New Orientations in France (and England)

One of the first influential figures in French Renaissance poetry, Clément Marot (1496–1544), was a court poet, “valet de chambre” to Marguerite d'Alenç and close to the royal entourage. The “school” of his followers kept close to him as well as to Francis I's court, starting with Mellin de Saint-Gelais, king's “aumonier” and “garde de la librairie,” first French practicing Petrarchist, and critic of the Pléïade. In his Amye de court, an episode among many in the lively querelle des femmes, Bertrand de la Borderie, Marot's and Saint-Gelais's friend, contrasted the habits of court ladies with the noble love that was then to be located in the Platonic mysticism of a Bembo rather than in the earlier tradition of courtly love. It started a parrying of pros and cons, with Antoine Héroët (1492–1568) coming down on the side of pure love as supreme good (La parfaicte amye, 1532). Héroët was in the entourage of Marguerite de Navarre, who imbued her own Heptaméron with Pla-

tonic love according to the fashion of the day, in and outside the courts. It was a way to turn courtly love into a philosophical experience.

Although I have paid particular attention to literature that grew in and around the courts, the ideas that concern us had become ubiquitous. In Rabelais, Frère Jean's Utopian Abbey of Thélème welcomes guests who fit a courtierly description rather well. They must be “genslibères, bien néz, bien instruictz, conversans en compaignies honnestes,” conditioned by what had traditionally been regarded as the prerogative of the nobility: they were guided by instinctual dispositions to act nobly and honorably through ancestral example—“par nature un instinct et aguillon, qui tousjours les poulse à faitz vertueux et retirés de vice, lequel ilz nomment honneur” (1.57.159).^[26] Occasionally acting as the king's unofficial publicist, Rabelais was the protégé of such highly located personages as Jean and Guillaume du Bellay and Marguerite de Navarre. In the creation of his Pantagruel (1532) he respected the traditional plot structures of the heroes of such chansons de geste as Fierabras, Huon de Bordeaux, and Les quatre filz Aymon. It bears mentioning that Mikhail Bakhtin singled out the Thélème episode as a reflection of the utopian climate of the humanistic feast at court rather than the popular feast, since it owed more to the aristocratic spirit of the Renaissance than to that popular sense of utopia that nevertheless invests the bulk of Rabelais's masterpiece.^[27]

The impact of the Italian treatises on conduct was felt as far as England, from Thomas Elyot's The Boke named the Governour (1531) to Roger Ascham's The Scholemaster (1570) and on to John Milton's celebrated essay “Of Education” (1644), even while in Italy Castiglione's treatise ceased being reprinted in 1562.^[28] Each country had its popular manuals, one of the most successful being Baltasar Gracián's Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (Portable Oracle on the Art of Prudence, 1647), a collection of maxims that Norbert Elias labeled “the first handbook of courtly psychology.”^[29] It was also often reprinted in Nicolas Amelot de la Houssaie's French version L'homme de cour (Paris, 1684).

Hoby's successful translation of II Cortegiano as The Book of the Courtier (1561) provided the basis for the future ideal of the English “gentleman,” well-versed in both arms and letters, “tam Marti quam Mercurio,” and accustomed to disguise his knowledge with elegant sprezzatura (hence, e.g., the still current objection to “talking shop” in social conversation). Soon thereafter (1576) Robert Patterson Anglicized Della Casa's Galateo. The French term honnête-homme that re-

placed cortegiano at the time English was replacing “courtier” with “gentleman,” cortegiania with “civility,” and courtly with “courteous,” combined the implication of a superior élitist model with the traditional Ciceronian honestas that we have seen associated with the ideal of curialitas from the beginning.

The New Historicists have called attention to the nonliterary motives of some Elizabethan literature that grew around the court of Elizabeth I, just as in his masterful study of Petrarchism (The Icy Fire, 1969; 1978) Leonard Forster had pointed out how Queen Elizabeth could exploit the political and diplomatic dimensions of the cult of Petrarca. Since this rich field lies outside the geographic area of our investigation, I shall limit myself to some brief remarks on fundamental aspects that have recently attracted attention. It seems clear that until at least the 1580s court poetry under Elizabeth I was also a way to seek preferment by displaying “a rhetorical virtuosity specifically identifiable with the sophisticated manners of the courtly elite” (Javitch 1982: 225 f.). Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589) explicitly drew “affinities between poetic style and court conduct” (ibid.), while George Gascoigne (ca. 1539–1577) provided an outstanding example of a knight-poet who skillfully used the pen as well as the lance to promote his courtly ambitions. Both Puttenham and Gascoigne make clear reference to the art of dissimulation (“cunningly to be able to dissemble”) as a means of survival and advancement at court, in an interesting analogy with the literary use of allegoria (Puttenham's term).^[30] Puttenham also called allegory “the figure of faire semblant,” essential to the courtier because “in any matter of importance his wordes and his meaning very seldom meete.” He included the political extension by explicitly associating dissimulation with the art of government: “qui nescit dissimulare nescit regnare.”^[31] A variant was offered by Sir Philip Sidney, who advocated what Castiglione had styled sprezzatura as a sign of true art as well as true aristocratic breeding, concealing artifice in both poetry and conduct: see “so smooth an ease” in Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 74 verse 9. Sprezzatura thus set off the high courtier's social superiority as against the mannerisms of would-be courtiers who were unable to hide their (for Sidney, misplaced) ambitions in speech or deed. It was also the appropriate personal marker whereby the former could keep the latter in their place, as they well deserved.^[32]

