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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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