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Monday, December 08, 2025

A Little Birdie Tells Me: Shakespeare Read Du Bartas in the Original French.

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Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “A Little Birdie Tells Me: Shakespeare Read Du Bartas in the Original French.” Virtual Grub Street,  https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2025/12/a-little-birdie-tells-me-shakespeare.html [state date accessed].


We have discovered that Shakespeare's description of Adonis's charger, in the poem Venus and Adonis, was almost certainly drawn from the collective wisdom of the horsemen of the 15th and 16th centuries rather than any particular text. That nothing, in particular, in his works can be shown to have been influenced by Joshua Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas Semaines, as was claimed by many traditional scholars in the early 20th century.

John of Gaunt's speech, in the play Richard the Second, however, was clearly influenced by a swatch from Du Bartas that appeared in a satirical French grammar, called Ortho-epia (1593), written under the name of John Eliot. (With maybe a smidgen of Sylvester.) So then, Shakespeare knew of the then famous poem by Du Bartas and his work was at least indirectly influenced by it.

Eliot, it bears mentioning, has no surviving biography. A student of that very common name is discovered to have matriculated to Oxford in 1580. This is the sole evidence by which he is said to have attended university. It is estimated that, if he had enrolled at 18 years of age, he must have been born in 1562, and, as a result, this is given as his birth date in encyclopedia entries.

The rest of his biography has been created for him out of his own works all of which were translations from the French published between 1591 and 1593. Not a trace of him remains after 1593 which encyclopedia entries offer for the date of his demise. Robert Greene mentions him, in his book Pierce's Supererogation, published that same year, but not by name.

Over the past 150 years or so, a very strange fact has been established about Eliot. For some seemingly inexplicable reason, Shakespeare incorporated in his plays more than a little bit from Eliot's translations.

I have already had the pleasure of revealing the man behind the name. There is much more to come on the subject. But now is not the time.

What all of this doesn't answer is: “Did Shakespeare read Du Bartas in the original French?” Could he read literary French?

A reader might be confident that Du Bartas's

Le Monde est un theatre, où de Dieu la puissance,

La justice, l'Amour, le Savoir la Prudence,

Jouet leurs personnages1

is the model for a famous image from the play As You Like It:

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

But there would have been an available crib for Shakespeare, if he needed it, in the translation by Sylvester (notwithstanding the fact that neither Du Bartas's original nor Sylvester's translation did the Ronsard justice). Shakespeare could have been referencing Sylvester, not Du Bartas.

The world's a stage where God's omnipotence ,

His justice, knowledge, love, and providence

Do act the parts.2

But Shakespeare didn't need Sylvester, because both he and Du Bartas were referencing the french poet Pierre Ronsard:

Le Monde est le theatre, et les hommes acteurs;
La Fortune, qui est maistresse de la Sceine,
Appreste les habits, et de la vie humaine
Les Cieux et les Destins en sont les spectateurs.3

[The world is the stage, and men the actors;
Fortune, who is mistress of the play,
Prepares the costumes, and the human lives
The Heavens and the Destinies look down upon.]

The passage in Ronsard is a much more exact match for As You Like It. In fact, the passage in the play qualifies as translation.

As it turns out, a little birdie tells us the answer to our question. In Shakespeare's Winters Tale, “The Larke, that tirra-Lyra chaunts,”4 sings the identical song that it sings in the fifth day of Du Bartas La Semaine, in which the lark (alouette) and the nightingale (rossignol) are compared:

La gentille Alouete avec son tire-lire

Tire l'ire à l'iré tirelirant tire

Vers la voute du ciel: puis son vol vers ce lieu

Vire, & desire dire adieu Dieu, adieu Dieu.5

[The gentle Lark with her tire-lire
Tire l'ire à l'iré tirelirant draws
Towards the vault of the heavens: then turns her flight toward
The place, & her way to say to god God, to god God.]

Eliot chose “Tee-ree-lee-ree”; Sylvester “Heer peer-l neer”. Shakespeare's onomatopoeia exactly matches Du Bartas's: “ tirra-Lyra”.

But Eliot's Ortho-epia is bi-lingual. With a bit of mental dexterity Shakespeare could pick out Du Bartas's lark song regardless that Eliot had modified it in the English translation.

