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Translation and Literature, Volume 15, Part 1, Spring 2006, pp. 1-20

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Between Surrey and Marot:

Nicolas Bourbon and the Artful Translation of the Epigram

Andrew W. Taylor

In many accounts of the early Tudor period, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Sir Thomas Wyatt are paired as exponents of thoseRenaissance poetics which mature in the later sixteenth century. Wyatt’sreputation has waned and waxed depending heavily on interpretationof his metres; more recently the value of his work has been located inthe poised reticence and artful equivocation sustained by his subtly developed poetic personae which articulate the experience of writingunder the tyrannical conditions of the Henrician court during religio-political crisis. Surrey palpably differs from Wyatt in his experimen-

tation in unrhymed hexameter, in the signal achievement of histranslation of Virgil’s Aeneid II and IV in unrhymed iambics, and moregenerally in the smoother rhythms and mannered diction of his lyricpoetry. Surrey’s engagement with classical sources constitutes anattempt to domesticate in the vernacular some of the poetic forms andqualities prized by humanist taste. This essay begins with identificationof the source of Surrey’s ‘Yf he that erst the fourme so livelye drewe’before discussing the implications for our understanding of thetransmission of humanist poetry from continental Europe.

It is an assumption too easily made that Henrician vernacular poetsof humanistic bent like Wyatt and Surrey relied completely uponContinental vernacular counterparts, relishing, as Puttenham has it,‘the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian’ (and sometimesFrench) poetry.1 Although humanism has its origins in neo-Latin writing, in poetry there was no straightforward subordination of the vernacular to the learned languages. Yet for English poetry of the early Tudor period, the habitual search for anterior texts has been under-

taken among Italian and French poets whose assimilation of humanisticinfluences into the vernacular was already well under way. In Surrey’s

1

1 Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie , 1.31.



‘Yf he that erst the fourme so livelye drewe’ we find a valuable counter-example.

Yf he that erst the fourme so livelye drewe

Of Venus faas, tryumpht in paynteres arte;Thy father then what glorye shall ensue,By whose pencell a goddesse made thow arte!Touchid with flame, that figure made some rewe,

And with her love surprysed manye a hart.There lackt yet that should cure their hoot desyer:Thow canst enflame and quenche the kyndled fyre.2

George Frederick Nott, the first proper editor of both Surrey’s and Wyatt’s poetry, was widely read in European vernacular and classical

poetry. He identified the source of this poem as one of Clément Marot’srondeaux, and this has been accepted by subsequent editors, includingEmrys Jones.3 The rondeau, entitled ‘A la fille d’ung Painctre d’Orléansbelle entre les autres’, is as follows:

Au temps passé, Apelles, Painctre sage,Feit seullement de Venus le visagePar fiction, mais (pour plus hault attaindre)Ton Pere a faict de Venus (sans rien faindre)Entierement la face & le corsage.

Car il est Painctre & tu es son ouvrage,Mieulx resemblant Venus de forme & d’aageQue le Tableau qu’Apelles voulut paindre

Au temps passé. Vray est qu’il feit si belle son ymage

Qu’elle eschauffoit en Amour maint courage;Mais celle là que ton Pere a sceu taindreI mect le feu & a dequoy l’estaindre.

L’aultre n’eut pas ung si gros advantage Au temps passé.4

(In times past, Apelles, the learned painter, represented only Venus’s facethrough art, but (to achieve yet higher) your father made Venus (without feigning anything) from head to toe. For he is a painter and you are his

work, better resembling Venus in shape and age than the painting Apelles wished to paint in times past. True it is that he made his image so beautiful

Andrew Taylor/Nicolas Bourbon and the Epigram

2

2 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Poems , edited by Emrys Jones (Oxford, 1964), p. 10,

no. 14.3 The Works of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder , edited by George Frederick Nott, 2 vols (London, 1815–16); Surrey, ed. Jones, p. 115.

4 Clément Marot, Œuvres diverses , edited by C. A. Mayer (London, 1966), pp. 122–3.Translations of French and Latin texts are mine except where stated.



that she enflamed with love many a heart; but the former which yourFather knew how to colour there sets the fire and has something toquench it. The other had no such advantage in times past.)

Surrey is thus credited with the transformation of a fifteen-line rondeauinto a strambotto of eight lines. As we shall see, some recent interpretersof Surrey’s life and letters have represented this apparent achievement of formal compression as an important paradigm for literary trans-mission between France and England, more specifically between thecourts of François I and Henry VIII.

Although Surrey’s foreign travels were extremely limited in com-parison with Wyatt’s, they did allow the direct contact with the Frenchcourt which seems to add colour to these suppositions. In October

1532, the sixteen-year-old Surrey and his intimate friend, the equally youthful illegitimate son of the king, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond,sailed to Calais as part of the ostentatious entourage which conveyedHenry VIII’s future queen, Anne, Marchioness of Pembroke, to theFrench court.5 After the two kings had met at Boulogne and Calais,Richmond and Surrey remained as close members of François’ Privy Chamber, visiting Saint-Hvert, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Etaples, Amiens,Compiègne, and Chantilly en route for Paris. Spring at Fontainebleau, where Surrey could not but have been influenced by the poets and works of art of the French and Italian Renaissance, was followed by summer in Provence and Avignon with the French king, before they returned to England from Calais in September. On the literary scene, Alamanni’s Opere Toscane issued from Lyon in November 1532, whileMarot, at this time present at court as valet de chambre to François I,published his important collection of verse, L’Adolescence clémentine , in August 1532, and his Suite de l’adolescence clémentine , verse predominantly composed during the Englishmen’s stay, appeared soon after their

departure. Although there seems, in fact, to be no evidence clearly connectingSurrey’s literary development with this period, William Sessions,Surrey’s most recent biographer, embeds Surrey’s Apelles poem in thenarrative of this intoxicating exposure to the French court:

In the rondeau that Surrey imitated, Marot transforms a blatant exampleof Seraphino’s type of Petrarchism, adding his own touches as Surrey didin imitation. Surrey writes in the popular epic metre of ottava rima ,a rhyme scheme of abababcc which is difficult in English. The lyric

Translation and Literature 15 (2006)

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5 For a recent account of the meeting of François I and Henry VIII see William A.Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford, 1999), pp. 85–96.



epitomizes, in fact, Surrey’s whole French experience – formal brilliance, visual art, and a fluid sexuality.6

Sessions finds the ‘pencil’ conceit central to this ‘very early example of

vers de société ’. Furthermore, he credits Surrey with the witty thrust of thefinal couplet, wishing us to identify ‘English brevity’ in opposition toMarot’s baggier conceit. Anne Lake Prescott, who similarly speculateson the impact of editions of Marot’s poetry on Wyatt and his Englishcontemporaries, depicts Surrey’s poem as a paradigm for the poet’soverall achievement in terms not dissimilar to Sessions’:

Surrey took a rondeau by Marot and made it into a short lyric which looksand sounds very much as though it were about to turn into a sonnet …The translation seems to freeze a moment in the evolution of poeticforms, or at least the development of English attitudes towards thoseforms. Instead of the modifications and accumulations encouraged by structural repetition we find greater urgency of movement towards somesharply lineated conclusion. Here the shift in structure changes the toneof the poem entirely. Surrey is far more epigrammatic; Marot is morediffuse, and his refrain adds a note at least remotely wistful.7

Both these interpretations are tacitly indebted to G. F. Nott, but also crucially gloss over the context of his identification. In the long

introductory ‘Dissertation’ to his weighty edition of 1815–16, Nott assessed the Continental elements of Surrey’s poetry:

It has been said indeed, that Surrey studied equally the French andthe Spanish poets, and that he translated from them both. Among theSpanish poets I have not been able to discover any one piece which he canbe supposed to have imitated. From the French poets I can cite a singlerondeau of Marot.

His reliance on that rondeau in dilating upon the ‘masterly’ manner in

which ‘Surrey has improved upon his original’ accords with those morerecent evaluations, especially in emphasizing the virtues of formalcontraction:

It is a leading defect in the Rondeau that the thought is not of sufficient magnitude for the length of the piece. Marot therefore uses repetition,

which destroys the epigrammatic turn of the compliment. Surrey com-presses the thought, and gives it its full effect.8


4

6

Sessions, p. 96.7 Anne Lake Prescott, ‘The Reputation of Clément Marot in Renaissance England’,Studies in the Renaissance , 18 (1971), 173–202 (pp. 174, 179). See also her French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation (New Haven, 1978), p. 9.

8 Nott, Works of Henry Howard , I, cclvii–cclix.



Nott contrasts Surrey’s classicism not only with his French contem-porary but with Skelton, perhaps the greatest poet of the previousgeneration, however idiosyncratic. But the affinity between ‘Yf he that erst the fourme’ and Skelton’s lines (892–8) on Zeuxis and Apelles inhis sui generis epic compilation, The Garlande or Chaplet of Laurell , lies innothing more than the two poems’ references to the limning of sublimeartists.

Surrey’s epigram certainly handles its erotic subject with dextrous wit and subtlety. The use of Apelles, whose Aphrodite Anadyomene was themost famous painting of antiquity, as a comparative figure of artisticrivalry derives from a poetic tradition difficult to locate elsewhere inSurrey’s writing. It also registers telling contact with the humanistic

preoccupation with Apelles, a topos endlessly reworked for bothcommendatory and less edifying purposes. In respect of the latter, eventhe precocious Surrey may perhaps be thought a little too young to havebeen drawn to Bourbon’s poem in the early 1530s. However, the claimthat Surrey’s protean neoclassical genius is modestly manifested in hisaggressive reshaping of Marot’s rondeau mistakes the genesis of thepoem. It must be pointed out that its source lies not in the French vernacular, but in the neo-Latin poetry of Marot’s contemporary Nicolas Bourbon:

Olim qui Veneris vultum depinxit Apelles,Maximus, & primus fertur in arte sua.

Ecce tamen genitor tuus est praestantior illo,Cuius peniculo facta puella Dea es.

Illa quidem multos urebat Apellis imago, Atque aliquot iuuenes cepit amore sui.

Non habuit tamen unde suos restingueret ignes:Tu simul inflammas, & medicamen habes.9

(Until now, Apelles, who painted the face of Venus, was forever held to bethe greatest and foremost in his art. Yet, behold, your father is moreoutstanding than him, through whose brush you, a girl, have been madea Goddess. Indeed that image of Apelles set many aflame, and seized some

young men with desire of itself. Yet it held not the wherewithal to quenchtheir fires: but you both kindle and hold the cure.)


5

9 Nicolas Bourbon, Nicolai Borbonii Vandoperani Lingonensis Nugarum libri octo (Lyons,

1538), p. 295; Nicolai Borbonii Vandoperani Nugae (Paris, 1533). I. D. McFarlane, ‘Clément Marot and the World of Neo-Latin Poetry’, in Literature and the Arts in the Reign of Francis I , edited by Pauline M. Smith and I. D. McFarlane (Lexington, 1985), pp. 103–30(pp. 109–10) seems to misread ‘peniculo’ as ‘periculo’; causa metri , ‘cepit’ is taken fromCratander’s 1540 edition from Basel, which seems to correct ‘cœpit’ from 1538.



Bourbon did not acknowledge the source of ‘Olim qui Veneris’ whenit was first printed in the first edition of his Nugae (1533), but heexpanded the perfunctory title ‘Ad Puellam’ in the Nugarum libri octo (1538) as follows: ‘Ad puellam, ex vulgari carmine Maroti, Borboniusscripsit.’ It is uncertain whether there was personal contact betweenBourbon and Surrey (or Wyatt), yet we shall see that the Frenchman’slater volume had an interested English readership at court. Within this wider reception, Surrey as the translator of Bourbon, rather than as thetransformative imitator of Marot, now requires consideration.

