27

As Philip Knox observes in chapter 11 in this collection, the heavy droning of ‘alone’ becomes so insistent by the third stanza that ‘it becomes increasingly difficult to relate the repetitions … to the syntax of the long sentence in which they appear’. Indeed, he suggests, the second half of the stanza ‘is an almost musical interruption of the flow of language across the lines, punctuating the division between phrases and knelling ineluctably across the stanza’. See p. 278. Compare similar, unanswered calls in Ballades 57 and 58.

114  B. S. W. Barootes For dedy lijf, my lyvy deth y wite; For ese of payne, in payne of ese y dye; For lengthe of woo, woo lengtith me so lite That quyk y dye, and yet as ded lyue y. Thus nygh a fer y fele the fer is ny Of thing certeyne that y vncerteyne seche, Which is the deth, sith Deth hath my lady. O wofull wrecche! O wrecche, lesse onys thi speche! (2082–2089)

The starkly chiastic opening captures the bewildered, bereaved mind, a mind that turns in upon itself while simultaneously moving in contrary directions.28 The regular weighting of the contraries in the first four lines (two and three feet, respectively) gives way to the free flow of the fifth and sixth lines, which then slows again to the regular pacing with the mention of death, that certain thing, in the seventh line. Although the contraries are weighted in regular 2:3 proportion, Charles varies his iambic pentameter in line 2084 to emphasise his languorous suffering: u / u / / / u / u / For lengthe of woo, woo lengtith me so lite.29

The spondee slows the line to a crawl, underscoring the near-interminable duration of the sorrow he experiences, just as the immediate repetition of woo rings out – not unlike Alone – as a too-constant reminder of Charles’s condition. On his path to silence, Charles must quiet the apparatus of speech. He accordingly partitions himself in the second stanza, dividing body from soul, and subsequently objectifying and addressing portions of his dissociated, departing corpus: O gost formatt, yelde vp thi breth attones! O karkas faynt, take from this lijf thi flight! O bollid hert, forbrest thou with thi grones! O mestid eyen, whi fayle ye not yowre sight? (2090–2093)

The dissection of the living and sentient being testifies to the splintered sense of self that the mourner undergoes in the wake of his loss. Without a beloved, a lover is adrift without purpose, and a love-poet struggles to 28

29

The effect is reminiscent of both the dreamer-narrator and the Man in Black in Chaucer’s Duchess; Charles of course combines these roles as both dreamernarrator and mourner. For another reading of this ballade, see Andrea Denny-Brown’s chapter 9 in this collection. For a discussion of Charles’s use of metrical stress, see chapter 6 by Ad Putter in this collection.



A Grieving Lover  115

identify as a poet at all. As Charles stated in Ballade 58, he has become a cipher, an empty signifier. Charles begins by first separating the soul from the body. He then turns his attention to dividing the body. He moves from largest to smallest, suggesting an increasingly refined division. After disdainfully dismissing his body, Charles addresses his heart and his eyes.30 This order inverts the typical blazon of the body, as the speaker moves up rather than down; this reversed arrangement places him in opposition to that particular trope of courtly love poetry, marking him as an outsider. The focus on the two organs most closely associated with Charles’s love for the departed lady is also significant. Several of the earlier love ballades show the eyes as the primary point of access for the lady’s beauty to stir his heart and his mind.31 In Ballade 60 the mestid eyes, presumably clouded by tears, continue their gaze even though their object is no more. Like the lover, the eyes have outlived their purpose. Charles’s heart is the part of his being most often and most directly identified with amorous suffering and with emotional ebullition, including wailing, sighing, and groaning (B 8; B 43; B 56, 1985–1999). The bollid (swollen) heart, already near bursting with sorrow, is called upon to end his plaints in one final, cacophonous cry: ‘forbrest thou with thi grones!’ The envoy completes the speaker’s journey toward silence. Through three stanzas the refrain has been an address to himself, a gesture that builds upon Ballade 59’s focus on speech and the comment therein that he is without auditors (2064). The self-directed command of Ballade 60’s refrain – ‘O wofull wrecche! O wrecche, lesse onys thi speche!’ – exemplifies the alienation from, and fragmentation of, Charles’s sense of self in response to his grief. This fracturing causes Charles to stand apart from (we might say ‘beside’) himself, there and yet elsewhere, the sole witness to his ineffectual speech acts, and finally to appeal for an end to speaking.32 The envoy embraces this desire for silence by omitting the refrain:

