Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer (Polyglot Encounters in Early Modern Britain, 1) 9782503598147, 2503598145

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Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England

Polyglot Encounters in Early Modern Britain Volume 1

Series Editors

Laetitia Sansonetti, Université Paris Nanterre & Institut Universitaire de France Ladan Niayesh, Université Paris Cité Editorial Board Marie-Alice Belle, Université de Montréal John Gallagher, University of Leeds Jane Grogan, University College Dublin Ton Hoenselaars, Universiteit Utrecht Sarah Knight, University of Leicester Sophie Lemercier-Goddard, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon Jean-Christophe Mayer, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique /​ Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l’Âge Classique et les Lumières, Montpellier Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Nigel Smith, Princeton University

This series has benefited from funding by Institut Universitaire de France

Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England Translation, Transmission, Transfer

Edited by

Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin

F

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

© 2022, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978-2-503-59814-7 e-ISBN: 978-2-503-59817-8 DOI: 10.1484/​M.PEEMB-EB.5.127293 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper. D/2022/0095/14

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgments

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Contributors

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Introduction Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin 13 Roots, Germanic and Latinate English as a Hybrid Language 1. An Expanding or a Fragmenting Lexicon? Some Possible Approaches to Loanwords, Lexical Change, and Multilingual Practices in Early Modern English Philip Durkin 33 2. ‘A little mint where you may coin words for your pleasure’: Cant and Linguistic Currency in Dekker’s Rogue Pamphlets Jean-David Eynard 57 3. Strange Roots in Roman Shakespeare Iolanda Plescia 81 Language and Universality The Transmission of Religious Dogma and Philosophical Concepts 4. Writing Catholic, Translating Protestant: English Translations from French in the Sixteenth Century Susan Baddeley 103 5. Bacon’s English and Latin Expositions of the Doctrine of Idols: Their Common Features and Differences Élodie Cassan 123 6. A Universe over the Channel: The Circulation of John Wilkins’s Universal Language Scheme in Early Modern Europe Fabien Simon 139

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Transnational Poetic Communities Appropriating Continental Models 7. Petrarchism as the European Language of Poetry: The Example of ‘Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura’ Enrica Zanin and Rémi Vuillemin 171 8. Traducing Ronsard: Larceny and the Poet in English Love-Lyrics, 1582–1591 Pádraic Lamb 195 9. Echo’s ‘Repercussive Voix’: Ovidian Echo Poems in Early Modern England Agnès Lafont 221 The Languages of Artistic Transfer Music and the Visual Arts 10. ‘Their Ditties Englished’: Naturalizing French Lyrics Chantal Schütz 247 11. Miniatures in Translation: Words for a Gentle Art Anne-Valérie Dulac 273

Index 293

List of Illustrations Figures Figure 1.1. Classification of immediate origins of words in the Oxford English Dictionary.

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Figure 1.2. Donor languages which have contributed the most words to OED’s word list.

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Figure 1.3. Absolute totals of French and Latin loanwords from 1150 onwards in OED.

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Figure 1.4. The data from Figure 1.3 presented as a proportion of all new words in English, as recorded by OED.

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Figure 1.5. Date of first attestation for loanwords among the 1000 most frequent items in the British National Corpus.

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Figure 1.6. Proportion of French loanwords in each OED frequency band, by date of first attestation.

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Figure 1.7. Proportion of Latin loanwords in each OED frequency band, by date of first attestation.

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Figure 2.1. Annotations by Robert Burton in Thomas Dekker, 70–71 The Belman of London.  Figure 6.1. Plate with Chinese characters, John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language.

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Figure 6.2. The characters for the forty Genera, with modi­ fications for Differences and Species, John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language.

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Figure 6.3. The Lord’s Prayer as a linguistic comparison tool, John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language.

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Figure 6.4. The pronunciation of the Philosophical Language, John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language. Figure 6.5. The Lord’s Prayer in the Philosophical Language, Johann Friedrich Fritz and Benjamin Schultze, Orientalisch- und occidentalischer Sprachmeister, 1748.

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Figure 6.6. Letter by Andrew Paschall to John Aubrey using the ‘Real Character’ in 1677.

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Figure 8.1. Map of Ronsardian ricochets.

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Figure 9.1. Thomas Watson, Hekatompathia or Passionate centurie of loue diuided into two parts: whereof, the first expresseth the authors sufferance in loue: the latter, his long farewell to loue and all his tyrannie. Composed by Thomas Watson Gentleman; and published at the request of certaine gentlemen his very frendes, Dr.

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Figure 9.2. William Percy, Sonnets to the fairest Cœlia, C2r.

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Figure 9.3. William Smith, Chloris, or, The Complaint of the Passionate Despised Shepheard.

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Figure 10.1. French court-aires, with their ditties Englished, of foure and five parts. Together with that of the lute… Collected, translated, published by Ed: Filmer, Gent: Dedicated to the Queene, fol. 5.

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Figure 10.2. French court-aires, with their ditties Englished, of foure and five parts. Together with that of the lute… Collected, translated, published by Ed: Filmer, Gent: Dedicated to the Queene, fol. 24.

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Tables Table 1.1. French and Latin loanwords in each of OED’s frequency bands. Table 8.1. Chronological list of Ronsardist writings discussed.

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Acknowledgements The series of encounters from which this volume originates took place before two events which have changed the way scholars in general, and European scholars in particular, can work together: the Covid pandemic and Brexit. As we look back on past exchanges and forward to renewed discussions, we would like to thank the colleagues who gave us their expert opinion on parts of the book, hoping for further opportunities of collaborations. We also wish to thank our respective institutions for their support: Université Paris Nanterre (and the CREA research unit) and Université de Strasbourg (and the SEARCH research unit), as well as Institut Universitaire de France, which has funded the ‘Translation and Polyglossia in Early Modern England’ project (led by Laetitia Sansonetti) and has partly subsidized the publication of this volume. We are very grateful to Ladan Niayesh, general co-editor of the ‘Polyglot Encounters’ series (the other co-editor being one of the editors of the present volume), and to Guy Carney, our publishing manager at Brepols Publishers, for their invaluable help at every step of the way, to the editorial board for their trust in our book to launch the series, as well as to our anonymous Brepols readers for their engagement with the volume and their invaluable suggestions. We would like to extend our thanks to our eagle-eyed copyeditor, Katharine Bartlett.

Contributors Susan Baddeley is Professor in Early Modern English Studies at Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin (Paris Saclay), and a member of the DYPAC research centre. She specializes in sixteenth-century written culture, and especially in Anglo-French cultural transfers (the teaching of French in England, French–English translation, and bilingual lexicography). She is the author of several books and articles on these subjects. Élodie Cassan holds a PhD in the history of philosophy. She is a member of the IHRIM research centre (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon). Her research bears on the genesis of early modern philosophy. Her publications include an edited collection of essays, Bacon, Descartes: Genèses de la modernité philosophique (2014), an edited special issue of the journal Perspectives on Science, Logic and Methodology in the Early Modern Period (May/June 2021, ), and a monograph, Les Chemins cartésiens du jugement (2015). Her book Descartes, Chomsky: le langage de la raison is forthcoming, and she is currently working on a new translation of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum into French for Garnier publishers. Anne-Valérie Dulac is Associate Professor in Elizabethan Studies at Sorbonne Université. Her research interests and publications focus on watercolour and portrait miniatures in early modern England. She is currently preparing a monograph on limning in early modern drama and poetry and a critical edition and translation into French of Nicholas Hilliard’s treatise on the art of limning with Céline Cachaud (École du Louvre, EPHE). Philip Durkin is Deputy Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary. His research interests include etymology, the history of the English language, especially lexis, loanwords in English, language contact, and multilingualism. He is the author of The Oxford Guide to Etymology (2009), and of Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English (2014). He has edited The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography (2015), and is currently preparing The Oxford Handbook of Etymology. Jean-David Eynard is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. His doctoral research investigates the importance of discord as a rhetorical and aesthetic principle in the early modern period, showing its influence on English epic writers. Further research interests include sound studies, economic criticism, and early modern theories of language.

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Agnès Lafont is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English Studies, Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, and a member of the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-Classical Age, and the Enlightenment (UMR 5186 CNRS). Her recent work on classical mythology in Renaissance England includes two co-edited collections of essays, Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (2017), and Breaking the Image in the Renaissance (2019). She is Assistant Editor of Cahiers Élisabéthains and a contributor to the Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Classical Mythology (). Pádraic Lamb is completing his PhD thesis at the Centre des Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours and teaches at Université Lumière Lyon 2. His research centres on Renaissance theories and practices of poetic inspiration, as well as Anglo-French literary relations. He has published articles on invocations in Shakespeare and Heywood, on James VI and I’s French poetic models, on inspiration in Spenser and Sylvester’s sonnet translations, and on Stephen Batman. Iolanda Plescia is Associate Professor of English at Sapienza Università di Roma. Among her research interests are stylistics, the history of the English language, the history of Italian-English translation, with special regard to the early modern age and the twentieth century. She has translated Henry VIII’s Letters to Anne Boleyn into Italian (first Italian edition, 2013), and published translations of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (2015) and The Taming of the Shrew (2019). She is editor of the special issue of Memoria di Shakespeare, ‘The Shape of a Language’ (2016), and co-editor of Elizabeth I in Writing: Language, Power and Representation in Early Modern England (2018). Laetitia Sansonetti is Senior Lecturer in English (Translation Studies) at Université Paris Nanterre and a junior fellow of Institut Universitaire de France. Her recent publications include two co-edited volumes: Auteurs-traducteurs (2018) and The Early Modern English Sonnet (2020). Her research bears on the reception of classical and continental texts in England, poetry and rhetoric, and questions of authorship and authority. Her current research project on ‘Translation and Polyglossia in Early Modern England’ (https://tape1617. hypotheses.org/) is funded by a five-year grant from Institut Universitaire de France.

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Chantal Schütz is Professor of English and Head of Languages and Communication at the École Polytechnique. In 2013 she published a critical bilingual edition of Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, my Masters with Garnier publishers. She was a Leverhulme scholar at Reading University seconded to the Globe from 1996 to 2000. Her recent work includes papers on Shakespeare and music; Middleton’s Black Book, A Mad World, my Masters, Microcynicon; John Dowland; Shakespeare and opera; Shakespeare in performance at the Globe; Harington’s Preface to Orlando Furioso (Englished) and its echoes in recent translators’ prefaces. Fabien Simon is Associate Professor in Early Modern History at Université Paris Cité, and a member of the ICT research centre. His research focuses on the history of knowledge and especially on the part played by languages within its elaboration and its circulation. He has co-edited L’Europe des sciences et des techniques (xve–xviiie): Un dialogue des savoirs (2016). His other publications include articles and book chapters on early modern universal languages or collections of languages. He is currently coordinator of the ANR Programme ‘Linguistic Indies. European reception of non-European languages, development and circulation of linguistic knowledge (16th–19th centuries)’ (2021–2025). Rémi Vuillemin is Senior Lecturer in early modern English literature at Université de Strasbourg. The author of a monograph on Michael Drayton’s sonnet sequences, Le Recueil pétrarquiste à l’ère du maniérisme: poétique des sonnets de Michael Drayton, 1594–1619 (2014), his work bears on the early modern English sonnet, its reception past and present, and early modern poetic theory. Recently, he has co-edited two collective volumes, Strasbourg and the English Reformation (2018) and The Early Modern English Sonnet (2020), and he is currently working on a project on the framing of lyric collections. Enrica Zanin is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Université de Strasbourg. Her work is mainly concerned with the circulation of Renaissance Italian literary models and poetics in early modern Europe. She has published two monographs on early modern drama and dramatic theory and she is now leading a project, funded by a five-year grant from Institut Universitaire de France, on the European circulation of short fiction, from Boccaccio to Cervantes.

Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin

Introduction As the increased circulation of people and texts within early modern Europe contributed to enhance language contacts and to reshuffle hierarchies between classical languages and vernacular tongues, the interactions between European languages enabled the expansion of vernacular lexicons from sources other than Latin or Greek. This volume argues that polyglossia, as embedded in specific material forms, held a major role in the shaping of literary communities, be they local, national, or international, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Being chronologically at the tail end of the Renaissance, geographically on the margins of Europe, and linguistically hybrid, early modern England is a good test case for the study of language contact and language mixing in literary texts.1 This collection of essays considers how language shapes identity in social, religious, philosophical, artistic, and literary contexts, and is in turn shaped by claims of social, religious, philosophical, artistic, and literary identity. It offers a reflection on the dialectic between community understood as a pre-existing (linguistic, social, religious, political) entity, which a given text will target, and community as a group in the making, as an awareness of common interests generated by the reception of a given text. It aims to account for both centripetal and centrifugal effects of community building by analysing its complex dynamics of inclusion and exclusion.

 1 In his 1578 manual for English learners of Italian, John Florio summarizes pithily the linguistic consequences of England’s geographical isolation as a problem in outward communication: ‘It [English] is a language that wyl do you good in England, but passe Dover, it is woorth nothing’. At the same time, he insists playfully on the multilingual nature of English: ‘It taketh many words of the latine, & mo from the French, & mo from the Italian, and many mo from the Duitch, some also from the Greeke, & from the Britaine, so that if euery language had his owne words againe, there woulde but a fewe remaine for English men’ (Florio, Florio his firste fruites, 50r–v). On the multilingual origins of English, see Durkin, Borrowed Words; Jefferson and Putter ed., Multilingualism in Medieval Britain (c. 1066–1520); and Wright ed., The Multilingual Origins of Standard English. Laetitia Sansonetti ([email protected]) Senior Lecturer in English, Université Paris Nanterre & Institut Universitaire de France Rémi Vuillemin ([email protected]) Senior Lecturer in early modern English literature, Université de Strasbourg (SEARCH, UR2325) Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer, ed. by Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin, PEEMB 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 13–30  10.1484/M.PEEMB-EB.5.127784

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Our conceptual matrix is the notion of commonness, which the volume develops as language commonality, the fact of sharing a language, and literary community, the group of writers and readers defined by the circulation among them of a shared body of works that they all understand (and others do not). While the written productions studied here vary in terms of genres and formats, ranging from the religious pamphlet to the treatise on limning via the sonnet sequence, they share a common feature, their use of a specific language within a defined group of cognoscenti, be it the metaphors of Petrarch’s love-poetry (whose European avatars are analysed in the third section) or the concepts of natural philosophy (the topic of the fifth chapter). With the growing interest in continental vernaculars and the lasting social prestige of classical languages, English writers and readers shared more than one language, having access to and knowledge of several tongues in varying degrees of proficiency.2 As Neil Rhodes has underlined in his study on the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England, translation played an important role in making foreign literature common in England, more readily available and therefore maybe less elitist, but also more easily assimilated by English identity.3 John Florio, in his Italian-English dictionary, offered the following English equivalents to the Italian verb volgarizzare: ‘to publish, to translate, to make common, to spread abroad’.4 The building of communities through the use of a common language was crucial to the development of literary coteries and, on a larger scale, to the expression of national loyalties.5 The two levels were interdependent in early modern England, as appears from a famous rhetorical question asked by Edmund Spenser in a letter to Gabriel Harvey and analysed by Richard Helgerson: ‘Why a Gods name may not we, as else the Greekes, have the kingdome of oure owne Language’?6 National sovereignty is not only a metaphor for how literature — poetry in the specific case of the Harvey–Spenser correspondence — can rely on, develop, and enrich a local vernacular, it is both the condition and the product of a thriving vernacular literature.7 The ever-growing output of printed books over the period contributed to expand readerships: literacy was facilitated by easier access to printed texts at the same time as the ability to read and/or write could place people in

 2 See for instance Gallagher, Learning Languages in Early Modern England; and Lawrence, ‘Who the Devil Taught Thee So Much Italian?’.  3 Rhodes, Common: The Development of Literary Culture.  4 Florio, A Worlde of Words, s.v. volgarizzare.  5 The notion of a literary community is thus broader than that of a ‘literary circle’ — about which see, for instance, Summers and Pebworth ed., Literary Circles and Cultural Communities.  6 Spenser and Harvey, Three proper, and wittie, familiar Letters, p. 6. See introduction and chapter 1 in Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood. On Three Letters, also see Sansonetti, ‘The Harvey-Spenser Correspondence’.  7 See, in France, Joachim Du Bellay’s Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse from 1549, itself adapted from Sperone Speroni’s Italian 1542 Dialogo delle lingue.

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different categories according to their levels of proficiency in either skill.8 It has thus become customary to speak of ‘literacies’ in the plural rather than the singular.9 The degree of literacy we consider in this volume is quite high compared to the basic skills of signing one’s name, for instance: the authors of the works studied were at least bilingual — some by trade, in the case of translators. As for their readers, there was probably no perfect homogeneity among them, as some may have been monolingual and others plurilingual. But what the following essays highlight is that the more plurilingual the readers, the better they can understand even texts that are apparently monolingual, and the more intimately they will feel they belong in the inner circle of the concentric communities the text creates around itself. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined community’, we would thus like to argue that language circulation created multilingual contexts for plurilingual exchanges, in a period before, as Anderson puts it, ‘capitalism and print created monoglot mass reading publics’.10 The chapters that make up this volume aim to explain how communication worked in literary communities defined by a multilingual awareness and made up of monolingual or plurilingual individuals. The term ‘polyglot’, which gives its title to the series of which Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England is the first volume, has seemed apt to encompass both multilingualism and plurilingualism, all the more so as it takes its origins in printing, with the ‘polyglot Bibles’ printed in early modern Europe.11  8 Although their respective accounts of the impact of printing in early modern Europe have been nuanced or challenged, Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change; McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy; and Ong, Orality and Literacy, remain useful. Also see Chartier, The Order of Books; Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, in particular chapter 8; Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance. An overview of the topic and of the related controversies can be found in Fox and Woolf, ‘Introduction’. Also see Richards, Voices and Books in the English Renaissance, pp. 7–10.  9 On literacy in early modern England, see Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order. Thomas, ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’, envisions a hierarchy of literacy skills. For the use of ‘literacies’ in the plural, see Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England, chapter 2, and Sanders and Ferguson ed., Literacies in Early Modern England, in particular their introduction.  10 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 43. Although it focuses on the Industrial Revolution, Anderson’s work is often referred to in discussions of early modern feelings of nationhood, especially Anderson’s anthropological definition of a nation as ‘an imagined political community’ (p. 6). Also see Shepard and Withington ed., Communities in Early Modern England. In accordance with standard practice, here ‘multilingualism’ means the use of more than one language within a group of speakers, while ‘plurilingualism’ refers to one person’s ability to speak several languages and to switch between them.  11 The editorial practice of providing parallel versions of the sacred text in several (ancient) languages was a European phenomenon that spanned the period covered in this volume, as polyglot Bibles were printed in Spain (with the ‘Complutensian Polyglot’ of 1514–1522), in Antwerp (Biblia Polyglotta, commissioned by Spain too, 1568–1573), in Paris (Guy-Michel Lejay’s work, 1645), and in London (Brian Walton’s in 1657). See for instance Mathiesen, The Great Polyglot Bibles.

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And of course, as a compound derived from Greek, it illustrates the processes by which early modern English could increase its lexicon by tapping the resources of foreign languages.12 Interest in early modern translation and its role in shaping English literature is not new of course: Mary Augusta Scott published her review of Elizabethan translations from the Italian over a hundred years ago, and F. O. Matthiessen called translation ‘an Elizabethan art’.13 The past twenty years or so have witnessed a development in interlinguistic and intercultural approaches to early modern literature that rely on translation studies, and this volume will try to bring its own contribution to the field. Such works are usually of two kinds: some focus on interlinguistic exchanges between England and one continental country, mostly France and Italy, whose respective languages had the highest status among vernaculars at the time;14 others have a much broader scope, most prominently the influential work of Peter Burke on ‘languages and communities’ throughout Europe.15 This volume stands in between, highlighting the multilingual (and not just bilingual) dimension of textual exchanges, while the main focus remains on one country, England, and the several continental countries with which it had literary exchanges over the period. A growing body of research centres on the enduring role of Latin as lingua franca in early modern Europe, and the interplay between Latin and vernacular languages in multilingual contexts has emerged as one fruitful topic of investigation in this volume, especially as English, being a marginal idiom at the time, could not claim any right to serving as Europe’s communication language.16 ‘Latin’ itself is a plural language which has evolved through time, and this volume testifies to the variety of ‘Latins’ juxtaposed in early modern England: classical Latin (see Lafont for the role of classical Latin literature as a common language between vernacular poets and Plescia for the cultural prestige wielded by words derived from Latin in Shakespeare’s England), forms

 12 See ‘polyglot, adj. and n.’ in the Oxford English Dictionary. For more on ‘polyglossia’ in early modern England, see the ‘Translation and Polyglossia’ project led by Laetitia Sansonetti ( [accessed 9 December 2021]).  13 Scott, Elizabethan Translations from the Italian; Matthiessen, Translation: An Elizabethan Art.  14 On France and England, see: Demetriou and Tomlinson ed., The Culture of Translation; Hillman, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Politics of France; Mayer ed., Representing France and the French; Martin and Melehy, French Connections in the English Renaissance; Melehy, The Poetics of Literary Transfer; Saenger, Shakespeare and the French Borders of English. On Italy and England, see: Marrapodi ed., Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare; Marrapodi ed., Routledge Research Companion to Anglo-Italian Renaissance Literature and Culture; Yarrington, Villani, and Kelly ed., Travels and Translations; Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England. On the triangulation between France, Italy, and England incarnated in John Florio, Italian teacher and translator of Montaigne, see Boutcher, ‘A French Dexterity, & an Italian Confidence’.  15 Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe.  16 Bloemendal ed., Bilingual Europe. Latin and Vernacular Cultures; Hass and Ramminger ed., Latin and the Vernaculars in Early Modern Europe.

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of mixed Latin inherited from medieval contact with emerging vernaculars (as appears in Eynard’s study of Latin cant and Durkin’s analysis of late medieval and early modern borrowings), and neo-Latin, which grew as a revival of classical Latin (see in particular Cassan and Simon).17 Most chapters study the impact of foreign works and languages on English literature via translation into English, but some also consider how English literature tried to reach wider readerships, and more generally how English culture managed to spread in Europe (Cassan, Simon, as well as Dulac on miniaturists). In chronological terms too we have aimed for a middle way between sharply focused studies of multilingualism in one author or group of authors and much broader surveys that bracket the early modern period with the Middle Ages or with the Enlightenment.18 So while the extreme chronological boundaries are the late fourteenth century at one end (with the chapters on lexical borrowings and on Petrarch) and the early nineteenth at the other (with the chapter on Wilkins’s universal language scheme and its European reception), overall the works discussed in the volume were published between 1500 and 1700. Some chapters deal with a relatively short period (Eynard, Plescia, Cassan, Lamb, Lafont, Schütz) and others span over a century (Durkin, Baddeley, Simon, Zanin and Vuillemin, Dulac). An approach relying on translation studies ensures that the early modern period is not considered in isolation by highlighting the interplay between horizontal and vertical translation.19 Translation studies themselves have taken a ‘cultural turn’ under Susan Bassnett and Henri Lefevere’s lead.20 Recent work on translation in early modern England provides insight into the cultural, social, and material conditions of production of translations, unravelling the processes by which texts are printed, circulated, and read.21 The material dimension of polyglot encounters

 17 On neo-Latin, see Moul ed., A Guide to Neo-Latin Literature, in particular Moul’s definition of neo-Latin as ‘Latin writing in a broadly classical style and in a range of both classical and post-classical forms and genres’ and her reminder that it ‘was a central part of the cultural landscape of Renaissance and early modern Europe at least until 1700’ (p. 2).  18 For collective volumes of the first kind, see for instance Delabastita and Hoenselaars, Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare. For examples of the second kind, see Bloemendal ed., Bilingual Europe. Latin and Vernacular Cultures; Frijhoff, Kok Escalle, and Sanchez-Summerer ed., Multilingualism, Nationhood, and Cultural Identity; Helfers ed., Multicultural Europe and Cultural Exchange.  19 On vertical and horizontal translation, see Stierle, ‘Translatio Studii and Renaissance’, as well as Folena, Volgarizzare e tradurre; on these processes in early modern England, see Rhodes, ‘Introduction’, in particular pp. 32–33, and Morini, ‘The Superiority of Classical Translation’, in particular pp. 274–75.  20 Burke and Hsia ed., Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe; Höfele and von Koppenfels ed., Renaissance Go-Betweens; Newman and Tylus ed., Early Modern Cultures of Translation; Barker and Hosington ed., Renaissance Cultural Crossroads; Schmidt ed., Elizabethan Translation and Literary Culture. On the ‘cultural turn’, see Bassnett and Lefevere, Translation, History and Culture, and Bassnett, ‘The Cultural Turn in Translation Studies’.  21 Armstrong, ‘Towards a Spatial Early Modern Translation Studies’; Belle and Hosington, ‘Translation, History and Print’; Belle and Hosington ed., Thresholds of Translation;

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in print is paramount in many chapters of this volume, with reflections on choice of type and printing techniques to fuse or set against each other the several languages and cultures present on the same page (Baddeley, Simon, Lamb, Lafont), on the technical requirements dictated by the type of work translated (Schütz on musical scores), and an account of manuscript forms of writing (Eynard on marginalia by Dekker’s readers, Simon on private correspondence among literati and unpublished works, Dulac on manuscript treatises on limning).22 Translation studies have also enriched our understanding of the processes through which English literature shaped itself in the early modern period by showing how — to borrow Ton Hoenselaars’s terms — ‘multilingualism in literature may well capture the most basic identifying experience of the language, of the medium on which a nation’s literature relies for its very essence’.23 Taken in its etymological broad sense of ‘transfer’, translation crosses over into and, in the early modern period, often merges with other intertextual phenomena such as adaptation and imitation.24 In texts influenced by foreign languages through various transfer mechanisms, individual style needs to be located within concentric communities, local and national, but also international,25 as linguistic features both determine and are determined by rhetorical/communicational strategies (a point that is highlighted in all chapters here). As the intense translating activity that was characteristic of early modern England reveals, closer contact with a growing number of foreign texts on a large scale both raised awareness as to the importance of a national language and literature and collapsed barriers between ‘monolingual’ and ‘multilingual’ within English itself. The following chapters see the relation between language commonality and literary communities in the context of polyglot exchanges as a dynamic process, in which the circulation of texts and lexicons can involve more than two languages and countries, bringing together vernaculars and the classical languages from which they derive — partly, in the case of English. Members of a community do not necessarily share one space, or navigate between just two: European polyglot communities of readers are formed across divides, be they geographical and political borders, religious conflicts, or linguistic differences, even if all members of the community are not plurilingual.26

 22  23  24  25  26

Boutcher, ‘The Renaissance’; Braden, Cummings, and Gillespie ed., Oxford History of Literary Translation; Coldiron, Printers Without Borders; Hosington ed., Translation and Print; Pérez Fernández and Wilson-Lee ed., Translation and the Book Trade. On these issues see Stenner, The Typographic Imaginary. Hoenselaars, ‘Introduction’, p. xvi. Also see Oakley-Brown, ‘“Have you the tongues?”: Translation, Multilingualism and Intercultural Contact’; Tudeau-Clayton, Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness. See Burrow, Imitating Authors. Plato to Futurity. See Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style. The phrases ‘without borders’ (in the title of Anne Coldiron’s monograph mentioned above) and ‘crossroads’ (in the title of Barker and Hosington’s edited collection, as

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These communities extend not only in space but also in time: they can be synchronic, forming elite coteries or wider networks of contemporaneous readers, but they can also bridge time gaps in a diachronic movement involving authors and the texts they produce, their successive translators and adaptors, and readers.27 The three chapters that make up the first section deal with roots, opening the volume with a reminder that English itself has multilingual origins. Philip Durkin proposes a lexicographical study of the mixed linguistic roots of late Middle and early modern English. Jean-David Eynard locates Thomas Dekker’s playful etymologizing account of thieves’ cant within the context of early modern debates over linguistic invention. Iolanda Plescia brings together literal and metaphorical uses of the word ‘root’ in some of Shakespeare’s plays. Philip Durkin adopts a diachronic perspective to study loan words and borrowings in late Middle English and early modern English, over a period going from 1325 to 1700. Combining a data-driven approach and a methodology relying on close reading within the framework of contact linguistics, Durkin’s two case studies, or ‘word biographies’, illustrate the mechanisms at work in Middle English lexical borrowings. The examples of ‘douce’ and ‘carry’, both borrowed from Anglo-Norman, reflect the extensive trilingualism among the literate in late medieval England, with Anglo-Norman, Latin, and English being used as working languages. Durkin shows that in many cases of borrowings, when Latin and French lexical or morphological features were similar, it is difficult to ascribe a loanword to one donor language or the other: rather, a more likely scenario is that of an input from both languages. By raising methodological issues related to the referencing of borrowings in historical dictionaries and drawing attention to how words are used in context, this study sheds light on the interplay between linguistic and stylistic motives in borrowings: types of texts are relevant, as are rhetorical issues, such as the positive valuation of copia verborum, which was an incentive to resort to lexical borrowing. Durkin’s analysis of a wide array of occurrences explicates a rich multilingual situation of language contact and its lasting consequences on the English language. Jean-David Eynard provides an insight into the literary treatment of a community’s specific jargon, thieves’ cant, by Thomas Dekker in Lanthorne and Candle-Light, showing how the playful derivation of this underworld language from Latin is highlighted by Dekker to critique the social prestige of

well as the online catalogue compiled under the supervision of Brenda Hosington at [accessed 9 December 2021]), are much more than apt metaphors. On the term ‘transnational’, which we use later in this introduction, see Boutcher, ‘Intertraffic: Transnational Literatures and Languages’.  27 Our approach thus differs slightly from Shephard and Withington’s, especially with regard to the fourth and fifth elements in their list of six constituent parts: ‘the geographical places in which [community] was located’; ‘the time in which it was done and perpetuated’ (Shepard and Withington, ‘Introduction’, p. 12).

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Latin by assimilating its academic speakers to knaves. But by the same stroke, Dekker raises the profile of cant by offering his readers many clues on how to coin cant words, thus giving them the key to become canters themselves, in words if not in deed. By encouraging linguistic creativity and fashioning it upon the language of thieves, Dekker upsets hierarchies within the English language. Dekker’s satiric use of cant serves him to enter the current debates on linguistic invention, crystallized in the controversy over ‘inkhorn’ terms which pitted against each other the Anglo-Saxon and Latin/Romance origins of the English language. Dekker’s early seventeenth-century pamphlets can be seen to belong in the strand of literature written in response to the criticism voiced by prominent sixteenth-century figures such as John Cheke and Thomas Wilson against excessive recourse to terms and structures borrowed from foreign sources, be they classical languages or continental vernaculars. Eynard brings to light the crucial role of thieves’ cant in Dekker’s linguistic reflection by tracing the monetary metaphor which shapes his discourse, and more generally early modern debates about how to enlarge the English lexicon: coining and minting were financial prerogatives as well as linguistic processes. In her study of roots in Shakespeare’s Roman plays, Iolanda Plescia muses upon the diverse meanings of the term ‘root’, from the linguistic to the botanical, and their interplay in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. Availing herself of concepts forged by recent developments in intercultural studies, such as ‘interlinguicity’ and ‘intrelinguistics’,28 Plescia explores plays like Coriolanus and Cymbeline to unravel the kaleidoscopic meanings of the word ‘root’, which functions as a nexus to think of identity and community, but also to understand the workings of communication. She highlights the expressive value of words depending on their Germanic or Latinate roots as they are used by characters performing etymology, building an individual and collective ethos through family, national, and linguistic genealogy. This chapter reveals the importance of antiquity in claims to prestige, for peoples and languages alike, as it is dramatized by the encounters between Britons and Romans in Cymbeline and between Romans and Volscians in Coriolanus. The salience of the word ‘root’ in a play like Sir Thomas More, which alludes to more recent conflictual encounters between ‘natives’ and ‘foreigners’, indicates how the joint issues of linguistic power and political superiority staged in the Roman plays echo the reflection on language hierarchy which was at the core of early modern endeavours to establish English as a language of prestige, on a par with Latin and Romance languages. The next section tackles questions of communication between languages, and between England and the Continent, by focusing on the role played by translation in spreading knowledge of topics considered to be of universal relevance, namely religion and philosophy. Susan Baddeley shows how sixteenth-century French Catholic texts were translated into English and  28 See Blank, ‘Introducing “Intrelinguistics”’.

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imported into England through processes of adaptation that made them compatible with the prevalent religious dogma after the Henrician Reformation. Élodie Cassan analyses Francis Bacon’s translations of his own philosophical works from English into Latin as a form of bilingual writing, highlighting his double aim: to reach a wider audience outside England and to forge sound philosophical concepts. Fabien Simon reviews the reception of John Wilkins’s universal language scheme. Though its aim was to put an end to language diversity and thus to the need for translation, it paradoxically ended up being circulated in translation and generating multilingual exchanges. In her analysis of a corpus of Catholic texts translated from French into English between 1500 and 1600, Susan Baddeley offers a typology of processes by which the English translators adapted the source texts and made them acceptable to Protestant readers. She identifies three main strategies which reveal the complex negotiations that took place in those translations: omission, the use of polyvalent words, and the choice of visual devices. Words (or even longer passages) that are too closely associated with Catholic ritual can be left out of the translation altogether. Linguistic and doctrinal divergences can also be overcome by choosing words whose polysemy makes them easier to be enlisted to the Protestant cause — starting with the word ‘Catholic’ itself. Conversely, to distance the translation from its Catholic environment, words specific to Protestantism combined with typographical enhancing devices serve to set the text firmly in its new context. Baddeley’s analysis shows that English translators could reject the doctrine but amalgamate fluid notions to acknowledge France’s lasting cultural prestige, achieving both ‘foreignization’ and ‘domestication’, to use Lawrence Venuti’s terminology.29 From the point of view of religious history, this chapter sheds light on the circulation of religious ideas and texts between France and England; from a linguistic point of view, the range of equivalents proposed as translations for various terms allows us to gain a better understanding of the meanings and, especially, of the connotations that were attached to them at the time. Élodie Cassan focuses her study of the bilingual dimension of Francis Bacon’s philosophical language on one of the most famous passages in The Advancement of Learning and its enlarged Latin translation, De augmentis scientiarum (1623) — the exposition of the doctrine of idols. Starting from the fact that ‘idol’ is a concept elaborated in Latin by Bacon, she shows that Bacon’s use of Latin in his philosophy is motivated by his wish to broaden his readership beyond a limited English-speaking community, but also by his very habit of thinking in Latin. Not only did Bacon translate an English work into Latin, he inserted Latin quotations and references into his English works, dealing with sources and authorities such as Cicero in their original languages. Even his criticism of medieval Scholasticism is phrased in Latin. For practical as well as for conceptual reasons, Cassan explains, Latin remains  29 See Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility.

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the language of philosophy for Bacon. Bacon’s bilingual practice as evidenced in his self-translation, or rather his rewriting of The Advancement of Learning, fuels his reflection on broader issues related to how language can express meaning and describe things, which is an important element in the doctrine of idols. More generally, in his search for an adequate philosophical discourse, Bacon chooses his language based on accurateness and on propriety of style considering the subject matter at hand. The to-and-fro movement between English and Latin serves to assess the claims of language as a reliable means of philosophical communication, and to offer definitions that underline its status as a cultural production. Fabien Simon’s study of the English and European reception of John Wilkins’s universal language scheme highlights the role played by multilingual exchanges in debates on universal communication. Both as a clergyman and as a natural philosopher, Wilkins was intent on finding common ground, and he devised his abstract philosophical language as a tool for sharing knowledge, based on the categories of natural classification. While his model was mathematical, algebraic, the main text which he chose to illustrate his scheme was the Lord’s Prayer, as a token of religious universality. His method relied on a comparison between existing languages, of which he compiled over fifty in his Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668). Simon follows the development and reception of Wilkins’s scheme adopting an approach indebted to the ‘history of knowledge’30 to highlight both the specific context of this endeavour, notably the role of the Royal Society of which Wilkins was a founding member, and its essentially transnational dimension. Importing models from the Continent (French and Italian academies) and circulating his works through translation, Wilkins takes part in a multilingual two-way circulation of texts and ideas which illustrates the marginal status of English in Europe and the lasting authority of Latin in erudite communication. Although it failed as a universal language, Wilkins’s scheme nonetheless succeeded in gathering a community of literati who were part of the European Republic of Letters and who shared and discussed it in several languages. The third part of the volume turns to poetry, a genre in which individuality and community meet, as a poet’s style is fashioned by models adapted from other eras, countries, and languages. Enrica Zanin and Rémi Vuillemin study the European transmission of Petrarch’s poetry through the example of one particular poem, Sonnet 248, which was translated, imitated, adapted, and repurposed by many poets throughout Europe before it reached England. Pádraic Lamb focuses on a short period in the reception of French poetry in England, the 1580s, which witnessed intense debates over the assessment of Pierre de Ronsard’s poetry as it was being imported through translation and imitation. Taking as her starting point an Ovidian myth which gave rise to

 30 See Van Doren, A History of Knowledge.

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a specific poetic subgenre, the echo poem, Agnès Lafont sheds light on the English reception of another member of the Pléiade group, Joachim Du Bellay. Placing English Petrarchism in its European context, Enrica Zanin and Rémi Vuillemin analyse the several ways in which the reception of Petrarch’s sonnet ‘Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura’ over two hundred years in Italy, France, Spain, and England shaped a common poetic language as well as particular national and individual poetic canons. Starting with early Italian commentaries and rephrasings, they review translations into other languages, which appropriated and adapted Petrarch’s poetry, making it available to readerships used to other literary traditions. These combinatory rewritings, in which Petrarch and his imitators/translators fused into ‘Petrarchism’, contributed to the development of English poetry in new directions, such as the spread of syllabic-accentual verse, and the rise of the sonnet, a heavily codified form which was considered Petrarch’s signature format. Both looking backward to Petrarch’s poems as a model and forward to new readers, poets all over Europe appropriated Petrarchism in elaborate parlour games of allusions to promote their own agendas, poetic or political. In England, Edmund Spenser voiced anti-papal attacks in his adaptations mediated by Du Bellay’s Ruines de Rome. Other poets, such as Thomas Watson and Philip Sidney, also took the Petrarchan test of poetry by writing new versions of his sonnets. Shared by a variety of poets who kept enriching and renewing it, Petrarchism became not only the poetic language of love par excellence, but also a matrix for imitation and a metalanguage in which to discuss poetry, its codes, its possible topics, and Petrarch’s own contribution to it, among transnational and trans-linguistic communities of writers and readers. Also located within the Petrarchan tradition, the English reception of Ronsard’s love-lyrics studied by Pádraic Lamb triangulates poetry with translation and imitation. As Ronsard asserts his poetic identity by claiming a filiation from ancient Greek poetry, specifically Pindar and Anacreon, who had become models for specific verse forms, so his English translators and imitators use the Ronsardian model to define their own relation to imitation, whether to endorse it or to distance themselves from it. Elaborating on the notion of poetic property/propriety after Adrian Johns,31 Lamb focuses on issues of style, which were hotly debated in the late sixteenth century as foreign texts and models came to shape English poetic practice. Mapping the ‘ricochets’, as he calls them, of the English translations of Ronsard’s poems, Lamb identifies strategies which merge classical origins and French traits, as with Thomas Watson’s catalogue of figures for which he provided the names in Latin or Greek, untranslated. As for John Soowthern, his deliberately French lexis and syntax were denounced as larceny by Puttenham, and Philip Sidney used Ronsard’s works to critique literary imitation, while Richard Tarlton made his version an outright pastiche. The debates over the degree of  31 See Johns, The Nature of the Book, pp. 187–89, 222–29.

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individuality of a poet’s style, which the Ronsardian vogue in England fuelled and for which it provided a language, reveal a community of poets eager to define their national literature with regard both to ancient classical models and to contemporary vernacular leaders. Vertical and horizontal translation also meet in Agnès Lafont’s analysis of French echo poems translated into English over the same period, as Ovid’s authority shapes continental models in a pattern that Lafont calls, after Anne Coldiron, ‘catenary’ transmission.32 Emulating the French Pléiade, a group of English poets including Thomas Lodge, Thomas Watson, and John Soowthern appropriate, critique, and repurpose Petrarchism through their adaptations of Du Bellay’s echo poems by harking back to their Ovidian mythological source, Ovid’s ‘babbling’ nymph. The triangulation between Italy, France, and England — and their respective languages — becomes a quadrangle, with Ovid’s Latin acting as a shared self-conscious poetic discourse that can play with and against the Petrarchan discourse of male self-achievement. A figure of repetition with a difference, Echo thus becomes an adequate symbol for processes of transmission via translation and appropriation. English responses to Petrarchism fuel a reflection on national poetry, as translation serves to enhance vernacular authority. The poems published by this English Ovidian ‘Brigade’ draw attention to their Englishness with typographical features, creating specific layouts that delineate a corpus and enhancing shared thematic and formal interests. The visual element paramount in echo poems, in which a dialogue is reproduced on the page to highlight both the repetition and the difference between one cue and the next, is itself repurposed to make visible the dialectic of imitation and reaction between continental and English poetic outputs. The closing section of the volume deals with communities for which the technical aspects and the social stakes of language circulation met, with two studies devoted to musicians and miniaturists respectively. Chantal Schütz shows how adapting French court airs in England went further than translating the lyrics, as the musical traditions differed between France and England and the requirements of melody influenced the choice of words. Anne-Valérie Dulac traces the transnational early history of the word ‘miniature’, borrowed from Italian and used by English limners to endow their craftsmanship with the social prestige of a fine art at home and to enter a select European community of artists. Chantal Schütz’s essay on English adaptations of French court airs and ballets de cour in the early seventeenth century highlights the interplay between technical and stylistic issues when different musical traditions as well as different phonetic systems are brought together in the act of translating songs. Her study case is Edward Filmer’s 1629 French Court-Aires With their Ditties Englished, which comprises translations of poems by Malherbe and Maynard, among others, together with the tablatures to sing them and the original versions appended  32 See Coldiron, Printers Without Borders, p. 21.

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at the end. Importing prosody and poetic forms alien to the English language called for transpositions, entailing changes in style to accommodate English tastes. It also triggered a reflection on the English language itself compared to continental languages, in terms of vocabulary and of phonetics, since English was accented differently from Italian, and there was little word stress in French. But Schütz’s analysis also reveals that Filmer’s translations were not necessarily target-oriented, as technical considerations could prevail over nativizing processes. As a result, those translations did not always favour singability, and the English versions of airs de ballet may not have been intended for performance, since their readers at the English Court, the entourage of Queen Henrietta Maria, were French-speaking and therefore able to sing the French originals. But the English translations materialized the alliances between the two royal families of France and England. This chapter thus draws the contours of transnational courtly communities made up of aristocratic elites on both sides of the Channel and of culture brokers such as courtier poets (who were amateurs), musicians (who were professionals), and translators. Anne-Valérie Dulac’s essay on miniatures brings together lexicography and material history to argue that lexical borrowings and translations contribute to shape the art forms with which they are concerned. As she demonstrates in her historical survey of the uses of the term ‘miniature’ in English works from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, the status and vocabulary of limning have a parallel evolution. The works she studies, only one of which was published — anonymously — at the time, play on the dialectics of divulgation and secrecy as they try to define the art of limning after European models, circulating in manuscript form (like Nicholas Hilliard’s Art of Limning) or left unpublished but probably intended for publication (like Edward Norgate’s Miniatura or the Art of Limning). An English-born artist trained in France, famous in Spain, and eager to compete with Italian masters, Hilliard (c. 1547–1619) was deeply involved in European networks. While the earlier anonymous author of A Very Proper Treatise (1573) compiled works in French, Latin, Italian, and German to which he had access via translation, Norgate (1581–1650), who belonged to a later generation for whom Hilliard’s style was ‘old’, used both foreign words and translations from European works. Transnational and trans-linguistic exchanges were thus crucial in the development of limning in England, with ‘miniatura’, a word used in Italy and Spain and imported to England via French, serving as a token of the elite aspirations of artists who remade an English craft by giving it a European dimension. This European dimension is paramount to the volume as a whole in its study of the role of transnational textual exchanges in the construction of national identities. Blending processes of horizontal and vertical translation, early modern literary transfers between England and the Continent, and in particular within the Italy-France-England triad, reveal a common European heritage that is acknowledged in paradoxical forms of assimilation based on attitudes ranging from collaboration to rivalry.

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Helfers, James P., ed., Multicultural Europe and Cultural Exchange in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 12 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005) Helgerson, Richard, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) Hillman, Richard, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Politics of France (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘Introduction’, in English Literature and the Other Languages, ed. by Ton Hoenselaars and Marius Buning (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), pp. xi–xxi Höfele, Andreas, and Werner von Koppenfels, ed., Renaissance Go-Betweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005) Hosington, Brenda M., ed., Translation and Print Culture in Early Modern Europe, Special Issue of Renaissance Studies, 29.1 (2015) Jefferson, Judith A., and Ad Putter, ed., Multilingualism in Medieval Britain (c. 1066– 1520). Sources and Analysis (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013) Johns, Adrian, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) Lawrence, Jason, ‘Who the Devil Taught Thee So Much Italian?’: Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) Marrapodi, Michele, ed., Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Rewriting, Remaking, Refashioning (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) —— , ed., The Routledge Research Companion to Anglo-Italian Renaissance Literature and Culture (London: Routledge, 2019) Martin, Catherine Gimelli, and Hassan Melehy, French Connections in the English Renaissance (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) Mathiesen, Robert, The Great Polyglot Bibles (Providence: John Carter Brown Library, 1985) Matthiessen, F. O., Translation: An Elizabethan Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931) Mayer, Jean-Christophe, ed., Representing France and the French in Early Modern English Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008) McLuhan, Marshall, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962) Melehy, Hassan, The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) Morini, Massimiliano, ‘The Superiority of Classical Translation in SixteenthCentury England: Thomas Hoby and John Harington’, Philological Quarterly, 98.3 (2019), 273–95 Moul, Victoria, ed., A Guide to Neo-Latin Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) Newman, Karen, and Jane Tylus, ed., Early Modern Cultures of Translation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

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Oakley-Brown, Liz, ‘“Have you the tongues?”: Translation, Multilingualism and Intercultural Contact in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love’s Labour’s Lost’, in Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, ed. by Dirk Delabastita and Ton Hoenselaars (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015), pp. 115–36 Ong, Walter, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982) Pérez Fernández, José María, and Edward Wilson-Lee, ed., Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Pettegree, Andrew, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) Rhodes, Neil, ‘Introduction’, in English Renaissance Translation Theory, ed. by Neil Rhodes, Gordon Kendal, and Louise Wilson (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2013), pp. 1–67 —— , Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) Richards, Jennifer, Voices and Books in the English Renaissance: A New History of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) Saenger, Michael, Shakespeare and the French Borders of English (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) Sanders, Eve Rachele, and Margaret W. Ferguson, ed., Literacies in Early Modern England, Special Issue of Critical Survey, 14.1 (2002) Sansonetti, Laetitia, ‘The Harvey-Spenser Correspondence: Redefining Poetry in Early Modern England’, in Crossed Correspondences: Writers as Readers and Critics of their Peers, ed. by Vanessa Guignery (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2016), pp. 24–42 Schmidt, Gabriela, ed., Elizabethan Translation and Literary Culture (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013) Scott, Mary Augusta, Elizabethan Translations from the Italian (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916) Shepard, Alexandra, and Phil Withington, ed., Communities in Early Modern Eng­land: Networks, Place, Rhetoric (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) —— , ‘Introduction’, in Shepard and Withington, ed., Communities in Early Modern England, pp. 1–15 Stenner, Rachel, The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019) Stierle, Karlheinz, ‘Translatio Studii and Renaissance: From Vertical to Horizontal Translation’, in The Translatability of Cultures: Figures of the Space Between, ed. by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) Summers, Claude J., and Ted-Larry Pebworth, ed., Literary Circles and Cultural Com­ munities in Renaissance England (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000) Thomas, Keith, ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’, in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. by Gerd Baumann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 97–131

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Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret, Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) Van Doren, Charles, A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, Future (New York: Random House, 1991) Venuti, Lawrence, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995) Wilson-Okamura, David Scott, Spenser’s International Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Wright, Laura, ed., The Multilingual Origins of Standard English (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020) Wyatt, Michael, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Yarrington, Alison, Stefano Villani, and Julia Kelly, ed., Travels and Translations: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions (Leiden: Brill, 2013)

Roots, Germanic and Latinate English as a Hybrid Language

Philip Durkin

1. An Expanding or a Fragmenting Lexicon? Some Possible Approaches to Loanwords, Lexical Change, and Multilingual Practices in Early Modern English

Loanwords, or lexical borrowings from other languages, can shed an important light on contact between cultures. They arise in a situation of language contact. For lexical borrowing to occur there must be some degree of bi- or multilingualism, although this may be very restricted, for instance, restricted to the needs of trade, or perhaps to the written mode in some cases of scholarly bi- or multilingualism, including some translations. Additionally, it may only involve a small proportion of the speakers of the language into which borrowing occurs. Lexical borrowing is not coterminous with conceptual transfer: there are always alternatives to lexical borrowing in order to render new concepts, and, conversely, lexical borrowing can occur for many reasons other than the need to express a new concept. For instance, borrowing may occur because of the prestige associated with speakers of another language, or in order to achieve stylistic variation, or to expand the range of stylistic or technical registers in a language. The information yielded by individual word histories becomes much more revealing when viewed in the context of large-scale trends over time — and similarly, larger-scale trends are often best understood by reference to individual examples. One important factor that looking closely at individual word histories frequently brings into focus is that borrowing into a language is seldom a once-and-for-all process: there is always an important process of intralinguistic spread, as a word becomes familiar to and adopted by wider circles of users, and may also spread to different stylistic registers or technical domains, and may adopt additional meanings from the donor language, as well as developing new meanings and uses within the borrowing language.1  1 For fuller investigation of these issues from the perspective of the wider field of Contact Linguistics, see Durkin, ‘Contact and Lexical Borrowing’.

Philip Durkin ([email protected]) Oxford English Dictionary Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer, ed. by Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin, PEEMB 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 33–56  10.1484/M.PEEMB-EB.5.127773

FHG

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This chapter examines how data from historical dictionaries can be combined with other categories of information to provide an overview of trends in lexical borrowing in different chronological periods. It focuses on borrowing into English from French and Latin, the two most significant sources of loanwords (in terms of volume of words borrowed) in both the Middle English and early modern periods. It contrasts the patterns of borrowing that typify borrowing in the Middle English and early modern periods, in particular by looking at the differing impacts on the core vocabulary in each period, and analyses these differences in the context of profound changes in the nature and contexts of bi- and trilingual activity in Britain in each period. It illustrates and further probes these trends by summaries of the histories of two very different loanwords: carry, a member of the core lexicon of modern English, borrowed in the late Middle English period, and douce (and its near relative dulce), a much rarer word, which also first appears in the fourteenth century, but shows its limited and distinctive flowering in English in the sixteenth century. The example of carry highlights the direct pathway that is frequently found between lexical borrowing and the core lexicon of English in the late Middle English period: the form of the word shows that it was borrowed from Anglo-Norman, not continental French, in the context of the widespread English/Anglo-Norman/Latin trilingualism of later medieval Britain. It entered English specifically via the language of trade and the keeping of business records, a key area in which Anglo-Norman remained in everyday use until very late in the period. The word’s core meaning in modern English may well have been innovated in English, not Anglo-Norman. It spread very rapidly to be employed in frequent use in a meaning that belongs to the core vocabulary of the language. By contrast, douce and dulce illustrate a pattern that is much more typical of early modern English, namely the enrichment of the vocabulary for stylistic purposes, and the exploitation of such variation for the development of new stylistic and technical registers of the vocabulary. While they overlap in meaning with the core vocabulary item sweet, and are borrowed from the usual words meaning ‘sweet’ in French and Latin, there is never the slightest indication of douce and dulce coming to be used as everyday, unmarked terms in the meaning ‘sweet’ in the usage of any users of English. In examining these particular illustrative examples, this chapter will highlight the methodological potential of combining techniques of close reading with data-driven approaches, in order to produce a rich picture of lexical history, as well as showing some of the challenges involved in such an approach.

1 . an e x pan d i n g o r a fragme nt i ng le xi co n?

Figure 1.1. Classification of immediate origins of words in the Oxford English Dictionary, comprising (above) OED headword entries only and (below) all lexical items in OED, including those nested under other headword entries (based on Philip Durkin, Borrowed Words, p. 29).

A Brief Overview of the Impact of Loanwords on the English Lexicon The data in a historical dictionary such as the Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED) can be used to provide an overview of the immediate origins of the words it contains. Figure 1.1 presents a high-level view, dividing OED’s content into (i) words that go back to the Old English period (the majority of which are words inherited from proto-Germanic or are formed from such words within Old English, although there are also some loans from Latin and a small number from other languages); (ii) words borrowed from other languages after 1150; and (iii) others, the largest category, overwhelmingly composed of complex words (formed by compounding or derivation) and conversions (that is to say, words formed by change of word class, for example development of a new verb alliance, first recorded in 1533, from the pre-existing noun).2 Among root words (as opposed to complex words), loanwords greatly predominate over other types.

 2 For further analysis see Durkin, Borrowed Words, pp. 28–30.

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Figure 1.2. Donor languages which have contributed the most words to OED’s word list.

Remaining at a very high level of analysis, we can identify the major donor languages, as in Figure 1.2. This data is taken from chapter 2 in my Borrowed Words (pp. 23–28), which is in turn based on revised parts of OED, because of the greater consistency of approach;3 very similar, if slightly messier, results are obtained if both revised and unrevised parts of OED are included.4 The remainder of this chapter will focus on the two overwhelmingly most common sources of loanwords, Latin and French. It will explore in particular how we can investigate differences in the profile of typical borrowing from these sources in two different chronological periods: late Middle English (approximately 1325 to 1500) and early modern English (approximately 1500 to 1750, focusing here particularly on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries).

Introducing a Diachronic Dimension: Loans from French, Latin, and French and/or Latin in Middle English and Modern English Figure 1.3 presents a diachronic perspective on borrowing from French and Latin as presented by revised portions of OED. (A broadly similar picture is presented by the full dictionary, including unrevised portions, once some inconsistencies in the data are allowed for.)5 In the picture presented by this  3 Since 2000, OED has been undergoing a process of revision, which has to date covered a little under 50 per cent of the full wordlist of the dictionary. This figure, like most in this chapter, draws on the consecutive alphabetical ranges A–ALZ, M–RZ. More recent revisions to OED have focused more closely on prominent entries or thematic sets particularly in need of revision.  4 For the particular challenges posed by counting words (certainly or probably) derived from early Scandinavian (traditionally denoted Old Norse), and for the approach adopted in these figures, see Durkin, Borrowed Words, pp. 173–221. The classic account of Norse loanwords in English remains Björkman, Scandinavian Loan-Words in Middle English; an excellent account of recent methodological and theoretical developments is provided by the introductory parts of Dance, Words Derived from Old Norse in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’.  5 Still valuable also are the data, taken ultimately from printed editions of dictionaries, in Finkenstaedt and Wolff, with contributions by Neuhaus and Herget, Ordered Profusion:

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Figure 1.3. Absolute totals of French and Latin loanwords from 1150 onwards in OED (A–ALZ, M–RZ) (based on Durkin, Borrowed Words, p. 33).

graph, borrowings from French appear remarkably steady from 1300 to the early 1900s, while borrowings from Latin show huge peaks in two periods, roughly 1550–1699 and 1800–1899 (in the latter case, which falls outside the chronological scope of this chapter, this is closely connected with the rapid growth of scientific vocabulary). However, a rather different perspective is given by Figure 1.4, which presents the same data as a proportion of all new words recorded by for each period. This is useful to counteract the skewing effects caused by the significantly greater amount of written material surviving for the period after 1500, particularly the huge expansion in printed material, on which OED’s data compilation has traditionally drawn heavily. In this perspective, we can see that borrowings from French make up a huge proportion of the relatively few new words recorded for the early Middle English period, while the eighteenth-century dip in Latin loans in Figure 1.3 is much reduced when we consider that there are fewer new words recorded for the eighteenth century generally, and the nineteenth-century spikes in Latin loans disappear completely in the context of the huge overall increase in new words documented by OED for this period (again, the terminology of the sciences and technology in general plays a significant part here).

Studies in Dictionaries and the English Lexicon, as well as the analysis in Wermser, Statistische Studien zur Entwicklung des englischen Wortschatzes, and the summary accounts and tables in Scheler, Der englische Wortschatz. Compare also Culpeper and Clapham, ‘The Borrowing of Classical and Romance Words into English’.

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Figure 1.4. The data from Figure 1.3 presented as a proportion of all new words in English, as recorded by OED.

In both of these graphs, words showing input from French and/or Latin show a big spike c. 1400. This phenomenon is worthy of close attention, particularly since it points to a major difference between lexical borrowing from these languages in late Middle English and in early modern English. As a result of Middle English borrowing from French (especially from AngloNorman, the variety of French used in medieval England), patterns became established by which many frequent Latin word endings were regularly represented in English by lightly assimilated versions of the corresponding ending in French. For example, Latin abstract nouns ending in -tās (oblique stem -tāt-) are regularly received into English with final -ty, following the pattern of French counterparts in -té, regardless of whether the particular word has been borrowed via French. In this instance, the pattern was established by early Middle English borrowings such as bounty, plenty, or poverty (in all of which cases the form of the stem makes clear the borrowing from French); evidence that the pattern is definitely applied also to words taken directly from Latin comes from late Middle English loans such as actuality, ponderosity, or mediety, where a suitable French etymon is simply not evidenced at the date of the word’s first occurrence in English. This in turn raises the much larger question of whether commoner words such as quality, opportunity, or security, which could on formal grounds be from either French or Latin, in fact show input from either language or both. The complex semantics of many such words point to probable input from both languages, as do the parallel cases of unsuffixed words such as person. Such an analysis is frequently adopted in the etymologies offered by both the Middle English Dictionary and the revised parts of OED.

1 . an e x pan d i n g o r a fragme nt i ng le xi co n?

The assumption that multiple inputs of this type occurred, and indeed were frequent, is greatly reinforced by consideration of the sociolinguistic situation of medieval England, in which Latin had a dominant role as a language of formal record and of learning, as well as a language of less high-prestige business records (see example below). Anglo-Norman meanwhile was in widespread use as a language of law and administration (in both spoken and written use), before showing a rapid decline in the range and extent of its use in the late fourteenth century at the expense of English. This situation implies extensive trilingualism, albeit highly constrained by particular contexts of linguistic practice, among all of that segment of society who were literate.6 In such a context of trilingualism that is determined by functional contexts, it is highly likely that the use of a word in one language significantly influenced the use of a related word in either of the other languages, particularly in the case of English as its range of functions expanded at the expense of Latin and (especially) Anglo-Norman. Particularly revealing in this context is the evidence of mixed language business and managerial accounts, in which vernacular French and English words (especially nouns) frequently occur in sentences which have Latin as the matrix language, as in the following simple example from 1404 from the account rolls of Durham Abbey: ‘In custodia Plumbarii, 2 planys’ (In the keeping of the plumber, two planes).7 Here the morphological ending indicates that planys is not Latin, and is more probably Middle English (in which -ys frequently occurs as the ending of plural nouns) than Anglo-Norman (in which the ending would be much more rare). It can often prove impossible to determine to which of these languages a particular lexical item belongs in a given instance, especially given the prevalence of use of marks of suspension in place of the endings of Latin words; in many cases, it is likely that the creators of practical documents of this sort would have had little concern about which language a particular word should be assigned to. Another feature which particularly marks borrowing from Latin and French in the Middle English period is the long-term impact on the high-frequency vocabulary of English. In data from corpora of contemporary written English, such as the late twentieth-century British National Corpus, words borrowed from other languages make up over 50 per cent of the 1000 most frequent words, and the vast majority of these loans are from Latin or French (the only other significant input is from the Scandinavian languages at roughly 6 per cent, reflecting Viking settlements in the Anglo-Saxon period, although

 6 On the general contexts for borrowing of this sort see especially Wright, Sources of London English: Medieval; Ingham, The Transmission of Anglo-Norman; and the essays in Trotter ed., Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain; Ingham ed., The Anglo-Norman Language and its Contexts; Schendl and Wright ed., Code-switching in Early English; and Wright ed., The Multilingual Origins of Standard English. For overview accounts see Durkin, Borrowed Words, pp. 223–97; and Durkin, ‘The Relationship of Borrowing from French and Latin’.  7 Taken from Fowler, Extracts from the Account Rolls of the Abbey of Durham, p. 397. For fuller discussion of mixed language documents of this type see Durkin, Borrowed Words, pp. 290–95.

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Figure 1.5. Date of first attestation for loanwords among the 1000 most frequent items in the British National Corpus.

the words often do not appear in written sources until rather later). When the dates of first attestation of the French and Latin loans are taken into account, we find the picture presented in Figure 1.5.8 Here, we see that the greatest impact on the high-frequency vocabulary of modern English results from borrowing from Latin and French in late Middle English; in particular, loans from French alone are very prominent, as are words that are likely to show some input from both languages (along the lines discussed above for words such as quality or person). In the latter category we find words that are among the building blocks of modern English educated discourse, such as art, culture, family, general, history, nature, person, or principle, but also some rather more workaday words such as question or accept. OED has recently introduced frequency information for all modern English words, assigning each word to a band according to its frequency in contemporary use. The eight bands are not evenly sized, but are graded according to comparative level of frequency; thus, band 8, consisting of the most frequent words, contains only sixty-four words, while band 2 contains 53,481 words. Table 1.1 shows how French and Latin loanwords map to these various bands, as well as giving summary information on the composition of each band. Figure 1.6 and Figure 1.7 map this same frequency information against date of first attestation, with band 8, the words of most frequent occurrence, at the top, and band 1, the words of least frequent occurrence, at the bottom. These demonstrate clearly some significant differences between borrowing from French and Latin in Middle English and in subsequent centuries.

 8 Based on analysis in Durkin, Borrowed Words, pp. 34–40.

1 . an e x pan d i n g o r a fragme nt i ng le xi co n? Table 1.1. French and Latin loanwords in each of OED’s frequency bands.

French loanwords

Latin loanwords

band 8 (freq. above 1000 per million words) (About 0.02% of all non-obsolete OED entries are in Band 8; only contains 64 words.)

1%

1%

band 7 (freq. 100–999 per million) (About 0.18% of all non-obsolete OED entries are in Band 7; contains 751 words.)

41%

21%*

band 6 (freq. 10–99 per million) (About 1% of all non-obsolete OED entries are in Band 6; contains 4317 words.)

35%

27%

band 5 (freq. 1–9.9 per million) (About 4% of all non-obsolete OED entries are in Band 5; contains 14,817 words.)

19%

19%

band 4 (freq. 0.1–0.99 per million) (About 11% of all non-obsolete OED entries are in Band 4; contains 35,337 words.)

9%

11%

band 3 (freq. 0.01–0.099 per million) (About 20% of all non-obsolete OED entries are in Band 3; contains 53,481 words.)

6%

9%

band 2 (fewer than 0.01 times per million words) (About 45% of all non-obsolete OED entries are in Band 2; contains 87,149 words.)

5%

13%

band 1 (extremely rare words) (About 18% of all non-obsolete OED entries are in Band 1; contains 29,673 words.)

5%

17%

* Many show input from French also

A significant proportion of both French and Latin loans in Middle English form part of the four most frequent bands of words in OED, reflecting high frequency in modern English; for French, just a little under 50 per cent of the Middle English loans fall within the top 16 per cent of most frequent words in modern English, and for Latin the comparable figure is a little under 40 per cent. In each subsequent century we see that more and more of the new loans are in the bands reflecting less frequent occurrence in modern English; in other words, in each century the new contribution of loanwords from French and Latin tends to contain a higher proportion of rare words of infrequent occurrence. (The slight bucking of this general trend shown by the data for words first attested in 1900 and later in comparison with those first attested in 1800–1899, more marked in the case of Latin than of French, is largely due to the rapid expansion of scientific vocabulary in the nineteenth century.)

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Figure 1.6. Proportion of French loanwords in each OED frequency band, by date of first attestation.

Figure 1.7. Proportion of Latin loanwords in each OED frequency band, by date of first attestation.

A response to the data in Figure 1.6 and Figure 1.7 could be that they simply show that words take a very long time to enter the highest frequency bands in English. However, this explanation is soon exposed as inadequate if we consider a number of additional factors: many of the Middle English loans quickly gained in frequency (one example, carry, is considered in the next section);9 few later borrowings have broken through even after hundreds of years into the thousand most frequent words in contemporary English (compare Figure 1.5); very many words current in Middle English have since declined considerably in frequency or become completely obsolete, often in fact being replaced by semantic counterparts of French or Latin origin. The remainder of this chapter will examine how individual word studies can be used to help probe these general trends further.  9 For a brief exploration of patterns of increasing frequency over time shown by words of French and/or Latin origin see Durkin, Borrowed Words, pp. 336–40.

1 . an e x pan d i n g o r a fragme nt i ng le xi co n?

A Late Middle English Test Case: Carry As noted above, late Middle English shows a great many borrowings from French and Latin that have penetrated into the high-frequency vocabulary of later English. Many of these could show input from French or Latin, and probably show some formal and semantic input from both languages, showing the results of mergers of multiple borrowings in the context of language shift from both Anglo-Norman and Latin to English in a range of different functional settings. This section will look at a rather different example from among the thousand most frequent words in contemporary English: carry. This stands out in various ways: as well as being a high-frequency word, it has a meaning that is generally regarded as being ‘basic’;10 it is identifiable on formal grounds as a borrowing from French, rather than Latin;11 the word’s form shows that it is a borrowing specifically from Anglo-Norman carrier, rather than from continental French charrier; and (as will be explored in this section) the word’s generalized use in the meaning ‘carry something from A to B’ (as opposed to the narrower ‘transport goods from A to B’) appears very likely to have been innovated in English. Although the word is thus in some ways an outlier, it is an outlier which highlights the profound influence of French on the English lexicon in this period, giving rise to loans which could spread very rapidly into areas of the highly frequent use in meanings which belong to a basic level of the vocabulary.12 The verb carry first appears in English in the mid-fourteenth century. The earliest attestation (of the gerund carrying) yet identified appears to be in a document of 1348 in the records of the guild of pewterers in London, and refers to commercial transportation of goods.13 This is very unremarkable in the context of the word’s etymon: Anglo-Norman carrier is amply attested with reference to transportation of goods, especially by cart; it derives ultimately  10 The concept of basic vocabulary is a powerful one, but notoriously difficult to define. The use made here follows the work of the World Loanwords Database project (WOLD), which in turn drew on the basic vocabulary lists used in the Intercontinental Dictionary Series. In this context, it is particularly striking that the meaning ‘carry’ is among those that feature in the Leipzig-Jakarta List of Basic Vocabulary, a list of one hundred basic meanings found particularly resistant to borrowing across a wide range of languages (this list is the main output of the WOLD project). See further on this work Tadmor, Haspelmath, and Taylor, ‘Borrowability and the Notion of Basic Vocabulary’, and the analysis and documentation in Haspelmath and Tadmor ed., Loanwords in the World’s Languages.  11 Although see footnote 15 below for discussion of a British post-classical Latin form carriare, which mirrors the uses of Anglo-Norman carrier, and is clearly either borrowed from or formally influenced by it, and which may well in turn have exerted influence on the adoption of carry in English.  12 The discussion in this section draws upon, but also in some respects updates, the much fuller account in Durkin, ‘Exploring the Penetration of Loanwords’.  13 See quotation dated (1348) in the Middle English Dictionary entry for ‘tāken’ v. 2a(b); this example is not taken note of in the discussion of early evidence in Durkin, ‘Exploring the Penetration of Loanwords’.

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from classical Latin carrus ‘cart, waggon’. Its standard continental French counterpart is charrier, reflecting palatalization of /k/ before a front vowel, a sound change that occurred in some varieties of Old French, including Francien (underlying modern standard French), but not in others, including Anglo-Norman.14 The Anglo-Norman Dictionary additionally records some minor sense developments, including ‘to carry something off ’, ‘to act, behave’, ‘to bring before a court’, ‘to (entitle) to’; one of these, ‘to carry (something)’, at first appears to show the broadened meaning that is now usual in English, but only one example is given, from John of Gaunt’s Register, referring to carpenters, masons, and iron workers taking tools with them on a military expedition, ‘tielx come ils purront leggerement carier’ [such as they can easily carry], probably meaning ‘such as are easily transportable’, as opposed to tools too bulky to be transported on a military expedition. Searching the Anglo-Norman Dictionary’s collection of source texts reveals no other examples that show a generalized meaning ‘to carry (something)’. The history of carry within English diverges rapidly from that of AngloNorman carrier. The word is frequently found with reference to commercial transportation of goods, especially in the Rolls of Parliament and in local regulatory and business documents, reflecting what was doubtless a widespread usage directly paralleling the core uses of the Anglo-Norman etymon; the borrowing thus appears very likely to reflect adoption of the Anglo-Norman word in precisely parallel use in English, as English came to be used in functional contexts where Anglo-Norman had previously been used.15 However, literary texts from the same period present a very different picture. This can be brought out in a particularly striking way by analysis of the twenty-five examples in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer.16 Nine refer to

 14 For a brief overview of the dialectal distribution of the change see Einhorn, Old French, and for more detail on Anglo-Norman see Short, Manual of Anglo-Norman. For listing of the attested forms of this lexeme in different dialects see Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, ‘carrus’.  15 In Latin documents from medieval Britain a verb form carriare is also found in a similar range of meanings from the twelfth century onwards (see detailed presentation in the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources). This is clearly either a borrowing from, or significantly influenced by, Anglo-Norman carrier, since the usual and expected post-classical Latin verb form is carricare, the etymon of French charger (from which English charge is in turn borrowed). Thus it is clear that, unsurprisingly in the context of the functional trilingualism of later medieval Britain, the equivalent verb forms Anglo-Norman carrier, Latin carriare, and English carry were all in use with reference to transportation, especially of goods in a commercial setting, and, in view of the relative dates of attestation, it is quite possible that use in written record-keeping in Latin also had an influence on the widespread adoption of the word in English. However, there is no evidence of Latin carriare being broadened to the basic core vocabulary meaning ‘to carry’.  16 This analysis, based on Tatlock and Kennedy, A Concordance to the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, includes one example from the Romaunt of the Rose Fragment B, which is now not normally attributed to Chaucer. The data is based on edited texts, but variation in the major Chaucer manuscripts does not make a material difference to the discussion here.

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bearing a person (living or dead) from one place to another (this remains a significant minor sense of carry in late Middle English); two uses show (debatable) special senses connected with placing or putting things in a specified place; the other fourteen uses all describe bearing something from one place to another, in almost all cases by hand, and with seldom any hint of a context of commercial bulk transportation of goods. An even more telling perspective is brought by comparing Chaucer’s uses of carry and the word it came largely to replace in this basic meaning, bear. When used with reference to carrying, conveying, or transporting things from one place to another, bear outnumbers carry in Chaucer, but only by a ratio of approximately 2:1. This is remarkable when we bear in mind that carry was at this point still in the first few decades of its recorded history in English, and that the broadened general sense may well have been innovated within English. Thus we find in The Manciple’s Prologue (ll. 95–96): ‘I se wel it is necessarie, | Where that we goon, good drynke with us carie.’17 Or in The Monk’s Tale (ll. 2049–51, c): The gates of the toun he hath up plyght, And on his bak ycaryed hem hath hee Hye on an hill whereas men myghte hem see. Beside comparable uses of bear, such as, in The Reeve’s Tale (ll. 4211–13): And up he roos, and softely he wente Unto the cradel, and in his hand it hente, And baar it softe unto his beddes feet. Or in Troilus and Criseyde (Book iii, l. 1141): ‘And bar the candel to the chymeneye’. For Chaucer, individual choices may well be determined by poetic considerations, not least the metrical alternatives of bear with a monosyllabic word stem and carry with a disyllabic one. The fact that both words were available, and carry clearly felt unexceptionable in contexts like these, is nonetheless indicative of the degree to which it had been received into the English vocabulary in this broadened, basic meaning. This case exemplifies the extraordinary receptivity of late Middle English to new loans from French, and specifically Anglo-Norman. In a context where words had been borrowed at a high rate from both French and Latin over all of the post-Conquest centuries, and where, following a lengthy period of balanced, functionally determined trilingualism, English was now showing rapid expansion in its range of uses and functions, words could be borrowed from French (and from Latin) and enter high-frequency, basic levels of the vocabulary of English with remarkable rapidity.

 17 All quotations from Chaucer are taken from Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson.

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A Contrasting Early Modern English Test Case: Douce, Dulce, and Related Words As described above, carry rapidly became a frequently used term in a meaning that belongs to a basic level of the vocabulary of English. The words considered in this section, douce and dulce, also at least approximate to a very basic meaning, ‘sweet (in taste)’, but never in any way rival the firmly entrenched term sweet as an unmarked means of realizing this meaning.18 The adjective douce is first attested in English in the mid- to late fourteenth century. The earliest instance, dated a1350, in the collocation dame douce, is sometimes interpreted as instead showing a (French) proper name. It shows a borrowing from Anglo-Norman douce, generalized use of the Middle French feminine douce, masculine doux, doulx. That there is also input from (continental) Middle French is shown particularly clearly by the adoption of Latinizing forms such as doulce, doulx. The word shows very little use in late Middle English. In the early sixteenth century the form dulce also appears in English. Two formal etymologies are possible for this form. It probably shows a direct borrowing of Latin dulcis, the Latin etymon of French doux. However, it could alternatively be explained as showing remodelling of the existing word douce (particularly its variant doulce) after the Latin word. Such etymological ambiguity is frequent among words of French and Latin origin in the early modern period. In modern-day English, douce belongs to OED’s frequency band 4, while dulce shows barely any instances at all in contemporary use. It is a relatively simple matter to establish that neither word was significantly more frequent in early modern English. The insight into published print sources by Early English Books Online is immediately revealing: sweet, the usual term in the meaning ‘sweet’, and part of the English language from earliest times (cognate with Dutch zoet and German süss), shows c. 220,000 matches in the full-text searchable components of EEBO, while douce and dulce (and all of their recorded spelling variants, such as the intermediate form doulce) have a combined total of about eighty matches (that is, after the very time-consuming task is carried out of eliminating matches from sentences written in French or Latin, and examples from multiple editions of the same text). A similar situation applies to all of the other near or full synonyms of sweet listed by the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary that are either borrowed or are formed on borrowed words (listed here with their OED date of first attestation):19

 18 This section draws considerably on Durkin and Allan, ‘Borrowing and Copy’, which it updates with information from entries now revised and updated in OED, as well as with additional information on the extended word families of douce and dulce in English.  19 See Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘sweet’ (adjective), a subsection of section 01.03.05 ‘taste’.

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douce a1399; dulcet 1440; luscious c.1475; mellite ?1440; dulce 1568; marmalade 1617; ambrosian 1632; dulcid 1657; dulcorous 1676; dulceous 1688; saccharaceous 1689; saccharic 1945; additionally, showing derivatives of borrowed words, there are sugarish c.1450; nectared c.1595; marmalady 1602; sugar-candyish 1874 In terms of the lexical structure of English, there is no evidence that any of these words have ever seriously challenged sweet as default realization of the core, basic meaning ‘sweet in taste’, and there is no reason to doubt that there has ever been any weakening of the isomorphic relationship between the lexeme sweet and the meaning ‘sweet in taste’ (all other meanings remaining transparently related by metaphor). This is in marked contrast to the competition between native bear and the Middle English borrowing carry discussed above. Close inspection of the semantic behaviour of douce and dulce in early modern English, and the stylistic contexts of their use, is revealing of their status in the lexicon, and their rather complex relationship with the default, stylistically unmarked term sweet. Latin dulcis and Middle French doux function in those languages as the default, stylistically unmarked terms realizing the meaning ‘sweet in taste’, hence they have very similar roles in the lexicons of Latin and French to that shown by English sweet. They additionally each have a number of (mostly very unsurprising) extended senses. In very crude summary, the meanings of Latin dulcis include (drawing primarily on analysis in the Oxford Latin Dictionary): − sweet (in taste); − not salty (in taste); (of water) not brackish, fresh (dist[inct] from sea water); free from impurity, clear; − sweet-smelling, fragrant; − sweet-sounding, melodious; − affording enjoyment (to the mind or senses), delightful, agreeable; − held in affection, cherished, dear; − possessing qualities that inspire affection, charming, dear, sweet. Similarly, the meanings of Middle French doux include (drawing primarily on analysis in the Dictionnaire du moyen français): − sweet in taste; − transferred use with reference to other senses (especially hearing); − ‘agreeable’, applied to weather, a place, or an action, or to a person’s character or behaviour, or to words or language; − use in address formulae, with the meaning ‘dear’; − (rarely) calm, harmonious. The semantic range of English douce and dulce is not surprising in terms of the semantic range of the Latin and French etymons. However, the historical

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sequence in which the senses appear, and their relative prominence in English, are both more surprising. OED has recently published revised entries for both douce and dulce. At ‘douce’ adj. (as published in September 2018) it records the senses: 1a. Of a person or thing: sweet, pleasing, gentle. (Attested from a1350 to the present day.) 1b. Sweet to the taste. Obsolete. (Attested a1425–1652.) 2. Scottish and English regional (northern). Of a person, his or her character, speech, etc.: quiet, sober, sedate, prudent. (Attested 1721—.) At ‘dulce’ adj. and adv. (as published in December 2019) it labels the word ‘Originally Scottish’ and records the senses: 1. Sweet in taste or smell. Also in figurative context. (Attested 1508—. It is notable that the earliest examples given are figurative.) 2. Pleasing to the eye, ear, or feelings; gentle, soft; delightful. (Attested a1513—.) Thus for neither word is non-figurative use in the meaning ‘sweet in taste’ in fact the earliest recorded use in English. Semantic analysis of the eighty examples for douce and dulce yielded by an EEBO search is revealing. Ten per cent refer to sweetness of smell. Thirty-five per cent designate sounds, speech, or even written language. Twenty-seven per cent modify nouns denoting other semantic categories, many of them abstract, sometimes with reference to behaviour or conduct; the best gloss for these is probably ‘pleasant’, ‘pleasing’, or ‘agreeable’. Seventeen per cent designate wine that is either inherently sweet or not sweetened, reflecting a specific use of Middle French vin doux (which is similarly ambiguous in early use).20 This leaves a mere eleven per cent of examples with the meaning ‘sweet in taste’ (other than in the specific use designating wine). One of these shows a different technical meaning, ‘(of water) non-saline’, others refer in technical or semi-technical language to a type of lye. One occurrence is in an extended metaphor as a high-register term paired as a near or full synonym with pleasant, and another is in a verse text with reference to the ‘sweetness’ of a person’s lips. Closest to simple use in the meaning ‘sweet in taste’ are two examples (from 1526 and 1542) referring to the taste of varieties of (respectively) apples and pears (both of which are cited in OED at ‘douce’ adj. 1b): ‘Whan […] sommer draweth nere, it [sc. an apple] waxeth melowe, douce & pleasaunt’;21 ‘Peares the  20 Another specific use is in the name of powder douce, the name of a sweet spice or a mixture of spices. However, while there are several instances of this collocation in late Middle English, there are apparently none in early modern English, with the collocation only reappearing as a term in historical or antiquarian use from the late eighteenth century. See OED at ‘powder’ n.C3 powder douce, and Middle English Dictionary at ‘pǒudre’ n.(1) 5b(b).  21 Bonde, The pylgrimage of perfection, Giiiv–Giiiir.

