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Amphion Orator. Michael Taormina
Читать онлайн.Название Amphion Orator
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isbn 9783823302490
Автор произведения Michael Taormina
Жанр Документальная литература
Серия Biblio 17
Издательство Bookwire
The personal ties between Henri IV and Malherbe, mediated by BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de, belong to the diffuse and particularistic network of personal relationships known as patronage. One of those unfamiliar but essential practices of early modern France, patronage needs some explanation if a twenty-first-century reader is to appreciate how its assumptions and conventions inform the composition of the royal odes. Fortunately, Peter W. Shoemaker’s important book, Powerful Connections: The Poetics of Patronage in the Age of Louis XIII, offers a compelling and nuanced analysis of this fundamental cultural practice which may be adapted, with small changes, to Malherbe’s royal odes, half of which were composed during the reign of Henri IV. The most important adaptation concerns the particularistic “audience of one,” which Shoemaker sees at work in all patronage texts. While this notion is certainly determinative for the royal odes (their patrons are Henri, Marie, and Louis, with one long ode addressed to BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de), one must recall that a monarch constitutes a special kind of patron, since he or she embodies an audience of more-than-one: this is because a monarch cannot in principle be limited to a single body but always includes the body politicbody politic of the nationnation.1 The royal odes written for the king, or the queen, frequently address him or her directly, but they are also addressed through the monarch to the nationnation and, often, are aimed at the great nobilitynobility in particular, a key constituency of the nationnation. The ode to BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de is an indirect appeal to the latter. Starting from the historical practice of patronage, this chapter shows how the monarch’s person (one of the three particulars of decorum: time, place, and persons) implies an imagined community of addressees.
The broad outlines of patronage described by Shoemaker apply without reservation to the royal odes. “Representations were produced, and power was exerted,” he writes, “through networks of interpersonal relationships that bridged the public and the nonpublic. Writers, historians, artists, architects, and other cultural creators specialized in the business of publicizing—and illustrating—their protectors’ influence. In return, patrons provided publicity for artistic works and gave artists and writers access to social elites where the latter could promote their works” (Shoemaker 17). “This highly personalized and hierarchical system inevitably exerted an influence on literary practice, shaping the exchanges that defined the economic, social, and political value of literature and favoring certain genres and modes of expression. The promise of social advancement created a gradient of desire that generated representations and put them into circulation. In their attempts to win over patrons, writers were drawn into an elitist mode of cultural production and consumption that promoted a hierarchy of literary value based on aristocratic canons of taste” (Shoemaker 19). While the informal arrangements of patronage were governed by verbal contracts based on antiquated feudal ideals, and the relationships were often charged with powerful emotionemotions, it is nevertheless true that self-interest and political calculation inevitably dictated the terms of both sides of the agreement and led to the frequent re-negotiation of loyalties.
The relationship of poet and monarch in the early seventeenth century fits comfortably within Shoemaker’s broad paradigm. “The royal family recruited literary talent both for official propaganda and to provide the scripts for ballets, tournaments, and other courtcourt (royal) festivities” (Shoemaker 30). In theory, a monarch was supposed to be the most distinguished member of the nobilitynobility. Because this was not always the case in fact, monarchs used belles-lettres for self-aggrandizement, reinforcing their social and political elevation over the nobles at courtcourt (royal), especially the great lords, but also shoring up their authority over clergy and magistrates, the other powerful members of the body politicbody politic. Furthermore, given the voluminous and wide diffusion of pamphlet literature, which “sought to reach not only the most reasonable part of the populace, but to interest the masses” (YardeniYardeni, Myriam 44), there is no reason to assume that the impact of belles-lettres was limited to the first two orders of the kingdom. Various poetry anthologies, “the mirrors of their epoch,” edited and published by entrepreneurs with “sharply distinguished literary and esthetic conceptions” (Lafay, “Recueils collectifs” 15), disseminated Malherbe’s royal odes to different sectors of the reading public. Both literary venues, elite and popular, paid homage to the monarch’s preeminence and authority. As Shoemaker notes, this French literature, whether pamphlets or lyriclyric poetry poems, represented an elitist point of view in an elitist mode of expression. Public values were indistinguishable from the elitist values expressed at courtcourt (royal) or in aristocratic circles thanks to the hegemony over cultural production that the monarchy and the nobility exerted through patronage (Shoemaker 17).
Although Shoemaker examines the flourishing of patronage primarily after the reign of Henri IV, he traces the practice’s “contingent rhetorical strategies” and its “personal or particularistic rhetoric” to a foundational text, Budé’s De l’institution du prince [On the Education of the Prince], published in 1547 (Shoemaker 19). “The treatise devotes an extended discussion to courtcourt (royal) oratory and lays particular emphasis on the man of letters’ potential role as counselor” (Shoemaker 20). In Shoemaker’s view, the significance of Budé’s treatise derives from its prescient anticipation of a “shift from oratory to counsel” (Shoemaker 20), of “a move away from the traditional public scope of rhetoric” (Shoemaker 20-21). However, this shift would have to wait more than half a century to come about. The contentious political environment that accompanied the Wars of ReligionWars of Religion not only fostered oratory of the sort practiced by Demosthenes and CiceroCicero, but also subsumed the traditional patronage ties of poets under the banner of one sectarian camp or the other. Polemic abounded, and this includes militant poems like Ronsard’s Les Discours (1560-1584) or Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques (1572-1616). Indeed, had it not been for the religious warsWars of Religionreligious warsreligious wars, Catherine de Médicis (1519-1589), “imbued with her ancestors’ ideal that governments and powerful persons should patronize artists and humanists,” would probably have dispensed more royal pensions and commissions (Baumgartner 293). With the return of peace in 1598, the crown and political elites could contemplate a return to the traditional arrangements of literary patronage.
What was unusual, therefore, about Henri IV’s accession was that it marked the end-game to a long and devastating civil war. In the early years of the seventeenth century, Henri IV enjoyed, if not a monopoly over literary patronage, then an unusually broad outpouring of goodwill. Despite isolated Huguenot and LeagueLeaguer opposition, “a kind of unanimity had formed around the idea of celebrating the return to order and peace symbolized by Henri IV” (Chauveau 67). Such strong support for the crown would not be seen again until after the Fronde. If the public and political thrust of the royal odes makes them outliers in the undeniable march toward “the expansion of two parallel realms of personalized discourse: private conversation and secret political counsel” (Shoemaker 22), it is almost certainly because Malherbe was a contemporary of Henri IV and grew up under the same dark clouds of civil conflict. In addition, placed in the clientele of BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de, he was invited to stay at courtcourt (royal) when literary patronage had only just recovered and encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry speech-making had only just supplanted politicalpolitical oratory. While the outward form of the royal odes—the encomiumencomium—is adapted to the epideicticeloquenceepideictic rhetorical climate instituted by Henri IV in 1603, their impassioned patriotismpatriotism recalls the stirring pleas of royalist pamphlets published in the 1580s and 1590s. Indeed, the eventual divergence of discourse into two personalized realms, reinforced by the vigorous rebirth of patronage culture, may well have doomed the odes to a reception not on their own terms.
Shoemaker rightly insists that all patronage texts—and this includes Malherbe’s royal odes—exhibit a particularistic rhetoric. “This rhetoric was necessarily ad hominem in that the success or failure of a given performance was not a function of swaying the opinions of a broad public, but rather of seducing