30

31 32

The word karkas is most often used in Middle English to refer to the slaughtered bodies of livestock and, by extension, when used to refer to human corpora it invariably connotes derision. See MED, s.v. carcais. Compare Thomas Hoccleve’s Male Regle, line 350: ‘my carkeis repleet with heuynesse’, from Selections from Hoccleve, ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, [1981]). The images of the faint carcass and the swollen heart return in the second ballade sequence, where Charles catalogues the lover’s maladies: ‘The poore karkes so enfeblisshid is, / The hert in woo forswelt and so attaynt’ (B 99, 5841–5842). See, for instance, Ballades 3, 9, and 45; compare also Roundels 10, 22, and 30. The end of Ballade 60 also marks the first dramatic ‘beat’ in the mourning lyrics. Ballade 61, a poem in the chess-as-love and game-against-Fortune traditions (cf. Duchess, 652–741), dashes off in a new direction. Ballades 62 through

116  B. S. W. Barootes Ther nys no thing sauf Deth to do me day That may of me the woofull paynes eche, But wolde y dey, allas, yet y ne may! (2106–2108)33

Every ballade in the first sequence of ballades includes an envoy, and the scribe of London, British Library MS Harley 682 faithfully copies these in full.34 Ballade 60 is unique among the seventy-four ballades of Fortunes Stabilnes’s first sequence in that it lacks a refrain in the envoy. This omission is deliberate, I believe. After each of the 121 ballades in the manuscript the scribe leaves two blank lines; this is the case with Ballade 60, near the top of folio 41r.35 It would appear, then, that the scribe was satisfied that the third line of the envoy marked its end. Moreover, it seems too convenient, indeed too apt, that this ballade, the thrust of which appears to move so deliberately toward silence, should be the site of the scribe’s lone omission of a full line across 2,300 lines of formes fixes poetry.36 Thus, I believe that the absence of the final refrain line of the envoy is authorial and was faithfully reproduced by the Harley 682 scribe from his exemplar. The result is a considerable, dramatic beat. Three stanzas of refrain have prepared an audience for the familiar shout in the lyric mirror to cease and desist. The lack of such a call, a silence louder than any words, strikes a reader – and even more so a listener – by its very absence. In this respect it echoes Charles’s experience of loss and his efforts to grapple with grief. Just as the sudden death of the lady shook his world and challenged his identity as a lover (and as a poet), so too does this disruption of form stun readers or listeners, challenging our

33

34

35 36

64 continue the mourning series in different ways, each largely disconnected from the others. In her edition, Arn puts the refrain back in the poem in square brackets and counts it as line 2109 in keeping with Steele’s practice in the earlier EETS edition. The set of English ballades, B 75 to B 81 (2814–2981), which parallel the French ‘La Departie d’amours en balades’, 1–7, do not include envoys. Ballades 82–84 do include complete envoys. My thanks to Mary-Jo Arn for her advice based on her consultation of the manuscript microfilm. There is only one other, later instance in Fortunes Stabilnes where an entire line is missing (and subsequently supplied by the editor in square brackets). In this case (2957), too, the line in question is the final refrain of a ballade, though not in an envoy, for the ballade in question is B 80, one of the seven ballades lacking envoys. However, line 2957 is not truly omitted; rather, it has been erased – whether by the scribe, Reviser A, B, or some later hand – and thus its absence is likely not authorial. One blank line follows the erasure. See Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes, note to line 2957.



