SOURCE: “Music as Dramatic Device in the Secular Theater of Marguerite de Navarre,” in Renaissance Drama, new series VII, edited by Joel H. Kaplan, Northwestern University Press, 1976, pp. 193-217.

[In the following essay, Auld claims that the significance of Marguerite de Navarre's plays lies in part with her innovative dramatization of personal beliefs, and her use of music to lend emotional force to the abstract religious ideas she wishes to convey.]

Among the diverse literary production of Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, the seven dramatic poems grouped together as the Théâtre profane bear testimony to the flexibility and range of her spirit.¹ A learned lady in the best sense, she may also be considered the first modern French poet, the first—even before Ronsard—to entrust to her verses, however clumsily, her intimate personal sentiments, her fears, her sufferings, her rare joys, her devotion to those about her, and her intense, mystical love of God. The most personal of these plays is the Comédie sur le trespas du roy, written shortly after the death of her beloved brother François I in March 1547. It presents Marguerite and those close to her, thinly disguised as shepherds and shepherdesses, seeking solace for the loss of their king and companion, Pan. Although the denouement is in keeping with the princess's Evangelical mysticism, the play is neither polemical nor didactic in essence, but an elegiac pastoral, “une déploration de Grande Rhétorique,” in Saulnier's phrase (TP, p. 208). Having already poured out her grief in the Chansons spirituelles, generally considered some of the most admirable lyric poems of the century, in her melancholy epistles, and in the lengthy effusions of the Navire, the bereaved sister felt the need to couch it in yet another form, a form that could make meaningful to those close to her the terrible conflict she was enduring.² The shepherdess Amarissime, condemned to bitter tears, expresses her sorrow in a series of strophes of song interspersed throughout the dialogue; as the action progresses, the others join in until the arrival of the divine messenger Paraclesis, who informs them that the departed knows the joys of paradise; then all intone the praises of God. Two of the other plays, L'Inquisiteur and the Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan, also involve music extensively. In each case song is brought into the structure in such a way as to contribute to the dramatic effectiveness of the piece; and in each case music is used in an entirely different way. This paper proposes to examine the Théâtre profane from the point of view of Marguerite's skill in handling that association of the two sister arts.

Apart from the Comédie sur le trespas du roy, all the plays have polemical and didactic intention, and most employ the satirical manner common to farce. All but two defend, discuss, and illustrate the joyous and increasingly mystical Evangelical faith that sustained the erudite princess in the last, difficult years of her life. Secular only in contrast to her four mystery plays, whose subjects were drawn directly from the New Testament, they present their pious exempla sometimes in contemporary, sometimes in conventional bucolic settings. In the earliest, Le Malade (1535), a sick man is cured by faith. In the next, a cynical Inquisitor is converted to the religion of love by the songs of little children (L'Inquisiteur, 1536). All are strongly marked by a symbolic or frankly allegorical mode of thought. The most enigmatic is Trop, Prou, Peu, Moins (1544): two portly noblemen, Trop and Prou (“Beaucoup”), “parangons d'ambition impure et de mauvaise conscience” (TP, p. 127), are unable to hide the disgrace of their long ears (symbols of the Inquisition spy?), while their impoverished counterparts, Peu and Moins, rich only in spiritual goods, are protected from all harm by horns which “ne sont de chair, ne d'oz” (l. 368).

The Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan, the most fully elaborated of the plays (1015 lines), was performed in that city on Mardi Gras, 1547. Although set in the countryside, it has little of the pastoral about it, except in the use of songs.³ Three women—La Mondainne, representing amoral materialism, La Supersticieuse, ascetic fanaticism, and La Sage, intelligent faith—debate the proper attitude to adopt toward life and faith, when a fourth arrives on the scene. She is La Ravie de l'Amour de Dieu, so full of joy in her complete and naïve love of her “ami” that she does not speak, but sings in answer to all their questions. The others are unable to share in or even comprehend her divinely inspired madness. Saulnier sees in this play a clear intention to answer Calvin's pamphlet Contre les libertins (TP, pp. 249 ff.). We will be more concerned with the way the shepherdess's snatches of song are made to serve the dramatic purpose.

Of the two plays which explore human love, the first does so in a realistic down-to-earth style, the second in a manner inspired by the author's study of Plato. Two maidens and two wives, representing a spectrum of attitudes and situations, seek out an aged woman for her advice—which all refuse to heed—on the proper conduct of their relationship with husband, lover, or suitor (Comédie des quatre femmes, 1542). “Pour la première fois au théâtre,” comments Saulnier (TP, p. 82), “Marguerite accepte … de descendre sur le plan humain, sans préoccupation symbolique.” Yet “descent to the human plane” does not automatically draw the artistic eye close enough to naturalistic detail to discover pimples and pockmarks. It remains at some distance from concrete reality; the allegorical mode—the habit of abstraction—is still operative, even here. The four figures in the Mont-de-Marsan comedy gave form to moral attitudes rather than to the more abstract moral qualities. Unlike the personifications of proverbial abstractions, Trop, Prou, et al., these women were designated as La Supersticieuse, not La Superstition; La Ravie, not L'Extase. The quatre femmes, if they illustrate real-life situations—one is jealous of her husband, another suspected by hers—as well as moral postures, are still far from that world of dramatic reality in which a Pathelin or an Argan takes on the weight of flesh and blood. Called simply La Première Fille, La Seconde Fille, La Première Femme Mariée, etc., their activity consists entirely of discussion on a general level, as the opening lines attest:

Tout le plaisir, et le contentement,
Que peult avoir un gentil coeur honneste,
C'est liberté de corps, d'entendement,
Qui rend heureux tout homme, oyseau, ou beste.

