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The Reputation of Clément Marot in Renaissance England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

Anne Lake Prescott*
Affiliation:
Barnard College
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Extract

It should be said at once that whatever his accomplishments as chief poet at the court of François I Clément Marot was never an important figure in Renaissance England. In his own country he was a popular and influential author, and although in La Deffence Du Bellay was to write of him in a tone verging on scorn Marot had in fact done a great deal to liberate French poetry from the Rhétoriqueur tradition and to ‘illustrate’ it with new grace, flexibility, and wit. To be sure, his early work owes much to the Rhétoriqueurs and to the Roman de la Rose, but some years before the Pléiade began its well-publicized program to improve French letters he had already experimented with such forms as the elegy and sonnet and had on occasion attempted intriguing combinations of Petrarchan themes and diction with older French forms.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1971

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References

1 There has been little published on Marot's reputation in England. Aside from occasional articles suggesting traces of influence here and there the most useful works are Lee, Sidney, The French Renaissance in England (Oxford, 1910)Google Scholar Upham, Alfred, The French Influence in English Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Lois Borland, ‘The Influence of Marot on English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century’ (unpub. M.A. thesis, University of Chicago, 1913). Borland emphasizes Marot's influence on Wyatt, Spenser, and the Scottish poets Lindsay and Montgomery.

2 For a brief notice of Marot's life and career see the notice biographique in Clément Marot, Les Epîtres, ed. C. A. Mayer (London, 1958). Mayer's persuasive description of Marot's rôle in the renaissance of French letters is to be found in his introduction to Marot's Oeuvres Diverses (London, 1966). Whenever possible I shall cite Mayer's as yet incomplete edition. Otherwise references will be to Les Oeuvres de Clément Marot, ed. Georges Guiffrey (Paris, 1875-1931), 5 volumes.

3 This description of Marot's bibliography is necessarily very brief. See Pierre Villey, 'Tableau chronologique des publications de Marot’, RSS, VII (1920), 46-97, 206-234; VIII (1921), 80-110, 157-211; and his Marot et Rabelais (Paris, 1923). See also, Mayer, , Bibliographic des Oeuvres de Clement Marot (Geneva, 1954)Google Scholar II.

4 It is difficult to determine how many Englishmen actually owned an edition of Marot's poetry. According to Sidney Lee's introduction to his Elizabethan Sonnets (London, 1904), 1, xxxv, Mary Queen of Scots owned one, and there is a record of a 1551 edition of Marot's Oeuvres in Thomas James’ Catalogus librorum Bibliothecae publicae quam T. Bodleius … (Oxford, 1605).

5 Marot, ed. Guiffrey, IV, 108. The epigram is discussed by A. K. Foxwell, A Study of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poems (New York, 1911, reissued 1964), pp. 7-8. Foxwell doubts that the poem is in Wyatt's own hand. It appears in a group of French epigrams in the latter part of the MS, but the poems are not arranged chronologically. On this latter point see Kenneth Muir's Introduction to Wyatt's Collected Poems (London, 1949).

6 This anthology is discussed by Kerman, Joseph in ‘An Elizabethan edition of Lassus’, Acta Muskologica, XXVI (1955), 7176 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 The text of Marot's version is from Orlando di Lassus, Sdmtliche Werke, ed. F. X. Haberl and A. Sandberger (Leipzig, 1894-1927), XIV, 15-17. The text follows the 1576 edition.

8 Kerman mentions this European influence and there is a description of the Pasquier in Lassus's Werke, XII, XXIII ff. Music by Lassus and Adrien Le Roy written to accompany Marot's poetry was also printed in Le Roy's A brief a. plaine instruction to set all musicke of eight divers tunes in tableturefor the lute (1574), although only the first few words of the texts are given.

9 Fraunce, Abraham, The Arcadian Rhetoric, ed. Seaton, Ethel (Oxford, 1950), p. 61 Google Scholar. The introduction discusses Fraunce's sources and his misunderstanding of Marot. For the original, see the Oeuvres Lyriques, ed. C. A. Mayer (London, 1964), p. 117.

10 Quoted from the 1608 edition published at Edinburgh, Sigs. M5V-M6. The work had been entered in the Stationer's Register in 1599.

11 Sig. X7V. The original French is even more dismissive: ‘un Poäte Francois assez estimé en son temps’ (Sig. 1.6). The lines by Marot are from his 77th epigram.

12 It has sometimes been thought that Wyatt translated another poem of Marot's, ‘S'il est ainsi’, a rondeau which shares with Wyatt's poem ‘If it be so’ the comforting conceit that a lover who has given his heart away is in no physiological condition to fall in love with anyone else. The French poem, however, is in fact an imitation of one by Sarafmo by the poet's father Jean Marot. Wyatt certainly copied the French, and in view of its inclusion in one of the early MSS of Clément Marot's works it is not inconceivable that he thought he was imitating the son. See C. A. Mayer and D. Bentley-Cranch, ‘Le Premier Pétrarquiste Français’, BHR, xxvil (January 1965), 183 ff. Marot has also been seen on occasion as one of the influences on Wyatt's experiments with the sonnet. This is the argument, for instance, of Mönch, Walter, Das Sonett (Heidelberg, 1955)Google Scholar.

13 OeuvresDiperses, pp. 122-123; Surrey, Poems, ed. Emrys Jones (Oxford, 1964), p. 10. G. F. Nott briefly discusses the translation in his edition of Surrey's Works (1815), p. eclxviii.

14 Tottel's Miscellany, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), I, 2. Rollins does not mention Marot as the source for any of the poems, but see Borland, p. 31.

15 Miscellany, pp. 179, 178; Marot, Les Epitres, p. 150, and Oeuvres Diverses, p. 219.

16 Marot, Oeuvres Lyriques, pp. 321-337; Spenser, Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1912), pp. 460-463. Spenser must have been familiar with Marot's work for some time, for he seems to have used Marot's translation of Petrarch's sixth canzone for his contribution to van der Noot's Theatre for Worldlings (1569).

17 Marot, Oeuvres Lyriques, pp. 343-353; Spenser, pp. 464-467. For a discussion of the extent of Spenser's borrowing see O. J. Reamer, ‘Spencer's Debt to Marot—Re-examined’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, x (1968-1969), 504-527.

18 Marot, ed. Guiffrey, IV, 193; Spenser, p. 577. Spenser's other borrowing, ‘As Diane hunted on a day’, is based on Marot's ‘L'enfant Amour’, ed. Guiffrey, IV, 169.

19 Marot, Oeuvres Lyriques, pp. 197-198; The Poems of Sir Arthur Gorges, ed. H. E. Sandison (Oxford, 1953), p. 23. See also no. 26 and no. 40, each possibly indebted to Marot.

20 Marot, ed. GuifFrey, rv, 164; Rhapsody, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), I, 268. Davison wrote his poems in the 1590s. One of them, ‘My love in her Attyre’, shows some similarity to Marot's 74th epigram on the beauty of his mistress's nudity.

21 Drayton's debts to Marot are noted in his Works, ed. K. Tillotson and B. Newdigate (Oxford, 1961), v, 4, 6, 9, 185, and 187. The actual influence that Marot may or may not have exerted on English literature is difficult to determine. Various claims have been made for some sort of impetus given to the development of the sonnet, the elegy, and the pastoral, but I must confess that I find few of them wholly convincing.

22 The literature on the development of the English psalm and its relationship to European psalters is enormous. Most useful for a study of Marot's influence on the English psalm are Orentin Douen, Clement Marot et le Psautier Huguenot (Paris, 1879); John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (London, 1907); Pratt, Waldo, Music of the French Psalter of 1562 (Columbia, 1939)CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hallett Smith,'English Metrical Psalms’, HLQ, IX (1945 /6), 249-271; Campbell, L.B., Divine Poetry and Drama in Sixteenth Century England (Cambridge, 1959)Google Scholar. Useful if brief summaries are in Ringler's introduction to his edition of Sidney's poems (Oxford, 1962) and in the introduction to The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, ed. J. C. A. Rathnell (New York, 1963). Both the music and the French texts are to be found in Pierre Pidous's Psautier Huguenot (Bâle, 1962).

23 This list of names is certainly not exhaustive. In any event the question of Marot's influence on the English psalm is complicated by the popularity of the French psalm tunes (the tune of ‘Old Hundredth’ comes from the French psalter), by the common origin of all translations of the psalms, and by the debts of the Dutch and Scottish psalters to the French.

