Staging romance across the Channel: French–English exchanges and generic common ground

In arguing that French narrative and dramatic models, and ways of thinking about generic blending, can shed light on Shakespeare’s practice in his late plays, this essay is anomalous. The three primary origins of English tragicomic composition, as commonly recognised, are various Italian dramatic forms, the popular romantic drama of the earlier Elizabethan period, and the Hellenistic novel. More broadly, the more-or-less insistent presence of the quintessentially tragicomic Christian pattern, often as mediated through biblical resonances, is universally admitted. ¹ Interweaving of these strands is generally allowed and reflected in the various compilations of sources and analogues. ²

Nevertheless, the idea of Italian influence as predominant has perhaps now moved into the ascendant. Recently, Louise George Clubb has argued essentially for cutting the Gordian knot formed by the ‘wars of Shakespearean classification’ ³ on the grounds that the Italian pastoral tradition, with its experiments in genre theory and its improvisational practices, sufficiently accounts for the whole range of English phenomena. Michele Marrapodi affirms that the characteristic procedures and effect (‘wonder’) of Shakespeare’s late romances largely ‘stem from Shakespeare’s reworking of the third genre theorised by G. B. Giraldi Cinthio and perfected by Giovanni Battista Guarini’. ⁴ Lois Potter posits that Shakespeare ‘worked his way through’ the latter’s Il Compendio della poesie tragicomica ‘in Italian during one of the many periods of plague closure’ and that Pericles, in particular, emerged under Guarini’s influence. ⁵ This last claim seems especially vulnerable: it runs afoul of the play’s dependence – embodied in the choric Gower – on sources remote from Italian pastoral, ⁶ as well as its admission of death into the picture. ⁷ The Compendio is unequivocal on that point.

Far from excluding Italian practices and theories from the field of vision, I seek merely to allow for more varied currents of influence and means of transmission, including French ones. To legitimise the procedure, one may enlist an eminent cultural ‘go-between’ who would seem uniquely qualified to comment on tragicomedy as an Italian speciality. Yet John Florio, in his Italian–English dictionary of 1611, settled for a succinct and inclusive definition of ‘Tragicomœdia’: ‘a tragicomedie, beginning mournfully, and ending merily’. ⁸ Thus to cut the Gordian knot of cultural and generic complexity frees up its interwoven strands, several of which lead back to French intertexts and generic practices.

Essential background is the prominence and chronological scope of tragicomedy in France, however loosely the label was applied: as Henry Carrington Lancaster observed, the term could be used in the later sixteenth century for ‘almost any survival of the medieval stage which showed a happy dénouement and a form that was at least partially classic’. ⁹ Moreover, Marvin Herrick, like others, assimilates to the genre plays not so identified, ¹⁰ as may be done for England also. Certainly, the genre was not invented in 1582, as neo-classically oriented scholarship once assumed, with Robert Garnier’s Bradamante, a highly literary adaptation of Ariosto. ¹¹ Nor, as more recently claimed, ¹² is the Lucelle of Louis Le Jars (1576) the first surviving tragicomedy, although it is an interesting one, with seemingly dead lovers coming back to life. Rather, French plays mingling tragedy and comedy in various ways can be traced back to the mid-sixteenth century, and the genre persisted for about a hundred years before yielding to neo-Aristotelian classicism.

Most striking is the early emergence of texts that graft material of diverse origins – from biblical to pastoral to chivalric romance – onto structures that essentially trace the simple trajectory described by Florio, with the broad proviso of performing poetic – encoded as providential – justice. For as a rule, characters are treated by tragicomic universes as they deserve, with mercy denied only to recalcitrant wrongdoers. Hence, the predilection for biblical topics with ‘happy endings’ in the Latin ‘tragicomedies’ that circulated throughout Europe and nourished theatre in the vernaculars. ¹³

A French example is the tragicomedy of Nabuchodonosor (1561), by the Protestant Antoine de La Croix, evoking the trials of the contemporary faithful on the eve of the first War of Religion (1562). Those trials are adumbrated in the condemnation to the fiery furnace of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego for refusing to worship the golden image. True to the biblical account, the tyrant is converted by their miraculous survival. Allowing for secularisation (with a Neoplatonic charge), we are not far from the example of tyranny converted by faithfulness in what is commonly termed the first English tragicomedy, Damon and Pythias, by Richard Edwards (1571). There, notably, the terminology is scarcely in place: the title page calls the piece a ‘Comedie’, while the transformed Dionysius tells the famous friends that ‘the immortal gods above / Has made you play this tragedy, I think, for my behove’ (15.217–18); ¹⁴ only the 1568 entry in the Stationers’ Register anticipates modern criticism: ‘ye tragecall comodye of Damonde and Pethyas’. ¹⁵

To privilege pattern over generic label makes room more problematically, on the French side, for self-described tragedies which, on their own terms, end ‘merily’ by vindicating divine truth and power, albeit in bloody ways. The Protestant ‘tragédies sainctes’ of Louis Des Masures on the subject of David (1563) would qualify. ¹⁶ But so would works of Catholic propaganda, such as François de Chantelouve’s defence of the St Bartholomew’s massacre as divine deliverance from evil in La tragédie de feu Gaspard de Colligny (pub. 1575). ¹⁷ The ending of the latter evokes a sense of wonder at the workings of providence which, mutatis mutandis, anticipates that of Pericles or Cymbeline – or indeed Macbeth (‘the time is free’ [5.9.21] ¹⁸ ).

Such overlap between the transcendental claims of certain tragic endings and the tragicomic passage from mournful to merry may usefully remind us that the concept of tragedy with a happy ending had standing in France, if seemingly not in England. Marrapodi cites Cinthio’s practice of a ‘newly conceived Italian genre, tragedie di fin lieto’. ¹⁹ But such tragedy was theoretically recognised from the earliest days of French neo-Aristotelianism – witness the influential poetics of Scaliger (1561), who spoke of ‘lætæ Tragœdiæ non paucæ’. ²⁰ Transformative potential within tragedy, I suggest, informs the French, and sheds light on the English, understanding of tragicomedy.

In late-Tudor England, certainly by Shakespeare’s time, dramatic treatment of religious subjects was more restricted than in France. Still, the tragicomic patterning of French biblical drama resonates across the channel – for instance, in Lewis Wager’s The Life and Repentaunce of Mary Magdalene (pub. 1566) or Thomas Garter’s The Most Virtuous and Godly Susanna (pub. 1578), both intended for travelling players. Even in the public theatre, Old Testament and apocryphal material, especially, maintained a place. ²¹ Nebuchadnezzar, played by the Admiral’s Men in 1596–7, must have traced a trajectory resembling that of its French precursor. ²²

In relating Pericles to the miracle play tradition, F. D. Hoeniger noted that two plays on the apocryphal legend of Tobias (or Tobit) are documented in England, one commissioned by Philip Henslowe from Henry Chettle in 1602. ²³ He noted, too, the partial French dramatisation made by Catherine Des Roches (1579), which is extant: it is identified as a ‘tragicomedie’ and preceded by an epistle stressing the ‘constance’ of the virtuous and pious protagonists, which earns them the mercy of God and relief from their prolonged (and fantastic) tribulations. ²⁴

Des Roches’s treatment was adapted and completed by the Norman playwright Jacques Ovyn in a version published in 1606. The generic label was retained, the trajectory reinforced: the story moves from tyrannical oppression across separations to eventual reunion and fulfilment, greeted with grateful wonder at God’s power and mercy. The younger Thobie asks rhetorically whether strangers hearing of all these dangers and marvels could ever forget such a story. ²⁵ As in Shakespeare’s late plays, past tragic experiences are incorporated through memory into a future suffused with blessing. Ovyn’s work, reissued the same year in an anthology of ‘tragédies sainctes’, ²⁶ makes a remarkable instance of a Pericles-like dramatic romance launched into wide circulation virtually at the moment when the English play must have been in conception.

The active circulation of romances between England and France and across formal genres can be specifically confirmed. Among the earliest French literary borrowings from English sources – at a period when knowledge of English was hardly widespread abroad – are translations of Robert Greene’s Pandosto and Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, as well as a ‘spin-off’ tragedy from the latter, almost certainly before it was translated. ²⁷ An otherwise unknown L. Regnault published a fairly faithful rendition of Pandosto in 1615; another freer adaptation (without acknowledgement) was produced in 1626 by Louis Moreau Du Bail, an author of romantic and pastoral novels. ²⁸ Two dramatic adaptations are recorded. The first, whose text has been lost, was by Alexandre Hardy, a prolific producer of tragicomedies, including a mammoth dramatisation of Heliodorus’ Aethiopica. ²⁹ The text does survive of a dramatic version of Pandosto by Jean Puget de la Serre (1631), which is based mainly on Regnault’s translation but shows acquaintance with Du Bail’s – and conceivably with The Winter’s Tale. ³⁰ As for the Arcadia, it was the object of competing translations in the mid-1620s, one of them commissioned by Marie de’ Medici. ³¹ A highly selective adaptation, identified as a ‘Tragi-Comedie’, was composed by André Mareschal in 1638 (pub. 1640) under the auspices of Richelieu; the dedication lavishes praise on the original work and its author, and the play presumes considerable knowledge of Sidney’s text on the public’s part. ³²

