- Shakespeare and Joshua Sylvester (or Maybe Not).
- The Horses of Shakespeare and Luigi Pulci.
- Du Bartas - Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second.
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? |
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.
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
Invention in a Noted Weed: the Poetry of William Shakespeare. September 21, 2024. “The coward conquest of a wretches knife,...”
The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 108. Edward de Vere to his son, Henry. “That may expresse my love, or thy deare merit?”
- Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
- Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”
Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
- Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.
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