The Difficulty of Meaning, the Dilemma of Labelling: Guillaume de Machaut
(c.1300-1377), a Romantic Poet-Composer?
Kate Maxwell
This paper is offered as a light-hearted stimulus for discussion as to how far the works
of the fourteenth-century French poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut can be
considered romantic, in order to demonstrate that at least some of the basic features of
Romanticism can be found in these works which long pre-date the movement that
bears the name. The general purpose of this paper is to bring to the fore the
difficulties of meaning attached to a term like romantic through the example of
Machaut. I intend thereby to invite debate as to whether we can open up the
ramifications of this term to apply it to an author from a century with which it is not
usually associated.
It is usual in the introduction to a paper such as this to offer interpretations of
key terms. This I will leave open to readers, for I should like you to think about the
first thing that comes to mind when you consider the word romantic. [Responses
received at the study day when this paper was delivered included:
Subjectivist
Hugo
Individualist
Opium (= escapism?)
Collective
Emotional
Revolutionary
Rhetorical]
Well, obviously Machaut is not Hugo, and as far as we know did not indulge in
opium. On the other hand, his works tackle emotional issues; they use rhetoric, and
could be described if not quite as revolutionary, then at least as innovative and
politically aware. It has also been argued that ‘these elegantly crafted songs, in
French, pleased an educated audience, and provided an enjoyable escapism from the
horrors of fourteenth-century life’. 1 In addition, the idea of "collective" is interesting,
for there is evidence to suggest that Machaut may have worked hard to oversee the
production of his works in manuscript form. 2 Of the responses received, however,
those which are most relevant to Machaut are "subjectivist" and "individualist", for he
is certainly very concerned with himself as an individual artist as well as a subject in
his own works, as we shall see.
Introduction to the Remede de Fortune
The figure of Machaut holds our attention today, over and above his contemporaries,
not only for the quality of his output but also because of the sheer volume of his
works which have survived, and which can be reliably attributed to him. In the latter
case this is due largely to six manuscripts which apparently, and with surprising
consistency, contain only his "complete works". Single-author collected editions are
nothing unusual today, but, to judge from the evidence — or lack of it — which has
come down to us from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France, such focus upon a
single author at that time appears to have been limited to a relatively small number of
collections of well-known authors, including Machaut. 3 The work under consideration
here is the Remede de Fortune (Fortune’s Remedy). In Machaut's long career the
Remede is an early work which in plot and structure anticipates the much later and
better-known Voir Dit (or "True Tale"). Although, of all of Machaut's works, the Voir
Dit is the most self-aware, romantic, and consequently the obvious candidate for this
discussion, I have chosen to focus upon the Remede instead not only because of its
1
Alexandra Eddy, http://www.colorado.edu/humanities/HUMN10101020Music/Midterm%20review%202005%20fix.html, accessed 18th May 2006.
2
Although this question is discussed by many writers, it is particularly well treated in relation to
Machaut's contemporaries by Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 1987), p. 211.
3
Huot, From Song to Book, especially Chapter 7.
2
much shorter length, but also so that the ensuing discussion is less biased than it might
otherwise have been. Although the Remede deals with love, perhaps more important
than the actual plot are the interpolated sung lyric poems which not only form an
integral part of the action, but which as a group of songs seem intended as a
demonstration of each of the poetic composition techniques popular at the time (i.e.
lai, complainte, rondeau, etc), presented in descending order of compositional
difficulty. As the Remede is an early work, we shall see the importance of the
development of its presentation in the still-extant manuscripts produced during the
author's lifetime.
The story of the Remede is relatively simple. The protagonist loves a lady who
is all goodness and beauty. He is a poet-musician and has written an anonymous lai to
her. She asks him to sing it, which he does, but when she questions him about its
author he runs away in silent shame to a dream-like garden. There he is comforted by
the female allegorical figure of Hope, who educates him until he is ready to return to
his lady. When eventually he does, she accepts his suit and becomes his amie. The
ending is slightly ambiguous, for the lover becomes worried lest his lady take other
lovers, but ultimately he remembers Hope's teachings and remains happy in his lady's
favour.
The Remede de Fortune does contain many romantic attributes: it is about
love; it has a first-person protagonist called Guillaume whose occupation (clerk or
scribe) is the same as that of Machaut; the action is divided between a dream-like
garden and believable dwelling; the protagonist undergoes various excesses of
emotion, and finally emerges stronger through his education and travails; Machaut's
sense of self is demonstrated both in the anagrammatic signature at the end and in the
manuscript presentation. I will focus the remainder of my discussion in particular on
3
this last point, Machaut's self-awareness through the authority of the manuscripts,
taking into account each element of this tripartite work: the text, the image and the
music.
Text - the Anagram
Starting with the text, I will focus on the anagram, which is a self-naming technique
used by Machaut in many of his works where towards the end of a piece he directs his
readers to a certain point and instructs them to unravel the letters presented which
reveal his name. Given that the anagram is not in itself a particularly romantic feature
of the Remede, why do I highlight it? Perhaps the term "authorial signature" is more
appropriate than "anagram". Also, in the Remede, the anagram is in keeping with the
didactic theme of the text, which, along with the music and the iconography, helps us
to realise that there is an author at work behind the story. Figures 1 and 2 show how
the Remede's anagram is introduced and presented in manuscript BN fr. 1586 (known
by the siglum C). See next page:
4
Figure 1: Bibliothèque Nationale de France M.S fr. 1586 [referred to as C], f. 58 (detail).
Mais en la fin de ce traitié
Que j'ay compilé et traitié
Weil mon non et mon seurnom mettre
Sans sillabe oublier ne lettre
Et cilz qui savoir le vourra
De legier savoir le porra
Car le quart ver ci com je fin,
Commencement moyen et fin
Est de mon nom qui tous entiers
Y est sans faillir quart ne tiers
Mais il ne couvient adjouster
En ce quart ver lettre n'oster
Car riens y adjousteroit
Mon non jamais ni trouveroit
Qu'il ni eust ou plus ou moins
[I wish to put my name and surname at the end of this work which I have composed and written,
not omitting a syllable or letter. And anyone who wants to know it can easily do so, for the
fourth line from the end contains the beginning, middle and end of my name in its absolute
entirety. But no letter in this fourth line must be changed or erased, for if anything were changed,
no trace of my name would ever be found. 4 ]
4
Unless otherwise stated, all transcriptions and translations are my own. For a complete edition and
translation of the Remede de Fortune see: Guillaume de Machaut, Le Jugement du roy de Behaigne and
Remede de Fortune, ed. J. Wimsatt and W. Kibler (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press,
1988).
5
Figure 2: Bibliothèque Nationale de France M.S fr. 1586 [referred to as C] f. 58 (detail): the end of the
Remede, including the anagram line (italicised).
Mon cuer si doucement resioie
Quen grant se ten et en grant ioie
Li change mal u tu me dis
Que pris en gre sera mes dis
Or doint diex quen bon gre le prengne
Et quen li servant ne mesprengne
[My heart is so sweetly glad that its desire and great joy are unalloyed and changed
from sorrow when you tell me that my composition will be welcome. Now may God
grant that she [my lady] will like it and that in her service I make no mistake.]
Here, and in the majority of his works, Machaut names himself within the text,
and this naming survives in every copy of the Remede. He was not the first to do so
by any means, although he appears the most consistent, or perhaps insistent, in
signing his longer works (individual songs do not generally contain signatures).
Whereas rubrics, added by scribes, could vary greatly from manuscript to manuscript,
the text, while by no means unchangeable, is somewhat less prone to scribal
intervention. Thus by not relying on scribal rubrics Machaut takes care to preserve his
name: he is aware of his identity, his status as creator of the work. Is this not
romantic?
What about the solution to the anagram? It has certainly eluded modern
scholarship (that is "modern" as opposed to "medieval", since I am talking about a
couple of hundred years here). For, despite Machaut's instructions about keeping
every letter intact, the key line contains one letter too many but does not render
enough a’s or u's to give any of the various spellings of "Guillaume de Machaut" used
in the sources — although any near-“solution” is close enough for us to know whose
name we are supposed to find. Of course, we do not know what Machaut's first
audience would have made of this, but it certainly seems as if he is playing games. As
Laurence de Looze has observed, it is much easier to solve an anagram if we know
what it is we are looking for and where to find it. Machaut appears to help us play his
game by pinpointing the location of his name as author of the work. 5 It is significant
that the music which is present in the Remede also contributes to this. For if we were
in any doubt that Machaut is the creator of the entire work, then we are taught it by
the descending order of difficulty of the music in relation to the lover's increasing
education at the hands of Hope as the story progresses. Moreover, our own learning is
completed at the end of the text by our "solving" of the anagrammatic puzzle.
Nevertheless, Machaut has the last laugh: we are left in frustrated admiration but in no
doubt that he is the author, although the disparity between the normal forms of
Machaut’s name and the form that results here from our attempts at decryption is one
of the factors which lead us to doubt that the author is really the first-person
"Guillaume" of the text (Laurence de Looze calls this ‘pseudo-autobiography’).6 In
fact, in the same way that the lover learns to act independently from Hope and
confronts his lady, we too are left facing the ambiguous consequences of our actions
— have we solved the puzzle or not? Was the lover's situation improved by his final
independent questioning of his lady? Whatever our answer, we are reminded, or
taught, that there is an author at work. The anagram is therefore an ingenious example
of romantic authorial promotion at a time when — in northern-French lyric poetry and
romance at least — it was often the text, rather than the author, which was to be
revered. 7
5
Laurence de Looze, ' "Mon nom trouveras": A New Look at the Anagrams of Guillaume de Machaut
– the Enigmas, Responses, and Solutions', The Romanic Review, 79 (1988), pp. 537-557, especially p.
547.
6
Laurence de Looze, " 'Pseudo-autobiography' and the Body of Poetry in Guillaume de Machaut's
Remede de Fortune", L'Esprit Créateur 33 (1993), vol. 4, winter, pp. 73-86.
7
For a discussion on authorial signatures before Machaut see: Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book, pp. 3940.
Iconography
Moving from text to iconography, Figure 3 is again from manuscript C:
Figure 3: MS C, f. 28v (detail)
C's miniatures are particularly numerous and clear, and the character here holding the
scroll is the lover-composer, the first-person "I" of the poem, singing to his lady (and
her noble entourage) the lai which sets the action of the story in motion. Here as in
many of the miniatures he is seen carrying a scroll: it is the mark of his profession and
a symbol of his upwardly mobile status, the equivalent of a knight's sword or a king's
crown. The miniatures in C are very busy, with active figures and beautifully
complete backgrounds, and here is no exception. In this miniature, as is many others,
the focus is on performance within the story: the lover is performing his lai.
Manuscript C is the earliest of the six surviving "complete-works" Machaut
manuscripts, dated as reliably as is possible to the early 1350s. At this time, Machaut
was quite probably well-established and well-respected as a poet and composer, no
longer employed by a particular patron but accepting commissions from several. This
in itself was not very common for a non-nobleman of his time, for it gave him a
relative autonomy which was not generally enjoyed by commoners. He is also
perhaps close to the medieval equivalent of the independent, romantic artist,
producing at least some work for its own sake rather than at the whims of an
employer. By the time the manuscript BN fr 1584 (A) was produced in the 1370s, this
situation had become even more clear-cut, with Machaut enjoying a life of comfort in
his large house in Reims paid for by his canonry at the cathedral there. 8 Yet there are
some interesting differences between the later manuscript A and the earlier C which
are relevant to this discussion.