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whiche be melow and doulce’.22 OED’s ‘dulce’ adj. 1 records a further example from 1698 referring to the taste of apples: ‘She ate of them [sc. apples] three and thought them right dulce.’23 Thus the ‘literal’ meaning ‘sweet in taste’ is not only not the earliest in English, it is also vanishingly rare.24 There appears to be some variation in early modern usage on geographical lines. As noted, OED labels dulce as ‘Originally Scottish’; the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue in its entry for dulce records numerous examples from poetic sources (including works by William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas), a tendency also confirmed by analysis of matches in EEBO. It is therefore tempting to assume that this form established some currency specifically in poetic diction in Older Scots. Even here, though, examples with reference directly to sweetness of taste are vanishingly rare. The form douce shows considerable currency in modern Scots, unlike in most other varieties of English. However, here the meaning ‘sweet in taste’ appears to be lost entirely; The Scottish National Dictionary (and its 2005 supplementary materials) records numerous examples of use, but all in the senses ‘Sedate, sober, quiet, respectable, often with a connotation of circumspection or cautiousness’, ‘Pleasant, kindly, gentle, lovable’, and ‘Neat, tidy, comfortable’; the first two of these senses also have some currency in northern dialects of modern English. Returning to early modern English, it is notable that many examples are in binomial constructions, paired with another adjective, usually with the conjunction and, as for example: Uyrgyns haue theyr harpes of Dauid, they haue the Psalter, they haue theyr songes and spirytuall hymnes, with whyche in theyr hartis they synge contynuallye to god, gyuynge thankes, lawdynge and besechynge, and sommetyme with dulce and softe syghinges desyringe the presence of theyr spouse, if he at any tyme absent hym selfe for a season.25 What more dulce & delectable Decacorda Cithera, what more profound Fidicula, then whose firste string is the eternall Woord of God.26 With much doulce and gentle termes, they make their reasons as violent and as vehement the one against the other as they may.27 Amongst the rest of that sugred and dulce aspect that they have of the works of the Lord, the Camelion is another, which is a very admirable creature.28

 22 Borde, A compendyous regyment or a dyetary of helth, Kiiiv.  23 A Delectable little history in metre of a lord and his three sons, p. 18.  24 For an exploration of other loanwords where the ‘literal’ sense is rare or absent in the borrowing language, see Allan, ‘An Inquest into Metaphor Death’.  25 Erasmus, The comparation of a vyrgin and a martyr, trans. by Paynell, 37r.  26 Strigel, Part of the harmony of King Dauids harp, trans. by Robinson, A2v.  27 Smith, De republica Anglorum, p. 40.  28 Pell, Pelagos, p. 259.

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Occasionally the conjunction is or, as for example: Seeing God hath bestowed on us these Baths for our great Benefit, if so be there be nothing that can more readily take away Distempers, (as Galen saith, de usu partium) of Heat and Cold, or evacuateth by the Pores the superfluous Humours, than a Dulce or pleasant Bath of warm Water, or that maintaineth Health more.29 Sometimes multiple adjectives are combined without a conjunction, as for example: When in this time, all the banket was done, after thanks being giuen, there was sung with most delicate dulce voices, and sweet harmonie in 7. partes, the 128. Psalme, with 14. voices.30 While recent work has shown the wide number of different functions of binomial constructions in literary and other texts in this period,31 analysis of these examples suggests strongly that they chiefly arise from the marked Renaissance inclination towards the rhetorical figure of copia verborum.32 It is also notable that in most of these examples douce and dulce are paired with other words which are of much less rare occurrence, and which often serve to clarify the type of ‘sweetness’ that is intended in each instance. Lexical productivity is often looked at as a sign of the degree of assimilation of a loanword to the lexical system of the recipient language. Dulce shows the derivatives dulcely (first attested 1508) and dulceness (1526), and, by conversion, a verb dulce (1558) and a noun dulce (1654 in the meaning ‘sweetness, gentleness’; earlier use denoting a type of sweet wine shows borrowing directly from Latin); either it or its etymon Latin dulcis also provides the stem of the adjectives dulcean (1606) and dulceous (1688). Douce shows only the conversion douce verb (a1475). All of these words are very rare in early modern English (as indicated by counts of matches in EEBO), and, while douce verb is attested in late Middle English in the meaning ‘to sweeten (an item of food)’, none of these words shows non-metaphorical reference to sweetness in taste in early modern English. Douce and dulce exemplify in miniature many of the key features typical of French- or Latin-derived words that either entered English in the early modern period, or already entered the language in late Middle English but without gaining significant frequency before 1500. In terms of classification

 29 Floyer, An enquiry into the right use and abuses of the hot, cold, and temperate baths in England, p. 124.  30 Fowler, A true reportarie of the most triumphant, and royal accomplishment of the baptisme of the most excellent, right high, and mightie prince, Frederik Henry, D2r.  31 See especially the essays in Kopaczyk and Sauer ed., Binomials in the History of English.  32 See especially the discussion of the connections between lexis, rhetoric, and literary style in Adamson, ‘Literary Language’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. iii; also Adamson, ‘Literary Language’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. iv.

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in a thesaurus, they can appear minor synonyms of a word in a basic meaning (in this case sweet), but closer inspection reveals that use in this meaning is in fact very rare, with metaphorical, extended, and specialized meanings (mostly reflecting those already found in the donor languages) in fact being much more characteristic of their use in English. They also gravitate towards the construction of particular registers, whether the (very broad) literary register characterized by copia verborum, or the developing technical registers of specialist fields such as medicine or the physical sciences.

Concluding Remarks This chapter has attempted to show how large-scale surveys of lexical history can fruitfully interact with detailed analyses of particular word histories. Inevitably, it will also indicate some of the tensions between these approaches. When we approach lexical history on the macro scale of developments across the whole of a lexicon in a particular time period, words become reduced to numbers, and we must constantly be cautious that we do not make assumptions that are not borne out by verification in individual word histories. Adding more layers of information, such as frequency data, or position in a semantic field, can enrich our analysis, but, inevitably, a world of further relevant detail comes into sight when we examine individual instances more closely. However, individual instances are just that, and we must be cautious to verify that they are indeed typical. Verification may come from looking at many other instances, and by identifying features — such as frequency relative to near or full synonyms, or distribution across different text types — that may be testable on a mass basis. This may not be quite within the grasp of today’s research tools, but suitable tools may not be far beyond the horizon, particularly if these aims are kept in mind as new tools are developed. We must also bear in mind, as outlined in the introduction to this chapter, that the concept of borrowing into a language is at best a simplification, and sometimes a dangerous one. At a high level of abstraction, it may appear that a word has entered English from the date of the first reliable uses accepted by historical dictionaries, but it is important not to lose perspective on what a first use represents. Revision work on historical dictionaries, such as that currently being carried out on OED, illustrates vividly how often earliest uses can be antedated as both new sources of data, and better methods of searching systematically those sources of data that were already known, become available. At the same time, a first use does not demonstrate that a lexical item was at that date in widespread use in a community: at its narrowest, all it shows is one instance of use by one individual. That use may itself have been influential, especially if it occurs in a widely read and widely disseminated text, or it may represent the tip of an iceberg of other roughly contemporary similar uses — but in other instances, it may not. What the situation is in the case of a particular word, or in a particular group or class of words, can

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only be established through detailed word biography, often, as in the cases examined above, pushing beyond what is possible in the confines of even the most extensive and detailed historical dictionary. Work on the lexicon must always steer a course between Scylla and Charybdis: on the one hand, large-scale work runs the danger of Procrusteanism and losing sight of the complex realities of individual word histories; on the other lurks the danger of atomization, as each word history opens up ever more tempting vistas of exploration from which, inevitably, we can always learn something new. It also benefits hugely from interdisciplinarity: we want and need approaches that can embrace number-crunching and statistical analysis, but also so much else complementing this. Sensitivity is required to the quantities of data available for each period and their typical content and genre, and to the prevalent rhetorical and stylistic modes. We will always learn more, the more time we can devote to close analysis of specific examples of use in their broadest contexts. We need to consider the nature of multilingual practices and contacts in each period, and the broadest range of developments in cultural and intellectual history. If all of these factors can be taken into account, examining lexical borrowing can yield huge rewards in what it can in return tell us about the development of the lexicon, about the development of literary and rhetorical styles and of genres, about the nature of historical multilingual practices and contact situations, and about the broad course of cultural and intellectual history — in short, it has the potential to shed new light on all of those areas that we bring to bear in its analysis, thus completing a virtuous circle. However, achieving this is a very tall order. Perhaps the surest foundation for success in this field is to build approaches that can readily be shared across a discipline, so that researchers can progress together, in networks such as the one from which the present volume has arisen.

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Bibliography Primary Sources A Delectable little history in metre of a lord and his three sons (Edinburgh: [n. pub.], 1698) Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson, third edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Bonde, William, The pylgrimage of perfection (London: Richard Pynson, 1526) Borde, Andrew, A compendyous regyment or a dyetary of helth (London: Robert Wyer for Iohn Gowghe, 1542) Erasmus, Desiderius, The comparation of a vyrgin and a martyr, trans. by Thomas Paynell (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1537) Floyer, John, An enquiry into the right use and abuses of the hot, cold, and temperate baths in England (London: Printed for R. Clavel, 1697) Fowler, William, A true reportarie of the most triumphant, and royal accomplishment of the baptisme of the most excellent, right high, and mightie prince, Frederik Henry (Edinburgh: Printed by R. Walde-graue, 1594) Pell, Daniel, Pelagos (London: Livewell Chapman, 1659) Smith, Thomas, De republica Anglorum (London: by Henrie Midleton for Gregorie Seton, 1583) Strigel, Victorinus, Part of the harmony of King Dauids harp, trans. by Richard Robinson (London: John Wolfe, 1582) Secondary Works Adamson, Sylvia, ‘Literary Language’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. iii, ed. by Roger Lass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 539–653 —— , ‘Literary Language’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. iv, ed. by Suzanne Romaine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 589–692 Allan, Kathryn, ‘An Inquest into Metaphor Death: Exploring the Loss of Literal Senses of Conceptual Metaphors’, Cognitive Semiotics, 5 (2014), 291–311 Björkman, Erik, Scandinavian Loan-Words in Middle English, 2 vols (Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer, 1900–1902) Culpeper, Jonathan, and Phoebe Clapham, ‘The Borrowing of Classical and Rom­ ance Words into English: A  Study Based on the Electronic Oxford English Dictionary’, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 1.2 (1996), 199–218 Dance, Richard, Words Derived from Old Norse in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’: An Etymological Survey, vol. i, Publications of the Philological Society 50 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018) Durkin, Philip, Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) —— , ‘Exploring the Penetration of Loanwords in the Core Vocabulary of Middle English: Carry as a Test Case’, in English Language and Linguistics, 22.2 (2018), 265–82

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—— , ‘Contact and Lexical Borrowing’, in The Handbook of Language Contact, ed. by Raymond Hickey, 2nd edition (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), pp. 169–79 —— , ‘The Relationship of Borrowing from French and Latin in the Middle English Period with the Development of the Lexicon of Standard English: Some Observations and a Lot of Questions’, in The Multilingual Origins of Standard English, ed. by Laura Wright (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 343–64 Durkin, Philip, and Kathryn Allan, ‘Borrowing and Copy: A Philological Approach to Early Modern English Lexicology’, Linguistics and Literary History: In Honour of Sylvia Adamson, ed. by Anita Auer, Victorina González-Díaz, Jane Hodson, and Violeta Sotirova (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016), pp. 71–86 Einhorn, Eric, Old French: A Concise Handbook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) Finkenstaedt, Thomas, and Dieter Wolff, with contributions by H. Joachim Neuhaus and Winfried Herget, Ordered Profusion: Studies in Dictionaries and the English Lexicon (Heidelberg: Winter, 1973) Fowler, Joseph Thomas, Extracts from the Account Rolls of the Abbey of Durham, 3 vols (Durham: The Surtees Society, 1898–1901) Haspelmath, Martin, and Uri Tadmor, ed., Loanwords in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009) Ingham, Richard, The Transmission of Anglo-Norman: Language History and Language Acquisition (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012) —— , ed., The Anglo-Norman Language and its Contexts (York: York Medieval, 2010) Kopaczyk, Joanna, and Hans Sauer, ed., Binomials in the History of English: Fixed and Flexible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) Scheler, Manfred, Der englische Wortschatz, Grundlagen der Anglistik und Amerikanistik 9 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1977) Schendl, Herbert, and Laura Wright, ed., Code-switching in Early English (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2011) Short, Ian, Manual of Anglo-Norman, Anglo-Norman Text Society Occasional Publications Series no. 7 (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2007) Tadmor, Uri, Martin Haspelmath, and Bradley Taylor, ‘Borrowability and the Notion of Basic Vocabulary’, Diachronica, 27 (2010), 226–46 Tatlock, John S. P., and Arthur G. Kennedy, A Concordance to the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and to the Romaunt of the Rose (Gloucester, MA: Smith, 1927 (reprinted 1963)) Trotter, David, ed., Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000) Wermser, Richard, Statistische Studien zur Entwicklung des englischen Wortschatzes (Bern: Francke, 1976) Wright, Laura, Sources of London English: Medieval Thames Vocabulary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) —— , ed., The Multilingual Origins of Standard English (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020)

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[accessed 1 October 2020] Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. by P. G. W. Glare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968–1982) The Oxford English Dictionary, First edition, ed. by Sir James A. H. Murray, Henry Bradley, Sir William A. Craigie, and Charles T. Onions (1884– 1928); Supplement and Bibliography (1933); Supplement, ed. by Robert W. Burchfield (1972–1986); Second edition, ed. by John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner (1989); Additions Series, ed. by John A. Simpson, Edmund S. C. Weiner, and Michael Proffitt (1993–1997); Third edition, OED Online, ed. by John A. Simpson (to 2013) and Michael Proffitt (from 2013) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000–), online at: [accessed 1 October 2020]

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The Scottish National Dictionary: designed partly on regional lines and partly on historical principles, and containing all the Scottish words known to be in use or to have been in use since c. 1700, ed. by W. Grant and D. D. Murison (Edinburgh: Scottish National Dictionary Association, 1931–1976); Supplement (2005); available online as part of Dictionary of the Scots Language: [accessed 1 October 2020]

Jean-David Eynard

2. ‘A little mint where you may coin words for your pleasure’ Cant and Linguistic Currency in Dekker’s Rogue Pamphlets

During the Renaissance, writers became increasingly interested in recording the languages of the criminal underworld. In 1466, Luigi Pulci wrote a ‘Nota di parole e Frasi Furbesche’ for Lorenzo de’ Medici, a glossary of different canting words employed by thieves and conmen in Italy. Around the same time, one finds the first printed editions of the German Liber Vagatorum — an encyclopaedic catalogue of false beggars and parasites, which also included a detailed description of their jargon.1 One of the earliest texts of this kind to be printed in England was Thomas Harman’s A Caveat for Commen Cursetors, originally published in 1566. This pamphlet quickly gained great popularity, and proved the main source of inspiration for Thomas Dekker’s subsequent treatment of cant, on which this chapter focuses.2 In Lanthorne and CandleLight (1608), Dekker provides a curious history of this jargon, treating it as a language in its own right. Throughout his discussion, he repeatedly compares words to coins; he then offers a glossary of cant to his readers, not simply as a tool for translation, but as ‘a little Mint, where you may coyne wordes for your pleasure’.3 Although the analogy between words and coins dates back to classical authors and was widely employed at the time, I would like to argue that Dekker’s innovative use of this comparison emphasizes the disruptive character of cant. Dekker presents canting words as counterfeit coins

* I wish to thank Gavin Alexander, the editors of this volume, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.  1 See Camporesi, Il Libro dei Vagabondi; on early modern Dutch cant dictionaries, see also Moormann, De Geheimtalen, pp. 301–351.  2 For an overview of early modern English glossaries of thieves’ cant, see Noyes, ‘The Develop­ment of Cant Lexicography in England, 1566–1785’; Gotti, The Language of Thieves and Vagabonds; and Coleman, A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries.  3 Dekker, The Non-Dramatic Works, ed. by Grosart, iii, p. 202. Further references to this edition will be embedded parenthetically within the text. Jean-David Eynard ([email protected]) Pembroke College, Cambridge Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer, ed. by Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin, PEEMB 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 57–80  10.1484/M.PEEMB-EB.5.127774

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threatening the currency of English as a national language, and emphasizes their illegal status through some highly material imagery. By providing his readers with their own linguistic mint, Dekker actively invites them to use this language — highlighting not only the disruptive nature of this practice, but also the economic gain that might be obtained from it.

Latin and Cant Lanthorne and Candle-Light opens with a dedicatory epistle addressed ‘To my owne Nation’, in which Dekker expresses the hope that this work may be of public service to his country. He explains his intention to shed light onto the deceits of the criminals plaguing the English nation, thereby joining the fight against those who are ‘up in open armes against the Tranquillitie of the Weale publique’ (iii.181). Dekker’s rogue pamphlet must be situated within the ‘exposure’ literature of the time, which aimed at unveiling the cheats and dangers of the underworld for the public good of the nation. The narrative framework of these texts occasionally revolved around the figure of Diogenes, who, ‘from a counterfeit Coiner of money, became a currant corrector of manners’, revealing worldly deceptions by means of candlelight.4 Dekker partly builds on this tradition in Lanthorne and Candle-Light, as he had already done in its prequel The Belman of London, published the year before. However, the figure of Diogenes is replaced with a watchman, who narrates his encounters with different figures of the underworld during his night walks. Although these pamphlets are largely narrative in their nature, at the beginning of Lanthorne is a curiously long chapter titled ‘Of Canting’. Written in the manner of a short treatise, this chapter offers an extensive discussion of the language of criminals. Dekker begins the chapter ‘Of Canting’ with a standard description of the linguistic consequences of the fall of the Tower of Babel, explaining that before God’s punishment, ‘Two could not then stand gabling with strange tongues, and conspire together (to his owne face) how to cut a third mans throat, but he might understand them’ (iii.187–88).5 Thieves’ cant and linguistic deception are posited as an inherently Babelic condition, and Dekker emphasizes the role of this language as a secret jargon employed by criminals to make money out of their verbal trickeries. Cant is described as disordered and unruly, just like its speakers.6 Nonetheless, Dekker suggests that this language is akin to  4 Greene, The Defence of Conny catching, A2r; the conceit is developed more extensively in Rowlands, Diogenes Lanthorne. Note the opposition of ‘counterfeit’ and ‘currant’ in the passage above.  5 Dekker’s description of the Tower of Babel is largely taken from Verstegan’s popular A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence from 1605 (see Gotti, The Language of Thieves and Vagabonds, p. 28).  6 David W. Maurer suggests that the notion of cant as being disordered was just ‘a bit of

2. ‘a little mint where you may coin words for your pleasure’

melodious poetic speech, pointing out that ‘canting seemes to bee derived from the latine verbe (canto) which signifies in English, to sing’, and indeed ‘the language of canting is a kinde of musicke’ (iii.194). Even from a lexical point of view, some order may be found: And yet (even out of all that Irregularity, unhandsomnesse, & Fountaine of Barbarisme) do they draw a kinde of forme: and in some wordes, (aswell simple as compounds) retaine a certaine salte, tasting of some wit and some Learning. As for example, they call a cloake (in the canting tongue) a Togeman, and in Latin, Toga signifies a gowne, or an upper garment. Pannam is bread: & Panis in Lattin is likewise bread, cassan is cheese, and is a worde barbarously coynd out of the substantive caseus, which also signifies a cheese. And so of others. (iii.195) By showing the etymological derivation of several canting words from Latin, Dekker suggests that this jargon may be a somewhat learned and orderly form of speech. In fact, he emphasizes the difficulty in learning cant, claiming that ‘seven yeeres study is little enough to reach to the bottome of it’ (iii.156). The idea of cant as a cultured language can be traced back to the first medieval glossaries, and was often invoked by popular writers in early modern England.7 Dekker’s effort to show the etymology of single words from Latin is unprecedented, though, and deserves further attention.8 At first glance, Dekker’s etymological work would seem to increase the nobility and legitimacy of cant, presenting it as the descendant of a classical language. Nonetheless, Dekker’s broader views on Latin problematize such an interpretation.9 Despite playing an important role in Dekker’s writings, this classical language is recurrently presented as a medium of deception. In one of his scorching critiques of mountebank doctors, for example, Dekker warns his readers: ‘beate not your braines to understand their parcell greeke, parcell-latine gibrish: let not all their sophisticall buzzing into your eares’ (ii.216). The same linguistic abuse can be found in religious contexts, as Dekker feels the need to contrast his plain style with the deceptive rhetoric of ‘some pedantical Vicar stammering out a most false and crackt latine oration’ to the brethren (ii.206). This attack against Catholic preachers shows just how obscure Latin would have been for common people, who could have seventeenth-century sophistry. As a matter of fact, the underworld cant of Dekker’s day, like the argot of our own, followed the same general rules of grammar to which the contemporary literary English was subject’ (Language of the Underworld, ed. by Futrell and Wordell, p. 40).  7 See Heller-Roazen, Dark Tongues, p. 24; and Reynolds, Becoming a Criminal, p. 72. Cant is also described as a ‘learned language’ in Beggar’s Bush (Beaumont and Fletcher, The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. by Bowers, iii, ii.i.137).  8 For a modern study of the development of English cant, see Gotti, ‘The Origin of 17th Century Canting Terms’.  9 Dekker’s interest in Latin has been noted by Hunt, Thomas Dekker: A Study, pp. 14–15; and Jones-Davies, ‘Source du latin scolastique dans The Whore of Babylon de Thomas Dekker’.

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been harmed by the ‘Latin bullets’ of dubious intellectuals, as Dekker puts it elsewhere (ii.343).10 These passages corroborate Peter Burke’s claim that Latin jargon was employed as a deceptive language by early modern Scholastics and conmen alike, with the purpose of dazzling and confusing people.11 Even when incorporated into English, Latin neologisms were considered unnecessarily obscure, and in the common imagination they became associated with the bombastic vocabulary of would-be intellectuals.12 One only need think of George Puttenham’s critique of the ‘fonde affectation’ of young scholars, who ‘will seeme to coigne fine words out of the Latin, and to use new fangled speaches, thereby to shew themselves among the ignorant the better learned’.13 This classical language was closely connected with linguistic trickery and obscurantism, as the notion of Pig Latin continues to suggest to this day.14 Dekker’s etymological connection between Latin and thieves’ cant is thus not simply a philological exercise aimed at showing the origins of criminal jargon, but also gestures towards deeper social links between these two languages as vehicles of deception. The association between learning and deception is already clear in Dekker’s earlier pamphlet The Belman of London. Emphasizing that the criminal world is a nation of its own, Dekker argues here that ‘no common wealth can stand without some Learning in it, Therefore are there some in this Schoole of Beggers, that practise writing and Reading’ (iii.103–04). These remarks are not completely unfounded. It is believed that in early modern England prisons and other hubs might have functioned as underground schools of some sort, where criminals could have learnt not only how to read and write, but also the very the art of canting.15 Ben Jonson repeatedly plays with this idea in his drama. In The New Inn, for example, the owner is tempted to turn his property into ‘An Academy o’ rogues! or gi’ it away | For a free-schoole, to breed up beggers in, | And send’hem to the canting Universities’.16 We find  10 Dekker’s criticisms of the Latin-speaking clergy are very Protestant in tone. In the literature of the time, Papists and vagabonds were often associated, as noted by Jeffrey Knapp in ‘Rogue Nationalism’, p. 148.  11 See Burke, ‘The Jargon of the Schools’. For further examples from Dekker, see The NonDramatic Works, ed. by Grosart, ii.62 and ii.275.  12 See Malcolm, The Origins of English Nonsense, pp. 30–31 and 104–05.  13 Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 209.  14 Usually consisting in the addition of suffixes, or the displacement of the initial consonantal cluster in a word, this technique was already employed by John Skelton in a mock Latin sermon around 1510 (‘Ware the Hauke’, in The Complete English Poems, ed. by Scattergood, ll. 239–244). Although the expression ‘Pig Latin’ appears to be more recent, the phrases ‘kitchen Latin’ and ‘dog Latin’ were used more generally to describe the poor Latin associated with Scholasticism during the Renaissance (see Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe, p. 57).  15 See Reynolds, Becoming a Criminal, pp. 81 and 86–7; and Pugliatti, Beggary and Theatre in Early Modern England, pp. 104–5.  16 Jonson, The New Inn, ed. by Sanders, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, vol. vi, I.v.37–40.

2. ‘a little mint where you may coin words for your pleasure’

a similar scene in The Staple of News, when some of the characters decide to establish a ‘Canters college’; here, students would be able to practise ‘such mint-phrase, as ’tis the worst of canting, | By how much it affects the sense it has not’.17 These passages not only emphasize the nature of cant as a specialized criminal language that may be learned through study, but also hint at its potential use as a meaningless form of speech aimed at gulling people. In this sense, cant resembles the fustian rhetoric that was created as a mimicry of the obscure Latinate jargon of the schools at the time.18 This similarity is reinforced by Jonson’s own phrasing in The New Inn, when he suggests that one of his dubious characters ‘cants in Latin comely’.19 These passages demonstrate that Latin words and bombastic terminology were recurrently associated with the language of thieves in early modern England. Dekker’s etymological discussion of cant strikes at the core of this issue.

Verbal Compounding In highlighting the derivation of canting terms from Latin, Dekker might also be making a rather more political statement. In the second half of the sixteenth century, scholars started to emphasize the Anglo-Saxon roots of the English language, favouring the use of indigenous words over Latinate terms. Such philological effort was dictated by a specific intellectual agenda, becoming an important way of expressing nationalist feelings.20 Within this context, Dekker’s etymological work sets up thieves’ cant in opposition to the language of the English nation; the very origins of this criminal jargon make it alien.21 The importation of Latinate terms is not the only kind of dangerous neologizing practised by canters, though, compounding being another important method of word-formation. Dekker explains that, ‘by ioyning of two simples, doe they make almost all their compounds. As for example: Nab (in the canting tongue) is a head, & Nab-cheate, is a hat or cap’, whereas ‘a Smelling cheate, signifies a Nose’ (iii.195). Dekker provides numerous examples of such compound words, showing how they might be created by adding not only  17 Jonson, The Staple of News, ed. by Loewenstein, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, vol. vi, IV.iv.74–82. Cf. Massinger, The Picture, Ev: ‘this is no canting language | Taught in your Academie’.  18 See Roberts, ‘Comparative nonsense: French galimatias and English fustian’, pp. 107–8.  19 Jonson, The New Inn, ed. by Sanders, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, vol. vi, II.v.42.  20 See e.g. Jones, The Triumph of the English Language, pp. 68–93; and Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe, pp. 156–234.  21 Throughout the pamphlet, the otherness of cant is reinforced visually by means of typography; canting terms are printed in Roman type, as opposed to the blackletter used for the main body of the text in English. This visual opposition is especially clear in Dekker’s glossary of cant, where English and canting words appear side by side in different types (not an unusual feature in bilingual dictionaries of the time).

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the term ‘cheat’, but also ‘the word Cove, or Cose, or Cussin, [which] signifies a Man, a Fellow, &c.’ (iii.196). The prominence of such compound words sets cant apart from the native language of England even further, since the latter had been traditionally considered to be in large part monosyllabic. Praising the sober simplicity of the English lexicon, many intellectuals ascribed ‘the abundance of monosyllables […] to the Saxon element in the language’, and encouraged their use.22 George Gascoigne’s advice on the matter reveals the nationalistic feelings attached to this linguistic issue very well: ‘the more monasyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seeme, and the lesse you shall smell of the Inkehorne’.23 Verbal compounding was not only associated with a sense of foreignness, but was also seen as a sign of exuberant excess.24 Thomas Nashe was clearly playing with these overlapping sentiments in his preface to the 1594 edition of Christs Teares over Jerusalem, where he provided this sardonic defence of the bombastic rhetoric of preachers: For the compounding of my wordes, therein I imitate rich men who, having gathered store of white single money together, convert a number of those small little scutes into great peeces of gold, such as double Pistols and Portugues. Our English tongue of all languages most swarmeth with the single money of monasillables, which are the onely scandal of it. Bookes written in them and no other seeme like Shop-keepers boxes, that containe nothing else save half-pence, three-farthings, and two-pences. Therefore what did me I, but having a huge heap of those worthlesse shreds of small English in my Pia maters purse, to make the royaller shew with them to mens eyes, had them to the compounders immediately, and exchanged them foure into one, and others into more, according to the Greek, French, Spanish and Italian?25 This passage serves a double purpose: while poking fun at the not-so-plain language of Puritan preachers, Nashe simultaneously sets out his own linguistic agenda of unrestrained coining and neologizing.26 The high number

 22 Jones, The Triumph of the English Language, p. 199; see also pp. 237–45. Cf. Brown, ‘Monosyllables in English Verse’.  23 Gascoigne, ‘Certayne notes of Instruction’, in The Posies, T4r. See below for a discussion of the inkhorn controversy.  24 Kenneth Hayes has argued that early modern English writers began to make a heightened poetic use of compound words, inspired by their extensive use in Greek and French literature; this practice became so widespread that, by the end of the sixteenth century, the abuse of extravagant compounds started attracting the critiques of popular writers like Joseph Hall (Hayes, English Literature and Ancient Languages, pp. 105–24).  25 Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. by McKerrow, ii, p. 184.  26 See Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric, p. 65. Even though the Puritan style was predicated on plainness, it has been shown that many Puritan preachers actually employed ‘longer words than the so-called ornate preachers’ (Orten, ‘Elizabethan Puritanism and the Plain Style’, p. 185).

2. ‘a little mint where you may coin words for your pleasure’

of monosyllabic words in English is taken as a sign of the poverty of the language, which should be enriched by means of verbal compounding. Nashe takes this practice to vertiginous levels in his sermon, using several compound words in close proximity to form phrases such as: ‘eye-bals well-neere to pinnes-heads’, ‘clowde-climing slaughter-stack’, ‘dead-mens bones and castout bodies’.27 Nashe justifies this art through a protracted economic conceit, perhaps following the advice that we ‘should compare wordes to money, which is so much the more esteemed, by how much lesser it is in quantitie, and greater in value’.28 He envisions the exchange of several monosyllabic English words for fewer neologisms of higher value, which may express things more succinctly. His explanation ultimately rests on competing meanings of the term ‘compounder’, which could also indicate ‘one who pays for a lump sum in discharge of recurrent payments to which he is liable’.29 Nashe’s monetary imagery is important for the following discussion, because it is echoed closely by Dekker’s own metaphors in his chapter on cant. In Lanthorne and Candle-Light, Dekker recognizes the native poverty of the English language. He explains that English was at first ‘a broken language: the singlest and the simplest Words flowed from her utterance: for she dealt nothing but in Monosillables’ (iii.188).30 The linguistic wealth of the nation comes from continental languages, from which words were subsequently loaned: ‘Yet afterwards those Noblest Languages lent her Words and phrazes, and turning those Borrowings into Good husbandry shee is now […] rich in Elocution’ (iii.188). The ‘good husbandry’ of the English language contrasts with the unchecked compounding characteristic of cant, through which words may be joined and ‘marryed to many others besides’ much more liberally (iii.196). Dekker emphasizes this distinction even more markedly through his economic imagery, as he presents cant as an illicit form of linguistic mintage. After providing several examples of compounds in cant, he informs his readers: ‘Many peeces of this strange coyne could I shew you, but by these small stampes, you may iudge of the greater’ (iii.191). Although Dekker is building here on a fairly commonplace comparison between words and coins, his specific formulation is revealing. As economic historians have shown, counterfeiting was popularly described as the circulation of ‘strange  27 Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. by McKerrow, ii.36, ii.49, and ii.67.  28 Guazzo, The Civile Conversation, trans. by Pettie, 62v. The same year Nashe’s preface was published, in a sermon preached on 6 March 1594, Lancelot Andrewes made a similar com­parison: ‘it fareth with Sentences as with coynes: In coines, they that in smallest compasse conteine greatest value, are best esteemed: and, in sentences, those that in fewest words comprise most matter, are most praised’ (‘A Sermon Preached Before Queene Elizabeth’, in Selected Sermons and Lectures, ed. by McCullough, p. 108); on Nashe and Andrewes, see McCullough’s ‘Introduction’ to his edition of Andrewes, Selected Sermons and Lectures, p. xviii.  29 OED, ‘compounder, n. 3.’.  30 Note how both the term ‘dealing’ and ‘utterance’ had economic undertones at the time; Dekker may be playing with the notion of linguistic richness (OED, ‘utterance, n. 1.’). On ‘utterance’, see also chapter 3 in the present volume.

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coins’ in society at the time.31 Dekker applies this concept to the linguistic realm. Canting words are not merely counterfeit because they are created in imitation of another language — being ‘coynd out of ’ Latin — but, more importantly, because they endanger the linguistic currency of the English nation.32 To fully understand the meaning of Dekker’s monetary imagery, one must look at the ideological background against which he was reacting.

Monetary and Linguistic Coinage The word-as-coin analogy goes back to the classical period, and was employed by a variety of authors (from Aristotle to Cicero and Quintilian), before being taken up by late antique commentators. The general aim of these comparisons was to address the function of words as signs, drawing on the opposition between intrinsic and extrinsic theories of monetary value to explain the difference between signifier and signified.33 In mid-sixteenth-century England, such economic imagery came to play a key role in the so-called inkhorn controversy. Discussing the relative merits of neologisms, intellectuals started to compare loanwords to foreign currency entering the English monetary market. Writers arguing from either side of the controversy exploited this imagery to opposite ends. In an often-quoted passage from a letter appended to Thomas Hoby’s translation of Castiglione’s Courtier, John Cheke argued against the use of inkhorn terms: I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges, wherin if we take not heed bi tijm, ever borowing and never payeng, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt. For then doth our tung naturallie and praisablie utter her meaning, whan she bouroweth no conterfeitness of other tunges to attire her self withall but useth plainlie her own.34 The excessive use of loanwords is said to be contributing to the instability of the national linguistic currency, with nefarious consequences comparable to those in the realm of finance. For this very reason, some thought that linguistic abuses should even be criminalized. Thomas Wilson, a close friend of Cheke’s, was a vocal proponent of this idea. He argued that, just as monetary counterfeiters  31 Bishop, ‘Currency, Conversation, and Control’. Given the original connotations of the term ‘strange’, this expression was also occasionally employed to describe foreign currency in early modern England.  32 Valerie Forman has picked up on the paradox inherent in the idea of counterfeiting, which originally meant ‘to imitate’ as well as ‘to make in opposition or contrast’, in ‘Marked Angels: Counterfeits, Commodities, and The Roaring Girl’, p. 1540. Cf. Lander, ‘“Crack’d Crowns” and Counterfeit Sovereigns’, p. 152.  33 See Shell, The Economy of Literature; and Goux, The Coiners of Language, trans. by Gage.  34 Cheke, ‘A Letter’ [1557], in Castiglione, The Courtyer, trans. by Hoby, n.p. See also chapter 3 in the present volume.

2. ‘a little mint where you may coin words for your pleasure’

were being punished for their crimes, so should those who corrupt their mother tongue be charged ‘for counterfeiting the kynges English’.35 On the other side of the controversy, intellectuals argued that the use of neologisms should not only be allowed, but even favoured. In the preface to his translation of Stefano Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation, George Pettie built on the same economic imagery as Cheke in order to make an opposite point. He argued that the use of neologisms ‘is in deed the ready way to inrich our tongue, and make it copious, and it is the way which all tongues have taken to inrich them selves’; emphasizing that this was a natural process in the development of any language, he concluded: ‘I marveile how our english tongue hath crackt it credite, that it may not borrow of the Latine as well as other tongues’.36 The importation of foreign words is thus presented as an essential method for improving the English language, rather than a threat. Such economic metaphors reflected a keen interest in the issue of authority. As Paula Blank has suggested, ‘above all, the question posed by the production of words in the period was one of social authority — who had the prerogative to “gain” words, to “mint” words, to discriminate among “base” words and the genuine article’.37 On the Continent, the creation of academies of language throughout the sixteenth century provided a partial solution to this problem. Like royal mints, these institutions took upon themselves the task of validating the semantic currency of the nation.38 In England, language purists like Thomas Wilson also called for the need to standardize and centralize language, promoting the ‘kynges English’.39 Despite their best efforts, however, they failed to create an academy after the continental models.40 It is precisely because of the lack of such central authority that Jonson could claim that ‘Custome is the most certaine Mistresse of Language, as the publicke stampe makes the current money. But wee must not be too frequent with the mint, every day coyning’.41 While warning against excessive linguistic ingenuity, Jonson suggests that words are ultimately authorized by usage and circulation. Such a view is based on the notion of linguistic currency: words are legitimized by being exchanged, and should pass the test of time.42 The lack of a central

 35 Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, 86r.  36 Pettie, ‘The Preface to the Readers’, in Guazzo, The Civile Conversation, trans. by Pettie, iijr.  37 Blank, Broken English, p. 38.  38 Praising Henry Cary’s translation of Malvezzi, Thomas Carew would make such connection explicit by writing that the language of the Italian author was ‘farre above the stile of Bemboe’s days, | Old Varchie’s rules, or what the Trusca yet | For currant Truscan mintage will admit’ (‘To my much honoured friend’, in Poems, p. 128). A later use of this analogy is mentioned in Harald Weinrich, ‘Münze und Wort’, p. 513.  39 See Shrank, ‘Rhetorical Constructions of a National Community’, p. 187.  40 Flasdieck, Der Gedanke einer englischen Sprachakademie, pp. 1–15.  41 Jonson, Discoveries, ed. by Lorna Hutson, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, vol. vii, p. 563. Cf. Davies, Microcosmos, p. 211: ‘We must use words as wee use Coyne, that is, those that be common and currant; It is dangerous to coine without priviledg.’  42 This idea already occurs in Horace (Ars Poetica, ll. 70–2), who also notes that ‘it has ever

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institution did not bring an end to the dream of standardizing the English language, though, and seventeenth-century lexicographers continued to adopt the imagery of mintage to explain how language might be regulated and imposed nationally, just like money.43

Dekker’s Private Mint In Lanthorne and Candle-Light, Dekker engages closely with these issues. His lexicographical endeavour has much in common with the more substantial dictionaries of the period in its attempt to bring some order to the Babelic confusion of languages.44 In ‘The Canters Dictionarie’, Dekker provides the meaning of some ninety canting terms, and several more are translated in the course of the chapter. Dekker also employs a similar economic imagery to that of contemporary scholars, as he compares his little dictionary to a mint — although he does so for a very different purpose. At the end of his glossary, Dekker tells his readers: And thus I have builded up a little Mint, where you may coyne words for your pleasure. The payment of this was a debt: for the Belman at his farewell (in his first Round which hee walk’d) promised so much. If hee keepe not touch, by tendering the due Summe, hee desires forbearance, and if any that is more rich in this Canting commodity will lend him any more, or any better, hee will pay his love double. (iii.202) Dekker thus presents his glossary not merely as a tool for translation, but as a mint by means of which new words may be created, and indeed he asks his readers to suggest further entries that the Bellman may have missed. As it should be clear from the brief history of monetary imagery outlined in the previous section, Dekker makes an original use of the minting metaphor. He does not employ it to argue for the standardization of the English language, but rather to undermine it; he presents his readers with a ‘private mint’, inciting them to create their own canting words. While the apparent purpose of Dekker’s chapter on cant might be that of warning his readers against the linguistic trickeries of the underworld, this passage actively encourages them to get involved in the use and production of this criminal language.

been, and ever will be, permitted to issue words stamped with the mint-mark of the day’ (ll. 58–59; in Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, trans. by Fairclough).  43 Minting metaphors abound in mid-seventeenth century dictionaries. See e.g. John Sergeant, ‘To His Honored Friend’, ll. 7–12 in Blount, Glossographia: Or a Dictionary, A7r–v; and Phillips, ‘Advertisement to the Reader’, in The New World of English Words.  44 The importance of the myth of Babel for Dekker has been discussed by Barbour, Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction, p. 133; and Comensoli ‘“A Kind of Music”: The Representation of Cant’, pp. 39–41.

2. ‘a little mint where you may coin words for your pleasure’

Dekker had already employed the image of the mint metaphorically before. In The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat (1607), for example, he had provided this vivid description of the English rebel forces: ‘Souldiers are the maisters of wars mint, | Blowes are the stamps, they set upon with bullets, | And broken pates are when the braines lyes spilt: | These light crownes, that with blood are double guilt’.45 Mintage clearly proved a fruitful source of metaphors for Dekker, as previous studies of his drama have suggested.46 By referring to his glossary of cant as a linguistic mint, however, Dekker would have been able to capitalize on a specific meaning of the term. As the OED shows, both the verbs ‘to coin’ and ‘to mint’ were often used to refer to the production of lies in the early modern period; even as a noun, the term ‘mint’ could indicate metaphorically ‘a source of invention or fabrication’.47 It is in this sense that John Earle used this word to describe Paul’s Walk, which he saw as ‘the great Exchange of all discourse’: ‘It is the generall Mint of all famous lies, which are here like the legends of Popery, first coyn’d & stampt in the Church’.48 By presenting his little dictionary as a mint of canting words, Dekker thus not only promotes linguistic fecundity, but simultaneously captures the ideas of trickery and deception associated with this form of speech. Dekker’s linguistic mint is deliberately presented as private, as if it were separate from more official forms of linguistic coinage. Instead of stabilizing the verbal currency of the nation, Dekker actively undermines its stability by promoting linguistic ingenuity. As has been noted, ‘this image is one of agency’.49 The benefits and dangers that come with such agency are embedded in the association of linguistic production with illegal mintage, which Dekker takes further in the second chapter of Lanthorne, when describing the satanical synagogue of Hell. He reports here a fictional letter written by the inhabitants of Hell directed against the Bellman, who ‘by the help of the lantern and candle, looked into the secrets of the best trades that are taught in Hell’, revealing them to the general public. Complaining about this act of exposure, they claim that no thief will now be able to walk into a fair or a playhouse but every crack cry ‘Look to your purses!’, nor a poor common rogue come to a man’s door but he shall be examined if he can cant. If this bawling fellow therefore have not his mouth stopped, the light angels that are coined below will never be able to pass as they have done but be nailed up for counterfeits. (iii.200)

 45 Dekker, The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat, D4r.  46 Jenny Sager highlights the parallels between minting and rebellion in ‘“Noble being Base”: Heads, Coins and Rebellion’, p. 9.  47 OED, ‘mint, n. 1’. On the relationship between false coinage and lying, which already played an important role in medieval thought, see Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies, p. 164.  48 Earle, Micro-cosmographie, or, A Peece of the World Discovered, I12r. Cf. also Dekker, The NonDramatic Works, v.167.  49 Stafford, ‘Englishing the Rogue, “Translating” the Irish’, p. 325.

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Although canting words had long been described as counterfeit, Dekker further emphasizes their nature as forged objects through some highly material imagery.50 Since antiquity, counterfeit coins had been recurrently punched through with a nail, as a way of marking their illegality. Dekker himself mentions this practice in The Roaring Girl (first published in 1611), when Sir Alexander tries to trick Moll into passing on ‘angels marked with holes in them’.51 In ‘The Excellent worth of a Penny’ (1631), Dekker also indicates that a coin that does not pass ‘for current money […] shall be nayled up for a counterfeit’.52 In fact, shopkeepers often nailed counterfeit coins to their counter or onto a post, in order to prevent their circulation and educate the people; an early modern poem suggests that once the true nature of a fraudulent coin is discovered, ‘pressently [it] is nayled on a Post’.53 The passage quoted above refers to this specific economic practice. Canting words become object-like entities, under the threat of being subjected to the same concrete act of exposure as counters, as a way of showing their illegitimate nature and stop their circulation. This material imagery goes a long way in demonstrating how cant was perceived at the time. As Bryan Reynolds has noted, early modern criminal jargon really ‘transgressed the sociolinguistic hegemony of official culture’, as ‘the emergent criminal culture challenged official culture’s language-standardization movement through its use of cant’.54 Dekker expresses these ideas vividly through his monetary imagery, presenting the words of thieves as illegitimate counterfeit objects.

Dekker’s Celebration of Cant In his classic study of early modern glossaries of cant, Stephen Greenblatt has drawn attention to their implicit agendas to tame criminal culture: ‘The subversive voices are produced by and within the affirmations of order; they are powerfully registered, but they do not undermine that order’.55 Dekker’s attempts at finding some order in this uncouth language and explaining its

 50 As early as 1530, John Palsgrave described cant as a ‘countrefait langaige’ (Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse, 368r). Cf. Skelton, ‘Magnyfycence’, in The Complete English Poems, l. 441.  51 Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, ed. by Mulholland, iv.ii.204. It has been noted that the issue of ‘counterfeiting dominates The Roaring Girl’, both in ‘literal and figurative forms’ (Forman, ‘Marked Angels’, p. 1539).  52 Dekker, ‘The Excellent worth of a Penny’, in Penny-Wis[e] Pound Foolish, A4v. Dekker also mentions counterfeit coins that have been ‘naild up’ in The Wonderfull Yeare (The NonDramatic Works, ed. by Grosart, i.146) and Dekker His Dreame (The Non-Dramatic Works, ed. by Grosart, iii.23).  53 Barnfield, The Encomion of Lady Pecunia, B4v.  54 Reynolds, Becoming a Criminal, pp. 64 and 68. Cf. Beier, ‘Anti-language or Jargon? Canting in the English Underworld’.  55 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 52. For a different reading that emphasizes the sense of otherness reinforced by this ideological act, see Agnew, Worlds Apart, pp. 66–8.

2. ‘a little mint where you may coin words for your pleasure’

governing rules might seem to confirm this point. In O per se O (which was appended to the editions of Lanthorne from 1612 onwards), Dekker even voices the wish to introduce canting words into the national language. In describing the characters of the underworld, he aims to include ‘words and phrases of their gibberish or beggarly language, giving them the stampe presently of true English’.56 The idea of linguistic mintage, embedded here in the term ‘stamp’, is thus employed yet differently to suggest that canting words might be tamed and incorporated into the English lexicon. Overall, Dekker’s metaphors of mintage convey a more ambiguous message, though, framing the subversion of order as an attractive linguistic activity. As a writer of popular pamphlets, Dekker adopts a much less moralistic approach than many of his contemporaries. Harman had quite clearly emphasized the status of cant as an ‘unlawfull languag’, and subsequent intellectuals voiced similar ideas, echoing Wilson’s suggestion that linguistic transgressors should be punished like any other criminals.57 While recognizing the subversive nature of this form of speech, Dekker also embraces it. The wavering ideological stance reflected by his monetary imagery thus confirms the general view that his ‘works typically criticised what they also celebrated; their moral posturing was tempered by tolerant amusement and even promotion of what were conventionally seen as vices’.58 In Lanthorne and Candle-Light, Dekker promotes the language of thieves by including canting songs and rhymes, with accompanying English translations, which may help readers learn this language. The Bellman suggests that these texts and the glossary are for the benefit of ‘him that is desirous to try his skill in the language’ (iii.197). This expression conceals a certain sense of pleasure and playfulness. In fact, it has been argued that the canting songs printed in early modern popular literature have a riddle-like quality, inviting readers to decode their obscurity.59 This also applies to the rhymes included in Dekker’s pamphlet, where readers are repeatedly tempted to learn and practice cant. Behind the façade of Dekker’s act of exposure, there lies a much deeper interest in the language of criminals. Dekker’s linguistic discussions not only build on early modern traditions of popular literature, but also echo the more scholarly treatments of criminal language of the time.60 In Lanthorne and Candle-Light, various paratextual  56 Dekker, O per se O, Or a New Cryer of Lanthorne and Candle-Light, Mv.  57 Harman, A Caveat for Commen Cursetors Vulgarely Called Vagabones, A.iiv. Criticizing the linguistic practice of canters, Alexander Gill suggested that ‘that detestable scum of wandering vagabonds speak no proper dialect but a cant jargon which no punishment by law will ever repress, until its proponents are crucified by the magistrates, acting under a public edict’ (Gill, Logonomia Anglica [1619], ed. by Danielsson and Gabrielson, p. 104).  58 Bayman, Thomas Dekker and the Culture of Pamphleteering, p. 3. The ‘moral equivocation’ of Lanthorne has sometimes been linked to Dekker’s narratorial strategy. Cf. Comensoli, ‘Introduction’, in Dekker, Lantern and Candlelight, ed. by Comensoli, p. 57; and Koch, ‘The De­sanctification of the Beggar’, p. 101.  59 See Tiffany, Infidel Poetics, esp. pp. 137–60.  60 Scholarly treatments of cant include Gessner, Mithridate Mithridates, ed. by Colombat and

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Figure 2.1. Annotations by Robert Burton in Thomas Dekker, The Belman of London. Bodleian Library, 4o G 8(14) Art.BS., unnumbered pages. Reproduced courtesy of the Bodleian Library.

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elements add to the scholarly feel of the pamphlet — including the copious marginal notes (often in Latin), the essayistic chapter titles, and the synoptic table of contents printed at the beginning of the work.61 However, the highest testament to the significance of Dekker’s lexicographical endeavours comes from the marks left behind by seventeenth-century readers, showing their keen engagement with his linguistic discussions. The copies of Dekker’s pamphlets annotated by Robert Burton, which survive at the Bodleian Library, are an extraordinary example in this regard. Burton added his initials to the frontispiece of O per se O, and filled The Belman of London with marginal notes summarizing Dekker’s arguments.62 Possibly noticing that many ideas had been silently borrowed from A Caveat for Commen Cursetors, Burton transcribed several passages ‘taken out of Harmans booke’.63 He copied out not only Harman’s own glossary (Figure 2.1), but also a long dialogue written in cant with interlinear English translation, which was evidently meant to facilitate the study of the language. Burton’s annotations testify to his analytical skills, as he cross-compared and merged information gathered from different sources. More importantly, they show his readiness to use Dekker’s chapter on cant as a source of information on the language and culture of thieves, almost as if it were an ethnographic study into the customs of a foreign people. Indeed, it has been noted that Burton’s library is a ‘telling example of pamphlet presence at sites of institutional high literacy’, which deserves better recognition.64 Burton’s copies are not the only surviving examples of textual engagement with Dekker’s representation of cant, though. A 1648 edition of O per se O held at the British Library is annotated in more than one hand — with alternative meanings noted next to Dekker’s dictionary entries, and a supplementary glossary added onto the endpapers.65 These annotations testify to the inherent dynamism of the canting lexicon, which could hardly be standardized and fixed, as the image of the private mint suggests.

Peters, pp. 270–83; and later on Wilkins, Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger, pp. 21–26.  61 Peter C. Schwartz has made a strong case for the scholarly character of Dekker’s pamphlets in his analysis of Dekker’s synoptic anatomy of the criminal underworld. He shows that ‘Dekker uses the Ramian method as his principle of organization’, ‘analyzing his subject according to descending degrees of generality’ (Schwartz, ‘Ramus and Dekker: The Influence of Ramian Logic and Method’, pp. 230–31).  62 Both texts are included in a Sammelband of rogue pamphlets catalogued under the shelfmark 4° G 8 Art.BS.  63 Dekker, The Belman [Bodleian Library, Oxford, 4° G 8(14) Art.BS.], n.p. Burton records to be using the first edition of Harman’s Caveat from 1566, of which no copy is known to survive (A2v).  64 Halasz, The Marketplace of Print, p. 9. The presence of multiple rogue pamphlets (one of which is also annotated) in Anthony Wood’s library further corroborates this theory; these are discussed in Liapi, Roguery in Print, pp. 45–9.  65 Dekker, English villanies [British Library, 1079.m.9], Mv–M2r. Coleman has suggested that the glossary is taken from Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1665), in A History of Cant, pp. 37–38.

2. ‘a little mint where you may coin words for your pleasure’

In Martin Mark-All (1610), S. R. also responds to the Bellman’s open call to improve his glossary by adding new words. Picking up Dekker’s economic imagery, the author writes: In the meane time, because the Belman entreateth any that is more rich in canting, to lend him better or more with variety, he will repay his love double: I have thought good not only to shew his errour in some places in setting downe olde wordes used fortie yéeres agoe before he was borne; for wordes that are used in these dayes (although he is bold to call me an usurper (for so he doth in his last round) and not able to maintayne the title) But have enlarged his Dictionary (or Master Harmans) with such wordes as I thinke hée never heard of (and yet in use too) but not out of vaine glorie, as his ambition is, but indéede as an experienced souldier that hath déerely paid for it: and therefore it shall be honour good enough for him (if not too good) to come up with the Reare (I doe but shoote your owne arrow backe againe) and not to have the leading of the Van as he meanes to doe, although small credite in the end will redound to eyther.66 In this lengthy passage, S. R. accepts the invitation of the Bellman calling those with a richer knowledge of cant to supply new terms, and he takes this opportunity to criticize Dekker’s work. With a sly parenthetical aside, he suggests that the glossary printed in Lanthorne is actually that of ‘Master Harmans’. S. R. thus hints at the fact that Dekker’s glossary is stolen from a previous source, and proceeds to indicate that his own has been ‘déerely paid for’, instead. By suggesting that the Bellman should ‘come up with the Reare’, S. R. eventually insinuates that the Bellman is now in debt, as he is being lent new words.67 As one can see, this passage is shot through with economic imagery, through which S. R. rebuffs some of the claims made by Dekker in Lanthorne. By doing so, S. R. draws out a suggestion that lurks behind Dekker’s metaphors of mintage: cant may actually be a form of linguistic capital, which could be used to gain interest and make money.68 I shall conclude with a few words on this idea.

Linguistic Interest and Inflation Dekker’s shifting imagery of mintage and counterfeiting in Lanthorne and Candle-Light does not merely present cant as an illegal language, but also hints at the gain that might be obtained from such illegitimate verbal currency. To fully understand the implications of this message, one must consider the social context of the time. The second half of the sixteenth century saw a substantial growth in the numbers of vagabonds and thieves, which was  66 S. R., Martin Mark-All, Beadle of Bridewell, E1v.  67 Cf. ‘arrear, n.’, and its variant ‘rear, n. 2.’, in OED.  68 On linguistic capital see Bourdieu, ‘The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges’, p. 651.

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largely determined by the terrible economic inflation caused by the Great Debasement.69 The devaluation of legal tender and the inflationary rise of prices plunged a large part of the population into poverty, strengthening the criminal subculture. Dekker transports this economic issue into the realm of language. His imagery depicts cant as an inflationary linguistic currency arising from the economic situation of the time, while simultaneously presenting it as a solution to this very problem.70 No matter how corrupted and inflationary cant may be, Dekker offers his glossary as a source of semantic and economic wealth. The equation of words and money becomes especially relevant since it is applied to canters, who could gain economic profit from their linguistic coinages, employing them for their trickeries. Just as the protagonist in Dekker’s Old Fortunatus who is shown to ‘transport | a mint about him’ and generate boundless wealth, so are canters shown to have an equivalent linguistic tool, which Dekker gifts to his readers.71 This process of converting language into money also reveals the link between canters and the first professional writers, like Dekker himself, who were actually selling their words to their readers. Dekker shows awareness of the economic potentials of print in the ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ prefacing Lanthorne and Candle-Light, in which he scolds those writers who ‘being free of Wits Merchant-venturers, do every new moon (for gaine onely) make 5. Or 6. voiages to the Presse’ (iii.178). Later in the pamphlet, he provides another vivid description of writers selling their works ‘Like Pedlars’ (iii.247). The popular literature of the time abounds with ironic portraits of this kind, which testify to the rise of the new category of the professional writer. A particularly piercing portrait is provided by John Earle when describing a ‘pot-poet’, for whom ‘the Press is his Mint, and stamps him now and then a sixpence or two in reward of the baser coin his pamphlet’.72 Dekker figuratively transforms his pamphlet into such a mint, generating both words and money. As several critics have commented, the popular writers of the period often adopted the ‘strategy of robbing the robbers — appropriating the tricks of the underworld trade as a means of personal enrichment’.73 Dekker’s discussion of cant matches this attitude, treating this criminal language as a potential source of wealth.  69 See Beier, Masterless Men, p. 20; on the economic and social consequences of the Great Debasement see Deng, Coinage and State Formation, pp. 87–102. The enclosure movement also had a role in the rise of beggary, as noted in Gregg, ‘Thomas Dekker: A Study in Economic and Social Backgrounds’, p. 75.  70 Blount makes an extended figurative use of the notions of inflation and debasement in order to explain how linguistic currencies might change their value over time (‘To the Reader’, in Glossographia, A4r–v).  71 Dekker, The Pleasant Comedie of Old Fortunatus, G2v.  72 Earle, Micro-cosmographie, E9v. On the rise of the professional author, see Voss, ‘Books for Sale’, and Halasz, The Marketplace of Print.  73 Blank, Broken English, p. 67. See also Bayman, Thomas Dekker, p. 110; Forman, ‘Marked Angels’, p. 1556; Reynolds, Becoming a Criminal, p. 64; and Taylor, ‘“Teach Me This Pedlar’s French”’, p. 120.

2. ‘a little mint where you may coin words for your pleasure’

Even within his lexicographical discussions, Dekker presents the language of thieves not merely as an object of study, but as a ‘canting commodity’ of great economic value (ii.202).74 In Lanthorne and Candle-Light, Dekker thus makes a skilful use of monetary imagery to describe the production of cant. Appropriating the same metaphors that had been generally employed to argue for the standardization of English at a national level, he repurposes them in order to subvert this levelling force. Dekker displaces linguistic authority and puts it into the hands of his readers, handing over the keys to his ‘little mint’ whereby they might coin words at pleasure. Although these coins are admittedly counterfeit, there is a clear sense in which they might be actively used to challenge and transform the linguistic currency of the time. Dekker’s lexicographical work ought to be taken seriously, as is suggested by the early modern annotators of his texts, who displayed a keen interest in understanding this language. Once the underlying current of economic metaphors is brought into focus, however, the meaning of the single canting words fades to give way to their coin-like nature. As Noel Malcom has commented in relation to the use of neologisms in the fustian literature of the time, ‘comic word-coinages […] threaten, through a process of apparent elaboration of sense, to destroy sense altogether. […] There is a comic effect of linguistic alienation, in which words are reduced (partially or wholly) to objects’.75 Dekker achieves this by means of material imagery, through which he reflects how illegitimate words might be produced and circulated. He thus makes an important intervention into the sociolinguistic debates of the time. In his writings, the high-brow Latin culture of the time merges with the linguistic endeavours of the lower classes. This is not only a great example of early modern polyglossia, but also a reminder that some of the most piercing linguistic insights may come from ‘popular’ writers who are often taken less seriously.

 74 Dekker elsewhere refers to words as wares when describing the theatre as ‘your Poets Royal Exchange, upon which their Muses, (that are now turnd to Merchants,) meeting, barter away that light commodity of words’ (ii.246). Robert N. Watson argues that this notion of verbal profit was ingrained more generally in the idea of playwright at the time (‘Coining Words on the Elizabethan and Jacobean Stage’).  75 Malcolm, The Origins of English Nonsense, p. 105.

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2. ‘a little mint where you may coin words for your pleasure’

Horace, Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, trans. by H. Rushton Fairclough, The Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1952) Jonson, Ben, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. by David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Massinger, Philip, The Picture, A Tragaecomaedie (London: T. Walkley, 1630) Middleton, Thomas, and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl (1611), ed. by Paul A. Mulholland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999) Nashe, Thomas, The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. by Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958) Palsgrave, John, Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse (London: John Hawkins, 1530) Phillips, Edward, The New World of English Words (London: J. Phillips, 1658) Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie (London: R. Field, 1589) R., S., Martin Mark-All, Beadle of Bridewell (London: J. Budge and R. Bonian, 1610) Rowlands, Samuel, Diogenes Lanthorne (London: Thomas Archer, 1607) Skelton, John, The Complete English Poems, ed. by John Scattergood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) Wilkins, John, Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger (London: John Maynard and Timothy Wilkins, 1641) Wilson, Thomas, The Arte of Rhetorique (London: R. Grafton, 1553) Secondary Works Agnew, Jean-Christophe, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in AngloAmerican Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) Barbour, Reid, Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993) Bayman, Anna, Thomas Dekker and the Culture of Pamphleteering in Early Modern London (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014) Beier, A. L., Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985) —— , ‘Anti-language or Jargon? Canting in the English Underworld in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Languages and Jargons: Contributions to a Social History of Language, ed. by Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), pp. 64–101 Bishop, Jennifer, ‘Currency, Conversation, and Control: Political Discourse and the Coinage in Mid-Tudor England’, English Historical Review, 131 (2016), 763–92 Blank, Paula, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London: Routledge, 1996) Bloch, R. Howard, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges’, Social Science Information, 16.6 (1977), pp. 645–68

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Brown, Calvin S., ‘Monosyllables in English Verse’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 3.4 (1963), 473–91 Burke, Peter, ‘The Jargon of the Schools’, in Languages and Jargons: Contributions to a Social History of Language, ed. by Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), pp. 22–41 —— , Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Camporesi, Piero, Il Libro dei Vagabondi (Milano: Garzanti, 2003) Coleman, Julie, A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries. Volume I: 1567–1784 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Comensoli, Viviana, ‘“A Kind of Music”: The Representation of Cant in Early Modern Rogue Literature’, in Langue et altérité dans la culture de la Renaissance, ed. by Ann Lecercle and Yan Brailowsky (Nanterre: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2008), pp. 31–44 Considine, John, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) Cowling, David, ‘“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”: Linguistic Mercantilism in Renaissance France’, in Metaphor and Discourse, ed. by Andreas Musolff and Jörg Zinken (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 190–204 Crewe, Jonathan V., Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982) Deng, Stephen, Coinage and State Formation in Early Modern Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Flasdieck, Hermann M., Der Gedanke einer englischen Sprachakademie ( Jena: Frommann, 1928) Forman, Valerie, ‘Marked Angels: Counterfeits, Commodities, and The Roaring Girl’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54.4 (2001), 1531–60 Gotti, Maurizio, The Language of Thieves and Vagabonds: 17th and 18th Century Canting Lexicography in England (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1999) —— , ‘The Origin of 17th Century Canting Terms’, in A Changing World of Words, ed. by Javier E. Díaz Vera (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 163–96 Goux, Jean-Joseph, The Coiners of Language, trans. by Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994) Greenblatt, Stephen, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) Gregg, Kate L., ‘Thomas Dekker: A Study in Economic and Social Backgrounds’, Language and Literature, 2.2 (1924), 55–112 Halasz, Alexandra, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Hayes, Kenneth, English Literature and Ancient Languages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) Heller-Roazen, Daniel, Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers (New York: Zone, 2013) Hunt, Mary Leland, Thomas Dekker: A Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911)

2. ‘a little mint where you may coin words for your pleasure’

Jones, Richard Foster, The Triumph of the English Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953) Jones-Davies, Marie-Thérèse, ‘Source du latin scolastique dans The Whore of Babylon de Thomas Dekker’, Études Anglaises, 6 (1953), 142–43 Knapp, Jeffrey, ‘Rogue Nationalism’, in Centuries’ Ends, Narrative Means, ed. by Robert Newman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 138–50 Koch, Mark, ‘The Desanctification of the Beggar in Rogue Pamphlets of the English Renaissance’, in The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. by David G. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 91–104 Lander, Jesse M., ‘“Crack’d Crowns” and Counterfeit Sovereigns: The Crisis of Value in 1 Henry IV’, Shakespeare Studies, 30 (2002), 137–61 Liapi, Lena, Roguery in Print: Crime and Culture in Early Modern London (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2019) Malcolm, Noel, The Origins of English Nonsense (London: Harper Collins, 1997) Maurer, David W., Language of the Underworld, ed. by Allan W. Futrell and Charles B. Wordell (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981) Moormann, Julius Georg Maria, De Geheimtalen (Amsterdam: L. J. Veen, 2002) Noyes, Gertrude E., ‘The Development of Cant Lexicography in England, 1566–1785’, Studies in Philology, 38.3 (1941), 462–79 Orten, Jon Dagfinn, ‘Elizabethan Puritanism and the Plain Style’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Minnesota, 1989) Pugliatti, Paola, Beggary and Theatre in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) Reynolds, Bryan, Becoming a Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) Roberts, Hugh, ‘Comparative Nonsense: French galimatias and English Fustian’, Renaissance Studies, 30 (2016), 102–19 Sager, Jenny, ‘“Noble being Base”: Heads, Coins and Rebellion in The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt (c. 1602)’, Early Modern Studies, 18 (2015), 1–15 Schwartz, Peter C., ‘Ramus and Dekker: The Influence of Ramian Logic and Method on the Form and Content of Seventeenth-Century Pamphlet Literature’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Bowling Green State University, 1978) Shell, Marc, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) Shrank, Cathy, ‘Rhetorical Constructions of a National Community: The Role of the King’s English in mid-Tudor Writing’, in Communities in Early Modern England. Networks, Place, Rhetoric, ed. by Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 180–98 Stafford, Brooke A., ‘Englishing the Rogue, “Translating” the Irish: Fantasies of Incorporation and Early Modern English National Identity’, in Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, ed. by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), pp. 312–36

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Taylor, Miles, ‘“Teach Me This Pedlar’s French”: The Allure of Cant in The Roaring Girl and Dekker’s Rogue Pamphlets’, Renaissance and Reformation, New Series, 29 (2005), 107–24 Thomas, George, Linguistic Purism (London: Longman, 1991) Tiffany, Daniel, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) Voss, Paul J., ‘Books for Sale: Advertising and Patronage in Late Elizabethan England’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 29.3 (1998), pp. 733–56 Watson, Robert N., ‘Coining Words on the Elizabethan and Jacobean Stage’, Philological Quarterly, 88 (2009), pp. 49–75 Weinrich, Harald, ‘Münze und Wort. Untersuchungen an einem Bildfeld’, in Romanica. Festschrift für Gerhard Rohlf, ed. by Heinrich Lauberg and Harald Weinrich (Halle: Niemeyer, 1958), pp. 508–21

Iolanda Plescia

3. Strange Roots in Roman Shakespeare Roots The title of this essay echoes a line from Sir Thomas More, taken somewhat out of context as a means to conduct a preliminary reflection on broader issues of community identity and linguistic awareness in the early modern English age as they emerge in some significant moments in Shakespeare, specifically in his Roman canon. Admittedly, Sir Thomas More is not a title unequivocally associated with Shakespeare: it is in fact a collaborative play, to which Shakespeare only made a partial, though important, contribution. Nor are its themes particularly Roman: we might recall the Pope’s Rome, and its relationship to Thomas More’s king, Henry VIII — but that is a very different Rome from the cultural and political centre of the classical world, and a Rome in any case not explicitly mentioned in the play, which tiptoes around the religious and political divide that historically led to the establishment of the Church of England.1 Yet precisely because of the play’s being, so to speak, ‘less’ Shakespearean than the texts I will be taking into account here — in so far as it is a piece of collective writing which has long occupied a position of ‘half-hearted endorsement if not exclusion’ within Shakespeare studies2 — it represents a stimulating, if slanted point of departure which transports us to the multi-voiced, and multilingual, early modern London stage in the first decade of the 1600s, that is, when Shakespeare was very deeply engaged with some of his most renowned plays, which included Roman and classical themes.3  1 There is, of course, the interesting, though passing, reference to a Roman past in Thomas More’s words in scene 13, ll. 175–78: ‘I will subscribe to go to the Tower | With all submissive willingness, and thereto add | My bones to strengthen the foundation | of Julius Caesar’s palace’. The myth of the Tower of London having been built by Caesar bolsters the theme of empire and of the ideal transference of power from Rome to London which was capitalized upon in the Tudor age.  2 The ‘hands’ which had a role in the making of the play are now accepted ‘with varying degrees of probability’ as those of Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, Thomas Heywood, an anonymous playhouse scribe, Shakespeare (the famous ‘Hand D’), and Thomas Dekker. See John Jowett’s rich Introduction to his edition of Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More, pp. 6–8. All quotations will be from this edition.  3 Multilingualism in early modern London and on the early modern English stage is a widely debated issue in historical studies of English language and literature at the moment. Iolanda Plescia ([email protected]) Sapienza Università di Roma Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer, ed. by Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin, PEEMB 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 81–99  10.1484/M.PEEMB-EB.5.127775

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From its opening scene the play in fact dramatizes the uneasy and at times violent co-existence of Londoners with ‘strangers’ — Lombards and Frenchmen in particular — who enjoyed particular rights within the city and were perceived as a threat to the peace and wellbeing of the native inhabitants: Thomas More’s ability in suppressing an insurrection on the point of erupting in London is the quality which showcases his character as good, noble, level-headed, but also politically savvy, in the first part of the play. It is during the initial stages of the feared insurrection that the sentence I would like to foreground here is pronounced, when some of the purebred Englishmen complain of the strangers bringing ‘strange roots’ into the country. The Englishman Lincoln’s exact words are: Lincoln. They bring in strange roots, which is merely to the undoing of poor prentices. For what’s a sorry parsnip to a good heart? (6.11) As the subsequent lines clarify, the immediate, denotative meaning of roots here refers to the peculiar diet of the foreigners, based on root vegetables that the English were evidently not used to and which, it is alleged, the apprentices indentured to the foreigners did not appreciate. At the same time, as Jowett notes, the comparison between ‘sorry parsnips’ and ‘good hearts’ pits the foreigners against the English in a culinary metaphor. Just a few lines earlier, Clown Betts — a character as quintessentially English as Lincoln — had set up an opposition between the ‘French Fleming/Fleming French’ and what he calls ‘plain English’ (‘Not a French Fleming nor a Fleming French to be found, but all fled, in plain English’, 4.73). Jowett notes that ‘plain English’ was also a proverbial expression meaning ‘simply put’, and that the opposition between French Fleming and Fleming French may well be comic nonsense,4 but there does seem to be here a nod to a motley, heterogeneous early modern linguistic culture in London, and the mention of plain English cannot but remind us of the ongoing conflict between so-called ‘inkhorn’ terms and the at times overt nationalistic project of a pure and simple English that had no use for imported words, which tended to be lengthy and difficult to retain.5

While at this stage the research on which this essay is based does not look at multilingualism as a distinct point of enquiry from more general phenomena of historical-linguistic develop­ ment involving linguistic borrowing and the modelling of English on prestige varieties, some reference points have been essential: see Saenger ed., Interlinguicity, Internationality, and Shakespeare and Saenger, Shakespeare and the French Borders of English, as well as TudeauClayton, Shakespeare’s Englishes and Gallagher, Learning Languages in Early Modern England; see also Delabastita and Hoenselaars ed., Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare; Maley and Tudeau-Clayton ed., This England, That Shakespeare; Blank, Broken English. Sir Thomas More was probably never performed in Shakespeare’s time, though it was of course written to be performed, which is what counts for our purposes.  4 Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More, ed. and intr. by Jowett, p. 174.  5 The debate on ‘inkhorn terms’ (words that required a great amount of ink to be written) raged in the sixteenth century and gradually intensified until the turn of the century. Foreign words especially were considered by some to be pedantic, but the main objections were

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We might thus give in to the temptation of decontextualizing the use of the word ‘roots’ in this passage, for the sake of discussion, to frame it in linguistic terms as a hint at the multilingual environment of early modern London, which offered rich stores of lexical material but also posed a threat to those who thought of the rise of simple English as a necessary step towards building a sense of nationhood. As Margaret Tudeau-Clayton has it in her most recent book on Shakespeare’s Englishes, in which she looks at a number of early comedies and history plays to argue that they dramatize tensions inherent in a politics of linguistic exclusion, whereby the ideology of the honest English citizen, who spoke and dressed plainly, is fostered at the expense of the linguistic and cultural ‘gallimaufry’ in which Shakespeare is actually interested: ‘The sense of straying as well as strange in “straing” together with the polyvalent word “rootes” provides, […] at least for readers, a metonym of the case of the strangers, who are made strange, like their food, by their straying with, and from their defining origins (“roots”)’.6 Tudeau-Clayton does not go so far as to consider the possible linguistic sense of the word ‘root’, which she mostly discusses as meaning, alternatively, ‘origins’ (pointing to the cultural alterity of the strangers in London) and ‘cause’ (in the sense of the strangers being represented as the ‘root’ of all the evils in the city). Her entire argument, however, freshly reframes many moments in which Shakespeare seems to be dramatizing what might be considered the linguistic anxiety of an entire age. In any case, the sense of ‘linguistic root’, which might sound a little too modern and connected to linguistics as a science, is shown in the Oxford English Dictionary to have its earliest examples precisely in the sixteenth century, with 1530 being its first recorded occurrence, taken from the royal tutor John Palsgrave’s important French grammar written in English, L’Esclarcissement de la language francoyse, where it is used in the most technical of ways: ‘His thre chefe rotes, that is to say, his theme, his preterit participle, and his present infynityve’.7 Two more instances are mentioned by the OED for this sense of the word within the span of Shakespeare’s lifetime (1599, 1615). Admittedly, this remains a specialized use which yields fewer examples than the earlier, established definitions having to do with the botanical sphere as well as the abstract and figurative idea of origins and belonging.

levelled at their obscurity and opaqueness. This opinion was held, for example, by the classical scholar John Cheke, Roger Ascham, the author of The Scholemaster, who had served as the young Elizabeth I’s tutor, and Thomas Wilson, author of the Arte of Rhetorique. On the other hand, innovators who defended borrowing included George Pettie, the translator of Civile Conversation by Stefano Guazzo, and the Latinist Thomas Elyot. For a succinct review of the controversy, see Baugh and Cable, A History of the English language, pp. 203–24. Also see the developments in chapter 2 of the present volume.  6 Tudeau-Clayton, Shakespeare’s Englishes, p. 141.  7 OED online, ‘root, n. 1’, 16a.

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Whether or not the ‘strange roots’ evoked by Lincoln actually contain a pun on this precise sense, the well-attested, metaphorical framework in which the issue of roots may be understood as involving origin and identity is brought to bear in Tudeau-Clayton’s reading of the text in ways that I would like to follow up on in this essay, which deals with a different corpus of texts, while keeping the metaphorical sense of ‘linguistic roots’ in mind, as an element in which characters ground their identities. In this sense, whether the meaning of ‘roots’ can be taken as a play on the role of language in the text of Sir Thomas More is perhaps less important than what the word may also evoke for us as contemporary readers of early modern English. As Paula Blank suggests, ‘We cannot entirely help hearing Shakespeare’s language through or against or alongside our modern vernacular, creating a friction between two “Englishes” — one that was ours, has influenced ours, yet is not quite ours’.8 This essay, then, will look at the use of the form ‘root’, both as a noun and a verb, in Shakespeare’s Roman plays, to explore its ‘polyvalence’ (in Tudeau-Clayton’s definition), which requires us to fully appreciate the diverse and often competing meanings within words used by Shakespeare to investigate complex identity issues that are brought to the fore with particular vitality in works dealing with English attitudes towards the historical past.

Roots and Rome The scene (Add. II in Jowett’s Arden edition) in which Lincoln complains of the strangeness of the imported roots is also the same section that contains Thomas More’s celebrated speech in defence of immigrants attributed to Shakespeare: ‘Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, | Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage, | Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation’ (6.85–87), a speech which has recently gained much momentum in the wake of the several waves of the European migrant crisis.9

 8 Blank, Shakesplish, p. 4. Blank suggests that we should factor in our own relationship to early modern English, in order to position ourselves within a history of English ‘that includes us’ (‘Introducing “Intrelinguistics”’, p. 140).  9 Numerous initiatives in support of refugee rights in the past few years have made reference to the speech, with wide resonance in the media. See for example this post on the International Rescue Committee website: . The webpage links to a moving video of the speech, entitled ‘The Strangers’ Case — Shakespeare’s rallying cry for humanity’, produced at the Globe theatre in London (2018), featuring refugees from Syria, Sierra Leone, and South Sudan alongside such well-known actors as Kim Cattrall, Yasmin Kadi, and Sophie Thompson: . Features have also been published by The Guardian () and the BBC () [all links accessed 5 December, 2020].

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In this addition, dichotomic positions defending either the political dignity of foreigners or the purity of the receiving people’s origins are fleshed out with great intensity with respect to the rest of the play. It is remarkable, within this context, that one of the worst insults levied at the strangers hinges on ‘roots’ as a multi-layered word pointing perhaps only superficially to what are perceived as odd eating habits: the English actually fear ‘infection’ (6.16–19), and the insult may also have sexual connotations (as Jowett suggests).10 It culminates, in any case, in the expression of a general fear of the intermingling and bastardization of origins and breeding processes: right after these lines, Williamson alleges that the roots also ‘breed sore eyes, and ’tis enough to infect the City with the palsy’ (6.14–15). Taking my cue from this curious passage in this collaborative play, and taking into account the different stratifications of meaning suggested by a word here used only apparently in its most innocuous sense, I would like to analyse some of the uses of the word ‘roots’ made elsewhere in the Shakespearean canon, particularly in the Roman plays. What I argue is that some crucial themes relating to origins, language, and communicative expression emerge which, to my knowledge, have not yet been fully investigated, and which punctuate the Roman plays specifically at several fundamental junctures. In Shakespeare the word ‘root’, both as a noun and a conjugated verb, appears seventy-five times,11 with a number of different meanings, none of them strictly connected to the idea of language, but many having to do with the question of origins and purity which is, as is well known, closely linked to the project of establishing early modern English as a language with some prestige of its own in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.12 What one can immediately

 10 See Jowett’s notes to ll. 13–15 on p. 181 of the Arden edition: ‘The phallic appearance of the root suggests sexual inadequacy if the exemplar is a poor one […]. The effect of the foreigners’ diet on the body is correlated with the xenophobic idea that their presence infects the body politic’.  11 A simple word search and count was first carried out using the resource . While the degree of reliability of online Shakespeare texts and concordances varies and is subject to rapid change, I still find value in Andrew Dickson’s 2010 suggestion that this is one of the best free online searchable concordances. See Dickson, ‘Shakespeare: Reading On’, p. 342. The Open source numbering of acts, scenes, and lines has been changed to enable readers to follow authoritative printed text editions. However, given the large number of quotations, the general edition Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. by Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan is used in all cases not otherwise specified, while single editions are cited in full in the notes for the plays which are most closely scrutinized.  12 While we should be wary of over-simplifying an intricate historical-linguistic period in which ambivalent feelings towards prestige languages were largely present, the famous, passionate tirades of sixteenth-century defenders of English attest to this concern with establishing prestige. One of the best-known examples is Richard Mulcaster’s (1530?–1611) often-quoted plea: ‘But why not all in English, a tung of it self both depe in conceit, & frank in deliuerie?’ And also: ‘I loue Rome, but London better, I fauor Italie, but England more, I honor the Latin, but I worship the English’ (Mulcaster, The first part of the elementarie vvhich

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notice about Shakespeare’s — and in some cases, his collaborators’ — use of the word is that he seems to like using it in clusters within certain plays, to cover a range of slightly varying shades of meaning: twice in Antony and Cleopatra, for instance, three times in Coriolanus, six times in Cymbeline, six times in Macbeth. A significant number of occurrences is found in the history plays, taken as a whole: twenty-two times across Henry IV Part II, Henry V, Henry VI Part I, Henry VI Part II, Henry VI Part III, Henry VIII, Richard II, Richard III.13 With the exception of a fairly large cluster of occurrences (ten) in Timon of Athens, where the word mostly points to actual, edible roots, nouns and verbs related to ‘root’ tend to be found in plays dealing with the historical past, oscillating between metaphorical meanings of stability and identity derived from the botanical idea of the base of a plant, and the sense, also metaphorically derived from plant life, of genealogy and origins. Adding weight to the idea that the word is used to deal with issues of identity of historical import, it is interesting to notice that it is much less frequent in the comedies. Mistress Quickly’s use of the word ‘root’ in the celebrated Latin lesson scene (IV.1.46) of The Merry Wives of Windsor seems to me the most interesting case, not only because of the pun on ‘root’ as a carrot (which Quickly mistakenly hears in place of the unfamiliar Latin word caret) and ‘root’ as a euphemism for the male sexual organ, but also because, as speakers of modern English, we may project a linguistic sense on the word in this context. The question of genealogy is one that, for example, predominates in the history plays, perhaps unsurprisingly: ‘root’ here often means breed, stock, a family branch — as in Henry VI Part III (‘We set the axe to thy usurping root’, II.2.165; ‘’tis Clifford; | Who not contented that he lopp’d the branch | In hewing Rutland when his leaves put forth, | But set his murdering knife unto the root | From whence that tender spray did sweetly spring, | I mean our princely father, Duke of York’, II.6.46–51). Again in the history plays a further use of ‘root’, mostly as a multi-word verb, has to do with the act of methodically eliminating political enemies (‘He’s a rank weed, sir Thomas, and we must root him out’, Henry VIII, V.1.52–53; ‘The sight of any of the house of York | Is as a Fury to torment my soul; | And till I root out their accursed line | And leave not one alive, I live in hell’, Henry VI Part III, I.3.30–33).

entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung, set furth by Richard Mulcaster, pp. 258 and 254). The passages are variously quoted in histories of the English language to illustrate the rise of nationalistic linguistic projects (as for instance in Baugh and Cable, A History of the English Language, p. 191).  13 Some of the mentioned plays are in fact collaborative, though in this particular case it probably does not make a substantial difference to the general analysis of this essay: Macbeth is recognized as having had the contribution of Thomas Middleton; the New Oxford Shakespeare edition (2016) credits Henry VI Part I to ‘Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlowe, and another (adapted by Shakespeare)’; Henry VIII is considered by most a collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher (see Gordon McMullan’s edition of the play).

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But, I would like to suggest, in plays dealing with a more remote historical past, which however is very present to the minds of Elizabethan playgoers, words belonging to the semantic field of the ‘root’ can take on peculiar nuances that open up issues specific to the Roman canon.14 Here, in fact, the word ‘root’ often co-occurs with, or near, the mention of a part of the body closely tied to emotions, such as the heart and the tongue. See, for example, Dolabella, one of Caesar’s followers in Antony and Cleopatra, as he comments upon Cleopatra’s grief as she contemplates suicide in her monument: Dolabella. Your loss is as yourself, great; and you bear it As answering to the weight: would I might never O’ertake pursued success, but I do feel, By the rebound of yours, a grief that smites My very heart at root. (V.2.100–04) The last line of the quotation bears some similarity to an expression found in Coriolanus, which is used as a way to reinforce the welcome Menenius Agrippa is giving his friend, Caius Martius Coriolanus, the Roman general who has returned in triumph: Menenius Agrippa. A hundred thousand welcomes. I could weep And I could laugh, I am light and heavy. Welcome! A curse begnaw at very root on ’s heart, That is not glad to see thee! (II.1.182–85)15 In these cases ‘root’ appears to stand for the very basis, the most profound place of the heart, in a word, interiority. It is true that the expression is used by minor characters in expressions of sympathy with other characters, perhaps pointing to a possible proverbial sense,16 but at least in the case of Menenius Agrippa’s outburst, the word ‘root’ seems to hold some significance as a

 14 The critical bibliography on what may be considered as a smaller, self-contained Shakespearean canon in itself is vast and ever growing. I will mention at least the booklength studies and collections I have most drawn inspiration from over the years: Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome; Hopkins, The Cultural Uses of the Caesars; Del Sapio Garbero ed., Identity, Otherness and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome; Del Sapio Garbero, Isenberg, and Pennacchia ed., Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare’s Rome; Hopkins, From the Romans to the Normans; Del Sapio Garbero ed., Rome in Shakespeare’s World.  15 In a note to this passage, Brockbank mentions that the previous Coriolanus editor for the Arden series, R. H. Case (co-editor with W. J. Craig, 1922), had noticed both the similarity of this expression with the one quoted here from Antony and Cleopatra, and with a line from Chaucer’s Romaunt of the Rose, ‘Me thinketh in myn herte roote’ (1026). See Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. by Brockbank, p. 162. Quotations from Coriolanus refer to this edition, while the quotation from Antony and Cleopatra refers to the text edited by John Wilders.  16 A preliminary, cursory search in the EEBO-TCP database on the Early print website () has pointed to a few instances of units similar to ‘root of the heart’, though expressions like ‘rooted in the heart’ / ‘root out of the heart’ seem more common.

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semantic centre for the both the concepts of ‘begnawing’ — suggesting a parallel between the curse he is evoking and a kind of infection threatening to damage the heart, in the way that a worm would gnaw at the root of a plant — and ‘grafting’ (‘You are three | That Rome should dote on: | Yet, by the fate of men, | We have some old crabtrees here at home that will not | Be grafted to your relish’, II.1.185–88). There are cases in which the word is used in even more poignant ways. For example, it is used by Tullus Aufidius, general of the Volscians, again occurring in proximity to the ‘heart’ (though not part of the same syntagma or grammatical phrase) to express his absolute change of sentiments towards his former foe, Coriolanus, with whom he is now about to form an alliance: Tullus Aufidius. O Martius, Martius! Each word thou hast spoke hath weeded from my heart A root of ancient envy. (IV.5.102–04) A remarkable instance of ‘root’ close to ‘heart’ also appears in the same play in lines spoken by Volumnia, Coriolanus’s mother: she is called upon to try to persuade the Roman hero who will not describe his own merits to a hungry audience, refusing to satisfy their need to see him theatrically display the wounds he has received in battle. In this case, we come closer to a figurative domain in which roots are connected to language, understood as rhetoric. As she urges her son to ‘speak to the people’, she seems to be encouraging him to ignore the roots of his heart — his innermost desires — in favour of the root of another body part, his tongue: Volumnia. Because that now it lies on you to speak To the people; not by your own instruction, Nor by the matter which your heart prompts you, But with such words that are but rooted [/roted] in Your tongue, though but bastards and syllables Of no allowance to your bosom’s truth. (III.2.52–57, my emphasis) A crucial point here is the fact that many editors after Johnson have emendated his ‘rooted in your tongue’ to ‘roted in your tongue’, including Case and Brockbank, who considers ‘roted’ to be a ‘more precise word’ even though no earlier attestations are to be found in early modern English (the original spelling in the 1623 Folio is ‘roated’).17 But I would argue that ‘rooted’ here yields much more than what Brockbank considers to be ‘an acceptable metaphor’, as it reinforces — even while departing from it — the established image of the root of the heart, to carry over its emotional urgency to the power of the tongue. Furthermore, there is no supreme need to definitively choose one solution over the other, as Brockbank himself points out: ‘it is possible to

 17 Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. by Brockbank, p. 221.

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recognize the pressure of one word upon the other, with some contact of sound, usage, and sense’.18 In fact the idea of Coriolanus’s mother having taught him by rote, by heart, how to use language to persuade, thus how to speak like a Roman — in short, a linguistic identity that Elizabethans who had gone to a grammar school and had studied rhetoric would themselves have learned — is fitting. The pressure to which Brockbank refers may also be intended in an etymological sense, since ‘root’ has a Scandinavian origin, while ‘rote’ is possibly derived from post-classical Latin rota, referring to a repetitive musical composition:19 rooting discourse in the tongue rather than the heart, as if it were a shallow root, does not exclude the need to learn by rote. But Coriolanus seems not to have been a very diligent student: his mother’s advice is in fact particularly galling to him since what he resists throughout the play is specifically the strategy of ‘showing and telling’, in short, a cunning use of rhetoric that emphasizes narrative, empty words, exteriority, over actual deeds — the kind of eye- and ear-catching rhetoric that will enable Antony to prevail over Brutus in another important Roman play, for example (and we may here just recall in passing the striking image Antony uses of putting his tongue into the ‘dumb mouths’ that are Caesar’s wounds to allow them to speak, in Act III, Scene 1 of Julius Caesar). Volumnia’s insistence that words of persuasion must be rooted/roted in the tongue rather than in the heart also suggests, to my mind, a concern with the body which is part of an overarching, anatomical theme in the Roman plays that has been analysed with particular attention in recent work on Shakespeare’s Rome.20 The fact that what is rooted in the tongue may be associated with ‘bastards’ and ‘syllables’ also interrogates us as we investigate Shakespeare’s relationship to the changing language of his time. In fact, both the idea of origins — impure in this case — and of language pronounced as mere means to an end, with the ensuing, complicated identity issues, are evoked in these lines. Language that does not spring from the heart is a bastard language, in Volumnia’s assessment, but it is a useful one. Might this also be taken as a hint at the opposition between spontaneous language, or one’s mother tongue, and learned language, as in the foreign languages that were present in Shakespeare’s theatre and his world in general? And if so, what conclusions are we to draw? The fact that Volumnia is exhorting her son to be ‘more Roman’, and thus to ‘speak more like a Roman’, complicates matters if our sympathy lies with Coriolanus (who, however, though being technically upright is not a character with whom it is easy to empathize).21  18 Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. by Brockbank, p. 221.  19 OED online, ‘root, n. 1’ and ‘rote, n. 1’.  20 On this, see in particular Del Sapio Garbero, ‘Anatomy, Knowledge, and Conspiracy’.  21 As suggested by one of the anonymous readers of this essay, the irony of Coriolanus’s predicament cannot be lost when one remembers that the very name by which his Roman identity is strengthened is derived from a non-Roman place.

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If this is taken as a possible reflection on the relationship of spontaneous language to rhetoric, it cannot be simply dismissed as bad advice, if we only think of the complexity of the issue in Shakespeare’s time — an age which, while seeking to uphold and build up English as its national language, still looked up to Latin, and the literary tradition of both Latin and Romance languages, as much more prestigious, with classical rhetoric and grammar the touchstones of learned and controlled speech.22 The issue is therefore complicated by the twofold nature of the relationship with models of prestige, which must be understood both in an interlingual dimension (the relationship of English to classical Latin and its cultural capital, its polished and well-established grammatical structure, as well as Latinate words), and within the communicative sphere (the use of a supposedly more direct and ‘truthful’ language as opposed to rhetoric). The ambivalence is well expressed by Mulcaster, who cannot be considered anything but a champion of English as national language, but who still recognizes Latin as a constant term of comparison — ‘I love Rome, but London better; I honor Latin, but worship English’.23 Interestingly, in his Elementarie, when seeking to discuss ‘the method which the learned tungs used in the finding out of their own right writing’ (chapter XII), Mulcaster uses a root metaphor: [M]y opinion is, that it best besemes a scholer, to procede by Art in anie recouerie, from the clawes of ignorance: Therefor I will rip vp, euen from the verie root, how and by what degrées, the verie first tung, doth seme to com by that her perfection in writing, & what order was taken to continew that perfection, euer sence the time that anie tung is perfited. (my emphasis)24 The need to consider other languages at their origins seems to be an ineludible step towards upholding and building a common English language, with a ‘right writing’ of its own.

Delving to the Root The clash between the moral values of interiority and the political strategies or attitudes of exteriority is a central theme in the Roman canon, which is also depicted in another play preoccupied with ‘roots’, written just two years after Coriolanus, that is, Cymbeline (1610).25 This play is also deeply concerned

 22 On the issue of spontaneous vs. controlled speech, see Hope, Shakespeare and Language, pp. 40–47.  23 See note 12.  24 Mulcaster, The first part of the elementarie, p. 63.  25 I am following here those who include Cymbeline within the Roman canon (which has not always been the case). See in particular: Del Sapio Garbero, Identity, Otherness and Empire, ‘Introduction’, p. 5; Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome, pp. 206–35; Bergeron, ‘Cymbeline’. See also, for emphasis on the Roman aspects of Cymbeline: Mikalachki, ‘The Masculine Romance

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with Roman identity, though in this case it is intertwined with an English identity under construction, so that the question of origins is foregrounded with greater intensity. The issue is explored starting with the double heritage of its protagonist, Posthumous, who has been taken in as a child by Cymbeline, king of Britain, after his mother’s death during childbirth, but whose biological parents, Sicilius Leonatus and his wife (called ‘an ancient matron’ in the play) tie him, for several reasons, to ‘Romanness’. As the hero of the play, it will be Posthumous’s lot to embody a synthesis between the two worlds of Britain and Rome, culminating in his marriage to Cymbeline’s daughter, with the acknowledged ‘watering down’ of the royal bloodline, and in a renewed pact with Rome. For all of these reasons it is intriguing to find the word ‘root’ also occurring several times in this play, and used in this case in the full range of its meanings, as if in the Roman plays between 1606 and 1610 — which are also years in which Shakespeare’s language becomes increasingly complicated26 — the playwright had a particular interest in its different ramifications. Its first appearance is at the very beginning of the play, in lines spoken by a ‘First gentleman’ at the court of Cymbeline, king of a Britain set in a misty past with strong, but conflictual, ties to the Romans, who suddenly decides to stop paying tributes to Rome, and mysteriously, after a number of adventures, mishaps, and a final recognition scene (aptly, for this is no longer a tragedy but a romance), decides to make peace with Rome and accept the cultural transfer from Rome to the West that is the legacy of a dying empire to a new one. As in some other cases discussed above, this first occurrence deals with the best-attested sense of genealogical origins. When two lords of Cymbeline’s court speak of Posthumous in the opening scene of the play, one of them asks about his ‘name and birth’, and the other replies: I cannot delve him to the root: his father Was call’d Sicilius, who did join his honour Against the Romans with Cassibelan, But had his titles by Tenantius, whom He served with glory and admired success: So gain’d the sur-addition Leonatus. (I.1.28–33)27 While roots here are meant to signify origins, it is the issue of genealogy itself that is complicated by the interlocking of British and Roman elements in

of Roman Britain’; Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, pp. 160–70; James, Shakespeare’s Troy, pp. 151–88; Hopkins, The Cultural Uses of the Caesars, pp. 111–26; and Plescia, ‘“From me was Posthumous ript”’.  26 The issue has been widely debated. For a comprehensive review and appraisal of the years in which Shakespeare produced a ‘poetic style like nothing he (or anybody else) had composed before: […] audacious, irregular, ostentatious, playful, and difficult’ (p. 1), see in particular McDonald, Shakespeare’s Late Style.  27 Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. by Nosworthy.

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Posthumous’s history.28 On the one hand, his father has fought the Romans under Cassibelan (Cymbeline’s uncle in some sources), but has received his title, Leonatus, from Tenantius, father of Cymbeline according to Holinshed. Nosworthy, however, adds in a note that the ‘sur-added’ title Leonatus is ‘an additional distinctive name’ received in compliance to the Roman tradition,29 much in the same way as Caius Martius had received the additional name of Coriolanus for taking the Volscian town of Corioli: the expression of glory in battle, even when it is the Britons who are resisting Rome, cannot but be tied to a more prestigious imperial tradition — one to which the Elizabethan audience would have been well attuned, since the construction of a Tudor political myth relied on a clear logic of translatio imperii grounded in part in the revival of the myth of London (Troynovant) as founded by the Trojan Brutus, a direct link to Troy and thus to Rome. That Cymbeline’s court recognizes the power and authority of Rome’s language — both in the sense of Latin, and in the sense of its communicative style — comes as no surprise. We will abandon here the word ‘root’, for just a moment, to illustrate this point with an example I have previously drawn on and which has to do, however, with competing ‘linguistic roots’. When, almost exactly at the middle point of the play, Cymbeline is formally challenged by a Roman general and ambassador as a result of his refusal to pay the previously recognized tribute, the British king has a quick reply ready: Caius Lucius. I am sorry, Cymbeline, That I am to pronounce Augustus Caesar (Caesar, that hath moe kings his servants than Thyself domestic officers) thine enemy: Receive it from me, then. War and confusion In Caesar’s name pronounce I ’gainst thee: look For fury, not to be resisted. Thus defied, I thank thee for myself. Cymbeline.

Thou art welcome, Caius. Thy Caesar knighted me; my youth I spent Much under him; of him I gather’d honour, Which he to seek of me again, perforce, Behoves me keep at utterance. (III.1.62–73)

This apparently courteous and formal structure of challenge and response is actually a key scene in the play, revolving around competing uses of the words ‘pronounce’ and ‘utterance’.30 In particular, I suggest that Cymbeline’s direct

 28 Del Sapio Garbero defines roots in Cymbeline as ‘rhizomatic, mingled and interwoven at the origins’, in a chapter of her forthcoming book, Shakespeare’s Ruins and the Myth of Rome.  29 Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. by Nosworthy, p. 5.  30 I have argued this point more extensively in Plescia, ‘“In Caesar’s name pronounce I”: Language and Power in Shakespeare’s Roman Plays’.

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retort hinges on his understanding of the verb ‘pronounce’, repeated twice by the Roman ambassador, a verb which in English is the direct development of Latin pro-nuntiare, linked to the production of speech in an authoritative or formal context. Cymbeline’s selection of the noun utterance in his response is, I believe, meaningful in that two separate roots, one Germanic, one Latinate, may be at play here: the Germanic derivation is connected to the adverb out, and moves into English also through Middle Dutch, conveying the idea of ‘driv[ing] away, [to] announce, speak, show, make known’, or possibly Middle Low German, ‘to turn out, sell, speak, demonstrate’.31 In these Northern roots the act of speaking is connected to showing, demonstrating, bringing forth, following the same ‘show and tell’ logic mentioned above as abhorred by Coriolanus; there is also a sense associated with the idea of commerce (or putting something into circulation), as well as, more importantly, with the more general question of ‘putting out’ as ejecting, and even exhaling breath. It is from this sense that we find the idea of emitting sounds, giving utterance to something, which is the meaning most commonly used for the word today, but it is significant that the OED also reports the meaning of ‘to express, describe, or report in words, to speak of ’ as being in very frequent use from circa 1560 to 1600: William Caxton associated the word to the idea of rhetoric tout court in 1474 (‘The gracious speche and utterance of rethorique’).32 However, a separate derivation of the word utterance is linked in the OED to Old French outrance, from Latin ultra, meaning: ‘to an extreme degree; to the bitter end; to the last or utmost extremity’; ‘with the highest degree of energy and vigour; with the utmost force or violence’; ‘to the utmost of one’s power’; ‘at the last extremity’.33 Cymbeline is using this sense of the word, with its archaic and literary connotations, to mean that he is prepared to fight to his last breath against the Romans. In other words, he has selected the Latinate sense of ‘ultra’: this diplomatic exchange with the ambassador may also serve to show that Cymbeline knows his Latin (via Old French, of course). It is thus that Cymbeline reminds his interlocutor that he is extremely familiar with the Roman honour code, and that he has received a knighting title from Caesar Augustus.34 Cymbeline has learned the language of imperial power and is intent on appropriating it to defend a Britain that cannot be considered a pure, untouched land of Englishness, but rather one where national identity is under construction: clear-cut distinctions between Roman and British identities do not seem possible in this play. What is important to note is that in using the word ‘utterance’, Shakespeare was asking his audience to select  31  32  33  34

OED online, ‘utter, v. 1’. The entry has not yet been fully updated (last updated in 1989). OED online, ‘utterance, n. 1’, 4. OED online, ‘utterance, n. 2’, 2a. On ‘utterance’, also see chapter 2 in the present volume. Both Geoffrey of Monmouth and Holinshed make reference to the story. See Valerie Wayne, editor of the Arden Third Series edition of the play (Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. by Wayne, p. 235).

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the most archaic meaning, one that was about to go out of fashion, while echoes of the Germanic root having to do more generally with speaking — a popular sense for the word in Shakespeare’s time — may well have also been swirling around, in a sort of ‘mixed hearing’ dynamic. It is only by ‘delving to the roots’ that we are able to uncover such different, competing layers of meaning as well as the implication that the British king is well versed in Latin. As Alysia Kolentsis has recently noted, ‘writers […] could play on the tension between Latin and English to creative ends in their work. In addition to his appreciation of the expressive possibilities of the vernacular, Shakespeare consistently draws attention to foundational Saxon words that form the cornerstone of everyday speech’.35 Here, however, the situation seems to be reversed as Germanic roots are pitted against Latin in a deeply asymmetrical relationship — such ‘radical asymmetry’ is key to understanding the ‘delving’ of ‘roots’ as origins (linguistic and otherwise) in the play, but also to thinking about language commonality in early modern England. Common, and community-building, language is an arena fraught with anxiety in Shakespeare’s age, marked by fears of impurity and foreignness, but at the same time by a constant search of balance between the construction of language as ‘everyday’ speech and an aspirational use of learned, Latin/Romance roots in order to underline a common link — and genealogy — with the classical past.36 Of course, the Protestant Reformation had re-structured linguistic hierarchies and further complicated the relationship of the vernacular to Latin, but as this reading has aimed to show, the preoccupation with Latinitas and Romanitas was by no means resolved in Shakespeare’s world. Within this context, then, ‘delving to the root’, the expression used at the beginning of the play by a gentleman of Cymbeline’s court to refer to Posthumous’s origins, does not merely refer to the genealogical tree to which he belongs, but to the relentless need to dig up, examine, plunge and inquire into a pedigree which cannot be considered purely British or English, but which incorporates the values of both Britain and Rome. Posthumous is indeed a fearless knight who represents ‘what is best in British manhood’,37 but he is also a link to the Roman world: personifying worthiness, virtue, and loyalty, he is compared by Imogen to an eagle (I.2.70) — a nod to Rome, and a prefiguration of the imperial eagle that will return at the end of the play to seal a renewed British and Roman alliance. As the play progresses, other senses of the word ‘root’ (both as a noun and a verb) are closer to the ones noticed in Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra, connected to feeling and the need to express emotions in adequate ways. Iachimo, the villain of the play who will try to seduce and corrupt Imogen,

 35 Kolentsis, Shakespeare’s Common Language, p. 6.  36 I am particularly grateful to both the anonymous readers of this essay for encouraging me to frame this argument in stronger terms, as well as for many other insightful suggestions.  37 Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. by Nosworthy, p. xliv.

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the British princess, refers to her ‘affiance’ for Posthumous — her trust, her faith, but also, more technically, her intent to marry him — stating he has wished to test how ‘deeply rooted’ it is (I.7.156–65). And much later on, in Act IV, Scene 2, the word and the theme of roots appear several times in a small, noteworthy cluster in an exchange between Arviragus and Guiderius, the long-lost sons of Cymbeline who have been brought up in a cave by Belarius, a banished lord of the court. The two brothers meet the runaway Imogen disguised as a young man named Fidele and feel a sudden affinity for her/him, as they observe her/his virtues and pleasing nature. It is here that the emotion of grief and the virtue of patience are said to be both ‘rooted’ in the ‘smile’ and the ‘sigh’, so many outward expressions of inner feelings: Arviragus. Nobly he yokes A smiling with a sigh; as if the sigh Was that it was, for not being such a smile; The smile mocking the sigh, that it would fly From so divine a temple, to commix With winds that sailors rail at. Guiderius. I do note That grief and patience, rooted in them both, Mingle their spurs together. (IV.2.51–58) Taking his cue from Guiderius’s idea that the roots (‘spurs’) of grief and patience are inextricably intertwined, Arviragus then builds on the metaphor to conceptualize them as actual plants, which may take root or die within, as a result of what seems to be a conscious, inward decision: ‘Grow, patience! | And let the stinking-elder, grief, untwine | His perishing root, with the increasing vine!’ (IV.2.49–60). If not directly associated to the parts of the body which are the seats of emotion (the heart) as opposed to calculated elocutio (the tongue), as in the examples from Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus discussed above, these ‘root’ metaphors are effectively linked to sentiments and interior dispositions which are manifested by outward expressions, both verbal and facial (the sigh and the smile). And fittingly so, since grief and patience are the true staples of Shakespeare’s interpretation of the romance genre.

Reshaping Roots If we cannot affirm with any certainty that, when using the word ‘root’, both as a noun and a verb, Shakespeare is using it in the modern sense relating to linguistic origins — though that sense, as we have seen, was certainly available in his time — even the brief journey we have taken throughout the later Roman plays points to tightly woven thematic threads which highlight several of the issues that were under discussion in the ongoing process of building a linguistic culture according to a shared project in the early modern

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English age. Roots as origins, in the Roman plays, seem to be inextricably tied to ideas of mixed identity and potential bastardization: a heterogeneous cultural identity that in Shakespeare’s time was both being resisted, as ideas of Englishness and national pride made their way within linguistic as well as political debates, and in some ways desired, as the language of authority was undoubtedly still highly regarded, and welcomed back from the classical past, in countless translations, commentaries, treatises, and teaching practices. But roots also have to do with emotional connections to history as well as personal histories, connections that course through the heart and the tongue: Coriolanus will not ‘root’ words he does not feel into his tongue, in short, will not speak politically, rhetorically — is he perhaps more Englishman than Roman? — while Cymbeline the Briton is not above speaking the language of Rome to make himself understood, even while upholding values of independence and nationhood. In thinking of linguistic communities, what better word than ‘root’ to point to shared origins? Yet Shakespeare seems intent on displacing the apparently inherent, centripetal force of such a word into multiple re-associations which entail a constant negotiation between belonging and innovating, between digging into an archaeological past and forging a way for the future. One final passage from Cymbeline will serve as a tentative conclusion. It is not by chance that in the wild, rustic setting in which Cymbeline’s sons have grown up unbeknownst to their father, the word ‘root’ is also used by them on one occasion to refer very simply, and denotatively, to edible plants, but with a striking and material association to writing, and to the powers that Imogen/Fidele seems to have as she/he brings some measure of civility and order in their lives. In praising Fidele’s ‘neat cookery’, they marvel at her/ his ability to ‘cut our roots in characters’, which, as Valerie Wayne explains referring to work by Wendy Wall on early modern English recipe collections, was actually a practice of many ‘women of means’, who would cut food into letter shapes, a culinary practice that revealed an interesting space of female literacy.38 It is hard to resist explaining this apparently nonchalant, but also enigmatic comment — almost an offhand reference to the complex art of moulding matter into signifiers — as yet another instance in which culture and cultivation are opposed, or applied, to what nature offers in the wild, that is, in short, nourishment which must however be prepared and made fit for consumption; roots that must be shaped. It is indeed the common endeavour of reshaping the roots of the past, and making sense of different origins in a larger social dimension, that enables a sense of community and belonging to develop, one in which a shared language, and a shared linguistic project, is paramount. And though the texts we have read closely here point to the difficulty of the task, what also seems to be implied in this final passage is that it is thanks to the civilizing force of  38 Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. by Wayne, pp. 285–86.

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shared and negotiated signifying practices that linguistic roots are eventually familiarized, made less strange, more palatable and easier to digest, to be presented as a dish which the commoners of Thomas More’s London might have accepted more graciously.

Bibliography Primary Sources Mulcaster, Richard, The first part of the elementarie vvhich entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung, set furth by Richard Mulcaster (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1582) Shakespeare, William, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. by John Wilders, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2006) —— , Coriolanus, ed. by Robert Hope Case and William James Craig (London: Methuen, 1922) —— , Coriolanus, ed. by Philip Brockbank (London: Cengage Learning, 2007) —— , Cymbeline, ed. by James Mansfield Nosworthy (London: Methuen, 1955) —— , Cymbeline, ed. by Valerie Wayne (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) —— , King Henry VIII, ed. by Gordon McMullan (London: Bloomsbury, 2000) —— , Sir Thomas More, ed. by John Jowett (London: Bloomsbury, 2011) —— , Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. by Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (London: Bloomsbury, 1998, 2001) —— , The New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition, ed. by Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terry Bourus, and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) Secondary Works Baugh, Albert C., and Thomas Cable, A History of the English language (London: Routledge, 2002) Bergeron, David M., ‘Cymbeline: Shakespeare’s Last Roman Play’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 31.1 (1980), 31–41 Blank, Paula, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London: Routledge, 1996) —— , ‘Introducing “Intrelinguistics”: Shakespeare and Early/Modern English’, in Interlinguicity, Internationality, and Shakespeare, ed. by Michael Saenger (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), pp. 138–55 —— , Shakesplish (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018) Brown, Mark, ‘William Shakespeare’s Handwritten Plea for Refugees to Go Online’, The Guardian, 16 March 2016 [accessed 1 October 2020]

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Del Sapio Garbero, Maria, ‘Anatomy, Knowledge, and Conspiracy: In Shakespeare’s Arena with the Words of Cassius’, in Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare’s Rome, ed. by Maria Del Sapio Garbero, Nancy Isenberg, and Maddalena Pennacchia (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2010) —— , ed., Identity, Otherness and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, rpt. Routledge, 2016) —— , ed., Rome in Shakespeare’s World (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2018) —— , Shakespeare’s Ruins and Myth of Rome (London: Routledge, 2022) Del Sapio Garbero, Maria, Nancy Isenberg, and Maddalena Pennacchia, ed., Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare’s Rome (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2010) Delabastita, Dirk, and Ton Hoenselaars, ed., Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015) Dickson, Andrew, ‘Shakespeare: Reading On’, in The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. by Margreta De Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 325–42 Gallagher, John, Learning Languages in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) Hope, Jonathan, Shakespeare and Language: Reason, Eloquence and Artifice in the Renaissance (London: Methuen, 2010) Hopkins, Lisa, The Cultural Uses of the Caesars on the English Renaissance Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) —— , From the Romans to the Normans on the English Renaissance Stage (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 2017) International Rescue Committee, ‘400 Years Ago, William Shakespeare Made a Rallying Cry For Humanity’, 20 June 2018 [accessed 5 December 2020] James, Heather, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Kahn, Coppélia, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, Women (London: Routledge, 1997) Kolentsis, Alysia, Shakespeare’s Common Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2020) Maley, Willy, and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ed., This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard (London: Routledge, 2010) McDonald, Russ, Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Mikalachki, Jodi, ‘The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain: Cymbeline and Early Modern English Nationalism’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 46.3 (1995), 301–22 Miola, Robert S., Shakespeare’s Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) Plescia, Iolanda, ‘“From me was Posthumous ript”: Cymbeline and the Extraordinary Birth’, in Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare’s Rome, ed. by Maria Del Sapio Garbero, Nancy Isenberg, and Maddalena Pennacchia (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2010), pp. 135–48

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—— , ‘“In Caesar’s name pronounce I”: Language and Power in Shakespeare’s Roman Plays’, in Rome in Shakespeare’s World, ed. by Maria Del Sapio Garbero (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2018), pp. 107–26 Saenger, Michael, Shakespeare and the French Borders of English (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) —— , ed., Interlinguicity, Internationality, and Shakespeare (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2014) ‘Shakespeare’s Take on Refugees, Performed by Harriet Walter’, Newsnight, BBC, online video recording, 15 March 2016

[accessed 5 December 2020] Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret, Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) Databases and Reference Works Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (2011)

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Language and Universality The Transmission of Religious Dogma and Philosophical Concepts

Susan Baddeley

4. Writing Catholic, Translating Protestant English Translations from French in the Sixteenth Century

Between 1500 and 1600, around 500 different works in French are known to have been translated into English.1 Translation of French works into English was an activity that was already well developed, for historical reasons, before the introduction of printing in Western Europe; however, the latter technology considerably amplified this phenomenon: both by making more original texts to translate available, and by assuring a greater circulation and a wider readership for the translations that were produced. In recent years, several projects in the field of the digital humanities have allowed us to gain a better understanding of this substantial corpus, and to see exactly what was translated, by whom, for whom, and when.2 It will come as no surprise to specialists of the period to note that, of all the genres that make up the corpus of texts translated from French into English and printed in Britain between 1500 and 1600, religious texts are by far the best represented, accounting for around a third of the total. These translations of French works were aimed at reinforcing devotion, bringing new theological arguments to the debate, or else simply relaying factual news elements from a neighbouring country in which religious wars were raging.3 The English situation itself was far from serene, with the  1 These figures are those of the TRAFA (Traductions français-anglais, 1500–1600) corpus, currently under analysis by the present author. This corpus currently exists as a database, and publication in the form of a printed volume is planned for 2022.  2 I have made extensive use of the Universal Short-Title Catalogue, the English Short-Title Catalogue, and the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads project. The Early English Books Online website has also been used for lexical occurrences and statistics.  3 On the different issues raised by the translation of religious texts, the reader may usefully consult the article by Peter Burke, ‘Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe’ (especially pp. 27–29). Lisa Ferraro Parmelee’s Good Newes from Fraunce. French antiLeague Propaganda in Late Elizabethan England deals with the question of the numerous propaganda pamphlets that circulated at the time of the League (1585–1594). A conference, Susan Baddeley ([email protected]) Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin (Paris Saclay) Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer, ed. by Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin, PEEMB 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 103–122  10.1484/M.PEEMB-EB.5.127776

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country having undergone four changes in its official religion in the space of thirty years, with religious persecutions taking place under all of the four Tudor monarchs, and a nation divided on many theological issues (though this never spilled over into out-and-out civil war). Accordingly, Protestant theologians such as Jean Calvin, Théodore de Bèze (Theodore Beza), and Pierre Viret are particularly well represented, for their doctrinal works as well as for their polemical treatises.4 The numerous translators of these works, in their prefaces and dedications, frequently underline the role of their own faith as the main motive for undertaking the translation of these often lengthy works: in the absence of professional translators from whom this type of work could be commissioned, the burden usually fell upon those of the faithful who possessed the necessary language skills. The prefaces to these translations, often addressed ‘To the Christian Reader’, abound with statements of intention from the translator, who will claim that his or her work has been done for the common good, and to advance the interests of the ‘true’ Church. Some prefaces indeed are almost minor theological treatises in themselves, extending over several pages. This is not to say, however, that works by Catholic writers were not translated at all in England during this time, or were only translated and diffused during the reign of Mary I. The works of certain well-established Catholic authors such as Antonio de Guevara, Charles V’s preacher and historiographer, were widely lauded and appreciated for their literary and moral qualities, and were regularly translated throughout the whole of the Tudor period, without any translator ever seeming to have felt the need to apologize for translating a Catholic author.5 Even the preface to Thomas North’s English version of Guevara’s Dial of Princes, translated during the reign of Mary I and addressed to that monarch (1557), in praise of Mary and of the people of Spain, was still being reproduced in its entirety in the editions published during the reign of Elizabeth.6 Although translations of the major Catholic writers of the time tended to be printed with a false imprint, or printed abroad,7 certain works of a doctrinal

 4  5  6  7

‘Translating Babel: Religion and Translation in the Early Modern Period’, organized at the University of Heidelberg in 2017 brought together a number of scholars on the questions of translation and adaptation of religious texts across cultural and linguistic boundaries in the Early Modern period. The report can be consulted here, but the proceedings have not yet been published: [accessed 1 June 2021]. Twenty-six works for Calvin, ten for Bèze and thirteen for Viret. It should be noted that this corpus does not include works by French authors written in Latin and translated directly from Latin (or other languages) into English. Around thirty editions of Guevara’s works were published between 1500 and 1600. See Baddeley, ‘Les éditions anglaises du Mépris de la cour de Guevara’. The work went through three re-editions: 1568, 1582 and 1691. A dozen works in English by Catholic authors that were in fact printed in London in the late sixteenth century have the imprint ‘Douai’ ou ‘Duaci’.

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nature by Catholic authors translated by Protestants did circulate quite openly during this period, without author’s anonymity and without false imprints. John Yamamoto-Wilson gives the surprising example of the re-edition, in 1584, of the Jesuit Robert Parsons’s First booke of the Christian exercise (or ‘Book of Resolution’, 1582) by the Protestant Edmund Bunny, a churchman of strong Calvinist persuasion.8 The work went through thirty editions between 1584 and 1640, so it can hardly be described as having appealed to a marginal audience. And yet, if we put the two editions side by side, we would be very hard-pressed to find much trace of editing on the behalf of Bunny, apart from a few cosmetic changes, such as the replacement of ‘devout company’ by ‘good company’, or a passage referring to angels praying for men which has been purely and simply suppressed.9 One of the questions that may legitimately be raised by this corpus of French–English religious translations is the following: how did translators deal with translating the inevitable theological references that occurred in their source texts, and which would have been found objectionable by an English Protestant audience? What sorts of references are left out or under-translated, what equivalents (if any) are given? Conversely, when analysing translations, how can identifying items that posed some kind of translational problem help us to better appreciate certain religious fault lines? Translating is, after all, an act not only of linguistic but also of cultural appropriation, the process of making a text which arose out of a certain context accessible to an audience in a different one. To put it another way, and to borrow the well-known words of Martin Luther, it is the process of ‘adapting to one’s own language something that has been said in a different one’:10 a resolutely target-oriented approach which was no doubt familiar to many Protestant translators of the sixteenth century. It should also be borne in mind that publishing a translation was an event which potentially involved several agents: the printer or publisher who  8 See Yamamoto-Wilson, ‘The Protestant Reception of Catholic Devotional Literature’. There is some hesitation as to the name of this author: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography uses Persons, and so do some contemporary writers. The English Short-Title Catalogue and the British Library catalogue, however, use Parsons, and this is the form that has been preferred here.  9 Parsons, The first booke of the Christian exercise appertayning to resolution, B7r–v; Parsons rev. Bunny, A booke of Christian exercise appertaining to resolution, A4–A5. Bunny warns his reader in a lengthy preface that the original author (whose name he claims not to know) quotes the Scriptures in the translation from the Vulgate, and adopts some lexical choices that he finds objectionable: ‘First, that throughout the whole booke the Author hath used, in those scriptures that he alledgeth, the vulgar translation that was before in common use with them: and some special words praecisely, such as before they have taken upon them to observe, and therin stil to discent from us. The vulgar translation is known wel inough: so that I need to say nothing of it. Those special words that praecisely he useth, are, Our Lord, when it is more agreeable to the text to say, The Lord: iustice, for righteousnes: poenance, for repentance: merit, for good works, or the service of God: and a few others’ (n. p.).  10 ‘Per aliam linguam dictum applicare suae linguae’, in Luther’s Tischreden [Table-talk], quoted by Bocquet, L’Art de la traduction selon Martin Luther, p. 74 (my translation).

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accepted to publish it, the various official bodies (Parliament, the Stationers’ Company) to which it had to be submitted for approval, the compositors and correctors who produced the text, the person to whom it was dedicated, and in the end, the reading public who bought and read the text. Anything that might have been found objectionable to any of these agents could potentially have compromised the whole publishing venture.

Crossing Red Lines Certain words or expressions evidently constituted a kind of ‘red line’: words so highly charged and marked that the translator, when faced with them, had three possible options: simply to leave them out; to ‘domesticate’ them by giving an equivalent (if such a thing existed);11 or to blunt their impact by adding some kind of commentary, in order to distance himself or herself from them so that it should not be thought that he or she had approved them. One of the earliest examples of a translator’s dilemma of this kind occurs in a rather unexpected place: in the English translation of Guillaume Alexis’s Débat de l’homme et de la femme, a typical late medieval dialogue between a man and a woman in which each of the protagonists attempts to prove the superiority of their sex.12 An anonymous English translation of the work was published in London by Wynkyn de Worde, which the Short Title Catalogue dates to around 1525.13 On close inspection, it appears that the third and fourth stanzas are missing in the translation, which read as follows in the French original: Lhomme. Dieu ne voulut oncques femme estre Ne quelque femme faire Prestre Pour chanter le Per omnia Bien eureux est qui rien ny a. La femme. Premier de femme voulut naistre Le seigneur de tous & le maistre Qui les prestres sanctifia Malheureux est qui rien ny a.  11 To use the term coined by Venuti (‘domestication’ as opposed to ‘foreignization’ as a translational strategy) in The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation.  12 Alexis, Le Debat de lhomme et de la femme, ed. by Picot and Piaget. The multiple transformations that this text underwent while being adapted from French to English have been studied by Coldiron in her English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, pp. 70 ff.  13 Alexis, He [sic] begynneth an interlocucyon, with an argument, betwyxt man and woman, & whiche of them could proue to be most excellent [anonymous trans.].

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(The man. God never wished to be a woman, | or to make any woman a priest, | to sing the Per Omnia. | Happy is he that has nothing to do with them. The woman. The lord and master of all, | who sanctified the priests, | wished first of all to be born of a woman. | Unhappy is he that has nothing to do with them)14 It would seem that the English translator here took exception to the reference to the liturgy in Latin, and to the notion of priests being sanctified by God.15 For this is not a simple omission, due to carelessness or made deliberately in order to make the content fit into a reduced form: the translator tries to cover his tracks, or at least to compensate, by adding two stanzas at the beginning, and filling them with French-style lexical calques (reluysant, ardent, the vmbre of a tree…), thereby creating the illusion that this part of the text had been translated out of French: When Phebus reluysant / most ardent was & shene In the hote sommer season / for my solace Vnder the vmbre of a tre / bothe fayre & grene I lay downe to rest me / where in this case As after ye shall here / a stryfe there began Whiche longe dyd endure / with great argument Bytwyxte the woman / and also the man Whiche of them coulde proue / to be moost excellent.16 If this was indeed the reason for the omission (and it is difficult to think of any other),17 it would seem to be a very early expression of Lutheran sympathies, with the translator taking exception to two features of religious practice that Luther had expressly condemned: the exclusive use of Latin to the detriment of the vernacular in church services (here, the formula per omnia), and the notion that priests were necessary as an intermediary between God and man. If the English edition does indeed date from 1525, as the material suggests, this dates from well before William Tyndale expressed aversion to the exclusive use of Latin in the liturgy in his Obedience of a Christen Man (1528),18 and it  14 Alexis, Le Debat de lhomme et de la femme, ed. by Picot and Piaget, Aiir. My translation.  15 The phrase Per omnia features in the concluding formula of many prayers that make up the liturgy, ‘Per omnia secula seculorum.’ It can be found in numerous editions of books of hours, many of which were printed in France to be sold in England, such as the Salisbury Primer: This prymer of Salysbury vse is set out a long without ony serchyng with many prayers. The formula per omnia appears ninety-six times in this text alone.  16 Alexis, He [sic] begynneth an interlocucyon, Aiir.  17 The editors of Guillaume Alexis’s work in 1896, Émile Picot and Arthur Piaget, also arrived at the same conclusion.  18 ‘All the promyses of God have they other wypt cleane out or thus levended them with open lyes to stablysh their confession with all. And to kepe vs from knowleage of the trouth, they doo all thinge in latyne. They praye in latyne, they Christen in latyne, they blesse in latyne,

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also predates Henry VIII’s requests for the annulment of his marriage and the beginnings of his opposition to the Church of Rome (1527). The second example of suppression of undesirable elements in a translation dates from 1539. By then, the religious context had evolved considerably, and we can see the effects of this change in a translation that dates from the early years of the Henrician Reformation. This is a translation, by John Gough, of Jean Lemaire de Belges’s De la difference des scismes (1511), published in 1539.19 This work, dedicated to King Henry VIII himself, was undertaken with a specific agenda, as the translator’s very virulent anti-papal prologue makes quite clear: Where as it is dyew and expedyent for all Chrysten people, to haue the perfyte knowledge and puryte of chrysten lyuyng whiche oughte to be in the catholyke Churche mylytant here in erthe. In the whiche Churche hath ben great abuses by the mynisters & hedes therof, to whom we haue gyuen great confydence, and specyally to theyr prophane Cerymonyes, decres, tradycyons, fantasyes, and dremes, engendred and spronge vp by the vsurped hed therof, very Antecrystes bysshoppes of Rome, whiche many yeres hath ben called popes as in this present lytell boke is euydently to be red & sene […].20 There would be a great deal to say about the multiple ways in which the translator transforms the moderate Gallican reformer Lemaire’s text into a violently anti-Roman manifesto. I will simply focus here on one of the most conspicuous alterations that Gough makes in the course of his translation, and it concerns the word ‘pope’. Lemaire’s original work was, admittedly, anti-papal (it was written specifically against Pope Julius II, and the purpose of it was to prove that most schisms in the history of the Church had been initiated by popes), but it was grounded in historiography; it is therefore not surprising to find the French word pape appearing seventy-nine times in the text. The English translator, however, seems to be reluctant even to use the word ‘pope’: it occurs only ten times in the translation (including a couple of times in the Prologue, so outside of the translation proper), and when the French word occurs, it is either not translated at all (for example, when it functions as a title, as in ledit pape Cornille, translated simply as ‘Cornelis’), or is replaced by some sort of paraphrase, generally ‘the Bishop of Rome’. The French antipape, however, is always translated: and as antipape, not as ‘anti-pope’. This is a very

they geve absolution in latyne, only curse they in the englyshe tonge’. See Tyndale, The obedience of a Christen man, Ciiijr.  19 Lemaire de Belges, The Abbreuyacyon of all generall councellys, trans. by Gough, translation of Le traictie Intitule, de la difference des scismes et des Concilles de leglise. Gough was a translator and bookseller who had connections to the printer Wynkyn de Worde, and who had been arrested several times in the 1520s and early 1530s for his ‘heretical’ religious beliefs and publishing.  20 Lemaire de Belges, The Abbreuyacyon of all generall councellys, trans. by Gough, Aiv.

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early occurrence of the term, which the Oxford English Dictionary attests as appearing much later, in 1579. The legitimacy of the very title of ‘pope’ was, of course, contested by English Protestants, and there are many other occurrences of suppressions or adaptations of the term in English translations from French. On the title page of the translation of Jacques Bongars’s Response à l’excommunication du Pape Sixte cinquiesme (1585), the pope in question becomes ‘Sixtus Quintus, Pope of Rome so called’. The non-recognition of the title of pope extends even into works such as Randle Cotgrave’s French–English dictionary, where we find, under the entry Pape, the definition: ‘A word which, howsoever it be used, signifies a father’, with the telling example, ‘Vn bon pape est un meschant homme’.21 Gough’s translation shows that, by 1539, even the neutral use of the term in a historical work was perceived as unacceptable for English eyes: the term is therefore either adapted, or else, most usually, simply suppressed. The derogatory derivative, antipape, is, however, retained. Even when the text translated refers to events that are clearly taking place in a foreign, Catholic country, certain terms are evidently deemed unacceptable for a Protestant readership. When Edward Aggas translated, in 1594, the ‘official’ account of the coronation of Henri IV of France, he deliberately omitted all the passages in the French original that referred to the king’s ‘miraculous’ conversion to Catholicism, replacing them simply with a discreet ‘&c.’.22 However, these local adaptations are carried out only in the first few pages of the French text: in the rest of the account, Aggas (who routinely describes himself as a ‘faithful’ translator23) leaves out no details of the preparations, and of the elements of the Mass that was celebrated — in Latin; the only other concession to a Protestant audience which might be offended by such things is a slightly ironic commentary on the name of the container of the holy oil used in the anointing, the sainte ampoulle, which becomes ‘the holy vyall (so tearmed there)’.24 It is as though Aggas’s vigilance was brought to bear in the first pages, which are typically those that a reader or a censor might be confronted with, but that he lowered his guard once the public had become accustomed to the fact that this was not, in fact, a Protestant celebration. Similarly, the anonymous translator of the The Copie of a Letter sent by the French king to the people of Artoys and Henault, in 1595, removes a whole passage relating to the French king’s conversion, replacing it with an apocryphal denunciation of Philip II’s activism in the Low Countries bordering on France,

 21 Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues.  22 Aggas, The Order of Ceremonies obserued, A2v.  23 The title pages of his numerous translations very often include the words, ‘Faithfully translated by Edward Aggas’.  24 Aggas, The Order of Ceremonies obserued, A2v. In one occurrence, perhaps because the compositor was unfamiliar with the term, ‘vyall’ becomes ‘voyalt’, thus creating an unintentional hapax.

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and a fleeting reference to ‘our [Henri’s] turning to the Catholike Romish religion’ (for the term ‘Romish’, see below). The suppression of theologically sensitive material was not, however, limited to Protestant translations of Catholic works. When the Protestant John Harmar undertook to publish, in 1587, his translation of Théodore de Bèze’s Sermons upon the three first chapters of the Canticle of Canticles, he indicated in his dedicatory epistle to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, that a certain number of passages (‘some few wordes’) had been deliberately omitted: Some fewe thinges, beeing personal matters, I must confesse vnto your Lordship, I haue omitted in the printed translation, which are pointed vnto by a little star, that who so list to see them maie by that meanes consult the autor himselfe. I thought it for my owne part not conuenient, as many good men also with me, to hinder the Church of so great a commoditie, as I doubt not this woorke will bring it, by occasioning anie offence through some few wordes which might happily breede some grieuance. And herein as I doubt not, but the autor himselfe, for his loue towards me, wil pardon me: so I hope al the godly wil hold me excused.25 The ‘little stars’ in question are not very numerous and are rather difficult to spot — and once they have been found, it is no easy task to identify the corresponding passages in the French original — but they correspond to fierce attacks by Bèze on the establishment of a hierarchy in the Church, and on the use of vestments: both of which had been retained in the Church of England. Bèze thus denounces ‘those who have been so brazen as to forge new vocations and charges, and to transform them later into dignities, and finally into a truly Satanic tyranny’;26 however, Harmar’s translation of the same passage refers to ‘the reverend names of Bishop, Pastor, Elder or Ancient’, in complete contradiction with Bèze’s positions, in order not to offend the established orders of the Church of England. While it is quite likely that Bèze’s positions would not have been looked upon unfavourably by Dudley, whose Puritan sympathies were well known, the date of publication — 1587 — corresponds to a crucial moment just in between the rejection of the Puritans’ efforts to introduce Presbyterianism by the English parliament (1586), and the publication of the violently anti-episcopal Marprelate tracts, in 1588. Harmar, who indicates in the preface of another of his translations which he dedicated to Dudley, that of Calvin’s Sermons on the Ten Commandments (1579), that Dudley did him a favour by asking Elizabeth to intercede on his behalf in order to obtain for him a place at Winchester College, may have  25 Bèze, Master Bezaes Sermons vpon the Three first Chapters of the Canticle of Canticles, trans. by Harmar, ¶3v.  26 ‘Autant est-il de ceux qui ont esté si outrecuidés de forger de nouuelles vocations & charges qu’ils ont puis apres transfigurees en dignités, et finalement en vne tyrannie vrayement Sathanique…’, Bèze, Sermons sur les Trois Premiers Chapitres du Cantique des Cantiques, p. 211 (oii). My translation.

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found himself in an uncomfortable situation of divided loyalty, and have resorted to this means of neither completely betraying the original text, nor going against the terms of the Elizabethan religious settlement.

Chameleon Words While some terms would have been considered inflammatory at the time, and for that reason tended to be eliminated or attenuated in translation, others which the modern reader might expect to have been problematic were in fact retained. Translation here can be a useful revealer of doctrinal divergences, which may not always have been as marked as might have been thought. In some cases, a lack of clear theological fault lines meant that certain works by Catholic authors could be translated with a minimum of adaptation. This is the case of Geoffrey Fenton’s English translation of a work by Jean Talpin, a canon of Périgueux, La Police chrestienne.27 Talpin’s work could be described as a kind of guide to Christian conduct, based on the Scriptures — but a guide for the ordering of society as a whole, and not for the individual. Talpin himself was a determined Catholic reformer, and the Table to his book features such items as ‘Abus des prescheurs ignorans’ and ‘Reformation de l’Eglise necessaire’. Fenton dedicates the translation to William Cecil, then Lord High Treasurer of England. He is slightly evasive about his own role in ‘putting out’ this work: in his dedication, he never states clearly that it is a translation, nor does the name of the original author feature anywhere in the work — although his name and credentials were prominently displayed on the title page of the edition that Fenton probably used: ‘Par M. Iean Talpin, Docteur & Chanoine Theologal à Perigueux’. Fenton has recourse to many of the aforementioned strategies that were employed by Protestant translators when confronted with controversial non-Protestant matter. He naturally cuts out all references to the Mass and to non-Protestant sacraments such as confession and absolution, and translates la grande messe by ‘publike seruice’. He mentions penance, but suppresses any references to absolution. And le pape is paraphrased as ‘the dissembled vicar of Rome’ or ‘that counterfet priest of Rome’. What is notable in this translation, however, is the relatively limited use that Fenton makes of such devices. Admittedly, most of Talpin’s treatise concerns topics that are not specifically religious, such as the remit of judges, the training of medical doctors, and the need for children to have good teachers. It is nonetheless remarkable that so little is left out. This may be because Talpin himself advocated substantial reforms against the corruption of his own Church, with certain arguments that would not have been out of place in a tract by Luther — a reminder that Protestantism, at least in England, grew  27 Talpin, A forme of Christian pollicie drawne out of French by Geffray Fenton, trans. by Fenton.

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out of a variety of continental reform movements, including the moderate Gallican reformation in France, adopting not only a number of its aims but also its vocabulary. Thus, in the passages where Talpin rails against the authors of ‘heresies’, against ‘heretics’ and ‘schisms’, it would not be difficult for a Protestant audience to take these terms as applying to their opponents. And again, when references are made to the ‘true’ Church, for Protestants this would be the Reformed Church. These ‘chameleon words’ thus take on a particular colour and meaning only when they are set alongside other, more marked, terms, that are used only by one of the confessional groups.28 One signifier therefore, but multiple signifieds, according to the context and to the reading public. More curious (at least for the modern reader) and deserving of thought, however, is Fenton’s conservation of the term ‘Catholic’. During the Reformation, the adjective ‘Catholic’ was generally claimed by those who remained under the obedience of Rome. Etymologically, of course, the term itself means ‘universal’, and was used by Catholics to distinguish the Europe-wide Church of Rome from the national Reformed Churches. The latter, however, also laid claim to the term, endowing it with a wider or more absolute sense: that of the whole communion of the saved and the saintly in all Churches, throughout the ages.29 In order to distinguish between the two interpretations, the adjective ‘Roman’ (or ‘Romish’: see below) was frequently added by Protestant authors. It is significant that in his translation, Fenton never adds the epithet ‘Roman’ to ‘Catholic’, and by doing so, indicates that he retains the ‘etymological’ sense of the term, in phrases such as ‘theyr office standes onelye vppon these, that they preache sincerelye and Catholikelye’. The following text could thus be accepted by a Protestant audience, despite the fact that it had been expressly written against them: The aduersaryes of the Faith, and Schismatikes, shalbe made one with the Catholikes30 by the continuaunce of hearing this Doctrine, which reprooueth schismes, abhorreth Heresies, and condemnes them to perpetuall curse:31 So that all people assembled togeather euery Holydaye, specially, to heare Gods worde in the Sermon, can not but bee nourished, entertayned, and preserued by this continuall conuersation in Preaching places, and by this vnion of Doctrine, in true Loue and mutuall Charitye, to the rooting vp of all inimities and grudges.32

 28 Examples of these are given above, in the quotation from Bunny’s preface to Parsons’ Book of Resolution: ‘The Lord’ rather than ‘Our Lord’, ‘justice’/‘righteousness’, ‘penance’/’repentance’, ‘merit’/’good works’.  29 See the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), ‘catholic, adj. and n.’  30 In the French original, ‘seront remis auec les catholiques’.  31 ‘les condamne de perpetuel anathéme’.  32 Talpin, A forme of Christian pollicie, trans. by Fenton, p. 24.

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References to the ‘dissembled vicar of Rome’ or to ‘that counterfet priest of Rome’ have already informed the reader that this is a Protestant text, and therefore that terms such as ‘heretic’/‘heresy’, ‘schismatic’ and ‘the faith’ should be interpreted accordingly. The final chapter of the original work, however, was a fierce attack by Talpin on the ‘seditions et esmotions populaires’ in France and in England, countries which are named without ambiguity, in which the ‘heretics’ are compared successively to wolves, to vermin, to the plague, and to a disease which needs to be literally excised with a razor. Fenton, a devout Protestant, could scarcely let this pass, and almost the whole chapter is suppressed. And yet, were it not for this chapter, and for the (infrequent) references to the Mass and certain sacraments, the whole work could very well pass for the work of a Protestant author. Precautions of the same sort, indeed, also had to be taken when translating more extreme, Calvinistic texts for a more moderate Protestant audience. The translator of Bertrand de Loque’s virulent diatribe against the (Roman) Catholic Church, the Traité de l’Eglise,33 Thomas Wilcox, felt it necessary to place a lengthy Admonition to the Reader before his translation, in which he explains that he was originally reluctant to publish the work, ‘because it being meant wel, may be taken ill’, and ‘trouble the happy and quiet state of the Church of England’, through its vehement denunciation of any hierarchy within the Church.34 The author, the translator is at pains to explain (and taking a few liberties with the truth), was not referring to any Reformed Churches today which happen to allow such practices, but to the abuse of such a system in the Roman Catholic Church. This need to be absolutely sure that the reader will not get the wrong message may explain why Wilcox, throughout the text, makes extensive use of doublets, that is, translating a single French term by two English ones. This is a strategy often resorted to by translators for various reasons. It may be used as a way of conserving both the original term in the form of a calque or a loan word, while coupling it with a more transparent, native word for the benefit of those unacquainted with the source-language, thus achieving both foreignization and domestication (in the words of Venuti) in a single phrase. It may also be used when a single English word does not exist with exactly the same shade of meaning, and the sense is more easily grasped when two words are used.35 Finally, translating a single term by multiple synonyms may simply be used to an aesthetic end, as a display of copia and to show off

 33 Loque, Traité de l’Eglise. English translation by Thomas Wilcox: A Treatie of the Churche.  34 Loque, A Treatie of the Churche, trans. by Wilcox, ***1.  35 Examples of this can be found in the English translation of Antoine Geuffroy’s Estat de la court du Grant Turc, in which the (anonymous and not very skilled) translator often resorts to this device, translating for example ‘ung meilleur scauoir que le mien’ by ‘one of a greater witte and knowelege than I am of ’, or ‘la plus grant fleur de leur force’ by ‘the chefest of all their strength and courage’ (Geuffroy, Estat de la court du Grant Turc, G3r–v; The order of the greate Turckes courte [anonymous trans.], K1v–K2).

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one’s lexical prowess. In Wilcox’s case, the use of synonyms seems to be to make the meaning more precise and to leave no possible room for doubt as to where his loyalties lay: thus, fausses assemblées becomes thus ‘false and counterfeited congregations’, conduite becomes ‘gouernment and guiding’, la perpetuité de l’eglise becomes ‘the perpetuitie or continuance of the Church’, and other terms are further qualified by adding adjectives, adverbs, etc.: declarer becomes ‘rightly declare’, l’Eglise Catholique & inuisible, qui est vne becomes ‘the Catholike and inuisible Church, which indeed is but one’. Loque’s treatise begins, appropriately enough, with a passage highlighting the need to define (or rather, ‘distinguish’) beforehand any terms one is intending to use in a treatise, and giving the example of the word ‘Church’: Of the different meanings and acceptions of the word Church, and how the Church is commonly distinguished. It is often said that any word which can be construed as having a number of different meanings should be distinguished rather than defined. For one can not declare the nature and power of any thing unless one has first of all resolved the sense in which it is to be taken.36 Loque’s insistence that the meanings of words ought to be properly ‘distinguished’, or the context in which they are to be used sufficiently well explained before being used, shows that Protestant authors were conscious of the potentially polyvalent nature of certain terms, and this may well have sparked Wilcox’s efforts to make sure that there were no ambiguities possible in his translation, by reinforcing terms with other qualifiers that left no room for interpretation. Loque’s preoccupations do indeed seem legitimate, for in many cases theological debates between the two Churches were essentially battles of words, revolving around what content to put behind a particular term, and who had the ‘right’ to claim it.

Shibboleths In such contexts, where the same word could potentially have two meanings — or be interpreted differently according to who was reading it — Protestant translators generally endeavoured to leave some clues, to orient the reader from the outset, and so that their orthodoxy could not be called into question. Whereas certain terms such as ‘Catholic’ could be interpreted according to what the reader wished to invest in them, other formulations left no scope for ambiguity or doubt. Like the biblical ‘shibboleths’, these devices would indicate to any reader that this was, indeed, a Protestant text. When discussing the Church of Rome, French Protestant writers would tend to use the phrases Eglise de Rome or Eglise romaine. When translating  36 Loque, Traité de l’Eglise, ai. My translation.

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these into English, there would potentially be two translations for the French adjective romain(e), ‘Roman’, or ‘Romish’. Effectively, however, the only form that is ever used to designate the Church of Rome by Protestant translators is ‘Romish’, an adjective which is never used otherwise than in a derogatory sense.37 The adjective ‘Romish’ was coined by William Tyndale in the 1530s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It was used very soon afterwards in Protestant translations as an equivalent of the French romain, when used to refer to the Catholic Church (the syntagm ‘Romish church’ dates from 1548). Catholic translators never use this term: in the (anonymous) translation of Jean d’Albin de Valsergues’s Notable Discourse (1575), l’église romaine is always translated either by ‘Church of Rome’ or, more usually, by ‘Romane Church’, singling this out as a Catholic translation.38 Other derogatory derivatives were also coined; the case of antipape has already been discussed. At least one of these would appear to have originated in a French–English translation, and it is the term ‘mass-monger’ (or ‘massmonger’). Antoine Marcourt, the author of the famous (or infamous) Placards against the Mass that were put up in public places in Paris and other major French towns in the autumn of 1534, giving rise to the ‘affair’ of the same name, coined in his Declaration de la Messe of 1534 the term missatiers, a humorous hybrid based on the Latin term for the Mass (missa) with the French suffix (-at)ier, designating an artisan. The full import of the term emerges in the phrase ‘ces tondus missatiers, qui au commencement estoyent plus paoures que sauatiers’ (with the deliberate rhyming of ‘missatiers’ and ‘savatiers’, ‘cobblers’).39 The anonymous English translator invents the term ‘massemongers’, with a similar type of derivation, the only difference being that the English suffix -monger also introduces the notion of buying and selling: a dimension absent from Marcourt’s neologism, but one which he had previously exploited in his Livre des Marchans of 1533, a satire in which he denounces the venality of the clergy. This would appear to be the first attestation of ‘massmonger’, a term which would then be taken up and re-used by polemical writers such as John Bale, in the First Examination of Anne Askewe: ‘And in thys she shewed her selfe to be a naturall membre of Christes mistycall bodie, relygyouslye carefull

 37 See OED, ‘Romish, adj. and n.’ As the Oxford English Dictionary indicates about the suffix ‘-ish’: ‘In later times this ending has become exceedingly common, sometimes in the earlier colourless sense as boyish, girlish, waggish, but chiefly in a derogatory sense, “Having the (bad or objectionable) qualities of ”: as in apish, babyish, boarish, […] wolvish, womanish. (These have usually corresponding Ger. forms in -isch.)’ The OED (‘popish, adj., 1’) also gives 1528 as the first occurrence of the adjective popish (‘Though popisshe curres here at do barcke’, in the anonymous pamphlet Rede me & be nott Wrothe for I saye no thynge but trothe, i iij), but the term can also be found in Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christen man from the same year (p. 130).  38 Albin de Valsergues, A notable discourse, plainelye and truely discussing, who are the right ministers of the Catholike Church [anonymous trans.]. The work is also designated as Catholic by its false imprint, having been supposedly printed in Douai.  39 Marcourt, Declaration de la Messe, Eivv.

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for her Christen bretherne & systerne, least they shulde take harme of the popes masmongers’.40 A further example of a Protestant ‘shibboleth’ is one which does not concern the lexicon, but has to do with typographical conventions. From quite an early date, in Reformed publications, the habit was taken of printing words such as ‘God’, ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’ entirely in capitals. John Flood has pointed this out, in his works on the specific uses of typography in Lutheran publications in German, and this is where the practice seems to have originated.41 It appears in the French Bibles of the 1530s, beginning with the version of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples and spreading from there to the Geneva Bibles.42 It appears, however, to have been a Europe-wide convention: it is certainly one that is retained when translating French Protestant texts into English, and it is a conspicuous feature whose presence would no doubt have signalled immediately to any well-informed reader that this was, indeed, a Reformed publication.43 Finally, there is a very curious example in which all the work of interpreting the text and putting it into context is given over to the paratexts and to a few strategically placed key words. This is the translation, by Robert Greene, of the funeral oration of Pope Gregory XIII, who died in 1585.44 Greene takes pains to include a preface ‘To the Courteous and Christian Reader’ in which he explains, in a very virulent tone, that this sermon came into his hands, that he hoped to find in it ‘some excellent (though erronious) shewe of skill and learning’, but only saw in it ‘a confused Chaos of doting conceipts, such an absurd fourme both of learning, reason, and method’: ‘But seeing their owne wordes might bee best witness of their follies, I thought good to translate it into English’. In other words, Greene declares that he translated and published the text in order to let it ridicule itself. He thus adds a few lines on the title page to warn the reader from the outset that this is not, in fact, a Catholic sermon; he also adds ironic marginal notes such as ‘The Wolfe is dead, and the Sheep want a good Sheepherde’,45 and his preface (including the ‘shibboleth’ form GOD in capitals) and the inclusion of two anti-papal poems by Théodore de Bèze (which, needless to say, did not figure in the original) make clear the way in which the translation is to be understood. However, the text itself is translated perfectly faithfully: there is no attempt at all to suppress or even edulcorate the numerous references to the Catholic Church, to its practices

 40 Bale, The First Examination of Anne Askewe, hviir.  41 Flood, ‘Humanism, “Nationalism”, and the Semiology of Typography’.  42 Baddeley, L’Orthographe française au temps de la Réforme, p. 283.  43 Bunny, when revising Parsons, occasionally slips in a ‘GOD’ in full capitals. Calvin’s Brieve instruction […] Contre les Anabaptistes (1544) frequently has DIEV or IESVS in full capitals, and the English translator in 1549 follows this convention.  44 An Oration or Funerall Sermon vttered at Roome, at the buriall of the holy Father Gregorie the 13. who departed in Iesus Christ the 11. of Aprill. 1585, trans. by Greene.  45 On the role of marginal notes, see Slights, Managing Readers, Chapter 7 (‘Briefe, Trew, and Contentious as Hell: The Voice from the Margins of Religious Polemics’).

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and its hierarchy, elements which would have been taken as red lines for other translators. If shorn of its peripheral matter, there would be nothing to prevent the text being taken at face value: only the paratexts and marginal notes allow for the Protestant reading that Greene claims to be promoting in his preface.46 However, it seems unlikely that the comic effect that Greene claimed to be aiming at was in fact produced, and given the persona of Greene, it is not impossible that the whole venture was a kind of perverse intellectual exercise, an elaborate joke, designed both to show off Greene’s skill as a translator and his ability to manipulate an audience, by having what was a purely Catholic text openly printed in England, and getting a Protestant audience to read it.47 *     *    * Translation is very much a matter of finding the right word — le mot juste — but this endeavour could be fraught with difficulty at a time when, in the absence of monolingual dictionaries that could arbitrate on the acception of a particular term, the meaning of a word was, like translation itself in Umberto Eco’s view, very much a question of negotiation: depending on who used it to mean what, in what context, together with which other terms, in a constant back-and-forth between etymology and evolution, origin and adaptation and appropriation. The French–English translations of the sixteenth century show an extreme sensitivity on the part of the translators in their choice of words, most especially when translating a religious text. Their main preoccupation was first of all not to offend, either the public, the authorities, or the high personage to whom the translation was usually dedicated, and secondly to indicate the translator’s own religious affiliation. Finally, when translating a text by an author whose religious convictions may have been somewhat divergent, it was vital not to let one’s habitual vocabulary be usurped: it was important to maintain a healthy distance where necessary. Protestant translators found numerous ways of doing this: by choosing the ‘marked’ variant when more than one existed for the word being translated (‘Romish’ rather than ‘Roman’), creating synonymous doublets where none existed in the original,

 46 An Oration or Funerall Sermon vttered at Roome, at the buriall of the holy Father Gregorie the 13, Preface by Robert Greene, Aiir–v. On paratexts, see the introduction of Smith and Wilson ed., Renaissance Paratexts.  47 The text translated by Greene can hardly be said to have much informative value or to have been very newsworthy, unlike the translation of André Maillard’s Aduertisement to the King of Nauarre (1585), in which the French author makes the case for the future Henri IV to convert to Catholicism. The English translator translates this text very faithfully (as he states, it is ‘truly translated’), but includes a title-page warning that this is ‘in trueth a very slaunderous, false, and seditious Libell’, ‘beeing subtilly conuayed, vnder pretence of winning him to the Romish Religion, is therfore the rather set downe in the same nature as it is written: to showe a wicked minde against God the King, and the sinceritie of true Religion’. A preface similarly informs the reader that the author of this pamphlet ‘by many needlesse shifts and palpable cauilles, […] laboreth to inueigh against the saide King, because of his Christian Religion, and for that he wil not stoup to the man of Roome.’

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in order to clarify the use of certain terms (‘Catholic and universal’ [emphasis added]), by including prefaces to the reader and other paratexts which left no doubt as to their convictions, and finally, dedicating their work to some high personage who would give it the seal of approval. They occasionally had recourse to suppressing material purely and simply, but this practice remained rare, and religiously motivated suppressions were generally accompanied by some sort of measure of compensation, or of identification. Above all, these translations show that doctrinal divisions were perhaps not as clear-cut as one might have expected: the Parsons text published with minimal editing by Bunny, and Fenton’s translation of Talpin are sufficient evidence of this. With the elimination of a few problematic references and the inclusion of a few cues and ‘shibboleths’, it is possible to interpret texts produced by the enemy camp on one’s own terms. Finally, these small (and sometimes minute) details of translation show us that the very act of translation, of transferring content between cultures that were sometimes at odds (when not frankly hostile), necessitated certain choices on the part of the translator, none of which were without consequence. Paying attention to the minutiae of these translational choices and to all the elements of a text that contribute to creating its meaning, can shine a very particular kind of light on a text, exposing fault lines and problems which might not otherwise have been visible.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Aggas, Edward, trans., The Order of Ceremonies obserued in the annointing and Coronation of the most Christian King of France & Nauarre, Henry the IIII. of that name, celebrated in our Lady Church, in the Cittie of Chartres vppon Sonday the 27. of February 1594 (London: John Windet, [1594]) Albin de Valsergues, Jean d’, A notable discourse, plainelye and truely discussing, who are the right ministers of the Catholike Church written against Calvin and his disciples […] [anonymous translator] (‘Duaci’ [London]: ‘per Iohannem Bellerum’ [William Carter], 1575) Alexis, Guillaume, Le Debat de lhomme et de la femme (1490), in Guillaume Alexis, Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Émile Picot and Arthur Piaget, Société des anciens textes français (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1896), vol. i, pp. 121–55 —— , He [sic] begynneth an interlocucyon, with an argument, betwyxt man and woman, & whiche of them could proue to be most excellent [anonymous translator] (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1525?) Bale, John, The first examinacion of Anne Askewe latelye martired in Smythfelde, by the Romyshe popes vpholders, wyth the elucydacyon of Iohan Bale (London: Nicholas Hill?, 1547) Bèze, Théodore de (Theodore Beza), Sermons sur les Trois Premiers Chapitres du Cantique des Cantiques, de Salomon. Par Theodore de Beze, Ministre de la Parole de Dieu en l’Eglise de Geneue ([Geneva: Jean le Preux, 1586]) —— , Master Bezaes Sermons vpon the Three first Chapters of the Canticle of Canticles: Wherein are handled the chiefest points of religion controuersed and debated betweene vs and the Aduersarie at this day, especially touching the true Iesus Christ and the true Church, and the certaine & infallible marks both of the one and of the other, trans. by John Harmar (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1587) Bongars, Jacques, Response à l’excommunication du Pape Sixte cinquiesme contre le Roy de Nauarre, et le Prince de Condé (London: Christopher Barker, 1585) —— , An Aunswere to the excommunication lately denounced and published by Sixtus Quintus, Pope of Rome so called, against the two Christian Princes, Henry king of Nauarre, and Henry Prince of Conde, made by the saide Princes, and sent to Rome [anonymous translator] (London: Christopher Barker, 1585) Calvin, Jean, Brieve instruction […] Contre les Anabaptistes (Geneva: Jean Girard, 1544) Cotgrave, Randle, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London: Adam Islip, 1611) Geuffroy, Antoine, Estat de la court du grant Turc, Lordre de sa gendarmerie, & de ses finances: auec vng brief discours de leurs conquestes depues le premier de ceste race (Antwerp: Jan Steels, 1542) —— , The order of the greate Turckes courte, of hys menne of warre, and of all hys conquestes, with the summe of Mahumetes doctryne. Translated oute of Frenche [anonymous translator] (London: Richard Grafton, [1542])

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Henri IV, King of France, The Copie of a Letter sent by the French king to the people of Artoys and Henault, requesting them to remooue the forces gathered by the king of Spaine, from the Borders of France, otherwise denouncing open warre. Also a declaration of the French kings proclaiming open warre against the king of Spaine and his adherents, and the causes him mouing therto [anonymous translator] (London: Peter Short for Thomas Millington, 1595) Lemaire de Belges, Jean, Le traictie Intitule, de la difference des scismes et des Concilles de leglise Et de la preeminence et vtilite des concilles: de la saincte eglise Gallicaine. Compose par Ian Lemaire de Belges, Indiciare, et Hystoriographe de la Royne. (Paris: Geoffroy de Marnef, 1511) —— , The Abbreuyacyon of all generall councellys holden in Grecia, Germania, Italia, and Gallia, compyled by Johan le maire de belges, most excellent Hystoryograffer to kynge Lowys the .xii. of late french kynge dedycated to the sayd kyng lowys. Anno domini. 1519, trans. by John Gough (London: Robert Wyer for John Gough, 1539) Loque, Bertrand de [François Saillans], Traité de l’Eglise, contenant un vray discours pour cognoistre la vraye Eglise, et la discerner d’auec l’Eglise Romaine et toutes autres fausses assemblées (Geneva: Eustache Vignon, 1577) ——— [François Saillans], A Treatie of the Churche, conteining a true discourse, to knowe the true Church by, and to discerne it from the Romish Church, and all other false assemblies, or counterfet congregations, trans. by Thomas Wilcox (London: [Thomas Dawson] for Richard Langton, 1581) Maillard, André, An Aduertisement to the King of Nauarre, to vnite him selfe with the King and the Catholique Faithe. Beeing in trueth a very slaunderous, false, and seditious Libell, against the said King of Nauarre, and other Christian Princes made as an answer to his Book intituled: The Declaration of the King of Nauarre, as touching the slaunders published against him &c which is heer extant in English. But this beeing subtilly conuayed, vnder pretence of winning him to the Romish Religion, is therfore the rather set downe in the same nature as it is written: to showe a wicked minde against God the King, and the sinceritie of true Religion. Truely translated according to the Copy Printed in French (London: [n. pub.], 1585) Marcourt, Antoine, Declaration de la Messe, Le fruict dicelle, La cause, et le moyen, pour­quoy & comment on la doibt maintenir ([Neufchâtel: Pierre de Vingle], 1534) —— , A Declaration of the Masse, the fruite therof, the cause and the meane, wherefore and howe it ought to be maynteyned. Newly perused and augmented by the first author therof. Master Anthony Marcort at Geneue. ‘Printed at Wittenberge by Hans Lufte’ [anonymous translator] ([London: John Day], 1547) Oraison et Sermon Funebre Prononcé à Rome sur le Corps de nostre sainct Pere le Pape Gregoire XIII. qui mourut en Iesus Christ le XI. Auril. 1585. Contenant ses mœurs, sa vie, ses faicts, & ses dernieres paroles en mourant, touchant les affaires du temps present. Auec les regrets des Cardinaux & tout le Clergé (Paris: Pierre Jobert, 1585) An Oration or Funerall Sermon vttered at Roome, at the buriall of the holy Father Gregorie the 13. who departed in Iesus Christ the 11. of Aprill. 1585. […] Otherwise to be intituled: A Sermon full of Papisticall adulation and matter sufficient to procure the wise and vertuous minded to contemne such grosse and palpable

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blindnesse, and all persons to laugh at their absurde and erronious follies, trans. by Robert Greene (London: George Robinson, 1585) L’Ordre des Ceremonies du Sacre et Couronnement du tres-chrestien Roy de France & de Nauarre Henry IIII. du nom, fait en l’Eglise de nostre Dame de la ville de Chartres, le Dimenche xxvii. de Feurier, 1594 (Rouen: Claude Cottereau, 1594) Parsons, Robert, The first booke of the Christian exercise appertayning to resolution. Corrected and newlye imprinted. Anno 1584. Wherein are layed downe the causes and reasons that should moue a man to resolue him selfe to the seruice of God: and all the impedimentes remoued, which may let the same. Wiht [sic] privylege (Rouen: [G. L’Oyselet], 1584) —— , rev. Edmund Bunny, A booke of Christian exercise appertaining to resolution, that is, shewing how that we should resolve our selues to become Christians indeede by R.P.; Perused, and accompanied nowe with a treatise tending to pacification, by Edmund Bunny (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1585) Rede me and be nott wrothe for I saye no thynge but trothe I will ascende makynge my state so hye, that my pompous honoure shall never dye. O caytyfe when thou thynkest least of all, with confusion thou shalt have a fall ([Strasbourg: Printed by Johann Schott, 1528]) Talpin, Jean, La Police Chrestienne : Au Roy. Liure tresutile & salutaire à tous Gouuerneurs de Republiques, pour heureusement les regir & gouuerner selon Dieu: & autant necessaire à toutes manieres de gens, de quelque estat ou vacation qu’ils soyent, à cause qu’il contient la doctrine non seulement generale, mais aussi speciale, pour l’instruction de toute particuliere & Chrestienne profession. De la doctrine duquel aussi les Curez & Predicateurs se pourront seruir quand ils voudront aduertir chacun estat de son particulier deuoir. Par M. Iean Talpin, Docteur & Chanoine Theologal à Perigueux (Paris: Nicolas Chesneau, 1568) —— , A forme of Christian pollicie drawne out of French by Geffray Fenton. A worke very necessary to al sorts of people generally, as wherein is contayned doctrine, both vniuersall, and special touching the institution of al Christian profession: and also conuenient perticularly for all Magistrates and gouernours of common weales, for their more happy Regiment according to God, trans. by Geoffrey Fenton (London: Henry Middelton for Rafe Newbery, 1574) This prymer of Salysbury vse is set out a long without ony serchyng with many prayers, and goodly pyctures in the kalender, in the matyns of our lady, in the houres of the crosse in the .vii. psalmes, and in the dyryge (Paris: François Regnault, 1531) Tyndale, William, The obedience of a Christen man […] (Antwerp: ‘Hans Luft’ [ J. Hoochstraten], 1528) Secondary Sources Baddeley, Susan, L’Orthographe française au temps de la Réforme (Geneva: Droz, 1993) —— , ‘Les Éditions anglaises du Mépris de la cour de Guevara: Usages d’une traduc­ tion’, in Le Mépris de la cour. La littérature anti-aulique en Europe (xvie–xviie siècles), ed. by Alexandre Tarrête, Marie-Claire Thomine-Bichard, and Nathalie Peyrebonne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne, 2018), pp. 139–51

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Bocquet, Catherine, L’Art de la traduction selon Martin Luther (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2000) Burke, Peter, ‘Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe’, in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 7–38 Coldiron, Anne E. B., English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476–1557 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009) Flood, John L., ‘Humanism, “Nationalism”, and the Semiology of Typography’, in Italia ed Europa nella Linguistica del Rinascimento. Confronti e relazioni. Italy and Europe in Renaissance Linguistics. Comparisons and Relations, ed. by Mirko Tavoni, Pietro U. Dini, John Flood, Aldo Gallotta, Kristian Jensen, Pierre Lardet, Hans-Josef Niederehe, and Giuliano Tamani (Modena: Panini, 1996), vol. ii, pp. 179–96 Parmelee, Lisa Ferraro, Good Newes from Fraunce: French anti-League Propaganda in Late Elizabethan England (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1996) Slights, William W. E., Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001) Smith, Helen, and Louise Wilson, ed., Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Venuti, Lawrence, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995) Woodfield, Denis B., Surreptitious Printing in England 1550–1640 (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1973) Yamamoto-Wilson, John R., ‘The Protestant Reception of Catholic Devotional Literature in England to 1700’, British Catholic History, 32 (2014), 67–90 Databases and Reference Works Early English Books Online English Short-Title Catalogue The Oxford English Dictionary, Second edition, ed. by John Simpson and Edmund Weiner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) Renaissance Cultural Crossroads A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed abroad, 1475–1640 [STC], ed. by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave (London: Bibliographical Society, 1926) Universal Short-Title Catalogue [USTC]

Élodie Cassan

5. Bacon’s English and Latin Expositions of the Doctrine of Idols Their Common Features and Differences

Francis Bacon promoted the English tongue in A Brief Discourse touching the Happy Union of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland, published in 1603, when James VI, the king of Scotland, ascended the English throne, under the name of James I. A former member of Elizabeth I’s legal counsel, fallen into disgrace, and soon to be knighted by the new king, Bacon claimed that a perfect political union between the kingdoms of England and of Scotland required ‘Union in name, Union in language, Union in laws and Union in employment’.1 In an attempt at unifying the basic legal systems of England and Scotland, he expressed a concern with the building of a common vernacular on the basis of the existing dialects. As a politician, Bacon, created Baron of Verulam in 1618 and Viscount St Alban in 1621, depicted the building and the use of a vernacular in the public sphere as crucial to the shaping of a new and united society. However, as a philosopher, this is not the way he addressed the issue of philosophical language choices.2 As far as communication is involved, Bacon makes it clear that English books are not citizens of the world, as he put it in a 1623 letter to the Prince, accounting for his translation into Latin of his 1605 book, On the Advancement * I would like to dedicate this chapter to my son Louis.  1 The editions of Bacon’s works will be quoted as follows: The Oxford Francis Bacon, ed. by Rees and others, as OFB, followed by volume and page numbers; The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. by Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, as SEH, followed by volume and page numbers. For A Brief Discourse touching the Happy Union of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland, see SEH x 96. See also Epstein, ‘Francis Bacon and the Issue of Union. 1603–1608’.  2 These remarks about Bacon’s different practices and theories of language respectively in his political and in his philosophical careers, are designed in order to show that his strategies of communication are context-oriented. I do not intend to go any further, as does Pérez Zagorin, who claims that there are two Bacons, that is, the cynical politician and the idealistic natural philosopher (Zagorin, Francis Bacon). In this essay, I shall not discuss the validity of Zagorin’s claim. Élodie Cassan ([email protected]) Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer, ed. by Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin, PEEMB 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 123–138  10.1484/M.PEEMB-EB.5.127777

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and Proficiency of Learning, which was originally written in English.3 Differently put, according to Bacon, the use of Latin was part of an English philosopher’s communicative strategy, should he want to make his ideas available to an international readership. But for Bacon, using Latin was not just a way to facilitate the dissemination of his philosophical texts all over Europe; it served him to forge an important part of his philosophical vocabulary. As a matter of fact, in the first half of the seventeenth century, Latin was the language in which philosophy was mostly written, all across Europe.4 This phenomenon can be traced back to the Middle Ages. It originated in a vast process of translation of a body of Aristotelian texts from Greek and Arabic into Latin. The submission of this canonical corpus to constant exegesis in a technical Latin provided its readers with a very precise and complex scholastical lexicon. To this extent, from the Middle Ages on, Latin became the ‘true language of philosophy’, as Alain de Libera provocatively called it, taking issue with the Heideggerian view of the supposed historical inferiority of Latin to Greek.5 Not only did Latin constitute the medium of philosophical acculturation all across Europe, but it also provided the matter out of which a philosophical lexicon, available on a European scale, was forged. As a consequence, Latin remained the toolbox of philosophers, even after fifteenth-century humanists and schoolmen began to express discontent about the status of this jargon.6 During that period, Latin underwent many transformations, which led to the emergence of neo-Latin.7 So at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when Bacon wrote most of his philosophical texts, Latin still was ‘a privileged medium that allowed a trans-national, trans-linguistic, and trans-cultural discussion and transmission of ideas’.8

 3 ‘I send your Highness in all humbleness my book of “Advancement of Learning” translated into Latin, but so enlarged as it may go for a new work. It is a book I think will live, and be citizen of the world, as English books are not’, Letter to the Prince, in The Works of Francis Bacon, SEH xiv 436.  4 One may say that things start to change a little with Hobbes’ publication of English written Leviathan (1651). See Serjeantson, ‘Becoming a Philosopher in Seventeenth-Century Britain’, pp. 28–29.  5 Libera, ‘Le Latin, véritable langue de la philosophie ?’, pp. 11–22.  6 Fattori, ‘La Survivance du latin comme langue philosophique’, pp. 119–42; Gregory, ‘Sul lessico filosofico latino del Seicento e del Settecento’.  7 The term ‘neo-Latin’ can be defined in terms of chronology. It refers to the Latin language and literature from the beginnings of humanism, with Petrarch (1304–1374), up to today. Its period of major development goes from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. ‘Neo-Latin’ also has stylistic specificities. For a systematic account of the distinctions between classical Latin, medieval Latin and neo-Latin, see Sidwell, ‘Classical Latin —Medieval Latin—NeoLatin’, pp. 13–26. To be sure, there was no such thing as a linear development from medieval Latin to neo-Latin, as scholastic Latin continued to play a part in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were also tensions between scholasticism and humanism. These tensions still inform our idea of ‘neo-Latin’.  8 Giglioni, ‘Philosophy’, p. 260.

5. bacon’s english and latin expositions of the doctrine of idols

Still, Bacon did not always do philosophy in Latin. On the contrary, his work is one of the major cases of philosophical bilingualism of the early modern period, like, for instance, those of Descartes, Spinoza, or Hobbes. First, Bacon wrote both in Latin and in English. For instance, to mention only some of his published texts, his Novum Organum (1620), written in Latin, followed On the Advancement and Proficiency of Learning (1605), written in English, and it was followed by another work written in English, the posthumously published Sylva Sylvarum. Second, Bacon was involved in many self-translation processes. In this context, strikingly, he did not intend his English and Latin texts to mirror one another in a different tongue. For instance, although De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623) was conceived as a Latin translation of The Advancement of Learning, it was different from it in terms of content, as it expanded and reshaped it. In this case, not only did Bacon add new topics in Latin, but his Latin text also presented a more elaborate version of the issues already dealt with in English. Lastly, on the scale of individual books, Bacon’s choice of one specific tongue, be it English or Latin, did not come at the expense of the other one.

The Interplay Between English and Latin in Bacon’s Philosophy This writing technique can be made very visible if we put in parallel The Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum: in the Advancement, Bacon inserted many quotations borrowed from Latin classical texts such as those of Virgil, he alluded to Latin classical texts such as those of Cicero, and he commented upon them in English. In Novum Organum, he cut and pasted: he rearranged these comments, he interpolated a summary of the classical texts he used, treating them as a collection of items and fragments. This rhetorical strategy can be exemplified by his use in both texts of the same passage by Cicero (De Natura Deorum, iii, 37). In the Advancement, Bacon refers to Cicero, when elucidating ‘that instance which is the root of all superstition, namely, That to the nature of the mind of all men it is consonant for the affirmative or active to affect more than the negative or privative’. As Bacon puts it: a few times hitting or presence, countervails often failing or absence; as was well answered by Diagoras to him that shewed him in Neptune’s temple the great number of pictures of such as had scaped shipwrack and had paid their vows to Neptune, saying, Advise nowe, you that thinke it folly to invocate Neptune in tempest: Yea, but (sayth Diagoras) where are they painted that are drowned? (OFB iv 116) The mention of Diagoras is borrowed from Cicero. Strikingly, although in Bacon’s text, Diagoras speaks English rather than Latin, and does not say all the things Cicero has him say in Latin, the general structure of his discourse

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is very close to the one articulated by Cicero.9 Not only does Bacon display a deep knowledge of classical Latin authors, he goes further than inserting quotations from them within his texts. This phenomenon occurs in a passage of Novum Organum also devoted to superstition. There, Bacon resorts to the story of Diagoras again. He then gives an abridged version of Cicero’s Latin text, with only Diagoras’s pithy reply.10 So his reference to Latin classics goes along with a rewriting of them, as if they were stones to assemble in order to invent and expound his own theories. How can we account for this polyglossia from a philosophical point of view? Critics tend to consider the proximity of Latin and vernaculars observed in early modern philosophical texts in cultural terms, as a sign of a ‘growing tension between traditional institutional sites of Latin knowledge such as the university and milieus that were becoming more and more receptive to philosophical discussions in the vernacular (courts in the first place, but also academies, convents, chanceries, and salons).’11 These developments in the understanding of early modern philosophical writing practices have led to a series of useful insights into the political problem of the circulation of philosophical discourses in early modern societies. In particular, it is now established that, while the wish to be a member of the international respublica literaria was an incentive to write in Latin, an early modern philosopher also had good reasons to write in his native tongue: the need to distance his philosophy from that of the schools, the desire not to narrow the social compass of his philosophy by excluding laymen and women from its exercise. But this general pattern does not apply to Bacon’s case, as his Novum Organum, while written in Latin, contains some of his most scathing comments on scholastic philosophy. The purpose of this essay is to consider the reasons why he does not fit within this scheme. I suggest that Bacon’s writing choices are determined by his understanding of the role played by language in the perspective of the building of natural philosophy.

 9 ‘At Diagoras cum Samothracam uenisset, Atheus ille qui dicitur, atque ei quidam amicus: “Tu, qui deos putas humana neglegere, nonne animaduertis ex tot tabulis pictis, quam multi uotis uim tempestatis effugerint in portumque salui peruenerint?”, “Ita fit”, inquit, “illi enim nusquam picti sunt, qui naufragia fecerunt in marique perierunt”’. In English: ‘Diagoras, named the Atheist, once came to Samothrace, and a certain friend said to him “You, who think that the gods disregard men’s affairs, do you not remark all the votive pictures that prove how many persons have escaped the violence of the storm, and come safe to port, by dint of vows to the gods?” “That is so,” replied Diagoras, “it is because there are nowhere any pictures of those who have been shipwrecked and drowned at sea”’ (Cicero, De Natura Deorum, trans. by Rackham, p. 375).  10 ‘ubi sint illi depicti qui post vota nuncupata perierint?’, OFB xi 83. This could be translated thus, paraphrasing Bacon’s English version: where are they painted that drowned after invocating Neptune?  11 Giglioni, ‘Philosophy’, p. 250.

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Bacon addressed the philosophical potential of language in the context of his philosophical project, the Instauratio Magna, which aims at a reform of knowledge in the field of natural philosophy, because he was convinced that reason does not rule words and that the ignorance of that fact constitutes a major impediment to the proper reading of nature.12 He drew this conclusion from the observation that scholastic logic, more concerned with words and names than with things, does not teach how to properly reason about nature, but only how to defeat an opponent in debate. He also claimed that men are not aware of this because they pursue natural philosophy with a naturally distempered mind, they operate with inadequate means of communication, and they rely on a corrupt philosophical culture. He called ‘idols’ the erroneous notions formed by men on these groundings and the ill-ordered predispositions of the mind that account for them. In doing so, he assumed that method can only be built by assuming a syntactical and semantical discontinuity between ordinary language and scientific language.13 How does this philosophical assumption impact his practice of writing philosophy? I will address this issue by taking Bacon’s concept of idol as a case study. His work on this concept is intended to show the debilitating effects of language and traditional learning.14 As such, it reveals that Bacon’s choices for one language over another, while building a philosophical discourse, can be accounted for from the point of view of a specific philosophical agenda, rather than, merely, in terms of publication strategy. First, I shall illustrate the philosophical agenda served by Bacon’s philosophical writing technique, by a study of his building of the doctrine of idols both in English and in Latin. Second, I shall consider Bacon’s critical assessment of Latin as a traditional tool for the exposition and transmission of past and present philosophies. Last, I shall examine the presentation of the doctrine of idols given in Novum organum as providing a repertoire of recommendations on how to write a sound philosophical discourse.

 12 This concern also leads him to research whether it would be possible to build a language that could be universally understood. See Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory, trans. and intro. by Clucas; Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature. See also Cassan, Descartes et Chomsky. The present chapter does not focus on this aspect of Bacon’s theory of language. It is concerned with mental language issues and with the use of language as a way both of communicating our ideas and of convincing others of their relevance.  13 Stephen Gaukroger discusses the status of the rules provided by the Baconian method: do they have ‘the rigour of a mechanical rule, which bypasses not only the weaknesses of the mind but to some extent its strength as well’? (Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, p. 127). Sorana Corneanu asks whether Bacon’s method could be ‘coherently seen as a curative regimen of the mind’ (Corneanu, Regimens of the Mind, p. 18). Both Gaukroger and Corneanu accurately show that Bacon’s claim of the need to correct the mind via a new method of natural investigation refashions natural philosophy by modelling it on humanistic moral philosophy.  14 See Weeks, ‘Francis Bacon’s Doctrine of Idols’.

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Latin: Bacon’s Medium for the Making of Concepts and Conceptual Distinctions First, the study of Bacon’s doctrine of idols shows that when engaged in a process of denomination of a concept and in conceptual distinctions, Bacon needs Latin, while he takes English as a medium capable only of describing the thing under the concept, its reference. This is apparent both in Bacon’s first hypothesis about the malfunctioning of the mind and in his full exposition of the ‘Idols of the mind’, although they are separated by a twenty-year gap.15 In order to support this claim, I shall concentrate on some of the main texts explicitly referring to the idols, whether they just mention them or discuss them at full length: Temporis Partus Masculus (1602), Valerius Terminus (1603), The Advancement of Learning (1605), Partis Instaurationis Secundae Delineatio (1606–1607), Distributio Operis (1620), Novum Organum (1620), De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623). Three of these texts are unpublished programmatic drafts (Temporis Partus Masculus, Valerius Terminus, Partis Instaurationis Secundae Delineatio), the other four are published texts, consisting either in public general expositions of Bacon’s Instauratio Magna project (Distributio Operis) or in public expositions of parts of it (Advancement; Novum Organum; De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum). Five of these texts are in Latin, while only two are in English: the Valerius Terminus and The Advancement of Learning. However different the statuses of these texts may be, they share common features. Bacon expressed both in English and in Latin his concern with the fragility and the fallibility of the mind, which provides the foundations of his inquiry into the idols of the human mind. Significantly, in one of his earliest philosophical texts dedicated to the issue, the Temporis Partus Masculus, he used the metaphor of language in order to establish that the way the mind spontaneously works generates bad habits of thought which make us ‘anticipate nature’, that is, form a distorted image of it. For Bacon, it is as if there were ‘linguas vernaculas diversas’ (diverse vernaculars) within the mind.16 He puts it this way: suppose a man who can only speak his native tongue. From the observation that the spelling and the pronunciation of a term belonging to a foreign language is very close to a term belonging to his own language, that man may infer that these two terms have the same meaning. He even may be tempted to proceed according to the same pattern of thought when he envisages the meaning of the whole discourse he is confronted with. Accordingly, that man would transform nature into an enchanted realm matching his own fantasy and his own will. Bacon’s drawing of this analogy between the way the mind works and the way one can spontaneously approach a foreign language with which one is not acquainted, reveals that, in his view, the mind is not a tabula

 15 For a systematic account of the evolution of Bacon’s theory of idols, see Rees’s introduction to his translation of Novum Organum, OFB xi.  16 Temporis Partus Masculus, SEH vii 28.

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rasa but rather a tabula full of non-objective inscriptions which have to be identified and subjected to criticism. As a consequence, the task of logic and method is to be understood in terms of a rewriting rather than in terms of a mere ‘replacement’ of bad habits of thought by good ones. Although this claim is set forth both in English and in Latin, idols, taken as elements of Bacon’s philosophical vocabulary, are Latin creations. The Advancement of Learning is a representative illustration of this phenomenon. In this text, written in English, Bacon analyses the different types of idols. But he does not name them as such in the vernacular. Rather, he refers to them as ‘false appearances’. In addition to this, he undertakes a tripartition of them on the basis of this English category, by differentiating between ‘false appearances’ imposed upon us by the general nature of the mind, ‘false appearances’ dependent upon man’s own individual nature and custom, and ‘false appearances’ imposed upon us by words. The one and only occurrence of the term ‘idol’ is found in a Latin marginal comment printed against the passage that delineates this conceptual partition process: ‘elenchi magni, sive de idolis animi humani, nativis et adventiis’, that is, ‘important refutations or concerning the idols of the human mind, innate and acquired’.17 So Bacon invents the concept of idol in Latin. This conclusion can be reinforced if we examine things at the scale of the corpus we are considering. First, Bacon always uses the Latin term idola to designate the concept of idol, with the exception of one single passage of the Valerius Terminus where he mentions the idols in English in passing. It is in a chapter dealing with ‘the internal and profound errors and superstitions in the nature of mind, and [with] the four sorts of idols or fictions which offer themselves to the understanding in the inquisition of knowledge’. Bacon, then, says: ‘The first sort, I call idols of the Nation or Tribe; the second, idols of the Palace; the third, idols of the Cave; and the fourth, idols of the Theatre’. Valerius Terminus is Bacon’s earliest surviving philosophical work. It is written in English. It adumbrates some of the major concerns dealt with in the first two parts of Instauratio Magna. It remained unpublished until 1734, but it did circulate as a manuscript: a copy of its opening passage has been found in the natural philosophical notebook of Edmund Leigh. Leigh had an academic career at Brasenose College, Oxford, from 1600 on: the first ten years, as a student; the following thirty years, as a fellow.18 Second, Bacon always uses Latin in order to specify the different types of idols he envisages.19 This classification process is meant to determine the power of man when confronted to them: once man has become aware  17 The Advancement of Learning, OFB iv 118.  18 Valerius Terminus, SEH vi 61–62. See Serjeantson, ‘The Philosophy of Francis Bacon in Early Jacobean Oxford’. Valerius Terminus is an important text to study Bacon’s bilingual writing, for it suggests that Bacon was writing first in English.  19 In the first part of this essay, Bacon’s partition of the idols is treated as a lexical invention. In the third part, it will be accounted for from a philosophical point of view.

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of the idols, is he forced to cope with all of them? Can he ‘extirpate’ at least some of them (the Latin term is extirpatio)?20 Bacon’s exploration of these questions is based on his development of a personal philosophical vocabulary in Latin. In the Temporis Partus Masculus, Bacon proceeds to a programmatic tripartition between the idola scenae, the idola fori and the idola specus. While he does not explain what these categories mean, as if assuming that his reader is already familiar with them, he insinuates that the last two types cannot be fully eradicated, only contained, without justifying this assertion. In Novum Organum, not only does he give an extensive account of these categories, but he also adds a fourth class of idols, the idola tribus. In addition to this, he changes the name idola scenae to idola theatri and shows that they are specific in the sense that one can completely eliminate them. In both works, Latin serves Bacon as a tool in order to forge conceptual distinctions and to experience their soundness. In other words, Novum Organum’s quadripartition of the idols is the final result of a series of more or less successful conceptual experiments.21 It also is complemented with an operative distinction between adscititia idola and innata idola, for depending on their source, either extrinsic or intrinsic to the mind, the idols can either be totally defeated or merely restrained.22 All these conceptual experimentations were undertaken in Latin. Why is that so? For Bacon, is the language of the wise more powerful philosophically than common language?

Bacon’s Critical Assessment of Latin as a Traditional Tool for the Exposition and Transmission of Past and Present Philosophies As I pointed out in my introductory remarks, in the early modern period, Latin, taken as the traditional language of philosophy, that is, as a technical language, was a fundamental way of communication within the respublica literaria. It served as a tool for transmitting philosophical concepts and doctrines, as a linguistic support for the exposition of theories coming from the past and the present. But its being a means of transmission of philosophical dogmas crucial to the European cultural identity does not mean that it is authoritative as a philosophical language. For Bacon, the diversity of philosophical positions conveyed in Latin shows that it only gives access to opinions whose authority is highly questionable. Bacon’s treatment of Aristotle’s philosophy, whose transmission and discussion in Latin constituted the basis of the learning of

 20 Novum Organum, i.70, OFB xi 112.  21 For instance, Bacon leaves aside his previous distinction between the idola hospitii and idola viae, briefly sketched at the end of Temporis Partus Masculus, SEH vii 32.  22 See Partis Instaurationis Secundae Delineatio, SEH vii 42; Distributio Operis, OFB xi 34. See also De Augmentis Scientiarum, SEH ii 403.

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philosophy from the Middle Ages on, exemplifies this. Bacon undermines the historiographical justification frequently adduced in order to make sense of the academically undeniable importance of Aristotle’s work: Aristotle’s philosophy was presented as having superseded the philosophies of earlier times, allegedly causing their natural ‘death’.23 Bacon grounds his claim in editorial and philosophical arguments. In addition to indicating that ‘long afterwards down to Cicero’s time and the age beyond, the works of the old philosophers still endured’ (‘diu postea, usque ad tempora Ciceronis, et saecula sequentia, manserunt opera veterum philosophorum’), he indicates that the main reason for the survival of Aristotle’s and Plato’s philosophies is that they were ‘like timbers of lighter and less solid matter’ (‘tanquam tabulae ex materia leviore et minus solida’). In his view, the giving of one’s consent to Aristotle’s philosophy is more a question of ‘sheep-like unanimity’ (‘sequacitas […] et coitio’) than of ‘agreement reached (after proper examination) by free judgements’ (‘Verus enim consensus is est, qui ex libertate judicii (re prius explorata) in idem conveniente, consistit’).24 To put it another way, Bacon takes it that the abundance and variety of books introducing to received philosophies and discussing them should not mislead the reader: those philosophies owe their authority to their productivity in controversies. That is why, in his eyes, one should refrain from taking the language of the schools as instrumental in the process of philosophical invention. For Bacon, ‘to invent is to discover that we know not, and not to recover or resummon that which we already know’.25 In so saying, Bacon plays on two meanings of the term ‘invention’. Bacon’s idea is that for an orator, or for a lawyer, to invent is to select among previously gathered materials, those pertinent to the purpose at hand, say the defence of a given case. On the contrary, according to him, a philosopher should focus on the task of inventing, understood as the task of discovering something not known before. Through this affirmation, he proceeds to a classic, Plato-inspired, reassignment of rhetorical and philosophical discourses to two distinct domains.26 But the duality he articulates also shows his reader how critical he is towards traditional rules for the building of discourse in general. In both classical rhetoric and Ramist logic, ‘invention’ (inventio) is a process by which to find previously formed arguments according to topics (arguments which will then be organized following the rules of ‘disposition’). Bacon’s critical use of the term ‘invention’ goes along with the attribution of a new meaning to it, in connection with knowledge acquisition.27 This is a very telling gesture. It reveals that the Novum Organum, i.77, OFB xi 121. Novum Organum, i.77, OFB xi 121. The Advancement of Learning, OFB iv 111. From Bacon’s interest in a non-rhetorical approach to invention, it does not follow that he undermines rhetoric. See Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England 1500–1700, p. 374. Also see Vickers, ‘Bacon and Rhetoric’; Anfray, ‘Les “Géorgiques de l’esprit”’.  27 Despite its author’s claims to revolutionize logic, the Ramusian system is indebted to

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vocabulary and the concepts of philosophy transmitted, through time, in Latin, do not play the part one could expect them to play.28 In his early texts, like Temporis Partus Masculus, Bacon gives this claim the shape of a general condemnation of the diverse philosophies received from the past and still cultivated in his present time. He also premises Novum organum’s theory of the idols on this assumption. In both texts, he views the Latin philosophical technicity transmitted in textbooks and in philosophical books in terms of a jargon whose productivity needs to be assessed.29 He develops this assessment along three directions. First, he questions the meaning of traditional philosophical terms: how can we be sure that what we take to be sound concepts are not purely verbal?30 Second, he questions the technical philosophical terms, built or transmitted in Latin, as syntactical elements generating philosophical arguments: ‘if the notions themselves (and this is the heart of the matter) are confused, and recklessly abstracted from things, nothing built on them is sound’ (‘si notiones ipsae (id quod basis rei est) confusae sint, et temere a rebus abstractae, nihil in iis, quae superstruuntur, est firmitudinis’).31 Third, he interprets the lack of correlation between the popularity of the philosophical doctrines to which these concepts contribute, and their truth, as the sign of an ignorance of the status of philosophical discourse. From the fact that ‘tales got up for the stage are more harmonious and attractive, and to one’s taste, than true stories from the historical record’ (‘narrationes fictae ad scenam, narrationibus ex historia veris concinniores s[u]nt, et elegantiores, et quales quis magis vellet’), it does not follow that the writing of philosophy is to be a work of imagination and fancy, rather than a work of reason.32 As a consequence, that Latin transmits

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the same Ciceronian pairing of inventio and judicium (invention and judgment) as earlier humanist logic (see Cicero’s commentary on Aristotle’s Topics in his own Topica). On the influence of humanist logic on Bacon, see Jardine, Francis Bacon, especially the first three chapters. Bacon’s negative perception of Ramism is accounted for by Feingold, ‘English Ramism’ (see in particular pp. 170–73): ‘It was precisely the likelihood that contemporaries might mistake his reforms as an extension of Ramus’ — simply because both men assaulted Aristotle — which prompted Bacon to assail Ramus’ (p. 171). I agree with Feingold when he dismisses Rossi’s thesis of Bacon’s considerable indebtedness to Ramus (see Rossi, Francesco Bacone. Dalla magia alla scienza). On these grounds, Bacon develops a research-oriented, experimental ‘art’ of investigating nature. See Jalobeanu, The Art of Experimental Natural History. Bacon’s familiarity with the French Libertins, who systematically question the relevance of scholastic jargon and express their admiration for Epicurus, Democritus, and Lucretius, is to be considered here. See Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du xviie siècle, p. 595, note referring to p. 139. See also Fattori, ‘Francis Bacon et la culture française (1576–1625)’. Bacon considers this issue on the basis of a critical assessment of Aristotle’s dialectic which he takes to have corrupted his natural philosophy. See Novum Organum i.63, OFB xi 99. Novum Organum i.14, OFB xi 69. Novum Organum i.62, OFB xi 97. Bacon famously champions the view that there are ‘three parts of man’s understanding, which is the seat of Learning: history to his memory, poesie

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technical and maybe impressive terms from the past does not make them accurate. This position leaves us with a problem: how are we to figure out whether words refer to existing things and properly describe them? Does the building of natural philosophy require a methodological use of language, and how are we to become aware of its necessity?

Bacon’s Philosophy of Language Supporting his Under­ standing of the Writing of Philosophical Discourse According to Bacon, a new kind of logic is needed. It shall purge the intellect so that it can actively construct truth. The necessity of a renewal in logic and the main features of this new logic are presented in Novum Organum, on the basis of a developed and formalized account of the theory of idols. In the De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum, which is a Latin translation (and a much-augmented version) of The Advancement of Learning, Bacon calls the Novum Organum’s presentation of the idols a ‘tractationem legitimam’ (legitimate treatment).33 This is a striking claim. Bacon does not build a philosophical system. He leaves many of his texts unfinished. He gives many versions of the same idea. But he wants his reader to take as authoritative Novum Organum’s approach to the idols. As he depicts Novum Organum’s account of the idols as a representative sample of his thoughts on the subject, I will consider the viewpoint it exposes about philosophical language as an explicit formulation of one of Bacon’s major methodological convictions. In the first book of Novum Organum, which is a ‘pars destruens’, Bacon denounces the siege laid by the idols to the mind.34 He treats this theory of error based on the idols as a propaedeutic which paves the way for the interpretation of nature.35 He expounds the rules permitting this interpretation in the second book of this text, presented as a ‘pars construens’ aiming to find ‘a proper, straight and secure route to the perceptions of the Intellect, which are true notions and axioms’ (‘recta, constanti, et munita via ducat ad perceptiones intellectus, quae sunt notiones verae et axiomata’).36 The readers may access these rules once they have learned the pieces of advice regarding the writing of philosophical discourse provided by the doctrine of idols.

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to his imagination, and philosophie to his reason’, The Advancement of Learning, OFB iv 62. This is not to say that he sees reason and imagination as diametrically opposed faculties. ‘The duty and office of rhetoric’, for instance, ‘is to apply Reason to Imagination for the better moving of the will’, The Advancement of Learning, OFB iv 127. De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum, SEH iii 403. Novum Organum i.115, OFB xi 72. Novum Organum i.130, OFB xi 197. For the pedagogical nature of Bacon’s programme, see Corneanu, ‘Francis Bacon on Imagination, Rhetoric and the Art of Direction’. Novum Organum ii.38, OFB xi 340–41.

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The focus put on the idols serves first as a general warning against the mind’s tendency to form abstract and misleading discourses. Such is the issue at stake in Bacon’s introduction of the doctrine of idols with the claim that it ‘stands in similar relationship to the Interpretation of Nature, as the doctrine of Sophistical Refutations does to ordinary dialectic’ (‘Doctrina […] de idolis similiter se habet ad interpretationem naturae, sicut doctrina de sophisticis elenchis ad dialecticam vulgarem’).37 ‘Sophistical refutations’ are arguments to which sophists resort in order to impress their opponent in debate and which only appear logical. They are covered in On Sophistical Refutations, the one and only book featuring in Aristotle’s Organon to be praised by Bacon, while he undertakes a vast process of redefinition of the main terms considered in the Aristotelian tradition in logic as critical to the learning of this discipline.38 There is a strong epistemological reason for Bacon to bring sophistical refutations to the fore: in his view, to learn how to identify a non-conclusive argument is the very first thing needed by a naturally distempered mind, for only with self-knowledge can man begin to reason better. Bacon’s analogy between the doctrine of idols and the doctrine of sophistical refutations makes this clear: Bacon envisages the exposition of a classification of the idols as well as a typology of the many ill-established arguments generated by them, as the founding moment of the process of learning how to reason well. In so doing, he invents a ‘new’ Organon. Not only does he make logic, as a discipline, begin where Aristotle has it end: a confrontation of the mind with material and formal falsity. But Bacon also assigns internal sources to this falsity and defines logic in terms of an art whose office is to regulate the way man operates on a repertoire of pre-constituted notions and judgements, in order to make scientific discoveries possible. In addition to revealing that the writing of philosophical discourse should be preceded by the decision of rectifying the mind, Novum Organum’s doctrine of idols amounts to showing that a reflection upon the power of language upon reason is a necessary preliminary condition for the building of philosophy. This assumption underlies Bacon’s remarks about the ‘idols of the market place’ and the ‘idols of the theatre’. Bacon studies these two categories shortly after dealing with the ‘idols of the tribe’ and with the ‘idols of the cave’. He places among the ‘idols of the tribe’ the fact that ‘the human intellect is to

 37 Novum Organum i.40, OFB xi 79.  38 The term ‘organum’ translates the Greek term ‘organon’ into Latin. ‘Organon’ is the name under which the ancient commentators grouped Aristotle’s logical works: Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, On Sophistical Refutations. In this context, logic relies on a classification of kinds of predication, on an account of the structure of assertions, and on a theory of valid inference. In addition to considering the logical structure of scientific demonstrations and of dialectical arguments, Aristotle analyses contentious arguments, which only apparently establish their conclusions. This is the issue at stake in On Sophistical Refutations. For Bacon’s praise of On Sophistical Refutations see The Advancement of Learning, OFB iv 115 and De Augmentis Scientiarum, SEH ii 397.

5. bacon’s english and latin expositions of the doctrine of idols

the ray of things like an uneven mirror which mingles its own nature with the nature of things, and distorts and stains it’ (‘Est […] intellectus humanus instar speculi inaequalis ad radios rerum immiscet, qui suam naturam naturae rerum immiscet, eam distorquet et inficit’). He places among the ‘idols of the cave’ the fact that ‘everyone has (besides vagaries of human nature in general) his own special cave or den which scatters and discolours the light of nature’ (‘Habet enim unusquisque (praeter aberrationes Naturae humanae in genere) specum sive cavernam quandam individuam, quae lumen naturae frangit et corrumpit’).39 After an investigation into the impediments to knowledge due to the nature of the human intellect in itself and to the peculiar nature of the individual, he intends to determine whether men’s need to communicate constitutes an impediment to thinking. His claim is twofold. On the one hand, men’s association through conversation, using words according to the capacity of ordinary people, generates ‘idols of the market place’, that is, ‘empty disputes, countless controversies and complete fictions’ (‘verba plane vim faciunt intellectui, et omnia turbant; et homines ad inanes, et innumeras controversias, et commenta, deducunt’).40 On the other hand, there are ways to resist the tendency of words to rule reason. In particular, it is possible to publicly denounce most of the philosophical doctrines inherited from the past for creating merely fictional worlds. Such is the issue at stake in the building of the category of the ‘idols of the theatre’. This category comprises three kinds of ‘false philosophy’ (philosophia falsa): the sophistical kind, the empirical kind, and the superstitious kind (sophistica, empirica, superstitiosa). The first is illustrated by Aristotle, the second by Gilbert of Poitiers, and the third by Plato.41 However problematic these particular doctrines may be, Bacon does not intend to confute them for themselves. His purpose is to shed light on the fact that all these traditional ways of building a philosophical discourse rely on problematic principles and demonstrations. By emphasizing the fruitlessness of the road followed by the Ancients, he rejects the history of philosophy as a valid source of philosophical knowledge. As Sophie Weeks puts it, ‘the received philosophies are stories, not philosophy, because they result from the free play of the imagination rather than the work of reason. Under the influence of their imaginations, philosophers have created “sham worlds” and shunned the real world.’42 As far as language issues are concerned, this comes down to saying that there is no point in resorting to incorrectly formed notions and abstractions, however pleasant they may be to the imagination. In other words, in Bacon’s view, a philosopher has to dare to ascribe new meanings to traditional terms, to invent new terms and to try to make sure not to define too quickly the objects

 39  40  41  42

See respectively Novum Organum i.41 and i.42, OFB xi 81. Novum Organum i.43, OFB xi 81. See respectively Novum Organum i.63, i.64, i.65, OFB xi 94–103. See Weeks, ‘Francis Bacon’s Doctrine of Idols’, p. 30.

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he elaborates on. Galileo famously said that Nature has a language, written in mathematical terms. Leaving aside the issue of mathematics in Bacon,43 one could say that Bacon is more concerned with language understood in terms of a cultural production of men than with the ‘language of nature’. That is why in his inquiries into the method for the pursuit of natural philosophy, he includes researches about the conditions under which the use of language might not be an obstacle to science. In the end, he undertakes these investigations in Latin because it is a language perfectly designed for that. Insofar as in the first half of the seventeenth century, Latin remained a monument of philosophical technicality, Bacon could not but write a logic textbook in Latin. Philosophical concepts, as they were articulated in Latin, were elements of the intellectual culture of that time. In the Novum Organum, Bacon brought these elements together and claimed that any true philosopher should discuss them starting from the original contexts in which they were formulated. However tempting it may be to depict early modern philosophers as eager to distance themselves from tradition, by choosing to write more in vernaculars than in Latin, this scenario does not fit Francis Bacon’s case. First, he definitely was a polyglot philosopher: he wrote both in English and in Latin. He could even be a polyglot within specific works, such as The Advancement of Learning where, as we saw, he used Latin quotations to illustrate claims made in English. So his choice of a writing language was not merely determined rhetorically, as a strategy urged by the kind of audience he wanted to reach and by the way he wanted to present his ideas. Second, he invented his philosophy in Latin. The case study of the doctrine of idols is revealing from that viewpoint: it shows that Bacon forged his concepts in Latin. In the course of his investigations into the idols, his confrontation with Latin went along with a questioning about the part played by language in the building of philosophical doctrine. Bacon, concerned with natural philosophy, was convinced that one has to make sure that words are always connected to things, in the perspective of the knowledge of nature. In the end, words matter less than things.

 43 On this vexed question, see Rees, ‘Mathematics and Francis Bacon’s Natural Philosophy’.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Bacon, Francis, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1963–1994 (1857–1874)) —— , The Oxford Francis Bacon, ed. by Graham Rees and others, 15 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985-) Cicero, De Natura Deorum, trans. by H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, no. 268 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967) Secondary Works Anfray, Jean-Pascal, ‘Les “Géorgiques de l’esprit” : Pouvoir de la rhétorique et faiblesse de la volonté chez Francis Bacon’, in Bacon et Descartes. Genèses de la modernité philosophique, ed. by Élodie Cassan (Lyon: ENS Editions, 2014), pp. 49–68 Cassan, Élodie, Descartes et Chomsky : le langage de la raison (Paris: Vrin, forthcoming) Corneanu, Sorana, Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) —— , ‘Francis Bacon on Imagination, Rhetoric and the Art of Direction’, in Knowledge and Imagination in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. by Koen Vermeir (Dordrecht: Springer, forthcoming) Epstein, Joel, ‘Francis Bacon and the Issue of Union. 1603–1608’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 33.2 (Feb. 1970), 121–32 Fattori, Marta, ‘La Survivance du latin comme langue philosophique jusqu’au xviie siècle’, Études sur Francis Bacon (Paris: PUF, Epiméthée, 2012), pp. 119–42 —— , ‘Francis Bacon et la culture française (1576–1625)’, in Bacon et Descartes. Genèses de la modernité philosophique, ed. by Élodie Cassan (Lyon: ENS Editions, 2014), pp. 25–47 Feingold, Mordechai, ‘English Ramism: A Reinterpretation’, in The Influence of Petrus Ramus: Studies in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Philosophy and Sciences, ed. by Mordechai Feingold, Joseph S. Freedman, and Wolfgang Rother (Basel: Schwabe, 2001), pp. 127–76 Gaukroger, Stephen, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Giglioni, Guido, ‘Philosophy’, in The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin, ed. by Sarah Knight and Stefan Tilg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 249–63 Gregory, Tullio, ‘Sul lessico filosofico latino del Seicento e del Settecento’, in Lexicon Philosophicum, Quaderni di terminologia filosofica e storia delle idee, 5 (1991), ed. by Antonio Lamarra and Lidia Procesi, 1–20

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Howell, Wilbur S., Logic and Rhetoric in England 1500–1700 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961) Jalobeanu, Dana, The Art of Experimental Natural History: Francis Bacon in Context (Bucharest: ZetaBooks, 2015) Jardine, Lisa, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) Lewis, Rhodri, Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) Libera, Alain de, ‘Le Latin, véritable langue de la philosophie ?’, in Aux origines du lexique philosophique européen. L’influence de la Latinitas, Actes du colloque international (Rome, 23–25 mai 1996), ed. by Jacqueline Hamesse (Louvain La Neuve: Fédération internationale des instituts d’études médiévales, 1997), pp. 11–22 Pintard, René, Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du xviie siècle (Paris: Boivin, 1943; repr. Geneva-Paris: Slatkine, 1983) Rees, Graham, ‘Mathematics and Francis Bacon’s Natural Philosophy’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 40.159/4 (1986), 399–426 Rossi, Paolo, Francesco Bacone. Dalla magia alla scienza (Bari: Laterza, 1957) —— , Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language, transl. with an introduction by Stephen Clucas (London: Continuum, 2006) Serjeantson, Richard, ‘Becoming a Philosopher in Seventeenth-Century Britain’, in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century, ed. by Peter Anstey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 9–38 —— , ‘The Philosophy of Francis Bacon in Early Jacobean Oxford. With an Edition of an Unknown Manuscript of the “Valerius Terminus”’, Historical Journal, 56 (2013), 1087–106 Sidwell, Keith, ‘Classical Latin — Medieval Latin — Neo-Latin’, in The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin, ed. by Sarah Knight and Stefan Tilg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 13–26 Vickers, Brian, ‘Bacon and Rhetoric’, in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. by Markku Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 200–31 Weeks, Sophie, ‘Francis Bacon’s Doctrine of Idols: A Diagnosis of “Universal Madness”’, British Society of the History of Science, 52.1 (2019), 1–39 Zagorin, Pérez, Francis Bacon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)

Fabien Simon

6. A Universe over the Channel The Circulation of John Wilkins’s Universal Language Scheme in Early Modern Europe Page 451 of John Wilkins’s An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language is occupied by a plate showing many Chinese characters (Figure 6.1). The author explains its origin on the opposite page: These Characters are strangely complicated and difficult as to the Figure of them, as may sufficiently appear by the following instance of the Lords Prayer in this Character: The Manuscript of which together with a Catechism in the China Character and Language, was communicated to me by that Ingenious, and Inquisitive Person, Mr Lodowick [sic] […]1 The plate is drawn from the book in which Wilkins described what has become probably the most famous of the philosophical a priori language schemes, to use the terminology of linguists.2 While other kinds of schemes designated one specific language as universal or posited that gestures could be the material of a common language, Wilkins’s aim was to create a new language, ex nihilo.3 In other words, he aimed for a perfect language with transparent words, corresponding to the things they describe, hoping to reconnect words and things by means of a supposedly universally understandable mathematical language, rather like the way algebra was thought of in seventeenth-century England. In order to study seventeenth-century universal language schemes such as Wilkins’s, I would like to give a broader perspective than linguistic or philosophical approaches by marshalling the resources of the history of knowledge.4 This chapter aims to provide a historical account less of the  1 Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, pp. 450–51.  2 For a synthesis on the history of universal languages schemes, see Eco, La Recherche de la langue parfaite. On Wilkins, especially: Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes; Slaughter, Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy; Salmon, The Study of Language; Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature; Poole ed., John Wilkins.  3 For examples of both kinds: Webb, An historical essay; Bulwer, Chirologia.  4 On the history of knowledge, see for example: Van Doren, A History of Knowledge; Fabien Simon ([email protected]) Université Paris Cité Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer, ed. by Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin, PEEMB 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 139–167  10.1484/M.PEEMB-EB.5.127778

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Figure 6.1. Plate with Chinese characters, John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London: S. Gellibrand and J. Martin, 1668) p. 451. Reproduced with the permission of the BNU Strasbourg, C.10.171

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theoretical elaboration of Wilkins’s language than of its concrete, material, receptions: the ways the Essay was read, sometimes probably not as Wilkins had planned it.5 That is to say to propose a history of the way those universal languages, which were never really used, nevertheless played a role in the construction of knowledge communities — networks of scholars, Jesuits, and fellows of the Royal Society, who discussed the schemes, contributed to their European circulation, and sometimes implemented them. As linguistic utopias cementing the intellectual utopia that was the Republic of Letters in early modern Europe, how did imagined languages build ‘imagined communities’ that were proclaimed as universal?6 The quotation with which I opened this essay contains elements that triggered two kinds of responses to Wilkins’s scheme which, despite their differences, were both based on misunderstandings, or were at least skewed receptions. The first is linked to the presence in the book of this Chinese version of the Our Father. It is only one of many Lord’s Prayers that Wilkins compares with the prayer translated into his ‘Real Character’ so as to establish which one is the most effective, linguistically speaking. As will appear, this short passage knew an even wider posterity than the rest of the book, transforming its meaning: from a universal language to a reservoir of varied idioms, from a scheme to build a single language to a book in which many languages can be found. Those textual circulations also led to the building of a virtual community, through ‘diachronic collaboration’.7 If the gleaning method was different for the other Lord’s Prayers, as will be discussed below, the Chinese one was given to Wilkins, as he wrote, by his friend Francis Lodwick (1619–1694). This is the other clue leading to a second form of reception of the Essay. This reception is inscribed almost exclusively within the Royal Society, largely reducing the scope one would expect from a universal language. Describing himself as a ‘mechanick’, Lodwick was a merchant, close to the London Dutch Church; but he was also close to important figures of the Royal Society such as Robert Hooke (1635–1703).8 He was eventually elected a fellow in 1681. Therefore it is no surprise John Wilkins mentioned him in his Essay, since Lodwick was also himself a language planner, and the author of a proposition entitled Common Writing as early as 1647.9 This exchange between fellows of the Royal Society is significant of the English reception of these linguistic schemes. But they

Burke, A Social History of Knowledge; Burke, What Is the History of Knowledge?; Van Damme ed., Histoire des sciences et des savoirs; Waquet, L’Ordre matériel du savoir.  5 On the history of reading, among other authors, see especially Chartier (for example Culture écrite et société) or Certeau (Arts de faire, ed. by Giard, pp. 239 or 253 for example).  6 I am referring to Benedict Anderson’s thesis in Imagined Communities and the idea that the existence of nations is based, in particular, on ‘national print-languages’ (pp. 67–82).  7 Blair, Too Much to Know, p. 208.  8 Salmon, ‘Lodwick, Francis (bap. 1619, d. 1694)’.  9 Lodwick, A Common Writing.

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were also read outside England, in France in particular, at a time when English was a marginal language in Europe. Before discussing the difficulties entailed by the use of existing languages to expound schemes of universal languages as they are reflected in the material conditions of the reception of Wilkins’s scheme at home and abroad, I shall first locate Wilkins’s scheme at a meeting point of scientific and religious endeavours and present the method at work in the Essay.

One Language Instead of Many or Many Languages in One: From a Universal Language Scheme to a Collection of Lord’s Prayers John Wilkins (1614–1672) was a theologian and a natural philosopher. In 1648, he became warden of Wadham College Oxford and was a member of a group bringing together men such as William Petty (1623–1687), Robert Boyle (1627–1691), and Seth Ward (1617–1689), who met between London and Oxford, and could be considered to be among the forerunners of the Royal Society.10 When the Society was created in 1660, Wilkins became one of its first secretaries, along with Henry Oldenburg (c. 1615–1677). In 1668, he was made Bishop of Chester and that same year he published his Essay. The author’s religious affiliation, but also the religious context in which he was writing, are reflected in the project: This design will likewise contribute much to the clearing of some of our Modern differences in Religion, by unmasking many wild errors, that shelter themselves under the disguise of affected phrases: which being Philosophically unfolded, and rendered according to the genuine and natural importance of Words, will appear to be inconsistencies and contradictions.11 His ‘Real Character’ was, according to its creator, one means of ensuring religious reconciliation after the turmoil of the English Civil War. The Essay indeed expressed Wilkins’s latitudinarian position, and (in Barbara Shapiro’s words) the fact that he stood ‘somewhere along the line between Laudianism and extreme Puritanism […] [where] lies a broad middle ground in which it is difficult to clearly differentiate between moderate Puritan and moderate Anglican’.12 According to Shapiro, his religious positioning also had an impact on his scientific stance: ‘For the scientists of latitudinarian persuasion the

 10 Brioist, ‘Les origines de la Société royale de Londres’. See also Michael Hunter’s works, for example: ‘The Social Basis and Changing Fortunes of an Early Scientific Institution’.  11 Wilkins, Essay, ‘Epistle dedicatory’, b1v.  12 Shapiro, John Wilkins 1614–1672, p. 61 (my emphasis). See also her ‘Latitudinarianism’ and Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England.

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impartial search for religious truth, not the final position reached, was the true mark of piety’.13 This middle-ground position also had an impact on his linguistic choices. Wilkins was indeed the author of two methods for building sermons, including Ecclesiastes, or a Discourse concerning the Gift of Preaching.14 In it, he defended the use of a simple and understandable way of speaking, the ‘plain style’. Clarity of expression required the rejection of any abusively rhetorical or metaphorical language.15 This stylistic evolution was promoted especially by John Tillotson (1630–1694), the Archbishop of Canterbury and a relative of Wilkins. In his funeral eulogy of Tillotson, Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715) explicitly traced a parallel between plain style and the philosophical language: the ‘Simplicity of Words’ necessary for the expression of religious truths was also essential for the expression of scientific truths.16 Here Wilkins’s roles as a bishop and as an animator of the ‘Oxford Experimental Club’ overlap. It is no coincidence that Thomas Sprat (1635–1713), himself very close to Wilkins, made a plea for the plain scientific style in a well-known passage of his 1667 History of the Royal Society, a Society whose motto was ‘nullius in verba’: [it] has been a constant Resolution to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style […] bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of the Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars.17 Wilkins explicitly presented his scheme as a collective venture of the Royal Society in which Francis Willughby (1635–1672) and John Ray (1627–1705), for example, actively participated. Among the collective enterprises that could serve as models for his own endeavour,18 Wilkins did not pick up scientific institutions, but linguistic ones: The compleating of such a design, being rather the work of a College and an Age, then of any single Person: I mean the combined Studies of many Students, amongst whom, the severall shares of such a Work should be distributed; And that for so long a course of time, wherein sufficient

 13 Shapiro, ‘Latitudinarianism’, pp. 303 and 310. It lies beyond the scope of this chapter to go into details about the rich historiographical debates concerning the link between early modern English intellectual culture and the religious context; for an example of a recent contribution see Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science, p. 15 for example on an ‘imagined “latitudinarianism”’. See also Parkin, ‘Wilkins and Latitudinarianism’.  14 Wilkins, A Discourse concerning the gift of prayer.  15 For another connection between the plain style and religious discourse in early modern England, see Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric.  16 Burnet, A Sermon Preached at the Funeral, p. 13; see Poole, ‘The Divine and the Grammarian’, p. 280.  17 Sprat, The History of the Royal Society, p. 113.  18 On natural philosophy as a collective enterprise for Francis Bacon, see Gaukroger, Francis Bacon.

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experiments might be made of it by practice. […] It has been sayd concerning that famous Italian Academy styled de la Crusca, consisting of many choice Men of great Learning, that they bestowed forty years in finishing their Vocabulary.19 The French ‘Académie’ and the Florentine ‘Accademia della Crusca’ were the models to follow. The second was founded in the 1580s with the project of normalizing the vulgar tongue. Its emblem is reproduced in the first edition of the Vocabolario.20 It is a frullone (a mechanical sifting machine), with the motto, borrowed from a line in Petrarch’s Canzoniere (LXXIII, 36): ‘il più bel fior ne coglie’ (it plucks the most beautiful flower/flour). This brand new agricultural machine (the frullone) used to separate the wheat from the chaff is a metaphor of the Academy’s linguistic task, purifying the Italian vernacular, especially ‘Florentinizing’ it, thanks to the repositories shaped by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.21 With this reference in mind, Wilkins underlined the aim of his Essay, that is, first and foremost, to build a new language, a practical, even though a ‘philosophical’ (that is, scientific) one. A part of the book is devoted to an Alphabetical Dictionary, on which William Lloyd (1627–1717) actively collaborated. With over eleven thousand entries, it is considered by Frederic Dolezal to be an important landmark in British lexicography.22 But instead of a specific vernacular language, Wilkins’s enterprise is aimed at finding a universal one: ‘as things are better then words, as real knowledge is beyond elegancy of speech, as the general good of mankind, is beyond that of any particular Countrey or Nation’.23 Wilkins’s own frullone tended to purify language, but not only English, since his goal was to elaborate a transparent language, in which science could be transmitted fluently and the study of nature, the goal set out by the Royal Society, would be conveyed in explicit terms. In the dictionary, the metalanguage is the philosophical language. The opening definitions lead to the first part of the book consisting mainly, with around 300 pages, of ‘philosophical’ tables organizing all knowledge. The first step in establishing the new language is to draw up an inventory of the world, a world in words. Drawing from Aristotle and Bacon, Wilkins selected forty major ‘Genus’s’, for each of which he invented a specific sign, divided into 251 ‘Differences’, themselves divided into 2030 ‘Species’: ‘we should, by learning the Character and the Names of things, be instructed likewise in their Natures’, Wilkins concluded.24 The new language is a classification of

 19 Wilkins, Essay, ‘Epistle dedicatory’, a3r–v.  20 Accademia della Crusca, Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca.  21 ‘Crusca’ means ‘chaff ’. On the Accademia, see Sabatini ed., Una lingua e il suo vocabolario; on the emblem, p. 18.  22 Dolezal, Forgotten but Important Lexicographers, John Wilkins and William Lloyd.  23 Wilkins, Essay, ‘Epistle dedicatory’, a3r–v.  24 Wilkins, Essay, p. 21.

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Figure 6.2. The characters for the forty Genera, with modifications for Differences and Species, John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London: S. Gellibrand and J. Martin, 1668), p. 387. Reproduced with the permission of the BNU Strasbourg, C.10.171.

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Figure 6.3. The Lord’s Prayer as a linguistic comparison tool, John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London: S. Gellibrand and J. Martin, 1668) p. 435. Reproduced with the permission of the BNU Strasbourg, C.10.171.

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the world. For example in the fourteenth Genus ‘Tree’, the first Difference is for ‘pomiferous’ (the second pruniferous, etc.); within the first Difference, the first Species is the apple tree; the second Species includes pear and quince trees, etc. (Figure 6.2).25 Wilkins’s language was intended to work as a map, on which every character acts as a ‘you are here’ sign in the path made up by the tables.26 On the forty characters referring to the forty Genera, variations on the right or the left side of the character indicate where to ‘turn’ at the ‘crossroads’ between Differences and Species in each tree diagram. It is meant to put the readers literally in the middle of science, to embark them on a cartography of universal knowledge. In fact, it often worked as a labyrinth.27 Wilkins devoted an ‘appendix’ of his Essay to ‘a Comparison betwixt this Natural Philosophical Grammar and that of other Instituted Languages, particularly the Latin […]’.28 He compared his creation to existing languages to establish its superiority. Chinese was, for example, a serious competitor, whose characters were read ‘universally’ in Asia. But Wilkins, relying on the existing Jesuit literature especially, concluded that it was too difficult.29 His conclusion was irrevocable also concerning Latin: though it did ‘in these parts of the world supply the place of a Common Tongue’, it also ‘exceedingly abound[ed] with unnecessary Rules, besides a vast multitude of Anomalisms and exceptions […]’.30 Those languages would then be positively replaced by his ‘Real Character’. Wilkins used the Lord’s Prayer as a text for the application of his method and also as a point of comparison with other idioms, such as Hebrew, Syriac, Ethiopic, and Russian, or even Poconchi (a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala).31 The Lord’s Prayer, which was often used in reading textbooks of the period as a tool for language learning, is also used here as a tool for comparing languages (Figure 6.3). A bedside text for missionaries, the prayer had been translated into all the languages of the missions; and its religious importance meant that it had to be translated literally. The text was so well known that it was accessible immediately to readers/learners, in spite of the foreign language in which it was written. The prayer was used as a linguistic tool for the paralleling of languages from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.32 Wilkins is therefore part of a chain of linguistic scholarship: most of the Lord’s Prayers he explains he

 25 On the workings of the language, see Pauchard, ‘Taxonomie et langue scientifique’.  26 For another interpretation of Wilkins’s Essay as a map: Rosenberg, ‘A Map of Language’.  27 See Simon, ‘Language as “Universal Truchman”’, pp. 328–34.  28 Wilkins, Essay, pp. 443 ff.  29 Wilkins, Essay, pp. 450–51.  30 Wilkins, Essay, p. 443.  31 Wilkins, Essay, pp. 435–40.  32 See Simon, ‘Collecting Languages, Alphabets and Texts’.

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Figure 6.4. The pronunciation of the Philosophical Language, John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London: S. Gellibrand and J. Martin, 1668), p. 421. Reproduced with the permission of the BNU Strasbourg, C.10.171.

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has ‘taken out of Gesner, Mithridates, and Megiserus his Specimen’.33 Within Wilkins’s book, the prayer, given into ‘fifty several Languages’, is part of his demonstration of the usefulness of his language, appearing as number 51, compared to the other idioms.34 In fact, in the list, number 50 is lacking and might correspond to the written ‘Real Character’,35 whereas number 51 is the ‘Philosophical Language’ itself, that is to say the system invented by Wilkins to pronounce the words written with his characters (Figure 6.4). This oral language is based on the exact same tables as the written one: the Genera are expressed by letters including diphthongs, the Differences by consonants (B, D, G, P, T, C, Z, S, N) and the Species by vowels (and two diphthongs). For example the second word of the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Coba’, is built thus: ‘Co [that] doth denote the Genus of Oeconomical Relation; the Letter (b) signifying the first Difference under that Genus, which is Relation of Consanguinity; the Vowel (a) the second Species, which is Direct ascending; namely, Parent’.36 This example shows the difficulty of the system since the reader/ speaker here has to deduce the exact word ‘Father’. But Wilkins considered his language simpler, both in its writing system and its pronunciation. And that is why he compares it with English written phonetically at the end of the list, as number 52 (Figure 6.3): It would be convenient, that every one of these instances should be Philosophically Lettered, according to the true pronunciation used in each Language; but this being a thing of too great difficulty, I do not attempt it. ’Tis probable that the doing of this, would make most strange Languages seem more harsh and uncouth, than now they do; as appears by that Instance of the English, this way written, which I have subjoined in the last place, for the more accurate comparing it with the Philosophical Language.37 Unsurprisingly, Wilkins’s conclusion states: ‘take it altogether, and in the whole, and it may at least stand in competition with the best of them, as to its facility and pleasantness’ and ‘for the Philosophy of this Language, it hath many great advantages above any other. Every Word being a description of the thing signified by it; Every Letter being significant […]’.38

 33 Wilkins, Essay, p. 434. Gessner, Mithridate Mithridates (1555), ed. by Colombat and Peters; Megiser, Specimen quadraginta diversarum atque inter se differentium linguarum & dialectorum.  34 Wilkins, Essay, pp. 435 ff.  35 A hypothesis to account for this lack could be that the printer had difficulties reducing the size of the characters for reproduction in a smaller format. More broadly, on the printing material used for the Essay, see Lewis, ‘The Publication of John Wilkins’s Essay (1668)’, pp. 141–42 and, with a different interpretation, Dolezal and Risvold, ‘Did Anne Maxwell print John Wilkins’s An essay towards a real character and a philosophical language (1668)?’.  36 Wilkins, Essay, p. 422.  37 Wilkins, Essay, p. 440.  38 Wilkins, Essay, p. 440.

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Despite its brevity (it occupies but a few pages at the end of the Essay), this passage had a significant impact on later developments which so far have not received much critical attention. Wilkins’s work functioned indeed as a textual hub, to which texts arrived, as we have seen, from Gessner for example, but also from which they departed. In a collection of Lord’s Prayers from 1748, one can find no fewer than three versions of the prayer in Wilkins’s philosophical language (Figure 6.5).39 This collection is the work of Benjamin Schultze and Johann Frederich Fritz entitled Orientalisch- und occidentalischer Sprachmeister.40 At the end of the volume, in the index, Wilkins’s text appears just after eight American versions of the prayer — Mexicana, Poconchica, Virginiana… — under the category ‘confictae’ (‘invented’). How did it find its way to this ‘master of oriental and occidental languages’ (as the title stands in German)? Its main author was Benjamin Schultze (1689–1760), a German Protestant missionary, trained at the University of Halle. From 1719, he participated in the Danish Tranquebar mission in India, founded by the Danish Co. of India in the seventeenth century.41 There, he became a specialist in oriental languages. He participated in the translation of parts of the Bible into Tamil, then wrote a grammar of Telugu, as well as a printed Hindustani grammar, completed in Madras in 1741  39 There is, in fact, a misunderstanding: if the ‘Philosophica Prima’ is the written ‘Real Character’ and the ‘Philosophica Secunda’, the oral ‘Philosophical Language’, the ‘Philosophica Tertia’ is, as we have seen, only English written phonetically, used as a comparison by Wilkins.  40 Fritz and Schultze, Orientalisch- und occidentalischer Sprachmeister.  41 On Schultze, see Liebau, ‘German Missionaries as Research Workers’; Duverdier, ‘L’œuvre en télugu de Benjamin Schultze’; Van Hal, ‘Protestant Pioneers in Sanskrit Studies’.

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Figure 6.5. The Lord’s Prayer in the Philosophical Language, Johann Friedrich Fritz and Benjamin Schultze, Orientalisch- und occidentalischer Sprachmeister (Leipzig: Christian Friedrich Gessner, 1748) p. 128. Reproduced with the permission of the BNU Strasbourg, C.101.229.

and published four years later.42 He was back in Halle in 1743 and remained there until his death in 1760. The publication of the Sprachmeister took place during this period. It contains ‘several polyglot tables of different languages’, but also the translation of the Lord’s prayer into two hundred languages and dialects ‘with their own characters and transcription’.43 In Schultze’s book, Wilkins’s language is therefore not even separated from the other idioms that precede it, being a vehicle of the word of God among others. The explanation of the presence of this particular text resides probably in the use by Schultze of another collection as a source-text: John Chamberlayne’s 1715 Oratio dominica.44 The author was a translator, with an interest in natural  42 Schultze, Grammatica hindostanica.  43 To translate parts of the title of the book.  44 Chamberlayne, Oratio dominica in diversas omnium fere gentium linguas versa.

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philosophy, and was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1702.45 It is probably through this network that he had access to Wilkins’s book and/or from an anterior anonymous collection of prayers also entitled Oratio dominica.46 In both, Wilkins’s prayer is present. But Chamberlayne was also the secretary of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge for which he translated texts and correspondences. Schultze, after a conflict in Tranquebar, made his way to Madras in 1726 and went on with his evangelical work under the supervision, this time, of the same Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. His access to Chamberlayne’s book may have been facilitated by this new network.47 Even more interestingly, at the end of the Sprachmeister, Schultze lists the authors he qualifies as ‘Collectores versionum Orationis Dominicae’, that is to say, the collectors of prayers from whom he borrowed his Our Fathers. Among the list, side by side with ‘Chamberlayne ( Jo.)’ but also ‘Gesnerus (Conr.)’ or ‘Megiserus (Hier.)’, one can find the name of ‘Wilkins ( Jo.), in Opere Anglico de Lingua Philosophica, p. 435 f.’.48 Between 1668 and 1748, Wilkins came to be seen as a collector of Lord’s Prayers rather than as the inventor of a universal language. From the Essay, Schultze picked, for example, the oratio in the Poconchi language and the Virginian language (‘New England’ in Wilkins), referred to as numbers 48 and 49. He recomposed it, in a sort of linguistic puzzle, from the fragments (the scattered verses) in Wilkins’s Essay.49 This new perception of Wilkins’s work persisted, and the migration of the text did not stop after the publication of Schultze’s book in 1748. We still find his name attached to the prayers, in the Mandarin, Saxon, and Spanish languages in the typefounder Edmund Fry’s 1799 Pantographia, dedicated to Joseph Banks (1743–1820), the president of the Royal Society.50 Fry (1757–1835) even reproduced, once again, the Our Father in the ‘Real Character’. Lastly, in 1805, Wilkins is still referred to,  45 See Gair, ‘Chamberlayne, John (1668/9–1723), translator and literary editor’.  46 Oratio Dominica, nimirum, plus centum linguis, versionibus, aut characteribus reddita et expressa…  47 Van Hal, ‘Protestant Pioneers in Sanskrit Studies’, p. 111 refers to contacts between Chamberlayne and the Tranquebar missionaries in India before Schultze (especially Ernst Gründler); Van Hal also quotes, p. 123, a letter by Schultze in 1731 in which he explicitly mentions Chamberlayne’s Oratio.  48 A shorter list of these ‘Collectores’ is already present in the 1700 Oratio, including Gessner, Megiser and Wilkins, but obviously not Chamberlayne whose book is posterior (and who does not include this kind of list in his 1715 Oratio).  49 Fritz and Schultze, Orientalisch- und occidentalischer Sprachmeister, pp. 124–26 and Wilkins, Essay, pp. 434–39. In Fritz and Schultze, for those two languages, two more references, except Wilkins, appear — for the ‘Virginiana’: ‘Bibl. Virg. Cantabrig. Nov. Angl. 1663’, that is to say, the 1663 translation of the Bible by John Eliot (1604–1690) (The Holy Bible containing the Old Testament and the New. Translated into the Indian language); and for the ‘Poconchica’: ‘Thom. Gage p. 473’, that is to say Gage, The English-American his travail by sea and land, where the prayer can indeed be found on p. 473.  50 Fry, Pantographia, p. 197 (Mandarine 2), p. 263 (Saxon 4), p. 375 (Spanish) and pp. 234–37 (Philosophic 1–3). On Fry, see Cassedy, ‘Types of Reading, Types of Pleasure’.

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erroneously, for the Mexican language Lord’s Prayer in a collection gifted by the Paris Imperial Printing Press to Pope Pius VII.51 All in all, within a century and a half, the Essay turned into a repository from which to extract prayers: not only the Lord’s Prayer in the philosophical language, but also in the various languages, especially from America, that Wilkins used only for comparative purposes. This validated Wilkins’s religious endeavours: his version in the philosophical language was collected with the other translations. But it also radically changed the meaning of the text: the project to subsume diversity in a single language began to be received as a reference work for polyglossia.52

A ‘Universal Truchman’ in Search of an Interpreter: The Multilingual Reception of Wilkins’s Universal Language Scheme Apart from the cases of skewed reception of Wilkins’s project I have just discussed, there are very few examples of uses of the ‘Real Character’ after 1668 and even of mentions of the scheme. But they are no less significant for being rare. After the circulation of fragments of Wilkins’s text, I would now like to turn to the way knowledge of Wilkins’s language scheme circulated. The universal languages created within the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters were considered to serve the function of translators or interpreters as of themselves, so that they were conceived as universally understandable. For example, in the context of the elaboration of Wilkins’s scheme, Robert Boyle spoke of Lodwick’s Common Writing as a ‘Universal Truchman or General Interpreter’;53 George Dalgarno (1625–1687) called the product of his first reflection on the universal language a ‘Swift Scribe and Faithful Interpreter’;54 and Cave Beck (c. 1623–1706), in a letter to Oldenburg dated 15 August 1668, portrayed his own project as a ‘Pocket Mercury to Travaylors’. It was intended to prevent all the problems inherent in any linguistic exchange: ‘all Equivocal words, Anomalous variations, and superfluous Synonomas (with which all Languages are encumbred, and rendred difficult to the learner)’. Beck expands on the advantages: ‘Save the charges of hiring Interpreters: Besides, avoyding

 51 On this particular collection of Lord’s Prayers, see Simon, ‘Imprimer le monde à Paris’.  52 This juxtaposition of biblical texts translated in different languages on the same page is not without evoking the Polyglot Bibles that flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in Antwerp, Paris, or London; see, for example, Hamilton, ‘In Search of the Most Perfect Text’.  53 Boyle, The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, ed. by Hunter, Clericuzio, and Principe, vol. i, p. 52. On Lodwick, see Lodwick, On Language, Theology, and Utopia, ed. by Henderson and Poole.  54 Dalgarno, George Dalgarno on Universal Language, ed. by Cram and Maat; ‘Broadsheet 1: The Universal Character’ (1657), p. 85.

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the danger of being mis-understood, or betrayed by Truch-men, misrelating his Expressions to Foraign Ears’.55 Designed as a pocket interpreter, the Universal Character was a dictionary of 4000 words, all numbered, Beck’s idea being to use only the numbers afterwards. Because the author was aware that it might very well be impossible to learn all the words, he announced the printing of a 500-sentence syllabus, inspired by Comenius’s Janua linguarum.56 In other words, the model of a new pedagogy set up to learn Latin by the Czech philosopher was now applied to the learning of a new common language intended to replace Latin. While the projects were meant to be universally useful, their reception was rather limited. They often acted as truchmen no one could understand. However, in the case of Wilkins’s Essay, two levels of reception can be distinguished. The first type of reception is to be found in England itself, where, though narrow, this reception was more developed than elsewhere. Its distinguishing mark was to have always been connected with the institution that saw the birth of the scheme: the Royal Society. As early as May 1668, it set up a ‘committee’ for the furthering of the scheme and its possible improvements.57 It was composed of prominent figures of the institution: among others, William Holder (1616–1698), John Wallis (1616–1703), Thomas Henshaw (1618–1700), Robert Boyle, John Ray, Robert Hooke, and Seth Ward.58 In fact, they never met in person but formed a correspondence group led by John Aubrey (1626–1697). Aubrey was directly involved in the projects aiming to create a universal language, through his connections with Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–1662), to whom he wrote, in December 1653, about ‘A common-language to bee written in ordinary characters’.59 The collective correspondence only started in 1676. The paths followed to extend Wilkins’s project were diverse: discussions about the Latin translation of the work (see below), refining the tables, and looking for ways to give the highest possible visibility to the project as a whole. One member of the group was particularly active: Andrew Paschall (c. 1630–c. 1696).60 A former fellow of Queen’s College, Cambridge, he was in charge of the Parish of Chedsey in Somerset. There, as early as 1669, he proposed to Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680) to gather a group in charge of ‘[tha]t great worke of the Bp of Chester his Essay, and concerning the probabilityes there are that this designe […] can

 55 Beck, The Universal Character by which All the Nations in the World may understand one anothers Conceptions, ‘To the Reader’.  56 Comenius, Janua linguarum reserata aurea.  57 On this commission, see Salmon, ‘John Wilkins’s Essay (1668)’; Lewis, ‘The Efforts of the Aubrey Correspondence Group’ and Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature, Chapter 6.  58 Francis Lodwick and Christopher Wren also took part in the commission, as did Andrew Paschall, as we shall see presently.  59 Quoted in Lewis, ‘The Efforts of the Aubrey Correspondence Group’, p. 334.  60 Lewis, ‘The Efforts of the Aubrey Correspondence Group’, pp. 339–46, and Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature, pp. 203–21.

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Figure 6.6. Letter by Andrew Paschall to John Aubrey using the ‘Real Character’ in 1677, Bodleian Library, MS Aubrey 13, 15r. Reproduced with the permission of the Bodleian Library.

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come to any thing’. Paschall’s letter was read during a meeting of the Society leading to the approval of the creation of the committee.61 The sine qua non condition to join the group was to engage in ‘facilitating, or promoting the learning or spreading’ of Wilkins’s language.62 It was no longer the social context of production that influenced the language, but the language itself that came to define its own social space. While the group rapidly dissolved, Paschall remained strongly committed to the project, acting as a goad when his correspondents’ enthusiasm slackened off. He set himself to the task by using the ‘Real Character’ with an interlinear translation in one of his letters to Aubrey (13 February 1677), and then by twisting the proposition, in November 1682, transforming the ‘Real Character’ into a tool for constructing a kind of phonetic alphabet (Figure 6.6).63 Another of the few occurrences of the ‘Real Character’ outside the Essay can be found in a plate of the Royal Society’s ‘Curator of Experiments’ Robert Hooke, in his 1676 Description of Helioscopes.64 As was the case for its elaboration, the reception of the project remained mediated by the networks of the Royal Society. One of Hooke’s purposes was to make some publicity for the already forgotten language created by Wilkins, and the 1676 correspondence group was also an answer to this wish. But Hooke’s use of the ‘Real Character’ was equally inscribed in the habitus of the Royal Society’s fellow in the context of scientific polemic, the purpose being to preserve an invention from the competition by the use of a cryptographic code. The universal language was also a secret language which no one could understand.65 As far as the European reception of the schemes is concerned, it is also characterized by some degree of misunderstanding, but this time concerning their metalanguage, namely English. The vernacular was indeed used in almost all the British schemes (Wilkins’s, Beck’s, Lodwick’s) whereas Latin was used in many others (Becher’s, Kircher’s, Labbé’s).66 This major difference could be linked in particular to the desire, expressed by Wilkins and Sprat, to favour the vernacular, the simple style and the common language of the ‘artizan’ to expound science, as we have seen. But on a transnational stage, it became a problem. Foreigners complained about this situation. In Henry Oldenburg’s correspondence, we can find letters insisting on the necessity to translate into

 61 Letter of Paschall to Glanvill, 16 June 1669, in Oldenburg, The Correspondence, ed. by Hall and Hall, vol. vi, p. 141; and for the mention of the reading of the letter, see Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, vol. ii, pp. 394–95 (as quoted in Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature, p. 203).  62 [Glanvill], Propositions for the carrying on a philosophical correspondence, p. 3 (as quoted in Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature, p. 203).  63 See Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature, pp. 207 and 219.  64 Hooke, A Description of Helioscopes, tab. II and III.  65 See Simon, ‘Language as “Universal Truchman”’, p. 332.  66 Becher, Character pro notitia linguarum universali; Kircher, Polygraphia nova et universalis; Labbé, Grammatica linguae universalis.

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Latin in order to give access to books to the community of the learned. It is the case with Sprat’s History of the Royal Society, about which Franciscus de le Boë Sylvius (1614–1672), a physician and professor of medicine in Leiden, wrote (in Latin) to Oldenburg in December 1667 that it should also be made available ‘to the whole world of literati [literatorum orbi] in the Latin tongue, in which, moreover, I myself […] could more easily follow and understand its proceedings’. A few months later, the astronomer Hevelius (1611–1687) made a similar comment, writing that ‘the History would have been far more acceptable to foreigners if written in Latin’.67 During the seventeenth century, Latin remained a ‘langue référentielle’ (a reference language) to borrow Benoît Grévin’s phrase, a language ‘enjoying prestige because it was associated with the conservation of sacred texts [as the language of the Catholic Church], because it was used in written communication, because it was used also in linguistic reflection’: a language to think about languages.68 That is why it still was a linguistic focus point in the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters. And that is also why, for example, the Minim friar Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) called for the creation of an international ‘academy of translators’ (‘quelque excellente Académie composée de 15 ou 20 honestes hommes de chaque nation’) to give access to knowledge on a wider scale, using what he called the ‘common language of Christian Europe’ (‘la langue commune de l’Europe chretienne’).69 All those attempts, which were aimed at replacing Latin, paradoxically triggered an interest in the issues related to its status, especially as lingua eruditorum vernacula.70 The conceptual frame in which efforts towards universal languages developed emerged from debates about Latin, and the authors of the language schemes cannot have been unaware of such debates. Latin was in fact the communication language of many members of this network. A renewed Latin was even the explicit goal of the Jesuit, but also member of the Republic of Letters, Pierre Besnier (1648–1705) in his 1674 La Réunion des langues. He was looking for a language that would make it possible to learn all languages at the same time, by using reasoning and comparison.71 Considering first Hebrew as the possible reference language, but disqualifying it because it was not known enough in Europe, he eventually set his choice on the Republic of Letters’ common language. Latin was therefore to become the ‘door’ to

 67 Oldenburg, Correspondence, vol. iv, letter no. 731, p. 69: ‘quin opto vehementer Latino etiam sermone universo Literatorum Orbi exponi Historiam Societatis vestrae Regiae, quo et Ego quoque, […] facilius capere possim & assequi ejus acta’; and no. 878, p. 444: ‘gratias habeo multas, quod me ea beare volueritis; si latine esset conscripta, longe adhuc acceptior foret exteris’.  68 Grévin, Le Parchemin des cieux, p. 18 (my translation).  69 Mersenne, Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne, ed. by de Waard, vol. xi, no. 942 bis (16 November 1640), p. 420.  70 The expression was employed by a Swedish member of the Republic of Letters, quoted in Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe, p. 53.  71 Besnier, La Réunion des langues.

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all languages, showing all the necessary qualities, ‘universality, certainty and proportion’, and having at the same time the advantage of a ‘dead’ language (‘immutability’) and of a living one (‘universality’).72 This European dimension of Latin is the reason why, paradoxically, even the translation of Wilkins’s Essay into this language was considered to facilitate its circulation within the Republic of Letters, as Oldenburg wrote (in Latin) to the Italian scholar Marcello Malpighi in a letter dated 22 December 1668: Not long since, Mr John Wilkins, the very worthy Bishop of Chester, published a truly philosophical book […] which is now being translated from English into Latin, in order that it may in this way be submitted to the criticism and comment of all scholars.73 To be received widely, even a universal language needed to be published, or at least translated, into Latin. The translation of Wilkins’s work and its twists and turns has been studied in detail by Rhodri Lewis: John Ray, who had been a close collaborator, drawing the tables about botany for example, was put in charge of the translation and started working on it as early as Spring 1668. Two years later, he wrote to Martin Lister (1639–1712) that he ‘intend[ed] to set afresh upon and despatch the translation, that so [he] may be free to prosecute [his] own inclinations and studies’.74 In 1671, Mark Lewis in his An Apologie for a grammar referred to the book as ‘now coming’ in Latin. But it is uncertain if the translation was ever finished and, in any case, it has not been found by modern-day scholars.75 More generally, the universal language schemes needed to be translated to be understandable: Lewis Du Moulin (1606–1680), the son of a French theologian and Camden Professor of History at the University of Oxford was, for a time, considered as a possible translator of Wilkins into French. Beck’s Universal Character was published in French and, conversely, Pierre Besnier’s 1674 book was translated into English by one Henry Rose in 1675 under the title: A Philosophical Essay for the Reunion of the Languages or the Art of Knowing all by the Mastery of one.76 Another translation endeavour has remained in manuscript form. The volume, which is held at the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris, includes, among other texts, two tracts entitled Artificium Linguae Artificialis and Explanatio Artificio Characteres Universalis. They are in fact Latin translations of George Dalgarno’s drafts, published in English on loose sheets, in particular the 1657 Tables of the Universal Character, summarizing his design.77 According to Jaap

 72 Besnier, La Réunion des langues, pp. 9–10.  73 Oldenburg, Correspondence, letter no. 1051, vol. v, p. 280.  74 Ray, The Correspondence of John Ray, ed. by Lankester, p. 55.  75 See Lewis, ‘The Publication of John Wilkins’s Essay (1668)’, p. 141 and note 36 p. 146.  76 Beck, Le Charactere universel, par lequel toutes nations peuvent comprendre les conceptions l’une de l’autre, etc.; Besnier, A Philosophical Essay, trans. by Rose.  77 Bibliothèque Mazarine MS 3788; on this manuscript, see Cram and Maat, ‘Dalgarno in Paris’, p. 169; and Dalgarno, George Dalgarno on Universal Language, in particular ‘Dalgarno’s first

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Maat and David Cram’s interpretation, the manuscript was probably written by a Jesuit from Collège Louis-le-Grand, who sojourned in Oxford in June or July 1657, and to whom Dalgarno explained his method orally, as the scribe noted in the manuscript.78 This time the difficulty posed by the use of the English language was avoided through conversation, possibly in Latin, and, once again, through translation of the tracts. It allowed the Jesuit to compare Dalgarno’s plans with Kircher’s and Labbé’s, about which he wrote another text (which has remained unpublished).79 Dalgarno seems to have called for such transfer of his work across geographic and confessional borders: in another of his tracts entitled News to the Whole World, of the Discovery of an Universal Character, and a new Rational Language (1658), he indeed defined his language as ‘[a] great help for propagating the Gospel, and if neglected by reformed States and Churches, [it] will certainly be improved by the Jesuites to that end’.80 If his Protestant co-religionists were unable to detect the pastoral usefulness of his scheme, Dalgarno did not hesitate to propose it to the post-Tridentine order par excellence, the Jesuits. This way of transgressing confessional boundaries was no isolated case within the province of the Republic of Letters concerned with the quest for a universal language. France, it appears, acted as an intermediary which allowed the dissemination of the schemes written in English in this specific province of the Republic of Letters. If the books themselves did not always circulate, awareness of the schemes spread nonetheless, albeit indirectly, as appears in two cases which evidence mediated reading strategies. Marin Mersenne’s suggestion (mentioned above) that an academy of translators should be created was made in the course of his correspondence with a Palatinian Calvinist exile, Theodore Haak (1605–1690), who was himself a translator.81 A polyglot traveller and a key figure in a network of literati that had members in England, France, and Italy, Mersenne saw himself as an ‘entremetteur’, a go-between.82 In 1691, Adrien Baillet commemorated

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schemes’, including Character universalis/A New Discovery of the Universal Character (1657) with the Tables of the Universal Character (p. 87 ff.) and News to the Whole World, of the Discovery of an Universal Character, and a new Rational Language (1658) (p. 107 ff.). Cram and Maat, ‘Dalgarno in Paris’, pp. 172–73. The full title of the tract is: Explanatio Artificio Characteres Universalis secundum cum modum, quem anglice Anno 1657 Mense Junio et Julio Oxonia explicare mihi curavi ab inventore huius characteris Scoto quodam George Dalgarno qui hunc characterem codem anno mense Majo invenit. Mazarine MS 3788, Characteris Polygraphici Kircheriani – Cum Lingua Universali P. Philipp Labbei Comparatio. British Museum 4377, 143r, as quoted in Cram and Maat, ‘Dalgarno in Paris’, p. 173. See Mersenne, Correspondance, for the years 1640 (vols viii–xi) and 1648–1649 (vol. xv), and in a special appendix, vol. xi, pp. 397 ff. See some comments especially in Salmon, The Study of Language, pp. 148–51, and Simon, ‘Language as “Universal Truchman”’, pp. 322–23. On Haak, see Barnett, Theodore Haak, F.R.S. (1605–1690). The term is used to qualify Haak (Mersenne, Correspondance, vol. xi, no. 952bis, p. 434) but

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his central role as a culture broker in the Republic of Letters by calling him ‘le centre de tous les gens de Lettres’, ‘le grand négociant des Lettres’.83 This role can be compared to that of modern translators as it has been analysed by Pascale Casanova: ‘a foreign exchange broker, responsible for exporting from one territory to another texts whose literary value they determine by virtue of this very activity’, a ‘legislator of the Republic of Letters’, with a ‘power of consecration’.84 In Mersenne’s correspondence with Haak, which consists of twenty-four letters, all written in French, many universal language schemes are mentioned: for instance, Haak sent information about Thomas Harrison’s Arca Studiorum or John Johnson and William Bedell’s ‘hieroglyphs’, and, as a literary counter-gift, Mersenne told him about the linguistic projects of a French inventor, Le Maire, but also about Kircher in Rome, whom he visited in 1644.85 The potential limitations in transmission entailed by the multiple languages in which the universal language schemes were written were thus overcome thanks to the polyglot skills of those who, like Mersenne and his numerous correspondents, discussed and circulated them. Another way of having access to the schemes was to use digests, or lists gathered in encyclopaedic compilations simply mentioning the languages. That was the tool used by another member of the small French milieu of language planners, Antoine de Vienne Plancy. His is a very little-known proposition for a universal language published in a periodical, l’Extraordinaire du Mercure: the publication started in Volume 14, in January 1681, and ended in Volume 32 in July 1685, after ten issues, four years and 476 pages.86 After having presented his ‘écriture numérale’ (numeral writing), Vienne Plancy stated that his proposition surpassed the English ones.87 In fact, he never actually read them: [Monsieur No] me mande qu’il luy est tombé entre les mains un Livre d’une seconde édition imprimé à Francfort en 1680. sans nom d’Auteur, intitulé Historia orbis terrarum Geographica & Civilis, in qua de variis hujus & superioris seculi negotis dont il croit me faire plaisir de s’entretenir avec moy. Il me donne donc que cet Auteur inconnu témoigne que les plus it is also the way Mersenne describes his own task in the same letter: ‘en fin je voudrois que tout ce qui se passe de gentil et de subtil par mes mains, vous le puissiez voir aussi’ (lastly, all fine and subtle material that is sent to me, I wish you could see it too).  83 Baillet, La Vie de Monsieur Descartes, vol. ii, p. 353. See Waquet, ‘Qu’est-ce que la République des Lettres?’, p. 492.  84 Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. by DeBevoise, pp. 21–22.  85 Mersenne, Correspondance, for example: on Harrison vol. viii, no. 858, p. 305; on Bedell vol. xv, no. 1632, p. 250; on Kircher vol. viii, no. 799, p. 720; on Le Maire vol. xi, no. 942bis, pp. 420–23, vol. xv, no. 1654, p. 354. For details, see Simon, ‘Sortir de Babel. Une “République des Langues”’, pp. 575–96.  86 On Vienne Plancy, see Simon, ‘Antoine de Vienne Plancy’.  87 His language was written in figures, which could be transposed into letters (the ‘écriture littérale’) with a system invented by Vienne Plancy: Extraordinaire du Mercure galant, vol. xxxi ( July 1685), 119–22 and 124–82.

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curieux d’entre les Anglois ont cherché le secret de l’Ecriture Universelle avec grand soin & avec peu de succez ; qu’à Londres en 1661. il y parut un Traité sur ce sujet sous le titre d’Ars signorum, seu caracter Universalis, & lexikon Grammatico-Philosophicum Georgii d’Algarno ; mais que cette methode tient trop du Pedant, pour estre receuë dans le monde ; qu’un nommé François de Lodvvik de Londres produisit ensuite quelque chose de semblable ; mais que son Ouvrage a esté si fort négligé, que cela montre assez que l’Autheur n’est pas arrivé au but qu’il se proposoit, & que le Docte Jean Vvilkins a essayé aussi les forces de son admirable esprit sur cette matiere ; mais que son travail n’a pas eu l’approbation qu’il en attendoit.88 ([Mr No] tells me that a copy of a second edition printed in Frankfurt in 1680 fell into his hands, without an Author’s name, entitled Historia orbis terrarum Geographica & Civilis, in qua de variis hujus & superioris seculi negotis, which he believes I will be pleased to discuss with him. He writes to me therefore that this unknown Author attests that the most curious among the English have sought the secret of the Universal Writing with great care & with little success; that in London in 1661. a Treatise on this subject was published under the title Ars signorum, seu caracter Universalis, & lexikon Grammatico-Philosophicum Georgii d’Algarno; but that this method is too pedantic to be accepted in the world; that a man named François de Lodvvik from London then produced something similar; but that his Work has been so badly neglected, that it shows well enough that the Author did not reach the goal he set himself, & that the learned Jean Vvilkins also exerted his admirable mind on this matter; but that his work has not received the approval he expected.) Plancy knew the existence of the English schemes through the Historia orbis terrarium, written by Johann Christoph Bekmann (1641–1717) — a theologian and professor at the university of Frankfurt an der Oder — where the passage can indeed be traced back.89 But Plancy did not even read Bekmann’s book, which was summarized for him by a friend in a letter: in Fau-Cleranton, Champagne, where Plancy lived, access to knowledge was sometimes only made possible by correspondence. This last example highlights the truly European dimension of the circulation of these schemes: a French inventor was familiar with English projects thanks to a German book, in Latin, summarized in French by a member of his epistolary network. *     *    *

 88 Vienne Plancy, Extraordinaire du Mercure galant, vol. xxxii (October 1685), 110–46 (my translation).  89 Bekmann, Historia orbis terrarum, pp. 390–93.

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All in all, how was Wilkins’s Essay read? Thoroughly, probably only by a few fellows of the Royal Society trying to keep the scheme alive after its author’s death (Andrew Paschall notably); in bits and parts, by a few other readers, over a long period of time. But they made their own reinterpretations of the book, with their own reading strategies, offering sometimes skewed receptions to the Essay. Some, like Benjamin Schultze and the other collectors of Lord’s Prayers, took the Our Father in the ‘Real Character’, but also in other languages. Wilkins’s work became only a repository where to pick up texts authored by others. Some, like Antoine de Vienne Plancy and other members of this province of the Republic of Letters interested in the universal languages, only heard of the book or read digests, because they did not have easy access to the Essay or because they could not read English. Beyond the very limited use of Wilkins’s ‘Real Character’ and of the other universal languages themselves, the reception of the universal language schemes set in motion a network of scholars, knowledge brokers exchanging learnedly on that issue. Proclaimed as universal, their scope was in fact, obviously, much more centred on and confined to Europe, sometimes to a particular country (England or France), or to a specific place (the Royal Society for example). Nevertheless, those languages managed to build communities around them — communities not so much of speakers or writers as of inventors. They delineated a social space (albeit a limited one) around utopias; their debates, correspondences, and books made up for the failure of universal languages to serve as means of communication.

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—— , A Philosophical Essay for the Reunion of the Languages or the Art of Knowing all by the Mastery of one, trans. by Henry Rose (Oxford: printed by Hen. Hall for James Good, 1675) Birch, Thomas, The History of the Royal Society of London, 4 vols (London: A. Millar, 1756–1757) Boyle, Robert, The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, ed. by Michael Cyril William Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio, and Lawrence M. Principe, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001) Bulwer, John, Chirologia, or, The naturall language of the hand composed of the speaking motions, and discoursing gestures thereof (London: printed by Tho. Harper, 1644) Burnet, Gilbert, A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Most Reverend Father in God, John by the Divine Providence Ld. Archibishop of Canterbury, Primate and Metropolitan of al England (London: Richard Chiswell, 1694) Chamberlayne, John, Oratio dominica in diversas omnium fere gentium linguas versa et propriis cujusque linguae characteribus expressa (Amsterdam: typis G. et D. Goerei, 1715) Comenius, Jan Amos, Janua linguarum reserata aurea, sive Seminarium linguarum et scientiarum omnium, hoc est compendiosa latinam (et quamlibet aliam) linguam (Geneva: J. de Tournes, 1638) Dalgarno, George, George Dalgarno on Universal Language: The Art of Signs (1661), the Deaf and Dumb Man’s Tutor (1680), and the Unpublished Papers, ed. by David Cram and Jaap Maat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Eliot, John, The Holy Bible containing the Old Testament and the New. Translated into the Indian language and ordered to be printed by the Commissioners of the United colonies in New-England, at the charge, and with the consent of the corporation in England for the propagation of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New-England (Cambridge: Printed by Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson, 1663) Fritz, Johann Friedrich, and Benjamin Schultze, Orientalisch- und occidentalischer Sprachmeister, welcher nicht allein hundert Alphabete nebst ihrer Ausprache, so bey denen meisten Europäisch-Asiatisch-Africanisch-und Americanischen Völckern und Nationen gebräuchlich sind (Leipzig: Christian Friedrich Gessner, 1748) Fry, Edmund, Pantographia, Containing Accurate Copies of All the Known Alphabets in the World (London: J. and A. Arch, 1799) Gage, Thomas, The English-American his travail by sea and land: or, A new survey of the West-India’s, containing a journall of three thousand and three hundred miles within the main land of America […] With a grammar, or some few rudiments of the Indian tongue, called Poconchi, or Pocoman (London: R. Cotes, 1648) Gessner, Conrad, Mithridate Mithridates (1555), ed. by Bernard Colombat and Manfred Peters (Geneva: Droz, 2009) [Glanvill, Joseph], Propositions for the carrying on a philosophical correspondence, al­ ready begun in the county of Sommerset (London: printed for James Collins, 1670) Hooke, Robert, A Description of Helioscopes (London: J. Martyn, 1676) Kircher, Athanasius, Polygraphia nova et universalis ex combinatoria arte detecta (Rome: Ex Typographia Varesij, 1663)

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Labbé, Philippe, Grammatica linguae universalis missionum & commerciorum (Paris: J. Roger, 1663) Lodwick, Francis, A Common Writing: Whereby two, although not understanding one the others Language, yet by the helpe thereof, may communicate their minds one to another (London: Printed for the Author, 1647) —— , On Language, Theology, and Utopia, ed. by Felicity Henderson and William Poole (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Megiser, Hieronymus, Specimen quadraginta diversarum atque inter se differentium linguarum & dialectorum; videlicet, Oratio Dominica, totidem linguis expressa (Frankfurt: Ex typographeo Ioannis Spiessij, 1593) Mersenne, Marin, Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne, religieux minime, ed. by Cornelis De Waard, 18 vols (Paris: G. Beauchesne, Presses Universitaire de France, Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1932–1988) Oldenburg, Henry, The Correspondence, ed. and trans. by A. Rupert Hall and Mary Boas Hall, 13 vols (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965–1986) Oratio Dominica, nimirum, plus centum linguis, versionibus, aut characteribus reddita et expressa. Editio novissima (London: D. Brown, 1700) Ray, John, The Correspondence of John Ray, consisting of selections from the Philo­sophi­ cal letters published by Dr Derham and original letters of John Ray in the col­lec­tion of the British Museum, ed. by Edwin Lankester (London: Ray Society, 1848) Schultze, Benjamin, Grammatica hindostanica, collectis in diuturna inter Hindostanos commoratione, in justum ordinem redactis (Halle: in typographia Instituti judaici, 1745) Sprat, Thomas, The History of the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London: printed for J. Martyn et J. Allestry, 1667) Vienne Plancy, Antoine de, Extraordinaire du Mercure galant, xxxi ( July 1685), 119–122 and 124–182; xxxii (Oct. 1685), 110–146; online at: and

[accessed 4 December 2020] Webb, John, An historical essay: endeavouring a probability that the language of the empire of China is the primitive language spoken through the whole world before the confusion of Babel (London: printed for Obadiah Blagrave, 1678) Wilkins, John, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London: S. Gellibrand and J. Martin, 1668) —— , A Discourse concerning the gift of prayer shewing what it is, wherein it consists […] Whereunto may be added ‘Ecclesiastes’, or a Discourse concerning the gift of preaching, by the same author (London: E. Gellibrand, 1678) Secondary Works Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) Barnett, Pamela, Theodore Haak, F.R.S. (1605–1690): The First German Translator of ‘Paradise Lost’ (The Hague: Mouton & Co, 1962)

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Blair, Ann M., Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) Brioist, Pascal, ‘Les Origines de la Société royale de Londres’, in La Science à l’époque moderne. Actes du colloque de 1996 de l’association des historiens modernistes des universités, Bulletin no. 21 (Paris: PUPS, 1998), pp. 91–122 Burke, Peter, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) —— , A Social History of Knowledge, 2 vols (Cambridge: Polity, 2000–2012) —— , What Is the History of Knowledge? (Cambridge: Polity, 2016) Casanova, Pascale, The World Republic of Letters, trans. by Malcolm B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) Cassedy, Tim, ‘Types of Reading, Types of Pleasure: Pantographia and the Specimens of Globalization’, Word & Image, 34.2 (2018), 137–151 Certeau, Michel de, Arts de faire. L’Invention du Quotidien 1, ed. by Luce Giard (Paris: Gallimard, 1990) Chartier, Roger, Culture écrite et société: l’ordre des livres xive–xviiie siècle (Paris: A. Michel, 1996) Cram, David, and Jaap Maat, ‘Dalgarno in Paris’, Histoire, Epistémologie, Langage, 20.2 (1998), 167–79 Dolezal, Frederic, Forgotten but Important Lexicographers, John Wilkins and William Lloyd: A Modern Approach to Lexicography before Johnson (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1985) Dolezal, Frederick T., and Ward J. Risvold, ‘Did Anne Maxwell Print John Wilkins’s An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668)?’, in Historical Dictionaries in their Paratextual Context, ed. by Roderick McConchie and Jukka Tyrkkö (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), pp. 23–55 Duverdier, Gérald, ‘L’Œuvre en télugu de Benjamin Schultze’, Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient, 63.1 (1976), 265–312 Eco, Umberto, La Recherche de la langue parfaite dans la culture européenne (Paris: Seuil, 1994) Gair, Reavley, ‘Chamberlayne, John (1668/9–1723), translator and literary editor’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) Gaukroger, Stephen, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Grévin, Benoît, Le Parchemin des cieux. Essai sur le Moyen Âge du langage (Paris: Seuil, 2012) Hamilton, Alastair, ‘In Search of the Most Perfect Text: The Early Modern Printed Polyglot Bibles from Alcalá (1510–1520) to Brian Walton (1654–1658)’, in The New Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. iii, ed. by E. Cameron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 138–56 Hunter, Michael, ‘The Social Basis and Changing Fortunes of an Early Scientific Institution: An Analysis of the Membership of the Royal Society, 1660–1685’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 31 (1976), 9–114

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Knowlson, James, Universal Language Schemes in England and France, 1600–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975) Levitin, Dmitri, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philo­ sophy in England, c. 1640–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Lewis, Rhodri, ‘The Efforts of the Aubrey Correspondence Group to Revise John Wilkins’s Essay (1668) and their Context’, Historiographia Linguistica, 28.3 (2001), 341–58 —— , ‘The Publication of John Wilkins’s Essay (1668): Some Contextual Considerations’, Notes and Records of The Royal Society, 56.2 (2002), 133–46 —— , Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) Liebau, Heike, ‘German Missionaries as Research Workers in India: Their Diaries as Historical Sources (Benjamin Schultze [1689–1760]—Exception or Norm?)’, Studies in History, 11.1 (1995), 101–18 Parkin, Jon, ‘Wilkins and Latitudinarism’, in John Wilkins (1614–1672): New Essays, ed. by William Poole (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 97–125 Pauchard, Jean, ‘Taxonomie et langue scientifique dans l’Essay (1668) de John Wilkins’, in La Production des textes spécialisés : structure et enseignement. Actes de GLAT-Barcelona 2004, 12, 13 et 14 mai 2004, Universitat politècnica de Catalunya, ed. by Groupe de linguistique appliquée des télécommunications (Brest: ENST Bretagne, GLAT, 2004), pp. 75–86 Poole, William, ‘The Divine and the Grammarian. Theological Disputes in the 17th-Century Universal Language Movement’, Historiographia linguistica, 30.3 (2003), 273–300 —— , ed., John Wilkins (1614–1672): New Essays (Leiden: Brill, 2017) Rosenberg, Daniel, ‘A Map of Language’, unpublished paper presented at the workshop ‘Visualizing Language’, Rome, Bibliotheca Hertziana-Max Planck Institut für Kunst-Geschichte, 27 February 2020 Sabatini, Francesco, ed., Una lingua e il suo vocabolario (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 2014) Salmon, Vivian, ‘John Wilkins’s Essay (1668): Critics and Continuators’, Historiographia Linguistica, 1.2 (1974), 147–163 (rpt. in The Study of Language in 17th-Century England, pp. 191–206) —— , The Study of Language in 17th-Century England (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1988) —— , ‘Lodwick, Francis (bap. 1619, d. 1694), Linguistic Scholar’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) Shapiro, Barbara, John Wilkins 1614–1672: An Intellectual Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969) —— , ‘Latitudinarianism and Science in Seventeenth-Century England’, in The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, ed. by Charles Webster (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1974), pp. 286–316 —— , Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships Between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)

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Shuger, Deborah, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) Simon, Fabien, ‘Sortir de Babel. Une “République des Langues” en quête d’une langue universelle à la Renaissance et à l’Âge classique’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Université Rennes 2, 2011) —— , ‘Language as “Universal Truchman”: Translating the Republic of Letters in the 17th Century’, in Translating Early Modern Science, ed. by Niall Hodson, Sietske Fransen, and Karl Enenke (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 308–40 —— , ‘Collecting Languages, Alphabets and Texts: The Circulation of “Parts of Texts” Among Paper Cabinets of Linguistic Curiosities (16th-17th Century)’, in Pieces and Parts in Scientific Texts, ed. by Florence Bretelle-Establet and Stéphane Schmitt (Berlin: Springer, 2018), pp. 297–346 —— , ‘Antoine de Vienne Plancy, un feuilleton de la langue universelle dans la France du xviie siècle’, Écrire l’histoire. Histoire, littérature, esthétique, 19 (2019), 127–38 —— , ‘Imprimer le monde à Paris: l’Oratio dominica CL linguis de 1805’ (forthcoming) Slaughter, Mary M., Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) Van Damme, Stéphane, ed., Histoire des sciences et des savoirs. 1. De la Renaissance aux Lumières (Paris: Seuil, 2015) Van Doren, Charles, A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, Future (New York: Random House, 1991) Van Hal, Toon, ‘Protestant Pioneers in Sanskrit Studies in the Early 18th Century: An Overlooked Chapter in South Indian Missionary Linguistics’, Historiographia linguistica, 43.1–2 (2016), 99–144 Waquet, Françoise, L’Ordre matériel du savoir : comment les savants travaillent, xviexxie siècles (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2015) —— , ‘Qu’est-ce que la République des Lettres? Essai de sémantique historique’, Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes, 147 (1989), 473–502

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Transnational Poetic Communities Appropriating Continental Models

Enrica Zanin and Rémi Vuillemin

7. Petrarchism as the European Language of Poetry The Example of ‘Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura’ The poetics that emerged all across Europe from the imitation of Petrarch in the centuries following his death produced local poetry through cross-fertilization of foreign influences and local tradition, and provided the impetus for the refoundation of local poetic traditions.1 As Michele Marrapodi explains, this means much more than ‘influence’, a concept that does not do justice to the complexity of the transformations and appropriations of a poetic model seen, then and now, to originate in Petrarch’s work. Petrarch’s Canzoniere can then be seen, in Marrapodi’s terms, as a ‘deep source’ of subsequent developments.2 The poetry of Petrarch and his followers progressively became something close to a European koine that seeped into the vernaculars, generating comparable neologisms, syntax, and tropes in each of them. Of course, Petrarchism cannot be said to have been a common language in the same way that Latin was. It nevertheless contributed to the shaping and reshaping of several vernaculars, including Italian, French, Spanish, and English, as we will insist below. The focus of the present chapter will be on the rewritings and translations of one specific sonnet in several European languages, especially Italian, French, and English. While much scholarship has understandably been mostly interested in the specificities of English Petrarchism, sometimes running the risk of singling out features that are in no way specific to it, we hope that considering the dynamics of rewriting in several different contexts will enable us to draw a nuanced picture in which English culture is not isolated from this large European cultural phenomenon. We will take Petrarch’s sonnet 248 as a case study, trying to show how its use as a deep source produced Petrarchism not just as a common set of tropes and topoi, but also as a process of cultural translation.

 1 On the local ‘origins’ of the sonnet in England, see Amanda Holton, ‘An Obscured Tradition’.  2 Marrapodi, ‘Introduction: Past, Present and Future in Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies’, p. 1. Enrica Zanin ([email protected]) Université de Strasbourg & Institut Universitaire de France Rémi Vuillemin ([email protected]) Université de Strasbourg Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer, ed. by Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin, PEEMB 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 171–194  10.1484/M.PEEMB-EB.5.127779

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Although sonnet 248 of Petrarch’s Canzoniere is not the most prominent poem in the collection, it was widely translated, imitated, and adapted in Renaissance Europe.3 Thanks to the help of colleagues and friends, we have already collected sixty versions, but there are certainly more.4 By analysing and comparing these imitations, we hope to contribute to document the reception and assess the impact of Petrarch’s poetry in Europe.5 The data collected from this large trans-linguistic corpus can illuminate the uses of Petrarchism as the transnational language of poetry in Italy, France, and England, with references to Spain and Portugal as well. We shall try and identify the specific features that were the focus of the rewritings, in order to understand how this sonnet came to be repurposed in various national and linguistic contexts. Here is our starting point, Petrarch’s sonnet 248, together with Robert M. Durling’s 1976 English translation: Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura e ’l Ciel tra noi, venga a mirar costei, ch’è sola un sol, non pur a li occhi mei, ma al mondo cieco, che vertú non cura; et venga tosto, perché Morte fura prima i migliori, et lascia star i rei: questa aspettata al regno delli dèi cosa bella mortal passa, et non dura. Vedrà, s’arriva a tempo, ogni vertute, ogni bellezza, ogni real costume giunti in un corpo con mirabil’ tempre: allor dirà che mie rime son mute, l’ingegno offeso dal soverchio lume; ma se piú tarda, avrà da pianger sempre.6 Whoever wishes to see all that Nature and Heaven can do among us, let him come and gaze on her, for she alone is a sun, not merely for my eye, but for the blind world, which does not care for virtue; And let him come soon, for Death steals first the best and leaves the wicked: awaited in the kingdom of the blessed, this beautiful mortal thing passes and does not endure.  3 See Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism, pp. 107–10 and Kennedy, ‘English Petrarchism’; see also Alduy, Politique des « Amours ».  4 We are very grateful to Jean-Charles Monferran and to Michel Jourde who largely contributed to the search for the French versions of sonnet 248. We also wish to thank Julian Lethbridge, Anne-Valérie Dulac, and Laetitia Sansonetti, who contributed to the search for the English variations.  5 See for instance Forster, The Icy Fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism; Greene, PostPetrarchism; Kennedy, Petrarchism at Work.  6 Petrarch, Canzoniere, ed. by Antonelli, sonnet 248, p. 213.

7. p e t r arc h i s m as t h e e u ro p e an language  o f po e t ry

He will see, if he comes in time, every virtue, every beauty, every regal habit, joined together in one body with marvellous tempering; then he will say that my rhymes are mute, my wit overcome by the excess of light. But if he delays too long he shall have reason to weep forever.7 The sonnet was composed between 1336 and 1374 and its first rewritten versions appeared at the beginning of the Quattrocento: Paolo da Firenze rephrased it and set it to music around 1410.8 Seven more versions were composed in Italy prior to 1500 by Cino Rinuccini (before 1417), Giusto da Conti (1440), Jacopo De Jennaro (c. 1468), Filippo Scarlatti (c. 1470), Angelo Poliziano (1495), and Cesare Nappi (1498).9 Eight more Italian versions were written between 1500 and 1544, and the first French translation, by Clément Marot, was published in 1535 in Six sonnets sur la mort de Laure. Maurice Scève included in his Délie (1544) a French adaptation which was inspired from Ludovico Martelli’s version (1533). The decade 1545–1555 was indeed the most productive: eight Italian versions were composed and published by poets such as Ludovico Dolce, Girolamo Parabosco, Pietro Aretino, Gaspara Stampa, and Bernardo Tasso. In France, five French poets repurposed the original sonnet and Pierre de Ronsard included at the opening of his Amours (1552) a rephrased version of Petrarch’s sonnet which would become a new poetical model influencing the French and English rewritings. After 1550 the number of Italian versions started to decrease: there were five between 1550 and 1570, two musical versions by Monteverdi in 1584 and then two later rewritings by Marino and Tassoni (1620). Conversely, the French versions were still numerous after 1550: ten rewritings were published between 1558 and 1599. French poets often composed several variations: Joachim Du Bellay and Nicolas Ellain wrote three, Ronsard two. Two Spanish translations were published in 1567 and 1591, a rewriting by Cervantes, in his Galatea, was first printed in 1585 and a Portuguese version by Camões was published (posthumously) in 1595.10 The first English imitation was probably by Thomas Watson, and was published in his Hekatompathia (1582), Philip Sidney rewrote the sonnet in Astrophil and Stella (c. 1580), and four more variations followed: a translation of Du Bellay’s version by Edmund Spenser (1591), a sonnet by E. C. in Emaricdulfe (1595), an imitation by Henry Constable (c. 1589–1591) and a prose version by Benvenuto Italian (1612).11

 7 Petrarch, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, trans. by Durling, p. 410.  8 See also Dionisotti, ‘Fortuna del Petrarca nel Quattrocento’.  9 See also Serafino Ciminelli’s ‘Chi uol ueder gran cose altiere & noue’ (1516), in Die Strambotti des Serafinos dall’Aquila, ed. by Bauer-Formiconi.  10 Camões, The Collected Lyric Poems, trans. by White, no. 159.  11 Sonnet 248 might also have been the basis for sonnet 48 in Michael Drayton’s Ideas Mirrour (1594). See Vuillemin, ‘Michael Drayton’s Early Career’.

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This quick survey confirms what is already known about the circulation of poetry in early modern Europe: the ‘sonnet craze’ culminated in Italy approximately between 1535 and 1555,12 in France between 1550 and 1570,13 in England between 1580 and 1600;14 the influence of Petrarch was great, and it was often relayed by prominent French poets such as Du Bellay or Ronsard.15 However, this survey does not explain why sonnet 248 was so widely imitated. A close analysis of Petrarch’s sonnet and of the traits and patterns that recur most frequently in the later versions may help explain its success. First, every imitation rephrases its first line. ‘Chi vuol veder …’ (whoever wish to see) works as a powerful protasis, creating a tension, vigorously leading the reader to the following line. The first line, as usually in Italian verse, follows a syllabic prosody: it is an endecasillabo a minore, a line of eleven syllables, with a caesura after the fourth syllable, ‘Chi vuol veder // quantunque pò Natura’. But its rhythm is clearly iambic and the line can also be read as an iambic pentameter: ∪

−  / ∪ − / ∪ − 

/ ∪ −  / ∪ − (∪)

Chi vuol/ veder/ quantun/que pò/ Natura

In other words, the first line can be both read as syllable-timed and stresstimed. It is therefore easy to understand and to translate into other languages based on different prosodic patterns. In the English context, such a structure, shared by other poems by Petrarch and his followers, might have encouraged Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey to use the iambic pentameter both in some of his sonnets and in a prosodic invention that was to enjoy tremendous success, blank verse.16 It might also have given a convenient basis for accommodating a syllable-timed prosody (the ‘Romance’ prosody adopted by Chaucer, itself derived from languages such as Italian and French) and the stress-timed prosody of the English language (found for instance in medieval accentual-alliterative verse), both in the practice of poets and in the writings of theorists. The most relevant attempts to understand and codify English metre in the period when Petrarchism was at its height — arguably George Gascoigne’s Certayne Notes of Instruction (1575), Samuel Daniel’s Defence of Rhyme (1603), and to a lesser extent George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) — were caught between a degree of awareness of the stress-timed nature of the English  12 Quondam, ‘Sul Petrarchismo’.  13 Balsamo, ‘“Nous l’avons tous admiré et imité : non sans cause”’.  14 See Wyatt, ‘Other Petrarchs in Early Modern England’; Clucas, ‘Thomas Watson’s Heka­ tom­pathia and European Petrarchism’; Roe, ‘The Comedy of Astrophil’; Hainsworth, ‘Translating Petrarch’, pp. 243–58; Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet.  15 Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism, pp. 163–250.  16 The more direct source for Surrey’s invention of blank verse is, as Sessions explains, versi sciolti, which he must have witnessed first-hand in the works of Luigi Alamanni, whom he encountered in France in the early 1530s. See Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey, pp. 94 and 279.

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language, influence from Romance languages, and metalinguistic concepts mostly inherited from Latin prosody.17 Second, the sonnet structure is clearly defined by its rhyme scheme and its syntactic framework. The octave (fronte) is driven by the general apostrophe (‘whoever wish to see’) inviting the reader to seek the view of a marvellous object, while the sestet (sirma) finally evokes the object of the vision (‘he will see virtue and beauty’) and the inadequacy of poetry to describe such a wonder. The structure of the sonnet is rather common in Petrarch’s poetry, but the perfect match between the rhyme and the syntax increases its effectiveness — a feature often found in Italian and French imitations, but which was perhaps less convincing to English poets, who consistently tended to stray from the original after the first few lines.18 Third, the themes addressed by the sonnet may be seen as representative of Petrarch’s poetry. The power of God and nature, the ineffable beauty of the lady, the vanity of it, the power and the powerlessness of poetry, which became extremely popular in early modern poetry, were revived and discussed in the later versions of the sonnet. In each of them, some of the themes were expanded, others discarded, depending on the poet’s purpose: the thematic diversity of the original therefore led to the versatility of the rewritings. Sonnet 248 has indeed some prominent features that make it an extremely well-composed example of love sonnet, and a sort of summary of Petrarch’s poetry both in terms of form and content. Its exemplary structure may be one of the reasons for its large success. If the reasons for the wide circulation of the sonnet may be explained, the purposes of its imitators and translators are less clear. Why did so many poets choose to rewrite once, twice, or even three times the same sonnet? Some of the rewritings clearly intend to initiate a dialogue with Petrarch, discussing some of his views on love, on beauty and on poetry. If according to Petrarch love is spiritual, some poets, such as Sidney (following perhaps an English strand already found in Thomas Wyatt’s poetry, possibly originating in the latter’s reading of Italian strambottisti such as Serafino Ciminelli), repurpose the sonnet stating that love is also physical.19 While Stella shows ‘beauty’ and ‘true goodness’, the last couplet reveals that her virtue ‘bends that love to good. | But, ah, Desire still cries, “Give me some food”’.20 The rhyme enhances the opposition between moral good and solid food, that is, between ‘love’ and ‘desire’. If the lady’s virtue drives any lover to good, it does not fulfil the lover’s desire. That is why, according to Jacopo De Jennaro (1468), the lady is  17 See Hardison, Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance, esp. pp. 92–124.  18 For the English tendency to translate Petrarch in ‘snippets’, see Stamatakis, ‘Petrarch in Parts’.  19 The term strambottisti refers to the authors of strambotti in general, and more particularly to Italian poets of the late Quattrocento and early Cinquecento such as Tebaldeo, Chariteo, or Aquilano. The strambotto is usually made up of eight hendecasyllabic lines.  20 Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, in The Poems of Philip Sidney, ed. by Ringler, sonnet 71, p. 201. See Kalstone, ‘Sir Philip Sidney and “Poore Petrarch’s Long Deceased Woes”’.

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cruel and savage (‘rigida e selvagia’): the poet does not mourn, at the end of the sonnet, because the lady is doomed to die, but because the lady cruelly refuses his love (‘sordo al mio grande [amore]’).21 Tansillo (c. 1550) similarly rephrases the sonnet in order to criticize Petrarch’s idealization: if Laura is the embodiment of beauty and harmony, his lady is a cruel monster (‘crudo abominevol mostro’). Tansillo depicts the lady as the allegory of jealousy who can transform love into hell.22 Pontus de Tyard also insists on the painfulness of love and explains that the greatest of wonders is not the heavenliness of the lady, but the poet’s love distress. If Petrarch invites the reader to ‘come and see’ the beauty of Laura, Pontus de Tyard (1549) invites him to see his raging love pain (‘qu’il vienne voir ma peine ardente et forte’), that is to read his love poems.23 Ronsard reworks Pontus de Tyard’s apostrophe and asks the reader to come and see how the god of love dominates him (‘Qui voudra voyr comme un Dieu me surmonte’). Instead of directing the reader’s looks towards Laura, Ronsard (1552) invites the reader to come and see the poet himself (‘qui voudra voir […] me vienne voir’).24 Ronsard starts his collection with his rewriting of sonnet 248 and transforms Petrarch’s love poem into a captatio benevolentiae, inviting the reader to peruse his Amours. Other rewritings aim at criticizing Petrarch’s view on beauty. Petrarch adopts an Augustinian concept of love and states, in sonnet 248, that beauty is a vanitas and therefore that anyone who loves beauty will inevitably suffer and cry (‘avrà da pianger sempre’) because the lady will die and her beauty will vanish.25 Conversely, most of the imitators adopt a Neoplatonic concept of love and consider that the lady’s beauty can lead the poet to see God and to reach heaven. Filenio Gallo (before 1503), like Petrarch, compares the lady to the sun, but he revives Petrarch’s metaphor and states that the lady’s eyes and smile lead the lover’s soul to paradise.26 Girolamo Parabosco (1551) also explains that the lady is a sun that brings heaven on earth. If, according to Petrarch, the lover is doomed to cry forever (‘avrà da pianger sempre’), Parabosco, on the contrary, will be glad to languish forever after his beloved (‘contento son languir sempre per voi’).27 While in Petrarch’s verse the lady’s beauty does not last (‘non dura’), in later versions it becomes a sign of resurrection. Both  21 ‘Chi vol vedere in questa nostra piagia’, De Jennaro, Rime e Lettere, ed. by Corti, sonnet 10, pp. 52–53. Pietro Jacopo De Jennaro was a Neapolitan nobleman. His poetry is preserved in the manuscript Ital. 1035 (at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France).  22 Tansillo, ‘La gelosia’, in Canzoniere, ed. by Percopo, vol. i, sonnet 15, p. 27.  23 Tyard, Erreurs amoureuses, in Œuvres Poétiques, ed. by Kushner, sonnet 2, p. 54.  24 Ronsard, Le Premier Livre des Amours, in Œuvres, ed. by Céard, Ménager and Simonin, vol. i, p. 25.  25 Petrarch’s closeness to Augustinian thought is explored in his Secretum, a work often seen as key to understanding his Canzoniere. See also Roche, Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences, chapter 1.  26 ‘Ma chi vedesse un voltar d’occhi e un riso, | sentiria el corpo solo in un momento | restare in terra e l’alma in Paradiso’, Gallo, Rime, ed. by Grignani, part 2, sonnet 240.  27 Parabosco, Il primo libro dei madrigali (1551), ed. by Longo, sonnet 37.

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Gallo and Maurice Scève (1544) compare the lady to a Phoenix: she is a new Christ, bringing immortality on earth (Gallo); her beauty elevates the lover and allows him to experience the separation of the soul from the body (Scève).28 In some late English versions, the praise of the lady is so hyperbolic that one may wonder if there is not something of the tongue-in-cheek in it: the sestet of Henry Constable’s ‘Eyes curious to behold, what nature can create’ (1589) is built upon a conflation of accumulated hyperbole, anaphora and enumeration of body parts, a sort of deconstructed blazon that expresses the speaker’s confusion (‘I doe not understand’, l. 11). A similar paradox possibly occurs in Michael Drayton’s Ideas Mirrour 48 (1594), which has recently been read as self-undermining hyperbolic praise: the discreet presence of the Petrarchan source both fuels the praise and draws attention to its excesses.29 Only in Du Bellay’s version (and in the English translation by Spenser) is beauty explicitly described as a vanitas. However, Du Bellay (1558) and Spenser (1591) do not consider the lady’s appeal but ponder over the ruins of Rome: Qui voudra voir tout ce qu’ont pu nature, L’art et le ciel, Rome, te viene voir: J’entends s’il peut ta grandeur concevoir Par ce qui n’est que ta morte peinture. Rome n’est plus : et si l’architecture Quelque ombre encor de Rome fait revoir, C’est comme un corps par magique savoir Tiré de nuit hors de sa sépulture. Le corps de Rome en cendre est dévalé, Et son esprit rejoindre s’est allé Au grand esprit de cette masse ronde. Mais ses écrits, qui sont los le plus beau Malgré le temps arrachent au tombeau, Font son idole errer parmi le monde.

Who lists to see, what ever nature, arte, And heaven could doo, O Rome, thee let him see, In case thy greatnes he can gesse in harte, By that which but the picture is of thee. Rome is no more: but if the shade of Rome May of the bodie yeld a seeming sight, It’s like a corse drawne forth out of the tombe By Magicke skill out of eternall night: The corpes of Rome in ashes is entombed, And her great spirite rejoyned to the spirite Of this great masse, is in the same enwombed; But her brave writings, which her famous merite In spight of time, out of the dust doth reare, Doo make her Idole through the world appeare.

Petrarch’s sonnet 248 is an ideal vessel for Du Bellay to express the contrast between his expectations of Rome and what he found there. For him, Rome is  28 ‘Sarete qui immortal e ’n ciel felice | et io beato sol per excellenzia’ (last lines responding to ‘avrà da pianger sempre’), Gallo, ed. by Grignani, Rime, part 4, sonnet 39; ‘Qui veult scavoir par commune evidence | Comme lon peult soy mesmes oblyer, | Et, sans mourir, prouver l’esperience, | Comment du Corps l’Ame on peult deslyer’ (first quatrain), Scève, Délie (1544), ed. by Defaux, sonnet 278, p. 128.  29 Constable’s sonnet appears in the Todd MS (Victoria and Albert museum, MS 44) and was probably written c. 1589–1591. See Constable, The Poems of Henry Constable, ed. by Grundy, p. 122 and notes p. 225. On Drayton, see Vuillemin, ‘Michael Drayton’s Early Career’. For convenience’s sake, we use the term ‘blazon’ in the sense it usually has in anglophone criticism (a list of the beloved’s body parts, with associated metaphor or imagery), as opposed to the blazon according to Marot, in which only one body part is described. More accurate terms would be descriptio puellae, or, in a sonnet, short canon (canone breve). See Goeury and Hunkeler ed., Anatomie d’une anatomie, pp. 39–40.

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clearly dead: her body is reduced to ashes.30 But the writings which praise ‘her famous merit’ take her out of the dust and ‘make her Idole through the world appeare’.31 The poem encapsulates the paradox of Du Bellay’s appropriation of the culture of the Italian peninsula: while not seeing in Rome the greatness he hoped to translate into French grandeur, he nevertheless uses the traces it has left to further his cause.32 As Hassan Melehy underlines, Du Bellay’s imitation is not based upon Rome, but upon an image, a simulacrum, of Rome, building as it were a French poetic edifice upon what is left of a city, the remains of a referent (eternal Rome) that never actually existed.33 Spenser’s translation is extremely close to Du Bellay’s poem, in ‘The Ruins of Rome’, a collection whose function, in Melehy’s words, is to ‘displac[e] Du Bellay, situating French poetry in the past even as [Spenser] depends on it for the production of English poetry’, and identifying French poetry as the past of English poetry, or the ‘ruins’ on which it is built.34 There might be another dimension to take into account, especially considering the fact that Spenser’s translations from Du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome have, on the whole, a more clearly Christian dimension than the originals. Du Bellay’s poem has a thematic origin, Rome, but also a poetic one, Petrarch’s poem. Petrarch was of course a Tuscan poet, but to a sixteenth-century Englishman, the connection between Petrarch and Rome was probably obvious: Petrarch’s anti-papal poems (Canzoniere 136–138), in which Rome is likened to Babylon, were crucial in the reception of Petrarch in sixteenth-century England.35 English readers, and presumably Spenser, might have recognized in the use of the term ‘Idole’ (l. 14) the ninth line of Petrarch’s poem 137: ‘Gl’idoli suoi sarranno in terra sparsi’. This would introduce some form of ambiguity in the poem, perhaps unwittingly questioning a poetry that would be mere idolatry of a glorious past, a kind of idolatry denounced by Puritan attacks against poetry. The above rewritings, and others, tend to stress the metapoetic meaning of the sonnet: if Petrarch underrates the power of poetry in order to enhance the wonder of beauty, his imitators underscore the power of poetry in order to raise the value of their own verses. In this sense, rewriting Petrarch is a metapoetic gesture and the implicit presence of the hypo-text reorients the meaning of the rewritings: if Petrarch claims that his verses are ‘dumb’ and speechless (‘le mie rime son mute’), Du Bellay, Spenser, Ronsard, and Pontus de Tyard overtly respond that their poems are eloquent and meaningful.

 30 ‘Qui voudra voir tout ce qu’ont pu nature’, Du Bellay, Les Antiquitez de Rome (1558), in Les Regrets, et autres œuvres poétiques ; suivis des Antiquitez de Rome, ed. by Jolliffe, sonnet 5, p. 178.  31 ‘Who lists to see, what ever nature, arte’, Spenser, ‘Ruines of Rome, by Bellay’, in Complaints (1591), in The Works, vol. viii, ed. by Greenlaw and others, p. 142. See Melehy, ‘Antiquities of Britain: Spenser’s Ruines of Time’ and Melehy, The Poetics of Literary Transfer.  32 Melehy, The Poetics of Literary Transfer, pp. 31–32.  33 Melehy, The Poetics of Literary Transfer, pp. 47–48.  34 Melehy, The Poetics of Literary Transfer, pp. 77 and 84–85.  35 See Boswell and Braden, Petrarch’s English Laurels, p. 4.

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Gaspara Stampa (1554) retorts that a poetess, better than a poet, can experience what real beauty is,36 and Du Bellay, in his Olive (1550), replies that French poetry is a greater wonder than Italian poetry, in the same way that the olive tree that grows on the banks of the French rivers is more precious and useful than the laurel.37 Du Bellay thus appropriates Petrarch’s metaphors to voice France’s linguistic and national claims in the European competition for poetic supremacy. In this international competition for poetic precedence, the English press their advantage as late-comers to the Petrarchan game — their disadvantage being their cultural and linguistic isolation (while Italian and French poetry circulated widely in England, English poetry was not of much interest to continental readers). Some of the English versions of Canzoniere 248 seem ambiguous — perhaps reflecting the mixed feelings of the English towards Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century. Some poets, then, imitate sonnet 248 because they wish to initiate a poetic dialogue with Petrarch, reprising or discussing his views and suggesting new poetic directions. However, many rewritings aim not only at responding to Petrarch but rather wish to play with a readership likely to know the sonnet and to participate in a parlour game with the poet. Some imitators clearly repurpose the original sonnet in order to please their audience by surprising them. The reprise of the first line of Petrarch’s sonnet raises the reader’s expectations, since she or he recognizes its hypo-text, but the following lines invalidate the reader’s predictions, by changing the original meaning of the sonnet or by applying Petrarch’s words to different situations and contexts. Pietro Aretino (1552), for example, includes a rewritten version of the sonnet in one of his letters in order to praise a painting by Titian: his portrait of Bishop Beccadelli is the perfect imitation of nature, and expresses the appearance as well as the true virtues of the sitter.38 In the same way, Giovan Battista Marino (1620) admires the art of the painter Cornelis Cornelisz. van Harleem, whose Fall of Phaeton is so skilfully painted that it seems truer than life.39 Bernardo Tasso (1555), Joachim Du Bellay (1550), and Lope de Vega (before 1635) rework the sonnet in order to praise the power of art, resuming the classical topos, and stating that art is a greater wonder than nature, because the figures it creates last forever.40  36 ‘Chi vuol veder l’imagin del valore’, Stampa, Rime (1554), ed. by Bellonci and Ceriello, vol. i, sonnet 121, p. 158.  37 ‘Qui voudra voir le plus precieux arbre’, Du Bellay, L’Olive (1550), ed. by Caldarini, sonnet 17, p. 115. See DellaNeva, ‘Illustrating the Deffence’, pp. 41–42, Baker, ‘Petrarchan Lyric Subjectivity’, p. 208, and more generally Rebhorn, ‘Du Bellay’s Imperial Mistress’.  38 Aretino wishes to compose a written version of the painting, thus eulogizing the sitter. See the last lines: ‘Se dipinto il contempla la Natura, | dirà, credendol vivo: — “Questo è quello | che de la mia innocenza ha in sé la cura”’, Aretino, Lettere sull’arte (1552), ed. by Procaccioli, p. 232.  39 ‘Chi vuol veder del Giovinetto audace’, commenting on ‘Il precipizio di Fetonte di Cornelio Fiamingo’, Marino, Galleria (1620), ed. by Pieri, part 1, favola 70, p. 45.  40 ‘Chi vuol veder quanto più possa l’arte’, Bernardo Tasso, Rime (1555), ed. by Martignone,

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Sonnet 248 is also used as the palimpsest of occasional verses. Benedetto Varchi (1555) and Nicolas Ellain (1561) rework it to praise the eloquence of fellow poets and orators;41 Machiavelli’s Discorsi are commended in a version by one M. G. M.,42 while Torquato Tasso (1563–1567), Angelo Poliziano (1495), and Cesare Nappi (1498) rewrite it to celebrate the beauty of their mistresses and muses.43 Nappi’s version seems, at first, a plain imitation of Petrarch: Chi vuol vedere el vero paradiso, Angelica beltà, la fresca aurora, Miri e contempli il corpo e sancto viso In cui natura pose ogni arte allora. Lucente stella, o vago e bel narciso, Alma regina de le ninfe ancora; Fa di toa gratia degno el mio disio, Ch’io t’amo e reverisco più che Dio.44

If you wish to see the true brightness of heaven, The beauty of an angel, the freshness of the dawn, Come and see the body and the celestial face In which nature displays its arts and skills. Shining star, beautiful and charming narcissus, Noble queen of the nymphs, Let my desire be worthy of your grace, Because I love and cherish you more than I do God.

But Nappi introduces a commentary that discloses the real meaning of his poem: he asks the reader to read the initial letters of the first six lines and then the last two lines. Indeed, the initials reveal the name of Nappi’s beloved, CAMIL[L]A, and the last two lines express the poet’s wish: ‘let my desire be worthy of your grace, since I love and cherish you more than I do God’. Be it overtly or covertly, Petrarch’s lines are thus used in occasional verses. The virtues of the recipient of the eulogy are so enhanced, since she is implicitly compared to Laura. Conversely, some poets choose to apply Petrarch’s praise of beauty to a repulsive object, thus creating a discrepancy between the model and its

 41

 42

 43

 44

book 5, sonnet 122, p. 137; ‘Si le pinceau pouvoit montrer aux yeulx’, Du Bellay, L’Olive, ed. by Caldarini, sonnet 74, p. 127; ‘[Conde] Quiso naturaleza, en un perfecto retrato, descansar de su porfía […]’, Lope de Vega, El paraíso de Laura y florestas del amor, Jornada II, in Obras, vol. viii, ed. by Cotarelo y Mori, p. 375. Varchi praises the eloquence of the preacher Andrea da Volterra: ‘Chi vuol vedere, ed asoltare in terra | di celeste eloquenza ondanti fiumi | e d’ardente virtute accesi lumi | vegga ed ascolti voi chiaro Volterra’, Varchi, Sonetti Spirituali (1555), p. 20. Nicolas Ellain praises Belleau’s eloquence in his sonnet ‘Qui vouldra veoir une doulce faconde’, Ellain, Les Sonnets, sonnet 25, p. 11, l. 10. See ‘Chi vuol sapere quantunque in guerra, o in pace | Si scosta il nostro dal Romano Stato, | Legga questa opra leggiadra e verace | Di Macchiavel, che sua lingua ha cangiato […]’ published as a preliminary sonnet in a French translation of Machiavelli’s Discorsi (Le premier [second-troisiesme] livre des Discours de l’estat de paix et de guerre, trans. Gohory, ãiiiv. We are very grateful to Laetitia Sansonetti for referring us to this version). Tasso praises Laura Peperara in ‘Chi vuol veder come ne l’acque amare’, Torquato Tasso, Rime d’amore, ed. by Solerti, book 2, sonnet 180, p. 270. Poliziano praises Ippolita Leoncina di Prato in ‘Chi vuol veder lo sforzo di Natura’, Poliziano, Rime, ed. by Delcorno Branca, rispetto 7, p. 284. ‘Legi li 6 capiversi primi e poi li dui ultimi versi’, Nappi, ‘Strambotto’ (1498), in Rimatori bolognesi del Quattrocento, ed. by Frati, strambotto 18, p. 191 (our translation).

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imitation, arousing the reader’s surprise and laughter. Berni, in his satirical verses (1537), composes an ironical rewriting of Petrarch’s sonnet: he asks the reader to come and see what marvel nature may achieve, that is, the Archbishop of Florence, who is an ugly, nasty, silly, and terrifying witch.45 The reference to Petrarch’s sonnet can then be used either to enhance or to satirize the object of the imitation. Girolamo Malipiero (1536), on the one hand, uses it as a palimpsest in a poem addressed to the Virgin Mary, in which the mother of God is theologically described as the true miracle created by Heaven and nature.46 On the other hand, Niccolò Franco (1546) reworks it to praise the greatness and magnitude of the longest achievement of nature and Heaven, that is… his own penis!47 Petrarch’s lines are then the hypo-text of sacred verses, of priapic sonnets, and even of scatological poems. Alessandro Tassoni (c. 1620) invites the reader to come and see a magnificent toilet, ‘whose modern and ingenious architecture | was made to fit the reverend Father’s huge bottom’. The reader should come and see it, behind Saint Peter’s church, because while sitting on it, he or she may enjoy a beautiful view of Rome. Indeed ‘who often suffer from constipation | should come at once, because the sight of it | prompts immediately loose motion’. Tassoni imitates carefully Petrarch’s sonnet, keeping its structure and rhymes: his poem is a vigorous and comical satire of the Roman clergy as well as a refined network of allusions addressed to a learned reader.48 In this sense, the rewritings are not (only) parodies of Petrarch’s poem, but rather poetical riddles, parlour games aimed at amusing and surprising the reader.49 They neither plainly imitate nor merely criticize Petrarch’s heritage, but rather engage in a fruitful dialogue with their model or playfully challenge their readers. Some of the English examples seem to exemplify a form of hesitancy towards what is sometimes taken as a central feature of Petrarchism, that is hyperbolic praise, and cannot therefore be categorized straightforwardly as either ‘Petrarchan’ or ‘anti-Petrarchan’.50 More essentially,

 45 ‘Chi vuol veder quantunque pò natura | in far una fantastica befana […] | legga per cortesia questa scrittura’, ‘Sonetto in descrizion dell’Arcivescovo di Firenze’, Berni, Rime (1537), ed. by Romei, sonnet 61, pp. 176–78.  46 ‘Chi vuol veder quantunque può natura, | ed anco il ciel, contempli sol costei | che ’l mondo alluma e abbaglia gli occhi miei: | Maria, che di noi tutti ha somma cura […]’, Malipiero, Il Petrarca spirituale, sonnet 210, 61v.  47 ‘Chi vuol veder quantunque può natura | E ’l ciel fra noi, non può veder mai cosa | Di questo cazzo più miracolosa, | Nè più fatta a compasso ed a misura’, Franco, Priapea (1546), ed. by E. Siccardi, sonnet 51, p. 39.  48 ‘Sopra il necessario fatto fare dall’abate di San Pietro’, Tassoni, La Secchia rapita, l’Oceano e le Rime, ed. by Rossi, xliii, p. 320.  49 See Mortimer ed., Petrarch’s Canzoniere in the English Renaissance, p. 24.  50 Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch, and Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, among others, insist on the complexity of Petrarchism. Dubrow, while usefully underlining that there were several forms of both Petrarchism and anti-Petrarchism, chooses to maintain the binary, averring that ‘the

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the great number of translations and of rewritings suggests that the sonnet is not only quoted as a deliberate reference to Petrarch, but also used as raw poetical material, that every poet can appropriate, transform, disassemble and reassemble in order to create new poetical forms. The several efforts to imitate, translate, rewrite Petrarch’s sonnet show the desire to create a new poetic language. In many rewritings, for example, the first line of sonnet 248 is clearly used as a poetical tag. This is often the case in the musical adaptations. In a polyphonic madrigale, only the first words are clearly audible: if Monteverdi (1584) begins two of his canzonette by ‘chi vuol veder’, it is therefore to help the audience understand the general atmosphere of his compositions.51 In this context, ‘chi vuol veder’ does not only signify ‘who wish to see’ but also: ‘this is poetry’ and ‘this is about love’. Petrarch’s phrase works as a marker, labelling as ‘poetry’ the lines that follow. A similar use of the first line of the sonnet is to be found in the French rewritings. Pontus de Tyard (1549) and Ronsard (1552) begin their collection with a rewritten version of sonnet 248: Qui veut savoir en quantes et quelles sortes amour cruel travaille les esprits […] qu’il vienne voir ma peine ardente et forte (Pontus de Tyard, sonnet 2)52 (Who lists to know the many ways by which Cruel love tortures the souls […] Let him come and see my raging pain) Qui voudra voyr comme un Dieu me surmonte, […] Me vienne voir: il voirra ma douleur, Et la rigueur de l’Archer qui me donte. (Pierre de Ronsard, sonnet 1)53 (Who lists to see how a God rules over me […] Let him come and see me: he will see my sorrow And the cruelty of the archer who subjugates me.)

intensity and even choler with which certain poets attack Petrarchism’ must be given due notice (Echoes of Desire, p. 7).  51 ‘Chi vuol veder d’inverno un dolce aprile’ and ‘Chi vuol veder un bosco folto e spesso’ in Monte­ verdi, Canzonette a tre voci, ed. by Malipiero, canzonetta 14 and canzonetta 20, pp. 17 and 23.  52 Tyard, Erreurs amoureuses, p. 54 (our translation).  53 Ronsard, Le Premier Livre des Amours, p. 25 (our translation).

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Pontus de Tyard and Ronsard thus include, at the opening of their works, a sonnet that was not the first of Petrarch’s Canzoniere. In such a prominent position, the sonnet works as an invitation: the poets invite the reader to ‘come and see’ something that can clearly be identified as poetry. Their strategy seems to have worked extremely well, since three other French poets opened their collections by a similar invitation: Clovis Hesteau de Nuisement (1578) asks the reader to come and see the powerful idea that blossoms in every soul — that is, love;54 Flaminio de Birague (1585) invites us to come and see a martyr, a suffering lover, and to read his complaints;55 Scalion de Virbluneau (1599) bids the reader to come and see the power of an iron bow and of a sharpened arrow — that is, the weapons of love.56 The reason why the first lines are so largely quoted and rephrased lies, according to Olivier Millet, in the habit of including an index of the first lines in late sixteenth-century collections.57 Cécile Alduy also asserts that ‘qui voudra voir’ works as a poetical tag, labelling the whole book as love-poetry.58 Indeed, not only the first line but also the structure of the poem is generally reprised and rephrased by the poets, as if the whole sonnet worked as a well-conceived model for sonnet-making. In this sense, some sonneteers seem to consider the practice of rewriting as a form of poetical training. Torquato Tasso (1563–1567), for instance, in his version of the sonnet, reproduces the original structure, opposing the octave to the sestet, using the same incipit (‘chi vuol veder […] vedrà’), keeping the same rhyme scheme, but changing the general meaning and the choice of rhymes.59 Scalion de Virbluneau (1599) also keeps the original structure  54 See the first sonnet of the second book of the Amours by Clovis Hesteau de Nuisement: ‘Quiconque voudra voir comme une sainte Idée | S’éclot en nos esprits et s’oppose à nos yeux […] | Il verra ce que peut pour dompter la poison’, Nuisement, Les Œuvres poétiques (1578), ed. by Guillot, book ii, p. 209.  55 See the second sonnet of the Premieres Amours, by Flaminio de Birague (1585): ‘Qui voudra voir un sujet de martyre, | Qui voudra voir un amant douloureux, | Qui voudra voir des regrets amoureux, | Vienne ces vers et ces complaintes lire’, Les Premières Œuvres poétiques, vol. i, ed. by Guillot and Clément, sonnet 2, p. 25.  56 See the first sonnet of the Loyalles et pudicques amours, by Scalion de Virbluneau (1599): ‘Cil qui voudra connaître le pouvoir | D’un arc d’acier d’une flèche pointue | […] Vienne vers moi afin de le savoir’, Loyalles et Pudicques Amours, sonnet 1, p. 1.  57 ‘Il est évident que les éditions du Petrarca, qui proposent en général, à la fin du volume, une table des incipit, sont favorables à une pareille sélection, puisque la circulation et la connaissance des rime sparse sont en partie filtrées par cet appendice éditorial, qui signale à l’attention du lecteur et impose à sa mémoire le premier vers comme point de repère permettant d’identifier une pièce du recueil’, Millet, ‘Du Bellay et Pétrarque’, p. 262. See for example the table at the beginning of Les Fleurs des plus excellents poètes de ce temps, ér–éiiiv, and, in England, the table at the end of Tottel’s Miscellany (Tottel ed., Songes and sonettes, Ggii–Ggiiiv).  58 ‘Ces trois mots, “Qui voudra voir”, fonctionnent comme un véritable sésame identificatoire : il suffit de les prononcer — si possible lors du sonnet inaugural — pour que l’œuvre soit aussitôt reconnue comme recueil d’“Amours”’ (Alduy, Politique des « Amours », p. 54).  59 ‘Chi vuol veder come ne l’acque amare […] Vedrà su queste sponde, in cui già nacque’,

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but tries to combine it with a different rhyme scheme in the sestet, using the so-called ‘rime marotique’ (CCD/EED).60 Moreover, some poets play with the original structure: Ronsard duplicates it, repeating ‘qui vouldra voyr’ at the beginning of every quatrain; Hesteau de Nuisement (1578) delays the response, replying to ‘qui voudra voir’ only in the second tercet.61 Flaminio de Birague combines the two strategies: he repeats ‘qui voudra voir’ anaphorically three times in his first quatrain, and then anticipates the response at the beginning of the second quatrain.62 The sonneteers not only rework the structure, they also put Petrarch’s vocabulary to new use. For example, in the original sonnet, the verb ‘fura’ appears at the end of line six: it is a rare form, it means here ‘abduct, kidnap’, and describes the action of death, taking beauty away from this world. It is an important word, since it rhymes with ‘non dura’ (every beautiful thing ‘does not last’) and eventually with ‘Natura’ in the first line. Indeed, later imitators try to use ‘fura’ in their rhyme scheme, though it is a rare and unusual form. Poliziano (1495) uses it with a slightly different meaning (in his verses the lady ‘steals’ the lover’s heart)63 and Dolce (1545) moves it from the octave to the sestet.64 Some rewritings can be seen as poetical laboratories, where the poets train themselves by combining different forms. Malipiero in his Petrarca spirituale (1536), for instance, reuses the structure, the rhyme scheme, and the works of Petrarch, introducing only a few changes.65 Conversely, the rewritings by Bernardo Tasso seem quite different from the original sonnet because Tasso changes most of the rhymes.66 But a closer analysis reveals that Tasso reuses rhymes taken from famous poems by Petrarch, and even from Dante’s Paradise: Chi vuol veder quanto può far Natura, quanto può dar il Ciel cortese e largo, rimiri questa angelica figura Torquato Tasso, Rime d’amore, ed. by Solerti, sonnet 180, p. 270.  60 Virbluneau, Loyalles et Pudicques Amours, sonnet 1, p. 1.  61 Nuisement, Les Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Guillot, book ii, sonnet 1, p. 209.  62 ‘Qui voudra voir un sujet de martyre, | Qui voudra voir un amant douloureux, | Qui voudra voir des regrets amoureux, | Vienne ces vers et ces complaintes lire. | Il connaitra comme Amour me martyre’, Birague, Les Premières Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Guillot and Clément, sonnet 2, p. 25.  63 ‘Chi vuol veder lo sforzo di Natura | Venga a veder questo leggiadro viso | D’Ippolita che ’l cor cogli occhi fura’, Poliziano, Rime, ed. by Delcorno Branca, poem 7, p. 284.  64 See Dolce’s poem in Domenichi, ed., Rime diuerse di molti eccellentiss. auttori nuouamente raccolte, p. 310: ‘[…] Sapra, si come Amor l’anime fura, | Come l’ancide e le risana, e come | Dolce è morir e viver in tal nodo. | Alhor dira: benedette le some, | Che premon quel fedele: ond’io ne lodo | Le sue bellezze, e l’alta mi Aventura’.  65 Malipiero clearly reuses the structure, the rhyme, and the words of Petrarch introducing very few changes, as we can see in line 8: if Petrarch states that a mortal beauty does not last, Malipiero, referring to the Virgin Mary, says that her nature lasts forever. See Malipiero, Il Petrarca spirituale, sonnet 210, 61v.  66 Bernardo Tasso, Rime, ed. by Martignone, p. 58. See Ferroni, ‘Come leggere “I tre libri degli Amori” di Bernardo Tasso (1534–1537)’ (our translation).

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per cui cotante carte io vergo e spargo, che sola così umil, così secura s’inalza dal mortifero letargo; ma bisogna la vista oltra misura aver pronta e vivace, e gli occhi d’Argo, ch’ ell’ ha tante bellezze altiere e nove quant’ onde ha’l mar, quant’ ha fioretti aprile, ond’ esce un foco de l’eterno ardore da cui sì rara e tal virtù si move ch’ ogni più scabro e più villano core rende col suo calor vago e gentile. (Who lists to see what Nature can do, How much the courteous and generous Heaven can give, Let them look at this angelical figure For whom I use and circulate so much paper, She who is the only one, so humble and unharmed by love, Who awakes from deadly sleep; But one needs both sight that is (to a high degree) Quick and fast, and Argus’s eyes Because she has as many high and new beauties As there are waves in the sea, as there are flowers in April, From which rises a fire of eternal ardour A fire from which moves such rare and great virtue That any rough and low heart Is made beautiful and noble by its heat.) The rhyme ‘nove – move’ is taken from Canzoniere 42 (ll. 2 and 3), ‘ardore – core’ from Canzoniere 161 (ll. 2 and 3), ‘aprile – gentile’ from Canzoniere 67 (ll. 9 and 12). The rhyme ‘largo – Argo – letargo’ (broad, Argus, lethargy) is a very difficult one, and is used in the last canto of Dante’s Paradise (canto 33, ll. 92, 94, 96) to express the ineffable nature of the vision of God. Bernardo Tasso probably chooses to use it in his sonnet in order to show his mastery, and also to compare (implicitly) the vision of the lady to the vision of God. Other sonneteers choose to expand the original sonnet: Pietro Barignano (1565) transforms the two four-line stanzas of the original sonnet into four six-line stanzas, thus amplifying the eulogy of the lady and describing her hair, her forehead, her eyes, her cheek.67 Thomas Watson’s rewriting of the poem in his Hekatompathia (1582) offers an instructive example of the processes at work — not least because the poet explains how he uses his source in the composition of his poem.  67 ‘Chi vol veder quantunque pò natura | ne l’excellenzia d’ogni suo lavoro, | venga a veder quest’angioletta pura | e sì vedrà, tra belle chiome d’oro […]’, Barignano, Rime, ed. by Quondam, Alfonzetti, and Asperti, no. 628, 213r.

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The paratext of Watson’s volume makes it look like ‘a virtual textbook of imitatio’, with its preliminary remarks and marginal annotations on each poem, in which Watson patiently describes his method and cites his sources, in a way that testifies to what Stephen Clucas calls ‘a kind of “telescoped” or compressed reception of the Petrarchan tradition’: the poems of Petrarch, his imitators and the imitators of those very imitators are jumbled together in a poetic game of combinatory rewriting.68 Petrarch’s original sonnet is developed over three six-line stanzas in which the beauties of the lady are carefully described. Watson also refers to an Italian imitation of that poem: a strambotto by Serafino Ciminelli, ‘Chi uol ueder gran cose altiere & noue’ first published in 1516.69 Watson therefore announces that the poem is at the same time an imitation of Petrarch, an imitation of Serafino, and an imitation of Petrarch through Serafino — although on closely reading the poem, the specific contribution of Serafino’s strambotto as a source is hard to point out. While the first few lines are close enough to both Petrarch and Serafino for the imitation to be obvious, lines 7 to 10 veer away from these direct models to turn into a blazon that first associates the beloved’s body parts with goddesses ( Juno, l. 7, Pallas, l. 8, Venus, l. 9) to then insist on the impact of the beloved’s eyes upon the speaker’s heart (ll. 11–18). This last part of the sonnet acts as an amplification of the thirteenth line of Petrarch’s poem, ‘l’ingegno offeso dal soverchio lume’, by insisting on the topos of the dazzling gaze of the beloved. This topos is associated with the metaphor of the flight early in the poem (l. 5–6), but the two are only developed in the final seven lines. A marginal note that Watson appends to the penultimate verse refers both to Pliny’s Natural History and a sonnet by Serafino, ‘L’aquila che col sguardo affisa el sole’.70 It is also possibly inspired from Petrarch’s poem 19, ‘Son animali al mondo de sí altera’. This time, Pliny (especially Natural History x.3) and Serafino are the two sources on which Watson bases his amplification. Watson’s poem exemplifies the inner workings of Petrarchism: amplification through the imitation, and then combination of different sources (sometimes several from Petrarch’s Canzoniere). Certain devices seem to be aimed at claiming Petrarch as a source: the use of the blazon, or the (here indirect) reference to well-known topoi from and/or poems by Petrarch such as ‘Pace non trovo’ (Canzoniere 134) or ‘S’amor non è’ (Canzoniere 132).71 Other devices, such as the repeated

 68 Watson, The Hekatompathia or Passionate Centurie of Loue, poem XXI. See Snare, ‘Trans­ lation and Transmutation in William Tyndale and Thomas Watson’, p. 197; see also Clucas, ‘Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia and European Petrarchism’, p. 217.  69 See Ciminelli, Die Strambotti des Serafinos dall’Aquila, ed. by Bauer-Formiconi, poem no. 247, p. 268.  70 See Ciminelli, Sonetti e altre rime, ed. by Rossi, p. 172.  71 See also sonnet XIX of Emaricdulfe by E. C. (1595), an amplification of the beginning of Canzoniere 248 based on the strife between contraries (a topos whose origin can be found in Canzoniere 134), in which Wisdom and Nature are personified.

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use of personification, seem to be more frequent in English than in Italian or French imitations. By rewriting, expanding, condensing, combining different verses taken from Petrarch, Renaissance poets seem to train themselves, as well as experiment with new forms of poetry. The desire to translate and rewrite Petrarch’s sonnet can also be seen as an attempt to create a new poetical language. Indeed, Petrarch’s sonnet was used as a conversational example and became a model for those who wished to speak of love in a courtly context. Muzzarelli (c. 1505), for example, included a rewritten version of the sonnet in a fictional dialogue between courtiers in Mantua. The characters are summoned to compose a corona to the lady, and each of them delivers in turn an improvised poem. One of the courtiers, Epenofilo, then performs an impromptu imitation of Petrarch’s sonnet.72 The improvised delivery of a sonnet is represented as a conversational practice and a required skill of the well-bred courtier. In Cervantes’ Galatea (1585), Elicio and Erasto, two shepherds enamoured with Galatea, sing a duet to praise their lady. The duet starts thus: ELICIO El que quisiere ver la hermosura mayor que tuvo, o tiene, o terná el suelo; el fuego y el crisol donde se apura la blanca castidad, el limpio zelo; todo lo que el valor, ser y cordura, y cifrado en la tierra un nuevo cielo, juntas en uno alteza y cortesía, venga a mirar a la pastora mía.

ELICIO Whoso would fain the greatest beauty find That was, or is, or shall be on the earth, The fire and crucible, where are refined White chastity and purest zeal, all worth, Being, and understanding of the mind, A Heaven that in the world had its new birth, Loftiness joined in one with courtesy, Let him approach my shepherdess to see.