The classical epigram was of variable length, to the extent that thegenre is defined not by form but by tone and structure of thought.Surrey perceived Bourbon’s eight-lined ‘Olim qui Veneris’ as a latent

strambotto .10

Although rare, his excursion into the form was not unique:the poem with which he headed his paraphrase of Psalm 88 illustrates well the cultivation of syntactic complexity through which he strove toemulate the extended Latin sentence:

When recheles youthe in an unquiet breast,Set on by wrath, revenge and crueltye,

After long warr pacyens had opprest, And justice wrought by pryncelye equitie;My Deny, then myne errour, depe imprest,

Began to worke dispaire of libertye,Had not David, the perfyt warriour, tought That of my fault thus pardon shold be sought.11

The strambotto , although no rival for the sonnet, was prominent amongthe new verse forms which attracted those English courtier poets most attuned to the fresh literary currents flowing from Italy through France.Its ottava rima has encouraged some to assert Surrey’s interest in theform as a miniature engagement with Italian epic poets such as Ariosto.

But the strambotto was already self-sufficient, and was available incollections of Serafino dell’ Aquila’s poetry, much as sonnets werein Petrarch’s. However, translation and imitation of the form weremore developed in France, with Sir Thomas Wyatt, whose protracteddiplomatic duties had fostered his cosmopolitan literary sensibility, theonly interested English poet of the period.12 The manuscript associated


6

10 The broader difficulty of defining the epigram also combines with the evolving, and

often careless, use of literary terms in the sixteenth century. See the discussion by Hoyt Hopewell Hudson, The Epigram in the English Renaissance (Princeton, 1947), Ch. 1.11 Surrey, Poems , p. 32, no. 36.12 See Annabel M. Endicott, ‘A Note on Wyatt and Serafino D’Aquilano’, Renaissance

News , 17 (1964), 301–3.



with Wyatt’s friend George Blage contains six epigrammatic octaves,13

while R. A. Rebholz, Wyatt’s most recent editor, gathered thirty-fivepoems into a section entitled ‘epigrams’, of which twenty-seven arestrambotti .14

Before discussing Surrey’s translation of Bourbon’s epigram,Bourbon’s recasting of his compatriot’s rondeau demands attention.Marot’s rondeau is not without a cumulative ironic charm which derivesin part from the refrain ‘Au temps passé’. Its relationship to music andperhaps performance should qualify our acceptance of Nott’s disdainof its intellectual feebleness. The poem first appeared in Marot’sRondeaux en Nombre troys cens cinquante (Paris, 1527), just prior to analleged revolution in his literary commitments. ‘Sources, treatment,

styles, genres, all confirm the break with the past’, where the rondeauis seen to give way to the epigram for the development of witty, oftenerotic, conceit: ‘through the intermediary of the Italian poets, both vernacular and neo-Latin, and the Latin poets Martial and Catullus,many of Marot’s lyrical épigrammes rejoin the tradition which issuedfrom the Greek Anthology’.15 However, it was just this earlier strainof Marot’s amatory poetry which the humanist Theodore de Bèzecelebrated in his Poemata (1548), a volume steeped in Ovid, Catullus,and Tibullus, the poets he read avidly with his sodalitium during his years

ostensibly studying law at Orléans in 1535–9 before he arrived in Paristo devote his life (so he thought) to bonae litterae :

Ad Cl. Marotum

Tam doctè Venerem diuinus pinxit ApellesIlli vt credatur visa fuisse Venus.

At tantam sapiunt Venerem tua scripta, Marote, Vt tibi credatur cognita tota Venus.16

De Bèze soon attracted English translators: Timothy Kendall’s loose version appeared in his Flowers of Epigrammes (1577), William Weever’smore polished one in his Epigrammes (1599):


7

13

Trinity College Dublin MS D.2.7, parts 2 and 3.14 Sir Thomas Wyatt, Complete Poems , edited by R. A. Rebholz (Harmondsworth, 1978).15 P. M. Smith, Clément Marot: Poet of the Renaissance (London, 1970), pp. 79, 155;

James Hutton, The Greek Anthology in France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1946), pp. 34–5.16 Quoted from Theodori Bezae Vezelij Poemata iuuenilia ([Paris], 1580), fo. 42r–v .




8

17 John Weever, Epigrammes in the Oldest Cut, and Newest Fashion (London, 1599), sig.E2 v ; Timothy Kendall, Flowers of Epigrammes (London, 1577), fo. 72r:

To Cl. Marotus

Apelles learned hand, so finedid paint fair Venus Queene:

That euery one suposd that he,had Venus vewd and seen.

But workes of thine Marotus lewd,of Venus sauour so:

That euery one sure deemes, that thoudost all of Venus know.

18 Selecta Epigrammata Graeca Latine uersa: ex septem epigrammatum Graecorum libris (Basel, 1529), pp. 340–55.

19 For fuller discussion, see The Works of Ausonius , edited by R. P. H. Green (Oxford,1991), p. 404.

In Spurium quendam scriptorem

Apelles did so paint faire Venus Queene,That most supposde he had faire Venus seene,But thy bald rimes of Venus sauour so,That I dare sweare thou dost all Venus know.17

De Bèze here draws on the Greek epigrammatic tradition typified by Anthologia Palatina 16.168:

Γυµνην ε

δε Παρι µε, κα Αγχιση, κα Αδωνι.

του τρει

ο

δα µνου. Πραξιτλη δ πθεν;

(Paris saw me naked, as did Anchises, Adonis too. I know only of thesethree. So how did Praxiteles see me?)

AP 16.168 is embedded in a run of thematically linked epigrams(16.159–68, 172, 175), many of which found their way into Cornarius’influential gathering of Latin translations, the Selecta Epigrammata.18

The anonymous couplet at AP 16.162 closes similarly with a question which titillates the reader, who is complicit with the imaginary malegaze upon Praxiteles’ celebrated nude, the Aphrodite of Cnidus:

α Κυπρι ταν Κνιδ ε

πεν δου

σα.

Φευ

, φευ. που

γυµνην ε

δ µε Πραξιτλ;

(The Cyprian upon seeing the Cyprian in Cnidus said, ‘Alas, alas, wheredid Praxiteles see me naked?’)

As the doubling of epithets suggests, the representation is so lifelike it substitutes for the forbidden divine reality.

Humanist poets like Bourbon knew their Ausonius, who offered amodel for the imitation of Greek epigrammatists and the sidelining of Roman exponents like Martial.19 Titles of several poems in the Nugae



(1533), such as ‘a Graeco Luciani, vel potius Ausonii imitatio’ (2.1) and‘a Graeco et Ausonio’ (4.70), indicate Bourbon’s ‘double orientation’;indeed, he composed Greek verse as well as translated and imitated it.20

In ‘Olim qui Veneris’, Bourbon works his eight lines of Latin elegiactowards a final couplet which justifies the indecent conceit: whereMarot’s thematic development asserted paternity more figuratively as‘celle là que ton Pere a sceu taindre’, Bourbon jests with the divinepower of creation with his double entendre on ‘peniculus’ (little brushor pen), a pun seemingly under-exploited in Roman antiquity. Marot’scontrast between the past image of Venus’ face and the present girl’sbody is likewise overtaken in the Latin epigram by suggestions about theuse to which the latter might be put. Ausonius’ Epigram 62 gives a clue

to Bourbon’s invention of the artist’s tool: Vera Venus Cnidiam cum vidit Cyprida, dixit

‘vidisti nudam me, puto, Praxitele.’non vidi nec fas, sed ferro opus omne polimus:

Ferrum Gradivi Martis in arbitrio.qualem igitur domino scierant placuisse Cytheren,

talem fecerunt ferrea caela deam.

(When the real Venus saw the Cnidian Cypris, she said ‘You saw me naked,methinks, Praxiteles.’ I did not see, nor is it permitted, but we finish every

work with an iron stylus: iron in the service of Marching Mars. Thereforethey had thought that as Cytheran Venus had pleased their master, so my iron chisels made the goddess.)

This savours of AP 16.160.4–6:

φθγξατο. Που

γυµνην ε

δε µε Πραξιτγη;

Πραξιτλη ου κ ε

δεν, α µη θµι, α λλ ο σιδηρο

εξεσεν, οιαν Αρη ηθελε, τη Παφιην.

(She said, ‘Where did Praxiteles see me naked?’ Praxiteles did not see what is not right to see, but the iron chiseled the Paphian as Ares wishedher to be.)

The answer to the allegation of Praxiteles’ transgression is that heneeded no such knowledge of her nude body: ‘his iron chisel, as theembodiment of her divine lover, produced the image’.21 To endow Marot’s theme with Hellenistic piquancy, Bourbon seems to havedeveloped ‘peniculus’ for an Apellean poem, in place of Praxiteles’


9

20 Works of Ausonius , p. xxxvii; Lucian contributed the Praxitelean AP 160.163.21 Kathryn Gutzwiller, ‘Gender and Inscribed Epigram: Herennia Procula and the

Thespian Eros’, Transactions of the Americian Philological Association , 134 (2004), 383–418(p. 397).



ferrum or caela . In this way he seems to have recognized in Marot’srondeau, itself semi-humanistic in its collision of form and subject,the potential for allusive association with this tradition of the Greekepigram.

Surrey’s translation immediately modifies Bourbon’s poem by deploy-ing the figure of antonomasia, what the Ad Herennium calls a kind of foreign epithet (cognomine quodam extraneo ): ‘in this way we shall beable, not without elegance, in praise and censure, concerning physicalattributes, qualities of character, or external circumstances, to expressourselves’.22 In declining to name Apelles, where Bourbon’s openingline runs ‘Olim qui Veneris vultum depinxit Apelles’, Surrey gently flatters his reader’s ability to identify the subject. This antonomasia also

suggests a readership attuned to a trope, the potential grace of which was identified by du Bellay in the Deffence as a necessary stylisticchallenge for vernacular imitation of classical, and then neo-Latin,poets: ‘Entre autres choses, je t’averty’ user souvent de la figureantonomasie , aussi frequente aux anciens poëtes, comme peu usitée, voire incongnue des Francoys’ (‘among other things, I admonish youto use often the figure antonomasia , as frequent in the ancient poets asit is little used, indeed even unknown to the French’).23 We hear theecho of Quintilian’s distinction between poets, who frequently employ

the trope, and its far rarer use among orators.24 Surrey was not alwayshighly attuned to the possibility of antonomasia. Indeed, Quintilianillustrated the trope with Dido’s anguished speech at Aeneid 4.494–7:

Tu secreta pyram tecto interiore sub aurasErige et arma viri, thalamo quae fixa reliquit Impius …

… superimponas.

Surrey’s version, syntactically problematic in relation to Virgil, misses

Dido’s pointed denunciation of Aeneas as ‘impius’, the traitorous orfalse man:

Right secretly within our inner court In open ayre reare up a stack of wood,

And hang theron the weapon of this man,The which he left within my chamber sticke.25


10

22 Anon., Ad Herennium 4.32.31: ‘Hoc pacto inornate poterimus, et in laudando et in

laedendo, in corpore aut animo aut extraneis rebus dicere.’23 Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse , edited by Fernand Angué (Paris, 1972), II.9, p. 95.

24 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria , 8.6.29–30.25 Surrey, Poems , p. 80, no. 42, ll. 657–60.



However, his fondness for the figure is evident from the opening of hissonnets ‘Th’ Assyryans king’ (Sardanapalus) and ‘The greate Macedon’(Alexander), poems which find parallels in Wyatt’s translations:Petrarch’s ‘Cesare, poi che ’l traditor d’Egitto’ (Rime 101) and, morepertinently, the opening of ‘Vinse Anibàl, et non seppe usar poi’ (Rime 103) for his strambotto ‘Off Carthage he that worthie warrier’, a poem which derived from Wyatt’s attendance on Charles V at Mountzon inOctober 1537.26 This network of stylistic and formal influence movesSurrey’s composition yet further away from his months in France in theearly 1530s to those years when Wyatt’s poetics and the reading of Bourbon’s trifles could have fruitfully overlapped in the more classically inclined English poet.

