This Series:
- Gutenberg, proto-Hack Writers and Shakespeare.
- Francois Rabelais and Shakespeare
- The Tempests of Shakespeare and Rabelais.
- Francois Rabelais was Born About this Date in 1483.
Texts in daily-use European vernacular languages dating from
at least the 12th century grace the great archives of the West. By far most, however, are written out by
monastic copyists in Latin. A smaller
number were copied from Greek. Copying
manuscripts was a tedious and enormously time-consuming task. Latin texts were read far more by the monks
and lay brethren in the course of their duties thus the scriptoria spent orders
of magnitude more time in their production.
General conversation, however, was spoken in the vernacular. Poets such as Chaucer
put considerable money and effort into pursuing the rare hand-written
manuscripts in the vernacular. They contained the record of the poems and
stories that had proven so popular that the time was taken to make copies of
them. Such poems and stories were the raw
material of their work product. In this
way, the 14th century vernacular stories of Boccaccio became an
international bestseller.
This was the state of affairs, in a nutshell, until about
1440 when Johannes Gutenberg invented the first fully functional, moveable-type
printing press. But centuries of habit —
no matter the source — were not to be overturned in a day. Latin resoundingly remained the language of
learning and leisure. Greek was suspect
super-elitist stuff and begrudgingly respected for it all the more. Those were the languages of the printed book.
Vernacular texts were not sought out by publishers. Most who trafficked in the vernacular could
neither read nor write. The few who
could would still required third parties to read church and government papers
and to do bookkeeping in Latin.
The Reformation rapidly increased vernacular texts. The movement was made possible by the
technology of printing. It needed
vernacular texts in order to rally the common folk. Somehow those folk managed informally to
learn to read — a small number in each social group, at first, who could then
read the texts to the others.
A less well known effect of the Reformation was that many
young Catholic men who had taken religious orders in order to receive an
education began to lead lives at large from monastic discipline. Like Erasmus and Rabelais they took up the
pen. While Erasmus did not roam too far,
the likes of Rabelais and a monk named Bandello began to live by pen and social
connections. They (sometimes nervously)
sought to advertise themselves as humanists writing cautionary moral tales but
their actions spoke louder than their self-representations. More and more their networks were filled with
wealthy laypersons. Their tales grew
vulgar.
Never did the Catholic church need such allies more. The tacit deal was struck. These monks straddled both worlds,
occasionally called upon to defend their lifestyles, those who were good at
excuses rapidly becoming a new educated class.
As this generation grew older the likes of Pierre Boaistuau
and Francois Belleforest appeared. They
tried to take the same route but the competition had greatly increased thus reducing
the value of their work and their social status. They must write books at a rapid pace in order
to keep body and soul together.
As was often the case in such matters, Boaistuau
forefronted the petit distinction “surnomm Launay” on all of his title pages. While he insisted upon the descriptor
“humanist,” he selected his subject matter from subjects history would soon
associate with hack writing.
After a number of encouraging successes, Boaistuau chose to edit the stories of Margaret, Queen of Navarre, and next to write translations of Bandello (then in possession of the bishopric of Agen, as a sinecure). The editor had been a servant at the castle in Agen of the lately deceased Margaret who was then sheltering Francois Belleforest, a young man with far too high an estimation of his own poetic powers.
In an admirable gambit, he passed the Channel, in 1560, to offer his new work for the patronage of the new English Queen, Elizabeth.[1] She does not seem to have been interested but he advertised nevertheless that she’d complimented it. A new relationship to the written word was beginning to be born.
After a number of encouraging successes, Boaistuau chose to edit the stories of Margaret, Queen of Navarre, and next to write translations of Bandello (then in possession of the bishopric of Agen, as a sinecure). The editor had been a servant at the castle in Agen of the lately deceased Margaret who was then sheltering Francois Belleforest, a young man with far too high an estimation of his own poetic powers.
In an admirable gambit, he passed the Channel, in 1560, to offer his new work for the patronage of the new English Queen, Elizabeth.[1] She does not seem to have been interested but he advertised nevertheless that she’d complimented it. A new relationship to the written word was beginning to be born.
While all of this was going on, England was shipping nearly
all of its books from the continent.
It’s theater was still dominated by the old Religious Mystery
Plays.[2] Shortly after Boaistuau’s visit,
the first English translations from the Latin plays of Seneca began to displace
the religious plays. The old Roman stoic
would dominate the tiny stages then available for over twenty years.[3] The first embers of what would become the
Elizabethan stage were only just beginning to glow.
Boaistuau was very
attentive to the desires of the growing reading classes. The first book of Histoires Tragiques (1559)
his translations of Bandello’s stories, was an immediate best seller. Italian
stories were all the rage, not only in France but among the educated French
readers in England. They were hungry for
editions they could easily read.
One of Boaistuau’s translations was Bandello’s story of
Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare’s play
about them contains many features from the poem “Romeus and Juliet” (1562) attributed
to a young University man, Arthur Brooke, who took his material both from Boaistuau
and the original of Bandello.
Shakespeare himself can be shown to have taken features from Brooke
(primarily), Boaistuau and Bandello.
An English writer of pamphlets, William Painter, looking for
a prospect for remunerative authorship, took Boaistuau’s strategy over in more
than one way. As translator, he, too,
could publish best sellers without having to write them — translations of Boaistuau
and Belleforest’s Histoires into English.
The first volume of his The Palace of Pleasure (1566)[4]
was even a bigger best seller than Boaistuau and Belleforest’s compilations. Soon plays heavily steeped in Seneca began to
have sub-plots from The Palace.
As this grew more and more popular, especially with the ladies, plays
had less and less Seneca and more and more Painter. The general lessons that could be drawn by
this progress were not lost on a Court novelist and playwright named John Lyly
and the Elizabethan theater that most know began to emerge.
[1]
Doukas, Georgios. Pierre Boaistuau (c. 1517-1566) and the Employment of
Humanism in Mid Sixteenth-Century France (2011), 60.
[2] see my “The Journey from Gaufridus to Shakespeare.”
[3]
see my “Shakespeare’s Funeral Meats.” https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2020/05/shakespeares-funeral-meats_13.html
[4]
see my “Shakespeare and Painter’s Palace of Pleasure.” https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2020/05/shakespeare-and-painters-palace-of.html
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
- What About Edward de Vere’s Twelfth Night of 1600/01? January 28, 2020. “Leslie Hotson, who brought the Orsino-Orsino coincidence to the attention of the Nevillians seems to have made one particular mistake that is all to our point.”
- Hedingham Castle 1485-1562 with Virtual Tour Link. January 29, 2019. “Mr. Sheffeld told me that afore the old Erle of Oxford tyme, that cam yn with King Henry the vii., the Castelle of Hengham was yn much ruine,…”
- Why Shakespeare Appears on Title Pages from 1598. November 20, 2018. ‘These he finds unconvincing. The author’s name having appeared in a number of title pages after 1598, he continues, “it would seem foolish for publishers not to attach the Shakespeare brand to his previously unattributed plays—unless they had other reasons not to do so.”’
- The Battle Over Shakespeare's Early and Late Plays. September 24, 2018. “The answers to the post-Oxford dilemma, of course, are three.”
- Shakespeare on Gravity. August 26, 2018. “So carelessly does Shakespeare throw out such an extraordinary divination. His achievement in thus, as it were, rivalling Newton may seem in a certain sense even more extraordinary than Goethe's botanical and osteological discoveries;…”
- Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
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