A Grieving Lover  117

conception of structure and order, if only in the formal microcosm of the ballade or the mesocosm of the lyrical sequence. Charles’s sonic cut-to-black may also be challenging his audience through a sort of unwitting participatory poetics. Having been conditioned to expect the refrain – not only in this ballade, but through the prior fifty-nine ballades, as well as through previous exposure to the form – our inclination may well be simply to supply the missing line, to blurt it out as it were. In so doing, Charles’s readers or auditors further isolate the mourner even as he manages a brief moment of self-assertion and autonomy. Whereas in the previous ballades Charles found his words falling on no ears but his own, in such an instance, when he yearns to be wrapped in silence, he would stand apart from, and against, a wall of sound. Alternatively, if an audience, whether a single reader or a group listening to a performance, is accordingly shocked by the refrain-shaped hole at the end of the ballade and remains silent themselves, then Charles achieves an important step in his work of mourning: he creates a community of fellow silence-observers. ‘all is broke and newe to make ayene’: Elegy and the Returns of Narrative Poetic elegies are an aspect of what Freud called ‘the work of mourning’: they are at once finished artefacts and the process of mourning; the action of composing elegiac poetry (and subsequent readings or performances) becomes the very means of working through that grief. In the poetry this process is often figured as a movement, metaphoric or physically represented, from grief to consolation. Other conventions include invocation, apotheosis of the beloved, a desire to bridge the gap between the quick and dead (possibly by dying oneself ), and the (annual) celebration and remembrance of the deceased.37 Each of these conventions can, of course, be readily found in Fortunes Stabilnes in Charles’s apostrophes to Death, the lady, and even himself; in his comparison of the dead lady to the phoenix (itself a trope found in earlier elegiac dream visions); in 37

See Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy, pp. 2–4, and a detailed examination of these conventions, pp. 18–31; see also Eric Smith, By Mourning Tongues: Studies in English Elegy (Ipswich: Rowan and Littlefield, 1977), pp. 1–13. For discussions of elegy in a specifically medieval context, see my ‘Elegy’, in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Medieval British Literature, vol. 2, gen. ed. Siân Echard and Robert Rouse, with associated eds Jacqueline A. Fay, Helen Fulton, et al. Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell), 2017, pp. 735–41; and Jamie C. Fumo, ‘The Consolations of Philosophy: Later Medieval Elegy’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman. Oxford Handbooks (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 118–34.

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his wish for a swift death; and in his vow to memorialise the maiden in verse. But there is much more to the ways in which Charles adopts the mantle of elegiac poet. The suite of Ballades 57–60 shows us Charles’s exploration of elegiac form in the instant aftermath of sudden (and traumatic) loss. We witness the first cry of sorrow and an appeal for answers, which give way to laments for she who was lost and he who remains. We are also privy to the elegiac speaker’s resolve to continue speaking, to use words to find a way, if not to restore her to life, then to keep her memory alive. And yet these ballades also testify to how, even when the speaker arrives at a moment of calm assurance amid turbulent grief, his faith in the power of words is tentative. When further efforts at creating verbal consolation fall short, he proceeds in the opposite direction, pursuing a path to speechlessness. Yet he does so by continuing the narrative of the first ballade sequence, demonstrating the way that mourning continues to haunt the formal experiments of Charles’s English work. The silence that Charles reaches at the end of Ballade 60 – whether in splendid isolation or in company with his audience – is a temporary state: he is of course speaking again at the outset of Ballade 61. He returns to his verbal efforts at consolation again and again, hoping, like all elegiac speakers, that this next time (or the next) he will succeed in full. Just as the opening of Ballade 58 belies the seeming closure of the speaker of Ballade 57 committing his beloved to God in the envoy, so does each of the fourteen lyrics that follow Ballade 60 negate the step into silence. And yet these subsequent ballades do not invalidate that experiment with silence. Instead, they remind us that the elegiac poem, and indeed the whole work of mourning, is never over. Something (someone) is always missing. And so something must always be done. Each mourning lyric, each text, that seems to be ‘tied up’ thus invariably leaves its own loose ends. And each elegiac poem thus invites not only another reading but another, new poem to follow. A lyric from later in the sequence of mourning ballades demonstrates the way Charles’s work carries on. Ballade 67 is a tomb poem in which the speaker describes a process of monumentalisation, moving from the funerary ritual to the ornate sepulchre that preserves the lady’s memory. These undertakings correspond to the promise Charles makes in the third stanza of Ballade 57, where he commits himself to serve his deceased lover through spoken remembrance. He begins by giving an account of the memorial service for his beloved that he sponsored and describing the way the ceremony proceeded: I haue the obit of my lady dere Made in the Chirche of Loue full solempnely And for hir sowle the service and prayere,