The shift from the medieval knight's individualistic ethos—analogous to Castiglione's ideal of a self-sufficient courtier—toward a docile and diplomatically adroit servant of princes found a clear statement in the

preface to Jean du Peyrat's translation of the Galateo (1562). The very title stressed the generalizing bent of this reading (  . . . comme le gentilhomme se doit gouverner en toute compagnie ), and these generalized social manners were expressly yet contrastively tied to the habits of the knight: “the entire virtue and perfection of a gentleman  . . . does not consist [merely] in correctly spurring a horse, hauling a lance, sitting straight in one's armor  . . .,” including the correct ways of loving ladies, but also in serving kings and princes at the table, performing the chores of court, talking and gesturing appropriately, and so on. The knight had thus accomplished his transformation into a courtier to princes, but the standard had also extended to all who wanted to be gentlefolk. Courtierly and chivalric manners had been a social and cultural distinguishing trait, a sign of belonging to privileged groups, and of superior prerogatives when deployed toward inferiors. Now they amounted to pleasing the powerful, the new lords, to fit elegantly at their courts as embellishments of the palace, or to impose on the populace with a public show. The restraints and compulsions of good conduct were extended to the inferiors who must keep their place and not offend their squeamish superiors with coarse manners.^[33] In other words, the knight/courtier had become a model for both his social superiors and his inferiors.

The new courtly ideology was bound to provoke further reactions, both subtle and strong, either deviously masked or frontally direct. We have seen the willfully radical rejection by Guevara, whose oeuvre's deep reverberations in England favored his Marco Aurelio also as an exercise in style. A provocative case is that of Philibert de Vienne's Le philosophe de cour (Lyons, 1547; Paris, 1548), a perceptive, tongue-in-cheek satire of court behavior which, curiously yet not too surprisingly, seems to have been read in England (in George North's translation: London, 1575) as a normative manual.^[34]

Philibert was pointing to a chronic irreconcilability between court ethic and classical ethic, which he identified with the Socratic tradition. “Socrates forbids such masking and general disguising, because we should not appear to be others than we are; and we also allow the same . . . . But Socrates letteth us not, that having no desire to show ourselves contrary to that we would be esteemed, notwithstanding we dissemble, and accommodate ourselves to the imperfections of everyone.” The satirical garb of the presentation turns the problem around by pretending that Socrates was wrong and we are right, since this is the wise way to live in the real world. Indeed, overlooking the exempla-

riness of his execution as a martyr of straightforwardness, Philibert declares Socrates himself a master dissembler through the deceptive maieutical method of his philosophical pedagogy: “Himself doeth serve us for example, for although he was ever like unto himself, yet was he the greatest dissembler in the world” (North's trans.: 97 f.).^[35]

By a brilliant stroke of psychological observation, Philibert makes us face the paradoxical opposition between private and public morality by exposing the pragmatic coincidence of the theoretically incompatible criteria of being and seeming (the fundamental dilemma of classical ontology and metaphysics), hence sincerity and insincerity, knowing and pretending, meaning and dissimulating. Even the most formidable symbol of the knight's status and power, the sword, had become little more than an ornament, since it was used mostly for duels in matters of personal honor. Success rested no longer on bravery and military prowess, but on playing the courtly game gracefully and cleverly. Molière's Misanthrope would present the dilemma in the very midst of the most organized exercise in dissembling in western history, Louis XIV's court.^[36] Like Molière's Alceste, Philibert's gentleman is taught that “the virtue of man consisteth not in that which is only good of itself, following the opinion of Philosophy: but in that which seemeth to them good” (12). “In so doing he shall be accounted wise, win honor, and be free of reprehension everywhere: which Proteus knew very well, to whom his diverse Metamorphosis and oft transfiguration was very commodious” (101).

Philibert was familiar with the ethical background of his “new philosophy of court” and brought Cicero's De officiis into the argument: from the adoption of the virtues and attitudes of courtiers “proceedeth the decorum generale, general comelinesse, that Cicero speaketh so much of in his Offices” (15). The Philosophe de cour was divided according to Cicero's categories of cardinal virtues: Prudence, Justice, Magnanimity, and Temperance, culminating, however, in a broadly treated new category that carried no Ciceronian flavor but clearly a Castiglionesque one, to wit, Good Grace, to which all other virtues are subordinated.^[37] Thus the new courtly “vertue  . . . differeth from the Philosophy of the Auncientes, in that their vertue  . . . is to live according to the instinct of Nature; and ours is to lyve according to the manner of the Courte” (17). The ancients “would have us, without any hope of honour to embrace and follow vertue for the love of hir selfe,” whereas the new philosophy of court teaches us “to live vertuously to the ende to obtayne honour and reputation” (20).

The critical reading of Castiglione is clear in the mock eulogy of a man who has “some pretie sprinckled iudgement in the common places and practizes of all the liberall sciences, chopt up in hotchpot togither,” just for the sake of spicing social conversation “and no more,” and so that “with the more assured cunning to couche our credite, it shall not be amisse to interlace our discourses with certeine suddaine lyes and inventions of our owne forging.” Similarly for “the knowledge of fence, of vaulting, of tennis, of dauncing, and other sportes of exercise: and some understanding of the state and affayres of the Realme, as of warres, of practizes, of merchandize, and howe we maye honestly robbe, deceyve, and make our best profite” (30 f.). It was a program, one can see, of unashamed dilettantism for the sake of mere make-be-lieve. In the same chapter the treatment of Prudence bends the traditional norm of measure into counseling the avoidance of excess even in knowing too much of these arts or taking them too seriously. Dealing with Justice, the next chapter intimates “that it is tollerable to beguile, filch, and cogge, and do the worst we can, so that neither lawe, judge, nor iustice may touch or catch hold of us for it.”^[38] In other words, laws, private or public, are of no consequence as long as we manage to get away with mischief and succeed in our endeavor, that is to curry favor of the powerful and be esteemed by society. This is a sort of Machiavellian courtliness or, more precisely, an indictment of Machiavellianism if the text is, as appears inevitable from its very brashness, a Lucianic satirical encomium.^[39]

Such acute sensibility to deep moral questions reflects the climate of religious crisis that would lead France into the wars of religion, while the apparent unawareness of the true meaning of this text in Tudor England is due to the climate of compromise and acceptance of Elizabeth's glorious image as the Virgin Mother of a new nation at peace with itself.^[40] The Elizabethan acceptance of these moral games of court, however, must not blind us to the fact that it was precisely in England that the feudal spirit lived on and, indeed, prevailed against the temporary experiment in authoritarianism by imposing the constitutional parliamentary solution.^[41] Neither in England nor in France was the aristocracy yet facing the sort of neutralization that characterized the Italian nobility at court. Long ago J. H. Hexter authoritatively rectified the notion of a “monstrous nobility” turned “half court insect, half bucolic vegetable” by the Renaissance despots, but his corrections threw light on the contrast between the Italian situation and that of other lands where, as in France and England, the sons of the gentry were still eagerly

sent to school to be instructed in the arts of serving the commonwealth rather than the prince.^[42] Montaigne, for one, urged the nobleman to give his scion a tutor who “shall frame his charge's will to be a most loyal servitor of his prince, very well affected and courageous, but he will dampen in him any desire to attach himself to the court except out of a sense of public obligation.” The boy will thus retain that sense of liberty that is impossible in “a man waged and bought,  . . . a courtier who can have neither the right nor the will to speak or think otherwise than favorably of a master who has chosen to foster and raise him up from among so many other subjects. Such favor and usage dazzle a man's eyes and corrupt his freedom.”^[43] In a famous letter of advice on education of the nobility Queen Elizabeth's great councilor Francis Walsingham spoke repeatedly of the duty to serve the commonwealth, but not of serving the prince.^[44] Much as the feudal lords could withdraw their loyalty when their interests were not preserved, so was obedience to the prince reconsidered at the time of the revolt of the Netherlands, the French civil war, and the English Puritan revolution. But few courtiers were in such a position in Italy.

Prose novels of chivalry remained highly popular, and a principal source of revenue to French printers: about eighty adaptations of romances and chansons de geste (only three of them Carolingian) saw the light between 1478 and 1549 in France, some of them enjoying several printings. In the enthusiasm for things Italian that sparked the French Renaissance, even such a genuinely French genre made use of Italian ingredients, and courtly themes were also drawn from Italy, as in the Treize élégantes demandes d'amour (1523), a translation of the episode of the court of love in Boccaccio's Filocolo. I have mentioned Antonio Possevino's blanket indictment of the romance, on the basis of the Aristotelian criteria of unity and verisimilitude. His attack was in tune with the classicistic critics who felt uneasy with the Orlando Furioso. In France an early expression of such concerns combined with the new Catholic rigorism was the preface to the translation of L'histoire éthiopique d'Héliodore (1547) by the courtier and clergyman, later bishop, Jacques Amyot.^[45] By setting the norms for a Counter-Reformation literature that satisfied the classical prerequisites of unity and verisimilitude while being entertaining, that is, aesthetically pleasing, Amyot, followed by Bishop Jean-Pierre Camus and then Bishop Huet, started a new phase of clerical intervention in the education of court audiences and the setting of literary and humane standards. I have also noted (chap. 10, end of section on “Novels of Chivalry”) the dissenting voice

of the learned poet-theorist Jacques Peletier du Mans, coming in 1555 to the defense of interlaced narratives. Since neither an extended discussion of the epic or narrative genres nor the mention of interlacing or other ordering techniques appear as part of the poetic arts of the time, such as Thomas Sébillet's and Joachim Du Bellay's, it is tempting to hypothesize that Peletier's introduction of a defense of the romans and specifically of Ariosto's narrative mode may have been prompted by Amyot's critique of the romances.

Between Amyot's influential preface and Possevino's text the specific butt of the new moralistic condemnation was the fashionable tale of Amadis of Gaul, which had invaded France in the form of a Spanish imitation of an older French tale, and had also been Italianized by Bernardo Tasso (Torquato's father). The popularity of the Amadis was also due to a new element vis-à-vis the older chivalric matter: an erotic taste for voluptuous and sentimental love scenes. These elegant affairs of the heart, immediately frowned upon by concerned moralists, were to develop into the literature of galanterie which also had an impact in other countries. Amyot's Histoire, a version of Heliodorus's Theagenes and Chariclea, was an attempt to replace the fantastic tales of the medieval romances with the matter of Hellenistic and Byzantine novels that Amyot, in his humanistic orientation, considered closer to nature and truth. What the new models lacked, however, was the heroic mold of the tales of knights errant, so that the translators and elaborators of the huge Amadis cycle, though shaken by Amyot's censures, were not subdued to the point of giving up. The French versions had started with Nicholas Herberay des Essarts, who expanded the Spanish original by Garci Ordóñez Montalvo (four books in one volume, ca. 1508) into eight successive books (1540–1546). Further elaborations continued to appear, with book nine by Claude Colet (1553) and books ten, thirteen, and fourteen by Jacques Gohory (1555, 1571, 1575).^[46] The prefaces pointed out, apologetically, that the frivolity of the subject matter was offset by the need to cater to audiences that demanded light entertainment as well as an uplifting spectacle of heroic grandeur, fit for noble warriors.

While in Italy Torquato Tasso bypassed the new objections by offering a serious poem on crusading Christian chivalry, in France the whole group of the Pléïade poets came to the aid of the continuing translators of the Amadis. Jacques Gohory prefaced his translation of book 13 (Paris, 1571) with a reminder that Francis I had rightly appreciated the very similar Girone il Cortese by the Italian poet Luigi Alamanni: the

beautiful veil of poetic lies hid “good moral instruction for the nobility.” It did so “by exalting virtuous deeds and condemning vicious ones, always recommending the adoration and reverence of God and the defence of good justice, principally of pitiful persons, such as maidens, widows, and orphans.”^[47] We do know how traditional these arguments were. As to the open-ended, multiple narrative plots, they had advantages over the greater tightness of the Hellenistic models: Ariosto had proved how delightful and instructive such techniques could be to the reader.

We cannot engage here in a detailed examination of the complex question of Cervantes's attitudes toward chivalry and the chivalric novel or romance, but when all is said and done concerning that rich and puzzling masterpiece, it is relevant to bear in mind that Don Quixote (first part 1605) was “still, for the general public of the period, one of the manifestations of the Catholic Reformation applied to literature.”^[48] As to the general perception of the courtier's role, such symptomatic observations as those by Philibert of Vienne show how the courtier's dignity vis-à-vis a potentially tyrannical prince could be preserved only by remaining true, in the new surroundings, to the time-honored aristocratic view of reciprocal obligations between sovereign and feudal lords. This “resistance” that Castiglione had so subtly and poignantly represented won out only in post-Tudor England. The courtier who started to seem clearly hypocritical was the one who had given in to absolutism.