Manuscript A is introduced by a well-known rubric: "vesci lordannance que G.
de Machaut vuet quil ait en son livre". ("Here is the order which G. de Machaut wants
his book to have." Not surprisingly, this introduces an index.) This prefatory remark,
together with the manuscript's elaborate prologue (which the earlier C does not have)
and Machaut’s allusions in the Voir Dit to a manuscript he is having made, has often
been taken as evidence that Machaut had some say in A's production, perhaps
governing the order of works, perhaps even more. 9 While I personally think that we
cannot ascertain the precise extent of Machaut’s involvement in the preparation of the
manuscripts, we should nevertheless continually bear in mind when discussing
manuscript A that there is a possibility here of direct authorial intervention: another
romantic trait (albeit one which, outside of the romantic period, is by no means
unique to Machaut). A, while still a luxurious manuscript, has fewer miniatures than
8
I am extremely grateful to M. l'Abbé Jean Goy, chief archivist for the diocese of Reims, for sharing
with me his knowledge and research into Machaut's house, role in Reims, and grave (personal
communication, 2nd August 2005). For Machaut's life in Reims see: Anne Walters Robinson,
Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in his Musical Works (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2002), especially Chapter 1.
9
Digital images of the prologue in A are available on the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s Web
resource Mandragore (http://mandragore.bnf.fr/html/accueil.html). For textual references to the making
of the manuscript see especially letter 33 of the Voir Dit and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s introduction to
his edition of R. Barton Palmer’s translation (New York: Garland, 1988).
C. In general, its miniatures are without background, have fewer figures, and when
figures are present they are more static. Whereas in C the miniatures adorning the
Remede each depict scenes from the story, in A this is not the case. 10
Figure 4 shows the miniature which introduces the Remede in A, featuring an
old man talking to a young man:
Figure 4: MS A f. 49v (detail)
The young man here is the same young lover, Guillaume, as is shown in the other
miniatures; however, there is no old-man character in the Remede. Who is he? I
concur with Sylvia Huot that there seems to be no other explanation for the old man
than that he is the now-aged author, addressing the youthful character in the (pseudo)autobiographical Remede. 11 Is this romantic? I think so. Like A's introductory rubric,
10
For a discussion of the reasons why the miniatures in the Remede in C may have received special
treatment, see James Wimsatt and William Kibler's introduction and appendix to their edition (Wimsatt
and Kibler, pp. 33-36 and 449-51).
11
Huot, From Song to Book, p. 279.
this miniature reminds us that there is an author at work behind the manuscript (and if
he is not directing its production, then we are apparently being asked to believe that
he is). It also tells us that this author, akin to some latter-day St Augustine reviewing
his misspent youth in the Confessions, has something to say both to his younger self
and to us. Whereas in C the miniatures take us further into the story, providing further
details and entertainment and inviting us to watch the characters perform, in A they
will not let us forget that we are passive appreciators of a genius author's work.
Music
It is not only the miniatures which change between these two manuscripts: the
presentation of the music shows a similar shift of emphasis from lover to author. Here
I do not suggest that the layout of the music in C is in any way lacking, for it certainly
clear enough to perform from; however it does fade somewhat in comparison with the
exceptional clarity of A. In the later manuscript, some of the interpolated songs have
additional voices, and, most intriguingly, the manner in which the music is arranged
in relation to the words suggests that both text and music scribes were not only
familiar with the music, but were perhaps even internally performing it as they
notated it.
For reasons of space I have chosen to illustrate this point by focusing on the
differences in the presentation of the closing rondelet in the two manuscripts, since
this short lyric interpolation takes up only one folio in each manuscript and can be
presented in its entirety. Although these differences may appear to be of the smallest
detail, I offer them as an extension of the parallel shift in iconography between the
two manuscripts which I believe can also be traced in the music.
