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- Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
The sonnet sequence Les Amours de Cassandre, first published in 1552, established Pierre de Ronsard as the outstanding French poet of his time. He was mentioned approvingly by Montaigne, admired throughout Europe, and fêted by the French Crown and foreign monarchs such as Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I. Based to some degree on a real relationship with an identifiable woman, Cassandra Salviati, the sequence combines the passionate narrative of the poet's love for an unattainable beauty with explorations of classical myth, the work of literary forebears such as Homer, Ovid and Petrarch, and questions about the very nature of love, literary creation, human existence and the forces that drive the universe. It is also deeply grounded in the natural landscapes of Ronsard's native Vendôme. Clive Lawrence's translation, the first complete translation of the sequence into English, captures the range and freshness of the writer known in his lifetime as Poet of Princes, Prince of Poets'.
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FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.
FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still. Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill, Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side
from ‘Thyrsis’
PIERRE DE RONSARD
Cassandra
Translated and edited with an introduction by
CLIVE LAWRENCE
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
A Renaissance Project
When in 1552 Pierre de Ronsard published Les Amours de Cassandre, a sonnet sequence rooted in the Petrarchan tradition, his first readers might have expressed some surprise. He had begun his public career as a poet at the age of 26 only two years earlier, with the publication of four books of Odes openly designed to break with the recent past of French poetry. Quite apart from their intrinsic value as poems, these Odes were examples set by Ronsard to champion the domestication into French of classical models such as the Odes of Pindar and Horace, in preference to following poets of the previous century such as Villon and Charles d’Orléans in the use of medieval forms such as ‘rondeaux, ballades, virelais’, which Ronsard and associates such as Joachim Du Bellay saw as signs of corruption in the language and of ignorance in the literary culture.
The success of these Odes with an influential and elite readership established Ronsard at the head of a classicising avant-garde of young poets who shared a humanist education and a certain contempt for their poetic predecessors such as Clément Marot and Mellin de Saint-Gelais. This new wave of poets, who called themselves ‘La Brigade’, and whom (following Saint-Beuve) we now often refer to as ‘La Pléiade’, saw these fashionable authors as the writers of a facile, merely decorative court verse who failed to treat French poetry with the high seriousness and dignity it deserved and demanded.
In his polemical preface to the Odes, a provocative piece of literary coat-trailing, Ronsard proclaimed Pindar as his model, and aimed a passing shot at the courtiers ‘who admire nothing save a little Petrarchised sonnet’, perhaps as a form of retaliation in advance for the neglect such learned and ‘difficult’ poetry could expect in court circles. He was careful however to include formal compliments to influential contemporaries and immediate predecessors such as Marot, Scève and Saint-Gelais, exempting them from the general censure and showing (however much his tongue may have been in his cheek amid some otherwise inflammatory language) some mastery of literary politics. The objective of the Odes and the poetry they advocated and exemplified was nonetheless clear: to take French poetry out of what La Brigade considered its decorative time-warp of trivial compliment and courtly flattery and to instil into it the epic scope and ambition of the Ancients.
As a result, when Les Amours de Cassandre was published alongside the fifth and final book of Ronsard’s Odes, the apparent transfer of allegiance it implied, from Pindar to Petrarch, the classical to the medieval, the humanist intellectuals to the butterflies of the court, might have raised a few eyebrows.
Yet Les Amours de Cassandre was far more than just a new flavour introduced into Ronsard’s evolving poetic career. It was a project that would help to define him as a poet, and go far beyond the coterie success of the Odes in establishing his status as one of the greatest poets of the European Renaissance. It is in many ways an archetypal Renaissance project, a synthesis of the best of the available traditions that combined the spirituality and inwardness of the Petrarchan tradition with the sensuality and mythological grandeur of the classical and Neo-Latin poets. Ronsard and his ‘Lady’, Cassandre, as the protagonists of the work, are depicted as intensely alive, and (for all their participation in the familiar configurations of the Petrarchan tradition) as individual people, lovers acting as physical, emotional and intellectual beings in a natural world governed by the material processes of change, movement and time that they themselves share and exhibit.
To the template of the Petrarchan sonnet sequence, recurring themes from classical mythology (and in particular Ovid’s theme of metamorphosis) add a flesh-and-blood sensuality and a sense of the numinous intervention, through nature, of the divine in this world; and Neo-Platonism overlays a philosophical, spiritualised intellectual scheme that imports elements of Christian mysticism and exalted ideas of poetic inspiration. The result is an enriching fusion whereby the lovers transcend the intimacy of their relations to become epic figures, sharing a mythical register and by metamorphosis partaking of the processes of the material world, while at the same time struggling with, fulfilling or failing their spiritual destinies both as individuals and as a couple.
The status of this work in Ronsard’s vast oeuvre can be seen by the arrangement of the many editions of his Collected Poems he supervised from 1560 to 1584, the year before his death. Rather than adopt a chronological plan, Ronsard came to group his poems by form: sonnet sequences, hymns, odes, occasional poems and so forth. Reworkings and re-orderings constantly took place as the oeuvre evolved as a whole, but, while not immune to such alterations itself, Les Amours de Cassandre, whether entitled simply as the First Book of Les Amours or by reference to Cassandre, always retained its integrity as a distinct work at the head of the sequences of love sonnets, and took pride of place at the beginning of Ronsard’s final edition of his works in 1584.
Ronsard would go on to be the great serial monogamist of the sonnet sequence – future sonnets and sonnet sequences would be written to Marie, Astrée, Hélène, and others. This later apparent contradiction of his professions of undying love to Cassandre was accompanied by his statements of frank disbelief that the great exemplar of the love sonneteers, Petrarch, never slept with his beloved, Laura – if he was not getting sex then he should have moved on, as Ronsard himself did after Cassandre. The later sonnet sequences develop Ronsard’s art yet further, and approach both the relationship with the beloved they depict and the nature of love poetry itself in different ways. In its own terms, the Amours de Cassandre remains unique in Ronsard’s work: it is not simply the first attempt in a genre further perfected in his later career. Ronsard, as inveterate a tinkerer with his published poetry as later poets such as Yeats and Auden, would continue to alter and reform it throughout his career as an autonomous and self-contained collection, and to retain the qualities that differentiate it from its successor sequences. The present translation is of the final and conclusive version of the sequence assembled from 1578 and published in the final collected works of 1584, representing Ronsard’s last thoughts after half a lifetime of additions and revisions.
In some ways, Ronsard’s early life and training, and the radical change of direction circumstances forced upon him in his youth, were the perfect preparation for a poet who would fuse such disparate elements as those that make up Les Amours de Cassandre. To understand the sources of the work, the contexts that gave rise to it and the poet who wrote it, some background from Ronsard’s early life, and an outline of the story behind Ronsard’s contacts with the woman conjectured to be the real, historical Cassandre, may be useful.
Ronsard’s Early Life
Ronsard was born on 2nd September 1524 at his family’s estate, La Possonnière, in the Loire valley between Château de Loire and Vendôme. His family were landowners and courtiers who owed their increased prominence and wealth in the two generations preceding Pierre’s birth to close links to the French Crown. Ronsard’s father, Loys (commonly modernised to Louis), was a man of broad culture and himself a keen amateur poet. In the decade prior to Pierre’s birth Louis had rebuilt La Possonnière on the model of the Renaissance buildings he had seen while on military service in Italy. Pierre was the youngest of four children and the third son.
Shortly after Pierre was born the French King François I was captured by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Battle of Pavia. To secure his own release, he was forced to enter into the Treaty of Madrid, one of the results of which was the offer of his two eldest sons, François and Henri, as hostages in his place. It is a mark of the respect in which Louis de Ronsard was held by the French Crown that he was selected to accompany the two young princes into their captivity to Spain, where he and they would ultimately spend more than four years from 1526. The main paternal influence in Pierre’s earliest years while Louis was away seems to have been his uncle, Jean, a churchman and humanist who on his death, tellingly, left his nephew his library. Louis, on his return, sought to give to his youngest son the modern education he had seen given to the princes in Spain. At the age of nine, Pierre, in whom his father had detected signs of great intellectual ability, was sent to the College of Navarre. There the intention would doubtless have been that he would not only receive an academic education, but also grow up in the company of many sons of the great families of France who would form an extended network of contacts at the highest levels throughout the rest of his life. However, this scheme does not seem immediately to have borne fruit. Ronsard soon left the College.
Notwithstanding that false start, Louis’s plans are not difficult to decipher. Given his position as a youngest son, Pierre’s future would be one through which he would have to make his own path. He was therefore to be educated to the life of the courtier in the manner fitting the Renaissance court of the brilliant François I: to combine learning and the cultivation of the arts with the military tradition inherited from the feudal past. Pierre appears to have been admirably suited to the life. By 1536 he was beginning the career of a courtier, for which the training was provided by the Ecurie du Roi, which should be considered as Ronsard’s next educational establishment, the place where he could be immersed in the milieu in which it was intended he would spend his adult life. He began as a page first to the Dauphin, François, then to his brother Charles, and then to their sister, Madeleine. This final transfer of his services coincided with the arrangements for a marriage between Madeleine and James V of Scotland, and would bring Ronsard in the following year in her entourage to Scotland.
The marriage was important diplomatically, but Madeleine’s health was too weak from tuberculosis for there to be any great optimism concerning her long-term survival in the harsher climate of Scotland. ‘The Summer Queen of Forty Days’, she died in Edinburgh on 7th July 1537. Thereafter, while James V pursued negotiations for another marriage with the royal house of France (which would culminate in his marrying Mary of Guise, the future Regent and mother of Mary Queen of Scots), Ronsard and his fellow French courtiers kicked their heels in Scotland. For a British reader, it is an intriguing time in the poet’s life, about which not enough is known. He and the French contingent seem to have spent the next year, until their departure under safe passage through England in July 1538, at St Andrews: what he did during a year of enforced idleness is open to conjecture, but he had already shown an aptitude and taste for literature, and the presence of the university there makes it unlikely that this was a time wholly wasted.
On his return to France Ronsard rejoined the entourage of Charles, Duc d’Orléans, the favourite son of François I. The next couple of years saw him involved in a minor, but growing, diplomatic role in the factional struggles of the French court and the wider European rivalries between François I, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Henry VIII of England. He was clearly considered a promising diplomat, and seemed set fair to pursue the all-round ideals of the Renaissance, as intellectual, soldier, amateur versifier and athlete: he easily held his own in the competitive machismo of the military and equestrian exploits of the court, and even much later in his life his skill as a footballer helped on occasions to keep him in high favour with the French Crown.
Illness and Change of Direction
In 1541, however, everything changed. While still in his teens Ronsard suffered a serious illness. What exactly it was we do not know. The biographer’s favourite stand-by for any illness that does not yield to immediate modern diagnosis, syphilis, has been mentioned as a candidate, picking up on some contemporary libels. Some form of rheumatic fever has also been suggested. Whatever this illness was, however, it is clear that this was a major, life-changing setback that affected Ronsard’s health and constitution for the rest of his days. It impaired his hearing and was said to have made him unsuitable for diplomatic life. The extent to which that holds water is perhaps debatable: he was left ‘hard of hearing’ rather than entirely deaf, and while it was said at the time that this made him unable to do a job that consisted largely in the picking up of backstairs whispers, there may have been other, political factors connected with factional in-fighting at the French court that helped to account for the radical change of direction Ronsard next took.
After a lengthy convalescence, Ronsard appears to have agreed a new life strategy with his father. The relationship between Louis and Pierre seems to have been a good one, between a father fond of his gifted youngest child and a precocious son slightly in awe of a figure who had remained somewhat distant, for all his affection. There was no need on either side for the revolt and oppression of the Romantic poet’s biography. Both seemed to have a healthy dose of pragmatism: and consequently, on 6th March 1543 Ronsard received the tonsure from the Bishop of Le Mans in his father’s presence.
This new status as a tonsured cleric, the lowest rung of Holy Orders, needs to be seen in context. It was not a calling to the Church in the way we might understand that now. To be tonsured was to be admitted into an estate in life where Church benefices became available to you. The vows you took could be renounced, particularly useful in the case of a younger son who might be called upon for one reason or another to supply a family with heirs.
Ronsard had taken an alternative path to the patronage he would seek as a poet, by opening up the possibility of receiving the livings the Church afforded to those who, nominally or in substance, became the effective directors of Church institutions by taking on the roles of abbots, priors and the like. Now, looking to exploit the intellectual and literary gifts he had not so far developed to the full, he was sent to Paris to receive the most rigorous of humanist educations with Lazare de Baïf and Jean Dorat in a kind of informal university based at Les Tournelles. He had accompanied Baïf on a diplomatic mission in 1540 and might have identified himself as promising in the eyes of the great scholar then. Now it was time for Ronsard to receive the comprehensive grounding in Latin, Greek, literature and philosophy he had so far lacked in his acquisition of the fashionable smatterings regarded as preparation for the life of a courtier. He started a long way behind his often much younger classmates, and was often helped out by the far more advanced Jean-Antoine de Baïf, natural son of Lazare and some eight or nine years his junior. That Ronsard caught up so much so quickly is a tribute as much to the intensive nature of the education he received as to his ability to assimilate it.
However, the time with Baïf and Dorat gave him much more than a good knowledge of Latin and Greek. Through them and their connections Ronsard became part of a network of similarly educated young men – Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Joachim Du Bellay, Remy Belleau, Pontus de Tyard, Marc-Antoine de Muret – who would form the nucleus of La Brigade or the Pléiade, the new ‘movement’ in French poetry he would lead throughout his career. Other contacts made at the same time, including the future Protestant reformer Theodore du Bèze, would crop up on numerous occasions in his later life. It was a network of intellectuals to rival and complement the network of rising court officials and aristocrats he had inherited from his family and then developed in his education for, and short experience of, life as a courtier.
Ronsard’s way was now further committed by the death in 1545 of his protector and patron in court circles, Charles, the Duc d’Orléans. While that by no means made him an unwelcome stranger to the court, it helped to determine the capacity in which he would appear there: it was now more or less settled for him that literature and the Church would be his future and represent his principal claims to preferment. The disabilities left to him by his illness could be accommodated and worked around, and the disadvantages of the youngest son without expectations of property, or any realistic prospect of royal employment, could be offset by literary talent and the skills his disparate experiences in youth had given him.
Brought up amongst the children of the great aristocrats in a military and courtly milieu; accustomed to and at home with the manners, interests and politics of a Renaissance court, having excelled in its strenuous pastimes and been blooded in its manoeuvrings; educated then amongst the leading humanists of his day; a man of flesh and blood, one who had suffered the disadvantages of the younger son, debilitating illness and disappointed ambitions, while at the same time having been in some sense liberated by those circumstances into being able to pursue literature: Ronsard was ready to begin his literary career.
Cassandra Salviati
The Lady of these sonnets, Cassandre, has long been identified as a real, historical woman, Cassandra Salviati. The extent to which she is really the Cassandre of the Amours de Cassandre remains controversial. Against such an identification is the paucity of contemporary comment about it, and some suggestive counter-evidence in the poetry. Prior to the Amours de Cassandre Ronsard had written poems to a Cassandre who did not seem to share the characteristics of the Cassandre of the sonnets, being apparently an altogether easier-going object of affection than the Petrarchan ideal depicted in the Amours. The Cassandre of the Amours also seems at times to share the physical characteristics and the actions of more than one woman – for instance, the general depiction of her is of a blonde woman with brown eyes, but there are other references that raise questions even over such general details. Certain sonnets seem to be written about or to another woman and in or about a different relationship altogether. It may be, therefore, that even where real-life circumstances are used directly in the poems, those are attributed to ‘Cassandre’ as a generic name for the loved woman. Indeed, it was said by some of his contemporaries, including his first biographer Binet (who knew him personally towards the end of his life) that he fell in love more with the name ‘Cassandre’, full of tragic and epic connotations, than with the woman. The resonance of that name and all it brought with it certainly forms a major element of the poems, and its adoption may result more from conscious choice than convenient accident.