But Du Bartas had made a mistake. He didn't know his birds as well as he thought. In the extended passage, the nightingales sang at daybreak (point du jour). Around 1587 he corrected his mistake, in a translation of his own, of the Scottish King James VI's poem Lepanto, and the translation was published in 1591.

In it, the lark finds its way into the conversation somehow. Its song a break in the midst of cruel war. The nightingale is nowhere to be found. Perhaps because he prefers privacy. The lark is the harbinger of the new day.

Aussi tost que l'aurore

Peinte d'or, de safran, de vermeillon encore

A banni la nuict ſombre, & qu'en tire-lirant

L'Alouëtte a donné d'un bec doux-souspirant

Un gai bon jour au jour,...6

[ As soon as the dawn
Painting with gold, saffron, and vermilion again
Banishes somber night, with tire-lirant,
The Lark, gives from a sweet-sighing beak,
A gay good day to the day,...]

Among the results, the following exchange between Romeo and Juliet about the lark and the nightingale:

    Juliet. Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:
    It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
    That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;
    Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:
    Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

Romeo. It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east:7
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day8
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.

Still, Romeo cannot choose to leave if Juliet wishes it to be the nightingale and not yet day:

Romeo. Nor that is not the lark, whose notes do beat
The vaulty heaven9 so high above our heads:

Juliet recalls that Lark's song is said to sweetly divide day from night:

Juliet. Some say the lark makes sweet division.10  

But now the song is not sweet for it divides she and Romeo.

Actually, this is only the beginning of the images Shakespeare borrowed from Du Bartas in the original French. But it will have to do for the present.


1Du Bartas. La Sepmaine (1579). 4-5.

2Sylvester, Joshua. The First Day of the First Week. ll.180-2.

3Ronsard, Pierre. Oeuvres ed. Blanchemain (1860), iv, 184

4The Winter's Tale, IV.iii.11-2.

5 Du Bartas Premiere Semaine (1585), V, 615ff

6 Du Bartas. Les Peres (1591). 79.

7 Painting with gold, saffron, and vermilion [Peinte d'or, de safran, de vermeillon]

8 A gay good day [Un gai bon jour]

9 the vault of the heavens [la voute du ciel]

10 The Lark, gives from a sweet-sighing beak, / A gay good day to the day, [L'Alouëtte a donné d'un bec doux-souspirant / Un gai bon jour au jour,...]



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Sunday, November 30, 2025

Du Bartas – Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second.

 

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Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “Du Bartas – Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second.” Virtual Grub Street,  https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2025/11/du-bartas-dinosaurs-shakespeares-gaunt.html [state date accessed].

As we have seen in the previous two segments, Shakespeare's description of Adonis's horse, in the poem Venus and Adonis, could not be attributed to any specific influence. Joshua Sylvester's description of Cain's horse in the Divine Weekes — pointed to by Sidney Lee — was almost certainly written after Venus and Adonis had been published. Having checked previous descriptions by the likes of Salustius Du Bartas, Frederigo Grisone, Thomas Blundeville, Luigi Pulci, etc., no compelling match emerged. Adonis's charger shared the traits that every European horseman during the 15th and 16th centuries agreed were impressive. The description was simply the common wisdom of the time.

But Sylvester's Divine Weekes, and Du Bartas's Semaines — of which it is a translation —, do have a great deal to teach us about Shakespeare. Correctly reasoning, based on incorrect information, that Sylvester's translation was written long after the appearance of Venus and Adonis, Lee declared that Adonis's horse must have come from Du Bartas's French original. Traditional Stratfordians, still uncomfortable with Shakespeare knowing languages other than English, found that, the “thin mane” being mentioned in both English poems, but not in the French, only Sylvester could be the source. Shakespeare must have seen the fourth part of the first day of the second of Sylvester's Divine Weekes — subtitled “Handie-Crafts” — when it was being circulated in manuscript such as was common at the time.

In the third part of the second day, however, much the same dilemma revealed itself. Sylvester translated a laudatory poem, by Du Bartas, on France, into one on England.

All hail (dear ALBION) Europ's pearl of price.

