1 - Virgil and Marot: Imitation, Satire and Personal Identity

Summary

The importance of Virgil for Clément Marot is evident from the fact that the first text of his first published collection, the Adolescence Clementine (1532), is a translation of Virgil's first eclogue – also Virgil's earliest published work (c. 39–38 BCE). Marot's obvious intention to draw on the prestige of the Greco-Latin tradition is, of course, in tune with the general aspirations of Renaissance humanists, but the connection is all the more important for a poet at the very beginning of his literary career. Already in this early poem, Marot sought, via his connection to Virgil, to appropriate literary authority and, perhaps even most importantly, to hint at the future glory that an association with Virgil might promise. Many aspects of the relationship between Virgil and Clément Marot have already been studied by critics, such as Marot's translations and imitations of Virgil, their status as royal poets – Marot repeatedly pleaded for patronage and protection as did Virgil –, and their stylistic and poetic similarities (even though Marot is, in many respects, closer to Ovid). In the present article, emphasis is to be placed not on Virgilian intertexts, a topic treated quite convincingly by many other critics, but on the poetic, and more precisely satirical, uses and implications of what Florian Preisig has so aptly named “le jeu Marot/Maro,” i.e. the play on Marot's own name, homophonous with Publius Vergilius Maro. The fact that Preisig talks of a “game” hints at the ludic background of Marot's exploitation of what was, in a first instance, merely a lucky coincidence.