A Grieving Lover  119 In thought waylyng, haue songe hit hevyly, The torchis sett of Sighis pitously Which were with Sorow sett aflame. (2297–2302)

As in the suite I discussed earlier, we see a concern with language and utterance. Charles’s initial account touches on elements of speech four times, invoking the ritualised utterances of the service and ordered prayers (2299) and setting the emotional chaos of ‘waylyng’ against structured (if ponderous) ‘songe’ (2300). The torches themselves have a linguistic source, being ‘sett of Sighis’. Like the brands composed of inarticulate exclamations, The tovmbe is made als to the same Of karfull cry depayntid all with teeris, That here, lo, lith withouten dowt The hool tresoure of all worldly blys. (2303–2306)

The fairy-tale casket constructed of cries and decorated with shed tears adds to the sense of defamiliarisation, even otherworldliness, that accompanies loss, grief, and the mourning process. The legend carved around the tomb reflects contemporary sepulchral ornamentation, but strives to exceed its grasp.38 Together with the transformation of the karfull cry into a building material, the stony legend here evinces the elegiac speaker’s desire for a lasting, ideally eternal, memorial to his beloved. The petrification of writing is an important topos for poetic mourning – in the fifteenth century as much as in the first and the nineteenth. St Augustine writes that spoken language is mundane and temporally bound, ‘sound[ed] in time’, one syllable after the other, and leaves the world with the silence that comes at the end of an utterance.39 So language, too, ‘nys but even a thyng in vayne’ (B 64, 2205r). In Ballade 67 Charles thus seeks a more permanent form of expression and a more secure form of preservation for ‘the hool tresoure of all worldly blys’. The lithic language that Charles here conjures provides for perpetual discourse. Even where success seems at hand with the close of the ballade – his beloved kept in an idealised coffer, the coffer enclosed 38

39

Charles may here be inspired by, and drawing on, tombs and related elegiac poetry with which he was familiar, including the tomb of Blanche of Lancaster that John of Gaunt commissioned from Henry Yevele and had built at old St Paul’s, London. For Chaucer’s possible engagement with this tomb, see Phillipa Hardman, ‘The Book of the Duchess as Memorial Monument,’ Chaucer Review 28 (1994), 205–15. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), 11.6.8 (p. 225); cf. 11.23.29 (p. 237); and On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green. Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 13–14.

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in the repeatable form of the lyric – Charles begins elegising again in Ballade 68, preparing his last will (2365) and testament (2339), ready to be placed on his own bier. Individual fixed-form lyrics provide important outlets and opportunities for the poetry of grief and the work of mourning. The emotional intensity associated with these forms, inherited from the courtly love tradition (including the dits amoureux), can help the speaker to channel his sorrow. Where the death of the beloved introduces a shocking discontinuity into the survivor’s life, the repetition that characterises fixed forms also exerts an element of control over the unexpectedness of, and sudden, drastic changes brought on by, that loss. As Peter Sacks writes, ‘the repetition of words and refrains and the creation of a certain rhythm of lament have the effect of controlling the expression of grief while also keeping that expression in motion’.40 Repetition thus serves several simultaneous purposes: its imposition of regularity counters the emotional chaos unleashed in the mourner; and the vitality that repetition insists upon – echoes, continuity, cycles – seems to overcome the finality of death. Yet the repetition of lyric can be a trap, keeping the mourner in an unproductive circuit of grief from which complete and lasting consolation cannot be derived. This is the state in which Chaucer’s Duchess-dreamer finds the miserable Man in Black; leaving lyric and telling the tale that discloses the fact of White’s death is what ultimately frees the Man from his pit of despair.41 The Fortunes Stabilnes dreamer-mourner, similar in so many other ways to his Chaucerian predecessor, is less susceptible to the eddying repetition of lyric mourning. The productive, constructive, and active elements of narrative in the ballade sequence lend a decided forward momentum to poetic mourning. The temporal flow of a narrative sequence, however short or oblique, stands in opposition to both the stasis of death and the potential vortex of lyric ‘mobility’. The narrative arc of Fortunes Stabilnes is long, and I believe it tends toward consolation – but it does not finally reach its ultimate end. I have described the narrative structure of the first ballade sequence as parabolic or gyral; we might equally imagine the consolation vector therein to be asymptotic – ever approaching the goal but never quite attaining it. Charles several times appears to pass through ‘gates’ of consolation, achieving degrees of relief, but ones that remain both fleeting and incomplete. For example, near the end of the first ballade sequence (B 72) he presents himself as ‘awakening’ into a bright morning, and the subsequent ‘Dream of Age’ 40 41

