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Translatio Lupae: Du Bellay's Roman Whore Goes North

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Anne Lake Prescott
Anne Lake Prescott*
Affiliation:
Barnard College
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Extract

In 1609 Gervase Markham, England's leading authority on horses, Sir John Harington's cousin, and not a truly bad poet, invited readers of The Famous Whore to give the prostitute “a kind welcome out of Italy.” According to the headnote of this long poem, the elderly woman who here makes her “lamentable complaint” was “Paulina the famous Roman Curtezan, sometimes M[istress] unto the great Cardinal Hypolito of Est.” Since Markham seems so confidently to direct our eyes to Rome, it is understandable both that the entry on him in the Dictionary of National Biography posits an unknown Italian model and that neither the modern bibliography of his works nor the revised Short Title Catalogue can identify his source. In fact, Markham's work is a fairly close imitation of Joachim Du Bellay's’ ‘Vieille courtisanne,'’ first published in 15 5 8 as part of a collection somewhat misleadingly entitled Divers jeux rustiques.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1989 , pp. 397 - 419
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1989

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References

1 Poynter, Frederick N. L., A Bibliography of Gervase Markham, I568? - 1637 (Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1962), 51–52 Google Scholar, suspects the poem is a translation but thinks it “a short novel of the Italian type.” He calls it “wise, humane, and even sad, with few or none of the vulgarities to which some of his contemporaries were tempted when treating similar themes,” in part a tribute to the work's hitherto unidentified ancestry. The edition by Frederic Ouvry (London, 1868) has no critical apparatus.

2 Edoard printed “Courtisanne” with Villon's “Belle Heaumière” and Terence's “Pornegraphie“; for his comments see Chamard's edition of the Divers jeux (Paris, 1947). I have also used V.-L. Saulnier's edition (Geneva, 1947). A “courtesan” was an accomplished woman whose sale of sexual favors to an elite was officially condemned but widely accepted among the sophisticated; asj. Sharpham's Fleire (1607) has it, “your whore is for every rascall but your Curtizan is for your Courtier.” Since Du Bellay's courtesan ends as a whore, I use both words. See also Lawner, Lynne, Lives of the Courtesans (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; in The New York Review of Books, May 28, 1987, Charles Hope disputes her methods but her book remains informative and refreshingly sympathetic toward these morally marginal if culturally central women.

3 Chamard ed., i-v.

4 Glatigny, Michel, “DuBellay traducteurdans lesjeuxrustiques, “Informationlitte'raire 18 (1966): 33–41 Google Scholar, notes a “certainepudeur” in this collection, although he does not mention the “Courtisanne.“

5 Heather Dubrow, who read this essay with a friendly but eagle eye and to whom I owe some stimulating suggestions, objects reasonably that later epyllia can be satirical. I agree, and indeed Keach, William, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives (New Brunswick, N.J., 1977)Google Scholar1 notes a satirical element even in the older epyllion. But by the same token the Jacobean narratives further mute or undercut the elegiac sensuosity found in long poems by Daniel, Drayton, and Shakespeare. To translate Du Bellay's ironic but still nostalgic lament after the decline of this late Elizabethan style (a style kept alive, to be sure, by new editions of older verse and by its occasional emergence in Shakespeare's plays) creates a minor swirl in generic chronology. Markham also wrote after some had been searching for new female lamenters. Peter Colse remembered a wife (Penelopes Complaint, 1596), but fashion soon made mild depravity desirable. Thus in 1607 William Barksted said leeringly oiMirrha the Mother of Adonis, “Muse be not affraide,/ Although thou chauntest of unnaturall love./ Great is my quill, to bring forth such a birth,/ as shall abash the Virgins of our earth” (As). Hulse, Clark, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton, N.J., 1981)Google Scholar, finds early Jacobean narrative poems few, mediocre, and written in a style closer to the 1560s (75; he does not mention Markham); slightly later erotic narrative “changes to the simply lascivious or the simply passionate” (33). Markham is not quaint, but neither is he lascivious or passionate, and although Paulina complains in an older manner, Daniel would have found her too shabby for his grieving elegance. So Markham is hard to place: he has an older foreign model; he sidles closer to Elizabethan patterns; and, as Professor Hulse wrote me after kindly reading this essay, any “diagnosis“ of Paulina's case is complicated by the minor epic's “generic breakdown.” For more on cross-generic patterns, see Hallett Smith, “A Woman Killed with Kindness,“ PMLA 53 (1938): I38-47.

6 Leggatt, Alexander, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare (Toronto, 1973)Google Scholar, ch. 6, describes stage whores and their connection with economic disease. Haselkorn, Anne, Prostitution in Elizabethan and Jacobean Comedy (Troy, N.Y., 1983)Google Scholar, finds moments of sympathy. Official views were harsh, enforcement often lax; see Bond, Ronald, “ ‘Dark Deeds Darkly Answered': Thomas Becon's Homily Against Whoredom and Adultery, Its Contexts, and Its Affiliations with Three Shakespearean Plays,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 16 (1985): 191–205 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Livy's History, 1.4. Du Bellay's wolf joke connects whorishness to urban foundation, a comment on Rome's source and a hint, perhaps, that whores symbolize or in some sense are the slippery and flawed stuff out of which human structures rise: all cities are grass. For speculation on wolves and archaic Roman religion, see Michels, Agnes Kirsopp, “The Topography and Interpretation of the Lupercalia,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 84 (1953)Google Scholar: 35-59.

8 Du Bellay's epic allusions are satirical, but Markham's complaint tradition had its own connections with the epic as well as with older Boccaccian notions of tragedy: regretful magnates had played roles of national moment, and lamenting females incorporate Ovidian (and hence semi-Virgilian) themes, political subtexts, and epic subplots; as Hulse, ch. 1, shows, the word “epyllion” is quite appropriate.

