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Sunday, November 30, 2025

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

 

In this series:
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

In this series:

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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Saturday, November 08, 2025

Shakespeare and Joshua Sylvester (or Maybe Not).

Sidney Lee introduced the theory, in his French Renaissance in England (1910), that Shakespeare's description of Adonis's horse, in the 1593 poem Venus and Adonis, was too close to a similar description in Joshua Sylvester's Divine Weekes and Workes to be mere coincidence.

With Sylvester's faithful translation (1613 ed., pp. 286-8) of Du Bartas's account of a 'goodly jennet' (ce beau Ienet) may well be compared Shakespeare's animated description of a ' courser ' catching sight of a 'jennet' in Venus and Adonis (lines 271-4, 295-8 , 301-4) . Shakespeare probably consulted the French text.1

The edition of Sylvester's work that Lee referenced was published in 1613, twenty years after the publication of Shakespeare's poem, therefore Lee suggested that the similarity must have come from Shakespeare reading the original by Du Bartas, published in two parts in 1578 and 1584. He was one of a modest number of scholars, at that point, that credited Shakespeare with being able to read French fluently.

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas's poetic account of the creation of the world, entitled  La Sepmaine; ou, Creation du monde (1578) and a second week, La Seconde Semaine (1584, additions and revisions published until 1590), intended to give an account of mankind's life after being expelled from the Garden of Eden, were immediately enormously popular. Du Bartas died in 1590, without completing the second week.


Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis was published in 1593. The line in question reads “Thin mane, thicke taile, broad buttock, tender hide”. It could arguably be a condensation from several lines describing Cain's horse in La Seconde Semaine.

Sylvester was born about 1563.2 An uncle of some wealth paid for some three years of schooling, at Southampton grammar school. At that time the school's head master required the students to speak only french. The master left after those years and there is no further record of Sylvester's life until the title page of his first published work — a translation of Du Bartas's Canticle of the Victorie obteined by the French King, Henrie the Fourth, at Yvry (1591) — identified him as a member of the Company of Merchant-Adventurers.

Not pleased to make his living as a member of the Company, he was attempting to improve his lot through dedications to various written works — predominantly, translations from the works of Du Bartas. Reference appears in the Stationers' Registers to his Du Bartas' Week in 15913. His Salustius Du Bartas his weeke or Seven Dayes work is formally entered on May 25, 1594.4 An Essaie of the second weeke of the noble Learned and Divine Salustius Du Bartas was entered in 1598.5

The work initially appeared, Alexander Grosart informs us, in a number of “fragmentary issues,” at first, with “dateless title-pages”. These fragmentary issues are not publicly available. They began to be gathered together in 1605, as a single work, and were so often reprinted thereafter as to make clear their great popularity.

Unbeknownst to Lee, then, portions of Sylvester's translation were being circulated as early as 1591 or even slightly before. Shakespeare could have seen it before the publication of Venus and Adonis in 1593. The passage in Sylvester, however, is given in the Second Week, which is entered in the Stationers in 1598, thus unlikely to have been available before 1593. Some have suggested that Sylvester's description of the horse, from Du Bartas, could have been influenced by Shakespeare's poem instead.

Thus begins our meandering journey back and forth through the 15th century Florentine court of Lorenzo de' Medici, stopping briefly at the works of Rabelais, of Matteo Boiardo, various 16th century Italian and English penmen, and Du Bartas's original Semaines. All of this arriving, in the end, at a shocking new finding regarding Shakespeare.

Stratfordian scholars at large, needing an English language model for Shakespeare's description of Adonis's horse, in the poem Venus and Adonis, needed first to quash Lee's suggestion that the uneducated Shakespeare's model was from Du Bartas's original Semaines. To this end, it was soon pointed out that Shakespeare and Sylvester both described their hero's exemplary horse as having a “thin mane”. But Du Bartas's original did not. Sylvester had chosen to translate “Sur qui flotte un long poil crespement espandu” as “Whereon a long, thin, curled mane doth flow.” Perhaps because the french “poil” can refer to short hair which he interpreted to mean “thin”.