Figures 5 (C) and 6 (A) show the last interpolated song in the Remede. It can
be seen in C that although there are three voices notated (two are untexted), the upper
triplum is not labelled (as it is in A). The presentation of the musical parts appears
quite squashed: although this is a highly melismatic rondeau, the melisma notes in all
voices are cramped, making the note values more difficult to work out. Finally, the
syllable "re" of "remant" is texted twice, which, whether or not it represents an
undeleted double-writing, would cause problems when a reader unfamiliar with the
music tried to perform it. In A (figure 6) there is no shortage of space — there are
even empty staves — and every voice starts on a new stave (whereas in C the tenor
begins immediately after the cantus — the texted voice — ends). The alignment of
notes to syllables in A leaves no doubt as to which note should be sung to which
syllable (whereas the extra texting of the "re" in C only becomes clear when
compared to A).
These differences between C and A would be unremarkable were it not for two
things. Firstly, they are in evidence throughout the Remede, and secondly they are
accompanied by a shift in emphasis in the iconography between the two manuscripts.
In C, every song is accompanied by a miniature of the relevant character performing
it, whereas A avoids this almost entirely. (The sole exception, showing Hope singing
the Baladelle on f. 69v as the lover Guillaume memorises it, 12 nevertheless highlights
the importance of the author, since ironically Guillaume is memorising his own
composition while assuring us that memory is more important than writing.) To me
this contrast suggests that the music in C, like the miniatures, is primarily present for
visual effect, whereas in A we are not tempted to watch the performance of the
characters, but instead are invited to create a performance of our own under the
12
Huot, From Song to Book, p. 277, n. 3
guidance of the increasingly present author. In short, whereas the music is by no
means unperformable in C, its presentation in A is much clearer and closer to that of a
"score": we have not only progressed from performer to author as Huot states; 13 we
have also moved from the elaborate performance of the page in C to the invited
performance of the reader in A. We are asked to work harder to appreciate more
deeply the author's achievement.
13
Huot, From Song to Book, p. 277-80.
Figure 5: C f. 57
Figure 6: A f. 78v
Conclusion
Thus each of the three prime distinguishing elements in two manuscripts of the
Remede de Fortune — text, iconography and music — constantly reminds us of the
fact that we are appreciating the work of an author. This is particularly the case when
we consider the differences between two manuscripts produced some twenty years
apart but which may reflect the author's increasing self-awareness: although the story
itself does not change, the presentation of manuscript A seems to put more emphasis
on an overarching author figure; it is perhaps even more romantic than the earlier C.
When we consider the wider context of the Middle Ages as a whole, this
change is even more striking, for, according to Kevin Brownlee, Machaut was the first
French author writing in the vernacular to be called "poète", a status which had
previously been reserved only for an auctor of antiquity. 14 Is the Remede de Fortune
romantic or not? It certainly contains some identifiably romantic attributes, and
although we certainly cannot use the term without qualification, the very fact that I
am considering this subject suggests to me that there is a gap in terminology to be
filled. Yet does the term really mean anything if it is applied to work produced
beyond its usual historical confines? Does the convenience of using a well-known,
one-word term reduce or increase that term's meaning? Is the term descriptive or
prescriptive? Is there a difference between Romantic and romantic? The purpose of
this paper was to open these questions, fascinating as they are, to wider discussion. If
in the process this discussion brings Machaut's living works a wider readership, then
that is all to the good. 15
14
Kevin Brownlee, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin
Press, 1984), pp. 7-8.
15
I would like to acknowledge here my debt to Margaret Bent who gave a paper entitled "What is
Isorhythm?" at the University of London Institute of Musical Research "Directions in Musical
Research" seminar series on 27th April 2006, the evening before I presented this paper at the 2001Group Study Day. Dr Bent's inspiring comments on the meaning of the term isorhythm, which she
subsequently kindly shared with me in writing, made me hastily re-write my conclusion in the form
presented both here and at the study day. Although I am alone responsible for my interpretation of her
views, I feel strongly that my paper has improved as a result of her input.