Frontières d'un genre aux frontières d'une langue: ballades typiques et atypiques d'Eustache Deschamps, John Gower et Geoffrey Chaucer.

Author/Editor
Dauphant, Clotilde.

Title
Frontières d'un genre aux frontières d'une langue: ballades typiques et atypiques d'Eustache Deschamps, John Gower et Geoffrey Chaucer.

Published
Dauphant, Clotilde. "Frontières d'un genre aux frontières d'une langue: ballades typiques et atypiques d'Eustache Deschamps, John Gower et Geoffrey Chaucer. In Le Rayonnement de la cour des premiers Valois à époque d'Eustache Deschamps. Ed. Miren Lacassagne. Paris: Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2017. Pp. 81-94.

Review
Each of the defining features of the ballade--the number of stanzas, the use of the refrain, the presence of an envoy, the patterns of rhyme--was in fact subject to variation, Dauphant points out. Deschamps, in his "Art de dictier," helped fix the form as it was practiced towards the end of the 14th century, while also, there and in his own practice, encouraging the new breadth of subject matter and the development of a "style personnel" by taking advantage of the "élasticité" of the form (82). Gower figures prominently among her examples. His "Cinkante Balades" are notable first of all for their "pauvreté formelle" (85), all in decasyllables, with only two stanza forms, one of seven lines, one of eight. She finds further evidence of conscious formal planning in the choice to include exactly 50 ballades (not counting the ninth, which is instead a five-stanza "chanson royale," or the final unnumbered poem) and in a pattern of 5's and 3's that is based, however, on Dauphant's misapprehension that the two "dedicatory ballades" that precede the collection are also five-stanza "chanson royales" (85-86) (one has three stanzas, the other four). One "irrégularité" that she finds "involontaire," and by that she means unconscious on Gower's part, has to do with his lack of concern for the difference between masculine and feminine rhymes, rhyming "Pantasilée" with "couché," for instance, and having an unusually large number of ballades with exclusively masculine rhymes, contrary to Deschamps' advice and to the preference of most other poets to mix masculine and feminine rhymes in the same stanza. Other "irregularities" in both Gower and Chaucer she attributes to a "choix esthétique réflechi," a deliberate aesthetic choice (87). Ballades 13, 14, 16, and 17, for instance, all lack a refrain. By grouping them together, they create a counter-pattern that has the effect of drawing greater attention to the refrain of 15, which in context stands out as the exception. And unlike 15, these four are all concerned with the narrator's suffering in love. The absence of a refrain may itself be expressive of that which he lacks. Beginning with Deschamps, there was also considerable variation in the use of the envoy, some of which Dauphant describes, including Chaucer in her discussion, but her only comment on Gower, apart from the fact that he uses the envoy on all but one of his ballades, is that his choice of rhymes—"bcbc"--echoes the last four lines of his 8-line stanza but not of the 7-line stanza, which ends in a couplet. But she does suggest that Gower is inspired by the envoy's function to attach a final stanza--an "envoy" to the collection as a whole at the conclusion of both the CB and his "Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz." [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]

Date
2017

Gower Subjects
Cinkante Balades
Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations