Francois Rabelais and Shakespeare.

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.

 The extent to which Shakespeare was familiar with Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel is an interesting question. It might not seem like the he had read the ribald Frenchman at all. But, as the reader goes further, it becomes evident that Shakespeare was actually quite well read in the work.

Henry Anders’ 1904 volume Shakespeare’s Books, dedicated a short chapter to the matter[1] which serves well still as an introduction.  Writing before the modern debate over Shakespeare’s identity, his dedication to discovering an English translation of the work where none is evident comes from an honest certainty that the plays were written by a barely educated man from Stratford who could not know the French language well enough to read in it.

Anders’ references to Captain Cox’s library[2] — partially inventoried in a letter of Robert Laneham[3] — and A briefe & necessary instruction verye needefull to bee knowen of all householders (1572) by “E.D.”[4] do have limited value as indirect evidence. But Laneham’s inventory lists several volumes in the Captain’s library by their French and Latin names however much Anders is confident that their contents could only have been in English translations available at the time. Furthermore, Laneham informs us that of books the Captain possessed

many moe then I rehearz heere….

In short, there can be no certainty that the Captain couldn’t read in French. E.D.’s instruction to the readers of a popular tract, in 1572, not to read Gargantua, hardly guarantees that he must have been referring to a popular English translation of which no record or text is extant. The case is the same with Hanmer.[5]

 

Of the remaining French writers of the sixteenth century the greatest is Francois Rabelais (d. 1553), the author of the famous and immensely popular romance of Gargantua and Pantagruel, between which and Shakespeare's dramas it is pleasant to find a link of connexion. Of this work an English translation or adaptation must have existed in the days of Queen Elizabeth, for Joseph Hall, in his 'Virgidemiarum’, Sixe Bookes', 1597, Bk. II, Sat. 1, says:

But who coniur'd this bawdie Poggies ghost,

From out the stetces of his lewde home-bred coast:

Or wicked Rablais dronken revellings,

To grace the mis-rule of our Tavernings?

'The historie of Gargantua' was licenced by the Stationers' Company on the 4th of December 1594, 'Provided that if this Copie doo belonge to anie other, Then this Entrance to be voide'.  But an English book on Gargantua must have been current long before this. E. D., in his 'Brief and Necessary Instruction', 1572, decries 'the witles devices of Gargantua' with other books of his time. 'Gargantua' is mentioned by Robert Laneham in 1575 as belonging to Captain Cox's library. As all the rest of his books are English, we should expect this one to be so too. In 1577 Hanmer enumerates 'the monstrous fables of Garagantua' in a list of popular English books. However, no shred of an Elizabethan English work on Gargantua has been preserved to us.

The following are traces, or supposed traces, of Rabelais in Shakespeare's works:—

1) The plainest and most direct allusion to the giant hero of the humorous romance is to be found in As You Like It, III, n, 238. Rosalind putting a long list of questions, urges Celia to answer her all these in one word; to which Celia:

You must borrow me Gargantua's mouth first: 'tis a word too great for any mouth of this age's size.

2) It can scarcely be looked upon as accidental that the pedant of Love's Labour's Lost bears the same name as his intellectual cousin-german, Thubal Holofernes, the instructor of Gargantua. (See Bk. I, ch. 14.)

3) Edgar, in King Lear, III, vi, 7, says:

Frateretto calls me; and tells me Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness.

Though neither Rabelais, nor any other author, so far as we know, ever represented Nero as an angler in hell, Trajan is introduced as a fisher of frogs in Hades by the French humourist, while Nero is made a fiddler, Aeneas, e. g., a miller, Cleopatra a hawker of onions, and so forth (Bk. II, ch. 30.).

4) An expression in Othello, I, i, 116-7,

your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs

has been traced to Rabelais, Bk. I, ch. 3, where we read of Gargantua's father:

En son aage virile espousa Gargamelle fille du Roy des Parpaillons, belle gouge, & de bonne trongne. Et faisoient eux deux souvent ensemble la beste a deux dos.[6]

Possibly the phrase was more or less proverbial.

5) Mr. W. F. Smith, the translator of Rabelais, 1893 (p. xiii), connects the following gibberish of Sir Andrew, in Twelfth Night, II, iii, 23-25:

when thou spokest of Pigrogromitus, of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Queubus

with the unintelligible speech of Kissbreech before Pantagruel, Bk. II, ch. 11, ad init:

But to the purpose, there passed between the two tropics six white

pieces towards the zenith and a halfpenny, forasmuch as the Rhiphaean

mountains had this year had a great Sterility of Happelourdes, etc., etc.

Having thus found traces of the greatest of French humourists in our poet's works, we are tempted to believe that a grain of the Rabelaisian Pantagruelism went to the making of some of Shakespeare's comical characters.

 

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[1] Anders, Henry. Shakespeare’s Books (1904), 56-7.

[2] Furnivall, Frederick. Captain Cox, his Ballads and Books; or, Robert Laneham’s Letter (1871).

[3] Robert Laneham was a London mercer who had attended both elite grammar schools of St. Paul’s and St. Anthony’s where he studied Latin, and, almost certainly, French. He also lived as a merchant in France for a time.

[4] Edward Dering, a fine classical scholar who surely knew French.

[5] Hanmer, Meredith. The auncient ecclesiasticall histories of the first six hundred yeares after Christ (1577). Page unnumbered. “The monstrous fables of Garagantua… with many other infortunate treatises and amorous toies wrytten in Englishe, Latine, Frenche, Italian, Spanishe,…”

[6] “In the vigor of his age he married Gargamelle, daughter to the King of the Parpaillons, a jolly pug, and well mouthed wench. These two did often times do the two backed beast together…” Urquhart translation.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Where Edward de Vere Lived: 1550-1570. July 25, 2021. “It is unclear just when Edward took rooms at court. It is clear, however, that he did and that the closer he came to his legal majority the more time he spent at Court.”
• More on Thomas North as Shakespeare and author of Arden of Feversham. June 14, 2021. “This is also the reason why the title pages included the address of the shop that was selling the book.”
• On Shakespeare and Drinking Smoke. January 4, 2021. “The debate raged for some time: Had Shakespeare smoked pot? Tobacco? Both?”
• Gutenberg, proto-Hack Writers and Shakespeare. May 26, 2020. “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.”
• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
• Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.