Together, these factors lead to the suggestion by some critics that ‘Cassandre’ is a fiction lent a potent name from a woman met in passing, and that what Ronsard needed for Les Amours de Cassandre was not a real-life love affair to record so much as a locus upon which the various literary conventions he would use and subvert could concentre. ‘Cassandre’ is Cassandra Salviati in the same way that ‘Stella’ is Penelope Rich in Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, for instance.
Set against that there is a persistent interest in the real-world transactions that are or may be traceable between Ronsard and Cassandra Salviati. She was the daughter of an Italian banker who had made his home in France, the master of the Château de Talcy which sits not far from Ronsard’s home in the surroundings of the Loire Valley. (Ronsard’s ‘home’ river, as he makes clear, was the Loir, a different river from the Loire – see sonnet CCVII). Ronsard met her when he was twenty and she was fifteen, in 1545 at a ball at Blois (see sonnet XVIII). On this version of events, aided by Ronsard’s references in the sonnets to the duration of his love and the particulars he gives of their first meeting (such as in sonnet CXV), his love or attraction for her can be dated back to this first sight. At least, even if only for the name, Cassandra Salviati seems to have stuck in his mind. Ronsard would hardly be the last to parlay a momentary attraction to a woman into a relationship played out only in the theatre of the imagination: but we have to remain open to the possibility that there could have been more to it than that.
At this point in his life Ronsard was young and comparatively obscure, certainly not yet the famous poet. His family was good, but he was a third son, a tonsured cleric, something even of a perpetual student, and had suffered from ill health. Even if there was a genuine attachment between them, the idea that there could be any suggestion of official courtship or marriage between M. de Ronsard and Mlle de Talcy would have been ridiculous. In November 1546 Cassandra married one Jean III de Peigné, a local aristocrat with land to offer. Their direct descendants would include another French poet of note, Alfred de Musset.
Cassandra and her husband lived at his estate at Pray not far from Ronsard’s family home of La Possonnière and shared some of the same social circles with the Ronsard family: there is evidence that there was some form of ongoing contact between her and Ronsard, probably including a visit by her and her husband to La Possonnière at the time the sonnets were being written. The highly anecdotal nature of some of the sonnets may be evidence that they contain stylisations of actual events. The very specific location of certain of the sonnets in place and time and contemporary references to events of 1552 may add some further justification to such a reading. There are also suggestions that there could have been further contact between Ronsard and Cassandra in later life around 1569, and possibly even later thereafter.
Where the truth ultimately lies can only be conjectured, and the side on which critics come down seems to be dictated in many instances less by the evidence within the poems or extraneous to them than by that critic’s attitude to biographical criticism and the sources of poetic inspiration. The modern fashion is to disclaim the direct autobiographical meaning of works such as Les Amours de Cassandre, just as the Victorians and their successors loved to extrapolate them into romanticised novellas in which asexual ciphers would romp through the fantasies of celibate scholars. If called upon to throw in my own view, for what it may be worth, I would suggest that the facts probably lie somewhere in the middle: there may have been a number of meetings, events, exchanges between Ronsard and Cassandra Salviati, and some of what appears in these poems, be it physical description or narrative, may have some ultimate basis in reality. There may have been an element of sexual attraction between Ronsard and Cassandra: some of it may even have been mutual. There may have been a romantic or flirtatious friendship. That there was no true sexual relationship is made clear by Ronsard. But the Cassandre of the poems is a fully fictional figure in a work of conscious artifice and artistry, an idealised projection, albeit possibly from some hints in reality, just as the landscape behind her is mythologised beyond the mere topography of the Vendôme region. Like Petrarch’s Laura, she is more a manifestation of the ‘Eternal Feminine’ as conceived by Ronsard than the girlfriend he couldn’t keep.
That is where the question of the real-life relationship between the two has to rest, in the absence of further evidence, and in the full realisation that any writer of Ronsard’s sophistication was more than capable of playing whatever games with truth and interpretation he chose in laying paths and pitfalls in his work. The relationship between the two in the poems, however, is what matters four hundred and sixty-odd years on, and is very much open to exploration.