More obliquely suggestive is the double dramatic adaptation made by Jean de Schélandre of Les Fantaisies amoureuses (1601), an anonymous pastoral novel mingling tragic and comic love affairs, verse and prose, in the style of the Arcadia and its Italian forerunners. ³³ Schélandre, from a Protestant family, and like Sidney a soldier who served against the Spanish in the Netherlands, first exploited this material to produce a tragedy in the free-ranging baroque style, Tyr et Sidon (1608), which he dedicated to England’s James I. ³⁴ An English connection, evidently cultivated over multiple journeys, thus existed before 1611, when Schélandre published the first two (and only known) books of La Stuartide, a heavily mythologised epic in honour of the Scottish–English royal dynasty. A substantial body of criticism has postulated an English, even specifically Shakespearean, influence on Schélandre’s drama. I have argued that La Stuartide shows familiarity with Macbeth (necessarily through performance) and have more tentatively noted points of contact with Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale. ³⁵ Might first-hand knowledge, then, have prompted Schélandre to rewrite his tragedy (sometime before 1628) as a tragicomedy, flouting his previous generic choice and freely mixing tragic with comic elements?

Still, such freedom was by no means alien to contemporary French practice. Moreover, as Schélandre’s editor points out, his rewriting recuperates the original story’s grafting of a ‘merveilleux’ happy ending onto tragic events, while the rational explanation furnished produces a double effect to the taste of French audiences. ³⁶ The impossible proves to be possible after all. If such an effect also recalls Shakespeare’s last plays, it seems imprudent to make claims for influence; confirmed, however, is the broad confluence of contemporary French and English tragicomic currents.

The popularity of Honoré d’Urfé’s sprawling and ramifying L’Astrée, from 1607 on, was an obvious factor in the persistence, spread and imitation of such material in France, onstage and off. In some cases, moreover – including the plays of Puget and Mareschal – political interests were being served. ³⁷ But, as the recuperations of Sidney and Greene demonstrate, the phenomenon developed on a basis of diverse influences – some of them Italian (or Italianate), but others derived directly or indirectly from the antique novel. ³⁸ And this basis extended across the Channel.

The narrative version of the Apollonius of Tyre story by François de Belleforest (in volume seven of his Histoires tragiques [1582; reissued 1583, 1595, 1604]) would seem to be a case in point. I have proposed elsewhere that it coloured the treatment by Shakespeare (and presumably George Wilkins) of their primary medieval and secondary Elizabethan sources (John Gower’s Confessio Amantis [late fourteenth century, latest ed. 1554]; Laurence Twyne’s The patterne of painefull aduentures [1576?; reissued 1594, 1607]). ³⁹ There is no space here to set out the evidence in detail, but it is possible at least to parallel the re-paganising of the two fictional universes – in effect, the transformation of medieval Christian exemplum into early modern romance – and the recourse to the ancient novel in doing so. It is striking, moreover, that Belleforest actually applies the label of tragicomedy – and evokes theatricality as such – from the outset. ‘Apolonie Tyrien’ is ‘celuy que nous introduisons pour ioüer vne Tragique comedie en ce Theatre [he whom we introduce to play a tragicomedy in this theatre]’, ⁴⁰ while the author’s preview of the plot virtually assimilates that genre to ‘tragédie à fin heureuse’ [tragedy with a happy ending]: ‘Accidens diuers…ses malheurs sur mer, ses pertes de femme, & fille, & la fin heureuse de tous ensemble [Various accidents…his sufferings at sea, his losses of wife and daughter, and the happy end of all together]’. ⁴¹ The generic label is reiterated when the protagonist’s daughter is rescued by pirates from her would-be murderer: ‘Ici se representent les assauts, les hazards, & les perils de toute ceste Tragicomedie [In this are represented the assaults, the hazards, and the dangers of this entire tragicomedy]’. ⁴²

Belleforest buttresses his generic claim with a telling precedent at once ancient and early modern. Apollonius’ story, he maintains, is as fully deserving of attention as that of Theagenes and Chariclea, ‘qui a tant esté caressee par la noblesse Françoise [which has been so adored by the nobility of France]’ ⁴³ – that is, the Aethiopica of Heliodorus, as translated by Jacques Amyot (1547) and frequently reprinted.

In the Aethiopica, Belleforest had before him the outstanding case of a Greek romance conceived and presented, through the regular deployment of dramatic metaphors, ‘as a series of theatrical spectacles arranged by superhuman agency’. ⁴⁴ The theatricality of his treatment of Apollonius follows suit. The Aethiopica’s culminating spectacle, in particular, with its multiple reunions and restorations, is couched in terms highly pertinent to the genre as Belleforest – and Shakespeare, in Pericles and the other late romances – adapted it:

Et paradventure que c’estoit vne certaine inspiration de la diuinité, laquelle auoit ordonné & conduit ces miraculeuses auentures, qui leur reueloit insensiblement & leur donnoit intelligence de toute la verité. Et ne peut autrement estre, que ce ne fust vne diuine puissance, qui accordast ainsi ensemble des choses si contraires de nature, ne qui liast en vn, ioye & douleur, qui meslast ris & larmes l’vn parmi l’autre, qui tournast la tristesse de mort en resiouissance de feste & de nopces, ni qui fist que chacun ensemble rist & pleurast, s’esiouist & lamentast, trouuast ceux qu’il pensoit auoir perduz, & perdist ceux qu’il cuidoit auoir trouuez.

[And perhaps it was a certain inspiration of the divinity who had arranged and managed these miraculous adventures that insensibly revealed, and made them aware of, the entire truth. And it could not be otherwise but that a divine power so reconciled harmoniously things so contrary in nature, and united in one joy and sorrow, who mingled laughter and tears one with the other, who transformed the sadness of death into the rejoicing of festivity and marriage, and brought it about that each at once laughed and wept, felt pleasure and lamented, found those he thought he had lost, and lost those he supposed he had found.] ⁴⁵

The English version of Thomas Underdowne (1569), who was translating from a different (Latin) original, supplies an explicit dramatic comparison:

Perhappes also they were styrred to understand the truth by inspiration of the Gods, whose will it was that this shoulde fall out wonderfully, as in a Comedy. Surely, they made verie contrarie things agree, and ioyned sorrow and mirth, teares and laughter together, and turned fearefull, and terrible thinges into a ioyfull banquette in the end, many that wept beganne to laugh, and suche as were sorowefull to reioyce, when they founde that they soughte not for, and loste that they hoped to finde. ⁴⁶

The term employed may be ‘Comedy’, but the co-presence and interpenetration of joy and sorrow, finding and losing – as well as the keynote of ‘wonder’ – point to the integration of tragic experience.

As for the divine power in question, the adaptations of Belleforest and Shakespeare stand out for re-paganising the Christian metaphysics. No version of Apollonius can do without the temple of Diana at Ephesus, but in Twyne, as in the other versions derived from the Gesta Romanorum, the hero is directed there by an angel to find his happiness, and Twyne presents the sequel in strongly religious terms. ⁴⁷ Gower cuts out the intermediary and opts for intervention by ‘The highe god, which wolde him keep’. ⁴⁸

In this context, the appearance of the goddess herself in the version of Shakespeare and Wilkins marks at once a disjunction and a return to origins, and it carries further intertextual baggage of a telling kind. The late Greek romance of Clitophon and Leucippe (c. second century CE), whose protagonist is also from Tyre, contains many typical plot elements reminiscent of the Apollonius story, including a heroine supposed dead and sold by pirates. It concludes with a parallel reunion in Diana’s Ephesian temple, at once of the separated eponymous lovers and of Leucippe’s father, Sosthenes, with his lost daughter. In that case, Diana appears to Sosthenes in a dream to direct him to Ephesus and promise that he will find a daughter and son-in-law there. It matches Diana’s importance that a great deal is made of the daughter’s virginity – an essential dimension also, of course, in the case of Marina.

Access to Clitophon and Leucippe would hardly have posed a problem. The 1554 Latin translation of Luigi Annibale della Croce (Croceius) had been republished in Cambridge, probably in 1589; an English translation by William Burton appeared in 1597. But by then a translation into French – by Belleforest himself – had been several times reprinted, which in fact comes closest to Pericles on the point. The appearance of Diana is there explicitly mentioned twice (not just once, as in Burton), the second time when Clitophon recounts that Leucippe’s father (here Sostrate) recognised him more readily, ‘se souuenant de sa vision, & promesse de Diane qu’il me recouueroit en Ephese [recalling his vision, and the promise of Diane that he would find me again at Ephesus]’. ⁴⁹ The word ‘vision’ is also used for Twyne’s angel, ⁵⁰ but it is here that one finds it associated with Diana – as in Pericles: ‘Pure Dian, / I bless thee for thy vision’ (5.3.68–9). ⁵¹

Belleforest had already subjectivised Apollonie’s vision, detaching it from Christian authority and making it contingent on interpretation: Apollonie sees ‘vne personne qui representoit vne grande maiesté, & qu’il estimoit estre vn genie [a person who showed forth a great majesty, and whom he judged a supernatural being]’; ⁵² his response reflects at once his learning and his openness to spiritual experience, for he is both ‘de grand sçavoir, & superstitieux en cet endroit [of great knowledge and superstitious in that regard]’. In effect, the human must rise to the divine occasion, meeting the test of faith, as a condition of contentment: Diana tells Pericles, ‘Do’t, and happy’ (5.1.248); Apollonie is promised that he ‘seroit là allegé de tous ses trauaux [would there be relieved of all his sufferings]’. Pericles accepts the divinity’s ‘just command’ (5.3.1): ‘Celestial Dian, goddess argentine, / I will obey thee’ (5.1.250–1); Apollonie is ‘resolu d’obeir au Dieu, ainsi le croyoit il, qui luy auoit donné cet aduertissement [resolved to obey the god, as he believed, who had given him this instruction]’.

Finally, we come full circle with the fact that the Apollonius story was also dramatised in France within ten years of the English play. The ‘Trage-comédie’ of Joachim Bernier de la Brousse (1580–1623) appeared in a 1618 collection with no indication concerning performance or original date. The title, ‘Les hevrevses infortvnes [The happy misfortunes]’, effectively evokes Florio’s formula, or, if one prefers, ‘tragédie à fin heureuse [tragedy with a happy ending]’, while the preface (‘Advis au lecteur [Notice to the reader]’) interestingly apologises for a departure from the ‘forme absoluë de la Tragedie [strict form of tragedy]’: the extent of the tale, ‘rempli d’accidens esmerueillables [filled with wonder-inspiring occurrences]’, ⁵³ has led the author to stage it in two parts with an interval of fifteen years. The insouciant handling of time in romance was evidently becoming an even sorer point for neo-Aristotelians than it was when Sidney, in An Apology for Poetry (pub. 1595), complained about allowing babies to grow up to marriageable age. ⁵⁴ It is a point, of course, for which Shakespeare makes his own wryly backhanded apology, through the personage of Time, in The Winter’s Tale.

Bernier’s preface also puts cross-Channel intertextuality into play. He claims that he worked from an old manuscript of the Gesta Romanorum and discovered Belleforest’s narrative only later. The disclaimer is disingenuous: many details follow Belleforest, rather than any known version of the Gesta. Bernier probably also owes to him, like Shakespeare and Wilkins, his re-paganised setting. ⁵⁵ Yet that aspect extends to an intriguing detail: at the moment of reunion with his daughter, Apollonius thanks the gods effusively. ⁵⁶ There is a corresponding effusion in Pericles, marking the transition from suffering to joy: ‘O Helicanus, / Down on thy knees, thank the holy gods as loud / As thunder threatens us’ (5.1.197–9). Yet no other analogue I know has an equivalent. It is also notable that the dialogue Bernier gives the fisherman who succours Apollonius (only in Pericles is there more than one) turns specifically on the danger of death, as in the English play: ‘Die, keth ’a? Now gods forbid’t, and I have a gown here!’ (2.1.78–9). The dialogue in other versions is further removed. These are perhaps local coincidences of dramatic instinct and opportunity. But if Puget’s adaptation of Greene was coloured by The Winter’s Tale, Bernier, too, might quite naturally have taken an English dramatic precursor into account. In any case, we are dealing with forms of cultural exchange that place what is still commonly deemed an international love–hate relationship under the infinitely reconciliatory auspices of romance.