Pierre de Ronsard

Marguerite de Navarre, also known as Margaret d’Angoulême, a sister of the late king Francis and the queen consort of King Henry II of Navarre, expresses her intensely felt religious views in poetry and plays.

As patron of humanists and reformers, and as an author in her own right, she is an outstanding figure of the French Renaissance.

Marguerite, who has written many poems and plays, has also written penned the classic collection of stories, the Heptameron, as well as a remarkably intense religious poem, Miroir de l'âme pécheresse or Mirror of the Sinful Soul.

This particular poem is a first-person mystical narrative of the soul as a yearning woman calling out to Christ as her father-brother-lover.

That her work was passed to the royal court of England provides the basis for conjecture that Marguerite had influence on the Protestant reformation in England.

Anne Boleyn, future second wife and Queen to Henry VIII of England, had been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Claude during her years in France before returning to England.

There is conjecture that the court of Queen Claude and the court of Marguerite overlapped and that, perhaps, Anne was in service to Marguerite rather than to Claude, as well as that Anne Boleyn may have become a friend, admirer, and disciple to Marguerite, who absorbed Marguerite's radical views about Christianity.

A written letter by Anne Boleyn after she became queen exists in which Boleyn makes strong expressions of affection to Marguerite.

It is conjectured that Marguerite had given Anne the original manuscript of Miroir de l'âme pécheresse at some point.

It is certain that in 1545, sometime after Anne Boleyn's execution by her husband Henry VIII, that Anne's daughter, who will become Elizabeth I (1533–1603), had translated this very same poem by Marguerite into English when she was twelve years old and presented it, written in her own hand, to her then-stepmother, the English Queen Catherine Parr.

This literary connection among Marguerite, Anne, Catherine Parr, and the future Queen Elizabeth I suggests a direct mentoring link between the legacy of reformist religious convictions and Marguerite.

As a generous patron of the arts, Marguerite befriends and protects many artists and writers, among them Rabelais, Marot and Ronsard.

Marguerite is also a mediator between Roman Catholics and Protestants (including Calvin).

Although Marguerite espouses reform within the Catholic Church, she is not a Calvinist.

She does, however, do her best to protect the reformers and had dissuaded her brother from intolerant measures as long as she could.

She dies on December 21, 1549, at the age of fifty-seven.

French poet and critic Joachim du Bellay, along with his contemporary, the poet Pierre de Ronsard, studies classical literature in Paris under Jean Daurat, the famous Hellenist and Latinist.

The meeting, in 1547, of du Bellay and Ronsard in an inn on the way to Poitiers may justly be regarded as the starting-point of the French school of Renaissance poetry.

The core group of the Renaissance "Pléiade"—Ronsard, du Bellay and Jean-Antoine de Baïf—has come together at the Collège de Coqueret under the tutelage of Daurat; they are generally called the "Brigade.” Du Bellay is twenty-seven years old in 1549 when he publishes the group’s celebrated manifesto: the nationalistic Defense et illustration de la langue francoyse, a plea for the enrichment of the French language to insure its parity with ancient tongues, calling for new French poetry based on classical models.

Lescot’s excellent understanding of Italian Renaissance styles enables him to expel from French architecture the lingering traces of the Gothic style in rebuilding the old medieval palace of the Louvre.

In the Cour Carreé, Lescot combines a French system of pavilions with an Italianate elevation of superimposed orders, enriching the facades with delicate low-relief sculpture designed by Jean Goujon.

Another of Lescot’s surviving major works is the Fontaine des Innocents, built around 1550.

Ronsard, regarded as the leader of the "Brigade," devotes his career to answering du Bellay’s nativist call for new poetry based on classical models.

Equally skilled at writing love poems, pastorals, sonnets, philosophical poems, and political verse, Ronsard’s assimilation of classical and native idiom and verse forms expands the range of French poetry.

The twenty-six-year-old poet produces Odes, a verse collection, in 1550.

His own generation in France will label him "prince of poets.”