ERASTO Venga a mirar a la pastora mía quien quisiere contar de gente en gente que vio otro sol que daba luz al día, más claro qu’el que sale del oriente. Podrá decir cómo su fuego enfría y abrasa al alma que tocar se siente del vivo rayo de sus ojos bellos, y que no hay más que ver después de vellos.73

ERASTO Let him approach my shepherdess to see, Whoso would tell the peoples of the sight That he hath seen, a sun whose radiancy The day illumined, than the sun more bright; How with her fire she chilleth, this can be Made known, and how the soul she sets alight Which touched by her fair flashing eyes has been. That naught is left to see when they are seen.74

 72 ‘Chi vol veder quel che non può natura, | né’l ciel con tutti i dèi, | miri dentr’al bel volto di costei […]’, Muzzarelli, Amorosa Opra (c. 1505), ed. by Scarpa, chapter 39, pp. 78–79.  73 Cervantes, Galatea, in Obras completas, vol. ii, ed. by Sevilla Arroyo and Rey Hazas, pp. 265–66.  74 Cervantes, Galatea, ed. by Fitzmaurice Kelly and trans. by Oelsner and Welford, p. 189.

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The two shepherds transform Petrarch’s sonnet into a musical dialogue: Elicio invites the audience to come and see (‘el que quisiere ver’) the greatest beauty on earth, that is, the shepherdess Galatea (‘la pastora mía’). Erasto continues the song, repeating the last line: ‘venga a mirar a la pastora mía’. The repetition shows the rivalry between the two lovers: ‘my shepherdess’ is now Erasto’s beloved, while the phrase referred to Elicio’s in the previous line. Erasto repurposes the sonnet, reversing its structure (‘venga a mirar […] quien quisiere contar’), and concluding it thus: if you come and see Galatea, you will be able to say how fire can at the same time freeze and burn the soul of the lover. Petrarch’s lines become a new language, which every poet wishes to learn, to translate, and to adapt to his own poetical tradition. This is clearly shown by Benvenuto Italian’s use of the sonnet. A teacher of Italian in London, Benvenuto Italian wrote a textbook for learning Italian (1612). His Passenger, like other language textbooks, is composed of several dialogues in English and in Italian between fictional characters.75 In one of the dialogues, staging a conversation between courtiers, one of the characters says: E. Chi vuol veder quanto può far Natura, e ’l Ciel tra noi, venga a mirar costei: Ah dolce vista di bel viso adorno, in qual parte del Ciel, in quale Idea era l’essempio, onde Natura tolse quel bel viso leggiadro, in che ella volse mostrar qua giù, quanto là su potea?

E. Hee that would see what Nature and the Heavens can effect in us, let him behold but her. O pleasant sight, adorned with faire hewe, in which part of heaven, and what Ideas mould, as an example, Dame Nature frame that pleasing looke, wherein shed meant to shew what she could doe both above and below?76

Benvenuto writes a prose version of the sonnet and translates it into English. Here, the sonnet is not regarded as poetry, but as a piece of Italian conversation. Petrarch’s line becomes a linguistic and conversational example: Benvenuto seems to suggest that every learned man should learn it, if he wishes to converse easily in an elegant context.77 This example also suggests that in Jacobean England, there might still have been a form of equation between the sonnet and the Italian language. *     *    *  75 As a similar example, see Florio, Florios second Frutes, whose dialogues and conversations were used by well-known writers (Yates, John Florio, the Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England, p. 335; Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England, pp. 157–204). On Italian language learning in early modern England, see Lawrence, ‘Who the Devil Taught Thee So Much Italian?’, esp. pp. 177–200; and Gallagher, Learning Languages in Early Modern England, esp. pp. 108 and 130 on Benvenuto.  76 Italian, The Passenger, pp. 556–57.  77 In Italy, Bembo prescribes Petrarch as the main model of literary language and induces every poet to use its grammar and words. See Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua, in Prose e Rime, ed. by Dionisotti, p. 83.

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Sonnet 248 was rewritten in various languages throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, adapted to various local (political and poetical) contexts by poets with their own artistic agendas, thus contributing to spread Petrarchism as a transnational language that could help fashion vernacular poetry in countries other than Italy. In that context, what singles out the English Petrarchan tradition is the limited amount of direct adaptations from Petrarch, and the fact that most of them are only partial rewritings of Petrarch’s poems. Imitations flourished according to a vertical process of transmission (from Petrarch to the imitator), but also according to a more horizontal pattern in which poets imitated both Petrarch and his imitators, the latter sometimes being their fellow countrymen and/or their contemporaries. We hope we have shown that the rewritings were not just aimed at establishing a deliberate dialogue with Petrarch, be it praise or parody. Ultimately, such a binary misrepresents even the most ideologically driven rewritings of sonnet 248 by having poets side with or against Petrarch and/or his followers (who were Petrarchists in very diverse ways). The efforts made to translate, adapt, and rephrase Petrarch express not only the desire to compete with him, but also, and perhaps more often, the desire to create a new poetical grammar and a new poetical language. Most of the imitators primarily (or also) wish to play with their audience, and to participate in a parlour game, aiming at surprising and pleasing. In this sense, Petrarch’s poetry acquires a conversational use. His poems and lines are considered commonplaces that constitute a stockpile of poetical and linguistic knowledge shared on the European scale.78 The large number of versions of sonnet 248 reveals that rewriting Petrarch became such a widespread practice that it almost coincided with the very act of composing poetry. The reasons for the enduring popularity of ‘Chi vuol veder’ probably lie in the faultlessness of its rhythmic and syntactic structure, as well as its paradigmatic choice of themes and vocabulary that make it a perfect paragon of Petrarch’s poetry, easy to imitate and to adapt. Imitating Petrarch, in the Renaissance, was a form of poetical training. The metapoetic dimension made it an ideal medium for poets to engage with the complex movements of the poem from one culture to another, translating and duplicating not just themes and tropes, but also the very imitation processes that gave birth to new poems.

 78 For the practice of commonplacing, see Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books; and Rhodes, Shakespeare and the Origins of English, pp. 149–88.

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Machiavelli, Niccolò, Discorsi (Le premier [second-troisiesme] livre des Discours de l’estat de paix et de guerre), trans. by Jacques Gohory (Paris: Estienne Groulleau, 1548) Malipiero, Girolamo, Il Petrarca spirituale (Venice: Marcolini, 1536) Marino, Giovan Battista, Galleria (1620), ed. by Marzia Pieri (Padua: Liviana, 1979) Monteverdi, Claudio, Canzonette a tre voci (Venice: G. Vincenti and R. Amadino, 1584); repr. ed. by G. Francesco Malipiero (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1967) Muzzarelli, Giovanni, Amorosa Opra (c. 1505), ed. by Emanuela Scarpa (Verona: Libreria universitaria editrice, 1982) Nappi, Cesare, ‘Strambotto’ (1498), in Rimatori bolognesi del Quattrocento, ed. by Ludovico Frati (Bologna: Romagnoli Dall’acqua, 1908) Nuisement, Clovis Hesteau de, Les Œuvres poétiques (1578), ed. by R. Guillot (Geneva: Droz, 1996) Parabosco, Girolamo, Il primo libro dei madrigali (1551), ed. by Nicola Longo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1987) Petrarch, Francis, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, trans. by Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976) —— , Canzoniere, ed. by Roberto Antonelli (Turin: Einaudi, 1992) Poliziano, Angelo, Rime (1495), ed. by Daniela Delcorno Branca (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1986) Ronsard, Pierre de, Le Premier Livre des Amours (1560), in Œuvres, ed. by Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), pp.  25–164 Scève, Maurice, Délie (1544), ed. by Gérard Defaux (Geneva: Droz, 2004) Sidney, Philip, Astrophel and Stella (1591), in The Poems of Philip Sidney, ed. by William A. Ringler Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) Spenser, Edmund, ‘Ruines of Rome, by Bellay’, in Complaints (1591), in The Works, vol. viii, ed. by Edwin Greenlaw and others (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), pp. 141–54 Stampa, Gaspara, Rime (1554), ed. by Maria Bellonci and Rodolfo Ceriello (Milan: Rizzoli, 1994) Tansillo, Luigi, Canzoniere, ed. by Erasmo Percopo (Naples: Liguori, 1996) Tasso, Bernardo, Rime (1555), ed. by Vercingetorige Martignone (Turin: RES, 1995) Tasso, Torquato, Rime d’amore (1593), ed. by Angelo Solerti (Bologna: Romagnoli Dall’acqua, 1898) Tassoni, Alessandro, La Secchia rapita, l’Oceano e le Rime, ed. by Giorgio Rossi (Bari: Laterza, 1930) Tottel, Richard, ed., Songes and sonettes, written by the right honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other ([London]: Richard Tottel, 1557) Tyard, Pontus de, Erreurs amoureuses (1549), in Œuvres Poétiques, ed. by Eva Kushner (Paris: Champion, 2004) Varchi, Benedetto, Sonetti Spirituali (1555) (Florence: Giunti, 1573) Virbluneau, Scalion de, Loyalles et Pudicques Amours (Paris: Jamet Mettayer, 1599) Watson, Thomas, The Hekatompathia or Passionate Centurie of Loue (London: John Wolfe for Gabriell Cawood, 1582)

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Secondary Works Alduy, Cécile, Politique des « Amours » : Poétique et genèse d’un genre français nouveau (1544–1560) (Geneva: Droz, 2007) Baker, Deborah Lesko, ‘Petrarchan Lyric Subjectivity in Joachim Du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome’, Annali d’Italianistica, 22 (2004), 207–19 Balsamo, Jean, ‘“Nous l’avons tous admiré et imité : non sans cause”. Pétrarque en France à la Renaissance : un livre, un modèle, un mythe’, in Les Poètes français de la Renaissance et Pétrarque, ed. by Jean Balsamo (Geneva: Droz, 2004), pp. 11–34 Boswell, Jackson Campbell, and Gordon McMurry Braden, Petrarch’s English Laurels, 1475–1700: A Compendium of Printed References and Allusions (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012) Clucas, Stephen, ‘Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia and European Petrarchism’, in Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 years, ed. by Martin McLaughlin and Letizia Panizza (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 217–28 DellaNeva, JoAnn, ‘Illustrating the Deffence: Imitation and Poetic Perfection in Du Bellay’s Olive’, The French Review, 61.1 (Oct. 1987), 39–49 Dionisotti, Carlo, ‘Fortuna del Petrarca nel Quattrocento’, Italia medioevale e umanistica, 17 (1974), 61–113 Dubrow, Heather, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) Ferroni, Giovanni, ‘Come leggere “I tre libri degli Amori” di Bernardo Tasso (1534–1537)’, Quaderno di italianistica [della Sezione di Italiano dell’Università di Losanna] (2011), 99–144 Forster, Leonard, The Icy Fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) Gallagher, John, Learning Languages in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) Goeury, Julien, and Thomas Hunkeler, ed., Anatomie d’une anatomie. Nouvelles recherches sur les blasons anatomiques du corps féminin, Cahiers d’Humanisme et Renaissance 154 (Geneva: Droz, 2018) Greene, Roland, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) Hainsworth, Peter, ‘Translating Petrarch’, in Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 years, ed. by Martin McLaughlin and Letizia Panizza (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 243–258 Hardison, Osborne Bennett, Jr., Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) Holton, Amanda, ‘An Obscured Tradition: The Sonnet and Its Fourteen-Line Predecessors’, Review of English Studies, 62.255 ( June 2011), 373–92 Kalstone, David, ‘Sir Philip Sidney and “Poore Petrarch’s Long Deceased Woes”’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 63.1 ( Jan. 1964), 21–32

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Kennedy, William John, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) —— , The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) —— , Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016) —— , ‘English Petrarchism: From Commentary on Poetry to Poetry as Commentary’, in The Early Modern English Sonnet: Ever in Motion, ed. by Rémi Vuillemin, Laetitia Sansonetti, and Enrica Zanin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. 17–30 Lawrence, Jason, ‘Who the Devil Taught Thee So Much Italian?’: Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) Marrapodi, Michele, ‘Introduction: Past, Present and Future in Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies’, in The Routledge Research Companion to Anglo-Italian Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. by Michele Marrapodi (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 1–51 Melehy, Hassan, ‘Antiquities of Britain: Spenser’s Ruines of Time’, Studies in Philology, 102.2 (Spring 2005), 159–83 —— , The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) Millet, Olivier, ‘Du Bellay et Pétrarque, autour de l’Olive’, in Les Poètes français de la Renaissance et Pétrarque, ed. by Jean Balsamo (Geneva: Droz, 2004), pp. 253–66 Mortimer, Anthony, Petrarch’s Canzoniere in the English Renaissance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005) Moss, Ann, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) Quondam, Amedeo, ‘Sul Petrarchismo’, in Il petrarchismo: un modello di poesia per l’Europa, ed. by Loredana Chines, 2 vols (Rome: Bulzoni, 2006), i, pp. 27–92 Rebhorn, Wayne A., ‘Du Bellay’s Imperial Mistress: Les Antiquitez de Rome as Pet­ rarchist Sonnet Sequence’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33.4 (Winter, 1980), 609–22 Rhodes, Neil, Shakespeare and the Origins of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Roche, Thomas P., Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS, 1989) Roe, John, ‘The Comedy of Astrophil: Petrarchan Motifs in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella’, Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 years, ed. by Martin McLaughlin and Letizia Panizza (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) pp. 229–42 Sessions, William A., Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) Snare, Gerald, ‘Translation and Transmutation in William Tyndale and Thomas Watson’, Translation and Literature, 12.2 (Autumn, 2003), 189–204 Spiller, Michael G., The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992)

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Stamatakis, Chris, ‘Petrarch in Parts: Scattered Rhymes in Sixteenth-Century English Books’, in Translating Petrarch’s Poetry: L’Aura del Petrarca from the Quattrocento to the 21st Century, ed. by Carole Birkan-Berz, Guillaume Coatalen, and Thomas Vuong (London: Legenda/MHRA, 2020), pp. 13–30 Vuillemin, Rémi, ‘Michael Drayton’s Early Career and the Petrarchism of Ideas Mirrour (1594)’, Studies in Philology, 118.1 (Winter 2021), 70–96 Wyatt, Michael, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) —— , ‘Other Petrarchs in Early Modern England’, in Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 years, ed. by Martin McLaughlin and Letizia Panizza (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 203–16 Yates, Frances, John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934)

Pádraic Lamb

8. Traducing Ronsard Larceny and the Poet in English Love-Lyrics, 1582–1591

English literary critics in the Renaissance made it their business to contribute to the achievement, or renewal, of excellence in English poetry, though there was disagreement on how best to go about it. Inspiration, imitation of nature (mimesis) and imitation of literary models were three of the most prominent means to excellence, discrete but not necessarily incompatible, covered in critical treatments of poetry.1 I wish to focus here on the circulation of the poetry of the leading French poet of the second half of the sixteenth century, Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585), in the critical and creative debate on how to compose English love-lyrics between 1582 and 1591. What I call English Ronsardism — close or loose imitation of Ronsard’s poetic practice as well as comment thereon — drove some leading Elizabethan literary figures to try to delineate in moral and aesthetic terms the limits of legitimate literary imitation in composing love-lyrics. An important corollary of delineating imitation was the attempt to define what distinguished a poet from a translator or imitator. As I hope to show, Ronsardism seems to have acted as something of a lightning-rod for these important debates in Elizabethan literary history in a way which has not been justly appreciated up to now.2 Furthermore, the Ronsardist debate suggests an interesting critical approach to the question of authorship and the possibility of literary property through the recurring trope of larceny. The crucial period 1582–1591 was marked by a surge in English poetic production and commentary, in which the question of circulation of foreign

 1 See for instance Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. by Whigham and Rebhorn, pp. 93–94.  2 For an extensive and documented overview, see Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance, pp. 76–131. Ronsard serves largely as a counterpoint to the perceived affinity between Spenser and Du Bellay in Satterthwaite, Spenser, Ronsard, and Du Bellay; and consideration of his reception in English poetry is largely absent from recent work such as Melehy, The Poetics of Literary Transfer, and Martin and Melehy ed., French Connections in the English Renaissance. Pádraic Lamb ([email protected]) Université Lyon 2 Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer, ed. by Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin, PEEMB 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 195–219  10.1484/M.PEEMB-EB.5.127780

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texts and forms surfaced in highly charged aesthetic and moral terms. Lovepoetry in the Petrarchan tradition was a particularly prestigious form which by definition raised questions of imitation. This study begins with what I consider to be Thomas Watson’s manual of poetic imitation, the Hekatompathia (1582), which openly cites its sources, and closes with the publication which would spark the sonnet craze of the 1590s, Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591). A seeming consequence of the importation of French or Italian models is the importation of continental critical debates. English poets and commentators were soon engaged in disputes concerning literary imitation similar to those, for example, provoked in France by the innovations of Ronsard and Joachim Du Bellay. The poet and theologian Théodore de Bèze (Theodore Beza), for instance, condemned the Pléiade’s imitations in a preface to a biblical play written in 1550 and translated by Arthur Golding in 1577. Théodore de Bèze derisively characterized their work as false and derivative, ‘counterfet[ing] a ballet of Petrarks’ or ‘counterfet[ing] the furies of the auncient Poets’.3 Recommending literary imitation, Philip Sidney, in The Defence of Poesy (written c. 1580–1585), noted ‘[t]hat Daedalus, they say, both in this and in other, hath three wings to bear itself up into the air of due commendation: that is, art, imitation, and exercise’.4 George Puttenham, in his Art of English Poesy (first published in 1589), recognized that a valid procedure for poets is to devise, he said, ‘by any precedent or pattern laid before them’.5 It was recognized, then, that no literature is an island and for English poetry to emulate the glory of the classical languages (the famous translatio studii), a degree of circulation of worthy models from abroad, both classical and contemporary, was needed.6 Imitation alone, however, would not allow English as a literary language to surpass rival continental vernaculars, or indeed the ancient languages. Richard Mulcaster wrote a stirring nationalist linguistic manifesto to this effect, based in part on Joachim Du Bellay’s 1549 apology for vernacular poetry, La deffence, et illustration de la langue françoyse.7 The incommensurable native ‘Genius’ or ‘soulish substance’ of each language had

 3 For such a series of imitations of Petrarch, see chapter 7 above, by Enrica Zanin and Rémi Vuillemin. Bèze, A tragedie of Abraham’s sacrifice, trans. by Golding, ed. by Wallace, p. 6. For the original text, see Théodore de Bèze, Abraham sacrifiant, ed. by Cameron, Hall, and Higman, p. 48. See also Barthélémy Aneau’s Quintil horatian (1550) with barbs directed at Ronsard’s counterfeit of ancient poems, in Goyet ed., Traités de poétique et de rhétorique de la Renaissance, pp. 183, 194, 204. Marcel Raymond cites and discusses contemporaneous criticism (including Aneau but not Bèze) of Ronsard for plagiarism, in his L’Influence de Ronsard sur la poésie française: 1550–1585, vol. i, pp. 13–18, 58–59.  4 Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in The Major Works, ed. by Duncan-Jones, p. 242. Sidney’s Defence was first published in 1595. For the date of composition, see The Major Works, p. 371.  5 Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. by Whigham and Rebhorn, p. 94.  6 On imitation, see Greene, The Light in Troy (I express some reservations below); Pigman, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’; and recently Burrow, Imitating Authors. Plato to Futurity, part 2.  7 Renwick, ‘Mulcaster and Du Bellay’.

8. t rad u ci ng ro nsard

to be respected and cultivated, too, in a debate which involved questions of national rivalry and individual pride.8 In the treatise already mentioned, Puttenham inveighs against an English writer he accuses of ‘larceny’ and ‘injurious dealing’ in respect of the poetic works of a ‘French poet’, whom he esteems for having ‘well translated’ ancient Greek lyric poets: Ronsard.9 Evidently, for Puttenham the boundary between legitimate imitation of a precedent or pattern and larceny somehow interacts with his definitions of a poet and a translator. Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591) again broached imitation by reference to Ronsard. The poet-speaker decries poets who are no more than ‘Pindar’s apes’. This is a barbed verdict on Ronsard’s imitation of Pindar, a lineage which the French poet lost no occasion to vaunt in early publications.10 More than this, however, Sidney’s gibe is also a rebuke to those of his English contemporaries given to ‘aping’ Ronsard’s vernacular poetry. Both poet-critics advocated literary imitation, but framed their objections to its excesses as faults inimical to courtly humanist ideals of virtue (theft, aping).11 The double reference to Ronsard in defining best practice in literary imitation of the Ancients and the Moderns is intriguing. It stems, I believe, from Ronsard’s importance as a contemporary vernacular practitioner of literary imitation, as well as the imposing authorial figure of an oeuvre itself worthy of imitation. Critical understanding of creative imitation and allusion in Renaissance poetic composition has advanced since the days when Sidney Lee denounced ‘the mire of deceit and mystification’ surrounding Lodge’s borrowings from Ronsard, and accordingly, the Romantic notion of ‘originality’ is one to be approached with caution.12 The tropes of larceny and ownership are very present in the Ronsardist debate. This fact prompts me to reconsider the question of ‘originality’, which entails an affirmation of what I would like to call poetic propriety of particular styles of writing from these tropes. For a style to be  8 See Du Bellay, La deffence, et illustration de la langue françoyse ; & L’Olive, ed. by Monferran and Caldarini, p. 90; see Mulcaster, The First part of the elementarie which entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung, p. 158. This type of thinking is also obvious in poetic treatises, see, for example, Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. by Whigham and Rebhorn, pp. 95–96; Sidney, The Defence of Poesy in The Major Works, ed. by Duncan-Jones, p. 249. Also see the developments in chapters 2 and 3 of the present volume.  9 Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. by Whigham and Rebhorn, p. 338.  10 See Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 3, l. 3, in The Major Works, ed. by Duncan-Jones, p. 154, and, for instance, Pierre de Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Céard, Ménager, and Simonin, vol. i, pp. 995–97.  11 For Pigman, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, p. 15, Vida was the only critic to present theft positively; compare, however, Aretino, Sur la poétique, l’art et les artistes (MichelAnge et Titien), ed. by Larivaille and Procaccioli, trans. by Larivaille, pp. 12–16 (English translation in The Works of Aretino, Translated into English from the Original Italian, trans. by Putnam, vol. ii, pp. 132–35).  12 Lee ed., Elizabethan Sonnets, vol. ii, p. lxvi. Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature, has a rich discussion of originality, in particular the relation between Renaissance and classical writers, through the source-trope.

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stolen, a poet must first have owned it, at least figuratively. Adrian Johns has shown how ‘propriety’ was the term used by the Stationers’ Company in the sixteenth century to refer to a printer’s ‘ownership of a publication’, a term which also implied notions of good conduct within the trade.13 My use of poetic propriety adapts it to relate, not to legal ownership of a work or even of a subject, but to the representation of style as personal or characteristic of one person to a degree akin to personal property, so that excessive imitation of it could be considered theft. Thus, this aesthetic and moral discourse of poetic propriety (‘ownership’) emerges in the Ronsardist debate as a parameter of literary imitation, in the attempt to impose a certain propriety (‘decorum’) in intertextual relations, before legal protection was afforded to writers. I prefer ‘propriety’ to ‘property’ because this is a figurative and not juridical discourse and because, as Mark Rose points out, the relation between the two senses of ‘“propriety” […] suggests the way that matters of “ownness” flow into matters of “ownership” in the early modern period’.14 In the shadow cast by Ronsard, poetic propriety of a style is a trope used in critical and poetic discourse whose purpose is to distinguish the laudable poet from the overly imitative and the translator. I propose to envisage the circulation of Ronsardism as salvoes in this debate on how best to compose love-lyrics. Connecting these different imitations, citations and allusions in the perspective of the debate will show how influential the circulation of Ronsard’s works was, more clearly than the evidence of book-ownership or published translations or passing mentions of him. ‘To traduce’ in sixteenth-century English could equally mean to ‘transfer’ and to ‘translate’ as well as its modern senses of to ‘malign’, ‘discredit’ or ‘disgrace’.15 I will address some of these different senses of ‘traducing Ronsard’ in turn to shape my argument and to underline my view that these Ronsardist episodes form a single, sustained literary controversy. Firstly, I would like to map for my purposes the ‘traduction’ or circulation of Ronsardist texts in early modern England. Secondly, I will then examine the uses of Ronsard translations integrated into different autonomous collections. A series of prose and verse ripostes either traducing (in the modern sense) Ronsard’s translators as inapt, or traducing the French poet as a bad example for the English will then be used to demonstrate Ronsardism’s importance in the stylistic development of the English Renaissance lyric.

 13 See Johns, The Nature of the Book, pp. 187–89, 222–29, and the references to Rose in the next note.  14 Rose, Authors and Owners, p. 18. Rose, like Johns (see the previous note), dates the advent of authorial property to after the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (p. 13) but signals the convergence of literary and legal discourses in the writings of Milton, pp. 27–30.  15 Oxford English Dictionary online, ‘Traduce’ v. 1., 2., 4., 5.

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Ronsard’s Traduction in Early Modern England Records of copies of Ronsard’s works are limited to the Scottish Royal Library, Puttenham’s book-lists, and some mentions in diplomatic correspondence.16 A political dimension, elucidated by Jan van Dorsten, may have affected the material record.17 During the French Wars of Religion, Ronsard wrote a series of Discours which eventually embroiled him in a print controversy with Protestant writers.18 For New Year’s Day 1568, Thomas Jeney and Daniel Rogers, employed at the English embassy in Paris, presented a volume, A discours of the present troobles in Fraunce, to their ambassador, Henry Norris.19 It contained Jeney’s translation of the ‘last conciliatory poem’ of Ronsard’s Discours (Discours à la royne) and several Latin pieces by Daniel Rogers.20 The following year, the volume was one of a number seized in a raid and, despite its irenic intent, entered in an inventory of ‘books for defence of Papistry’.21 Was Ronsard’s name, equated with anti-Protestant polemic, dangerous? Was this episode responsible for the Ronsardist silence of the 1570s? Whatever the case, booksellers and cataloguers seem to have been dissuaded and English Ronsardism is closely associated with private and diplomatic networks. Ronsard was evidently read outside of the limited documented circles, and the accompanying documents (Table 8.1 and Figure 8.1) aim to give an insight into circulation of Ronsard’s works beyond the remaining bibliographical evidence. Table 8.1 lists English authors and their works which contain an imitation, translation, or comment on Ronsard’s poetry.22 Details of some of the dedicatees of these works are included to show that the reading of Ronsard crossed the boundaries of the infamous courtier feuds, as well as confessional lines.23 Ronsard found enthusiastic imitators and promoters amongst the crypto-Catholic sphere around the Earl of Oxford, with the Catholic Thomas Lodge, as well as with the unimpeachably reformed Daniel Rogers, while Sidney also knew his work.24 The writers most evidently familiar with the French ‘Archipoet’, as ambassador Thomas Smith called him, had all, with the exception of Lodge,  16 See Warner, The Library of James VI, 1573–1583; Willis, Shakespeare and George Puttenham’s ‘Arte of English Poesie’. On copies of his works given as diplomatic gifts, see Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance, p. 83.  17 Dorsten, Poets, Patrons, and Professors, pp. 73–75.  18 For broader analysis, see Malcolm Smith’s introduction to his edition, Ronsard, Discours des misères de ce temps, ed. by Smith, pp. 7–26, esp. 19.  19 Ronsard, A discours of the present troobles in Fraunce, and miseries of this tyme, trans. by Jeney. Rogers’s Elegia Danielis Rogerii Albimontii Angli was given its own half-title with independent pagination in the same volume. They are recorded separately in the bibliography.  20 Dorsten, Poets, Patrons, and Professors, p. 72.  21 Dorsten, Poets, Patrons, and Professors, p. 64.  22 References to the original editions are given in the bibliography even where quotations are drawn from modern critical editions.  23 Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, pp. 163–67.  24 For the earl himself, see Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, p. 166; for Watson, see Nicholl, The Reckoning, pp. 192, 213–17. On Rogers, see Dorsten, Poets, Patrons, and Professors, pp. 29–30, 100.

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pá d r a ic lam b Table 8.1. Chronological list of Ronsardist writings discussed.

1568

Thomas Jeney, A discours of the present troobles in Fraunce Daniel Rogers, Elegia Danielis Rogerii Albimontii Angli

1582

Thomas Watson, The Hekatompathia. Dedicated to the Earl of Oxford.

1584

John Soowthern, Pandora. Dedicated to the Earl of Oxford.

1584? Arthur Gorges, Vanneytes and Toyes 1589

George Puttenham, The arte of English poesie. Dedicated to William Cecil. Thomas Lodge in Robert Greene’s Spanish Masquerado

1590

Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde. Dedicated to Baron Hunsdon. Tarltons newes out of purgatorie Robert Greene, Francescos Fortunes

1591

Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella

spent time in France.25 All of those who had travelled to France had been in the employ of the English embassy in Paris, with the exception of Sidney, who did, however, spend time there in 1572.26 While Jeney’s Discourse was clearly an embassy-sponsored translation, and poetic translation could on occasion be an arm of government propaganda, it is difficult to discern in the other cases specific political motivations for the uses made of Ronsard, aside from the general aim of cultivating learned humanism at the Elizabethan court.27 Figure 8.1 makes use of the above information to map the ‘ricochets’ of Ronsardism, as its circulation becomes a productive factor in the illustration and discussion of English love-lyrics. In the opening volley, Ronsard’s oeuvre directly inspired poetic works in the cases of Thomas Watson and John Soowthern. These uses provoked the riposte of George Puttenham and the reprimand of Philip Sidney. Thomas Lodge, an early admirer of Sidney, was also devoted to Ronsard.28 The Ronsardism on display in Lodge’s and Robert Greene’s prosimetrical romances was such that it gave rise to another artistic reprimand: a pastiche in Tarltons news out of purgatorie (1590).

 25 Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance, p. 83.  26 Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, pp. 60–62, 233–34. For Arthur Gorges’ collaboration with the embassy, see May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets, p. 103.  27 Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641, pp. 672–83. The specific role of Ronsard is not addressed in a suggestive article by Gibson, ‘Remapping Elizabethan Court Poetry’.  28 Lodge’s The Delectable Historie of Forbonius and Prisceria (1584) was based on an episode from Sidney’s then-unpublished Arcadia (see Lodge, Rosalind: Euphues’ golden legacy found after his death in his cell at Silexedra, ed. by Beecher, p. 257). For Lodge and Ronsard, see Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance, pp. 112–16, but as Beecher could write in 1996, the question is still ‘awaiting further investigation’ (in Lodge, Rosalind, p. 78 n. 4), despite some recent work, see Holmes, ‘Thomas Lodge’s Amours: The Copy-Text for Imitations of Ronsard in Phillis’.

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201

Pierre de Ronsard’s oeuvre

Thomas Watson, Hekatompathia

Arthur Gorges, Vanneytes and Toyes

John Soowthern, Pandora

Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella

George Puttenham, Arte of English Poesy

Thomas Lodge, Rosalind Robert Greene, Francescos Fortunes

Tarltons news out of Purgatorie

Figure 8.1. Map of Ronsardian ricochets.

Translation I: Watson and the ‘Rule of Art’ Though in numerical terms Watson’s Hekatompathia drew most on Italian sources, the commendatory verse of the little-known Charles Downhall revealingly challenges English poets to emulate closer neighbours. Indeed, the flourishing of contemporaneous French poetry seems to have offered a tantalizingly achievable model: The Gallic language begins to grow rich at Parnassus, And to flourish with the new works of Ronsard. Meanwhile, England, why do you alone produce no poet?29 These lines make use of a trope employed by Ronsard to present his work as a perfect example of the translatio studii: his poetic vocation was Greek in origin but in expression identifiable with French and the person of Ronsard.30 Downhall intended that Watson be recognized as the poet (‘vatem’) of the  29 ‘Gallica Parnasso coepit ditescere lingua, | Ronsardique operis Luxuriare novis. | Sola quid interea nullum paris Anglia vatem?’, Watson, The Hekatompathia: Or, Passionate Centurie of Love (1582), ed. by Heninger, ❧3v. All quotations are from this facsimile edition of the 1582 edition. The translation is Heninger’s (p. xiii). The same passage is exploited differently by Anne Coldiron in her important article, ‘Watson’s Hekatompathia and Renaissance Lyric Translation’, p. 4. Also see Snare, ‘Translation and Transmutation in William Tyndale and Thomas Watson’, esp. pp. 197, 202.  30 See, for example, the ‘Vœu’ which opens the Amours (1552) (Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Céard, Ménager, and Simonin, vol. i, p. 19). The translatio studii could also be represented as theft in a glorified, militarized form: ‘Je pillay Thebe, et saccageay la Pouille’ (p. 677).

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translatio studii in England, equivalent to France’s Ronsard — though Watson was to emulate a living poet. Downhall’s liminary verse points to Ronsard as the chief model of imitation. The succeeding sequence further designates Ronsard as one of a number of models to imitate (others include Petrarch and Serafino). Downhall’s evocation of an ‘English Ronsard’, along with the deliberate naming of sources and repeated references to the ‘Authour’ in the headnotes, make it clear that imitation is not a bar to qualifying as a poet in one’s own right. Studying Watson’s Ronsardian references will enable us to observe the process by which the many sources of the Hekatompathia became Watson’s own poetic propriety. Watson uniquely explains his method of composition: in headnotes to each poem, he either comments on and cites his source, describes the dominant emotion of the ‘I’, or states the main rhetorical figure at work. Watson thus emphasizes training in elocutio through the use of figures, for which he gives the Greek or Latin names: This Passion is framed upon a somewhat tedious or too much affected continuation of that figure in Rhethorique, whiche of the Grekes is called παλιλογία or ἀναδίπλωσις, of the Latines Reduplicatio: whereof Susenbrotus (if I well remember me) alleadgeth this example out of Virgill, Sequitur pulcherrimus Austur, Austur equo fidens AEneid. 1031 Though the expressive capacities of the English vernacular are clearly recognized through this approach, Watson does not feel the need, as Puttenham later will, to translate systematically the Greek or Latin names of the figures into English. This polyglot show of learning no doubt also indicates that he presumes his prospective readers have at least some competence in Latin. Given this apparatus, it seems to me the Hekatompathia was intended as a manual or art of love-poetry in English with extremely extensive examples; other poetry collections had been published with commentaries but none in this detail and with this pedagogical bent. Watson wishes to guide the development of English love-lyrics and voices the desire in a liminary Latin poem that his book cross the desk of Sidney.32 This rhetorical-pedagogical focus extends to the second key element of the Hekatompathia which Downhall had identified, via the comparison with Ronsard, as an important part of the advancement of English poetry: namely the treatment of the poetic persona. In the preface, Watson gaily alerts the reader that he will be speaking out of both sides of his mouth: ‘in respect of my travaile in penning these love passions, or for pitie of my paines in suffering them (although but supposed)’. He is in thrall not to a dark lady, nor to the depredations of his humour but to a rhetorical and generic model  31 Watson, The Hekatompathia, ed. by Heninger, F1r.  32 Watson, The Hekatompathia, ed. by Heninger, ❧2r.

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of expression: ‘It is nothing praeter decorum [inappropriate] for a maiemed man to halt in his pase, where his wound enforceth him, or for a Poete to falter in his Poëme, when his matter requireth it’.33 The reader is invited to give blithe credence to the overriding fiction of the persona of the suffering love poet, while at the same time taking cognizance of the rhetorical artifice of the discursive situation. Watson’s is a sophisticated view of poetry as a transmissible ‘rhetorical’ art with an emphasis on elocution, which actively seeks to encourage the biographical fallacy — the ethical position of the poetic ‘I’ addressing his ‘Mistresse’ — as an essential part of the decorum of love-poetry. The foregrounding of the poetic subject, as opposed to the object, is a trait of Ronsard’s verse, as Downhall seems to have remarked. Watson insists on these two elements, thereby making it clear that the overarching and avowedly fictional passions of the author’s persona, allied with the recognition of referentiality, constitute what John Lyly, in a commendatory epistle addressed to ‘the Authour his friend’, recognized as the ‘persuading pleasure’ of the text for the reader.34 Ronsard’s lyrics are called on to furnish forth Watson’s love-fiction in four different poems, numbers 27, 28, 54, and 83. In the headnote to his twenty-seventh lyric, Watson gives an account of his assimilation of Ronsard under two headings. The first is ‘perfect imitation’, that is, translation; and the second is ‘close imitation’: In the first sixe verses of this Passion, the Author hath imitated perfectly sixe verses in an Ode of Ronsard, which beginneth thus: Celui qui n’ayme est malheureux, Et malheureux est l’amoureux, Mais la misere, &c?35 And in the last staffe of this Passion also he commeth very neere to the sense, which Ronsard useth in an other place, where he writeth to his Mistresse in this maner: En veus tu baiser Pluton La bas, apres che Caron T’aura mise en sa nacelle?36 Unhappy is the wight thats void of Love, And yet unhappy hee, whom Love torments, But greatest griefe that man if forc’t to prove. […]  33 Watson, The Hekatompathia, ed. by Heninger, A3r.  34 Watson, The Hekatompathia, ed. by Heninger, A3r. On referentiality and pleasure, see Beecher’s introduction to his edition of Lodge, Rosalind, p. 64, and Rees, ‘Italian and Italianate Poetry’ (cited by Beecher).  35 See Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Céard, Ménager, and Simonin, vol. i, pp. 839–40.  36 See Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Céard, Ménager, and Simonin, vol. i, p. 93.

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She hopes (perchance) to live and flourish still, Or els, when Charons boate hath felt her peaze, By loving lookes to conquer Plutoes will; But all in vaine: t’is not Proserpin’s ease: She never will permit that any one Shall joy his Loue, but she her selfe alone.37 Watson domesticated Ronsard’s AABCCB rhyme scheme as ABABCC sixains and transformed two different Ronsardian odes into a single poem in a different genre, which he called indifferently a ‘Passion’ or a ‘Sonnet’. Passion 27 fulfils Watson’s aims in respect of rhetoric and poetic persona. The rhetorical requirement is met by the judgement used in selecting and arranging the poem’s themes or conceits, as well as by the elocutionary work involved in imitating or translating from French to English, according to his knowledge of the ‘rule of art’.38 The persona requirement is satisfied by uniting judgement and elocution in a coherent fiction of a lover writing his ‘passions’ (in both senses) to his beloved. It is in this sense that the consequent English verse is attributed to the ‘Author’, and not, for instance, to an English translator or imitator of Ronsard, nor to Ronsard directly. An annotation on the first of the Ronsardian extracts quoted above (‘Celui qui n’ayme est malheureux’) seems to confirm this reading and highlight Watson’s consciousness of Ronsard as a model of imitation. The poem’s status is clearly indicated by the genitive: it is an ‘Ode of Ronsard’, though the note remarks that ‘Ronsard here transcribes [describuntur] three verses from Anacreon the Greek’.39 As Anacreon’s verses became Ronsard’s ode, so Ronsard’s ode becomes the passion of the ‘Author’. The transfer is justified by the rhetorical work and the stamp of a persona outlined above. Watson is thus himself applying what he knew to be the method Ronsard had applied to Anacreon, amongst others. In doing so, he was taking up the role of English Ronsard that Downhall had assigned him: ‘But finally Watson, outstanding in talent as well as art | has taught the Pierides to speak English.’40 I would argue that the approach based on propriety enables a finer understanding of how Watson represented his imitative practice. Others, like Thomas Greene’s classifications in The Light in Troy (1982), seem less relevant because the Hekatompathia displays few if any signs of the angst-ridden relationship to Time and its passing which underlies Greene’s analysis; Ronsard was still alive and publishing in 1582.41 Anne Coldiron refers at length to the famous

 37 Watson, The Hekatompathia, ed. by Heninger, D2r.  38 Watson, The Hekatompathia, ed. by Heninger, A3r.  39 ‘Hii tres versus a Ronsardo describuntur ex Anacreonte Graeco’ (my translation), Watson, The Hekatompathia, ed. by Heninger, D2r.  40 ‘Ingenio tandem praestans Watsonus, et arte, | Pieridas docuit verba Britanna loqui’, Watson, The Hekatompathia, ed. by Heninger, ❧3v, p. xiii.  41 For ‘heuristic’ imitation, see Greene, The Light in Troy, pp. 40–43. His ‘eclectic’ imitation

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classical comparison of the poet’s imitation of a variety of authors and a bee’s gathering of nectar from diverse flowers, employed elsewhere by Watson and by Ronsard, to characterize both poets’ imitative practices.42 Though illuminating, this does not take much account of Watson’s pioneering role in setting out an English discourse of poetic propriety. I would like to return to Watson’s initial metaphor in the dedication to the Hekatompathia itself, according to which his collection is a flock of lambs grazing on the commonage: ‘this my pettie poor flocke vpon the open common of the wide world’.43 Watson is drawing on Horace’s guidelines in the ‘Art of Poetry’ on how a poet should make personal use of public (that is, well-known) subjects. The Roman poet figuratively opposed common property to personal property. I quote Ben Jonson’s version: ‘’Tis hard, to speak things common [communia] properly: | And thou mayst better bring a rhapsody | Of Homer’s forth in acts than of thine own | First publish things unspoken and unknown. | Yet common matter [publica materies] thou thine own mayst make’.44 Watson’s ovine metaphor has the advantage over the apian image of denoting what is specific to the poet, what is ‘properly’ the poet’s, in Jonson’s terms. His verses have been nourished with the flowers of rhetoric and poetic conceits which are likened to lands held in common ownership. The individual poems, however, like each lamb in a flock, are no longer common property but bear the stamp of their owner — the Watsonian ‘Author’. Watson gives guidelines on how to distinguish one’s own poems from a mass of common material — a ‘flock’ from the ‘common’ in his proprietorial adaptation of the Horatian metaphor. Though he adopted Ronsard (amongst others) as a model of imitation and a model to imitate, the composition process confers the right of propriety on the individual to whom Watson consistently refers as the Author. Watson’s Hekatompathia makes a major introductory statement on how to consider writers of this relatively new European genre, the Petrarchan sonnet sequence, in English. It is striking that in the emulation and criticism which would ensue, the Ronsardian strand was specifically magnified.

(pp. 39–40) does not fit because Watson’s borrowings are not random. Watson himself does not figure in Greene’s index.  42 Coldiron, ‘Watson’s Hekatompathia and Renaissance Lyric Translation’, pp. 10–11.  43 Watson, The Hekatompathia, ed. by Heninger, A2v. On the notion of commonality in early modern England (with no mention of Watson), see Rhodes, Common: The Development of Lit­erary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England, esp. chapter 1 (on ‘commonwealth’) and chapter 5 (on poetry), and on the role of translation as ‘making common’, see Rhodes, ‘Introduction’, p. 4.  44 Jonson, Horace, of the Art of Poetry, ed. by Colin Burrow, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. by Bevington, Butler, and Donaldson, vol. vii, p. 26. Cf. ‘Difficile est proprie communia dicere; tuque | rectius Iliacum Carmen deducis in actus, | quam si proferres ignota indictaque primus. | Publica materies privati iuris erit’, Horace, The Art of Poetry, ll. 128–31, in Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, ed. by Fairclough, pp. 460–61. For ancient and Renaissance commentaries, see Brink, Horace on Poetry, vol. ii, pp. 204–05, 432–40.

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Translation II: ‘And when I Gette the Spoyle of Thebes’ The obscure John Soowthern’s Pandora: The Musyque of the beautie, of his Mistresse Diana can be described as the next ricochet of Ronsardism because Soowthern’s collection, also dedicated to the Earl of Oxford, followed hot on the heels of Watson and embraced his precepts, while amplifying the specifically Ronsardian character of eclectic imitation.45 Imitations or translations of Joachim Du Bellay, Remy Belleau, and Philippe Desportes, as well as Ronsard, have been identified in the volume, but A. L. Prescott is justified in saying that the overall tone is Ronsardian.46 Firstly, the explicit references to Pindar alone were enough to alert contemporaries to the debt to Ronsard. Most importantly, Soowthern, by naming Ronsard three times in the amorous section of the text, designates Ronsard, and not Du Bellay nor Desportes, as the chief contemporary love poet.47 This slim volume is undoubtedly an oddity, marked by an extreme use of French lexis and syntax, but that it was remarked-upon by contemporaries (Puttenham and Michael Drayton) means that the critic must take it into account (aesthetic criticism of Soowthern will be dealt with in a subsequent section).48 Where Watson converted Ronsardian odes into ‘Passions’, Soowthern earned an indisputable place in literary history as the first author to use in English the triadic structure of strophe, antistrophe, and epode and the panoply of images associated with Pindar’s poetry of praise.49 His consciousness of his innovation in Englishing Pindar, which takes the form of a metapoetic commentary on his achievement in the opening ode, dedicated to the Earl of Oxford, is particularly striking. It draws heavily on Ronsard’s ‘Ode à Michel de l’Hospital’ verbally and thematically, but sometimes takes its phrasing from similar passages in other Ronsardian poems.50 Below, a passage from the

 45 Soowthern, Pandora.  46 Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance, p. 105. For sources, see Espiner-Scott, Les Sonnets élisabéthains, pp. 11–13, and Shafer, The English Ode to 1660, pp. 46–49.  47 Soowthern, Pandora, B1r, D2v, D4r.  48 The collection is made up of a Pindaric ode, a number of fourteen-line sonnets, elegies, intercalated poems by the Countess of Oxford and the Queen, then come ‘Verses taken out of his Stanses, Hymnes, and Elegias’, several odes, ‘odellets’, a ‘stansse’ and two ‘quadrans’. For Puttenham and Soowthern, see below. Drayton appears to praise Soowthern as the first writer of odes in English (Drayton, Poems, ed. by Buxton, vol. i, p. 122).  49 Shafer, The English Ode to 1660, p. 45.  50 Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Céard, Ménager, and Simonin, vol. i, pp. 626–50. For example, the ‘Ode à Michel de l’Hospital’ evokes the Fates but Soowthern’s ‘Filandinge systers’ resembles Ronsard’s ‘Parques filandieres’ (vol. ii, p. 516). Soowthern’s strophe 2 owes a debt to Ronsard’s strophe 6 (as published 1567–1583), which combines the terms fredonner, harpe, and honneur. For the variants, see Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Laumonier, Silver, and Lebègue, vol. iii, p. 152. Other passages resemble loose versions of Ronsard’s preferred motifs, such as ‘Divine furie’ (A1v), or the Muses and his lyre (A2r).

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second strophe is followed by an extract from the third epode; facing them are Ronsardian sources:51 Making speake (her with a sweete brute) The ten divers tongues of my Lute, I will Fredone in thy honour, These renowned songs of Pindar: And immitate for thee Dever, Horace, that brave Latine Harper. […] For I will shewt, heere with my verces, (Following the auncient traces) As high up to the ayre this Hymne, (With a strong bowe and armes, presumptous) As Dever is both wise and vertuous, And as of my Harpe, he is digne.52 […] And when I gette the spoyle of Thebes, Having charged it on my shoulders, In verses exempte from the webbes, Of the ruinous Filandinge systers: I promise to builde thee a glorie, That shall ever live in memorie. In meane while, take this little thing: But small as it is: Devere, Vaunt us that never man before, Now in England knewe Pindars string.53

Faisant parler sa grandeur Aux sept langues de ma lyre. […] Bien que Pindare j’imite: Horace harpeur latin.54 […] Puissé-je autant darder cet hymne Par l’air, d’un bras presomptueux, Comme il est sage et vertueux, Et comme il est de mes vers digne.55 […] Je pillay Thebe et saccageay la Pouille T’enrichissant de leur belle despouille. Et lors en France avec toy je chantay, Et jeune d’ans, sur le Loir inventay De marier aux cordes les victoires Et des grans Rois les honneurs et les gloires. […] Le premier de France J’ay pindarizé56

Note the heavy emphasis in these passages on the value of this poetry for its innovation and the prominence of the poetic ‘I’, represented far more, in fact, than the object of praise. Both the use of the Pindaric triad and the metapoetics have, as we can see, definite sources in Ronsard’s work. I would like to relate the insistence on novelty with another conspicuously Ronsardian feature of Pandora, the construction of poetic subjectivity through onomastic self-referentiality. Soowthern develops further the fiction of the poetic persona Watson had recommended, through the use of his own name: he employs ‘Soothern’ in

 51 Shafer, The English Ode to 1660, pp. 46–49.  52 Soowthern, Pandora, A2v–A3r. The text is in blackletter, with words in roman type (here underlined) and words in italics (in italics here too).  53 Soowthern, Pandora, A4r–v.  54 Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Céard, Ménager, and Simonin, vol. i, pp. 648, 655.  55 Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Céard, Ménager, and Simonin, vol. i, p. 648.  56 Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Céard, Ménager, and Simonin, vol. i, pp. 677, 683.

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his verses no fewer than six times, and ‘John’ once.57 Here, an instance in a passage translated from Ronsard: My name, quoth I, is Soothern, and Madame, let that suffice: That Soothern which will rayse the Englishe language to the Skies. The wanton of the Muses, and Whose well composed ryme, Will live in despite of the hevens, And Triumph over tyme. &c.58

Je suis, di-je, Ronsard, et cela te suffise : Ce Ronsard que la France honore, chante et prise, Des Muses le mignon, et de qui les escris N’ont crainte de se voir par les ages surpris.59

Soowthern’s Pandora is a condensed transposition (imitation and translation) of contemporary French verse, its individual words, poems and themes, which flaunts particularly its Ronsardian referentiality, both as a model to imitate and a model of imitation. The two perspectives converge when one considers Soowthern’s proclaimed status as a ‘Poëte’.60 Soowthern’s Pandora is a personal expropriation of a Ronsardian authorial self derived from the Odes and the Amours: from ‘Je suis, di-je, Ronsard’ to ‘My name, quoth I, is Soothern’. Unlike Watson, who positioned himself as the re-maker of Ronsard’s rendition of Anacreon, Soowthern represents himself as directly imitating Pindar in English. There can be no doubt that his model of imitation was Ronsard. Soowthern the Poet represents the legitimation of his work and status in a bellicose image of translatio studii, which was the French poet’s own legitimating variant on the propriety trope of poetic composition and linguistic renewal. Ronsard ‘pillaged Thebes and sacked Apulia’; Soowthern omits Apulian Horace altogether and plunders Ronsard to ‘gette the spoyle of Thebes’ for himself.61

Traducing I — Puttenham and ‘Injurious Dealing’ I cited in the introduction Puttenham’s general comments in favour of the circulation of poetic texts: he endorsed literary imitation as a judicious means of composition. In Book III of his Art, however, he denounced Soowthern’s Pandora as traducing Ronsard’s work. As such, the case affords a rare extended example of a sixteenth century critic’s views on a specific instance of circulation and imitation.62  57 Soowthern, Pandora, B1r, B2v, C3r, D1v.  58 Soowthern, Pandora, D1v.  59 Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Céard, Ménager, and Simonin, vol. ii, p. 307.  60 Soowthern, Pandora, C3r.  61 Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Céard, Ménager, and Simonin, vol. i, p. 677 (my translation); Soowthern, Pandora, A4r.  62 Shafer, Lee, Prescott have mentioned Puttenham’s connection with Soowthern without analysing it.

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Puttenham’s catalogue of ‘intolerable vices’ of style is the occasion for his criticism: he takes Soowthern as his example of ‘soraismus’. This figure consists in ‘when we make our speech or writings of sundry languages using some Italian word, or French […] not for the nonce or for any purpose (which were in part excusable) but ignorantly and affectedly’. ‘Fredone’ and ‘filanding’ are two examples of French words Puttenham cites from Pandora, which ‘have no manner of conformity with our language either by custom or derivation which may make them tolerable’. Puttenham himself applies the latter two principles in translating the names of rhetorical figures into English. ‘[S]oraismus’, for instance, becomes the homely ‘Mingle-Mangle’.63 He explains, at the outset of Book III, his decision to translate the learned classical terms by arguing that to leave them untranslated would have made his Art a ‘work more fit for clerks than for courtiers’.64 Puttenham thus insinuates that his courtier readership had only a very limited grasp of the classical languages. The aesthetic, rhetorical criticism directed at Soowthern quickly cedes to the legalistic language of moral criticism, as Puttenham has manifestly been enraged by Pandora: Soowthern, unnamed in the text, does ‘impudently rob the French poet both of his praise and also of his French terms’, so that Puttenham is ‘angry with him for his injurious dealing’; this ‘said maker’ should be ‘ashamed’ and indeed, ‘be indicted of petty larceny for pilfering other men’s devices from them and converting them to his own use’.65 Puttenham, who may also have had Horace’s precepts about poetic property in mind, deems that Soowthern’s use of Ronsard’s texts makes him false and derivative, a thief posing as a poet. He thus implicitly defends Ronsard’s poetic propriety. Puttenham’s tirade against Soowthern has the advantage of causing him to set out more precisely the parameters of his famous general definition of the poet as maker and the translator as versifier.66 It is a measure of Ronsard’s status as a model in English poetics that his specific case gives the best insight into Puttenham’s ideas on the frontier between the poet and the translator: Another [Soowthern] of reasonable good facility in translation finding certain of the hymns of Pindar and of Anacreon’s odes, and other lyrics among the Greeks very well translated by Ronsard the French Poet, and applied to the honor of a great prince in France, comes our minion and translates the same out of French into English, and applieth them to the honor of a great nobleman in England.67

 63 Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. by Whigham and Rebhorn, pp. 338–39.  64 Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. by Whigham and Rebhorn, p. 242.  65 Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. by Whigham and Rebhorn, pp. 338–39.  66 Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. by Whigham and Rebhorn, p. 93.  67 Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. by Whigham and Rebhorn, p. 338.

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Both Soowthern and Ronsard are said to perform translation and yet only Ronsard is a ‘poet’, while Soowthern, one recalls, is only a ‘said maker’. Ronsard earns the title by virtue of his re-application of the Greek poets to a new discursive and cultural context; Soowthern has merited the full blast of Puttenham’s irony, scornfully treated as a ‘minion’ of Ronsard and wittily upbraided for his wanton translation of ‘mignon’ (see the previous section). Puttenham objects strenuously to this instance of circulation of texts. Elocutionary skill is a prerequisite for a poet and to criticize soraismus is unremarkable in itself; expressing the moral objection in terms of larceny, however, implies poetic propriety as an operative poetic notion. Puttenham is not stating a profound disagreement with Watson’s principles; rather he is indicting Soowthern for an incomplete conversion of Ronsard’s poetry into his own. Aside from his vice of eloquence, Soowthern commits an important vice of rhetorical inventio in his evident reliance, in Puttenham’s opinion, on Ronsard (who, he reminds us, translated from several Greek authors) and his ‘devices’, or figures of style and of thought. Seen as a translator, Soowthern is reasonably good; seen as a poet, he is a thief. This is particularly acute in this case given that the hypotexts selected advance so forcefully the Ronsardian authorial persona (‘Je suis, di-je, Ronsard, et cela te suffise’), in a way characterized by Puttenham as ‘braggery’.68 It seems that Puttenham’s perception of wrongdoing is heightened by a correlation between the assertion of poetic propriety and the degree of selfhood or subjectivity ascribed to the poetic ‘I’. That is, the more personalized the poet-speaker, the easier it is to identify certain particular conceits and devices as having a proprietor. Puttenham’s censure thus seems to focus on Soowthern as thief and usurper of Ronsard’s inalienable property, his poetic persona.

Traducing II — Sidney and ‘Pindar’s Apes’ The subsequent wave of Ronsardism consists of three texts published in close succession at the beginning of the 1590s. I begin with Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591), which continues the dialogue with earlier English Ronsardism, before turning to the pastiche of Ronsardism in the pastoral romances: the anonymous Tarltons newes out of purgatorie (1590). It is striking that the learned debate was carried on in verse, as these two examples show. The contested circulation of Ronsardism was not only a fertile method of composition: it became a poetic trope in its own right. Excessive literary imitation is thematized and features as a significant metapoetic conceit of larceny in Astrophil and Stella (for instance sonnets 1, 3, 6, 15, 74), an attitude summarized in the famous line ‘I am no pickpurse of another’s wit’.69 The poetic speaker proffers a literary ideal, intercut, indeed,  68 Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. by Whigham and Rebhorn, p. 339.  69 Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 74, l. 8, in The Major Works, ed. by Duncan-Jones, p. 184.

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with allusion, which places emphasis on the ethical search for a style expressive of a particular literary persona: ‘Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes’.70 Persona, rather than property as in Watson’s ovine metaphor, is advanced as the basis for the poetic utterance. Allusions draw attention both to the attempt and to its difficulty. The collection contains dismissive allusions to the Ronsardist poetics of imitation, a topic which Sidney treated in more general terms in The Defence of Poesy. Interestingly, the Pindaric persona of Ronsard is referenced in sonnet 3, though this is an amorous collection: Let dainty wits cry on the sisters nine, That, bravely masked, their fancies may be told; Or Pindar’s apes flaunt they in phrases fine, Enam’ling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold.71 The ape had long been used as a metaphor for the ‘failures of transformation’ in imitation: the ape’s imitation is risible, obvious, inferior, and degrading.72 Reference to the ‘gorgeous eloquence of Pindar’ and in the same passage the ‘unimitable Pindar’ in the Defence, clarifies the meaning of this attack on excessive mimicry.73 The accusation is that Pindar’s style is ‘unimitable’ precisely because its gorgeousness makes it recognizable. ‘Pindar’s apes’ are repeating, and badly at that, the Theban poet, not producing anything of value themselves. Though he certainly is aiming at Ronsardism, by refusing to name ‘Pindar’s apes’, Sidney emphasizes the point that their work lacks the stamp of personal expression, the subjective or ‘inward touch’ that should stem from the particular ‘Idea, or fore conceit of the work’.74 In sonnet 6, exaggerated mythological conceits are rejected in favour of simplicity because of their distance from the experience of the poetic persona, with the example taken from the catalogue of Jupiter’s metamorphoses in Ronsard’s Amours 20.75 Joined to this is a subtle censure of literary imitation on the same grounds. Arthur Gorges’ translation of the sonnet, probably written before 1584, had transformed Ronsard’s bull into a swan; the presence of bulls, swans, and the golden rain in Sidney confirm the allusion.76 Astrophil alludes to both versions to reject more forcefully traceable, and thus simian, literary imitation: ‘Some  70 Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 1, l. 11, in The Major Works, ed. by Duncan-Jones, p. 153. On Sidney in particular, see Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye, pp. 189–93, and Ferry, The ‘Inward’ Language, pp. 128–30. For the broad context of this aesthetic posture, see Lecointe, L’Idéal et la difference, pp. 373–468 and references.  71 Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 3, ll. 1–4, in The Major Works, ed. by Duncan-Jones, pp. 153–54.  72 Pigman, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, p. 4.  73 Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in The Major Works, ed. by Duncan-Jones, p. 231.  74 Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 15, l. 10, in The Major Works, ed. by Duncan-Jones, p. 158 ; The Defence of Poesy, in The Major Works, ed. by Duncan-Jones, p. 216.  75 Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Céard, Ménager, and Simonin, vol. i, p. 94.  76 Gorges, The Poems of Sir Arthur Gorges, ed. by Sandison, pp. 55–56; for likely date of composition, see pp. xxviii and xxxii.

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one his song in Jove, and Jove’s strange tales, attires, | Broidered with bulls and swans, powdered with golden rain’.77 Ronsard’s confirmed presence as an object of Sidney’s censure in sonnets 3, 6, and probably elsewhere (sonnet 74) justifies seeing Astrophil’s forswearing of literary borrowing with the trope of larceny as targeting, in part, contemporary Ronsardism as an example of dealing in ‘stol’n goods’. The poets, he writes in the Defence, ‘to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be’.78 Though the principal sense of ‘imitate’ here is Aristotelian mimesis, literary imitation of existing texts must too, on this head, be disallowed.79 The ‘learned discretion’ with which the poet may ‘range’ over ‘into the divine consideration of what may be and should be’ does no doubt leave room for a degree of allusion, but he objects to too-evident borrowings — Ronsard’s fingerprints — in the English Ronsardists.80 The chronological perspective adopted allows us to see Sidney’s Ronsardist intervention as an attempt, amongst others, to guide the course of English poetry. But the tide of Ronsardism had not ebbed.

Traducing III — ‘His Stile is not Common’: A Ronsardian Pastiche The last text I wish to look at pursues Sidney’s satirical vein in relation to Ronsard but forgoes discreet allusion for vigorous pastiche: the anonymous Tarltons newes out of purgatorie (1590). That Ronsardism merited a pastiche is a clear sign of its perceived pervasiveness in this literary culture; that two different English authors of prosimetrical romances, Thomas Lodge in his Rosalind (1590) and Robert Greene in his Francescos Fortunes (1590), are considered to have been the targets of the pastiche is another.81 Lodge had advertised their interest in Ronsard in 1589 by publishing a commendatory poem for Greene made up of rearranged lines from a Ronsard ode in Greene’s Spanish Masquerado.82 I propose reading Tarlton’s Ronsard as a ‘wittie jest’ rebuking uncontrolled circulation.83 The text presents itself as an account given by the recently deceased actor and clown, Richard Tarlton, of his experiences in Purgatory to ‘Robin  77 Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 6, ll. 5–6, in The Major Works, ed. by Duncan-Jones, p. 155.  78 Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 15, l. 11, and The Defence of Poesy, in The Major Works, ed. by Duncan-Jones, pp. 158 and 218.  79 Zim, English Metrical Psalms, p. 20.  80 Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in The Major Works, ed. by Duncan-Jones, p. 218.  81 On Tarltons newes, its authorship and discussion of the targets of the satire, including another Greene poem, see Belfield, ‘Tarlton’s News Out of Purgatory’, pp. 217–72 (esp. 223) and 467–72.  82 Lodge in Greene, Spanish Masquerado […], A2v. See Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance, p. 112.  83 Tarltons newes out of purgatorie, B1r.

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Goodfellow’. As an interlude between the different tales, Tarlton recounts that he came upon a ‘crew’ of Latin poets. Amongst them, Tarlton ‘marked ould Ronsard, and he sat there with a scroule in his hand, wherin was written the description of Cassandra his Mistresse’.84 The Catholic setting is the occasion to air some of the erotic verses which won Ronsard his place in Purgatory.85 For the initiated, however, there is the added pleasure of a gibe against prominent contemporary ‘Poets’ — not translators or imitators — and a pastiche of their borrowed poetic style. Tarlton plays the innocent in remarks weighted with irony. He remarks that Ronsard’s style is not ‘common’ and, lightly insisting on his feigned nonchalance (‘marke it’), adds that English poets have not yet imitated it: ‘And because his [Ronsard’s] stile is not common, nor have I heard our English Poets write in that vaine, marke it, and I will rehearse it’.86 The poem which follows is original but has analogues in Ronsard and in Lodge and Greene: it points up the error made by the latter two in thinking they could treat Ronsard’s style as common, whereas, for the author of the piece, Ronsard’s style was very clearly recognizable as his own, too particular to be ‘common’ to ‘our English Poets’. This is a light-hearted but very definite ironic swipe at illegitimate borrowing of what was precisely uncommon, of what, as the genitive signals, was considered the rightful possession of Ronsard. The heterometrics and extravagant verbal repetitions (‘too much affected’, in Watson’s terms87) of the piece, an approximate blazon, make the resemblance to works of the ‘poets’, Lodge and Greene, clear. No direct source for this text has been found in the works of Ronsard, though it recalls the easy rhymes of ‘Bel aubépin fleurissant’.88 It is a pastiche of a style, Ronsardism, not of a particular poem by Ronsard. I quote an entire stanza of each: Bel aubepin fleurissant, Verdissant Le long de ce beau rivage, Tu es vestu jusqu’au bas Des longs bras D’une lambrunche sauvage.89 Downe I sat, I sat downe where Flora had bestowed hir graces: Greene it was, It was greene  84 Tarltons newes out of purgatorie, F2r.  85 See Tarltons newes out of purgatorie, F3r.  86 Tarltons newes out of purgatorie, F2r.  87 Watson, The Hekatompathia, ed. by Heninger, 1r.  88 Metrically and thematically, these English poems recall the Continuation des Amours and Nouvelle Continuation des Amours.  89 Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Céard, Ménager, and Simonin, vol. i, p. 824.

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Far surpassing other places, For art and nature did combine With sights to witch the gasers eyne.90

Phoebe sat Sweet she sat, Sweet sat Phoebe when I saw her, White her brow, Coy her eye, Brow and eye how much you please me. Words I spent, Sighs I sent, Sighs and words could never draw her. Oh my love, Thou art lost, Since no sight could ever ease thee.91 It was a valley gawdie greene, Where Dian at the fount was seene, Greene it was, And did passe All other of Dianas bowers, In the pride of Floras flowers.92 Based on Ronsard’s metrics and the style doux of love-lyrics which abandon Pindar for Anacreon,93 the writer is making a similar point to Sidney about English poets’ adoption of what he considered an easily-identifiable ‘stile’ or ‘vaine’ attached to a clearly delineated persona: the poetic ‘I’ is equated with Ronsard and his excessive loving, and damned to Purgatory for his erotic verses! This pastiche of the University Wits makes clear the view that their treating the characteristic Ronsardian ‘stile’ as part of ‘common’ use was a larcenous abuse. The question of Ronsard’s rapport with the Greeks, on the other hand, goes unaddressed. In keeping with the exaggerated mode of pastiche, their wrongdoing has gone from crime to sin and will see them sent to Purgatory rather than to the assizes. For Arthur Marotti, as the ‘status of the author was strengthened’, imitations and parodies won a permanent place in the canon.94 A text such as this underlines the extent to which imitation, both its theory and practice, was crucial in defining just what ‘author’ meant. The pastiche of imitations

 90 Tarltons newes out of purgatorie, F2v. Jane Belfield gives texts of Lodge and Greene quoted here in full in her Appendix II, see Belfield, ‘Tarlton’s News Out of Purgatory’, pp. 467–72.  91 Lodge, Rosalind, ed. by Beecher, p. 136.  92 Greene, Francescos Fortunes, J4r.  93 Gendre, Ronsard, poète de la conquête amoureuse, pp. 249–352.  94 Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, p. 167.

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in question here brings about the apotheosis — albeit in Purgatory — of a poet’s style, undefined but reproduced indirectly, as something inalienably proper to his person. *    *    * In her documentary study, A. L. Prescott remarked that ‘Ronsard’s effect on the history of English poetry certainly transcended the response to his work as expressed in explicit comment or quiet expropriation’.95 I hope to have confirmed the truth of that remark by tracking Ronsard’s circulation, from printed work to printed work and even from manuscript to manuscript (Sidney and Gorges). Ronsard was taken on as a model to imitate and a model of imitation and the retrospective coherence of the corpus assembled here justifies use of the term Ronsardism, as well as showing that Ronsard, as a cross between Pindar and Petrarch, became ‘authorized’ in W. J. Kennedy’s sense as ‘command[ing] […] authority’ and forming ‘a “norm” or “rule” by which to measure other texts’ in English poetic culture in the late sixteenth century.96 ‘Style’, according to George Puttenham, is the ‘image of the man’.97 What emerges from this study is how competing definitions of the poet depended equally on the affirmation of individuation of style, through self-reflexive use of related expressions of larceny and propriety. The case of Ronsard, imitator of the Greeks, in England illustrates the fact that attitudes towards transposition in fashioning a personal style were influenced by the source-language: vernacular transposition attracted more criticism than ancient. Positive and negative transpositions of the authorized Ronsard, with his recognizable style, perhaps paradoxically, inspired English verse and prose attempts to make a style proper to the writer necessary to the definition of the English vernacular poet.

 95 Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance, p. 102.  96 Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch, p. ix.  97 Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. by Whigham and Rebhorn, p. 233.

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Mulcaster, Richard, The First part of the elementarie which entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1582) Puttenham, George, The arte of English poesie. Contriued into three bookes: the first of poets and poesie, the second of proportion, the third of ornament (London: Richard Field, 1589) —— , The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. by Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007) Rogers, Daniel, Elegia Danielis Rogerii Albimontii Angli (Antwerp [Paris?]: [André Wechel?], 1568) Ronsard, Pierre de, Discours des misères de ce temps (1562), ed. by Malcolm Smith (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1979) —— , A discours of the present troobles in Fraunce, and miseries of this tyme, compyled by Peter Ronsard gentilman of Vandome, and dedicated vnto the Quene Mother, translated in to English by Thomas Ieney gentilman, trans. by Thomas Jeney (Antwerp [Paris?]: [André Wechel?], 1568) —— , Œuvres complètes, ed. by Paul Laumonier, Isidore Silver, and Raymond Lebègue, 20 vols, Société des textes français modernes (Paris: E. Droz, 1914–1967) —— , Œuvres complètes, ed. by Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin, 2 vols, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade 46 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994) Sidney, Philip, Astrophel and Stella (London: John Charlewood for Thomas Newman, 1591) —— , The Major Works, ed. by Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Soowthern, John, Pandora, the Musyque of the Beautie, of His Mistresse Diana (London: John Charlewood for Thomas Hackette, 1584) Tarltons newes out of purgatorie Onely such a jest as his jigge, fit for gentlemen to laugh at an houre, &c. Published by an old companion of his, Robin Goodfellow (London: Robert Robinson, 1590) Watson, Thomas, The hekatompathia or Passionate centurie of loue diuided into two parts: whereof, the first expresseth the authors sufferance in loue: the latter, his long farewell to loue and all his tyrannie (London: John Wolfe for Gabriel Cawood, 1582) —— , The Hekatompathia: Or, Passionate Centurie of Love (1582), ed. by S. K. Heninger (Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1977) Secondary Works Burrow, Colin, Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) Coldiron, Anne E. B., ‘Watson’s Hekatompathia and Renaissance Lyric Translation’, Translation and Literature, 5.1 (1996), 3–25 Dorsten, Jan Adrianus van, Poets, Patrons, and Professors: Sir Philip Sidney, Daniel Rogers, and the Leiden Humanists (Leiden: Sir Thomas Browne Institute at the University Press, 1962)

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—— , The Radical Arts: First Decade of an Elizabethan Renaissance (Leiden: University Press, 1973) Duncan-Jones, Katherine, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991) Espiner-Scott, Janet Girvan, Les Sonnets élisabéthains : les sources et l’apport personnel (Paris: Librairie ancienne Honoré Champion, 1929) Ferry, Anne, The ‘Inward’ Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) Fineman, Joel, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) Gendre, André, Ronsard, poète de la conquête amoureuse (Paris: Payot, 1970) Gibson, Jonathan, ‘Remapping Elizabethan Court Poetry’, in The Anatomy of Tudor Literature: Proceedings of the First International Conference of the Tudor Symposium (1998), ed. by Mike Pincombe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 98–111 Greene, Thomas M., The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982) Holmes, John, ‘Thomas Lodge’s Amours: The Copy-Text for Imitations of Ronsard in Phillis’, Notes and Queries, 53.1 (2006), 55–57 Johns, Adrian, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) Kennedy, William John, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) Lecointe, Jean, L’Idéal et la différence: la perception de la personnalité littéraire à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1993) Marotti, Arthur F., Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) Martin, Catherine Gimelli, and Hassan Melehy, French Connections in the English Renaissance (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) May, Steven W., The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991) Melehy, Hassan, The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) Nicholl, Charles, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) Pigman, G. W., III, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33.1 (1980), 1–32 Prescott, Anne Lake, French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978) Quint, David, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) Raymond, Marcel, L’Influence de Ronsard sur la poésie française: 1550–1585, 2 vols (Geneva: Droz, 1965) Rees, D. G., ‘Italian and Italianate Poetry’, in Elizabethan Poetry, ed. by J. R. Brown and B. Harris, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 2 (London: Arnold, 1960), pp. 53–69

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Renwick, William L., ‘Mulcaster and Du Bellay’, The Modern Language Review, 17 (1922), 282–87 Rhodes, Neil, ‘Introduction’, in Neil Rhodes, with Gordon Kendal and Louise Wilson, English Renaissance Translation Theory, MHRA vol. ix (London: Modern Human Research Association, 2013) —— , Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) Rose, Mark, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) Satterthwaite, A. W., Spenser, Ronsard, and Du Bellay: A Renaissance Comparison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960) Shafer, Robert, The English Ode to 1660: An Essay in Literary History (New York: Haskell House, 1966) Snare, Gerald, ‘Translation and Transmutation in William Tyndale and Thomas Watson’, Translation and Literature, 12.2 (Autumn, 2003), 189–204 Stone, Lawrence, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965) Warner, George Fredrick, The Library of James VI, 1573–1583, from a Manuscript in the Hand of Peter Young, His Tutor, Publications of the Scottish History Society 15 (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable for the Scottish History Society, 1893) Willis, Charles Murray, Shakespeare and George Puttenham’s ‘Arte of English Poesie’ (St Leonards-on-Sea: UPSO, 2003) Zim, Rivkah, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer (1535–1601) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)

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9. Echo’s ‘Repercussive Voix’ Ovidian Echo Poems in Early Modern England Qu’est-ce qu’aimer, et s’en plaindre souvent? Vent. Speake Eccho, Tell; how may I call my love? Love1 The echo poem belongs to a poetical subgenre which dates back to the Greek Anthology and to Angelo Poliziano’s Miscellanea (1489).2 It bears affinities to the Italian disperata tradition in which the poet, or the lover, complains to a pastoral landscape, calling for some answer (erudite, playful, sometimes sincere) on the part of nature or local divinities (like nymphs and more specifically Echo).3 As it filters through to English early modern poetry, from pastoral and from Italian Petrarchist poetry, it does not necessarily keep the sonnet form. In France, it was popularized in the 1550s and was notably used by Joachim Du Bellay in his ‘Dialogue d’un amoureux et d’Echo’. Du Bellay’s poem, first published in 1549, in Recueils lyriques, and republished as the concluding piece in his 1553 edition, offers a fitting example in which the nymph Echo parodies the lover’s plaints by repeating them, following an anti-Petrarchist vein while playing with an acoustic phenomenon, a rhetorical figure (anadiplosis), as well as renovating an Ovidian topos.4  1 Du Bellay, ‘Dialogue d’un amoureux et d’Echo’, poem 17 in Recueils lyriques (1549), ed. by Chamard, p. 148 (see translation below); Barnfield, Cynthia, sonnet 13, C4r.  2 This contribution concentrates on echo sonnets referencing the Ovidian Echo in England. For other poetical works, see Sternfeld, ‘Repetition and Echo in Renaissance Poetry and Music’, and Mauré, ‘Écho ou les dangers de la voix dans la littérature élisabéthaine’. See also more specifically Bardelmann, Eros and Music in Early Modern Culture and Literature, on echo poems pp. 180–92 and 216–37 while Anderson, Echo and Meaning on Early Modern English Stages focuses on the trope of echo on stage.  3 Murphy, ‘Diane et la Disperata’.  4 Du Bellay, Recueil de poesie, presente à tres illustre princesse Madame Marguerite, seur unique du Roy, et mis en lumiere par le commandement de ma dicte dame, p. 96. On Du Bellay’s successive editions, see Gély-Ghedira, La Nostalgie du moi, p. 353; Du Bellay, Recueil de poésie présenté à très illustre princesse Madame Marguerite, seur unique du Roy, p. 93. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Agnès Lafont ([email protected]) Université Paul-Valéry – Montpellier 3 / Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l’Âge Classique et les Lumières (UMR 5186-CNRS) Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer, ed. by Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin, PEEMB 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 221–243  10.1484/M.PEEMB-EB.5.127781

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Piteuse Echo, qui erres en ces bois, Repons au son de ma dolente voix. D’où ay-je peu ce grand mal concevoir. Qui m’oste ainsi de raison le devoir? De voir. Qui est l’autheur de ces maulx avenuz? Venus. Comment en sont tous mes sens devenuz? Nuds. Qu’estois-je avant qu’entrer en ce passaige? Saige. Et maintenant que sens-je en mon couraige? Raige. Qu’est-ce qu’aimer, et s’en plaindre souvent? Vent. Que suis je donq’, lors que mon coeur en fend? Enfant. Qui est la fin de prison si obscure? Cure. Dy moy, quelle est celle pour qui j’endure? Dure. Sent-elle bien la douleur, qui me poingt? Point.5 (Piteous Echo who wanders in this field To the sound of my moaning voice yield Whence did I this great ache conceive? Who deprives me of reason and duty? Beauty Who is the author of this surliness? Venus. How are all my senses become? Naked. What was I before entering this passage? Sage. And now what do I feel in my courage? Rage. What means to love, and oft one’s pain declare? Air. What am I, when my heart does lament? Infant. Who will end a prison so obscure? Cure. Tell me, who is the one for whom I have grief? Stiff Does she feel the pain which makes my heart knot? Naught.) Humanist and learned, harking back to neo-Latin poetry as well as to Hellenic sources, this literary form typically shows how Du Bellay’s inventio is informed by the classical tradition to serve his own voice.6 Guy Demerson has shrewdly noted how Du Bellay wavers in his use of the mythological figure of Echo in his works; he contrasts the poet’s appeal to a compassionate Echo in ‘Piteuse Voix, qui écoutes mes pleurs […] Seule je t’ai pitoyable trouvée’ [Piteous voice, who listens to my plaints […] You are the only one I found pitiful] in Olive (1549–1550), sonnet 24,7 with Du Bellay’s famous line in Regrets (1553–1557), ‘Mais nul, sinon Echo, ne répond à ma voix’ [But none, except Echo, answers my voice] (sonnet 9), which reveals the solitude of the poet.8 If Echo echoes

 5 Du Bellay, ‘Dialogue d’un amoureux et d’Echo’, in Recueils lyriques (1549), ed. by Chamard, p. 148.  6 For a survey of the echo poem and its classical sources, see Galand-Hallyn, ‘Des “vers échoïques” ou comment rendre une âme à Écho’.  7 This is a Petrarchist adaptation of Battista della Torre; see Gély-Ghedira, La Nostalgie du moi, p. 354 n. 2 on ‘Olive Olive : et Olive est ta voix’ (sonnet 24, line 7).  8 Demerson, La Mythologie classique, p. 481 n. 78.