Bourbon’s poem neatly breaks down into four sentences of two verses. Surrey translates the first four Latin verses as a sustainedsentence to substitute the balanced comparison of the rhetoricalquestion for Bourbon’s apostrophic and emphatic assertion of thesuperiority of nature over art. Furthermore, the substitution of ‘Yf’ for‘Olim’ lends Surrey’s version the syntactic impetus of the conditionalconstruction (‘Yf’/‘then’) absent from Bourbon’s temporal framework(‘Olim’/‘Ecce’). Here, Surrey’s use of rhyme juxtaposes the creation of the ‘paynteres arte’ with a pun on ‘arte’ as the procreative result of her

father’s ‘pencell’. Thus Surrey unifies Bourbon’s opening juxtapositionof two sentences. In the second half of the poem, Bourbon introducesthe theme of burning desire through ‘urebat’, which anticipates theexplicit emotional ‘ignes’ and ‘inflammas’ found in the final pair of verses. Surrey, on the other hand, marks emphatically the thematicdevelopment by beginning ‘Touchid with flame’, a potent adjectivalphrase which flickers between the image of Venus and her arousedobserver. Indeed, his deft use of ‘Touchid’ offers not only contact between the living and its erotic verisimilitude, but the affective frisson

as well. Moreover, the relationship between life and art negotiated by Bourbon and his English translator is one that connects closely to a useof the epigram which returns the genre to its etymological origin:epigramma – a legend inscribed on an object. Behind ‘Yf he that erst thefourme so livelye drewe’ lies not merely an excursion into a book of neo-Latin epigrams, but a network of personal and formal relations betweenpoets, painters, and their creations.


11

26 Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt , edited by Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson(Liverpool, 1969; hereafter ‘M&T’), no. LXXXI.



Bourbon’s Nugae was published sufficiently early in 1533 for Surrey tohave acquired a copy while in France. A letter of Erasmus to Bourbonfrom Freiburg, 10 April 1533, acknowledges appreciatively his readingof a gift copy, while Bourbon managed to include a letter fromLudovicus Carinus dated 25 February 1533 in the volume itself.27

Erasmus’ letter gives us one vision of the variety of the ‘Trifles’. Beforerequesting that Bourbon convey best wishes to his fellow Latin poet, the‘French Horace’ Salmon Macrin, he encourages Bourbon’s pietas :‘Farewell, my dear Bourbon, most honeyed poet, and see that thoseMuses who grant you such friendly favour are made to serve the glory of God rather than that of men.’ Although this caveat to Bourbon’spursuit of patrons registers Erasmus’ own alienation from French

religious and intellectual circles, it also obliquely indicates how thepoetic fabric of playful diversions and dignified encomia includedstrands of evangelical reform which Erasmus wished more conspicuous.Their commitments, as with those of so many reform-minded courtiersof the 1530s, alternate between Erasmian ecclesiastical criticism andmore strident protest.28 Bourbon’s more problematic ‘trifles’, which were rightly taken as attacks on the Church, led to his humiliatingincarceration following the Affaire des Placards on 17–18 October 1534.Bourbon found refuge from religious persecution within Boleyn circles,

probably through the sympathetic diplomatic channels of Jean deDinteville and Jean du Bellay, Bishop of Paris.29 Dinteville, who figuresso famously in Holbein’s The Ambassadors , was a favourite of Anne’s andhad been educated with Bourbon. Bourbon was writing from Londonby 5 May 1535, a little after his arrival, and he seems to have left before Anne’s fall, travelling to Lyon to see his Paedagogeion through thepresses by the end of 1536.30 The poet’s celebrity, his intermingling of


12

27 Erasmus, Opus epistolarum , edited by P. S. Allen, 12 vols (Oxford, 1906–58), X,193–5, Ep. 2789. This letter was printed first in Bourbon’s Paidagogeion (Lyon, 1536), andthen as the introductory epistle to the third book of the enlarged Nugarum libri octo (1538), pp. 149–50. Carinus’ letter to Bourbon appears at sigs P8 r–Q1r.

28 See Margaret Mann Phillips, ‘Nicolas Bourbon and Erasmus’, in Acta Conventus Neo- Latini Amsteldamensis: Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies 1973 , edited by P. Tuynman and G. C. Kuiper (Munich, 1979), pp. 859–65 (p. 864).

29 Eric Ives has given the fullest account of Bourbon’s sojourn, focusing primarily onthe information yielded by his verse on English evangelical associations prior to Anne’sfall: Eric Ives, ‘A Frenchman at the Court of Anne Boleyn’, History Today , 48/8 (1998),21–6; The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (Oxford, 2004), pp. 274–6, 289. The debts

Bourbon incurred during his subsequent exile at the English court were recorded inalmost fifty poems in his expanded Nugarum libri octo (1538). There are poems toCromwell, Cranmer, Latimer, Sir William Butts, the royal physician, Henry Knevet, JohnDudley, and several others.

30 Margaret Mann Phillips, ‘The Paedagogion of Nicolas Bourbon’, in Neo-Latin and the



sacred and profane themes, and the stylistic paradigms explored in hiscollection, would have recommended the Nugae to Surrey and those who considered themselves courtly progressives of literary bent.

The specific appeal to Surrey of Bourbon’s ‘Olim qui Veneris’ most likely lies in the period of the Frenchman’s exile. In his Paedagogeion Bourbon addressed a prefatory letter ‘D. Hansi pictori Regio, huiusaeui Apelli’ (‘To the King’s painter Hans Holbein, the Apelles of thisage’).31 In England we find Bourbon sitting for this Henrician Apelles,a painter associated with Surrey, whose image he captured more thanonce, and with John Leland, who also celebrated Holbein in a seriesof Latin epigrams. Holbein’s portrait of Bourbon in coloured chalksand black ink led to a woodcut which soon promulgated his image in

printed works, first in the Paedagogeion and then the Tabellae (1539), for which he composed the following accompaniment:

Borbonium qui de facie nouêre Poëtam,Hanc ueram agnoscunt illius effigiem.

Vnum hoc peccauit pictor, quòd Vatis honestumNon meminit sacra cingere fronde caput.

Laurigerum at pictor qui nuper fecit eundemHansus, ob id celeber uiuit Apelle magis.32

(Those who know the Poet Bourbon by sight recognize this true imageof him. The painter erred in this alone, that he forgot to crown thehonoured head of the prophet with sacred leaf. But the painter, Hans,

who recently fashioned the same wearing laurels, on that account livesmore greatly renowned than Apelles.)

