Appendix

Two fragments which were with Briffault’s translation of Les Troubadours may be of some interest. Editors should have some qualms about the submission to public view and criticism of the rough drafts of a deceased author who might well have altered them considerably had he lived to put them in a form he deemed fit for print. This is especially so in the case of a fastidious author such as Briffault. His extensive revisions of The Mothers, even after it was in proof, came near to driving the publisher to distraction. The detailed revisions, and revisions upon revisions penned in the manuscript of The Troubadours indicate that after a quarter of a century he had changed little in this respect.

The first item appears to be an alternate, probably deleted, version of the passage on Shakespeare. The second, more interesting, item, which deals with the derivation of Dante’s “terza rima,” exists in two versions. The one version appears to have been written as a result of inferences Briffault based on extrapolation, before he had been able to locate any examples of this form which predated Dante. Then later he must have located the cited examples, which confirmed his conjecture nicely, rewritten the passages to include them, and at the same time deleted the original suppositions on which the conjectures were based. Only the second passage is included here.

SHAKESPEARE

Shakespeare went to school with the Italianate sonneteers. It has sometimes been deplored that he was an Elizabethan. But his faculty, no less than his failings, is a product of his age, and had he written in any other we should not have known the quality that enthralls us. He appears to have been inspired with a genuine poetic ambition and to have had a sense of vocation. From the start he attained, with “the first heir of his invention,” to universal favor. On the strength of Venus and Adonis, Lucrece and his first sonnets alone, Richard Barnsfield (1598) places his name among the immortals. He betters himself by court connections; he was well on the way to becoming the leading lyric and narrative poet of the age. Then a strange thing happened. We know nothing of the circumstances which led to his association with the stage. The rare signposts which help us to plot out the trend of his career fail us entirely at its critical turning-point. “Became stage-struck” is a phrase that recurs in comments; but there is no indication of such an outburst of enthusiasm; much rather the reverse. The successful poet, the “immortal,” accepted hack-work, re-writes, odd, almost menial tasks, and even small parts on the boards. One conclusion only accords with the known traits of Shakespeare’s character. To put it bluntly, he abandoned lyric poetry and took to the theater because it paid better. He commercialized his gift, quite in the same manner as the novelist of today who grinds out three books a year and buys a villa at Monte Carlo. The thought of Edmund Spenser dying of penury may not have been absent from his mind.

In the sixteenth century the theater sprang into sudden prominence in every country of Europe, in Italy, in Spain, in France, in England. Printing had revolutionized the conditions of literary diffusion; but books were still a privilege of the relatively well-to-do classes; they were out of reach of the great masses of the people. The medieval popular jongleur, once the universal provider of entertainment, had practically died out. More exactly, he had modified the form of his activities; he enacted, on the boards of fairs, thrilling scenes of miracle or murder, scraps of patriotic history, clowneries and buffooneries. The play was the thing which filled the gap in popular entertainment. The theater which thus sprang up had little connection, save in name, with Greek drama or even Roman comedy. It was a form of entertainment which supplied a popular need.

THE TERZA RIMA

The derivation of Dante’s terza rima has been much discussed, and to little purpose. Some have thought that he invented it. But the terza rima was current in popular Italian poetry. The following example is from the early twelfth century, and in Cremonese dialect:

The close affinity of early Italian popular poetry with the zajal form has already been noted. It is manifest in the following anonymous piece:

But Provençal poetry, and that of all Romance languages, introduced from an early date a variation in the zajal model. Each line of the latter, save the concluding one of the strophe, employed the same rhyme. The Arabic language being almost destitute of tonic accent, each syllable being uttered with equal emphasis, no opportunity was lost in Arabic poetry of stressing the beat of the rhyme by repetition of the same rhyme. Romance languages, on the contrary, are rich in tonic variations. The hammer-like beating of time on one rhyme is needless, and was rightly regarded as not altogether pleasant. Hence Romance poets preferred an alternation of rhymes, either in couplets or interwoven. In popular Italian poetry, that interwoven poetry in sets of three lines appears, by no means uncommonly, if allowance is made for the dearth of documents. Dante did not invent the terza rima, nor did he evolve it by variation on the virtuosity of the more sophisticated troubadours. He found it ready to his hand in popular Italian poetry.