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within Du Bellay’s poetry, in a range of forms from love poem to lamento, it is because her Ovidian story provides a narrative backdrop for the poet’s aching:9 Echo’s voice is typographically materialized on the poem’s page, she is a metaphorical cipher memorializing his nostalgic call to love and homeland (occasionally a depleted cipher), and she offers the poet an ironical persona so that he can self-consciously distance himself from his emotions: ‘Qu’est-ce qu’aimer, et s’en plaindre souvent? Vent’ (‘Dialogue’, line 9, quoted above). Barthelémy Aneau, the learned mythographer from Lyons, borrows the epithet ‘repercussive’ from Du Bellay, stating that ‘Echo est la voix repercussive’ in his knowledgeable gloss on Book iii of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Clément Marot’s translation.10 By so doing, Aneau reads the myth etiologically, sealing the association between the nymph and this adjective. The term ‘repercussive’ in English is firmly associated with the figure of Echo as the Oxford English Dictionary traces the first occurrence of the adjective in its acoustic sense to Thomas Dekker’s 1604 News from Gravesend, a pamphlet on the plague: Vntill the Danish sound With repercussiue voice rebound, That Eccho’s (doubling more and more) May reach the parched Indian shore.11 George Sandys, in his later 1632 Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized and Represented in Figures, explains that ‘[…] [n]ow Eccho signifies a resounding: which is only the repercussion of the voice, like the rebound of a ball, returning directly from whence it came’.12 Therefore, a repercussive sound is repeated and reverberates or echoes (OED, 3a); metaphorically, it is also a sound which has implications (OED, 4b). It is thus tempting to read echo poems staging the nymph Echo as a way to self-consciously re-embody Ovid in the late Renaissance, negotiating several tensions: between loss of shape and gain of voice, or depletion of meaning and narcissistic recuperation, or expression of erotic longing and self-conscious ironizing.13 Within some printed sonnet sequences, the visual dynamics of modes of duplication on the page renovate a common pattern and also seem to destructively erase the nymph’s name, Echo, only retaining an acoustic pattern  9 See Marot and Aneau, Les Trois premiers livres de la Métamorphose d’Ovide, ed. by Moisan et Malenfant, iii.339–510.  10 Demerson shows that glossing poetry attests to the complexity of a learned mythological language in La Mythologie classique, pp. 227–28. See Du Bellay, ‘Chant du désespéré’ (ode 9), L’Olive, Er-v: ‘La voix Repercussive | En m’oyant lamenter | De ma Plainte excessive | Semble se tormenter | Car cela, que j’ay dit, | Tousjours elle redit.’  11 Dekker, Newes from Graues-end, D3v. For the Ovidian subtext introduced in graveyard scenes, see Lafont, ‘“I am truly more fond and foolish than ever Narcissus was”’.  12 Ovid, Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz’d and Represented in Figures, trans. by Sandys, ed. by Hulley and Vandersall, pp. 157–58.  13 About the acute sense of permanence and bodily frailty in Ovid, see Burrow, ‘“Full of the Maker’s Guile”: Ovid on Imitating and on the Imitation of Ovid’.

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on the page. While the reading practices are standardized thanks to editorial transformation and the echo poems are fully acculturated in English poetry as a genre of its own, the material existence of shape-shifting Echo is threatened by each of her recursions. William Kuskin borrows from computer science the notion of recursion — describing the reiteration of a small operation, each time made more complex — to question the direct intertextual relationships that present texts may have with past ones. Building on this, Anne Coldiron identifies several early modern ‘catenary’ patterns of textual transmission testifying to ‘a recursive relation to the past and authority’ as well as to foreign cultural elements. She suggests that some transmissions are ‘non-linear’ due to ‘incidents of translations’ (and she defines those incidents as ‘concentration or dilation’, ‘looping-back translations’ or ‘staccato points of translation’ for instance).14 I would like to argue similarly that the poets’ direct or indirect indebtedness to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, their early modern rewritings of the Ovidian echoic dialogue between Echo and Narcissus within the strict pattern of echoic poems, and the way these poems are first printed turn them into a set body which tells us about the poets and their readerships: how useful is Ovid’s Echo to understand English relations to the authority of the past and of foreign cultural input? How does this Ovidian dialogue take on several shades of meaning by playing on Echo’s acoustic and etiological name, which also meta-textually coincides with a self-referential rhetorical device? This seems to define a ‘peripatetic’ transmission as well as a ‘looping chain’ of the specific transmission of the Echo poem in the last two decades of the vogue for this genre in England. Repercussion and recursion, I argue, are therefore interconnected notions. Echo’s repercussive voice, variously inscribed within the typography of the page, is accommodated in English poetry, her visible presence shaped in the book while various literary sensibilities of the readership are called upon. When ventriloquized by male sonneteers, Echo’s mythological voice is threatened with disappearance as she becomes a parrot spelling out the poet’s anxieties; conversely, in the eco responsiva, she may be repercussive with a difference, allowing erotic banter for instance. But its more surprising effect is the layering of several readings that the mythological figure may add to a conventional poetic genre: as ‘the prattling Echo’ is condemned, her disobedient vocula also serves a poetics of self-criticism and offers an ironic counterpoint — which usually serves to dismiss these poems as formal and insincere literary games.

 14 See Coldiron, Printers Without Borders, p. 21: ‘By catenary pattern, I mean serial incidents of translation […], something like pearls on a chain’. For recursion, see Kuskin, Recursive Origins.

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Echoic Dematerialization: The Dynamics of Repercussion and Impermanence English poems from the 1580s onwards accommodate a great number of references to the trope of echo, yet only a few of them focus on the mythological nymph Echo.15 Echoic poems with a speech-prefix and the repetition of the ‘echo’ word in an adjacent space on the page are comparatively rare: only six sonnets and a few occurrences within pastoral poetry explicitly played visually with the nymph’s name in editions, materializing her on the page in a way reminiscent of a dramatic convention: tracing how English printed poems engage with Ovid via a typographic form and within diverse poetic volumes will show the specificity of the English acculturation of the mythological intertext, as the cohesive role of the Ovidian nymph arguably creates a local poetic subgenre.16 The main English authors who wrote echo poems, Thomas Watson, Barnabe Barnes, William Percy, Richard Barnfield, and William Smith form what we could call, borrowing Pierre de Ronsard’s coinage, the English ‘Brigade’.17 They all studied at Oxford, and some of them travelled extensively on the Continent, even as far as Italy.18 Paratextual evidence that their works presenting echo poems answer each other can also be found: Barnabe Barnes dedicates his 1593 Parthenophil and Parthenophe ‘To the right noble and vertuous gentleman, M. William Percy, Esquier, his dearest friend’ while the very title of his collection is a clear allusion to Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella.19 Percy, in turn, dedicates his final madrigal to Barnes: ‘To Parthenophil upon his Laya and Parthenope’.20 As for Percy, he feigns modesty and warns his ‘Courteous Reader’: ‘whereas I was fullie determined to haue concealed my Sonnets, as thinges priuie to myselfe, yet of courtesie hauing lent them to some, they were secretlie committed to the Presse, and almost finished, before it came to my knowledge’ (‘To the reader’). A sense of literary conversation is also to be felt when Thomas Watson with a similarly affected modesty mentions that he ‘[…] published at the request of certaine Gentlemen his very frendes’.21

 15 Some research was conducted on aspects of the mythological Echo: see Mauré, ‘Héritages et réappropriations du mythe d’Écho’; Ginestet, ‘Écriture mythologique dans les sonnets amoureux’, pp. 469–87. An early typology was also established by Colby, ‘The Echo Device in Literature’.  16 To the best of my knowledge, none of these poems is a translation of French echo poems.  17 ‘La Brigade’ refers to a literary and humanist group of French poets (later known as La Pléiade) who shared a background of Hellenic and Latin culture, at the court of Marguerite of France, Henri II’s sister.  18 Watson, The Complete Works of Thomas Watson, 1556–1592, ed. by Sutton; Cox, ‘Barnes, Barnabe (bap. 1571, d. 1609)’; Gair, ‘Percy, William (1574–1648)’; Massai, ‘Barnfield, Richard (bap. 1574, d. 1620)’; Brink, ‘Smith, William (fl. 1596)’.  19 Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe.  20 Percy, Sonnets to the fairest Cœlia, n.p., after sonnet 20.  21 Watson, Hekatompathia, title page.

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Smith dedicated his own sequence, Chloris, to Edmund Spenser, whose works were published by William Ponsonby, Percy’s publisher. Small world! Mythology and literary allusions are shared by this friendly coterie as echo poems are repeated from one sonnet sequence to the next — with functional differences. None of the echoic poems including Echo as speech-prefix in our corpus was ever republished.22 These poems seem to be a literary hapax and their relative stability as a group (in time and place of publication) may help us to follow the gradual consolidation of poetry reading habits shaped by evolving printing practices, as well as the self-conscious Ovidian dynamics of the nymph’s gradual physical disappearance. First, most of these poems circulated in manuscripts before coming to the press, and were initially meant for the aristocratic readership of the Brigade. Once published, as they became parts of successful sonnet sequences like Daniel’s Delia (1592) and Barnfield’s Cynthia (1595), they were normalized within a new generic format for printing sonnet sequences, a format relatively widespread in England in the 1590s, which ‘framed the individual poems through a simple but uniform page border’ of printed flowers.23 Thus, Wendy Wall has shown that by 1594 English printers used formats that altered practices of manuscript circulation to more standardized printing practices for poetry, consolidating it as a genre.24 Yet, although this theory provides a general framework to conceptualize the printing process at the time, it seems that this small group of sonnets challenges some of these conclusions. Indeed, while English printers shared a continental training, a plurality of models for static pattern poetry co-exist and they arguably reveal different approaches to mythology according to the author and the printer/typographer and have an impact on the reader. As the period unfolds over more than twenty years one sees how a poetry ‘for the happy few’ may have become more accessible to a broader readership. What reads as erudite exegesis, somewhat burdened by explicit mythological references, becomes more fluid, more integrated, as the dramatized character of Echo recedes to give way to a pattern using crowned rhyme, subtly introduced by mythological allusion.25 It is reading habits that are impacted: now the reader clearly sees through the page arrangement and only a clue in the title is enough to identify the learned game. When John Wolfe printed Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia in 1582, he used a remarkable combination of types (see Figure 9.1).26

 22 If we except the two successive editions of Barnfield’s Cynthia in 1595.  23 Fleming, ‘Changed Opinion as to Flowers’, p. 55.  24 Wall, The Imprint of Gender.  25 Crowned rhyme or rime couronnée is a process of enrichment at the end of a line in which the rhyming syllable is redoubled. This is rather infrequent in poetry but constitutes one of the characteristics of echo poems.  26 John Wolfe, a prolific printer trained on the Continent, was in trade from 1579 to 1601. See Hoppe, ‘John Wolfe, Printer and Stationer, 1579–1601’. On the design of Watson’s Hekatompathia, see Fleming, ‘Changed Opinion as to Flowers’, p. 56.

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Figure 9.1. Thomas Watson, Hekatompathia or Passionate centurie of loue diuided into two parts: whereof, the first expresseth the authors sufferance in loue: the latter, his long farewell to loue and all his tyrannie. Composed by Thomas Watson Gentleman; and published at the request of certaine gentlemen his very frendes (London: John Wolfe for Gabriell Cawood, 1582) (STC (2nd edn) 25118a). Reproduction of the original in the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. Passion 25, Dr. Reproduced with permission.

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The use of both black letter and roman type, roman pagination, marginal gloss and interpretive prose introductions furnished by the poet all provide a decisively didactic frame for the reader, showing how allegorical reading practices are transferred here to vernacular amorous literature. The arrangement separates verse from literary interpretation by moving between roman and black letter type, thereby offering the poem as a textual artefact, establishing and promoting its vernacular authority. This follows a well-established continental tradition for annotating sonnets in italics, with commentary in roman type, like Bembo’s on Petrarch or Muret and Belleau’s on Ronsard’s Amours.27 Kuskin reminds us that ‘black letter type is unanimously understood as indicating a popular audience as opposed to the more learned Roman. [I]t is “the English letter”’.28 It is a form used for cheap print (like broadside ballads, chapbooks, romances), a form of ‘debased’ literary culture which is sometimes interpreted as a ‘nostalgic impulse’, combining Englishness with a sense of it being somewhat outdated by the end of the sixteenth century. Conversely, roman/italic types derive from Italian and French booksellers and are endowed with classicizing prestige, combining a sense of antiquity with continental newness. So this edition of Hekatompathia presents a specific typographical composition which derives from a carefully differentiated use of native and continental types, celebrating the echo poem printed in black letter as typically English. Moreover, the explicit apparatus of strips of flowers as a tail-piece, without background, providing a form of clear-cut separation between one ‘passion’ and the next, also suggests an ‘inward-directed’ cultural authority and a strong acculturation of the echoic poem in English.29 When Wolfe published Barnabe Barnes’ Parthenophil and Parthenophe in 1593, he also provided a carefully designed and highly literary object, meant for reference purposes.30 In this edition, as the printer-designer, John Wolfe uses a title page with frontispiece, as well as a complex structural division of volume (with headings, running titles, section titles, indexes, Arabic pagination as well as roman). All this again tends to point to a didactic presentation of a learned edition, aimed at a scholarly audience, slightly austere, without any printer’s flowers. In terms of readability, the echo sonnet does not stand out particularly: it is printed on two pages (recto/verso) while the sonnet’s specific

 27 Ronsard, Les amours […] commentées par Marc Antoine de Muret. For Bembo’s commentary on Petrarch, see Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch, pp. 82–113.  28 See Kuskin, Recursive Origins, p. 76. Although the date of the change in the use of black letter is a debated issue, critics now tend to agree for the ‘closing decades of the sixteenth century’ (Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, p. 414). See also Keener, ‘Printed Plays, Polyglot Books’, p. 483.  29 Anne Coldiron designates inward-directed English translations from the Continent’s mixeddirected patterns, in her Printers Without Borders, p. 13.  30 The date and printer’s name are cut out from the British Library edition but we find the book entered in the registers of the Stationers’ Company under John Wolfe on 10 May 1593 (information provided by STC (2nd edn) 1469).

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Figure 9.2. William Percy, Sonnets to the fairest Cœlia (London: Adam Islip, for W[illiam] P[onsonby], 1594), sonnet 15 C2r (STC (2nd edn) 19618). Repro­ duction of the original in the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. Reproduced with permission.

layout as echo poem is reinforced by the name of Echo’s speech-prefix and the use of crowned rhyme. Conversely in 1594, when Barnes’ friend’s sonnet sequence appeared, Percy’s Sonnets to the fairest Cœlia, the echo poem was thrown into relief in a clear-cut and elegant version (Figure 9.2).31  31 Only one edition.

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This may be linked to his stationer’s skills, as William Ponsonby was then ‘the official printer of the Sidney family’ who also issued the entire Spenserian canon from The Faerie Queene onwards.32 Famously reputed as a non-dramatic publisher, Ponsonby, who was still in the early stages of his career, issued many poetic works: both the 1590 and 1593 editions of the Arcadia, the 1595 edition of The Defence of Poesie, and the large 1598 folio collection that included Astrophil and Stella. Ponsonby delegated the short sonnet sequence to a professional printer, Adam Islip. It is nicely done, with blank white space around the poem and one sonnet per page, adorned with good quality and nice size head- and tailpieces and fleurons. Certainly Richard Barnfield’s 1595 edition of Cynthia: with Certaine Sonnets, and the Legend of Cassandra is highly comparable.33 Both Percy’s regular end-of-line echoic answers and Barnfield’s less systematic use of echoes as crowned rhyme are materialized by italics, without an explicit speech-prefix giving the cue to the Ovidian Echo. Percy’s ironical line ‘By Narcisse is it true?’ (l. 13) as well as the title of the sonnet (Echo) clearly posit it as an Ovidian variation while Barnfield’s opening line ‘Speake Eccho, tell’ (l. 1) starts a monumental depiction of his mistress’s beauty, clearly using a vocabulary of artistry dear to Ovid: she is the ‘Image of love, faire shape of Alabaster’ (l. 7). Ironically then, Eccho is not the mistress’s voice (she has none here), only the acoustic reverberation of the poet’s own voice against a stone sculpture. The layout of sonnet 22 published in Smith’s Chloris, or, The Complaint of the Passionate Despised Shepheard by Edmund Bollifant in 1596 is different (Figure 9.3). The optimized use of a page, nonetheless including blank white space, with sonnets (two per page) numbered in Arabic and running titles, makes for a simple layout. Without any change in type, the echo poem’s vertical reading stands out for the reader in an acrostic form, both visually replicating the sound and reverberating the poet’s lament with echo as a blank void. The poem thus subtly links the Ovidian poetics to the Italian tradition of disperata without exposing the name of the nymph. Even if there is a form of teleological consensus among most specialists of the history of the book as regards the constitution of a new poetic genre from these piecemeal editions, it is interesting to note the functional differences between the possible embodiments of Echo on the page: from a formal dialogue with Echo (in Watson’s Hekatompathia, the name of Echo is nestled within the poem) to a dramatized Echo given a speech-prefix (Barnes’ Parthenophil, sonnet 89 and sestina 4 adopting the same layout, at the end

 32 Brennan, ‘William Ponsonby: Elizabethan Stationer’, p. 91.  33 On the two versions of this sonnet sequence, see Fleming, ‘Changed Opinion as to Flowers’, p. 55 n. 13. The head and tail borders are composed of a type named Flower 12 (STC (2nd edn) 1484). Another version is STC (2nd edn) 1483, composed of flower 19 (and characteristic of printer James Roberts — used for other Barnfield works as well).

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Figure 9.3. William Smith, Chloris, or, The Complaint of the Passionate Despised Shepheard (London: Edmund Bollifant, 1596). Sonnet 22, n.p. © British Library Board. Shelfmark: General Reference Collection Huth45. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Image produced by ProQuest as part of Early English Books Online .

of the line), to Echo only materialized by a shift in typefaces (from normal to justified italics, in Percy’s Cœlia, and not even systematically italicized in Barnfield’s Cynthia) and then by a separate column at the end of the line in Smith’s Chloris.34 What does the Ovidian mythological reference add to this recursive pattern at stake in standardizing editorial practices, different layouts, and mechanized transmission of texts? The answer to that question may help us to understand how much reading practices and compositional strategies are guided — or not — by the classical authority. From continental mythographic scholia in the margins of the page to Watson’s formal introduction for each of his passions, the classical past is present as an authority presiding over the reception of these vernacular poems. This is not just a cosmetic difference: in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Juno dooms Echo to endless (faithful)

 34 A comparable example of Echo’s absent presence can be found in William Alexander’s poem ‘An Eccho’, a 19-line dialogue (placed after song 9 between sonnets 85 and 87) in which Echo’s answers are placed at the end of each iambic pentameter and form an extra syllable or a supplementary iamb (as signalled by Ginestet, ‘Écriture mythologique dans les sonnets amoureux’, p. 483). See Alexander, Aurora, K4 r–v, reproduced below.

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repetition of the end of sentences and Narcissus’s neglect wears her out so she eventually becomes a voice without a body: her acoustic replication is her only existence. On the page, in these successive editions, Echo is gradually denied her explicit speech-prefix, she is fading, losing her bodily shape while her ‘repercussive’ voice is still heard thanks to crowned rhyme, echoing faithfully, subtly disagreeing or even railing disparagingly. From reference to allusion, the shape-shifting presence of Echo in these English echo poems produces a meta-strategy of reading these poems framed by the Ovidian poetics: the gradual erasure of the mythological figure on the page reverberates her initial Ovidian dematerialization.

Echoic Transmission and Re-Embodiment Typographically, then, the material transmission of Echo’s voice in echo poetry is one of depletion; the conceptual metaphor of intertextual echoes may also fittingly help us to apprehend how E/echo embodies the notion of transmission and its repercussions for the poets. Burrow reminds us that ‘literary imitators are adept at using their difference from a point of origin’ and how they like to ‘make a constructive use of their unlikeness to [the] original’: so repetition is implied, always with a difference.35 How much material is kept and how much gets lost with each recursion? Three other sonnets — French and English compressed translations of Petrarch’s longer canzone 23 — will help discuss the idea of transmission as echo. Philippe Desportes’ version and its two translations by John Soowthern and by Thomas Lodge typify how the male poetic voice chooses to adopt the voice of the nymph by elaborately rearranging the series of metamorphoses in canzone 23, thus making Echo’s voice simultaneously emerge and disappear as such from the Franco-English transmission of Petrarch.36 Celuy que l’Amour range à son commandement Change de jour en jour de façon différente; Hélas! J’en ay bien fait mainte prevue apparente, Ayant esté par luy change diversement. Je me suy vu muer, pour le commencement, En cerf, qui porte au flanc une fleche sanglante; Depuis je devins cygne et d’une voix dolente, Je presage ma mort, me plaignant doucement.  35 Burrow, ‘“Full of the Maker’s Guile”’, p. 278.  36 Petrarch was translated into English (Thomas Wyatt is an early adaptor) but also in Latin. Interestingly Thomas Watson is one of the earliest neo-Latin translators of Petrarch in England. Even if his translation is now lost, it is attested to by other references and therefore shows the direct familiarity of the English poets with the Italian Canzoniere. What is more, four translations from Petrarch’s Canzoniere into Latin appear in Watson’s Hekatompathia (poems VI, LXVI, XC and the epilogue are translations of Canzoniere 132, 164, 364 and 365 respectively). There are two explicit mentions of Echo in Petrarch: canzone 23 and canzone 45.

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Après je devins fleur languissante et panchée, Puis, je fu fais fontaine aussi soudain seichée, Espuisant par mes yeux toute l’eau que j’avois Or je suis salemandre et vy dedans la flame; Mais j’espere bien tost me voir changer en Voix, Pour dire incessamment les beautez de Madame.37 Philippe Desportes’ version of canzone 23 is in turn faithfully translated into English by John Soowthern and Thomas Lodge:38 He that wyll be subiect to Cupidos call, Is chaungd euerie day, I doo not knoe how. And of this, I my selfe haue made prouues enowe. As Metamorphosd, but wot not wherewithal, Fyrst? I was turned to a wandering Harte, And sawe my stomacke pierst with a dolefull arrow. Next? Into a Swan, and with a note of sorrowe. I foresong my death, in Elegicall arte. Since that, to a Flowre, and since withred away: Since that, to a fountaine, and since, I am drie: And now that Salamander, liue in my flame. But ye Gods, if euer I have my owne choyce, I wyll be turn’d, into a well singing voyce: And there in louange, the fayre eyes of Ma-dame.39 Who lyues inthrald to Cupid and his flame From day to day is chang’d in sundry sort: The proof whereof my selfe may well report, Who oft transformd by him may teach the same. I first was turnd into a wounded Hart, That bare the bloodie arrow in my side: Then to a Swanne that midst the water glide, With pittious voyce presagd my deadlie smart. Eft-soones I waxt a faint and fading flower, Then was I made a Fountaine suddaine dry, Distilling all my tears from troubled eye: Now am I Salamander by his power, Liuing in flames, but hope ere long to be A voice, to talke my Mistresse maiestie.40  37 Desportes, Les Amours de Diane. Édition critique suivie du commentaire de Malherbe, ed. by Graham, I.34.  38 See Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance, pp. 137–38 on Soowthern and 144–45 on Lodge. See also Ginestet, ‘Écriture mythologique dans les sonnets amoureux’, pp. 479–80.  39 Soowthern, Pandora, sonnet 13, C2r.  40 Lodge, Phillis, Honoured with Pastoral Sonnets, Elegies and Amorous Delights, sonnet 38, n.p.

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Translation from the Italian and from the French functions identically and obliquely: there is no explicit reference to Echo’s metamorphosis in these poems — just as there is no mention of her in Petrarch’s canzone. Yet her voice is present in her absence. What is more, as Véronique Gély-Ghedira has perceptively noted, whereas Petrarch’s final metamorphosis turns the poet into a hart, a mesmerized Acteon by a Diana-like mistress, Desportes in Les Amours de Diane and his English translators, who otherwise strictly follow him, change the order of the metamorphoses: hart, swan, flower, fountain, salamander, voice.41 So it is tempting to see this re-ordering of Ovidian metamorphoses as a sign of the emergence of a new male lyricism which appropriates Echo’s lament in a form of praesentia in absentia, renovating the trope of a Petrarchan subjugated Acteon left to cry and to be devoured by his hound-like love torments. This then arguably illustrates the self-conscious use of a female-gendered Ovidian acoustic trope to empower a distinctively male poetic voice in the French, and then in the English translations. Simultaneously, this specifically illustrates how Petrarch’s Ovidian lyricism is locally imported during the last decades of the sixteenth century through the lens of Desportes and the extent to which the language of Ovidian mythology is shared by French and English poets. This use of Echo as a means to fashion a lamenting poetic voice, which connects with Ovid’s self-consciousness about literary imitation, may also point to another of the very well-known — and non-Ovidian — classical sources for echoic poems, Ausonius’s epigram 32 about acoustic echoes (‘Vane, quid adfectas faciem mihi ponere, pictor’).42 It is mentioned in several Renaissance commentaries printed in England,43 and George Sandys even translated it in his 1632 Ovid’s Metamorphosis, thereby supplementing his Ovidian translation of the Echo episode with Ausonius’s text: Fond Painter why wouldst thou my picture draw? An unknown goddess, whom none ever saw. Daughter of aire and tongue: of judgement blind The mother I; a voice without a mind. I only with an others language sport: And but the last if dying speech retort. Lowd Ecchos mansion in the eare is found: If therefore thou will paint me, paint a sound.44 Poets, like painters, favour Echo, ‘daughter of aire and tongue’, to be able to ‘paint a sound’, that is to embody their self-portrait. Soowthern thus claims ‘I wyll be turn’d into a well singing voice’. Indeed, according to Joseph Loewenstein,  41 See Gély-Ghedira, La Nostalgie du moi, pp. 358–60.  42 See Ausonius, Volume II, Books 18–20, trans. by Evelyn-White, pp. 174–75.  43 For a list of Elizabethan translations, see Mauré, ‘Héritages et réappropriations du mythe d’Écho’, pp. 63–64.  44 Ovid, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, trans. by Sandys, ed. by Hulley and Vandesall, pp. 157–58.

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‘[d]ialogic form, once separated from its merely social functions, made possible the literary imitation of the self. The relocation of an external voice, the return of Echo to her proper place of origin, becomes a fable of literary and personal achievement’.45 Ausonius’s epigram describes Echo’s mirror function for the poet’s lyrical self, troublingly reducing her to another form of narcissistic projection. Be it in French or in English translations of Petrarch or in Ausonius’s oracular reading, the nymph’s voice, following another pattern of depletion, gradually lends itself to a rhetoric of male self-achievement. As opposed to a strictly Petrarchan use, this use of the persona of Echo is more Petrarchist, that is to say, pertaining to the transmission of the Petrarchan canon as analysed above, as it turns the nymph into a spokesperson for male lyricism. We can find a trace of this formal use of the Ovidian figure in Smith’s Chloris, sonnet 21, which echoes sonnet 20 by the device of chain verse, linking the last line of one poem to the beginning of the next one: The echo of my still lamenting cries, From hallow vaults in treble voice resoundeth, And then to the emptie aire it flies, And backe againe from whence it came reboundeth. That nimphe unto my clamors does replie, Being likewise scornd in love as well as I. And he starts again: Being likewise scornd in love as well as I. By that self-loving boy, which did disdaine To heare hir after him for love to crie […]46 This culminates in sonnet 22 in which yet another poem appears vertically on the page, mirroring the poet’s first poem, while erasing Echo through the typography. This depletion of the Ovidian Echo, reduced to her acoustic quality for lyrical (narcissistic?) reasons, culminates in a display of formal skills, a maestria so perfectly achieved that the poems actually become conventional literary games devoid of sincerity. In other poems, however, acoustic repetition includes the eco responsiva, the possibility of responding, or of suggesting. This creates an interpretive space in the text and engages with the reader’s reception, allowing irony about other subtexts. As Véronique Gély-Ghedira reminds us, ‘each literary dialogue with the echo is based on a pact: the reader, or the character, must tacitly accept the assumption that the words composing the echo bear a meaning and that this meaning is revealed thanks to a dialogue; to put it differently, this pact is based on the idea that what the echo says formulates answers’.47 In Ovid, Echo’s

 45 Loewenstein, Responsive Readings, p. 26.  46 Smith, Chloris, sonnets 20 and 21.  47 ‘[…] tout dialogue littéraire avec l’écho repose sur un pacte: le lecteur, tout comme le

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voice pleads for her love and expresses her sexual longings by her suggestive repetitions. In Latin, ‘adest’ (somebody here) is the first word repeated by Echo, as if to answer Narcissus’s question ‘Ecquis adest?’ (Is there somebody here?) (3.380). When Narcissus says ‘come’ (‘veni’), the imperative form subtly changes meaning as it moves from one speaker to the other, and so does the interrogative ‘Quid me fugis?’(3.383–84) (in Sandys’ translation: ‘Why shunst thou mee?’). When Narcissus says: ‘Huc coeamus’, Echo suggests: ‘coeamus’ (3.386–87) (in Sandys’ translation: ‘Let us joyne’).48 Joseph Loewenstein notes this ambiguity of Echo’s lament, not only in Metamorphoses but in the whole Ovidian canon. He concludes: ‘In Ovid […] [Echo’s] suffering has a mildly, cannily antiauthoritarian bias. Her vocula will murmur against a variety of repressive forces — chastity, discretion, science, vanity, the court’.49 Barnabe Barnes even uses her suggestive female voice to write erotic poetry. His most regular echoic poem in Parthenophil and Parthenophe, sestina 4, counts no fewer than seventy-eight lines, punning and playing at length with the stereotypes of courtly love and Eccho’s saucy answers. Eccho, what shall I do to my nymphe, when I goe to behold her? Eccho, hold her (ll. 1–2) Me beare will she (with her to deale so saucily) never? Eccho, ever. (ll. 7–8) Then if I finde as I would, more bold to urge her I may be so? Eccho, be so. But if she do refuse, then woe to th’attempter? Eccho, attempt her. She will proudly refuse, and speakes in jest never? Eccho, ever. (ll. 43–48)50 Here the poetic persona questions a daring Echo, and the character seems to take its cue from the mythological Echo punished by Juno in Ovid as she covered up for Jupiter’s adulterous behaviour. This creates a sense of erotic titillation and opens the possibility that if the Lady is not given her own voice, her erotic desires may nonetheless be expressed and spur her lover’s. From erotic to disobedient, the afterlife of Echo’s vocula in echo poems seems to offer a progressive ironizing of earlier subtexts. In Echoes of Desire, Heather Dubrow has analysed how, in Watson’s passion 25, ‘Echo not only repeats the words of Author but mimes and even mocks his literary enterprise in that he too is echoing the conventional language associated with his genre’. personnage, acceptant implicitement le présupposé que les mots de l’écho ont un sens, et que ce sens se révèle par le procédé du dialogue; en d’autres termes, ce pacte repose sur l’idée que les paroles de l’écho sont des réponses’ (Gély-Ghedira, La Nostalgie du moi, p. 169) [my translation].  48 Gély-Ghedira also analyses Ovid’s echoing poem, La Nostalgie du moi, pp. 178–79.  49 See Loewenstein, Responsive Readings, p. 35.  50 Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe, pp. 135–36.

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Dubrow carefully studies this poem to show how it ‘enacts the repetitiveness that is the fundamental praxis of Petrarchism’ using this rhetorical repetition to play against the dialogic form of the poem, normally a give-and-take conversation. To her, this aims at ‘clearly distinguishing between the masculine and feminine (voices) in Petrarchism’.51 Parodic repetition thus mocks the fastidiousness of an overwrought compliment, what Du Bellay called pétrarquiser, and allows the poet to distance himself from his poetic stand, as in Du Bellay’s ‘Dialogue d’un amoureux et d’Écho’. This convincing reading sheds light on the agency Echo’s voice gains when she rails against the poet’s conventional poetry, reminiscent of Du Bellay’s criticism in ‘Contre les Pétrarquistes’.52 Like Thomas Watson in his passion 25, several contemporary poets develop this type of irony: for instance, Philip Sidney in his pastoral poetry and Samuel Daniel in some sonnets which are not echoic in form (and therefore are not addressed here) twist the cliché love lamento of Arcadian Echo (inherited from bucolic and pastoral disperata traditions) to make her the representative of a form of counter discourse.53 References to Echo thus contribute to the vogue of Petrarchism as well as questioning it in several types of poetic production: in Sidney’s Arcadia, maybe influenced by Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido,54 Philisides gives an echo poem (Book ii, Eclogue 2). The poem’s genre is explicitly mentioned in the narrative frame: ‘Philisides was commended for the placing of his echo, but little did he regard their praises…’ and the voice of Echo is carefully embedded to mock the shepherd poet’s in an in-built irony: Thou liest false echo, their minds as virtue be just … to the hells I go.

Echo Just Echo Go55

Dismissing the lamenting voice and mocking it, the reference to Echo is posited ironically as it reinterprets itself, a vestige of pastoral love-poetry in this English context. The female voice is appropriated for its railing power. This sense of Echo’s babbling and mocking, a female vice traditionally associated with the shrew, resonates beyond the classical tradition, creating a literary community of readers. In medieval glosses and scholia, Echo is regularly condemned. Tattling and meddling with Gods’ affairs has turned her into ‘the babbling nymph Eccho’, as Sandys calls her in 1632 at the end of a long mythographic tradition.56 Ovidian Echo lost her capacity in initiating discourse and was doomed by Juno to repeat only the end of sentences  51 Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, pp. 2 and 4.  52 ‘J’ay oublié l’art de Petrarquizer’, Du Bellay, ‘Contre les Pétrarquistes’ (1553), l. 1, in Divers jeux rustiques et autres œuvres poétiques, 28r–v.  53 See Mauré, ‘Héritages et réappropriations du mythe d’Écho’, pp. 102–104.  54 Arcadia and Pastor Fido, which both circulated in manuscripts before publication, share a number of sources like Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, see Wilson-Lee, ‘Glosses and Oracles’.  55 Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Liber 2, 119r–v, 120r–v.  56 Ovid, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, trans. by Sandys, ed. by Hulley and Vandersall, pp. 157–58: ‘Among whom the babbling nymph Eccho for being formerly Jupiters property was deprived by Juno of speech’. Sandys evokes her role as go-between, favouring Jove’s infidelities.

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since she helped Jove to shelter his love affairs, a role that Barnes seemed to expatiate upon in his sestina 4.57 Criticized for her copious language, she is then punished for it; in Watson’s passion 25, when she rails she uncannily calls to mind the clerical attacks on her figure as the poet calls her the ‘foolish tattling guest’ (l. 2) and reproves her ‘prattling voyce’ (l. 14).58 These are the common adjectives that one may find in early mythographers: the ‘Love-Brokerage tale of Echo’ is condemned by John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (1390)59 as well as by William Caxton’s (unpublished) translation of Metamorphoses (1480). In Golding’s 1567 translation of Metamorphoses, she is blamed for ‘her tattling talk’ (3.453). She is ‘[a] babbling Nymph that Echo hight, who hearing others talke, | By no meanes can restraine hir tongue but that it needs must walkes’ (3.443–44).60 This crucial encounter between love-poetry and a shrew-like woman radiates from our initial corpus of echo poems to other poems such as William Alexander’s Aurora, entitled ‘An Eccho’ (1604). The swift give-and-take conversation the Poet holds with the eco responsiva borrows the same type of humorous intertextuality, and plays on these common terms: Ah, will no soule give eare unto my mone? one Who answers thus so kindly when I crie? I What fostred thee that pities my despaire? aire Thou babbling guest, what know’st thou of my fall? all What did I when I first my Faire disclos’d? los’d Where was my reason, that it would not doubt? out What canst thou tell me of my Lady’s will? ill Wherewhith can she acquit my loyall part? art What hath she then with me to disguise? aguise What have I done, since she gainst love repin’d? pin’d What did I when I her to life prefer’d? er’d What did mine eyes, while she my heart restrain’d? rain’d What did she whil’st my muse her praise proclaim’d? claim’d And what? And how? This doth me most affright. of right What if I never sue to her againe? gaine And what when all my passions are represt? rest But what thing will best serve t’asswage desire? ire And what will serve to mitigate my rage? age I see the sun begins for to descend. end61

 57 See my analysis of Parthenophil and Parthenophe, sestina 4, above.  58 Anthony Brian Taylor traces other subtle references to these intertextual markers in George Peele’s The Arraignment of Paris and in Abraham Fraunce, The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch, in ‘George Peele and Golding’s Metamorphoses’.  59 Gower, The English Works of John Gower, ed. by Macaulay, pp. 71–74. See Mauré, ‘Héritages et réappropriations du mythe d’Écho’, pp. 30–31.  60 Ovid, The. xv. bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, trans. by Golding.  61 Alexander, ‘An Eccho’, Aurora, K4 r–v.

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This nineteen-line dialogue rehearses the Lady’s Petrarchist praise — the crowned rhymes, however, take a clearly ironical stance, as the poet is fully aware when he reuses the epithet ‘babling guest’, reminiscent of Golding’s phrase: ‘babbling nymph that Echo hight’.62 This repetition of ‘babbling’ articulates several readings in a metapoetic fashion. Elizabeth D. Harvey uses the conceptual metaphor of intertextual ‘echo chambers’ to interrogate ‘literary ventriloquism’. She argues that ‘[a]n intertextual allusion opens a text to other voices and echoes of other texts, just as ventriloquism multiplies authorial voices, interrogating the idea that a single authorial presence speaks or controls an utterance’.63 Not only is the mythological cipher of Echo metamorphosed in its shape; it is also allegorized differently. The medieval, mythographically charged and anti-feminist epithet ‘Author’ used in the Hekatompathia comes from several authorial voices and this, in turn, interrogates Echo’s words. This multi-layered intertextuality brands Echo as a shrew and this adds weight to her disagreeing voice of virago within the poem. Ultimately (ironically?), the male author sets her voice against his own Petrarchist rhetoric while using a favourite and common Petrarchist trope. Watson’s recursive echo poem, so typically English, is thus replete with Ovidian self-consciousness about his own art, making him part of a wider, European, anti-Petrarchist literary community of which Du Bellay is also a member. *    *    * Thus, to explore Echo’s ‘repercussive voice’ is to follow repercussion and recursion in the specific corpus of English echo poems at the end of the sixteenth century. This study has sought to illustrate the commonality of a strategy of reading these poems as framed by the Ovidian poetics. First they were composed with a direct or an indirect indebtedness to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, offering several early modern versions of the Ovidian echoic dialogue between Echo and Narcissus within the strict pattern of echoic poems; then, the way these poems were materially printed — and paratextually presented — tells us about the poets themselves, the English ‘Brigade’: Thomas Watson, Barnabe Barnes, William Percy, Richard Barnfield, and William Smith among others, and their readerships. Finally, Echo’s acoustic and etiological name meta-textually coincides with a self-referential rhetoric device: Echo can be merely echoing, or being repercussive with a difference (eco responsiva), even occasionally serving a poetics of ironizing, when classical intertextuality is also linked to Ausonius’s and the mythographers’ texts. Echo’s gradual typographic depletion does not prevent her pervasive voice from resonating. Ovid’s Echo is thus useful to understand common English relations to the authority of the classical past and of foreign cultural input, as she voices debates about the reception of the classical and Petrarchist traditions.

 62 Ovid, The. xv. bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, trans. by Golding, iii.443.  63 Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices, p. 10.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Alexander, William, Earl of Stirling, Aurora Containing the first fancies of the authors youth, William Alexander of Menstrie (London: Printed by Richard Field for Edward Blount, 1604) Ausonius, Volume II: Books 18–20. Paulinus Pellaeus: Eucharisticus, trans. by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Loeb Classical Library 115 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921) Barnes, Barnabe, Parthenophil and Parthenophe. Sonnettes, madrigals, elegies and odes (London: John Wolfe, 1593) Barnfield, Richard, Cynthia: with Certaine Sonnets, and the Legend of Cassandra (London: Printed for Humfrey Lownes, 1595) Dekker, Thomas, Newes from Graues-end (London: T[homas] C[reede] for Thomas Archer, 1604) Desportes, Philippe, Les Amours de Diane. Édition critique suivie du commentaire de Malherbe (1600–1606), ed. by Victor E. Graham (Geneva: Droz, 1959) Du Bellay, Joachim, L’Olive et quelques autres oeuvres poeticques . Le contenu de ce livre. Cinquante Sonnetz à la louange de l’Olive. L’Anterotique de la vieille, & de la jeune Amye. Vers Lyriques (Paris: Arnoul l’Angelier, 1549) —— , Recueil de poesie, presente à tres illustre princesse Madame Marguerite, seur unique du Roy, et mis en lumiere par le commandement de ma dicte dame (Paris: Guillaume Cavellat, 1549) —— , Recueil de poésie présenté à très illustre princesse Madame Marguerite, seur unique du Roy (Paris: Benoist Provost, 1553) —— , Divers jeux rustiques et autres œuvres poétiques (Paris: Frederic Morel, 1558) —— , Recueils lyriques (1549), ed. by Henri Chamard (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1983) Fraunce, Abraham, The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch (London: Thomas Orwyn for Thomas Woodcocke, 1592) Gower, John, The English Works of John Gower, ed. by G. C. Macaulay, EETS 81–82 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1901; rpr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) Lodge, Thomas, Phillis, Honoured with Pastoral Sonnets, Elegies and Amorous Delights (London: James Roberts for Iohn Busbie, 1593) Marot, Clément, and Barthélemy Aneau, Les Trois premiers livres de la Méta­mor­ phose d’Ovide (Lyon: Guillaume de Roville, 1556), ed. by Jean-Caude Moisan et Marie-Claude Malenfant (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997), 3.339–510 Ovid, The. xv. bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, trans. by Arthur Golding (London: Willyam Seres, 1567) —— , Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz’d and Represented in Figures, trans. by George Sandys (1632), ed. by Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970)

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Percy, William, Sonnets to the fairest Cœlia (London: Adam Islip, for W[illiam] P[onsonby], 1594) Ronsard, Pierre de, Les amours […] commentées par Marc Antoine de Muret (Paris: Vve M. de La Porte, 1553) Sidney, Philip, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (London: John Windet for William Ponsonbie, 1590) Smith, William, Chloris, or, The Complaint of the Passionate Despised Shepheard (London: Edmund Bollifant, 1596) Soowthern, John, Pandora, or the Musyque of the beautie of his mistress Diana (London: [By John Charlewood] for Thomas Hackette, 1584) Watson, Thomas, Hekatompathia or Passionate centurie of loue diuided into two parts: whereof, the first expresseth the authors sufferance in loue: the latter, his long farewell to loue and all his tyrannie. Composed by Thomas Watson Gentleman; and published at the request of certaine gentlemen his very frendes (London: John Wolfe for Gabriell Cawood, 1582) —— , The Complete Works of Thomas Watson, 1556–1592, ed. by Dana F. Sutton, 2 vols (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1996) Secondary Works Anderson, Susan, Echo and Meaning on Early Modern English Stages (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) Bardelmann, Claire, Eros and Music in Early Modern Culture and Literature (London: Routledge, 2018) Blayney, Peter, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 383–440 Brennan, Michael, ‘William Ponsonby: Elizabethan Stationer’, Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, 7.3 (1983), 91–110 Brink, Jean R., ‘Smith, William (fl. 1596)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) Burrow, Colin, ‘“Full of the Maker’s Guile”: Ovid on Imitating and on the Imitation of Ovid’, in Ovidian Transformations: Essays on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its Reception, ed. by Philip Hardie, Alessandro Barchiesi, and Stephen Hinds (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999), pp. 271–87 Colby, Elbridge, ‘The Echo Device in Literature’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 23.11 (Nov. 1919), 683–713 Coldiron, Anne E. B., Printers Without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Cox, John D., ‘Barnes, Barnabe (bap. 1571, d. 1609)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) Demerson, Guy, La Mythologie classique dans l’œuvre lyrique de la Pléiade (Geneva: Droz, 1972)

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Dubrow, Heather, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) Fleming, Juliet, ‘Changed Opinion as to Flowers’, in Renaissance Paratexts, ed. by Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Gair, Reavley, ‘Percy, William (1574–1648)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) Galand-Hallyn, Perrine, ‘Des “vers échoïques” ou comment rendre une âme à Écho’, Nouvelle Revue du 16e siècle, 15.2 (1997), 253–76 Gély-Ghedira, Véronique, La Nostalgie du moi dans la littérature européenne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000) Ginestet, Gaëlle, ‘L’Écriture mythologique dans les sonnets amoureux élisabéthains’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Université Montpellier 3, 2005) Harvey, Elizabeth D., Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992) Hoppe, Harry R., ‘John Wolfe, Printer and Stationer, 1579–1601’, The Library, 4th ser. 14 (1933), 241–88 Keener, Andrew, ‘Printed Plays, Polyglot Books: The Multilingual Textures of Early Modern English Drama’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 112.4 (2018), 481–511 Kennedy, William, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) Kuskin, William, Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013) Lafont, Agnès, ‘“I am truly more fond and foolish than ever Narcissus was” (Painter, Palace of Pleasure): Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and Ovidian Reson­ ances’, in The Duchess of Malfi: Webster’s Tragedy of Blood, ed. by William C. Carroll and Pascale Drouet (Paris: BELIN/CNED, 2018), pp. 60–77 Loewenstein, Joseph, Responsive Readings: Versions of Echo in Pastoral, Epic, and the Jonsonian Masque (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) Massai, Sonia, ‘Barnfield, Richard (bap. 1574, d. 1620)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) Mauré, Cécile, ‘Héritages et réappropriations du mythe d’Écho dans la littérature élisabéthaine’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Université Montpellier 3, 2003) —— , ‘Écho ou les dangers de la voix dans la littérature élisabéthaine’, Savoirs en prismes, 5 (2016) [accessed 5 December 2021] Moody, Ellen, ‘Six Elegiac Poems, Possibly by Anne Cecil de Vere, Countess of Oxford’, English Literary Renaissance, 19.2 (1989), 152–70 Murphy, Stephen, ‘Diane et la Disperata’ in Le mythe de Diane en France au xvie siècle, ed. by Jean-Raymond Fanlo and Marie-Dominique Legrand, Albineana, Cahiers d’Aubigné, 14 (2002), 119–29 Prescott, Anne Lake, French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978)

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Sternfeld, Frederick, ‘Repetition and Echo in Renaissance Poetry and Music’, in English Renaissance Studies Presented to Dame Helen Gardner in Honour of Her Seventieth Birthday, ed. by Helen Gardner and John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 33–43 Taylor, Anthony Brian, ‘George Peele and Golding’s Metamorphoses’, Notes and Queries, 16.8 (1969), 286–87. Wall, Wendy, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) Wilson-Lee, Edward, ‘Glosses and Oracles: Guiding Readers in Early Modern Europe’, in Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe, ed. by José María Pérez Fernandez and Edward Wilson-Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 145–63

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The Languages of Artistic Transfer Music and the Visual Arts

Chantal Schütz

10. ‘Their Ditties Englished’ Naturalizing French Lyrics This chapter examines an unusual collection of French songs that were translated and published in 1629 by Edward Filmer, in a volume of French Court-Aires dedicated to Queen Henrietta Maria. In order to assess the significance of this collection, both in terms of its presentation and of its manner of translating, the chapter begins with a discussion of the historical context in which the collection appeared, then moves on to an analysis of Filmer’s preface, in which he lays down the aims and method of his translation. Particular attention is then devoted to several of the translated poems, notably those by Malherbe and Maynard. In Philip Sidney’s well-known words, the poet is one ‘who cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting skill of music’.1 Of course, for an early modern author, calling poems songs and comparing poets to Orpheus did not necessarily entail musical settings, and there are many instances of a purely figurative use of the trope. It should however not be forgotten that it is through the medium of song that many lyric poems were communicated to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century public — as David Lindley puts it, ‘verses came most frequently attached to tunes’, be it in the theatre, on the street or in the parish church.2 Because songs are easier to memorize than unsung verse, even in an age that was far more reliant on memory than ours, poems set to music were guaranteed a different type of circulation, which was not only dependent on manuscript or printed versions. In addition, the widespread practice of parody and contrafactum, that is of writing new words to pre-existing tunes, significantly extended that circulation, generating new variants that might share form and thematic content, or sometimes only form, and then go on to acquire an independent format, without the music that originally gave rise to it.

 1 Sidney, ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. by Alexander, p. 23.  2 Lindley, ‘Words for Music, Perhaps’, p. 10. Chantal Schütz ([email protected]) École Polytechnique & Sorbonne Nouvelle Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer, ed. by Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin, PEEMB 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 247–272  10.1484/M.PEEMB-EB.5.127782

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Besides, musical settings frequently helped poems make their way into print. Peter Walls reminds us that ‘[t]he first poems by both Sidney and Donne to appear in print did so because they were set to music’:3 Sidney’s ‘O You that hear this voice’ from Astrophil and Stella was first published in William Byrd’s Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs of Sadness and Piety (1588), while two of John Donne’s poems first appeared in the form of lute-songs, ‘The Expiration’ in Alfonso Ferrabosco’s Ayres (1609), and ‘Break of Day’ in William Corkine’s Second Book of Ayres (1612) — this is even the ‘first evidence that Donne lyrics were in circulation’.4 However, the authors of the poems were not necessarily credited in the books of songs. In fact, most of the poems set in such song collections are anonymous and have not been attributed to particular poets with any certainty, in spite of the efforts of scholars to verify their authorship.5 It is generally assumed that they were written by courtiers, whose works were circulating in manuscript form, just like Donne’s. The incentives for print circulation were clearly very different for musicians and courtier poets, in part because the latter were amateurs who valued the selectiveness and social exclusivity associated with manuscript circulation and/or feared the ‘stigma of print’ (if one accepts the validity of that concept),6 whereas the former were professionals who had everything to gain from publication: economic increase, reputation enhancement, status acquisition. In addition, the names of famous musicians promised better sales for the songbooks, whereas the attribution of poems within the collections may not have been perceived as a useful addition to boost distribution. Some early modern composers did indeed derive income from the rapid development of music printing: while some had to be content with the sale of a printed volume to a publisher, others like Thomas Morley received far more profitable printer’s patents and royal monopolies.7 Most court musicians, however, had small incentives to publish in England: the composer John Dowland, for instance, virtually stopped printing music after he was appointed royal lutenist in 1612, although he had been a prolific and successful publisher while in employment on the Continent.8 On the contrary, the lutenist Robert Jones, who did not have a secure position as a teacher or as a client of an aristocratic family, issued five books of songs. The situation was quite different in France, where publishing was actively encouraged by the court, and the patent holders had easy access to the music commissioned by the royal household. However, authors were also frequently not credited in French collections.9

 3 Walls, ‘“Music and Sweet Poetry”?’, p. 238.  4 Carey, John Donne, p. 40.  5 Gibson, ‘John Dowland and the Elizabethan Courtier Poets’, p. 239.  6 Saunders, ‘The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry’, p. 140; May, ‘Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical “Stigma of Print”’, p. 11.  7 Murray, Thomas Morley, p. 85.  8 Kenny, ‘The Uses of Lute Song’, p. 286.  9 Durosoir, L’Air de cour en France 1571–1655, p. 348.

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The Donne poems mentioned above were set as lute-songs, and thus belong to a fashion that began with the publication of a book of airs by William Barley, A New Book of Tabliture (1596), and ended in 1622 with the publication of John Attey’s The First Book of Ayres, encompassing approximately 650 songs, including the aforesaid ones by Dowland and Jones.10 This considerable output enabled a substantial circulation of English lyrics, and certainly facilitated their reception, since the performance format maximizes the audibility of the words, contrary to madrigals, where the many simultaneous parts tend to obscure the meaning. In that respect and in others, lute-songs have much in common with the French airs de cour or court airs. Those secular, strophic songs, usually dealing with love in pastoral settings, were also written by the finest court poets and composers. They were performed both at court and in aristocratic circles where they were appreciated for their simple lyrical nature and the fact they offered scope both for amateur and professional performance.11 The main difference between lute-songs and court airs resides in the nature of the instrumental part: while the English songs are based on highly contrapuntal lute accompaniments (especially in the case of Dowland’s songs), the French airs rely on relatively simple harmonies. Both lute-songs and airs de cour were also published as four- or five-part songs, as is the case for Dowland’s highly successful First Book, but it is not known whether they were first harmonized for voices or on the contrary first intabulated for the lute (thus highlighting the solo voice line). What is certain is that the practice of intabulation was far more generalized in France, and that the continuo version often involved one note for each syllable, in order to facilitate such realization.12 This was not necessarily the case for English lute-songs, notably Dowland’s later production, where the lute part almost seems to take precedence over the vocal line. While the fashion for court airs in France began roughly at the same time as the vogue for lute-songs in England, it lasted well into the seventeenth century and led to the systematic publication of over a thousand songs, thanks to the activity of the printers Adrian Le Roy and Robert Ballard, the holders of the exclusive royal privilege for music printing, whose printing house dominated the French market from 1551 to 1789.13 Le Roy and Ballard issued many tastefully set books of court airs, in prestige versions for four or five singers (part-songs) usually gathering pieces by a single composer, or in the form of miscellanies for solo singer with a lute accompaniment. For instance, the six books of Airs de différent autheurs mis en tablature de luth by the lutenist Gabriel Bataille published by Pierre Ballard between 1608 and 1615, were

 10 Maynard, Elizabethan Lyric Poetry and Its Music; Doughtie, Lyrics from English Airs, 1596–1622; Fischlin, In Small Proportion: A Poetics of the English Ayre.  11 Sullivan, ‘French Court-Aires, with Their Ditties Englished’, p. 25.  12 Wainwright, From Renaissance to Baroque, p. 194.  13 Boorman, Selfridge-Field, and Krummel, ‘Printing and Publishing of Music’.

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Figure 10.1. French court-aires, with their ditties Englished, of foure and five parts. Together with that of the lute… Collected, translated, published by Ed: Filmer, Gent: Dedicated to the Queene. (London: Printed by William Stansby, 1629). Christ Church Mus791, fol. 5. Reproduced with permission of Christ Church Library, Oxford.

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reprinted several times and also circulated outside France, as is attested by the fact that they appear in several English library inventories of the period.14 Songs circulated in different ways from one country to the other: they were brought over by professional musicians or travellers who had obtained them during their sojourns abroad, or they were dispatched to be sold by local booksellers. But they could also be translated, both in manuscript and print version. Nicholas Yonge, who launched the fashion for Italian madrigals by publishing two books of translations, Musica Transalpina (1588) and a Second Booke of Madrigalles (1597), declared that he had furnished ‘a great number of Gentlemen and Merchants of good accompt (as well of this realme as of forreine nations) […] with Bookes of that kinde yeerly sent me out of Italy and other places’ before he decided to publish his translations — although he claimed that they had been done by ‘a Gentleman for his priuate delight’.15 This material trace of the circulation of songs between the Continent and England was followed three decades later by a volume of French court-aires, vvith their ditties Englished, published in London by the younger brother of the royalist philosopher and politician Robert Filmer.16 Dedicated to Queen Henrietta Maria, daughter of King Henri IV of France and wife to King Charles I of England, this book arrived on the market well after the supposed demise of the lute-song, and in so doing it actually perpetuated a mode of presentation that was idiosyncratically English. Indeed, Filmer opted to use the layout popularized by Dowland’s First Book of Songs, combining part-song and solosong in a single page (Figure 10.1). As a result, by crossing the Channel, the poems not only changed languages but also took on a new guise, or to quote Filmer, ‘new-colour’d their Forme, by changing their language’.17 Ironically, the moment in which Filmer’s collection was issued corresponds to a lull both in English music publishing and French court-air printing, and there was no follow-up to Filmer’s attempt to ‘naturalize’ the French court air in Britain, contrary to what had been the case with the translated madrigal-books.18 This may well have been due to the importance of the lyrics in French songs, and therefore to the way in which Filmer translated them. Filmer’s collection contains nineteen songs composed by the celebrated court composers Pierre Guédron (156?–1620?) and Antoine Boësset (1586?–1643), and published by the Le Roy and Ballard workshop in the first decades of

 14 Sullivan, ‘French Court-Aires, with Their Ditties Englished’, p. 34. These songs are documented in detail by Thomas Leconte: [accessed 1 October 2020].  15 Yonge, Musica Transalpina (1588), ‘Dedication’, n.p.  16 See Till, rev. by Ford, ‘Filmer, Edward’.  17 Filmer, Boesset, and Guédron, French Court-Aires (hereafter cited as Filmer, French CourtAires), 3. Further references to this work will be given parenthetically in the main body, the numbers corresponding to folio numbers.  18 ‘my moderate desires are, that my Home-hearted unaffecting Countrie-men, Favourers and Practizers of Musicke, would courteously entertaine this Recopilation as a Worke naturaliz’d chiefly for their sakes’ (Filmer, French Court-Aires, 4).

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the seventeenth century. By choosing the table layout pertaining to lutesongs, Filmer conflated the part-books and the solo collections into a single, carefully presented compilation, ostensibly destined to familiarize English amateur performers with the French style of singing while sparing them, and their listeners, the torture of mispronouncing the original lyrics — in the translator’s words, ‘they themselves, besides understanding them but to halves, pronounce them to a natural French Eare as Misbecomingly as ever Crude Forrainer was heard to sing an English Ballet’ (3). In fact, the book makes the unusual step of including the original French lyrics (the ‘ditties’) in the last pages, as a legitimation of Filmer’s translating efforts: ‘by the same meanes testifying, to the skilfull in both Tongues, my integritie (as farre as is formerly professed) in their Translations’ (5) (Figure 10.2). Filmer’s ‘integrity’ extended to consistently crediting authors and arrangers, as explained in the address ‘To the Musicall User of this Booke’, a part in which he includes some technical directions: ‘I have therefore put his name to those Lute-parts that were not Composed by the Authors themsealves of the Aires, to the intent that each man may bee duely reputed-of according to his Deserving’ (5). Filmer also included comments on the circumstances of the composition of some pieces, notably the ones that underlined a parallel between Queen Henrietta Maria and some female members of her family for whom some of the songs had been written: ‘C’est trop courir les eaux’ and ‘Enfin la voyci’ respectively celebrate the leave taking of Henrietta Maria’s sister Elisabeth (1602–1644) to marry the future Philip IV of Spain (1605–1665) and the arrival of the Spanish Infanta, Anne of Austria (1601–1666), when she came to marry Henrietta Maria’s brother Louis XIII. Of the latter, Filmer noted that it was written ‘To ANNE the French Queene, new come from Spaine, at her first meeting with the King her husband: and applicable to our Sacred MARIE, at his Majesties first sight of her at DOVER’(13v). Filmer also added an extensive preface in which he discussed the difficulties of translation. The sum of these paratexts and the care with which the collection was presented give the book the qualities of an early critical edition, and it is frequently referred to by modern editors of court airs (Verchaly, Leconte, etc.). In fact, it even stands out in the printer’s record: the attention with which the book was prepared and printed seems to have been an unusual feature for the printer William Stansby, a versatile but sometimes offhand artisan, who had however published Ben Jonson’s First Folio in 1616.19 This may in part account for the presence of a commendatory poem by Jonson, a highly political text in which the poet insisted on the harmony of the Anglo-French alliance embodied by the king and queen. One of Jonson’s works, The Fortunate Isles and Their Union, a masque performed at court in 1625, had referred to that alliance as the union of the Rose and the Lily, a trope he used again in this poem.20 The

 19 Miller, ‘Stansby, William’; Jonson and Hole, The Workes of Beniamin Ionson.  20 Jacquot, ‘La Reine Henriette-Marie et l’influence française dans les spectacles’, p. 132.

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Figure 10.2. French court-aires, with their ditties Englished, of foure and five parts. Together with that of the lute… Collected, translated, published by Ed: Filmer, Gent: Dedicated to the Queene. (London: Printed by William Stansby, 1629). Christ Church Mus791, fol. 24. Reproduced with permission of Christ Church Library, Oxford.

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poem hints that the translated songs should be a way for the queen to improve her English, her poor command of the language being one of the reasons why she had had trouble establishing her place at court:21 They are a Schoole to win The faire French Daughter to learne English in; And, graced with her song, To make the Language sweet upon her tongue. (4) The prerequisite for such a prospect was that the queen should be familiar with the songs, something which Filmer’s dedication intimates: ‘Courtiers they were borne, (at being begot of purpose to serve in those Chambers where your Majestie had your high Beginning)’ (2). Some of the songs were indeed sufficiently well known to have been published with their French text in English collections: ‘Vous que le bonheur rappelle’ and ‘Si le parler et le silence’ were included in Robert Dowland’s miscellany, A Musical Banquet, published in 1610.22 Much of the scholarly debate about the poems in the English lute-song corpus has had to do not only with attribution but also with considerations about metre and form. What is often questioned is whether the ubiquitousness of song had an effect on the development of new poetic forms, and whether the song-writing activities of poets like Sidney or Donne influenced their experimenting with metre and stanza.23 In the act of translating, as in the writing of contrafacta, these issues become crucial, as the tunes have been designed by the composer to fit a prosody and poetic form that are both alien to the English language. This is of course a major consideration when poetry circulates through the medium of song collections.24 Nicholas Yonge, for instance, underlined the care he had taken to respect the accents of the music, claiming that ‘many skilfull Gentlemen and other great Musiciens, […] affirmed the accent of the words to be well mainteined, the descant not hindred, (though some fewe notes altred) and in euerie place the due decorum kept’.25 Thomas Watson went further in his attempt to match the new lyrics to the musical style of the pieces he had selected: when he published The First Set of Italian Madrigals (1590), he emphasized on the title page that he had translated the texts ‘not to the sense of the originall dittie, but after the affection of the Noate’, allowing himself more freedom than Yonge.26 Whatever the degree of fidelity to the original, the transposition from Italian to English seems relatively less difficult when it comes to fitting the text to music than  21 Griffey, Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage, p. 15.  22 Robert Dowland, A Musicall Banquet Furnished with Varietie of Delicious Ayres, Collected out of the Best Authors in English, French, Spanish and Italian. By Robert Douland, pp. xi and xiii.  23 Maynard, Elizabethan Lyric Poetry and Its Music, pp. 102–10.  24 Macy, ‘The Due Decorum Kept’, p. 2.  25 Yonge, Musica Transalpina (1588), ‘Epistle dedicatory’, n.p.  26 Watson, The First Sett, of Italian Madrigalls Englished, title.

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when translating from French, precisely because Italian and English are strongly accented, whereas French is not. In Filmer’s words, French syllables, as well in Verse as Prose, are pronounced with a more Continu’d Equalitie of sound, then ours. For that Tongue admits seldome of any Tones or Intentions of the Voice (by Grammarians called Accents) unlesse at the End of the Clause, or in the penultims of words ending in their e fœminine. And this their Mother-pronunciation they often apply even to the Latine, and other acquired Tongues. (3) Filmer, like Thomas Campion before him, bemoans the contempt his fellow Englishmen seem to have for their own language and native music. Thus, Campion stated mordantly in the foreword to Two Bookes of Ayres that ‘some there are who admit only French or Italian ayres, as if every country had not his proper ayre, which the people thereof naturally usurp in their Musicke’, echoed by Filmer’s remark that ‘such is the aptnesse of halfe-digested Noveltie to breed in the Stomackes of our yong Countrie-men a Queasie despising of the almost-matchlesse Abilities of their owne Language’ (3).27 In fact, Campion’s attempts at transposing French measured verse, vers mesuré à l’antique, in some of his songs (‘Come, let us sound’, or ‘My sweet Lesbia’, for instance), reflect the French influence on the English ayre, and his failure to continue on this path is suggestive of the obstacles posed by the structural linguistic differences between the two countries.28 This is all the more significant as French measured verse, as theorized in the texts of Marin Mersenne, is central to the definition of the ut musica poesis in France.29 In addition, the freedom of form of many French court airs certainly owes a lot to the work of Baïf and Lejeune on fitting music to words rather than the reverse.30 Yet, unlike Campion, Filmer attempted to ‘naturalize’ the foreign airs (4). However, in keeping with this high regard for his mother tongue, Filmer proceeded to augment and embellish the French poems, ostensibly to fit the words to the music and to respect the place of the musical accents. As a result, many of the translations turn the spare French lyrics into heavily metaphorical English poems — including a marked use of rhetorical devices such as allegory, amplification, and transposition. The English version also generally appears to be both more elaborate and more specific than the French, due to the almost systematic addition of adjectives that qualify monosyllabic or disyllabic nouns, as opposed to the longer unqualified French nouns. More importantly, Filmer’s translations lay heavy emphasis on the senses and bodily functions, notably with metaphors involving disease and decay, constantly drawing the songs away from the spirit of abstraction of French courtly style.

 27 Campion, Tvvo bookes of ayres, ‘To the reader’, 3.  28 Wilson, ‘Music in Campion’s Measured Verse’, p. 267.  29 Bardelmann, ‘Poésie et musique dans l’Harmonie Universelle de Marin Mersenne’, p. 28.  30 Walker, ‘The Influence of “Musique mesurée à l’antique”’.

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A case in point is the translation of a text by François de Malherbe, one of at least five poems commissioned by King Henri IV in his efforts to seduce Charlotte-Marguerite de Montmorency in 1610, the very year he was assassinated. Malherbe’s correspondence with Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) tells us about the commission, explaining that he used the measure of an extant song to base his prosody on it: 18 février 1610: Il [le roi] m’a commandé ce soir de lui faire une élégie : je vais me mettre après. Je lui ai baillé la chanson pour laquelle je vous avois prié de m’envoyer un certain air sur lequel j’ai pris ma mesure. Je vous fais encore la même priere, ce sera pour le comparer avec celui que Guesdron y fera ; car le roi l’a envoyé quérir à l’heure même qu’il a lu mes vers, et lui a dit qu’il voudroit qu’il y travaillât des ce soir.31 In a further letter dated 24 March 1610, the poet confirms the general enthusiasm elicited by the musical setting that had been provided in the interim by Guédron: ‘Je viens de recouvrer l’air qu’a fait Mr Guesdron sur la chanson dont il est question. Je ne m’y connois pas ; mais tout le monde le trouve fort beau, et surtout le Roy.’32 Malherbe is recognized as the major reformer of French poetry, which he directed towards greater simplicity of expression. Although the above-mentioned letter suggests he had little ear for music, his poetry cannot be dissociated from the rules and format of the air de cour, as is the case for most of the poetry of the period, which was frequently written with a view to potential musical setting. This is most notable in the requirement to end-stop the lines, that is to avoid enjambement, which matches the practice of setting the music line by line.33 Besides enjambement, Malherbe’s prohibitions included ‘hiatus, poetic licence, grammatical incorrectness, foreign borrowings, inversions, ambiguities, unpleasant innuendoes, padding and cacophony’.34 This purified language is exemplified in ‘Que n’estes-vous lassées’, along with the use of a relatively limited lexicon and a care to choose demanding rhymes and sober epithets. Such limitations were recognized by a critic like Perrault as characteristic of French poetry destined to be sung, since they make it possible to understand the meaning of the poem while concentrating on the pleasure provided by the music.35 It is therefore ironic that Filmer translates this poem much in the spirit of the poetry that Malherbe spent his life disparaging: he makes heavy use of conceit and sustained metaphor, rhetorical repetition, chiasmus and antithesis, alliteration and neologism, or in Guillaume Colletet’s words, ‘contrebatteries de mots’.36  31 Malherbe, Œuvres, ed. by Adam, p. 451.  32 Malherbe, Œuvres, ed. by Adam, p. 453.  33 Winegarten, French Lyric Poetry, p. 5.  34 Winegarten, French Lyric Poetry, p. 15.  35 Buffard-Moret, La Chanson poétique du xixe siècle, p. 109.  36 Winegarten, French Lyric Poetry, p. 22.

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Custom indicates that not all verses of court airs were actually sung, but both Ballard and Filmer made sure they all appeared on the page, thus giving the performer a choice of which ones to sing. This particular poem boasts ten stanzas that are all variations on the pain of separation.37 The first verse makes use of the fairly commonplace metaphor of love’s sickness, presented in a dialogue between the lover and his own thoughts, and opposing reason to passion: Que n’estes vous lassées Mes tristes pensées De troubler ma raison ? Et faire avecque blâme Rebeller mon ame Contre sa guarison. Filmer duly transposes the metaphor, but in so doing removes the implicit dialogic format (of the narrator with his thoughts). Above all he builds on the idea of rebellion (‘rebeller mon ame’) to introduce a legal conceit, where the soul of the lover seems to be tried for its wrongdoing (‘Making my Soule accused’) and plotting (‘Why have my Thoughts conspired’). In addition, the worn metaphor of healing (‘guarison’) opens up a medical conceit which is subsequently sustained and developed throughout the English lyric: ‘refused | Her antidote’ is echoed by the narrator’s ‘blew-striped’ skin, while his ‘bones of flesh are stripped’. This physicality extends to the Fates, whose ‘Spleen’ is ‘enraged’, requiring ‘balme-leafe’, while grudges are felt by ‘earthly stomackes’. The legal conceit is intertwined with the medical one, as the ‘Gods’ invoked by the narrator offer a deaf ‘tribunal’, having been ‘stil’d free Judges’ (6v–7). To top it all, the lyric ends with a food-based conceit that is entirely absent from the French text, which, in keeping with due decorum, privileges the senses of sight and hearing over those of taste and smell: Deux beaux yeux sont l’empire Pour qui je soupire, Sans eux rien ne m’est doux : Donnés moy cette joye Que je les revoye, Je suis dieu comme vous. The following verse becomes a cannibalistic conceit around the bitter-tasting feast from which the eyes are absent, punning on ‘rue’ as regret and bitter herb: Two sweete Eies are my wishes; Feasts, without these dishes,  37 The complete text of the poem is appended to this chapter with its translation in Filmer’s French Court-Aires (Appendix 1).

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Rellish of nought but rue: Do but, yer Famine end mee, This Ambrosia send mee, I am a God like you. Blissfully unaware of Malherbe’s preferences, Filmer seems to flout every single one of his prescriptions, making lavish use of enjambement (‘since the longest-aged | Spleene of Fates’), neologism (‘misconster’, which the translator feels obliged to explain in the margin: ‘perperam vel indigne construere’), chiasmus (‘Turnes, from Nettle, Balme-leafe’), personification (‘Light! that keep’st all Lights under’) and overall rhetorical excess (‘What poison’d stabbes of Furie | In swell’d breast endure I’) (6v–7). The system operating in this poem is applied in most of the other translations, even though the original poems may not have been so ambitious in their rejection of the earlier forms of French verse. Generally speaking, Filmer’s translations tend to haul urbane expressions of gallant love towards quasi-manneristic, intensely contrasted and highly alliterative eruptions of despair, as when the sober ‘ma triste voix’ is rendered as the resonant ‘my blazing dints’ in ‘Arme toy ma raison’ — ‘Reason! arme thy wrong’d hands’ (17v). The governing rhetoric is that of excess, as in the powerful and somewhat obscure soundscape of the penultimate verse of ‘Vous que le Bonheur r’appelle’ (‘Thou, whome Fortune, now turn’d tender’), which Malherbe might well have termed cacophony: Thralldome stands on happie pillres, Whose Frame, Fate-proofe, feares no powres Of her ruines strongest willers, Shakes of Death and Lethe’s showres[.] (18v) Compare the resonant fricatives and stops of the English with the sonorants prevalent in the French: Bien heureuse servitude Dont le genereux effort, Peut vaincre l’ingratitude De l’oubli & de la mort. This rhetoric of excess and copia is in complete contrast to the conceit of inexpressibility that governed the aesthetics of English lute-songs, and Filmer’s attempt to fit his translations into that format were probably doomed for that reason among others. The alliterations and harsh rhythmic structures also do not favour singability, in spite of his claims that he was furnishing translations in order not to suffer from English performers’ mispronunciation of the French lyrics. Thomas Campion had observed in the preface to his first and second books of songs that English syllables are ‘loaded with Consonants as that they will hardly keepe company with swift Notes, or give the Vowell convenient liberty’, and most lute-song composers could claim, like Robert Jones, that

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their ‘chiefest care was to fit the Note to the Word’.38 Filmer on the contrary chose to give preeminence to the music and not to alter the musical rhythm, which forces the singer attempting to perform the songs either to stumble upon the consonants or to negotiate misplaced accents or incomplete sentences. Nevertheless, this book of songs represents one of the few attempts to translate précieux poetry into English, albeit within aesthetic choices that belong to a different ethos.39 It is also probably one of the earliest printed translations of Malherbe, who does not seem to have made as much of an impression on the English public as he did on the French. Another notable poet translated in the collection is François Maynard (1582–1646), who authored the text of the first song of the book, a panegyric ‘Sung by the Sun, in a Masque of the Prince of Condies, to the now French Queene-Mother, at that time Regent’ (4v–5).40 Entitled ‘LE SOLEIL| A LA| Reyne Mere’, it had been published in 1626 as a poem in Recueil des plus beaux vers de MM. de Malherbe, Racan, Monfuron, Maynard, Boisrobert, L’Estoille, Touvant, Motin, Mareschal. Et autres des plus fameux esprits de la cour by Toussaint Du Bray, a collection that went through several re-editions.41 It gathers poems by Malherbe and his followers — ‘ceux qu’il avoue pour ses écoliers’42 — ordered hierarchically according to Malherbe’s system, beginning with religious poetry then odes dedicated to kings and queens, all the way down to verse written for court masques and epitaphs. In both volumes the poem appears among the ‘vers de ballet’, albeit with many variations with regard to the text printed both in Ballard’s and Filmer’s collections, which in effect constitute the first editions.43 Filmer in fact respects the Malherbian hierarchy by placing two panegyrics at the opening of his own collection, but there is no apparent logic to the rest of the anthology. Filmer’s translation of the eulogies is particularly interesting in that it both amplifies and specifies the fairly neutral flattery of the French text. For instance, the English version feminizes the allegories and adds to the ones already present. Thus, Neptune is replaced by his consort Thetis, France is

 38 Campion, Tvvo bookes of ayres, ‘To the reader’, 3; Jones, First Booke of Songes and Ayres in foure parts, ‘To the reader’, 4.  39 Sullivan, ‘French Court-Aires, with Their Ditties Englished’, pp. 128–29.  40 François Maynard, a disciple of Malherbe who spent much of his life in Toulouse, was secretary to Margaret of Valois, wife of Henri IV of France. He should not be confused with the English composer John Maynard (1577–1633) whose best-known work is the musical setting of The Twelve Wonders of the World, a book of epigrams levelled at the shortcomings of the Court written by John Davies.  41 Malherbe, and others, Recueil des plus beaux vers, pp. 403–05. First edition 1626, further editions in 1627, 1630, and 1638.  42 Du Bray in Malherbe and others, Recueil des plus beaux vers, ‘Le libraire au lecteur’.  43 Maynard, ‘Le soleil à la Reyne Mere’, reproduced in Leconte, Catalogue de l’air de cour en France (1602–c. 1660) (online) [accessed 1 October 2020].

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embodied as a ‘she’ as opposed to the masculine ‘empire’, Bellona embodies ‘la Guerre’; the ‘seaven Wandring Torches of Heaven’ expand ‘les Cieux’, and ‘my Coach and cunning’ give more character to ‘le rang qu’elle y possède’. All in all, the English poem fulfils its objective of flattering the queen and her particular interest for female agency by underlining her actions:44 it is her eye that actively ‘reproves’ the sun, where ‘le soleil’ felt shame at seeing it (‘me donne tant de honte’).45 The English version also emphasizes the theatrical origin of the poem by repeatedly introducing movement and agency through the addition of adjectives and verbs: ‘your Fates hinder’d paces’ thus expands ‘vos destinées’ while ‘[thou] mak’st Bellona grumble | To see her Demons tumble | In chaines with Hellish Fiends’ introduces some humour into ‘Et montres à la Guerre | Au centre de la Terre | Ses Demons enchainés’. Concepts are transformed, as when ‘en qui la France, | A logé l’esperance | De la felicité’ becomes ‘in whose high assistance | France assures her resistance | Against all future harme’, underlining the idea that war and strife were eschewed thanks to the royal marriage. Filmer also exploits the syntactic flexibility of the English language by inventing compounds such as ‘skie-running’ or ‘the Now-livers’. Filmer’s collection contains a third panegyric whose author is identified (contrary to the second one), but this is surprisingly placed as the twelfth song in the collection. ‘C’est trop courir les eaux’ is ascribed to Étienne Durand (1586–1618), poète ordinaire to Henrietta Maria’s mother Marie de’ Medici, to whom he remained loyal following the assassination of her favourite Concini, which caused him to be executed by order of Louis XIII in 1618.46 The poem is extracted from the Ballet du triomphe de Minerve, which was performed in 1615, and the published description provides details about the lavish costumes and sets that supplemented the music: Le Balet des Bergers finy, la machine changea, et ce qui estoit bois auparavant, devint rochers aboutissans en branches de coral, escailles, mousses maritimes, et representans des escueils battus des vagues. Dans la mer passoit une musique de Tritons, et après eux venoit encores la musique de la chambre du Roy, vestuë en Tritonides, la teste, les espaules et les hanches recouvertes de roseaux artificiels d’or et de soye, et le reste de l’habit de satin recouvert de clinquant d’or.47

 44 Gough, ‘A Newly Discovered Performance by Henrietta Maria’, p. 435; Veevers, Images of Love and Religion, pp. 4–7.  45 The complete text of the poem is appended to this chapter with its translation in Filmer’s French Court-Aires (Appendix 2).  46 The poem is ascribed to Maynard by McGowan, L’Art du ballet de cour en France, 1581–1643, but to Durand by Verchaly, ‘Les Ballets de cour d’après les recueils de musique vocale (1600–1643)’.  47 Gariel, Les Oracles françois, ou Explication allégorique du Balet de Madame, soeur aisnée du Roy, ed. by Lacroix, vol. ii, pp. 65–66.