Sacks, The English Elegy, 23. See, among others, George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1915), p. 52; and R. A. Shoaf, ‘Stalking the Sorrowful H(e)art: Penitential Lore and the Hunt Scene in Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 78 (1979), 313–24.



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leads to his withdrawal from Love's service and his quasi-retirement at No Care. However, Charles’s jubilee of roundels remains concerned with his relationship and with the loss of his beloved, betraying his lingering grief as much as it continues the act of memorialisation promised in Ballade 57.42 In his dream colloquy with Venus, Charles admits that he still dwells with sorrow (4814–4819), a conceit that matches his assertion in Ballade 58 that he is ‘[d]wellyng no more with ioy nor yet gladnes’ (2032). He deploys minor narrative recollections of his courtship and how he has dealt with her final absence (4821–4864), which begins a process of further recovery. This dialogue with Venus and the inset ‘Vision of Fortune’ result in an informal return to Love’s service. But the second ballade sequence, supposedly devoted to his new love, is haunted by the memory of Charles’s first lady and the sequence through which he courted, and then mourned, her. We see it in the diction; we hear it in the rhymes; we feel it in the poetic devices.43 In the end, despite the achievements made through the process of narrative mourning, the form of grief remains.

42 43

For lyrics concerning her death, see Roundels 65, 94 and 101. The exuberant, anaphoric greetings through the first stanza of B 98 echo and elevate the glad tidings of Charles being admitted into the lady’s grace in B 47, just as the stanza-long parting salutation of the final ballade, ‘As for farewel! farewel! farewel! farewel! (B 121, 6504) recalls that first goodbye in B 57: ‘Allas! alone am y out compane. / Fare well, my lady! fare well, my gladnes!’ (2013). Similarly, the image of the sorrow-swollen heart in the last ballade, ‘Mi bollid hert doth so his sikis rore’ (B 121, 6510), invokes the same bollid hert groaning its way into silence in B 60.

5 Charles d’Orléans’ English Metrical Phonology ERIC WEISKOTT

W

hen writing syllabic poetry in his native French, Charles d’Orléans contributed to two poetic traditions, the line of eight syllables (octosyllabe) and the line of ten (vers de dix). When he came to translate his French poetry into English and to compose new English poetry, Charles employed the corresponding accentual-syllabic metres, tetrameter and pentameter.1 These metrical choices in a second language necessarily held a different cultural-historical significance, since the French and English literary fields did not develop in lockstep.2 Whereas the other three metres 1