24 The 1592 edition is mentioned by Julian and Douen, but it appears to have been lost.

25 Sig. c8, Divers of Davids Psalmes According to the French Forme & Metre. Douen also lists two other English translations. One is based only on Beza, by Gilbie, Anthony. The other is the Psalmes of David ﹛in English meter) (Middleburgh, 1598)Google Scholar, which I have not seen.

26 For the price of a French psalter in the 1580s see Robert Jahn, ‘Letters and Booklists of Th. Chard (or Chare) of London 1583-4’, Library, 4th series, IV (1923), 219-237. The book could also be bought in Shrewsbury; see Rodger, Alexander, ‘Roger Ward's Shrewsbury Stock: an Inventory of 1585', Library, 5th series, XIII (1958), 247268 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. G. Delamothe, author of The French Alphabeth (1595), urges his readers to attend Huguenot churches to improve their French.

27 Transcript of the Registers, ed. Edward Arber (London, 1875-1876), III, 52.

28 Sometimes Marot's psalms were quoted, as in Richard Day's Christian prayers and meditations (1569), Sig. 113; Robert le Macon's Catechisme, published in English in 1580 and in French in 1602; and John Wodroephe's The marrow of the French tongue (2nd ed., 1625), Sig. Q5v.

29 This point is stressed by Pierre Jourda, Marot, L'Homme et L'Oeuvre (Paris, 1950). It should be conceded, however, that the popularity of ‘le style Marotique’ in the 1640s must have owed much to a taste for the by then pleasantly old-fashioned language. English opinion that Marot was archaic was not without parallel in France.

30 Warton, Thomas, History of English Poetry (London, 1824) III, 445Google Scholar. ‘Murthing’ must mean making merry, although it seems a peculiar word to choose.

31 Sig. B3V. The original reads, ‘Poetam nostrum Marotum (cui similem nee vidit, nee visura est Gallia) propter lepores et sales et suave dicendi genus … ‘ . Familiarity with Marot is ‘opus tuum consummandum’.

32 Gabriel Harvey, Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913), p. 162.

33 WilliamBrowne.'Britannia'sPastorals ‘Works.ed.W.C.Hazlitt (1868-1869),1, 192.

34 Lindsay's poem is discussed by Borland. For Sempill, see Satirical Poems of the Time of the Reformation, ed. James Cranstoun, (Edinburgh, Scottish Text Society, 1891), 1, 386.

35 Samuel Lewkenor, A discourse for such as are desirous to know … of all those citties wherein doe flourish priviledged universities (1600), Sig. N2; Edward Benlowes, Sphinx theologica (Cambridge, 1636, first pub. 1626), Sig. A5.

36 Smith, G.G., Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford, 1904)Google Scholar II, 17.

37 From a MS of Rogers's epigrams in the collection of the Marquis of Hertford. The Latin reads:

Quantus erat Tusco Boccacius ore, favebat

Itala quantum olim lingua Sueda Petrarche tibi;

Qualis os insurgit Gallo sermone Marottus

Aptat dum patria verba poeticae lyrae;

Tantus eras Galfride tuis Chaucere Britannis,

Ingenio vates nee minus ore potens.

Anglica quo veneris nunc spirat lingua magistro

Quas Italis, Gallis, ille vel ille dedit.

(f- I35a)

The translation is by Hoyt Hudson, The Epigram in the English Renaissance (Princeton, 1947)> P- 137- Rogers's epigrams were for the most part written in the 1560s and 1570s.

38 James Howell, Epistolae Ho-elianae, ed. Joseph Jacobs (London, 1892), 11, 591-592. The same remarks appear, slightly altered, in Howell's introduction to his Lexicon Tetraglotton (1660).

39 Du Bartas, Works, ed. U. T. Holmes, J. C. Lyons, and R. W. Linker (Chapel Hill, 1935-1940), III, 142; (Goulart, Simon), La Seconde Sepmaine de Guillaume de Saluste, seigneur du Bartas (Geneva, 1593)Google Scholar Sig. S7

40 Parts Added to The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. L. B. Campbell (Cambridge, 1946), p. 450; Spenser, ed. Smith and Selincourt, pp. 418, 422. In the Argument to the November eclogue E. K. says that the poem was ‘made in imitation of Marot his song, which he made upon the death of Loys the frenche Queene. But farre passing his reache …’ (p. 460).