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As in the first panegyric, Filmer is careful to emphasize the connection to Henrietta Maria, adding the subtitle: ‘The Aire of the Tritonides, in a Masque before this LEWIS the thirteenth and his Mother, at Madame his Sisters taking her leave to goe into SPAINE.’48 However, some of the words that seem too closely connected to the context of the Masque are changed in the English version: thus ‘Roseaux’ is replaced by ‘crystal graves’. Filmer also supplies some sort of stage directions and narrative logic when ‘ces beaux lieux’ is expanded into ‘hunt for Pallas heere in this more likely place’. Finally, he naturalizes the poem by emphasizing the maritime images that give it a more British flavour: ‘Gow’ then! Let’s now accost’ or ‘Their beauties to abbord the more wee slacke our pace.’ The union of the lily and the rose is thus echoed by the association of the British sea-world and of French wisdom materialized as the ‘great bright Sunnes of France, | Whose prudent Lawes good chance | Gives breath to tired hearts by sweet restraint of hand’ (15v). *    *    * The panegyrics provide a key to the underlying reasons for the publication of Filmer’s collection: it may in fact not really have been intended for performance, since the French speakers at court could very well sing court airs in the original language, and there seems to have been little appetite for translated songs, which did not really fit into the patterns of musical fashion in Britain in 1629.49 They do nevertheless represent one of the few instances of an attempt to naturalize the new forms of poetic production that predominated in France in the early seventeenth century. They also undoubtedly form part of the body of works that testify to the influence of the French ballet de cour on the English court masque after 1630, as well as on comedies which borrow from the structure of the court masque. The translations, however, bear witness to the resistance of the English aesthetic to the simplicity and abstraction of the poetry of Malherbe and his followers.

 48 The complete text of the poem is appended to this chapter with its translation in Filmer’s French Court-Aires (Appendix 3).  49 Sullivan, ‘French Court-Aires, with Their Ditties Englished’, p. 208.

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Appendix 1 Why have my Thoughts conspired, Never to bee tired, With doing Reason wrong? Making my Soule accused, For having refused Her antidote so long.

Que n’estes vous lassées Mes tristes pensées De troubler ma raison ? Et faire avecque blâme Rebeller mon ame Contre sa guarison.

Why, by vaine force of weeping, Am I kept from sleeping? Why ordaine not the Skies Out of my Mind to banish What they have made vanish Already from mine Eies?

Que ne cessent mes larmes Inutilles armes, Et que n’oste des Cieux La fatalle ordonnance, A ma souvenance, Ce qu’elle oste à mes yeux ?

Light! that keep’st all Lights under, Deare adored Wunder! How would I applaud Fate, That deludes us with distance, If, by his assistance, Death would cut-of my Date!

O beauté nompareille ! Ma chere merveille, Que le rigoureux sort Dont vous m’estes ravie Aymeroit ma vie S’il m’envoyoit la mort.

What poison’d stabbes of Furie In swell’d breast endure I, To see how Danger may (Renting thy youth like Monster) Thine ashes misconster In urne of forraine clay!

Quelle pointe de rage Ne sent mon courage De voir que le danger En vos ans les plus tendres, Menasse vos cendres D’un cercueil estranger.

I bind my selfe from speaking, Though my heart lie breaking In conflict with this Hell: But thus I sure augment it, Because not to vent it Makes the fire more rebell.

Je m’impose silence En la violence Que me fait ce malheur : Mais j’acrois mon martire, Et n’oser rien dire M’est douleur sur douleur.

My bones of flesh are stripped, And violets, nipped With an untimely cold, Or with a long drought wiped, Of my skinne blew-striped Doe much resemblance hold.

Aussi suis-je un squellette, Et la violette Qu’un froid hors de saison Et le sec a flestrie,50 A ma peau meurtrie Est la comparaison.

 50 Variant: ‘Ou le soc a touchée, | De ma peau seichée’ (Malherbe and others, Recueil des plus beaux vers, pp. 98–99).

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Gods! (since the longest-aged Spleene of Fates enraged Turnes, from Nettle, Balme-leafe) After so many beatings, How can just entreatings Find your tribunall deafe ?

Dieux ! que les destinées Les plus obstinées Tournent de mal en bien !51 Apres tant de tempestes, Mes justes requestes N’obtiendront elles rien ?

Have yee bee’n stil’d free Judges Of all wrongs and grudges, That earthly stomackes feele, To prove inexorable When the miserable Before your altars kneele ?

Avés-vous eu les tiltres D’absolus arbitres De l’estat des mortels, Pour estre inexorables Quand les miserables Implorent vos authels ?

I would not shew the glorie Of my warlike storie To the low Hemispheare; Nor, from the deepe descending Of the Worlds steepe ending, More Lawrels fetch to weare.

Mon soin n’est point de faire En l’autre Emisphere Voir mes actes guerriers, Et jusqu’au bord de l’onde Ou finit le monde, Aquerir des lauriers.

Two sweete Eies are my wishes; Feasts, without these dishes, Rellish of nought but rue: Do but, yer Famine end mee, This Ambrosia send mee, I am a God like you.52

Deux beaux yeux sont l’empire Pour qui je soupire, Sans eux rien ne m’est doux : Donnés moy cette joye Que je les revoye, Je suis dieu comme vous.53

 51 Variant: ‘Dieux qui les Destinées | Les plus obstinées | Tournés’ (Malherbe and others, Recueil des plus beaux vers). There are also some spelling variations in that edition.  52 Trans. in Filmer, French Court-Aires, 6v–7.  53 François de Malherbe, in Leconte, Catalogue de l’air de cour en France ( [accessed 17 December 2021]).

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Appendix 2 Adorable Princesse, Il est temps que je cesse De courir dans les Cieux, Et que ma flame cede Le rang qu’elle y possede, Aux flames de tes yeux.

Bright Abstract of us seaven Wandring Torches of Heaven! Earths most adored Shrine! ’Tis time I leave skie-running, And quit’ my Coach and cunning, To give thee way to shine.

O beauté sans exemple, Où nature contemple Son pouvoir nompareil : Depuis l’heure premiere Que je vis ta lumiere, Je ne suis plus Soleil.

Thou, unmatch’d Beauties Treasure! Whereby Nature doth measure Of her strain’d skill the hight; I thinke thee much beguiled, That I the Sunne am stiled, Since first I saw thy Light.

Ton œil qui me surmonte, Me donne tant de honte Lors que je fais mon cours, Que pleust à la fortune Que les flots de Neptune Me couvrissent toujours.

Thine Eye, mounting above mee, Doth so clearly reprove mee, Whilest I my high course keepe, That when Thetis last rock’d mee, I wish that shee had lock’d mee Up with eternal sleepe.

Ma course vagabonde En quelque part du monde Qu’elle éclaire aux humains, Ne void rien qui n’admire, En l’heur de ton Empire, L’adresse de tes mains.

Though my course, nowhere ending, ’Bout Earths whole Globe runne bending To gild the Ball with Ray, It sees no Weales but wunder At France so happie under Thy Scepters painefull sway.

Tes conseils, & tes veilles Ont par tant de merveilles Ces malheurs abatus, Que les chansons des Anges N’auront pas des louanges Dignes de tes vertus.

Thy Counsels and thy Watches Have, by so strange Dispatches, Her mischiefes beaten-downe, That Angels Compositions, Sung by themsealves Musitions, Must publish thy Renowne.

Ta prudence a des charmes Qui font tomber les armes Des mains des plus grands Roys, Et mettent dans les bouches Des gens les plus farouches La gloire de tes loix.

Onely thy Prudence charmed Kings, unto Battell armed, Till their hands dropp’d their swords: And now each wild mouth, tamed And to thy bridle framed, Praise to thy Lawes affords.

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Tu fais voir à cet âge De la Seine & du Tage Les discors terminés, Et montres à la Guerre Au centre de la Terre Ses Demons enchainés.

Thou hast shew’n the Now-livers, That the two iarring Rivers, Seine and Tage can bee friends; And mak’st Bellona grumble To see her Demons tumble In chaines with Hellish Fiends.

L’art de la flatterie Aux graces de Marie Ne pût rien adjouster : Sa gloire s’est haussée Où l’humaine pensée Tasche en vain de monter.

Flatt’ries best Common-places Can not of Maries graces The least augmenting make: To reach her estimation All humane speculation In vaine doth undertake.

O Dieux ! en qui la France, A logé l’esperance De la felicité, Jamais vostre largesse Ne mit tant de sagesse Avec tant de beauté.

Powres! in whose high assistance France assures her resistance Against all future harme; Never, of any creature, Did you so faire a Feature With so much Wisedome arme.

Facent vos destinées Que le cours des années Qui ne pardonne à rien, A ce parfait visage N’oste point l’avantage Qu’il a dessus le mien.54

May your Fates hinder’d paces Grant, that old Times long races, Which make each thing decline, From face so perfect, never May that sweete vantage sever It now holds above mine.55

 54 François Maynard, in Malherbe and others, Recueil des plus beaux vers, pp. 403–05.  55 Trans. in Filmer, French Court-Aires, 4v–5.

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Appendix 3 C’est trop courir les eaux, Sortons de ces roseaux, Et cherchons desormais Pallas en ces beaux lieux Puis qu’entre les vertus on doit chercher les Dieux. Voicy les bois sacrés Tant de fois desirés Et ces Astres divins brillans sur cette Cour, Tesmoignent que nostre heur doit estre en ce sejour. Allons donc, approchons Les yeux que nous cherchons : Tant plus nous differons d’aborder leurs beautés, Tant plus nous tesmoignons d’ignorer leurs bontés. Grands soleils des François, Dont les prudentes Loix Font respirer les cœurs sous un regne si doux, Dittes-nous si Minerve est point aupres de vous ? Vous avés le pouvoir De nous la faire voir, Et trouvant la Valeur & la Prudence icy, Avec grande raison nous l’y cherchons aussi.56

 56 Étienne Durand, in [Gariel], Ballets et mascarades de cour de Henri III à Louis XIV, ed. by Lacroix, pp. 65–66.

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Too much wee range the waves, Let’s quit these crystall graves: And hunt for Pallas heere in this more likely place, For sure in Vertues Court the Gods leave still their trace. The Groves of our desires Heere blaze with holy fires: And those influent Lights, that showre on us such beames, Give hope our happinesse will flow from their bright streames. Gow’ then! let’s now accost Those eyes that wee thought lost : Their beauties to abbord the more wee slacke our pace, The lesse we seeme to know the bountie of their grace Yee! great bright Sunnes of France, Whose prudent Lawes good chance Gives breath to tired hearts by sweet restraint of hand, Tell us, if our Minerva doe not neare you stand? It lieth sure in you To blesse us with her view: For, finding Valour heere so close by Wisedomes side, Welle may wee judge that Shee doth also heere abide.57

 57 Trans. in Filmer, French Court-Aires, 15v

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Bibliography Primary Sources Campion, Thomas, Tvvo bookes of ayres The first contayning diuine and morall songs: the second, light conceites of louers. To be sung to the lute and viols, in two, three, and foure parts: or by one voyce to an instrument. Composed by Thomas Campian (London: Thomas Snodham, 1613) Dowland, John, The First Booke of Songes or Ayres of Fowre Partes with Tableture for the Lute so Made That All the Partes Together, or Either of Them Seuerally May Be Song to the Lute, Orpherian or Viol de Gambo. Composed by Iohn Dowland Lutenist and Batcheler of Musicke in Both the Vniversities. Also an Inuention by the Sayd Author for Two to Playe Vpon One Lute (London: Peter Short, 1597) Dowland, Robert, A Musicall Banquet Furnished with Varietie of Delicious Ayres, Collected out of the Best Authors in English, French, Spanish and Italian. By Robert Douland (London: Thomas Snodham, 1610) Filmer, Edward, Anthoyne Boesset, & Pierre Guédron, French Court-Aires [by Pierre Guédron and Antoine Boesset], With their Ditties Englished, Of foure and fiue Parts. Together with that of the Lute […] Collected, Translated, Published by Ed. Filmer, etc. (London: William Stansby, 1629) Gariel, Élie, Les Oracles françois, ou Explication allégorique du Balet de Madame, soeur aisnée du Roy; ensemble les Paralleles de son Altesse avec la Minerve des Anciens et le Parnasse royal sur le mesme sujet (Paris: Pierre Chevalier, 1615), reprinted in Ballets et mascarades de cour de Henri III à Louis XIV (1581–1652), vol. ii, ed. by Paul Lacroix (Geneva: Slatkine, 1968) Jones, Robert, First Booke of Songes and Ayres in foure parts with Tableture for the Lute So made that all the parts together, or either of them severally may be song to the lute, orpherian or viol de gambo. Composed by Robert Iones (London: Peter Short, 1600) Jonson, Ben, and William Hole, The Workes of Beniamin Ionson (London: Will Stansby, 1616) Malherbe, François de, Œuvres, ed. by Antoine Adam (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) Malherbe, François de, and others, Recueil des plus beaux vers de MM. de Malherbe, Racan, Monfuron, Maynard, Boisrobert, L’Estoille, Touvant, Motin, Mareschal. Et autres des plus fameux esprits de la cour (Paris: Toussaint du Bray, 1626) Mersenne, Marin, Harmonie Universelle (Paris: Pierre Ballard, 1636) Sidney, Philip, ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. by Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin Books, 2004) Watson, Thomas, The First Sett, of Italian Madrigalls Englished, Not to the Sense of the Originall Dittie, but after the Affection of the Noate. By Thomas Watson Gentleman. There Are Also Heere Inserted Two Excellent Madrigalls of Master VVilliam Byrds, Composed after the Italian Vaine, at the Request of the Sayd Thomas Watson (London: Thomas East, 1590)

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Yonge, Nicholas, Musica Transalpina Cantus [-Sextus] Madrigales Translated of Foure, Fiue and Sixe Partes, Chosen out of Diuers Excellent Authors, Vvith the First and Second Part of La Verginella, Made by Maister Byrd, Vpon Tvvo Stanza’s of Ariosto, and Brought to Speake English Vvith the Rest. Published by N. Yonge, in Fauour of such as Take Pleasure in Musicke of Voices (London: Thomas East, 1588) —— , Musica Transalpina Cantus. The Second Booke of Madrigalles, to 5. & 6. Voices: Translated out of Sundrie Italian Authors & Newly Published by Nicolas Yonge (London: Thomas East, 1597) Secondary Works Bardelmann, Claire, ‘Poésie et musique dans l’Harmonie Universelle de Marin Mersenne : une poétique de l’unité’, Études Épistémè, 18 (2010) Boorman, Stanley, Eleanor Selfridge-Field, and Donald W. Krummel, ‘Printing and Publishing of Music’, Grove Music Online (2001) Buffard-Moret, Brigitte, La Chanson poétique du xixe siècle: Origine, statut et formes (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016) Carey, John, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London: Faber and Faber, 2008) Doughtie, Edward, Lyrics from English Airs, 1596–1622 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970) Durosoir, Georgie, L’Air de cour en France 1571–1655 (Liège: Mardaga, 1991) Fischlin, Daniel, In Small Proportion: A Poetics of the English Ayre, 1596–1622 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998) Gibson, Kirsten, ‘John Dowland and the Elizabethan Courtier Poets’, Early Music, 41.2 (2013), 239–53 Gough, Melinda J., ‘A Newly Discovered Performance by Henrietta Maria’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 65.3/4 (2002), 435–47 Griffey, Erin, Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) Jacquot, Jean, ‘La Reine Henriette-Marie et l’influence française dans les spectacles à la cour de Charles Ier’, Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Études Françaises, 9 (1957), 128–60 Kenny, Elizabeth, ‘The Uses of Lute Song: Texts, Contexts and Pretexts for “Historically Informed” Performance’, Early Music, 36 (2008), 285–300 Lacroix, Paul, Ballets et mascarades de cour de Henri III à Louis XIV (1581–1652) (Geneva: Slatkine, 1968) Leconte, Thomas, Catalogue de l’air de cour en France (1602-c. 1660) [accessed 1 July 2020] Lindley, David, ‘Words for Music, Perhaps’, in The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations, ed. by Marion Thain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 10–29

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Macy, Laura, ‘The Due Decorum Kept: Elizabethan Translation and the Madrigals Englished of Nicholas Yonge and Thomas Watson’, Journal of Musicological Research, 17.1 (1997), 1–21 May, Steven, ‘Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical “Stigma of Print”’, Renaissance Papers, 10 (1980), 11–18 Maynard, Winifred, Elizabethan Lyric Poetry and Its Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) McGowan, Margaret, L’Art du ballet de cour en France, 1581–1643 (Paris : CNRS, 1963; 1978) Miller, Miriam, ‘Stansby, William’, Grove Music Online (2001) Murray, Tessa, Thomas Morley: Elizabethan Music Publisher (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2014) Saunders, J. W., ‘The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry’, Essays in Criticism, 1.2 (April 1951), 139–64 Sullivan, Kathryn Jane, ‘French Court-Aires, with Their Ditties Englished: How Language Influences Text Settings in the 17th-Century French Air de Cour’ (doctoral thesis, Monash University, 2019) Till, David, rev. by Robert Ford, ‘Filmer, Edward’, Grove Music Online (2001)

Veevers, Erica, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Verchaly, André, Airs de cour pour voix et luth (1603–1643) (Paris: Société française de musicologie, 1961, 1978; repr. SEDIM, 1989) —— , ‘Les Ballets de cour d’après les recueils de musique vocale (1600–1643)’, Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises, ix (juin 1957), 207–16 Wainwright, Jonathan, From Renaissance to Baroque (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) Walker, D. P., ‘The Influence of “Musique mesurée à l’antique”, Particularly on the “Airs de Cour” of the Early Seventeenth Century’, Musica Disciplina, 2.1/2 (1948), 141–63 Walls, Peter, ‘“Music and Sweet Poetry”? Verse for English Lute Song and Continuo Song’, Music & Letters, 65.3 (1984), 237–54 Wilson, Christopher, ‘Music in Campion’s Measured Verse’, John Donne Journal of America, 25 (Spring 2006), 267–89 Winegarten, Renee, French Lyric Poetry in the Age of Malherbe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954)

Anne-Valérie Dulac

11. Miniatures in Translation Words for a Gentle Art The National Portrait Gallery in London commemorated the 400th anniversary of Nicholas Hilliard’s death by organizing a major exhibition entitled ‘Elizabethan Treasures. Miniatures by Hilliard and Oliver’ (21 February–19 May 2019). Interestingly enough, the now internationally acclaimed ‘treasures’ produced in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, which thousands of visitors from around the world flocked to admire, were never referred to as ‘miniatures’ at the time they were painted. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first ever use of the word ‘miniature’ as applying to ‘the art or process of painting miniatures’ to 1644.1 The word had first been used in print in Philip Sidney’s revised Arcadia (published in 1590 and composed c. 1586), where it refers to a likeness on a small scale.2 Sidney is known to have imported several words from the Italian into English, thus testifying to both the importance of his Italian stay and his curiosity for visual arts.3 Yet it is interesting to note that he did use ‘miniature’ to refer to a small picture, a meaning which the OED explains was reinforced by the term’s association by folk etymology with minus. This, in fact, is a departure from the original meaning and etymology of the word which denoted the art of illumination in minium, or red lead, a definition that was still current in the Italian language. Dictionaries attest that both meanings circulated in England until late in the mid-nineteenth century. For instance, John Florio, in his Worlde of words, gives the following three definitions: Miniare, to die, to paint, to colour or limne with vermilion or sinople or red lead. Miniatore, a painter or limner with vermilion. Miniatura, a limning, a painting with vermilion.4  1 ‘Miniature, n. and adj.’ Oxford English Dictionary Online.  2 About Philip Sidney’s revised Arcadia and his knowledge of miniature painting, see Dulac, ‘Hilliard and Sidney’s Rule of the Eye’.  3 See for example Michael Baxandall’s analysis of Sidney’s use of ‘design’ as a noun in ‘English disegno’.  4 Florio, A vvorlde of words, or Most copious, and exact dictionarie in Italian and English, collected / Vocabolario italiano & inglese, p. 227. Anne-Valérie Dulac ([email protected]) Sorbonne Université Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer, ed. by Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin, PEEMB 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 273–291  10.1484/M.PEEMB-EB.5.127783

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Conversely, a later definition (1616) found in An English expositor associates the word with ‘[a] small proportion: a little figure’.5 The first written record of the combination of the two meanings appears in Thomas Blount’s 1657 Glossographia, where it is said to designate ‘the art of drawing pictures in little, being commonly done with red lead’.6 In the years preceding the Englishing of the word and adoption of its twofold reference, Edward Norgate, who was engaged in the illumination of official royal documents under James I and later became one of the Clerks of the Signet under Charles I, popularized the Italian miniatura by using it as a title for the two successive versions of a treatise which he wrote and revised, entitled Miniatura or the Art of Limning (composed around 1627–28 and 1648 respectively). This straightforward borrowing from Italian was soon after replaced in the English language by the now familiar ‘miniature’, whose varying spelling and pronunciation over the years bear witness to the European history of the word: The pronunciation, which must originally have had three unstressed syllables in succession, a pattern which is rare in English, appears to have been subject to variation and simplification throughout its history. Early spelling variants with a single vowel for the -ia- of the Italian probably reflect trisyllabic pronunciations of the type later recorded by Walker (1806), Knowles (1835) and Smart (1857).7 The circulation of the word also strikingly mirrors the portability of these small pictures. Portrait miniatures circulated as diplomatic gifts and played a prominent part in early modern political negotiations and encounters. One often-quoted example of such diplomatic use is that of Elizabeth I kissing a miniature of Mary, Queen of Scots, in front of James Melville, a Scottish diplomat, as evidence of her great love for Mary. Outside Europe, miniatures were circulated for similar purposes, as is illustrated by the diary of the first English ambassador to India, Thomas Roe, who presented the Mogul Emperor with a miniature by Isaac Oliver.8 Despite the Italian origin of the term and Norgate’s own constant references to Italian art and language in his treatise, the history of the art of limning in England tells a much wider story, with many stops and turns in places other than Italy, including France, which I will be focusing upon in the last part of the present chapter. I will argue that limning offers a strikingly telling

 5 Bullokar, An English expositor teaching the interpretation of the hardest words vsed in our language, n.p.  6 ‘Miniature, n. and adj.’ OED Online.  7 ‘Miniature, n. and adj.’ OED Online. I am most grateful to my reviewers for pointing out that the stress having moved to the first syllable in English seems to be a sign of nativization, as in Italian the stress falls on the penultimate syllable.  8 For some recent papers on the exchange of miniatures as diplomatic gifts see Chauvin, ‘La Place des miniatures dans les échanges diplomatiques’, or Dulac, ‘Miniatures between East and West’.

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example of the way lexical borrowings and translations contributed to both registering and shaping the making and reception of the very art forms they were concerned with. In other words, I will be showing how in the case of miniature painting the changes (or lack thereof) in artistic terminology can never be disconnected from either artistic communities or material history. I will first trace the complex journey of the word through treatises in English and in translation between the second half of the sixteenth century (the period when portrait miniatures appeared as separate works and objects, distinct from the production of illuminated manuscripts) and the 1640s which saw the word ‘miniature’ progressively supersede that of ‘limning’. ‘Limning’ (from the Old French and medieval Latin for ‘light’) refers to all art forms borrowing their techniques from manuscript illumination. Richard Haydocke, in his 1598 translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (1584), provides what is perhaps the clearest technical definition of limning: ‘[i]n Limming, where the colours are likewise mixed with gummes, but laied with a thicke body and substance, wherein much arte and neateness is required’.9 Limning therefore more or less corresponds to what we would today group under the umbrella category of watercolour painting. Although persistent over the years in my chronology as well as technically consistent, the term ‘limning’ is perhaps best characterized by its semantic variability, which I argue stems from the portability of the small pictures’ materials, and its techniques, which made their circulation easier. In the period I am looking into, limning included such visual productions as heraldic images, decorative borders, or illustrations for treatises on botany, zoology, military strategy, or geography, among many other things. I will then inquire into the plausible parallels between the lexical choices of the authors of treatises on limning and the evolving status of both limning and limners in early modern England. I will finally discuss how this also brought about and accompanied major technical innovations, either preceding or deriving from lexical expansion and adaptations. The growing number of treatises dealing with painting and arts in general, in the closing years of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth, testifies to the increasing popularity of the subject.10 I will only be inquiring  9 Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Caruinge & Buildinge, trans. by Haydocke, p. 126.  10 For England only, Mansfield Kirby Talley mentions eleven printed books and ten manuscripts between 1573 and 1699 in Portrait Painting in England. Her selection omits some more sources (such as the early seventeenth-century MS 86.EE.69 (National Art Library, V&A) or the equally anonymous BL, MS Harley 6376, composed in 1641). The website of the ERC-funded LexArt project which ended in March 2018 ( [accessed 18 December 2021]) provides a much longer list of writings on art published in French, German, Dutch, English, and Latin between 1600 and 1750. The project, which focuses on the development of a common language across artistic communities in early modern Europe and includes a dictionary of artistic terminology structured in multilingual entries offers the most up-to-date list of works in some European

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into three of those concerned specifically and primarily with ‘limning’, all of which make it clear from their very title.11 This will allow me to look into the early lexical history of the portrait miniature which exemplifies, perhaps more than any other genre, the development of a European artistic vocabulary. The first ever printed source on limning in the English language is an anonymous treatise published in 1573, whose characteristically long title is commonly abridged to A Very Proper Treatise. The author behind this early printed source remains disputed: although a decade ago Susan E. James attributed the authorship of the book to Levina Teerlinc,12 a prominent female artist at the time, Annemie Daniel Gerda Leemans has more recently argued against this assumption.13 Using internal evidence and close observation of all possible sources, she suggests instead that Richard Tottel himself, the original printer, is responsible for assembling and compiling the textual material making up the treatise. The text is indeed most probably a compilation, as was common for recipe books at the time, rather than the work of one original author. This would explain that many recipes featuring in A Very Proper Treatise can be found in other written sources (both in manuscript and printed forms).14 This didactic booklet, teaching ‘dyvers thinges, verye meete and necessarie to be knowne to paynters and scriveners’,15 gives equal importance to drawing with a pen or painting with pencil, thereby illustrating its indebtedness to the production of manuscripts. This is the reason why among the subjects listed as fit for limning, the title chosen by the author/compiler only mentions the ‘drawing & tracing of letters, vinets, flowers, armes and imagery’. Portrait miniatures do not appear explicitly anywhere in the text, which is concerned with a far greater number of art forms than just portrait miniature on vellum, the only subject of Hilliard’s own later treatise on ‘limning’. Yet although A Very Proper Treatise is mostly concerned with the production of manuscripts, it does include a great number of recipes and advice which may be applied to miniature portrait painting. Among such advice, the pages dedicated to the limning of beards, hair, or carnation, may be mentioned, where the reader learns about ‘Okre de Luke & Okre de Rouse’, which make brown colours perfect for ‘heare on heades, or on beardes’.16 This connection with later forms of limning also shows in the ‘middle portion of Hilliard’s manuscript dealing with color […] which collates closely with the passages on colors in the Very

languages, to the exclusion of others (including Spanish or Portuguese, which contributed to the history of limning).  11 The three treatises I will be dealing with here are [Anon.], A very proper treatise, wherein is briefly sett forthe the arte of limming (1573); Nicholas Hilliard’s Arte of Limning (c. 1598–1603), and the two versions of Edward Norgate’s Miniatura or the Art of Limning (c. 1626–1648).  12 James, The Feminine Dynamic in English Art, 1485–1603, pp. 293–97.  13 Leemans, ‘Contextualizing England’s First Printed Source about Limning’.  14 See Leemans, ‘A Very Proper Treatise’.  15 A very proper treatise, 11v.  16 A very proper treatise, 6r.

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Proper Treatise, although Hilliard adds more detail and is generally more sophisticated in his treatment’.17 Finally, A Very Proper Treatise also testifies to the European dimension of limning: not so much in the use of imported words, of which there are none, but in the very names given to many of the ingredients needed by the draughtsman and limner, including ‘Spanishe greene’, ‘Vennis Cerius’ (the ceruse manufactured in Venice was then deemed the best possible), ‘Browne of Spaine’, ‘boole Armoniake’ (Armenian bole) or ‘Romayne vitrial’.18 Interestingly enough, the identification of some possible sources for the treatise makes it clear that although the compiler used previous translations from French, Latin, Italian, or German, he or she relied on the vernacular only to further disseminate technical knowledge.19 The intended audience for the treatise, which the full title of the treatise refers to as ‘gentlemenne’ and ‘other persones as doe delite in limming, painting or in tricking of armes’, is even wider than the title page indicates, given that the text itself also includes ‘paynters and scriveners’20 among its addressees, hence a more professional crowd. As a printed vernacular work, A Very Proper Treatise thus contributed to divulging recipes and ingredients to a rather large intended audience: ‘[t]he continuation and longevity of a professional enterprise benefited by protecting its knowledge from competitors and preserving “secrets” within a hierarchical and often hereditary workshop system. A Very Proper Treatise was a significant contributor to wider dissemination’.21 Although it has a great deal in common with A Very Proper Treatise, most obviously so in the discussion of colours, Hilliard’s own manuscript on limning serves radically different purposes. The only surviving version of the manuscript is held at Edinburgh University Library (MS Laing 173). It is not in Hilliard’s hand and it is not signed, yet internal and external evidence alike make it clear Hilliard did author the text. Hilliard’s Arte of Limning is not a treatise as such, or, at least, it is much more than that. Hilliard adds so many personal anecdotes and stories to the properly technical part of the text that it reads as a ‘treatise-cum-autobiography’.22 Far from the pedagogical arrangement of the printed Proper Treatise, Hilliard’s manuscript is unfinished and savours of an unrevised draft: ‘combining more formal and rhetorical passages with personal observations, outbursts and what amount to grumblings on subjects where his feelings are roused or his professional pride is touched’.23 This shows for instance in the way Hilliard describes those who are bold enough to criticize the workman’s proceedings or think he does not work quickly enough:

 17 Hilliard, Nicholas Hilliard’s Arte of limming, ed. by Kinney and Salamon, p. 6.  18 See A very proper treatise, respectively 6v, 2, and 7r.  19 See Leemans, ‘A Very Proper Treatise’, p. 24 ff.  20 A very proper treatise, 11v.  21 Leemans, ‘A Very Proper Treatise’.  22 Goldring, Nicholas Hilliard, p. 244.  23 Hilliard, The Arte of Limning, ed. by Thornton and Cain, p. 11.

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[T]he better and wiser sort will have a great patience, and marke the proceedings of the workman, and never find fault till albe finished […], but the Ignoranter and basser sort, will not only be bould precisely to say, but vehemently sweare that it is thus or soe, and sweare so contrarely that this volume would not containe the rediculious absurd speeches w[hi]ch I have hard uppon such occasion.24 Although we cannot be certain that Hilliard himself chose the title under which we now know this protean work, he does use the word ‘limning’ to describe the kind of painting he practises for his portraits in ‘small voloms’.25 Many passages in the manuscript also make it clear that Hilliard was writing for, not to say writing to, someone, answering questions and requests that may have been directly addressed to him. This seems rather clear from such formulations as ‘heer I enter myne opinion conserning the question, whether of the two arts is the most worthy, Painting or Carveing’26 or again later: ‘now to the matter for precepts for Observations ore directions to the art of limning, which yo requier, as briefly and as plainly as I can’.27 There is more about the origins of this document in Richard Haydocke’s preface to his translation of Lomazzo’s Italian art treatise: Then would M. Nicholas Hilliard’s hand, so much admired amongst strangers, strive for a comparison with the milde spirit of the late worldes-wonder Raphaell Urbine; for (to speake a truth) his perfection in ingenuous Illuminating or Limming, the perfection of Painting, is (if I can judge), so extraordinarie, that when I devised with my selfe the best argument to set it forth, I found none better, then to persuade him to doe it himselfe, to the viewe of all men by his pen, as hee had before unto very many, by his learned pencell, which in the ende hee assented unto, and by mee promiseth you a treatise of his owne practice that way, with all convenient speede.28 Haydocke’s use of paratext makes it clear that his translation was aimed at developing knowledge and expertise in foreign artistic techniques as much as publicizing the works and names of English artists for his intended readers. This specific passage shows how Hilliard’s art of limning was still explicitly related to that of illuminating, both terms being used as synonyms here. We also learn from Haydocke’s note to the reader that he desired Hilliard to translate, as it were, his mastery of ‘pencells’ (the term then most commonly used for brushes) into ‘pen’ work. Haydocke’s comparison between the future

 24 Hilliard, The Arte of Limning, ed. by Thornton and Cain, pp. 76–78.  25 Hilliard, The Arte of Limning, ed. by Thornton and Cain, p. 44.  26 Hilliard, The Arte of Limning, ed. by Thornton and Cain, p. 50.  27 Hilliard, The Arte of Limning, ed. by Thornton and Cain, p. 52.  28 ‘The Translator to the Reader’, in Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Caruinge & Buildinge, trans. by Haydocke, n.p.

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treatise (‘to doe it himselfe to the view of all men by his pen’) and past visual productions (‘as hee had before unto very many, by his learned pencell’) is a fascinating example of intermediality: the translator of Lomazzo’s text from Italian into English is here anticipating another translation from pencell into pen, both of them sharing one common aim: that of ‘setting forth’ English art and artists, along with a new vocabulary. Haydocke’s intention in persuading Hilliard to write for ‘all men’ was to show that an English-born artist could compete with Italian masters in ‘the perfection of painting’. This international rivalry is made even clearer in another passage of the prefatory discussion, when Haydocke reminds his readers of the fact that there had been no recent translation or reprinting of Lomazzo’s text, for which he gives the following explanation: I can impute it partly to his Priviledge not yet fully expired; partly to the great expence that it would aske to be published in such sort as the matter would require (for my pictures are but a shadow of that which might be done) partly to the scarcity of copies, which in likelyhood were bought up by the Italian painters, for feare least the perfection of the Arte, (which they holde to rely whollie with them) might bee nowe divulged unto other Nations.29 The aim of Haydocke’s translation is thus to ‘divulge’ techniques onto other nations, to circulate recipes for the perfection of the art which he wanted to prove did not rely wholly with Italians only. Hilliard’s contribution is therefore presented as the English chapter in a hitherto Italy-centred narrative. Yet Hilliard seems to have never wanted to divulge his techniques to ‘all men’. The opening lines of his manuscript much rather emphasize how much he valued secrecy and how he deemed limning an art worthy of ‘noble persons’ only, as Hilliard explains he intends ‘to teache the arte of limning […] as also to shewe who are fittest to be practisers [thereof, for whom only] let it suffice that I intend my whole discourse that way’.30 Only those fittest to limn were therefore intended as Hilliard’s audience, which he later describes in even greater and socially distinctive detail: [N]ow therfor I wish it weare so that none should medle with limning, but gentelmen alone, for that it is a kind of gentill painting of lesse subiection work taketh any harme by it, Morover it is secreat a man may usse it and scarsly be perseaved of his owne folke it is sweet and cleanly to usse, and it is a thing apart from all other Painting or drawing and tendeth not to comon mens usse […] and yet it excelleth all other Painting what soeuvr in sondry points, […] beining fittest for the decking of princes bookes or to put in Ievvells of gould and for the imitation of the purest flowers  29 ‘The Translator to the Reader’, in Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Caruinge & Buildinge, trans. by Haydocke, n.p.  30 Hilliard, The Arte of Limning, ed. by Thornton and Cain, p. 42.

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and most beautifull creaturs in the finest and purest coullers which are chargable and is for the service of noble persons very meet in small voloms in privat maner for theem to haue the Portraits and pictures of themselves.31 Hilliard’s manuscript thus promotes secrecy rather than ‘divulgation’, although his pictures in pencil, contrary to his penned work, were circulating ever more widely on the Continent. At the time when Haydocke wrote these words, Hilliard was indeed already ‘admired amongst strangers’,32 perhaps mostly in France at the time, which I will be discussing in the last part of this chapter. Years after Haydocke noted how popular the English limner was across the Channel, he was still celebrated on the Continent at large, as is illustrated by the following praise, written by Spanish Master Francisco Pacheco (teacher and father-in-law of Diego Velázquez), which, although Hilliard’s name is not mentioned, has been identified by art historians as a reference to the English artist: Demas desto, goza esta Ciudad un Retrato pequeño sacado del natural de un muchacho Ingles, que oi tiene el Racionero Diego Vidal, guarnecido en Marfil, es ovado en campo azul, con unas letricas de oro molido, está hecha la cabeça con tanta destreza, fuerça i suavidad que (a mi ver), dexa atras, con grande intervalo, cuanto deste genero se â visto. I digo verdad que me parece que no puede passar mas adelante la iluminación, i que acabó allí l’arte. El Maestro que lo hizo era Ingles, pero no se tiene noticia de su nombre, que por esto sólo se le debia eterno. (This city enjoys possession of a small portrait, taken from the life, of an English boy, which today belongs to the Prebendary Diego Vidal; framed in ivory, it is oval on a blue ground, with some letters of powdered gold; the head is done with such skill, power and smoothness that in my opinion it leaves far behind whatever has been seen in this genre. I say truly that it seems to me that limning can advance no further, and that the art ended there. The Master who did it was an Englishman, but there is no note of his name, which for this alone should be ever-living.)33 Again we see that although the genre developed as such (Pacheco uses the word ‘genero’, thereby indicating that limning was recognized as distinct from its origins in manuscript illumination), it was still considered, in 1649, as belonging to ‘iluminación’.34  31 Hilliard, The Arte of Limning, ed. by Thornton and Cain, pp. 42–44.  32 ‘The Translator to the Reader’, in Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Caruinge & Buildinge, trans. by Haydocke, n.p.  33 Pacheco, Arte de la pintura, su antiguedad y grandezas, pp. 355–56. The translation of the passage is by Hotson in Shakespeare by Hilliard, p. 194.  34 About portrait miniature painting in early modern Spain and Portugal, see Telles, ‘De la miniature au Portugal’.

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Portrait miniatures, the perfection of painting, were therefore evolving into a genre dominated by the English which lacked a distinctive name. This is perhaps the reason why Norgate chose to entitle his own manuscript (both the original and revised versions) Miniatura or the Art of Limning. Norgate must have taken the word ‘directly from the Italian, where the word was current in exactly this spelling’.35 According to Muller and Murrell, this choice of word shows that ‘painters of portrait miniatures wanted a new name to distinguish their prestigious art from what had become the humbler and more pedestrian craft of limning charters, plea rolls, genealogies, and other documents’.36 Just as Hilliard sought to elevate limning above other forms of painting and drawing, Norgate was trying to elevate limning above the decoration and colouring of prints and maps. Both men tried to elevate their art and themselves, by the same token, something which also transpires through the circulation of their treatises in manuscript rather than in printed form, for fear, perhaps, of seeing their art demeaned. Yet in this regard, Norgate’s treatise offers a middle ground of sorts between divulgation and secrecy as it seems that although the first version of his treatise had been written for the eyes of a friend only (thus allowing a rather obvious parallel with Hilliard’s own), some additions and amendments to the later Miniatura reveal he may have wished to see this expanded version into print. This transpires through the addition of a whole section on drawing, for instance, aimed at ‘accommodating the novice who had first to learn the ABCs of art and the “Gentry of this Kingdome” who would delight in their improvement of skill’.37 The dedication to Henry Howard, Earl of Arundel, which accompanied this revised version also accounts rather explicitly for this change in scope and intended audiences: I wrote this discourse many yeares agoe since which time it hath broke forth and bene a wanderer and some imperfect Copies have appeared under anothers name without my knowledge or consent. Whereupon perusing my former notes I have recollected such observations, as on this side and beyonde the Mountaines I had learnt bought or borrowed upon this Argument.38 To stop the discourse from ‘wandering’ any further, Norgate thus takes it upon himself to lead the way and decide on the journey of his treatise, which he later explains is ‘principally intended [for] the Gentry of this Kingdome’, so that they may become ‘excellent men’ and make ‘excellent things’.39 This textual voyage, he writes, mirrors his own, ‘on this side and beyond the Mountaines’. From his very opening dedicatory words, Norgate acknowledges  35 Norgate, Miniatura, ed. by Muller and Murrell, p. 113.  36 Norgate, Miniatura, ed. by Muller and Murrell, p. 114.  37 Norgate, Miniatura, ed. by Muller and Murrell, p. 12.  38 Norgate, Miniatura, ed. by Muller and Murrell, p. 57.  39 Norgate, Miniatura, ed. by Muller and Murrell, p. 95.

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and stresses the European dimension of his compendium. Yet Norgate’s Italian-sounding title proves more of a self-promoting strategy than a true lexical adaptation: ‘miniatura’ is nowhere used in the text, in which Norgate systematically uses the more familiar ‘limning’. There had been other attempts at the time to find a name for the ‘perfection of limning’, or the ‘gentle’ art of portrait miniatures.40 In a manuscript dated from the 1660s, held at the British Library, an anonymous author suggests the word ‘limniture’, which never became common usage but is interesting for its combination of the continental tradition and the English word.41 Norgate seems to have intended his manuscripts as a conversation with the Italians, whose techniques and styles he was trying to adapt to the English tradition despite his repeated claims of his country’s superiority: There are now more than 20 yeares past since at the request of that learned Phisitian, Theodore Mayerne, I wrote this ensewing discourse. His desire was to know the names, nature and Property of the severall colours of Limming, commonly used by those excellent Artists of our Nation who infinitely transcend those of his; the Order to be observed in preparing, and manner of working those colours soe prepared, as well for Picture by the Life, as for Landscape History Armes, Flowers &., and that propriis Coloribus, and otherwayes as in Chiar oscuro (a Species of Limming frequent in Italye but a stranger in England).42 Just as Hilliard had answered Haydocke’s request, Norgate wrote for Théodore de Mayerne, whose most famous manuscript, Pictoria, Sculptoria & Quae Subalternaum Artium, contains many pictorial recipes but also cooking recipes, medical and physical ones, as was common at the time.43 Some of Mayerne’s observations do seem directly derived from conversations he may have had with Oliver, all of which he writes about in French (like everywhere else in the manuscript and contrary to what the Latin title may have the reader expect). Although Norgate was answering Mayerne’s request when composing his first Miniatura, his first lines do not spare the French: ‘those excellent artists of our nation who infinitely transcend those of his’.44 Writing between the years 1620 and 1640, Norgate belonged to a different generation from Hilliard’s, to whom he refers as ‘old master Hilliard’. By then the style developed by Isaac Oliver, Hilliard’s pupil, had become far more popular. His style was deeply

 40 I am here borrowing Hilliard’s own characterization of limning as ‘a kind of gentill painting’ (Hilliard, The Arte of Limning, ed. by Thornton and Cain, p. 42). Hilliard insists limning should be taught to gentlemen only and insists on both the delicacy, neatness of limning and its socially distinctive practice.  41 BL, MS Harley 6376 (57).  42 Norgate, Miniatura, ed. by Muller and Murrell, p. 58.  43 Mayerne, Pictoria, sculptoria et quae subalternarum atrium (BL, MS Sloane 2052).  44 Norgate, Miniatura, ed. by Muller and Murrell, p. 58.

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inspired by Italian practices and techniques,45 and he is usually considered as having paved the way for later developments in portrait miniatures: His use of linear perspective and modelling is seen as heralding later developments in English art. This fact has sometimes been used to give Oliver’s stylistic choices an almost evolutionary superiority — his was the fruitful path, his son Peter becoming a successful miniaturist in his own right — while Hilliard is consigned to one of history’s ‘dead ends’, medievalism’s last gasp in England.46 To most limners from the 1620s on, the way forward was the Italian way, and while Oliver made his pencils follow Italian techniques, Norgate was adapting Italian words, and in fact many other foreign words, with his own pen, thus participating in ‘the English aristocracy’s deliberate assimilation of European artistic culture’.47 Miniatura abounds in foreign words and translations. I will here give just one example of Norgate’s typical habit of mixing languages: Now Landscape, or shape of Land, is but the same with the Latine Rus Regiones Regiunculae, The French Paisage, or Italian Paese: and is nothing but a picture of Gli belle Vedute, or beautifull prospect of Fields, Cities, Rivers, Castles, Mountaines, Trees or what soever delightfull view the Eye takes pleasure in.48 As this quotation shows, most borrowed words come from Latin, French and Italian, a rather apt illustration of Norgate’s belonging to a privileged circle at the court of Charles I as well as his many travels to carry the king’s letters (to Paris in 1612 for example, or to Venice in 1621). This also accounts for the list of the earlier owners of his manuscripts: [A] tight-knit group of artists and virtuosos — all male — linked to the court of Charles I and to the circle of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel. During the Civil War and Interregnum they were retired aristocrats, Royalists with one exception, for whom limning might provide a secret refuge along with poetry, gardening, or fishing.49 Through their wanderings and circulation, the two versions of Miniatura may have contributed to the growing trend of referring to ‘limning’ as ‘miniatura’ which paved the way for ‘miniature’, until it became common usage at the end of the seventeenth century. Norgate’s manuscript reads as a deliberately polyglot discourse and makes ‘ostentatious use of foreign technical terms’,

 45 About the many different reasons behind Isaac Oliver’s stylistic evolutions see MacLeod, ‘Isaac Oliver and the Essex Circle’.  46 Faraday, ‘Little Britain – The Elizabethan Passion for Portrait Miniatures’.  47 Norgate, Miniatura, ed. by Muller and Murrell, p. xi.  48 Norgate, Miniatura, ed. by Muller and Murrell, p. 82.  49 Norgate, Miniatura, ed. by Muller and Murrell, p. 14.

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praising the most continental sort of English limners.50 At one point, for example, Norgate praises the work of Isaac Oliver’s son, Peter, in the following terms: Now to my last division, histories in Lymning, are strangers to us in England till of late years it pleased a most excellent King to command the copying of some of his own pieces, of Titian, to be translated into English limning which indeed were admirably performed by his Servant Mr Peter Olivier. And I verily believe that all excessive commendation given by Giorgio Vasari to don Julio Clovio, an Italian limner, might with much more truth and reason have been given to our countryman.51 Norgate therefore mostly celebrated those limners who translated Italian pieces and genres. His treatise offers evidence of the importance of translation and Englishing at large, both in pen and pencil, and not just from Italian to English. At one other point in his text, for example, he writes the following about landscape painting: [A]n Art soe new in England and soe Lately come ashore, as all the Language within our fower Seas cannot find it a Name, but a borrowed one, and that from a People, that are noe great Lenders, but upon good Securitie (the Dutch) perhaps they will name their owne Child.52 Pencils sometimes worked faster than pens in translating a genre or a format, but naming your own child was part of a fierce European competition between artists. In this respect, I find it rather revealing that although making it clear from the very introduction that he deemed the French artists infinitely inferior to the English or the Italians, Norgate did not completely silence the importance of the translation of both techniques and words between England and France in the development of portrait miniatures. French artists are conspicuously absent from most treatises on limning of the period. There is for example no single French limner mentioned by Hilliard in his manuscript, although he does mention Pierre de Ronsard, whom he allegedly heard comment upon the rarity of noteworthy artists among islanders: ‘I hard kimsard [Ronsard] the great french poet on a time say, that the Ilands indeed seldome bring forth any cunning Man, but when they doe, it is in high perfection so then I hope there maie come out of this ower land such a one.’53 Yet we now know, and perhaps have only begun to fully measure, that Hilliard’s years in France in the second half of the 1570s were most significant

 50 Evans, Renaissance Watercolours, p. 21.  51 Norgate, Miniatura, ed. by Muller and Murrell, p. 89.  52 Norgate, Miniatura, ed. by Muller and Murrell, p. 82.  53 Hilliard, The Arte of Limning, ed. by Thornton and Cain, p. 48. A portrait of a hitherto unknown gentleman by Nicholas Hilliard has recently been identified as a portrait of Pierre de Ronsard by William Aslet, Lucia Burgio, Céline Cachaud, Alan Derbyshire, and Emma Rutherford whose investigation and ground-breaking findings were published in ‘An English Artist at the Valois Court: A Portrait of Henri III by Nicholas Hilliard’.

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for his own artistic development and, as a consequence, in the history of a genre he is near-unanimously considered to have initiated in England. Hilliard left England in September 1576: he was probably sent by Elizabeth to produce a miniature of her then suitor, François, Duke of Anjou, the younger brother of Henri III of France. He stayed until 1578 in Paris, where he opened an independent workshop as a miniature painter and goldsmith. A newly re-discovered miniature of Henri III, which was until recently thought to be a nineteenth-century copy, demonstrates that Hilliard also spent time in close proximity to the king.54 Hilliard’s style evolved quite visibly over the years he spent in France, partly to accommodate the taste of a French audience: [W]e can also see evidence of the efforts that Hilliard undertook to accommodate the taste of a French audience. Unlike in his English miniatures, where he largely deferred to Elizabeth’s preference for clean line and little shadow, Hilliard here models the face with great tonal subtlety, echoing characteristics of the chalk drawings that were then popular in the Valois court.55 Recent research in dating has also established that the miniature portrait of Henri III may actually be the first surviving oval portrait by Hilliard, who had up to then only worked with circular formats. Although oval formats did circulate in England before this, Hilliard did not limn in such format until he travelled to France where miniatures were commonly executed on elongated oval support at the time.56 The oval form was later to become Hilliard’s favourite, although not exclusive, format. One other major French influence on Hilliard’s work was his conception of the limner’s status and position. This shows in his self-portrait, which he limned in 1577. In this self-portrait Hilliard presents himself in a way nearly identical to that of his aristocratic patrons. Such a confident form of self-fashioning further shows in the gold initials above his left shoulder: ‘Hilliard’s journey to France was not simply a physical one. It was also an intellectual, artistic and aesthetic journey, the impact of which was to be felt on Hilliard’s life and oeuvre long after his departure.’57 Although seemingly reluctant to acknowledge any form of French influence in his manuscripts, there is at least one suggestion by Norgate of a name for  54 See Aslet, Burgio, Cachaud, Derbyshore, and Rutherford, ‘An English Artist at the Valois Court’. The portrait is visible at [accessed 4 April 2020].  55 Aslet, Burgio, Cachaud, Derbyshore and Rutherford, ‘An English Artist at the Valois Court’, p. 106.  56 Muller and Murrell argue that the 1572 miniature of Elizabeth I painted by Hilliard: National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 108, the picture is visible at [accessed 4 April 2020], which predates the limner’s French stay, is already a ‘squat oval’ (Norgate, Miniatura, ed. by Muller and Murrell, p. 132).  57 Goldring, Nicholas Hilliard, p. 133.

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small portrait miniatures, specifically, which divulges (to use Norgate’s own verb) the French undercurrent in the history of limning in England: You may choose your owne Table of what size you please but if you follow the Order I promised in the Title we must begin with pictures by the Life which are comonly made en petit volume in an Ovall of an indifferent size not too large nor yet soe very little as I have seen in France (about the bignes of a penny), wherein the Lines and likenes must be a worke of faith rather than Sence.58 The phrase en petit volume was the one most commonly used in France at the time to name portrait miniatures which were not yet called miniatures either. I will here give two examples from contemporary sources related to Hilliard. The first one is from a letter dated 1578 authored by Blaise de Vigenère (who we know met Hilliard and even saw him work),59 who writes about Nicholas Hilliard’s unparalleled excellence in limning: ‘à ce propos ledit peintre angloys est tenu pour l’un des plus excellents dont on aye mémoire au moins en petit volume’ (talking about which the said English painter is considered as one of the most excellent ever, at least in small volume).60 The second one is by Catherine de’ Medici, in an epistolary piece where she orders a portrait miniature (now lost, but which may have looked something like Hilliard’s 1572 squat oval miniature portrait of Elizabeth I): Je vous prie me faire ce plaisir que je puisse avoir bientost une peinture de la royne d’Angleterre en petit volume, de la grandeur et qu’elle soit bien pourtraicte et faicte de la façon mesme de celle que m’avez envoyée dudict comte de Lestre.61 (Would you please do me the favour of sending me soon a portrait of the queen in small volume, of the same size and quality and in the same fashion as that of the portrait of the Earl of Leicester which you sent me.)

 58 Norgate, Miniatura, ed. by Muller and Murrell, p. 67. The editors here note that these very small pictures were in fact not exclusively French. We also learn from their commentary that the aforementioned manuscript offering the portmanteau word ‘limniture’ omitted the ref­erence to the French tradition in its own adaptation of Norgate’s material. This, along with the English prerogative audible in the word ‘limniture’, is a striking illustration of the fierce artistic competition between countries at the time and the silencing of some foreign influences.  59 Blaise de Vigenère gave one of the most precise descriptions of Hilliard’s method (outside Hilliard’s own treatise), thereby revealing by the same token that Hilliard publicly showcased his art in France. See Vigenère, Traicté de Chiffres, ou Secrètes manières d’escrire, 253r–54v.  60 Blaise de Vigenère to Louis de Gonzague, Duc de Nevers (20 February 1578), BNF, MS Français 4538, 171–75.  61 Catherine de’ Medici, ‘Letter to the Count de la Mothe-Fénelon’ (3 July 1571), in Lettres de Catherine de Médicis, ed. by De la Ferriere and Baguenault de Puchesse, vol. iv, p. 52.

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Norgate’s mention of the untranslated phrase ‘en petit volume’, made en passant, illustrates how much the history of limning — both stylistic and semantic — is one of borrowing, translations, and circulation of techniques, materials, fashions, and words. Portrait miniatures limned in England under Elizabeth and James were indeed, to some extent, partly inspired from the French peintures en petit volume, both for historical and stylistic reasons. The use of the French phrase tells us a lot about the reception of limning in early modern Europe.62 The word ‘volume’ (from Old French) had been used in English since at least the fourteenth century to refer to a ‘written or printed text’.63 The idea that ‘volume’ could be related to the size of a book only appeared around the year 1530, and to things in general only from 1621 on (coincidentally also the moment when miniature painters started specializing in this trade).64 Tellingly enough, the second example that the OED gives to illustrate this specific meaning applies to pictures.65 The semantic journey of the word, borrowed from the French, seems to follow the very emancipation of these small pictures from the ‘volumes’ they were initially meant for, as illuminations. This may account for Hilliard’s early use of the phrase to describe portrait miniatures in his Arte of Limning: ‘[limning] is for the service of noble persons very meet in small voloms in privat maner for theem to have the Portraits and pictures of themselves’.66 It also illustrates the importance of French limners and their own words in the history of miniatures in England: it is perhaps no coincidence that the earliest instances of the phrase en petit volume are attributed to persons belonging to the social, political, and cultural environment which Hilliard became acquainted with while in France, the only European country other than England with a significant tradition of peintures en petits volumes. To conclude, Hilliard and Norgate shared a common ambition of promoting their art and status, which they both chose to do in the vernacular, and in manuscript form (originally at least, for Norgate), not unlike other apologies

 62 Although the genre and some of its material evolutions need to be considered within a wider international context and not just from a Eurocentric perspective (see for example Dulac, ‘Miniatures between East and West’), the words related to limning in early modern England mostly come from other European countries and owe only little to wider influences.  63 See ‘volume, n.’ OED Online.  64 See Strong, The English Renaissance Miniature, p. 8: ‘[Miniature painters in Renaissance England] were often incidentally miniaturists. What we are in fact dealing with is a sequence of artists who worked in England within the tradition of the late medieval and Renaissance workshop. They were artist-craftsmen who could paint panel portraits, design and often make jewels and plate, execute designs for tapestries and stained glass, supervise the décor and costumes for court festivals, provide drawing for engravers or illuminate official documents. […] Specialization set in only after about 1620.’  65 The quotation is excerpted from Richard Lassels’s The voyage of Italy, or, A compleat journey, ed. by Wilson and reads: ‘It [sc. The great hall] is beautifyed with rare pictures in a great volume’, p. 49.  66 Hilliard, The Arte of Limning, ed. by Thornton and Cain, p. 44.

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or defences composed around the same years. The revised version of Miniatura testifies to Norgate’s perception of the growing interest in technical literature, a trend which the pirated edition of the first version in 1658 as part of William Sanderson’s Graphice tends to corroborate. National interest was clearly involved as limning was then promoted as England’s unique contribution to the art. By the time of the reign of James I the limners were all Englishmen, ‘as opposed to the easel painters who still by and large came from the Continent’.67 The way limners divulged techniques and recipes also reminds the reader of the extent to which, in the sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century, limners were involved in the processes of their art: ‘the limner’s meticulous care reached back into the preparation of his colours, of his painting surface and often of his brushes’.68 Hence perhaps also their recurring concern and fear of being confused with craftsmen and artisans. What I find particularly interesting is the way they were equally involved with the process of naming their works and choosing words as carefully as pigments or surfaces to describe their pictures, as Norgate’s choice of miniatura illustrates. Pencil in one hand, pen in the other, Hilliard and Norgate show how much the naming of pictorial formats and genres shaped the perception of both their works and positions in comparison with other painters and limners. This is perhaps most striking in the history of such an ambivalently viewed form of art as the portrait miniature, both jewel and picture. Hence also perhaps the reason why the word ‘miniature’ was later heard as being related to the small size of the portrait, or again the spelling of mignature with a ‘g’, in French, at around the same time, which created a parallel with mignon (cute, lovely, precious). This may have contributed to the relative marginalization of limning into an art of minor importance which, in the second half of the seventeenth century, became mostly negatively associated with women, who by then had become an incredibly important part of the audience for Norgate’s treatise, a century after old master Hilliard so vehemently and beautifully defended his gentle pictures ‘in small voloms’.

 67 Jansson, Art and Diplomacy, p. 55.  68 Hilliard, The Arte of Limning, ed. by Thornton and Cain, p. 31.

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Bibliography Manuscripts Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Library, MS Laing 173 London, British Library, MS Harley 6376 —— , MS Sloane 2052 London, National Art Library, V&A, MS 86.EE.69 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 4538 Primary Sources A very proper treatise, wherein is briefly sett forthe the arte of limming which teacheth the order in drawing [and] tracing of letters, vinets, flowers, armes and imagery, [and] the maner how to make sundry sises or grounds to laye siluer or golde vppon, and how siluer or golde shalbe layed or limmed vppon the sise, [and] the waye to temper golde [and] siluer and other mettales and diuerse kyndes of colours to write or to limme withall vppon velym, parchement or paper, [and] howe to lay them vpon the worke which thou entendest to make, [and] howe to vernish yt when thou hast done, with diuerse other thinges very mete [and] necessary to be knowne to all such gentlemenne, and other persones as doe delite in limming, painting or in tricking of armes in their right colors, [and] therfor a worke very mete to be adioined to the bookes of armes, neuer put in printe before this time (London: Richard Tottel, 1573) Bullokar, John, An English expositor teaching the interpretation of the hardest words vsed in our language. With sundry explications, descriptions and discourses. By I. B. Doctor of Phisicke (London: Printed by John Legatt, 1616) Florio, John, A vvorlde of words, or Most copious, and exact dictionarie in Italian and English, collected / Vocabolario italiano & inglese (London: By Arnold Hatfield for Edw. Blount, 1598) Hilliard, Nicholas, Nicholas Hilliard’s Arte of limming (c. 1598–1603), ed. by A. F. Kin­ney and Linda Bradley Salamon (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983) —— , The Arte of Limning (c. 1598–1603), ed. by R. K. R. Thornton and T. G. S. Cain (Manchester: The Mid Northumberland Arts Group, Carcanet Press, 1992) Lassels, Richard, The voyage of Italy, or, A compleat journey through Italy in two parts: with the characters of the people, and the description of the chief towns, churches, monasteries, tombs, libraries, pallaces, villas, gardens, pictures, statues, and antiquities: as also of the interest, government, riches, force, &c. of all the princes: with instructions concerning travel / by Richard Lassels, Gent. who travelled through Italy five times as tutor to several of the English nobility and gentry; never before extant (London: John Starkey, 1670) Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Caruinge & Buildinge, trans. by Richard Haydocke (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1598)

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Medici, Catherine de’ (Caterina de’ Medici), Lettres de Catherine de Médicis, ed. by H. De la Ferriere and Baguenault de Puchesse, 11 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1880–1942), vol. iv Norgate, Edward, Miniatura or the Art of Limning (c. 1627–8, then 1648), ed. by Jeffrey Muller and Jim Murrell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) Pacheco Francisco, Arte de la pintura, su antiguedad y grandezas (Sevilla: Simon Faxardo, 1649) Vigenère, Blaise de, Traicté de Chiffres, ou Secrètes manières d’escrire (Paris: Chez Abel L’Angelier, 1586) Secondary Works Aslet, William, Lucia Burgio, Céline Cachaud, Alan Derbyshire, and Emma Rutherford, ‘An English Artist at the Valois Court: A Portrait of Henri III by Nicholas Hilliard’, in The Burlington Magazine, 161.1391 (February 2019), 102–13 Baxandall, Michael, ‘English disegno’, in England and the Continental Renaissance, ed. by Edward Chaney and Peter Mack (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1990), pp. 203–15 Chauvin, Maëlig, ‘La Place des miniatures dans les échanges diplomatiques entre les grandes puissances européennes et la Papauté (xviie siècle – xviiie siècle)’, Études Épistémè, 36 (2019) [accessed 3 September 2020] Dulac, Anne-Valérie, ‘Miniatures between East and West: The Art(s) of Diplomacy in Thomas Roe’s Embassy’, Études Épistémè, 26 (2014) [accessed 3 September 2020] —— , ‘Hilliard and Sidney’s Rule of the Eye’, in The Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern English Literature, ed. by Sophie Chiari (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 59–70 Evans, Mark, Renaissance Watercolours: From Dürer to Van Dyck (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2020) Faraday, Christina J., ‘Little Britain – The Elizabethan Passion for Portrait Mini­ atures’, Apollo, 13 April 2019 [accessed 3 September 2020] Goldring, Elizabeth, Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) Hotson, Leslie, Shakespeare by Hilliard: A Portrait Deciphered (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) James, Susan E., The Feminine Dynamic in English Art, 1485–1603: Women as Consumers, Patrons and Painters (London: Routledge, 2009) Jansson, Maija, Art and Diplomacy: Seventeenth-Century English Decorated Royal Letters to Russia and the Far East (Leiden: Brill, 2015) Leemans, Annemie Daniel Gerda, ‘Contextualizing England’s First Printed Source about Limning: A Book-historical Study of A Very Proper Treatise (1573)’, in Contribution à une histoire technologique de l’art, actes de journées d’étude de la composante de recherche PBC, ed. by Claire Betelu, Anne Servais, and Cécile

1 1 . m i n i at u re s i n t ranslat i o n

Parmentier (Paris: INHA, site de l’HiCSA, 2018), pp. 101–116, accessed 3 September 2020] —— , ‘A Very Proper Treatise: Specialist Knowledge for a Non-Specialist Public’, British Art Studies, Issue 17 (2020) MacLeod, Catharine, ‘Isaac Oliver and the Essex Circle’, British Art Studies, Issue 17

Strong, Roy, The English Renaissance Miniature (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983) Talley, Mansfield Kirby, Portrait Painting in England: Studies in the Technical Liter­ ature before 1700 (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1981) Telles, Patricia, ‘De la miniature au Portugal : peintres et objets voyageurs, entre l’Europe et l’Amérique’, Études Épistémè, 36 (2019)

291

Index

Accademia della Crusca: 144 Aggas, Edward: 109 Albin de Valsergues, Jean d’: 115 Alexander, William: 231 n. 34, 238 Alexis, Guillaume: 106–07 Anacreon: 23, 204, 208, 209, 214 Andrewes, Lancelot: 63 n. 28 Aretino, Pietro: 173, 179, 197 n. 11 Aristotle: 64, 124, 130–31, 132 n. 27, 132 n. 30, 134–35, 144, 212 Ascham, Roger: 83 n. 5 Babel (Tower of Babel): 58, 66 Bacon, Francis: 21–22, 123–38, 143 n. 18, 144 Bale, John: 115–16 Barnes, Barnabe: 225, 228–29, 230, 236, 238, 239 Barnfield, Richard: 68 n. 53, 221, 225, 226, 230–31, 239 Beaumont, Francis: 59 n. 7 Beza, Theodore (Théodore de Bèze): 104, 110, 116, 196 Bible: 15, 114, 116, 150, 152 n. 49, 153 n. 52, 196 binomials: 49–50 Blount, Thomas: 66 n. 43, 74 n. 70, 274 Bonde, William: 48 n. 21 Bongars, Jacques: 109 Borde, Andrew: 49 n. 22 Boyle, Robert: 142, 153, 154 Bunny, Edmund: 105, 112 n. 28, 116 n. 43, 118 Byrd, William: 248

Calvin, Jean: 104, 105, 110, 113, 116 n. 43, 159 Campion, Thomas: 257, 260–61 cant. See jargon Carew, Thomas: 65 n. 38 Castiglione, Baldassare: 64 Catholicism: 20–21, 59, 103–22, 157, 199, 213 Cecil, William: 111, 200 Charles I, King of England: 252, 274, 283 Chaucer, Geoffrey: 44–45, 87 n. 15, 174 Cheke, John: 20, 64–65, 83 n. 5 Cicero: 21, 64, 125–26, 131, 132 n. 27 Ciminelli, Serafino (Serafino Aquilano): 173 n. 9, 175, 186, 202 collaborative writing: 25, 81, 85, 86 n. 13, 141 Comenius, Jan Amos: 154 copia: 19, 50–51, 65, 113, 143, 185, 186, 238, 257, 259–60 Cotgrave, Randle: 109 Daniel, Samuel: 174, 226, 237 Davies of Hereford, John: 65 n. 41 Dekker, Thomas: 18, 19–20, 57–80, 81 n. 2, 223 Desportes, Philippe: 206, 232–34 Dolce, Ludovico: 173, 184 Donne, John: 248–49, 256 Dowland, John: 248, 249, 252 Dowland, Robert: 256 Drayton, Michael: 173 n. 11, 177, 206

2 94

i n dex

Du Bellay, Joachim: 14 n. 7, 23, 24, 173, 174, 177–79, 180 n. 40, 183 n. 59, 195 n. 2, 196–97, 206, 221–23, 237, 239 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester: 110, 286 Durand, Etienne: 262, 268 Earle, John: 67, 74 Elizabeth I, Queen of England: 63 n. 28, 83 n. 5, 104, 110, 123, 274, 285, 286, 287 Erasmus, Desiderius: 49 n. 25 etymology: 18, 19, 20, 38, 43–44, 46–47, 50, 59–61, 67, 89, 112, 117, 273 Fenton, Geoffrey: 111–13, 118 Filmer, Robert: 24–25, 247–72 Fletcher, John: 59 n. 7, 86 n. 13 Florio, John: 13 n. 1, 14, 16 n. 14, 188 n. 78, 273 Floyer, John: 50 n. 29 Fowler, William: 50 n. 30 France: 14 n. 7, 16, 21, 23, 24, 25, 82, 107 n. 15, 109, 112, 113, 142, 144, 159, 162, 172, 173, 174, 179, 196, 200, 202, 207–08, 209, 221, 225 n. 17, 248, 249, 252, 257, 261–63, 266–69, 274, 280, 284–87 Gascoigne, George: 62, 174 Gessner, Conrad: 69 n. 60, 149 n. 33, 150, 152 n. 48 Geuffroy, Antoine: 113 n. 35 Gill, Alexander: 69 n. 57 Golding, William: 196, 238–39 Gorges, Arthur: 200, 201, 211, 215 Gough, John: 108–09 Greene, Robert: 58 n. 4, 116–17, 200, 201, 212–14 Gregory XIII, Pope: 116

Guazzo, Stefano: 63 n. 28, 65, 83 n. 5 Guevara, Antonio de: 104 Harman, Thomas: 57, 69, 72–73 Harvey, Gabriel: 14 Haydocke, Richard: 275, 278–80 Henri III, King of France: 284 n. 53, 285 Henri IV, King of France: 109–10, 117 n. 47, 252, 258, 261 n. 40 Henrietta Maria: 25, 247, 252–53, 256 n. 21, 262–63 Henry VIII, King of England: 21, 81, 108 Hilliard, Nicholas: 25, 273, 276–88 Horace: 65 n. 42, 205, 207–08, 209 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey: 174 imitation: 18, 22–24, 62, 64, 171–94, 195–220, 223 n. 13, 232, 234, 235, 258, 279 inkhorn controversy: 20, 62, 64, 82 intellectual property: 23, 195–220 Italy: 16, 22, 23, 24, 25, 57, 85 n. 12, 144, 159, 172–79, 188 n. 80, 189, 225, 252, 273–74, 279, 282, 287 n. 65 James VI and I, King of Scotland and England: 123, 199 n. 16, 274, 287, 288 jargon thieves’ cant: 17, 19–20, 57–80 philosophical jargon: 124, 132 Jesuits: 105, 141, 147, 157, 159 Jonson, Ben: 60–61, 65, 205, 253 Julius II, Pope: 108 language and nationhood language and transnational/ international circulations: 22–25, 124, 144, 154 n. 55, 156–57, 172, 189, 252

index

language purity and national identity: 18 n. 23, 25, 26, 30, 58, 60 n. 10, 61, 62, 67, 69, 75, 79, 82–83, 86 n. 12, 90, 93, 96, 98, 99, 116 n. 41, 141 n. 6, 122, 164, 179, 196–97, 228, 288 languages Anglo-Norman: 19, 34, 38, 39, 43–45, 46 Anglo-Saxon: 20, 39, 61 Chinese: 139–41, 147 Dutch: 13 n. 1, 46, 57 n. 2, 93, 141, 275 n. 10, 284 French: 13 n. 1, 16 n. 14, 19–25, 33–56, 61 n. 18, 62, 74 n. 73, 83, 93, 103–22, 158, 160–61, 171–75, 178, 179, 180 n. 42, 182, 187, 196, 201, 204, 206, 208, 209, 232, 234–35, 247–72, 275, 277, 282–83, 287, 288 German: 25, 46, 116, 150, 161, 275 n. 10, 277 Germanic roots of the English language: 20, 35, 93, 94 Greek: 13, 14, 16, 23, 59, 62, 124, 134 n. 38, 197, 201–02, 204, 209–10, 214–15, 221 Hebrew: 147, 157 Italian: 13 n. 1, 14, 16, 23, 24, 25, 62, 65 n. 38, 144, 171–75, 179, 186, 187, 188, 196, 209, 230, 232 n. 36, 234, 252, 256, 257, 273–74, 277, 279, 281–84 Latin (classical and postclassical): 13, 16–17, 19–25, 34–47, 50, 58–61, 64–65, 72, 75, 85 n. 12, 86, 89, 90, 92–94, 104 n. 4, 107, 109, 115, 123–38, 147, 154, 156–59, 161, 171, 175, 199, 202, 207, 213, 222, 225 n. 17, 232 n. 36, 236, 257, 275, 277, 282, 283

Middle English: 19, 34–50 Native American: 147, 150, 152 Old English: 35 Portuguese: 173, 276 n. 10 Scots: 49 Spanish: 62, 152, 171, 173, 276 n. 10 Lemaire de Belges, Jean: 108 lexical borrowing: 17, 19, 25, 33–56, 63, 82 n. 3, 83 n. 5, 197, 205 n. 41, 258, 274, 275, 287 Lodge, Thomas: 24, 197, 199–201, 203 n. 34, 212–14, 232–33 Lodwick, Francis: 139, 141, 153, 154 n. 58, 156, 161 Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo: 275, 278–80 Loque, Bertrand de (François Saillans): 113–14 Lord’s prayer: 22, 141–42, 146–53, 162 Luther, Martin: 105, 107, 111, 116 madrigal: 176 n. 27, 182, 225, 249, 252, 256 Maillard, André: 117 n. 47 Malherbe, François de: 24, 233 n. 37, 247, 258–61, 263, 264–65 manuscript: 18, 25, 44 n. 16, 129, 139, 158–59, 176 n. 21, 215, 226, 237 n. 54, 247–48, 252, 275–87 Marcourt, Antoine: 115 Marlowe, Christopher: 86 n. 13 Mary, Queen of Scots: 274 Mary I, Queen of England: 104 Massinger, Philip: 61 n. 17 Maynard, François: 24, 247, 261, 262 n. 46, 266–67 Megiser, Hieronymus: 149, 152 Mersenne, Marin: 157, 159–60, 257 Middleton, Thomas: 68 n. 51, 86 n. 13 Mulcaster, Richard: 85–86 n. 12, 90, 196, 197 n. 8

295

2 96

i n dex

Nashe, Thomas: 62–63, 86 n. 13 Norgate, Edward: 25, 274, 276 n. 11, 281–88 North, Thomas: 104 Oliver, Isaac: 273, 274, 282–84 Ovid: 22, 24, 221–45 Palsgrave, John: 68 n. 50, 83 paratext: 17 n. 21, 69, 116–17, 118, 186, 225, 239, 253, 278 Parsons, Robert: 105, 112 n. 28, 116 n. 43, 118 pastoral: 210, 221, 225, 233 n. 40, 237, 249 Pell, Daniel: 49 n. 28 Percy, William: 225, 226, 229–31, 239 Petrarch: 14, 17, 22, 23, 124 n. 7, 144, 171–94, 202, 215, 228, 232, 234, 235 Petrarchism: 23, 24, 171–94, 196, 205, 215 n. 96, 221, 222 n. 7, 232, 234, 235, 237, 239 Phillips, Edward: 66 n. 43 Pindar: 23, 197, 206–11, 214, 215 Plato: 131, 135, 196 n. 6 Poliziano, Angelo: 173, 180, 184, 221 pope: 67, 81, 108–09, 115 n. 37, 116, 153 propriety: 22, 23, 197–98, 202, 204–05, 208–10, 215 Protestantism: 21, 60 n. 10, 94, 103–22, 150, 152 n. 47, 159, 199 Puritanism: 62, 110, 142, 178 Puttenham, George: 23, 60, 174, 195 n. 1, 196–97, 199, 201, 202, 206, 208–10, 215 Ramus, Peter (Pierre de la Ramée): 72 n. 61, 131 n. 27 Republic of Letters: 22, 141, 153, 157–60, 162

rhetoric: 18, 19, 50, 52, 59, 61, 62, 65 n. 39, 88–90, 93, 96, 125, 131, 133 n. 32, 133 n. 35, 136, 143, 202–05, 209–10, 221, 224, 235, 237, 239, 257, 258, 260, 277 Rome classical: 20, 23, 81, 84, 87–89, 91–94, 96, 177–78 early modern: 23, 81, 84, 85 n. 12, 90, 108, 109, 111–15, 117, 160, 177–78, 181 Ronsard, Pierre de: 22, 23–24, 173–74, 176, 178, 182–84, 195–220, 225, 228, 284 Rowlands, Samuel: 58 n. 4 Royal Society: 22, 141–44, 152, 154, 156, 157, 162 Saillans, François. See Loque, Bertrand de Sandys, George: 223, 234, 236, 237 scholastics: 21, 59 n. 9, 60, 124, 126, 127, 132 n. 29 Shakespeare, William: 16, 19, 20, 81–99 Sidney, Philip: 23, 173, 175, 196, 197, 199–202, 210–12, 214–15, 225, 230, 237, 247, 248, 256, 273 Skelton, John: 60 n. 14, 68 n. 50 Smith, Thomas: 49 n. 27, 199 Smith, William: 225–26, 230–31, 235, 239 sonnet: 14, 22–23, 171–94, 196, 197 n. 10, 204, 205, 206 n. 46, 206 n. 48, 210–12, 221–33, 237, 248 Soowthern, John: 23, 24, 200, 201, 206–10, 232–34 Spenser, Edmund: 14, 18 n. 25, 23, 173, 177–78, 195 n. 2, 226, 230 Stansby, William: 251, 253, 255 Strigel, Victorinus: 49 n. 26

index

style literary: 17 n. 17, 18–19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 33–34, 47, 50 n. 32, 52, 59, 62 n. 26, 91 n. 26, 92, 107, 124 n. 7, 143, 156, 197–98, 209–10, 211–15 musical: 253, 256, 257 pictorial: 282–83, 285, 287 Talpin, Jean: 111–13, 118 Tarlton, Richard: 23, 200–01, 210, 212–14 Tasso, Bernardo: 173, 179, 184, 185 Tasso, Torquato: 180, 183, 184 n. 61 translatio imperii: 92 translatio studii: 17 n. 19, 196, 201, 202, 208 Tyard, Pontus de: 176, 178, 182–83 Tyndale, William: 107, 108 n. 18, 115 type blackletter: 61 n. 21, 207 n. 52, 228 italic: 207 n. 52, 228, 230–31 roman: 61 n. 21, 207 n. 52, 228 utterance: 63–64, 92–93, 211, 239 Watson, Thomas: 23–24, 173, 174 n. 14, 185–86, 196, 199 n. 24, 200–06, 207, 208, 210, 211, 213, 225–27, 230, 231, 232 n. 36, 236–39, 256 Wilcox, Thomas: 113–14 Wilkins, John: 17, 21–22, 72 n. 60, 139–67 Wilson, Thomas: 20, 64, 65, 69, 83 n. 5 Wolfe, John: 226–28 Yonge, Nicholas: 252, 256

297