2

See Ad Putter’s chapter 6 in this volume. In both languages, Charles also uses a shorter line of four syllables, as in R 57 and Fortunes Stabilnes, lines 4505–4552, and even an ultra-short line of two syllables, as in R 54.2–3, R 54.7–8, and R 54.11–12, and Fortunes Stabilnes, lines 4487–4504. Additionally, in French Charles writes lines of five syllables, as in R 89; six, as in R 137; and seven, as in R 36. All the French poems cited in the previous sentence are in Charles’s hand in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS fr. 25458. Citations of Charles’s French poetry are from Fox and Arn, eds., Poetry of Charles d’Orléans and His Circle. Citations and quotations of Fortunes Stabilnes are from Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes. On Charles’s metres, see Arn, ed., Fortunes Stabilnes, pp. 83–88 (English); Fox and Arn, eds., Poetry of Charles d’Orléans and His Circle, pp. liv–lv (French); and Martin Duffell, Chaucer’s Verse Art in Its European Context. Medieval and Renaissance Text & Studies 513 (Tempe: ACMRS, 2018), pp. 153–155 (French). I warmly thank B. S. W. Barootes and Boyda Johnstone, who organised the paper panel ‘Charles d’Orléans: Forms and Genres’ (53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2018), at which I presented a condensed early version of this chapter; as well as Mary-Jo Arn and R. D. Perry, for expert comments on drafts of this chapter. I take the concept of the literary field from Pierre Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York:



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were centuries old by the time of the battle of Agincourt, Geoffrey Chaucer’s pentameter dated only to the 1380s. The Parliament of Fowls and Troilus and Criseyde were the first substantial works in this new English verse form.3 French also had no equivalent of alliterative verse, the first metre in English. William Langland’s bestseller Piers Plowman lent alliterative verse prominence in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century London literary culture. The presence of alliterative verse on the English literary scene made tetrameter and pentameter more marked formal departures than either of the major French metres. Among the challenges facing Charles in English versification was metrical phonology. That is, he had to decide how to map the English language onto English metre. Notice that I have said ‘decide’. Linguists assume that metrical language mirrors spoken language, but I understand metrical phonology as a culturally contingent component of metrical style. Like other components of style, it varies according to its own historical logic. I propose to demonstrate that Charles’s English metrical phonology was aberrant. In French metre, Charles employed the full range of obsolescent final -e’s that tradition had handed down.4 By contrast, he versified without much of the historical baggage of English metre, likewise packed into certain final -e’s in the fifteenth century.

3

4

Columbia Univ. Press, 1993) and Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995), esp. pp. 214–77. While scholars have traditionally assigned some of Chaucer’s short poems (all in pentameter aside from Proverbs), the Second Nun’s Tale, parts of the Monk’s Tale, and Anelida and Arcite (tetrameter/pentameter) to the late 1360s and 1370s, the dating of all these poems is debatable. See the Riverside Chaucer, pp. xxvi–xxix (the standard model), and Kathryn Lynch, ‘Dating Chaucer’, Chaucer Review 42 (2007), 1–22 (doubts), esp. 7–9 (metre). Quotations of Chaucer’s poetry are from the Riverside edition. For instance, B 1.1 Belle, bonne, nompareille (adjs.), B 1.6 faille (vb.), B 1.6 destresse (n.; rhymes B 1.8 maistresse), B 1.7 Comme celle (conj.; pron.), B 1.8 seule maistresse (adj.; n.; maistresse rhymes B 1.6 destresse), B 1.10 Force (n.), B 1.14 toute lïesse (adj.; n.; lïesse rhymes B 1.16 maistresse), B 1.16 seule maistresse (adj.; n.; maistresse rhymes B 1.14 lïesse), B 1.18 ose dire (vbs.), B 1.20 puisse (vb.; elision vie user), B 1.22 mette (vb.), B 1.22 jeunesse (n.; rhymes B 1.24 maistresse), and B 1.24 seule maistresse (adj.; n.; maistresse rhymes B 1.22 jeunesse). In my scansion of B 1, which is in vers de dix, I assume elision of final vowels before a vowel or h-.

124  Eric Weiskott

Charles’s English Metrical Landscape It will be convenient to begin with a capsule description of the London English metrical status quo before Charles arrived on the scene.5 Langland and Chaucer shared a linguistically conservative metrical phonology, one that included historical forms of words from Old English, Old French, Old Norse, and Latin alongside contemporary spoken forms. Take the word ‘tale’, for example (throughout this chapter, ‘S’ represents a stressed syllable, and ‘x’ represents an unstressed syllable or the equivalent after elision of adjacent vowels):        Sx x x Sx Piers Plowman B.1.9  Of ooþer heuene þan here holde þei no tale