41 Timothy Kendall, Flowers of Epigramtnes (London, 1577); Spenser Society reprint Vol. xv (1874), p. 159. The translation is fairly close.

42 One such, a girl as fresh and pretty as Ronsard's Marie, wrote, ‘Living at the corner of Broadway and ndth, why should I concern myself with the death of a rose?’.

43 Thomas Brice, Against filthy writing (1562; a broadside); John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A treatise or exposition upon the ten commandments (1628, first pub. 1603), Sig. srv; John Ford, Linae Vitae (1620), Sig. C4; I. H. This worlds folly (1615), Sigs. B2V-B3; and Charles Butler, The principles of musik (1626), Sig. R2.

44 It is true that some authors attempted to make love poetry acceptable by claiming an allegorical meaning or an intellectual interest of some sort. Even in our own day we seem more comfortable with interpretations of Renaissance sonnet sequences which stress psychological or philosophical exploration and complexity. Such approaches rescue Renaissance love poetry for our own ideas of importance but for one reason or another they were unused by critics at the time. The most important discussion of English doubts about love poetry in the Renaissance is L. B. Campbell's Divine Poetry, but there is also some material in Peterson, Douglas, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne (Princeton, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also suggestive is the comment of Durling, Dwight L. in The Georgic Tradition in English Poetry (Columbia, 1935), p. 14 Google Scholar, that the chief reason why Marot and Ronsard were not more often translated was the didactic emphasis of English critics and scholars.

45 Hall, Joseph, Collected Poems, ed. A. Davenport (London, 1949), p . 257 Google Scholar. In a book of paradoxes translated from the French by Anthony Munday as The defence of contraries (1593) we read of those learned men ‘of our time’ who came to troubled ends, including 'The French P o e t … by the miserable and implacable sute of the court, even in his coldest years’ (Sig. E3v), which sounds like a reference to Marot.

46 Harvey, Gabriel, Works, ed. A. B. Grosart (London, 1884-1885), 11 Google Scholar, 247. ‘Bellay’ is almost certainly not the poet but one of his learned relatives. Harvey does not say which one he means, although probably the best known in England was the general and diplomat Guillaume du Bellay.

47 Coryate, Thomas, Coryats Crudities (Glasgow, 1905) 1 Google Scholar, 31, 42.

48 Marot, , Oeuvres Satiriques, ed. C. A. Mayer (London, 1962), p. 15 Google Scholar. Beza is quoted in Mayer, C.A., La Religion de Marot, Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, XXXIX (Geneva, 1960), 94 Google Scholar.

49 Calendar of Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, XVI, 234, no. 488. The passage is discussed by Mayer in Religion, pp. 93-94. Such comments make one doubt the accuracy of Lee's statement that Marot's religious difficulties ‘could but evoke sympathy in England’ (Renaissance, p. 113).

50 Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, v, 614, no. 1413.

51 The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford, 1912), 1, 349; Hall, p. 271.

52 This phrase forms the subtitle of William Damon's Psalmes of David in English meter (1579).

53 Spenser Society reprint no. 37 (1884), p. 8.

54 Quoted in Holland, J., Psalmists of Britain (London, 1843) 1 Google Scholar,257-258.1 have been unable to find the original.

55 This passage is quoted from the French edition published at Lyon in 1583; the first edition was in English, published at Paris in 1580. Hay was a professor at Tournon.

56 From a poem by the printer prefaced to the 1640 edition of A banquet of jests, or change qfcheare (1630), Sig. A5V. Actually one of the stories is about Scoggin. The comment on Skelton is from Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589), in Smith, II, 87.

57 In this regard English response to Marot is not wholly unlike that given to Montaigne; there are traces of the latter's influence on English thought and one sees him quoted for his'sentence’, but awareness of his particular experiments with style and selfrevelation is rarer. In France many critics vehemently objected to Montaigne's ‘peinture du moi’, but at least they noticed it. See Pierre Villey, Montaigne devant laposterite (Paris, 1935).