9 Danae recurs in English complaints; Lawner, Courtesans, 151-59, explores her legend in Italian images of the courtesan.

10 The allusion is also Petrarchan (“Quanto cangiata, oimè, da quel di pria,” Rime 33) and thus serves a satirical strain that helps unify the Divers jeux. See Hoggan, Yvonne, “Anti-Petrarchism in Joachim Du Bellay's ‘Divers Jeux rustiques,’ “ Modern Language Review 74 (1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 808-19, although she does not mention this line. Helen O. Piatt, “Structure in Du Bellay's Divers Jeux rustiques,” Bibliothèque d'humanisme et renaissance 35 (J973): 19-37 argues that Du Bellay has positioned this poem so as to balance “Le Combat d'Hercule et d'Acheloys“; if so, that too subverts the epic mode.

11 Rebhorn, Wayne, “Du Bellay's Imperial Mistress: Les Antiquitez de Rome as Petrarchist Sonnet Sequence,” Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 609-22.

12 The comparison of a body to a building is common and of a woman's body to a city scarcely less so. For particularly relevant comments on sexuality, urban subtexts, and complaints, see Dubrow, Heather, Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987)Google Scholar. See also Allen, D. C., “The Rape of Lucrece,” in Image and Meaning (Baltimore, 1968)Google Scholar. The lady as a besieged town was found everywhere: “Then say you yea, or say you no, / I'le scale your wals, before I go,” says a lover in Willobie hisAvisa, 1594, an anonymous poem thatjests at this tradition (ed. G. B. Harrison, New York, 1966, 67).

13 Greene, Thomas The Light in Troy (New Haven, 1982)Google Scholar, 220-41, eloquently treats Du Bellay as an ambivalent archaeologist, although he may underestimate the recoil and negation in Du Bellay's feelings about ancient Rome. On Du Bellay and modern Rome see Dickinson, Gladys, Du Bellay in Rome (Leiden, 1960)Google Scholar.

14 Buchanan, who made lupa / wolf / Lupercalia jokes (“In Romam,” Poemata, 1615, sig. B5), shepherds a flock of classical allusions into his defense of bawds. Ford, Philip J. and Watt, W. S., eds., George Buchanan, Prince of Poets (Aberdeen, 1982), 61 Google Scholar, call this “playful erudition,” but the ironies do not leave the ancient city unscathed. Buchanan's Leonora is the mother and daughter of whores: Lena tibi est genitrix, tu matris filia paelex, / et tua suscipiet filia matris onus” (146).

15 Theactes ofEnglysh votaryes (1546; 1551 ed.), A6V, A3.

16 I can find no influence of Du Bellay on Dekker's Honest Whore plays (1604, 1608?) but they sometimes show a semi-serious empathy not unlike his.

17 The Pléiade contributed notably to this vile tradition; see Bailbé, Jacques, “Le Thème de la Vieille femme dans la poésie satirique du seizième et du début du dixseptième siècles,“ Bibliothèque d'humanisme et renaissance 26 (1964)Google Scholar: 98-119 and, although not on the old courtesan, V.-L. Saulnier, “Sur deux poèmes des ‘Jeux rustiques,'” Revue universitaire 59(1950) 1265-71. Bailbé, who traces an increasing humanity in such poetry, points also to its sadism. This sadism shows in some Protestant attacks on Rome as a biblical harlot, hatred merging with sexual anxiety. In foretelling what male theologians will do to the Whore of Babylon, John Bale outdoes his biblical source in ferocity: Luther, Erasmus, Tyndale, Calvin, and “others,” doubtless including Bale, will desert her, chase her, strip her, “eate her fleshe” and “Ffinally with fyre shall they burne her“ (The Image ofhothe churches, 1548? ed., sig. s8).

18 Although the association of woman and city is common, the diction and the emphasis on devouring time show, I believe, the impact on Daniel and Drayton of Du Bellay's Antiquitez especially as translated by Spenser; see also Hieatt, A. K., “The Genesis of Shakespeare's Sonnets: Spenser's Ruines of Rome: by Bellay,” PMLA 98 (1983)Google Scholar: 800- 14. My own essay owes much to conversations with Professor Hieatt on Spenser, Shakespeare, and Rome.

19 I canot find a real “Paulina“; nor can Lynn Lawner, who generously tried to help me. True, Du Bellay's friend Olivier de Magny refers to an old Roman whore “La Paule,” who now suffers neglect and the pox: Les Souspirs, ed. David Wilkin (Geneva, 1978), no. 115. Nicholas Goodman's Hollands leaguer (1632), set in “the Kingdome of Eutopia,” describes how the proud atheist Britanica Hollandia becomes a prostitute, inspired partly by a devilish Jesuit and Puritan named Ignatius who describes such rolemodels as “Lollea Paulina, the greatest Courtezan, the basest Whore, and the deceitfullest Bawde, that ever Rome did acknowledge” (C3); Ms. Hollandia is fascinated by the tales of Paulina's wealth, but Ignatius is careful not to follow “the truth of the Story“ and omits mention of her sad decline. Many details parallel Markham's poem and I assume that Goodman has no independent information on “Paulina.“

20 Compare Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters, I.i.149-51: a bawd tells her daughter, “Fifteen times thou know'st I have sold thy maidenhead / To make up a dowry for thy marriage, and yet / There's maidenhead enough … still” (ed. Standish Henning, Lincoln, Ne., 1965).

21 A reversal of tradition: Edoard's “sage Calypsonne” is now the victim.

22 Poynter, Bibliography; says the daughter will now marry the artisan. I see no such indication.