Catherine de Médici in 1573 stages Ballet des Polonais to the music of Roland de Lassus, the poetry of Pierre de Ronsard, and the dances of Balthazar de Beaujoyeux.

French poet and dramatist Robert Garnier, an eloquent and imaginative poet, bases his play Hippolyte, published in 1573, on a classical theme.

Charles IX of France dies of tuberculosis at twenty-three on May 30, 1574, sweating blood and reputedly tormented with guilt for his role in the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

Charles leaves no children by his consort, Elizabeth of Austria, whom he had married in 1570, but one son, Charles (later duc d'Angoulême), by his mistress Marie Touchet.

French Catholic partisans look to the late king’s younger brother Henri, duc d’Anjou, remembered as the "young eagle" of Jarnac and Moncontour, to settle the long and bitter Catholic-Huguenot conflict with a strong hand.

On hearing of his succession to the French throne, Henri immediately abandons his new elective crown of Poland and, after a leisurely tour of Italy, arrives in France to ascend the throne as Henri III.

In this year also, French poet Pierre de Ronsard publishes his verse collection Sonnets pour Helene.

Ronsard has devoted his career to the call of the late Joachim du Bellay to French poets to cultivate the resources of their native language.

Equally skilled at writing love poems, pastorals, sonnets, philosophical poems, and political verse, his assimilation of classical and native idiom and verse forms has expanded the range of French poetry.

Guillaume de Salluste, seigneur du Bartas, is an ardent Huguenot and a trusted counselor of Henry of Navarre, though he has tried to avoid participating in the Wars of Religion.

His aim is to use the new poetic techniques introduced into France by the literary group known as La Pléiade for the presentation of distinctively Protestant views.

He is himself dissatisfied with his first biblical epic, Judith, published in 1574.

However, on the publication, in 1578, of La Semaine, a poem about the creation of the world, du Bartas is hailed as a major poet.

His prestige is all the greater because Pierre de Ronsard, his contemporary, had failed in his ambition to compose a first-class epic in French.

La Semaine does not remain popular in France for long; its style is marred by numerous neologisms and ungainly compound adjectives, and the didactic intent is too obvious.

In fact, the poem makes a more lasting impression in England, where its Protestant teaching is more generally acceptable.

Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton are among the English poets influenced by du Bartas.

Robert Garnier had won two prizes in the jeux floraux, or floral games (an annual poetry contest held by the Académié des Jeux Floraux), while a law student at Toulouse,

He had published his first collection of lyrical pieces (now lost), Plaintes Amoureuses de Robert Garnier, in 1565.

After practice at the Parisian bar he became conseiller du roi in his native district, the middle Loire valley, and later lieutenant-général criminel.

Garnier's early plays—Porcie (1568), Hippolyte (1573), and Cornélie (1574)— are in the style of the Senecan school.

His next group of tragedies—Marc-Antoine (1578), La Troade (1579), and Antigone (1580)—show an advance in technique beyond the plays of Étienne Jodelle, Jacques Grévin, and his own early work, since the rhetoric is accompanied by some action.

He produces his two masterpieces, Bradamante and Les Juifves, in 1582 and 1583.

In Bradamante, the first important French tragicomedy, which alone of his plays has no chorus, he has turned from Senecan models and sought his subject in Ludovico Ariosto.

The romantic story becomes an effective drama in Garnier's hands.

Although the lovers, Bradamante and Roger, never meet on the stage, the conflict in the mind of Roger supplies a genuine dramatic interest.

Les Juifves, Garnier's second great work, is the story of the barbarous vengeance of Nebuchadnezzar on King Zedekiah and his children.

This tragedy, almost entirely elegiac in conception, is unified by the personality of the prophet.

As a Roman Catholic and a patriot, Garnier uses his tragedies to convey moral and religious arguments to his contemporaries, who are now suffering in the Wars of Religion.

His fine verse reflects the influence of his friend Pierre de Ronsard.