In any event, the extent to which Les Amours de Cassandre has genuine roots in autobiography, though interesting, is in the final analysis relatively unimportant. What can be said, however, is that, whatever variant of initial attraction and continuing emotional attachment on Ronsard’s part existed, when allied to the clear practical impossibility of the relationship going any further, it led to a perfect poetic opportunity. In Les Amours de Cassandre Ronsard selects and uses the elements before him to unify his poetic interests in the evolution of a transcendent fiction. That he is entirely aware of doing so is constantly evident: the Renaissance poets have plenty left to teach the postmodernists in terms of ludic self-awareness.
It is a trite observation to make that in the act of writing writers express themselves to some extent, while to another they discover and create themselves in the act of expression: every writer’s characteristic approach falls, and every literary work derives its origin, somewhere on the graph between those two apparent extremes. Ronsard appears to be one of those writers whose emotional intensity and the intensity he is capable of expressing are one and the same thing: his ability to create and his ability to feel are directly related, and it is purely simplistic psychology to suggest that the traffic from emotion to expression only travels in one direction. It goes both ways: in fact, it creates a circle. Put in its bluntest form: if Ronsard was not in love with this girl helpfully named after a Greek mythological heroine before he started work, he could write himself into whatever state he needed to occupy for the poetry he wanted to write.
Later Life
Ronsard’s status as the leading French poet of his time was acquired early and never seriously challenged in the French court circles where he established his base. ‘Prince of Poets, Poet of Princes’ was an epithet applied to him in his own lifetime, and reflects how close he remained to the French Crown through the entirety of his career, through all the evolutions and changes of a turbulent time. He wrote ‘official’ verses, although with a reservation of individualism, an irony, and an occasional eloquent silence, that speak to his independence of spirit, and he acquired and swapped benefices to build substantial possessions in and around his beloved Vendôme. One of these, the Priory of Saint-Cosme near Tours, where he died and was buried in 1585, still exists and can be visited. While it was a life of relentless activity, controversy and literary production, one constantly immersed in a fractured and tormented time, there are few of the usual biographical landmarks to record.
The history of France throughout Ronsard’s adult life was dominated by the Wars of Religion, as Protestants and Catholics fought through France war after war, with such atrocities as the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre as testimony to the murderous intensity of the hatreds that were unleashed. Ronsard, as a Catholic cleric and royal poet, could not remain isolated from the controversies and accompanying pamphlet wars of the time. His initial attempt at statesmanlike moderation somewhat crumbled in the face of the vicious personal attacks he suffered at the hands of Protestant propagandists, and, in perhaps their most provocative move, their persistent suggestion that, in Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, the Protestant faction had a poet greater than Ronsard. The interventions made by Ronsard into the pamphlet and propaganda wars of the time, such as Discours des Misères de Ce Temps, provide yet another dimension to a poetic career that explored a multitude of forms and registers, from a semi-abortive epic, La Franciade, via odes, hymns, elegies and eclogues to public poetry in the form of occasional poems, discourses and epitaphs.
The final collected works, collected and collated with immense care by Ronsard throughout his career, mark him as one of the great Renaissance writers and one of the leading poets in French literature, vastly admired in his own time, and, although eclipsed and largely disregarded during the lengthy ‘classical’ phase of French literature, rediscovered and relaunched by critics of the nineteenth century such as Saint-Beuve. He was admired by even so fastidious a reader as Flaubert, who declared him in his correspondence to be greater than Virgil and the equal of Goethe. In modern times his reputation is secure, with numerous editions of his poetry available and a vast scholarly literature. He has been referred to as one of the ‘big three’ of French sixteenth-century literature, alongside Rabelais, whom he appears to have known and on whom he wrote a vigorous epitaph, and Montaigne, who refers to him with admiration.
The Strategies of Les Amours de Cassandre
As seen above, Ronsard’s preface to the Odes of 1550 had scorned the prevailing Petrarchan style adopted by the courtier poets of his time and joined Du Bellay’s influential ‘manifesto’ for the Pléiade poets, Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française, in its rejection of the medieval forms. In fact, it is probable that Ronsard collaborated on the Défence with Du Bellay. The analogy with Wordsworth and Coleridge working on the Preface to Lyrical Ballads is highly inexact but irresistible. In this document, the author or authors are clearly picking a fight: it is deliberately provocative. Its main objectives are to advocate the fitness of French as a literary language against those who felt that, as a mere vernacular, it could never rival Latin or Greek in its range of expression, and to exhort those who wrote in French to help build it into a language capable of acting as a medium for great literature. This would be achieved by following the example of great classical authors, while rejecting the trivial and corrupt poetry of the court with its reliance on nostalgic forms and subjects. The rudeness here and in Ronsard’s preface towards the court as a literary centre is striking: maybe Ronsard in particular was keen to vindicate his new path against that from which circumstances had excluded him. But that is simply speculation.
The Odes themselves marked a new departure in French poetry, with Ronsard marking himself out as the leader of an avant-garde, classicising group, in the tradition of, and claiming authority from, epic poets such as Homer, Virgil and Ovid, and lyric poets such as Pindar and Horace. Rejecting the option taken by many humanist poets of writing in Latin, Ronsard had taken on instead the project advocated in the Défence of domesticating into French vernacular poetry the best his classical models had to teach, to give French poetry a corresponding reach and dignity.
So why then in 1552 did the leading poet of this new classical school apparently perform a volte-face and write a sonnet sequence that not only clearly shows an extensive knowledge of Petrarch but manifestly is designed as a work in that tradition? Had Ronsard gone over to the enemy? Had he deserted the humanist intellectuals and joined the court faction to advance his temporal interests? Was Ronsard playing to the court here, to win back friends and potential benefactors he may have alienated with his difficult and mythologically dense Odes, or, perhaps more dangerously, with the corrosive sarcasm of his preface? Was this just politics and patronage?
The first point to make here is that the apparent opposition between the factions is easy to oversimplify and overstate. For all Ronsard’s contempt for the French Petrarchan poets of his day, that contempt did not extend to Petrarch’s work itself. The Défence had clearly held out Petrarch’s work as being another fruitful model for the new French poetry, and as a poet Du Bellay himself anticipated Ronsard with his own sonnet sequence, L’Olive, published alongside the Défence in 1549. There was not a simple binary opposition between the classicisers and the Petrarchans, but a subtler and more nuanced difference of opinion and approach relating to many issues, amongst them the manner in which Petrarch’s influence should be assimilated into French.
Nonetheless, by assimilating and appropriating Petrarch in his own way, Ronsard pulled off a bold flanking manoeuvre in the literary politics of the day. It could also be seen as a skilful move in the court politics of the time to which Ronsard would owe most of his future hopes of patronage: it enabled him to nuance his previously hostile stance towards the court and its Petrarchan literary fashions, to join in rather than remain out in the cold, while at the same time consolidating his position at the head of the avant-garde. It allowed him also to mend fences with influential court poets such as Mellin de Saint-Gelais, whose influence could otherwise have stood in the way of his career.
The result was a considerable success for Ronsard, cementing his position as the leading poet of his day and eclipsing the elders his lip-service had helped to disarm. In 1553, a new edition of Les Amours de Cassandre, including new additions to and re-orderings of the sonnets, was issued, accompanied now by a commentary by Ronsard’s friend Marc-Antoine de Muret. While the purpose of this commentary was doubtless principally to guide readers through the mythological thickets of learned allusions, it was also an opportunity to flaunt the erudition of the poetry, to give the allure of difficulty at the same time as seeking to dispel its reality. One is reminded of the annotations to their works by modern poets such as Eliot, Empson and Bunting, which often have the effect less of explication than of increasing the poetry’s suggestive range. Like the poems it accompanied, the commentary continued to evolve over time, even at times when Muret could not feasibly have been involved, and it has been conjectured that Ronsard himself began to use this ventriloquial method to shape the perception of the poems as new editions were issued.
The Poetry of Les Amours de Cassandre
In purely formal terms, Les Amours de Cassandre is a sonnet sequence, with a few interpolated songs and lyrics and, at the conclusion, several extended ‘Elegies’ in a markedly more relaxed and sometimes ironic register. The 229 sonnets are dense with allusions to, quotations from and translations of not only Petrarch, whose manner, style and subject matter dominate the sequence, but also other Italian lyric poets such as Ariosto and Bembo, Latin poets such as Catullus, Horace and Ovid, Neo-Latin poets such as Marullus, and many more.