He also included in his Nugarum libri octo verses composed while inEngland, including ‘In Hansum Vlbium pictonem incomparabilem’(‘On the peerless painter Hans Holbein’):

Dum diuina meos uultus mens exprimit, Hansi,Per tabulam data docta praecipitante manu,

Ipsum & ego interea sic uno carmine pinxi:Hansus me pingens maior Apelle fuit.33

(While your divine mind gave expression to my features, Hans, and yourskilled hand hurried over the canvas, I painted you thus meanwhile ina single line of poetry: Hans, as he did my portrait, was greater than

Apelles.)


13

Vernacular in Renaissance France , edited by Grahame Castor and Terence Cave (Oxford,1984), pp. 71–82.31 Bourbon, Paidagogeion , sig. M7 v . The printed portrait bears the date 1535.32 Nicolas Bourbon, Tabellae elementariae (Paris, 1539), fo. 46 v .33 Bourbon, Nugarum libri octo (1538), p. 338, VI.12.



The expressive and competitive exchange between image and inscrip-tion could be cleverly exploited, as in Thomas More’s two-part poem ona two-part picture (‘Versus in tabulam duplicem’) in his Epigrammata (1518).34 In the second part, More ‘himself’ speaks to praise the painterin conventional terms:

Quentine O veteris nouator artis,Magno non minor artifex Apelle,Mire composito potens colore

Vitam adfingere mortuis figuris …

(Quentin [Metsys], reviver of an ancient art, not less an artist than great Apelles, marvelously gifted to lend life by a mixture of colours to lifelessshapes …)

But before this, the speaking picture confesses its genesis: ‘Sic desyderioest consultum absentis, ut horum / Reddat amans animum littera,corpus ego’ (‘They arranged to satisfy their absent friend’s longing forthem: a living letter represents their minds, I their bodies’).

Susan Foister has suggested that early Tudor courtiers were relatively unaware of the rhetorics of praise for artistic skill, some undergoinga rapid humanistic conversion in the 1530s.35 The Burgundian tastes with which they are generally credited did not extend to the en-

comiastic literary culture of the Netherlandish rhetoricans. ThomasMore’s cosmopolitan achievements in his Epigrammata neverthelessprovided for John Leland’s literary augmentation of a more patriotichumanism at the English court. It was during Holbein’s English careerthat Leland, the foremost Latin poet in the generation after More, wasmoved to write inscriptions for paintings.36 Leland’s epigrammaticsupplementation of court painting was an activity continuous with hiscelebration of those exponents and patrons of ‘good letters’ whomhe admired, or on whom he depended. His self-presentation as thepurveyor of French humanistic culture to England also pervades hispoetry.37 Bourbon’s celebration of Holbein, moreover, seems to have


14

34 Thomas More, Complete Works , Vol. 3 Pt 2: The Latin Poems , edited by Clarence Milleret al. (New Haven, 1984), pp. 299–301, no. 276.

35 Susan Foister, ‘Humanism and Art in the Early Tudor Period: John Leland’s PoeticPraise of Painting’, in Reassessing Tudor Humanism , edited by Jonathan Woolfson(Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 129–50 (p. 131); Caroline Barron, ‘Introduction: England and

the Low Countries 1327–1477’, in England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages ,edited by Caroline Barron and Nigel Saul (Stroud, 1995), pp. 1–28.36 See Susan Foister, Holbein and England (New Haven, 2004), pp. 110–11.37 See James P. Carley, ‘John Leland in Paris: The Evidence of his Poetry’, SP , 83

(1986), 1–50 (p. 17). Carley provides a prosopographical survey for all those addressed



been fostered by Leland’s own.38 On returning to France, Bourbon alsocomposed extensive liminary verses for Holbein’s Historiarum Veteris Testamenti Icones (1539), a work destined for English translation adecade later. The prominence of Bourbon in Leland’s poetry, and theirshared literary investment in Holbein, together strongly suggest that at least some of Leland’s epigrams on Bourbon sprang from his exile inEngland, rather than deriving from his earlier Parisian days.39 Of Leland’s four extant epigrams on Bourbon, one explicitly voiced hisambition to rival the Nugae : ‘Vandoperane, mei censor tu carminis esto,/ Quam vellem Nugis proximus esse tuis’ (O Vandoperanus, be a criticof my song, how I should like to be closest to your Nugae ).40 Althoughno autograph manuscript survives of the poetry Leland compiled over

many years, a copy made by John Stow shortly after Leland’s death in1552 (now Bodleian MS Tanner 464.iv) provides the text above in which‘Nugae’ appears capitalized; furthermore, in Thomas Newton’s editionof 1589, the word is italicized as a work’s title.41 The encomiasticfunction of Leland’s distich is then better thought of as representingan implied readership familiar with his Nugae , and as having beenprompted by Bourbon’s arrival in England with, or following, his volume.

If we now re-read Surrey’s translation of Bourbon’s epigram in this

context, we perceive how it plays off the rich rhetorical interactionbetween image and inscription only recently cultivated in England, tobring Surrey into the ken of Bourbon and Leland. Just as the versesLeland subtended to Holbein’s roundel of Wyatt in the Naeniae (1542) were to protest the inability of even a masterful portrait to mitigate the


15

in Leland’s Parisian poetry. See also J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds, 1990), pp. 18–26.

38 Foister, ‘Humanism and Art’, p. 142.39 There has been little progress in dating many of Leland’s epigrams, and his state-ment in the preface to the Cygnea cantio (1545) that ‘Adolescens … treis Epigrammaton

libellos scriberem’ merely provokes more questions about the age of an adolescens .Leland seems to have returned from Paris long before Bourbon’s ‘trifles’ were publishedunder that name in 1533. However, in the epigram next discussed he may possibly havebeen recalling Bourbon’s reference to his poetry as ‘nugas scilicet meas’ early in thededicatory epistle to Charles de Tournon, Bishop-elect of Viviers, of his Epigrammata of 1529. This was the precursor of the Nugae proper, but as the phrase suggests, theeuphemistic appellation was informal, nor did he repeat it in that letter to root theconceit deeper in the reader’s mind.

40 John Leland, Principium, Ac illustrium aliquot et eruditorum in Anglia virorum, Encomia,

Trophaea, Genethliaca, et Epithalamia (London, 1589), p. 51.41 For a discussion of the relationship between manuscript sources of Leland’s poetry and the printed texts, see Carley, ‘John Leland in Paris’, pp. 5–6. Evidence from Leland’sepigrams (such as a reference to John Barrett, d.1526) suggests that he was composing

verses by the time he was a student at Christ’s College, Cambridge from c .1519–22.



loss of the dead poet, so Surrey’s poem plays, but here with erotic intent, with the distinction between the spirit and the flesh:

In effigiem thomae viati

Holbenus nitida pingendi maximus arteEffigiem expressit graphicè: sed nullus ApellesExprimet ingenium felix animumque Viati.42

(On the image of Thomas Wyatt. Holbein, greatest in the brilliant art of painting, portrayed his image skilfully: but no Apelles can portray favourably the wit and spirit of Wyatt.)

In addition to commissions designed to project political power, court portraitists also supplied works which were exchanged as love tokens.

Intellectual community, such as that idealized among Erasmians for whom ‘among friends all is in common’, was sustained by portraits bothtextual and graphic. Yet there were, then as now, other motives formaking the absent feel nearer. In 1536, Lord Thomas Howard con-fessed that his mistress Lady Margaret had given him her ‘Phisnamye’; we may imagine the intimate physical affections for which it stood asboth remembrance and anticipation. The erotic jest at the heart of Surrey’s ‘Yf he that erst the fourme’ thus assumes the edge of satiricalcomment on Apelles’ ability to create a likeness which rendered the

subject fully present to the observer. Although Marot’s ‘Au temps passé’has a carnal theme, Bourbon’s formal transformation of that rondeauinto an eight-line Hellenized epigram, and the rhetorical field of inscription off which it ironically played, both seem to have attractedSurrey. Indeed, Sir John Cheke’s poem in unrhymed hexameter, ‘What natures worke is this’, which is thought to address Surrey, encouragesus to think ‘Yf he that erst’ was well known to those who would haveunderstood Bourbon’s anterior allusion to the Greek tradition:

What saye we then by thee whose wittie workes we seeexcell in kynde of vearce as worthie Chawcers mateeven as the paynter good, with pensell, natures matche

Apelles once did leave the Lusting goddesse headPorterid with shape of lif faire blomes of bewties sheeneso faire and lyvelye drawne with Collours to beholdethat onlye it lacktt in deede bothe lif and heat there in43


16

42 Leland, Naeniae in mortem T. Viati equitis incomparabilis (London, 1542), sig. A1 v ;Kenneth Muir, Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool, 1963), p. 261.

43 The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry , edited by Ruth Hughey, 2 vols(Columbus, OH, 1960), I, 332–3, no. 282.



It is not too far-fetched to think that Cheke’s gratuitous introduction of the phrase ‘with pensell’ alludes to Surrey’s Apellean poem.

The English vernacular poetry of Wyatt and Surrey has, at best, beenrelated only to their vernacular counterparts abroad, which has tendedto exclude full consideration of the role of neo-Latin in their literary reception of humanism. The mediation of Marot’s ‘Au temps passé’to Surrey via Bourbon’s ‘Olim qui Veneris’ suggests that the fertileinteraction between Latin and vernacular at the French Court couldserve as a model for contemporary English literary transformation.Bourbon’s ‘Non pacem inuenio’, an imitation of Petrarch’s ‘Pace non

trovo’ (Rime 134), is far from an isolated instance of the influence of vernacular poetry on theNugae : titles such as ‘De uulgari carmine Clem.Maroti, iocus’, ‘De passere mortuo Lampadis puellae, ex vulg. Maroti’,and ‘Ex uernaculo Petrarchae, de Laura’, punctuate the volume toadvertise the generic boundaries of this literary exchange. In theEnglish courtly sphere, Leland was perhaps the best equivalent of theprominent French humanists Geoffroy Tory and Nicole Bérault whoproduced liminary Latin verse for Marot’s Adolescence clémentine , whileMacrin and Bourbon, the two leading Latin poets, added others to the

Suite of 1533.44 Bourbon included his contribution in the Nugarum libri octo (1538). Nor were these dedicatory and encomiastic currentsisolated from England. Bourbon dedicated the second book of theNugarum libri octo to William Benson of Boston, Abbot of Westminster(generally known as Boston). However, this letter had already appearedin his Paedagogeion (1536), a collection swiftly published on his returnto France which had grown out of his role as tutor to the sons of prominent English courtiers. The epistle reveals Bourbon’s ongoingconnection with the English court:

Plura his aggregarem, nisi plusquam serias occupationes tuas reueritus,caetera persequi mallem, quae a me iampridem amplitudo tuaefflagitauit: neque possum, quin genio isti tuo morem geram, quem scioipsum nugis meis apprime delectari. Nugas appello, non carmina measolum, quae uel nunc ad te mitto, uel quotidie noua cudo, uerum etiamquicquid a me dici, scribi, cogitari potest.45

(I would add many to these if, more than respectful of your serious affairs,I did not prefer to pursue the other things, which your dignity has now

for a long time entreated from me. Nor can I but comply with your genius,


17

44 Bourbon’s poem was translated for the second edition.45 Bourbon, Nugarum libri octo (1538), pp. 84–5.



which I know delights above all in my trifles. I call not only my poemstrifles – both those which I am now sending to you or the new ones I forgeeach day – but truly also anything that I am able to say, write, or think.)

Bourbon here also records his admiration for the poetry of Marot, andstates that he is shortly to send him pieces by Marot and the two Scèves,lest he want something to exercise his lungs with laughter.46 It is difficult to say whether this implies that Bourbon had keen hope of a new printed edition, or that he intended to send Boston a supply of manuscript Latin translations enclosed in letters. It is tempting to agree with Carré, who without explanation relates this offer of light relief directly to Bourbon’s epigrammatic imitation of Marot’s ‘Au tempspassé’; however, the poem had already appeared in the Nugae (1533),

although only under ‘Ad Puellam’ rather than ‘Ad puellam, ex uulgaricarmine Maroti’.47 Nevertheless, the evidence offered above doesencourage us to think of a greater frequency and complexity of literary transactions between the English and French courts.

If the strambotto is to be associated with the emergent Englishepigram, its later manifestation as a shaft of barbed wit was initially unusual. The prevailing vividly expressed paradox or single conceit keep Wyatt’s epigrams close to the metaphysical strains found inPetrarchan sonnets. Indeed, the strambotto has been thought of as an‘abbreviated sonnet, reducing Petrarchan complexity to focus on asingle conceit or antithesis which is developed with a sardonic wit’.48

Wyatt’s ‘Alas madame for stelyng of a kysse’ and ‘What nedeth thesethretning wordes and wasted wynde’ clearly derive respectively fromSerafino’s ‘Incolpa donna amor se troppo io uolsi’ and ‘À che minacci,à che tanta ira e orgoglio’, to justify this formulation.49 Yet beyond thesetranslations of original strambotti , there is a supplementary movement towards poetic condensation from slightly longer forms into the octave.

Wyatt, for example, reduced the Petrarchan sonnet ‘Vinse Anibàl e nonseppe usar poi’ for his strambotto ‘Off Carthage he that worthie warrier’, while he fashioned the sonnet ‘Thou slepest ffast’ not by expansion, but rather the condensation of consecutive strambotti in Serafino’s Opere ,‘Ahime tu dormi’ and ‘Tu dormi, io veglio’, evidence itself of Wyatt’s


18

46 Bourbon, Nugarum libri octo (1538), p. 86.47

G. Carré, De Vita et Scriptis Nicolai Borbonii Vandoperani (Paris, 1888), p. 48, n. 4; Nugae (1538), pp. 92–3.48 Elizabeth Heale, Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry (London, 1998), p. 83.49 M&T XLIV and XLVIII. From, for example, Serafino de Ciminella (Aquilano),

Opere (Florence, 1516), fos. 179 v and 170r–v . For a full discussion, see notes in M&T.



perusal of the volume, rather than of some secondary transmission.50

Moreover, Surrey’s translation of Bourbon’s ‘Olim qui Veneris’indicates that we should also be aware of the neo-Latin epigram as anextra force acting on the vernacular poetics of compression. Theopportunities it afforded for gnomic condensation, allusive potency,enigma even, appealed to classicizing court poets in both the vernacularand neo-Latin, with the strambotto becoming an important embodiment of the epigram in which poetic capability could be displayed throughboth translation and imitative adaptation. Moreover, it is generally thought that Wyatt’s interest in the strambotto stemmed from hisknowledge of the French imitation of the Italian by Clément Marot,Mellin de St Gelais, and others. Unlike Thomas More’s Epigrammata ,

which surpasses William Lily’s and John Constable’s ‘repetitious exer-cises’ in both originality and engagement with the Greek Anthology ,51

Wyatt’s debt to Ausonius, for example in his ‘For steadfast harm of great and hatefull nede’ (M&T CCLVII), suggests only limited receptivity tothe fourth-century translator of Greek epigrams who attracted theattention of neo-Latin poets such as Bourbon and Leland.52 Nor should we think that the vernacular poets easily asserted their epigrammaticpoetry as versions of the classical epigram. Just as Wyatt experimented with strambotti , so it was not until 1538 that Marot formally identified his

dixains as epigrams.53 But where both these poets handled the rondeau,Surrey seems not to have been attracted to this aging form.

These strands of literary and historical evidence suggest that Surrey’sattraction to Bourbon’s Nugae , and the poem ‘Olim qui Veneris’ inparticular, derive from the period 1535–6 at the earliest. Furthermore,it brings Leland closer to the humanistic development of the youngEnglish poet: Leland’s Naeniae on Wyatt was dedicated to the Earl asthe dead poet’s phoenix. We have found Leland manipulating therelationship of Holbein to Apelles in this elegiac context, the soberformality of which is typical of most of Leland’s praise of Holbein’s ‘raredexterity of hand’. But we can also find the topos of Apelles employed


19

50 Petrarch, Rime 103; M&T LXXXI; Serafino, Opere , fo. 132r.51 Binns, Intellectual Culture , p. 12; Epigrammata clarissimi disertissimique uiri Thomae

Mori Britanni (Basel, 1520); Ioannis Constablii Londinensis et artium professoris epigrammata (London, 1520); Epigrammata Guil. Lilii Angli (London, 1521).

52 See Lawrence V. Ryan, ‘The Shorter Latin Poem in Tudor England’, Humanistica Lovaniensia , 26 (1977), 101–31, and the introduction More, Latin Poems . Roger Green,

‘Ausonius in the Renaissance’, in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Sanctandreani , edited by I. D.McFarlane (Binghamton, 1986), pp. 579–85.53 Even in 1536, Marot did not either wish or insist that any of his short poems be

termed epigrams. Only in his Œuvres (1538) does the term appear. See Mayer’s extendeddiscussion in his edition of Marot’s Epigrammes (London, 1970), pp. 1–18.



for wittier and more piquant entertainment among contemporary humanist poets. Padelford thought highly of Surrey’s ‘Yf he that erst thefourme’: ‘This epigram, with its trenchant final couplet giving anunexpected turn to the thought, is quite in the spirit of the best Renais-sance tradition.’54 In this movement from Bourbon to Surrey we find animportant instance of how this humanist tradition was transmitted toearly Tudor poets. The importance of the sources and fortune of neo-Latin poetry in the emergent tradition of the English epigram is beyondthe scope of this essay. Equally, where Wyatt’s and Surrey’s poetry hasbeen thought of as representing imitative responses to Italian, French,and Spanish writing, further work may reveal that the influence issometimes, as in this case, the result of an intermediary Latin text.

Studies of the richer French literary cultures in the second quarter of the sixteenth century emphasize the importance of bilateral exchange with the vernacular in the cultivation of humanistic receptivities. Nott, we remember, considered ‘Au temps passé’ the sole Surrey poemderived from a French source. Yet it was finally a French exponent of neo-Latin rather than vernacular poetry who was responsible for theunusual Hellenism of this English epigram.

Trinity College, Cambridge


20

54 Frederick Morgan Padelford, The Poems of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey (Seattle,1928), p. 211.

between surrey and marot- nicolas bourbon and the artful translation of the epigram

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