His plays, which contain many affecting emotional scenes, will be performed to the end of the sixteenth century.

Philippe Desportes, a French courtier poet who bases his style on that of the Italians—chiefly Petrarch, Ludovico Ariosto, and Pietro Bembo—had in about 1567 displaced Pierre de Ronsard as the favorite poet of Henry, Duke d'Anjou, whom he had accompanied to Kraków when Henry was elected king of Poland in 1573.

With the publication that year of Desportes' Premières Oeuvres (“First Works”), he became Ronsard's rival.

Desportes had returned to France with Henry on the death of Charles IX in 1574, and has written sonnets and elegies, in graceful alexandrines, for Henry III and others to present to their mistresses.

He received the livings of the abbeys of Tiron and Josaphat in 1583, enjoying the revenues of other benefices also and entertaining an intellectual circle in a princely manner.

His Dernières amours (1583; “Last Loves”), also known as Cléonice, marks his farewell to secular verse.

French humanist Jean Dorat, a brilliant Hellenist, one of the poets of the Pléiade, and their mentor for many years, belongs to a noble family; after studying at the Collège de Limoges, he had become tutor to the pages of Francis I.

He had tutored Jean-Antoine de Baïf, whose father he succeeded as director of the Collège de Coqueret.

There, besides Baïf, his pupils had included Pierre de Ronsard, Rémy Belleau, and Pontus de Tyard.

Joachim du Bellay was added to this group by Ronsard, and these five young poets, along with and under the direction of Dorat, formed a society for the reform of French language and literature.

They had increased their number to seven with the dramatist Étienne Jodelle and named themselves La Pléiade, in emulation of the seven Greek poets of Alexandria.

The election of Dorat as their president proved his personal influence, but as a writer of French verse he is the least important of the seven.

Dorat had stimulated his students to intensive study of Greek and Latin poetry, while he himself writes incessantly in both languages.

He is said to have composed more than fifteen thousand Greek and Latin verses.

His influence and fame as a scholar extends to England, Italy, and Germany.

He had in 1556 been appointed professor of Greek at the Collège Royal, a post that he had held until he retired in 1567.

He publishes a collection of the best of his Greek and Latin verse in 1586.

Baïf, the most learned of the seven, had received a classical education and in 1547 had gone with Ronsard to study under Dorat where they planned, with du Bellay, to transform French poetry by imitating the ancients and the Italians.

To this program Baïf had contributed two collections of Petrarchan sonnets and Epicurean lyrics, Les Amours de Méline (1552) and L'Amour de Francine (1555).

Le Brave, ou Taillebras, Baïf's lively adaptation of Plautus' Miles gloriosus, had been played at court and published in 1567.

Baïf—who was the natural son of Lazare de Baïf, humanist and diplomat—has enjoyed royal favor and received pensions and benefices from Charles IX and Henry III.

His Euvres en rime (1573; “Works in Rhyme”) reveal great erudition: Greek (especially Alexandrian), Latin, neo-Latin, and Italian models are imitated for mythological poems, eclogues, epigrams, and sonnets.

His verse translations include Terence's Eunuchus and Sophocles' Antigone.

Baïf is a versatile, inventive poet and experimenter who, for example, has invented and made use of a system of phonetic spelling.

With the musician Thibault de Courville, Baïf had founded a short-lived Academy of Poetry and of Music in order to promote certain Platonic theories on the union of poetry and music.

His metrical inventions include a vers baïfin, a verse of fifteen syllables.

His theories had been exemplified in Etrénes de poezie fransoèze en vers mezurés (1574; “Gifts of French Poetry in Quantitative Verse”) and in his little songs, Chansonnettes mesurées (1586), with music written by Jacques Mauduit.

His Mimes, enseignements et proverbes (1576; “Mimes, Lessons, and Proverbs”) is considered to be his most original work.

A personal poet whose gifts are inferior to his genius for invention of form and language, Baïf has a talent for vivid, realistic description, particularly in scenes of country life and in satire.