The World's rich Garden, Earth's rare Paradise:

Thrice-happy Mother, which ay bringest forth

Such Chivalry as daunteth all the Earth1

It was noticed that Sylvester's bore a resemblance to John of Gaunt's famous speech in The Life and Death of Richard the Second. But, once again, the fact that Sylvester's Second Weeke was published well after the play seemed to present an insuperable obstacle.2

The search was on, again, to find the English-language model. After quite some time it was discovered that one John Eliot's French lesson book Ortho-epia Gallica included a considerable number of translations from Du Bartas's enormously popular epic one of which was the poem in question. While it left the subject France, it was published in 1593, which gave hope that it might have been published before Richard the Second (1st quarto, 1597) was written. The fact that most plays were published later than four years after their composition was waived off in the customary fashion of traditional Shakespeare dating.3

At least a couple more facts lead one back to Shakespeare having read Du Bartas Semaines in the original French, however. The original and Sylvester's translation conceive the poem in fabulous terms. Their England and France are quite literally presented as New Edens.

Gaunt, on the other hand, is realistic and contemporary in his high praise:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,4

In Du Bartas we have:

O mille & mille fois terre heureuse & feconde!

O pere de l'Europe! Paradis du Monde!

France, je te salvë, o mere des guerriers,

Qui jadis ont planté leurs triumphans lauriers

Sur les rives d'Euphrate, & sanglanté leur glaive

Ou la torche du jour & se couche & se lene:

Mere de tant d'ouvriers, qui d'un hardy bonheur

Taschent comme obscurcir de Nature l'honneur:

Mere de tant d'esprits, qui desçavoir es puisent

Egypte, Grece, Rome: & sur les doctes luisent

Comme un jaune esclattant sur les palles couleurs,

Sur les astres Phebus, sa fleur sur les fleurs.5


[O a thousand times, happy and fertile land!
O father of Europe! Paradise of the World!
France, I salute you, O mother of warriors,
Who once planted their triumphant laurels
On the banks of the Euphrates, and bloodied their swords
Where the torch of day sets and rises:
Mother of so many workers, who, with bold happiness,
Strive to obscure Nature's honor:
Mother of so many minds, who draw knowledge from
Egypt, Greece, Rome: and shine upon the learned
Like a brilliant yellow upon pale colors,
Upon the stars, Phoebus, his flower upon the flowers.]6

Du Bartas's “mother of warriors” becomes “This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings”. Those warriors and their bloody swords are compressed to “ this seat of Mars”. Nature's fortifications are changed to fit the country:

Tu as pour bastions & deux monts, & deux mers.


[You have for your strongholds two mountains and two seas.]

becomes:

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Eliot, however, provides a nearly literal translation so these touches can be theorized to come from his influence rather than from the original.

Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say?

In Richard the Second Gaunt credits the sea with protecting England “Against infection” — at that time a reference to the plague, the peste7. The original in Du Bartas is

Le Crocodile fier tes rivages n'infeste,

Des piolez Serpens la race porte-pest,8

[The fierce Crocodile does not infest your shores,

Nor the plague-bearing Serpent nest]

In Du Bartas' Seconde Semaine, Adam and Eve have been cast out into a world that is depicted long before there was any actual plague — any peste. His exotic, terrifying landscape is infested by a plague of crocodiles, giant snakes, tigers, giant Sea Horses (the Leviathan, presumably), etc.

Again, Gaunt's speech transforms Du Bartas's mythical landscape into a scene realistic and contemporary. It keeps the infeste/peste idea and discards the dinosaurs (as it were): neither reptile makes an appearance. The snake is not the plague. The plague is the plague. The crocodile is not the infection. The plague is the infection. Sylvester's translation keeps both beasts and does not so much as render “pest(e)” as plague, at all. Only Du Bartas's original.

Curiously, Eliot's translation does mention the plague in much the same fashion as Gaunt's speech.

Thy soile is fertill-temperate-sweete, no plague thine aire doth trouble,

Bastillyons fower borne in thy bounds: two Seas and mountaines double9

Here, however, the resemblance to Gaunt's speech ends. In the following lines Eliot keeps the reptiles but they are no longer expressly plagues.

The Crocodile fierce-weeping-teares annoyeth not thy maine,

The speckled-race of crawling Serpents hant not thy domaine,

Not in one Acre of thy land that cursed seed is seene,

Backs-venimous-twinding to and fro t'infect10 thy medowes greene.

The Tigre-swift-of-foote prayes not within thy mountains hollow,

Nor hungry-foming ore thy Plaines inrag'd his chace doth follow.

