Reading Philippe Desportes in Le Rencontre Des Muses De France Et D’Italie
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Renaissance Studies Vol. 26 No. 3 DOI: 10.1111/j.1477-4658.2011.00729.x Reading Philippe Desportes in Le Rencontre des muses de France et d’Italie Gabriella Scarlatta Eschrich The Renaissance poet Philippe Desportes (1546–1606) was considerably appreciated and admired during his lifetime.1 In 1573, while the poet was leaving France for Poland in order to follow the Duke of Anjou (1551–89), who was the newly crowned King of Poland and future Henri III of France, his Premières Œuvres was published in Paris.2 From that year on, a new edition of his poems would be published almost every year until 1602, with a total of thirty-three editions in thirty years. His poetry, esteemed for its lyric and clear qualities, met with great success and fulfilled the expectations of his readers, patrons and fellow writers. Desportes succeeded Pierre de Ronsard as the court poet of Henri III and he became the secretary of the king’s chancellery. He was a favourite member of the salon of the Maréchale de Retz and an active participant in the Palace Academy of Henri III. These two institutions per- formed cultural, intellectual and social roles of great importance at the end of the sixteenth century, and they shaped and contributed to Desportes’ writing and success.3 As the favourite poet of Henri III, he wrote to order and tried to respond to the demands and tastes of his public. Just before his death, Desportes became the tutor of Henri IV’s son, the future Louis XIII. His 1 Two important studies dedicated to Desportes and his writings have recently been published: Bruno Petey-Girard and François Rouget (eds.), Philippe Desportes. Poète profane, poète sacré. Actes du Colloque interna- tional de Chartres (14–16 septembre 2006) (Paris: Champion, 2008), and Jean Balsamo (ed.), Philippe Desportes (1546–1606). Un poète presque parfait entre Renaissance et Classicisme (Paris: Klincksieck, 2000). For an extensive biography, see Jacques Lavaud, Un Poète de cour au temps des derniers Valois. Philippe Desportes (Paris: Droz, 1936). My deep gratitude goes to my two colleagues Stéphane Spoiden and Jackie Vansant, as well as to the anonymous, patient reader for their indispensable comments and help in the various stages of this article. 2 Les Premières Œuvres de Philippe Desportes au Roy de Pologne (Paris: Robert Estienne pour lui-même et Robert le Mangnier, 1573). The first modern edition of Desportes’ poetry is by Alfred Michiels, Œuvres de Philippe Desportes (Paris: Adolfe Delahais, 1858). A more recent edition of his work is by Victor Graham, Desportes, Philippe, Premières Œuvres (Paris et Genève: Minard et Droz, 1958) in seven volumes. All references will be based on this edition. 3 For Desportes’ role in Henri III’s Palace Academy, see ‘Desportes orateur à l’Académie du Palais’, in Philippe Desportes. Poète Profane, poètesacré, 23–100; Daniela Costa, ‘Desportes et l’Académie du Palais’, in Philippe Desportes (1546–1606), 163–72, and for his role in the Salon of the Maréchale de Retz, see Rosanna Gorris, ‘Je veux chanter d’amour la tempeste et l’orage’: Desportes et les Imitations de l’Arioste’, in Philippe Desportes (1546–1606), 173–211; Frances A. Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London: Warburg Institute, 1947); Robert J. Sealy, The Palace Academy of Henri III,(Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, XI, 1971), 61–83; Mark Greengrass, Governing Passions. Peace and Reform in the French Kingdom, 1576–1585 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 46–59. © 2011 The Author Renaissance Studies © 2011 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd 386 Gabriella Scarlatta Eschrich career flourished during the reign of three different kings, Charles IX, Henri III, and Henri IV, in three courts and under two dynasties, the Valois and Bourbons. *** Desportes wrote extensively and in a variety of genres and styles.4 His poetry has almost always been analysed in relation to its sources, mostly the Italian Petrarchist and neo-Petrarchist poets of the Quattrocento and Cinquecento, or in relation to some of his contemporaries.5 This trend started while the poet was still alive when, in 1604, an anonymous editor published the pam- phlet, Le Rencontre des Muses de France et d’Italie. The text was later attributed to R. J. de Saint-Jorry,6 who was undoubtedly familiar with Desportes’ poetry and with the many Italian anthologies circulating in France during the end of the sixteenth century. This little-known volume, dedicated to the queen of France, Marie de Medici, brought together forty-three poems by Desportes and, on the facing page, forty-three Italian poems deemed to be his sources. The Rencontre is the embodiment of a perfect example of the literary and critical preoccupations of the Renaissance, and it raises several important questions dealing with the tension between mimesis and creativity, individuality and intertextuality, and, of course, language and Italianisms. Most importantly, I will argue here that the Rencontre contributes to a better understanding of Desportes and of how he read, adopted, and adapted his sources. This study will focus on Le Rencontre des muses de France et d’Italie, a text that is rarely discussed yet is crucially important in the reading and interpretation of Desportes. It scrutinizes Saint- Jorry’s intentions and position toward not only his ‘rencontre’ of two poetics, but also toward matters of imitation. While this preface has been mostly ignored by literary critics, it constitutes an important document because it eloquently sheds light on significant conven- tions of Renaissance imitation. Moreover, through a close reading and textual analysis of four paired sonnets from the Rencontre, I hope to identify some 4 His Premières Œuvres (1573) includes: Le premier livre des Amours, Le second livre des Amours, Diverses Amours et autres œuvres meslées, les Amours d’Hippolyte; Elégies, a Latin play Ad Philipum Portaeum, and Imitations. For subse- quent editions see Philippe Desportes (1546–1606), 513–34. 5 See Jean Balsamo, who notes: ‘En fait l’on n’a cessé d’opposer Desportes à Ronsard, Desportes à Malherbe dans ces duels si caractéristiques de l’historiographie française.’ in Philippe Desportes (1546–1606), 8. A recent article on Desportes’ imitation by Roberta Cavallini is also very compelling, ‘L’Amour entre le profane et le sacré: échos pétrarquistes et nouvelles perspectives dans la poésie de Desportes’, in Philippe Desportes. Poète profane, poète sacré, 167–80. 6 Le Rencontre des muses de France et d’Italie, (Lyon, Jacques Roussin, 1604). The volume also includes the Dialogue de Minerve et Junon sur les nopces Royales du Treschrestien Henry de Bourbon, Roy de France & de Navarre et de la Ser.me Marie de Medicis, Prince de Toscane by Guarini. Roussin also published Desportes’ work in Lyon in 1593. For Saint-Jorry, see Jean-Pierre Niceron, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des hommes illustres dans la république des lettres XXV (Paris: Briasson, 1734), 315; Francesco Flamini, Studi di storia letteraria italiana e straniera (Livorno: Giusti, 1895), 348; and Roméo Arbour, Répertoire chronologique des éditions de texts littéraires: l’ère baroque en France (Genève: Droz, 1977), 502. Le Rencontre des muses de France et d’Italie 387 characteristics of Desportes’ imitative practices, his individual poetic skills and specific contributions to early-modern French poetry, and mostly what distin- guishes his poetry from his model texts.7 I will argue that this volume, possibly compiled with the intention to denounce Desportes’ many Italianisms, in fact, turned out to herald his work because it reunited, in a unique bilingual collection, poetry that was well known in both Italy and France. After all, this is precisely what many Italian anthologies had done for several early modern poets.8 Philippe Desportes was an avid reader of the Italian anthologies of the Quattrocento and Cinquecento, and of the work of many Italian writers, such as Ludovico Ariosto, as his Imitations de quelques chans de l’Arioste (1572) attest.9 These translations and imitations helped the poet to perfect his lyrical skills and linguistic erudition. They also further enhanced his apprenticeship of the culture of Italian literature and of its major and minor authors. Indeed, one of Desportes’ principal contributions to French literature is his pivotal role as an intermediary between, and synthesizer of, French and Italian poetry. Later on in his career, because of his contribution to the transmission of Italian poetry through French translations, he became essential reading for the next generation of French poets who took inspiration from his writings.10 His many deviations from his Italian models enabled him to produce work that embod- ies a poetic, linguistic, and cultural repository in which the writings of past, present, and future French poets converge in a dynamic continuum.11 The original content and format of the Rencontre illustrates Desportes’ personal process of selection, imitation, and deviation from his sources, as they reveal which models incited his imagination the most. The volume is also 7 Recent scholarship on Le Rencontre includes the work of JoAnn DellaNeva, ‘Reading Desportes through the Italians: Two Early Modern Readers Responses’, Italique XI (Droz: Genève, 2008), 31–52; Philippe Desan, ‘Desportes devant la postérité: des premiers Tombeaux aux anthologies modernes’, in Philippe Desportes (1546– 1606), 495–510; Jean Balsamo, Les Rencontres des muses (Genève: Slatkine, 1992), 238. Le Rencontre is also mentioned in Roméo Arbour, Répertoire chronologique des éditions de texts littéraires, 502; in Frédéric Lachèvre, Bibliographie des recueils de poésies publiées de 1597 à 1700 (Paris: Henri Leclerc, 1901), 162; and, in more detail, in Jean-Pierre Niceron, Mémoires: 309–10. 8 For a study of Italian anthologies, see Joseph Vianey, Le Pétrarquisme en France au XVIe siècle (Montpellier: Coulet et Fils, 1909), and Louise George Clubb and William G.