(ll. 1-4)

There are no doors or windows, no physical properties of any sort on the surface of these texts. The dramatic space is the mind and heart. Like Molière's Bourgeois gentilhomme, this playlet served as an elaborate prelude to a courtly dance spectacle and so has another kind of relation to music—but it is beyond the scope of this inquiry. The other truly secular, Platonic work, Le Parfait Amant, a trifle of 185 lines, written, in all probability, during the final year of Marguerite's life (1549), takes the form of a debate: Another wise old woman, this one more than a thousand years old, seeking to honor the perfect lover, considers three girls, but rejects each in turn as each sets limits to her love; she finally offers the crown to a man and a woman, each of whom insists that his partner and not himself is worthy of it.

Marguerite's literary production, whether in prose or in verse, is characterized as much by the sincerity of her emotions as by the constant and honest intellectual probing of her spirit, which Rabelais called “abstrait, ravy et exstatic.” In all that she wrote she displayed greater concern for the matter she sought to express than for technique and form. Her preoccupations were moral, psychological, and spiritual rather than aesthetic. Thus, the plays present in dramatic form ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and feelings which she treated in other genres as well. Written for use among her entourage, they stand outside the scope of the professional theater of her time, that moribund medieval tradition. In fact, classification is difficult. In the embroiled terminology of the period, three are labeled farce, the rest, comédie; because of their abstract, allegorical character and nearly constant didactic intent, they could just as well be called moralités.

I

The foregoing summaries have meant to suggest—and to do no more than that at this point—the extent to which these plays depend on schematicization of their subjects, a conception far removed from that of modern theater. The constant simplification, the avoidance of concrete detail, the predilection for polarities and carefully calibrated intermediate degrees—all seem to bespeak a set of poems cast in dramatic form, but essentially devoid of necessary theatricality. Are they, unlike Musset's eminently playable “spectacles dans un fauteuil,” fit only to be read? The reader, even one who enjoys that ability which Molière insisted upon as indispensable, “de voir dans ces indications tout le jeu des acteurs” (“Avertissement” to L'Amour médecin), finds little here to guide his visual imagination. In this Marguerite's plays are not unlike the other dramatic texts of her time. The realism was on the stage, in the gestures of the actors. Playwrights had not yet discovered the art of incorporating the telling gesture into the text itself. Indeed, they did not seek it. Professor Saulnier has testified, in a note to the revised edition (1963), that several productions undertaken since the first appearance of the entire set in 1945, revealed “que ces textes passaient la rampe” (p. xxv).

However disappointed we may be to find in the Théâtre profane so little of the density of the author's shorter poems, or the psychological realism of her Heptaméron, however frustrated by the resolutely general nature of the vocabulary, its relative colorlessness, we may still admire her skill at manipulating dramatic structures, creating poetic dialogue, handling a certain type of conventionalized dramatic rhythm, and finding varied ways to integrate song into the dramatic framework. In the highly personal dramatization of profound anguish that animates the Comédie sur le trespas du roy, as in L'Inquisiteur and the Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan, song serves both the development of the drama and the structural interplay of hidden meanings. This is a theater of the mind, intent on stimulating not so much the senses as the intellect. It draws its force from effective use of the rhetorical tradition. We tend to think of that ancient art either as a sterile collection of shopworn formulas or as a system of classification of tropes. But until relatively recently rhetorical learning concentrated more on forms, schemata, than on images. This play of forms—structures, in today's terminology—is what gives Marguerite's theater its dramatic power. The beauty of well-contrived schemes is intellectually perceived. This is not to say, of course, that these rhetorically based works have no affective power, that they touch only the mind and not the heart: rhetoric, after all, is the art of moving an audience. It is to suggest rather that the role played by music, as by the other constituent elements, employs that art's unquestioned affective power in a way specifically involving perception of forms.

Besides the variety of subjects and of levels of abstraction in this collection of essentially meditative chamber plays, the three that we are about to consider in detail furnish a note to the history of theater with music in France. Not only is the use of song a device clearly impossible in texts meant to be read, whether silently or aloud, but, since music has a very special effect in the theater, the way it is employed calls for study. Not the least of Marguerite's accomplishments is the distinctly different use of song in each case. In the first, L'Inquisiteur, she put into the mouths of children some of the most beautiful words of the Old Testament, those of Psalm 3; then, once the divinely inspired children have confounded and converted the worldly prelate to their “madness,” the “Canticle of Simeon.” In the second, the elegiac Comédie sur le trespas du roy, she set new lyrics to already existing, learned chansons musicales, using dialogue between strophes of song as less intense but still lyric episodes. And in the Mont-de-Marsan play she collected snatches of secular love songs, capitalizing on the ambiguous similarities in expression between sacred and profane love.