No Lions in thy desarts lurke: no Sea-horse monster-rumbling,

Swimmes to thy maine, and steales thy infants under waves them tumbling.11

Intended to be realistic, Gaunt's speech leaves Du Bartas and Eliot to describe the fierce dinosaur world without him. Until that point, Eliot's description of France would seem to be undeniably a close model for Shakespeare's Gaunt speech. Unlike Sylvester's translation of the passage, Eliot's translates the plague and was published in 1593 — a date well before the 1597 1st Quarto of Richard the Second was published.

But, here again, irony prevails. The 1597 1st Quarto has long been famous for being a censored revision of an earlier version of the play. And what has not been long known is the fact that “John Eliot” is one of a number of pen-names of Edward de Vere's servant Anthony Munday.

Edward de Vere's Ulysses & Agamemnon (1584)!


1 Sylvester, Joshua. The Second Weeke, “The Colonies”. l.767-770

2 See Lapage, John Louis. Joshua Sylvester's Translation of Du Bartas' Les Semaines and the Development of English Poetic Diction. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis (1982). 434-436. The paper serves best as a road-map to a range of semi-obscure facts and issues.

3Those who have read my “Shakespeare’s King Richard II as Prequel” know that I assign the play to 1588 or so. https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2018/08/shakespeares-king-richard-ii-as-prequel.html

4 The Life and Death of Richard the Second, II.i.40-50.

5 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste. La Seconde Semaine (1584). “Les Colonies”. 88.

6 Du Bartas translations by Google Translate edited by the author.

7 The Latin word used to designate the plague is/was pestis.

8 Du Bartas, 89.

9 Eliot, John. Ortho-epia Gallica (1593). 175. The Eliot Ortho-epia connection first pointed out in Lever, J.W. 'Shakespeare's French Fruits,' Shakespeare Survey, Volume 6, Cambridge University Press (1953) pp.79-90

10 Infect] infest. The two were interchangeable in English though infest was much the rarer.

11 Eliot, 175-6.



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Friday, November 14, 2025

The Horses of Shakespeare and Luigi Pulci

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Starting from Sidney Lee's assertion that the description of Adonis's horse, in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (1593), was influenced by Salustius Du Bartas's La Seconde Semaine (1584-90), we have sampled horse literature of the 16th century France and Italy translated into English. Our examples by no means exhausted the literature on the subject. Nor do they exhaust the authors Shakespeare might have read on the subject.

We have not mentioned Barnabe Googe, fellow member of the Elizabethan theater scene. He describes the prime features of the horse in his 1577 translation of Konrad Heresbach's Four Books of Husbandry. His description echoes the others of the time with the standard variations. He praises thick manes. He also has the common habit of citing the standard ancients on nature and husbandry: Pliny, Virgil, Columela, etc.

Thomas Bedingfeld, whose Cardanus Comforte Edward de Vere patronized and Shakespeare frequently quoted in his plays, translated Claudio Corte's Art of Riding (1584). The book is dedicated to training, however, rather than buying, breeding or chivalry. The curvet performed by Adonis's horse is a subject dwelt upon by Bedingfeld and a favorite maneuver among England's elite horsemen among whom Vere ranked high.

Each of these translations were published well before Venus and Adonis. While Joshua Sylvester first published his translation of Du Bartas well after Venus and Adonis first appeared, earlier partial editions were published perhaps as early as 1591 and manuscripts possibly circulated before that. The translation of the Second Weeke, however, — in which the horse references appear — was only entered in the Stationers Registers in 1598 creating substantial doubt that Shakespeare could have borrowed from it for his poem.

One more description of the horse merits attentions, here, for unique reasons. Luigi Pulci's poem Morgante was first published in its final form in 1482. It is a romance epic. Stanzas 106 and 107 of the Canto XV have been advanced as a possible model for Shakespeare's lines. We give them here with on-the-fly literal translation.

Canto XV


CVI

Egli avea tutte le fattezze pronte

Di buon cavai, come udirete appresso,

Perché nato non sia di Chiaramonte:

Piccola testa e in bocca molto fesso:

Un occhio vivo, una rosetta in fronte;

Larghe le nari; e'l labbro arriccia spesso;

Corto l'orecchio e lungo e forte il collo;

Leggier si, ch’alla man non dava un crollo.