Once the thin mane became the main point of identification, it was noted that numerous works were potential matches. Thomas Blundeville’s Arte of Ryding, in particular, contained a similar list of features of the exemplary horse with a thin mane. Not only that but the book was published in 1560 — leaving Shakespeare time to read it before he began his own list during the composition of Venus and Adonis.

Then, as so often happens in these matters, irony struck. Blundeville's book was by-and-large a translation from the Italian of Frederigo Grisone's Gli Ordini Di Cavalcare (1550). The Ordini, it turns out was the source for Du Bartas's description of Cain's horse in the fourth day of the Seconde Semaine. Du Bartas followed Grisone closely yet he has no “thin mane”. Somehow the thin mane skipped from Grisone, past Du Bartas, and reappeared in Sylvester.

Du Bartas, however, was not translating Grisone's work but co-opting only individual items from it's list of superior characteristics of the horse, toward an original work of poetry. Himself not an expert horseman but rather a poet, he needed an impressive description of Cain's horse. Grisone's “thin mane” didn't make the cut, as it were.

As for Blundeville, he recommends a horse with a “crisp mane,” in accordance with the Grisone quote above, garnishing it with the observation that “the creast whereof neither too thick nor too thin”6. Elsewhere he gives “his mane would be thin and long, albeit I do not mislike the opinion of those that would have it to be thicke”7. In fine, both Grisone and Blundeville could equally be cited as the source of a thin or a thick mane.

Those who have done surveys of the matter inform us that thick manes were more often approved in medieval literature and thin in Tudor times. It was a common topic.

But the irony does not end with translations of Grisone that don't keep his “thin mane” which somehow, nonetheless, skips a generation in order to appear in Sylvester's translation and Venus and Adonis. There is another passage in which the mane of Adonis's horse is mentioned:

His eares up prickt, his braided hanging mane

Upon his compast crest now stand on end,8

Edmund Malone, in the 1821 edition of his variorum Shakespeare, notes that the verb “stand” implies the noun “mane” is a plural: “Our author uses mane, as composed of many hairs, as plural.”9 Of course, Grisone, writing in Italian, does the same in the key passage that Du Bartas left out: “I crini rari... crespi”10. In English “mane” is always a singular noun, in Italian it can be “crini,” a plural noun .



1Lee, Sidney. French Renaissance in England (1910). 337n.

2The details of Joshua Sylvester's life, here, are almost entirely taken from Alexander Grosart's two volume Complete Works (1880) of the poet. No other biographical information seems to have been discovered — only bibliographical.

3 Arber, Edward. Transcript of the Stationers' Registers (1875). II.278. “Entred for his Copie vnder th [e h]andes Of master Judson and master Watkyns a book in English Entituled, SALUSTIUS DU BARTAS his weeke or Seven Dayee woork. August 14, 1591.”

4Grosart, Alexander. Complete Works of Joshuah Sylvester (1880). I.xii. Citing Arber. “Entred for his Copie vnder thandes of master Judson and master Watkyns a book in English Entituled, Salustius Du Bartas his weeke or Seven Dayes work, 25th May, 1594: Edward Blunt.”

5Grosart, Alexander. Complete Works of Joshuah Sylvester (1880). I.xii. “A booke Called An Essaie of the second weeke of the noble Learned and Divine Salustius Du Bartas: Translated by Josua Siluester 1598, vjd. Provided that this entrance shall not be effectuall if any other have right to this booke by any former entrance.”

6 Blundeville, 6.

7 Ibid. 3. A correct translation of Grisone's “non vitupero l’opinion di chi vuole che siano folti,” etc. @ viii.

8 Rollins, Hyder Edward. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: the Poems (1938). 33.

9 Malone, Edmund. The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare. XX.26.

10Grisone, Frederigo. Gli Ordini di Cavalcare (1550). viii. “the mane thin... crisp”.



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