Music was not uncommon in plays of the early sixteenth century, but neither was it an indispensable element. In a thorough study of the repertoire from 1400-1550, Howard Mayer Brown found that “of the nearly 400 remaining plays … less than half mention any chanson specifically.”⁴ Marguerite's Mont-de-Marsan comedy is one of six plays which contain “ten or more chansons each, with at least a part of the text given. … The shepherdess … has twenty-nine sung lines and couplets, although some of them refer to different parts of the same chanson” (pp. 82-83). Marguerite's use of songs in the other two plays, while it does not qualify them for mention among six out of four hundred, takes a form that Brown considers only “theoretically possible” in this period, the situation that arises when speech is “replaced by song, as in opera, where the audience must accept a convention it knows to be unrealistic” (p. 88). They do not, of course, truly anticipate operatic recitative; in fact, they draw their effect from that convention which denies ordinary mortals the right to sing on stage except in situations in which they might do so in real life.

Curiously, the earliest secular theatrical works known in France, the two plays by Adam de la Halle, not only contain examples of singing and dancing but offer a striking illustration of the two distinct ways in which song (and dance) can be used in nonoperatic theatre. In Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion (ca. 1283) Adam included pastoral songs and dances to help fix the action in that special realm which is peculiar to pastoral as a partially allegorized portrayal of human society.⁵ The shepherds and shepherdesses of that play sing and dance as part of their normal everyday activities, but for ordinary communication they speak. Song and dance, which the audience may well appreciate as performance, are nonetheless presented primarily as amusement activities that the characters do among themselves. The tradition dates from antiquity; it would be revived in the later Renaissance through the influence of the Orphic myth, and in the device of the singing competition between rival shepherds.

The other play by Adam de la Halle, Le Jeu de la feuillée (1262), contains only one line of music, sung by fairies as they descend to earth.⁶ This solitary line reinforces the miraculous effect in contrast to the otherwise realistic situation. It opens for the spectator, if only fleetingly, the door to another world, from which these supernatural beings come, a world in which the normal state is so different from that of ordinary mortals that its beings communicate in song. These two examples represent opposite poles of music's use in drama. (We are not concerned here with incidental music, preludes, horn calls, fanfares). On the one hand there is performance per se, whether presented as naïve amusement of the characters at play or as polished and accomplished artistry. This approach culminates in the play-within-a-play device, and sometimes, as a variant, in the ballet-within-a-play, as in Durval's Agarite (Paris, 1636). On the other hand there is song or dance as the natural mode of expression of the character: one who sings when others speak is immediately understood to be either “possessed” (by love or some other form of madness) or a being different from, and normally superior to, the other characters of the play.

II

It is the second approach which Marguerite adopted in the earliest of her plays to call for singing, as she dramatized the conversion of the evil Inquisitor, symbol of the spirit of persecution into which the established Church had fallen, brought by seven little children to recognize the true, joyous message of Christianity. As is often the case in these plays, the title character simply explains to the audience what he represents. In nine eight-line strophes he complains of the difficulty of dealing with “ce savoir neuf, qui le nostre surmonte,” the new Evangelism whose adepts know the Bible better than he; he confesses himself venal and corrupt; then, with a casuistic argument which relates him to Tartuffe, he explains the efficacity of occasionally condemning an innocent man as an example for others, for one can always justify excessive cruelty by ascribing it to zeal:

Le noir en blanc ainsi sçay convertir,
Car ma fureur en zelle je desguyse.

(ll. 55-56)

With that, he concludes that he is a “Rien-ne-vault.”

The scene shifts briefly to the children, whose words suggest symbolically their nearness to God. A simultaneous shift to a five-syllable line expresses the carefree nature of their play. They are presented two at a time, each speaking a tercet, each pair of tercets following the rhyme scheme aab / aab. With the exception of the first set, in which the first child, Janot, has a sixain to himself between two of the exchanges, the three groups are perfectly uniform.

Shocked by their carefree play, the Inquisitor upbraids them for passing their time “ainsi en jeux et en chansons” rather than at their lessons. They answer each of his charges with riddles and enigmas of such infuriating wisdom and cleverness—

L'Inquisiteur Quel
plaisir pouvez vous avoir
A jeu de si peu de valleur?
Jacot Comment pouvez vous le jeu
veoir,
Qui n'a ne forme ne coulleur?
L'Inquisiteur Je voy le jeu,
où fourvoyez
Vous estes de faire tout bien.
Thierrot Ha, vous dictes que vous
voyez!
En bonne foy, je n'en croy rien.

(ll. 195-202)

—that he finally commands them to stop talking, whereupon they commence to sing, since they may no longer speak their faith. The Varlet takes up their defense and interprets their song for the incensed prelate, who needs an interpreter to comprehend the word of God. When the Inquisitor suspects that they are making fun of him, his servant reassures him:

Ce sont enfans, qui sans soulcy
S'accordent d'une voix ensemble:
Chacun est joyeulx comme ung roy.

(ll. 291-293)

Line 292, which at first glance seems doubly redundant, in fact suggests a contradiction, since s'accorder implies that they sing in harmony. The figurative meaning suggests that they praise God in complete accord, with the natural sweetness of innocence. It is not unlikely that the children sang a single melodic line in unison. But they may have adopted the learned, polyphonic style. Whatever the case, their song, so appropriate for the occasion (Marot's French translation of Psalm 3)—

O Seigneur, que de gens,
A nuyre dilligens,
Qui nous troublent et griefvent!
Mon Dieu, que d'ennemys,
Qui aux champs se sont mis
Et contre nous s'eslièvent!

(ll. 283-288)

—shows that without study or effort they naturally praise God in the worthiest of styles. Their untutored discourse, like that of Jesus in the temple, is shown by this device to be on a higher spiritual level than that of the churchman. As children they are still close to God. Thus, the step from speech to song is a short one for them, almost a return to a more natural means of expression.

Besides lifting the children above the base world of the Inquisitor—“Ilz [sic] sont hors de mérencolye” (l. 297)—their song also produces its wonted effect upon the soul. As the Varlet comments, again:

Escouttez leur chanson jolye,
De joye serez possesseur.

(ll. 301-302)

After the first sextet, sung in one section, every three lines of the psalm are punctuated by his increasingly ecstatic comments, comments that clearly delineate the stages of his conversion, as he comes to share in their accord. At the beginning of the scene he simply tries to defend the children from his master's wrath, arguing their youth and innocence. Just before the song the Inquisitor asks him if he means to take their side, and he quickly replies, “Non faiz.” But as they continue to sing he remarks first on their joy and the beauty of their song, then on the unity of their singing, the absence of strife and discord in their wholly pure, Christian existence. This leads him to praise the lack of falseness in their hearts. When they begin to sing of nearness to God (“Poinct ne m'a repoulsé”), he decides to join them, to share in this communion which is a means of approaching God:

En liberté et sans contraincte
Jouans, chantans, tousjours joyeulx,
Passent le temps à chose maincte,
Mais tousjours ont au ciel les yeulx.
          Si congé me donnez, mon maistre,
Avecques eulx je demourray:
Car en pleur je ne veulx plus estre,
Mais avecques eulx je riray.

(ll. 323-330)

This affirmation of the joys and pleasures of life, which is one of the central currents of the rediscovery of pagan antiquity, takes on mystical significance in the revitalized Evangelistic Christianity of Marguerite's fellow-believers, who have indeed “become as little children,” finding a source of joy in all the things of God's creation.

As the beauty of the children's song wins the Varlet to their side, as he begins to desire to live at one with them as they are in a sense at one with God, his thought begins to coincide with theirs in a striking verbal parallel:

Les Enfans Donq coucher m'en iray,
En seurté dormiray,
Sans craincte de mesgarde.
Le Varlet L'oeil de Dieu tousjours
les garde.
Les Enfans Puis me resveilleray:
Et sans peur veilleray,
Ayant Dieu pour ma garde.
Le Varlet Je croy qu'à
chacun d'eulx bien tarde
L'heure qu'en Paradis seront.
Les Enfans Cent mil hommes de front
Craindre ne me feront,
Encores qu'ilz emprinsent.
Le Varlet Pleust à Dieu,
sans tant sermonner,
Qu'avecques eulx ilz me retinsent.
Les Enfans Et que, pour m'estonner,
Clorre et environner
De tous coustez me vinsent.
Le Varlet Et que leur chant si
bien m'apprinsent
Que, comme eulx, vesquisse de foy.

(ll. 331-349)

Their faith takes root in him so solidly that he is ready to side with them, as indicated in the words of their song, against a hundred thousand men—even, and more immediately, against his master, the Inquisitor. Here the poetess brings to bear her rhetorical skill by aligning the Varlet's ruminations with the ideas contained in the children's song, so that, lost in his own thoughts, he is at the same time carried along by the suggestions of the psalm until finally at the end of the passage his sentence and that of the children dovetail syntactically (“Et que …” plus the subjunctive verb), even though they started from syntactically as well as morally different positions. Not only is this sort of device particularly well suited to the schematic-symbolic style of the play, it is equally appropriate for use with music, for it operates in the same way as musical forms. It serves to set the servant and the children into a parallel relationship, to establish a communion among them, even though the Varlet is not yet filled with the divine madness that lifts their expression into song.

Moments later the learned cleric again questions the children. At first the smallest among them answers in the most infantile way possible, uttering great truths in double monosyllables, while the Varlet interprets:

L'Inquisiteur Mon filz,
comme appellez vous Dieu?
Le Petit Enfant Pappa.
Le Varlet                              C'est
tresbien respondu,
Père il est de tous en tout lieu,
Mais il n'est pas bien entendu.
L'Inquisiteur Qu'espérez
vous trouver en luy?
L'Enfant Dodo.
          …
L'Inquisiteur Mais qui est
ce Dieu là?
L'Enfant                                                   Bon,
bon.
          …
L'Inquisiteur Des bonnes oeuvres,
des mérittes,
Qu'est ce?
L'Enfant Cza.

(ll. 419-433)

Thus does even the smallest child confound the powerful, worldly prelate with a verbal snap of the fingers (“çà!”). Immediately, the children begin, in a series of nine quatrains, to propound the tenets of the Evangelical faith.

Qui voyt Dieu partout en tout lieu
Et ne veoit plus ne soy ny homme,
Il est par grâce filz de Dieu,
Et Dieu, non plus homme, se nomme.

(ll. 448-451)

Having risen above the level of ordinary mortals in the eyes of their interlocutors—and the audience—they can now return to the speech-level of the play (i.e., poetry) for rational exposition of their position. The two men are deeply moved by this demonstration:

L'Inquisiteur Ilz ne
disent rien d'aventure:
J'ay tout dedans la Bible leu.
Et leur parolle est si trèspure
Que jamais tel sens je n'ay veu.
Le Varlet Mais oyez le divin langaige
Que chacun de ces enfans tient.

(ll. 472-477)

The conversion of the Inquisitor is signaled as he bursts into a fast-moving (pentasyllabic) odelike prayer which begins:

O puissant Esprit,
O doulx Jésuchrist.

(ll. 488-489)

His four twelve-line stanzas will be followed by four more spoken by the Varlet, then by six half-stanzas as each of the children adds his voice to the paean. Then all join hands in a visual indication of their spiritual union as they sing the “Cantique de Siméon,” newly translated by Bonaventure des Périers:

Puis que de ta promesse
L'entier accompliment
Octroye à ma vieillesse
Parfaict contantement:
J'actendray sans soulcy
De la mort la mercy.

(ll. 624-629)

Marguerite's faith in the redemption of sinners is expressed in a dramatic poetry largely devoid of imagery and concrete detail, a poetry of moral preoccupation, built of the sort of structural blocks that rhetoric has in common with music.⁷ We need seek no realism here, material or psychological. What is portrayed is spiritual action. The Inquisitor's conversion, like his inability to comprehend the children's transparent riddles, may not be understood in realistic, temporal terms. They are abstract, or symbolic, representations of events that might be observed in life in any number of different specific forms. Similarly, if he is converted, suddenly and without transition, to the pure, humanistic faith of the children, that conversion is effected through essentially musical means, including musiclike structures, which elevate the action of the play above the constraints of realistic convention.

III

In the “mystical mascarade” performed at Mont-de-Marsan three women discuss and finally agree upon the best way to live: neither to put all one's faith in things terrestrial and material (La Mondainne), nor to disdain the body in the attempt to elevate the soul (La Supersticieuse), but to accept the dualism of the human condition, and to gain peace through study of the Scriptures (the position urged by La Sage). A coup de théâtre, however, shows even this to be inferior to another approach to God, that of simple, complete love, as exemplified by La Ravie de l'Amour de Dieu, a shepherdess whose only occupation is loving her “berger” and expressing that love in song and dance. She hardly ever speaks, but responds in song to their every remark, with the exception of one short passage, where she condescends to reason with them. In the play just discussed the princess had incorporated into a dramatic context serious songs written, and probably set, by members of her entourage. In this case she simply drew bits of song from the standard repertoire. The trick, a not uncommon one in the later Middle Ages, consisted of placing the secular lyrics in a context where their nonspecific professions of profane love would be understood in a sacred sense:

Jamais d'aymer mon cueur ne sera las,
Car dieu l'a faict d'une telle nature
Que vray amour luy sert de noriture:
Amour luy est pour tout plaisir soulas.

(ll. 603-606)

J'ayme bien mon amy
De bonne amour certaine,
Car je sçay bien qu'il m'ayme
Et aussi fay je luy.

(ll. 628-631)

Laisser parler, laissez dire,
Laisser parler qui vouldra.
Médire qui veult mesdire;
J'aymeray qui m'aymera.

(ll. 639-642)

Using lyrics in the familiar style of medieval popular songs, Marguerite profits from the prevalence of pastoral love songs to develop the conceit of the person who truly loves God as Shepherdess to the Great Shepherd of Psalm 23. None of this was new; Marguerite put it into a dramatic structure of her own creation.

She amused herself in a sort of tour de force that involved making these borrowed words to popular songs serve as answers to the comments of the three other women:

La Supersticieuse Qui l'entretient
en ceste amour
          aymée?
La Bergere chante Doulce memoire en plaisir
          consommée.
La Sage Voicy une nouvelle loy:
Comment venez vous si contente?
La Bergere chante Seure et loial[e] en foy,
Jusqu'à la mort amante.
La Mondainne N'avez vous d'autre
vie envie?
La Bergere chante Chanter et rire est ma vie,
Quant mon amy est près de moy.
La Supersticieuse J'oy d'elle
ce que croire n'oze.
La Bergere chante Helas! il n'est si doulce chose …
La Sage En sa fasson ny chant je
n'entend[z] rien.
La Bergere chante Que ne m'entendz! assez je
          m'entend[z] bien.

(ll. 653-665)

The others will never know nor understand this state of ecstasy, and the end of the play leaves them uncertain as to whether “Elle est du tout ou folle ou beste, / Ou opiniastre ou glorieuse” (ll. 940-941).

La Supersticieuse and La Mondainne each sing a short passage at the opening of the play (ll. 41-46, 87-88). This is the same sort of music as that of La Ravie later on, but it has a very different purpose from hers.⁸ The sextet and couplet sung by the first two set the pastoral atmosphere and foreshadow the climax, where the Bergere will give voice to thirty-four snatches of song, consisting of from one to six lines. Her song, which renders ordinary conversation impossible and thus disrupts normal social interaction, stands apart from theirs. A director would make sure that she had the sweetest voice of the three. La Supersticieuse, ancestor of Arsinoë, might have a harsh, dry sound, while her worldly companion could sport a torchy contralto, for instance. Then, if the Shepherdess had a clear, flexible soprano, the effect would be achieved without any necessity for other musical distinction.

In any case, the point is made dramatically. The satisfaction of the first two gives way easily before the sober arguments of the Wise Woman, while the complete and unreasoning abandon of La Ravie withstands the arguments of all three. Because the ineffable, mystical source of her joy lies beyond the expressive powers of human discourse, it is natural that she sing, just as it is effective dramatic convention that they, like the Inquisitor, not comprehend the true meaning of her statements when the audience does so with ease. In adapting these “chansons païennes” to pious intentions, the Queen of Navarre followed the recent example of the Chrestienne Resjouyssance by Eustorg de Beaulieu.⁹ She devised her own way of putting them to use.

With that remarkable combination of erudition, charity, and mystical faith which caused Marot, who knew her well, to describe her as “corps féminin, coeur d'homme, et tête d'ange,” the poetess cast in dramatic form with this play a forceful statement of a problem which haunted the Renaissance and which was to divide France in bloody strife later in the century: what place, in an increasingly secular society, should the true saint be accorded? The play offers no solution to the problem, other than the dramatically clumsy one of tolerance, as the three earthbound women decide to leave the young Shepherdess to her transports:

Peult estre qu'un jour sera bonne;
Pensez que telle avez esté:
L'iver ne resemble à l'esté.
Retirons-nous, car il est tard.

(ll. 955-958)

They can see in her action nothing but madness. Saulnier has pointed out that the theme of the apparent folly which possesses those of true faith recurs constantly throughout this set of plays (TP, pp. 128, passim). That observation gives added support to the corrected reading he offers for the name of the heroine. Abel Lefranc, who first published the long-undiscovered manuscripts to these works, read her name as La Reine de l'Amour de Dieu.¹⁰Ravie, like those other “fous pour le monde,” Peu and Moins, and the psalm-singing children, she is transported out of this world to a higher plane. (The same term, ravi, is used to describe the trespas du roy; he too has been carried away by perfect love, in a way not essentially different, but only more complete.) “Out of this world” may appear inaccurate unless we assume that the world of the play may be equated with that of basic human existence. This is true in the sense that, since reality is rich in multiple and often contradictory suggestion, no work of art can be other than selective. The qualities of the individual, as Aristotle knew, are infinite; every work of art must to some extent deal in species rather than individuals. Every play, from the most naturalistic drawing-room drama to the most allegorical morality, establishes a base level at some lesser or greater remove from undifferentiated, existential reality; that base level is then understood, within the framework, to stand for that reality. In the Mont-de-Marsan comedy, as in the Inquisitor farce, Marguerite presents a highly schematized view of life—existence on the level of moral perception. In order to present a character of a different stripe, one, as we might say, who has her head in the clouds, she has recourse to the device used by Adam de la Halle in the Jeu de la feuillée, the supraverbal power of song. On a different satirical level, Molière, for instance, allowed the two lovers in Le Malade imaginaire, to express their passion in improvised song before the girl's uncomprehending father. On yet another level, a popular farce of the fifteenth century made sport of a man who refused to speak to his wife except in song.¹¹ Such deviant behavior is indeed folly in the down-to-earth world of farce. The traditional pastoral setting, reminiscent of Robin et Marion, which seems to be suggested at the outset of Mont-de-Marsan when each shepherdess absentmindedly sings a bit of a familiar tune, takes on an entirely different character with the appearance of La Ravie. Marguerite's playlet lifts well-known insignificant ditties out of their commonplace banality and, profiting from that ambiguity which is the special gift of musical expression, transforms them into vehicles of profound devotion.

IV

Yet another possible way of using existing songs is the frequent Renaissance device of parody, writing new words to old melodies. This Marguerite did in the Comédie sur le trespas du roy, in which courtly inhabitants of a pastoral society, Amarissime, her husband Securus, and their cherished friend Agapy, mourn the death of the chief Berger, Pan. She used a feminine form of Paraclesis, the messenger of comfort, who assures them that Pan has not died but risen to a new life in paradise. The transparently symbolic Greek names help to establish a humanistic infrastructure for the elaboration of a not quite typical medieval allegory. “Les personnages,” noted Saulnier, “n'habillent pas ici, comme c'est si souvent le cas chez elle, un certain nombre d'attitudes differentes de l'âme” (TP, p. 212). If it is possible to identify the principals more or less convincingly as members of the author's family (Amarissime, Marguerite herself; Securus, her husband Henry d'Albret; Agapy, most likely her nephew, the future Henry II), the existence of such historical keys does not limit the meaning of the play by setting it in the realm of history, but adds yet a further level of significance. Marguerite mourns the loss of her brother, the King of France; on the stage a shepherdess bemoans the loss of her community's respected leader, Pan; his very name, however, shows him to be a demigod and sets the action on a level higher than that of the ordinary shepherd-play. For Paraclesis there can be no historical key. Her arrival with words of Christian consolation not only raises the play to the abstract conceptual level indicated in the other names, but firmly anchors it within a context of Christian Evangelism, in an archetypal situation patterned on that of the disciples overcome with grief at the loss of their Messiah. The characters do not incarnate “a number of different moral positions” in the sense that the work is not polemical, not a debate, but eulogistic and elegiac. They share the same attitudes: what keeps the subject from becoming unbearably static is a touch of psychological realism that permits each to react in a somewhat different way.

Into this highly formalized rhetorical drama are introduced strophes of song, with a regularity reminiscent of the slow drum beats of a funeral procession. Each song is introduced with a notation indicating the most familiar words of the melody used, the timbre (cf. “To be sung to the tune of God Save the Queen”). Several stanzas or couplets of the same song may appear, separated by dialogue, without further need for reference to the timbre; but when a new timbre begins, its first two lines are given to identify it. These are chansons musicales, learned songs, and most of the music has survived both in monophonic and homophonic versions. Amarissime sings the first two couplets, to the timbre “Jouyssance vous donneray.”¹² This would seem an incongruous vehicle for such a doleful burden as “Las! tant malheureuse je suis,” had not the ability of a given piece of music to adapt to the most diverse textual meanings and moods so often been demonstrated. Besides, the emotional content of this sort of music was relatively indeterminate, with little or no attempt made to convey a mood through the music alone. The second chanson, a strophe of eight lines, uses the timbre “Las! voulez-vous qu'une personne chante / De qui le cueur ne faict que souspirer.” Marguerite evidently followed the original text closely in this case, for the first two lines of her chanson correspond structurally, and she even kept some of the original rhymes, with slight variations in the order.

In the other plays there is a clear distinction between the styles of the texts for music and those for spoken dialogue. In the Trespas du roy the two are virtually indistinguishable:

O Pan, o Pan, mon maistre et mon amy,
Puisque tu es de nos yeulx arraché,
Et que ton corps en terre est endormy,
Et avecq toy tout nostre bien caché,
Que fera plus mon ceur triste et fâché
Fors de pleurer, delaissant toutte joye?
Pourquoy mon lut j'ay au saulle attaché
Sans que jamais son armonie j'oye.

(ll. 55-62)

Tant de larmes gettent mes yeulx,
Qu'ilz ne voient terre ne cieulx,
Telle est de leur pleur l'habondance.
Ma bouche se plainct en tous lieux,
De mon ceur ne peult saillir mieulx
Que soupirs sans nulle allegence.

(ll. 63-68)

Of these two lamentations, the first is spoken by Securus, the second sung by Amarissime. Save for a few lines that serve to indicate and advance the stage action, all the speeches and songs until the appearance of the Paraclete mourn the death of Pan. The strongly rhetorical character of the entire text, which heightens the language of even the spoken passages in a way not observable in the other plays (where the poetic expression remains relatively unadorned), minimizes the distance between wailing lamentation and full-fledged song. Securus indeed takes his wife's song as an indication of her grief:

Mais n'ay-je pas ouy la foible voix
De la dolente et triste Amarissime,
Devers laquelle à grand haste m'en vois?
Car à l'oyr presque morte l'estime,
Plaine de deuil du pied jusqu'à la cime.
De desespoir j'ay son chant entendu:
Elle a raison, soit en prose ou en rime,
De lamenter, car elle a tout perdu.

(ll. 69-76)

And if the inconsolable shepherdess consents to live for her husband's sake, she does so only that she may continue her dirge:

Pour toy vivray en ceste vie amère.
Mais chantons donc puisque ceste cymere
Mort a de nous nostre joye ravie.

(ll. 116-118)

All share the same overwhelming sense of loss, and thus transported out of themselves they communicate better in song than in speech. Whereas in the other plays song served to create distance between one group and another, now it brings all the characters into communion, it unites them in suffering. Agapy hears Amarissime's song as she approaches, and at first fails to understand its specific referent:

Quel son, quel chant est-ce que j'oy de loing,
Tant que je pers le sens et la parole?

(ll. 153-154)

He nevertheless immediately perceives the mournful tone:

C'est voix de femme et qui a grand besoing,
A mon advis, que quelcun la consolle.

(ll. 155-156)

She sings two more strophes, whereupon he exclaims that she is speaking directly to him:

Ceste voix là me tire à soy,
Car elle est semblable à la mienne:
Et sens une douleur en moy
Toute telle comme la sienne.
Sa chansson me semble ancienne,
Si sont les motz de neuf ouvraige;
D'où que ce soit que la voix vienne,
Ignorer n'en puis le langaige.

(ll. 173-180)

That “language” is music, the most powerful mover of the passions. Almost as though it were a password to a secret society, that of mutual grief and suffering, Securus then sings a couplet: “Ma triste voix plus rien que dueil ne chante” (l. 201), to which Agapy responds with one of his own:

Ma douleur, [trop] grande au dedans
Du cueur ne peult sortir dehors.

(ll. 217-218)

Amarissime recognizes the community of spirit she feels with his mode of expression:

C'est Agapy: je congnois sa voix doulce.
Hélas, c'est luy, j'en ay bonne apparance.
Son chant piteux à lamenter me poulse,
Car, comme moy, il n'a que desplaisance.

(ll. 225-228)

The unanimity of their sorrow once established in this manner, they can speak their mutual pain until, rising to a new height of feeling, they join their voices as well as their hearts in the trio “Tant ay d'ennuy et tant de desconfort” (l. 351), which is interrupted by the messenger with words of reassurance and comfort. The play ends with a four-part Latin song in the tradition of the Te Deum Laudamus with which most medieval plays concluded.

V

Thus, in each of three comédies profanes, Marguerite made different and effective use of song: by putting poetic translations of biblical texts into the mouths of children; by transforming popular ditties into devotional lyrics; and by composing new, dramatically appropriate lyrics to preexistent music. Each device, far from being a facile adornment, makes a significant contribution to the dramatic effectiveness of the works. In all three cases she drew on the power that music has on the stage to set those who use it apart from other characters. Music, whose strangely affective structures are the only source of its meaning, often seems to reveal higher forms of existence; it is the Platonic art par excellence. It may place the singer above the others in the eyes of the audience, it may bring others up to the same spiritual level as the singer, or it may underline a common spiritual state. All three plays depend on the convention which decrees that ordinary mortals do not normally sing. In all three that refusal of norms produces perception of a higher, an ideal world.

There is no recitative here, no cantar parlando such as would be devised for the new genre of opera. Yet song in these plays does convey verbal along with supraverbal meanings. The device is not proto-operatic, but thoroughly and strictly dramatic. Professor Saulnier has suggested that the integration of song into these dramatic structures makes them “de vraies chantefables” (TP, p. xxi). Tempting though such comparison may be, it threatens to obscure the true character both of Marguerite's poems and of the curious medieval genre known to us through the familiar Aucassin et Nicolette.¹³ That delightful thirteenth-century work alternates passages of prose with sections of chanted verse in a way that does indeed resemble the contrast of recited and sung passages in Marguerite's comedies. Yet, however slim the dividing line between narrative and dramatic material in an age when stories were normally recited, the chantefable remains a narrative, not a dramatic form. Its chanted sections contrast sharply with the prose narrative. They do not advance the action, but provide a lyric commentary on it through the lament, meditation, or rejoicing of one of the characters, or simply through remarks by the narrator on their psychological state. There is a distinct difference in style between the generally quite straightforward, bare-storytelling narrative passages and the lyric passages, full of descriptions, direct quotations, lamentations, etc. Since there are no actors, but only the narrator, the music need not be presented as a natural activity of certain sorts of characters. (There is only one passage of song as such, the lament of a guard sympathetic to the plight of the lovers: section 15.) Even the music is rooted in narrative tradition. Closely akin to the repetitive phrases of liturgical chant, it is intoned on a single repeated line of plainchant until the final line of each section, which gets a different melodic configuration to mark the ending. Marguerite's intentions and methods are essentially different.

Her playlets, written neither as popular entertainment nor for art's sake, as we think of art today, but in the service of her deep-seated religious convictions, are among the first works to cast personal lyricism in a dramatic mold. In order to express her philosophically oriented thought, they take maximum advantage of the schematic tradition of rhetoric and music. Her dramatic technique, like her thought, deals in symbolic structures and high levels of abstraction. It is a constant of lyricism that musical setting wants simplification of verbal expression. It has the power, as it were, to fill in the spaces, created by the simplified expression of the text, with richer meanings of a supraverbal nature. By giving them the strongly affective force that abstract thought lacks, music plays a large part in making the schematized worlds of these plays dramatically viable.

Notes

1. Marguerite de Navarre, Théâtre profane, ed. V. L. Saulnier, Textes Littéraires Français (1946; rev. ed., Geneva, 1963). (Hereafter cited as TP). See also Saulnier's “Etudes critiques sur les comédies profanes de Marguerite de Navarre,” BHR, IX (1947), 36-77.

2. Abel Lefranc, ed., Les Dernières poésies de Marguerite de Navarre (Paris, 1896), p. xxviii.

3. Ibid., p. xxxii.

4. Howard Mayer Brown, Music in the French Secular Theatre, 1400-1550, (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), p. 82.

5. Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion, ed. Ernest Langlois (Paris, 1896); or cf. the editions by K. Varty, mus. trans. Eric Hill (London, 1960); Friedrich Gennrich, (Frankfurt a.M., 1962).

6. Le Jeu de la feuillée, ed. Ernest Langlois (C.F.M.A.), 2d ed. rev. (1923; repr. Paris, 1964).

7. This observation and other assumptions made here concerning the union of words and music are explained and illustrated, with specific reference to seventeenth-century practices, in my forthcoming book, The Lyric Art of Pierre Perrin, Founder of French Opera, to be published by the Institute of Mediaeval Music.

8. Some of the music to these plays has been identified by Lefranc, Dernières poésies, “Appendice sur les timbres des chansons,” pp. 441 ff.; see also Brown, pp. 183 ff.; a complementary volume, Theatrical Chansons of the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries, 1963, gives scores, sometimes several settings of a single poem or timbre.

9. See the Addendum, TP, p. 323, with reference to the study by Harvitt, Eustorg de Beaulieu (Paris, 1918), pp. 114-139. Saulnier also notes three songs used by both authors. Confusion of secular and religious modes was a common practice, as amply demonstrated by D. W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, N.J., 1962), pp. 17, and passim.

10. Lefranc himself revised his reading on this point; see Saulnier, “Etudes critiques,” p. 47.

11. Le Savetier qui ne respont que chansons, in Recueil de farces françaises inédites du XVe siècle, ed. G. Cohen (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), pp. 287-294.

12. The original text (and perhaps the melody as well) is by Clément Marot; cf. his Oeuvres, ed. Jannet, II, 177, and Les Chansons de Clément Marot, by Jean Rollin (Paris, 1950). The music exists in several polyphonic versions, listed by Brown, pp. 244-245. He also notes there that the Bergere in the Mont-de-Marsan play sings two lines of this chanson, beginning with “Encores quant mortes seray.” And he points out an erroneous stage direction in the Saulnier edition (p. 221), which would have Securus and Amarissime begin to sing to the new timbre: Je vous supplie, voyez comment / En amour je suis mal traicté, whereas in fact they merely intone a fourth stanza of the “jouyssance” chanson.

13. Aucassin et Nicolette, ed. F. W. Bourdillon (Manchester, 1919). Saulnier finds that “les chansons se mêlent agréablement aux textes (en trois des comédies) pour en faire de vraies chantefables” (TP, p. xxi). Grace Frank, in a chapter devoted to Aucassin et Nicolette, discussed the slim dividing line that existed between narrative and dramatic material, concluding that the chantefable was not essentially theatrical (The Medieval French Drama [Oxford, 1954], pp. 237-242).