[He had all the features attractive
In a good horse, as you will hear,
For he was not born of Chiaramonte:
Small head and very cleft mouth1:
A lively eye, a rosette on the forehead;
Large nostrils; and thickly curled lips;
Short ears and a long and strong neck;
So light, he did not fight the hand.]


CVII

Ma una cosa nol faceva brutto,

Ch’ egli era largo tre palmi nel petto,

Corto di schiena e ben quartato tutto,

Grosse le gambe, e d’ ogni cosa netto,

Corte le giunte, e ’1 piè largo, alto, asciutto,

E molto lieto e grato nello aspetto ;

Serra la coda, ed anitrisce e raspa,

Sempre le zampe palleggiava e innaspa.2


[Nothing about him fell short:
He was three spans wide at the chest,
Short-backed and well-quartered throughout,
Thick in the legs, in every detail neat,
Short jointed, and feet broad, high, and lean,
And very happy and pleasing in appearance;
His tail curled, and whinny harsh,
His hooves always restless and stamping.]

Both descriptions included large nostrils, broad chest, a lively vs. a scornful eye, etc. But the actual similarity is the fact that both descriptions are two stanzas short and contain but a few points selected from the standard description of the superior stallion.

What presumably has attracted scholars is the fact that most of the other texts we have mentioned were didactic poems that accordingly included much longer and more inclusive descriptions. Pulci's description reminds us of Shakespeare's because each was a talented poet who knew not to be thorough but selective — not to over-write.

Du Bartas, who was also writing something of an epic did not know this distinction. His was intended to be a didactic poem. Therefore, he allowed his description to interrupt the flow of his poem to an extent that can try a reader's patience.

But yet another irony, here (for we have mentioned that much is ironic in the scholarly analysis of Adonis's horse), Pulci's interest vis-a-vis horses merits our attention entirely for reasons other than relate to the poem Venus and Adonis. Pulci's Morgante is a link in the centuries long chain of Italian poems about the hero Orlando — the chain that arrived at Ariosto's Orlando Furioso a poem that greatly influenced the works of Shakespeare. Obscure little Luigi Pulci was also a major influence upon the great french raconteur François Rabelais who influenced Shakespeare to a much smaller degree.

Pulci's Morgante was a retelling of an earlier anonymous version of the tale.3 In turn, his own version was sampled in the retelling by Matteo Maria Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato (bk. 1&2, 1483; bk. 1-3, 1495). Boiardo's retelling was incorporated into both Francesco Berni's (1518) and Lodovico Domenichi's (1545) retellings of the same name. A strong case has been presented for Shakespeare having taken from Berni's (and perhaps a bit from Boiardo's) version for use in his plays Othello and Love's Labours Lost. The last original work in this line, prior to Shakespeare, was Ariosto's far more popular continuation of Boiardo's work, Orlando Furioso (1532), from which Shakespeare took a great deal, most notably the trope of posting poems on trees, in As You Like It, and the tragic falling out between Claudio and Hero in Much Adoe About Nothing.

So then, we can say with considerable confidence that Shakespeare had read the versions of the Orlando story by Boiardo, Berni and Ariosto. Traditional scholars who do not wish add polyglot to Shakespeare's long list of talents demand that he read Ariosto only in John Harington's 1591 English translation. While the claim does not hold up, no similar convenience is available to them regarding Boiardo or Berni. There was no translation available from those authors during the Stratford man's lifetime and they must fall back upon Ben Jonson or John Florio, etc., having provided him extended cribs of the texts.

We have been impressed elsewhere with Shakespeare's unusually exhaustive research into obscure works in the romance languages for his plays.4 It is quite possible that he did search out and read Pulci's Morgante. Of which there also was no translation.



1 I can only assume that this refers to a pronounced philtrum. A “cleft mouth” is often mentioned in medieval and Tudor times as a very positive trait.

2 Pulci, Luigi. Il Morgante; test e notes a cura di Giugliemo Volpi (1914) II.54.

3 See Riana, Pio. “La Materia del Morgante: in un Ignoto Poema Cavalleresco del Secolo XV.” Il Propugnatore. May-June 1869. 7-36.

4 See my Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584). The Early Plays of Edward de Vere, Book 1 (2018), in particular. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JD7KM1T.



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