Influences de Deschamps sur ses contemporains Anglais, Chaucer et Gower.
- Author/Editor
- Yeager, R. F.
- Title
- Influences de Deschamps sur ses contemporains Anglais, Chaucer et Gower.
- Published
- Yeager, R.F. "Influences de Deschamps sur ses contemporains Anglais, Chaucer et Gower." In Le Rayonnement de la cour des premiers Valois à l'époque d'Eustache Deschamps. Ed. Miren Lacassagne. (Paris: Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2017). Pp. 69-79, 183-91.
- Review
- Deschamps' influence upon his English contemporaries lay not in their direct borrowing or quotation, Yeager demonstrates, but more generally, in providing an example of how to escape the dominant model for lyric poetry set by Machaut. Metrically, Deschamps made popular the decasyllabic line, eschewed by Machaut in his shorter poems which, even when not sung, were still closely tied in his mind to their musical origins. This "littérarisation" of the lyric (75)--the separation of the written poem from its musical setting--opened the way for a wide broadening of themes, including the many occasional poems among Deschamps' ballades, which provided the inspiration for poems such as Chaucer's "Adam Scriveyn" and "To His Purse," which, along with at least one copy of "Truth," also follows Deschamps' example in the addition of an envoy. Gower, writing in French, is keenly aware of the Englishness of his audience. In the "Traitié," he apologizes for his lack of skill in French, and in condemning adultery, which he associates with the French, he has a predecessor in Deschamps, "dont les ballades adoptent un ton moral proche du sien" (whose ballades adopt a moral tone close to his). In the "Cinkante Balades," written in response to the French "Livre des cent balades," he follows Deschamps' formal example in his regular use of an envoy. Yeager uses as another point of comparison the fifteen poems marked with a "Ch" in the Pennsylvania "chansonnier" (Philadelphia, Van Pelt Library, Codex 902, olim MS French 15). He gives much too early a date for the manuscript (70), and while he does not accept Wimsatt's suggestion that the "Ch" stands for Chaucer, he does assume that it is meant to identify a single poet for all 15, which is not at all certain, and that the poet must have been English, for which there is no real evidence, either linguistic or otherwise; but this little bit of confusion does not affect his argument on either Chaucer or Gower. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]
- Date
- 2017
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Cinkante Balades
Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz