Adulteration or Adaptation? Nathaniel Lee's Princess of Cleve and Its Sources

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Adulteration or Adaptation? Nathaniel Lee's "Princess of Cleve" and Its Sources Author(s): Tara L. Collington and Philip D. Collington Source: Modern Philology, Vol. 100, No. 2 (Nov., 2002), pp. 196-226Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1215730Accessed: 03-03-2015 19:32 UTC

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Adulteration or Adaptation? Nathaniel Lee's Princess of Cleve and Its Sources

TARA L. COLLINGTON

University of Waterloo

PHILIP D. COLLINGTON

Niagara University

Nathaniel Lee's 1681 theatrical adaptation of Madame de La Fayette's 1678 novel La Princesse de Clives has met with near-universal condem- nation in English and French criticism. Harry Ashton dismisses the play as a vulgar desecration of a delicate French pearl, thrown before the playgoing swine of Restoration England: "On etait en pleine li- cence a cette epoque et si Lee a emprunte le sujet pour le mettre au the"tre c'est dans une piece ignoble qui n'est qu'une indigne carica- ture de la Princesse et qui montre combien l'original fut au-dessus des esprits grossiers des Anglo-Saxons de l'epoque. Depuis, on a pu l'ap- precier a sa juste valeur."1 Even the play's defenders cannot contain their disgust; Robert D. Hume calls its farce plot 'joylessly obscene ... rancid smut," and Harold C. Knutson asserts that "had Madame de la Fayette found the occasion to see or read the drama.., .she would have been horrified beyond measure."2 Judging by the play's short run, audiences familiar with the French original or recent English translation may also have been offended by Lee's coarse humor, new characters, and sexual content.3 In spite of an all-star cast including

1. Harry Ashton, Madame de La Fayette: Sa vie et ses oeuvres (Cambridge University Press, 1922), p. 178. All quotations of the novel are from Madame de La Fayette, La Princesse de Clives, ed. Bernard Pingaud (Paris: Folio, 1987) and are cited parenthetically in the text by page number. All quotations of Lee's plays are from The Works of Nathaniel Lee, 2 vols., ed. Thomas B. Stroup and Arthur L. Cooke (1955; reprint, Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1968). Lee's play The Princess of Cleve is cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number.

2. Robert D. Hume, "The Satiric Design of Nat. Lee's The Princess of Cleve," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 75 (1976): 132-33; Harold C. Knutson, "La Princesse de Clives on the English Stage: A 1681 Adaptation by Nathaniel Lee," in Ouverture et Dia- logue: Milanges Offerts d Wolfgang Leiner d l'Occasion de son Soixantiime Anniversaire, ed. Ulrich D6ring, Antiopy Lyroudias, and Rainer Zaiser (Tiibingen: Narr, 1988), p. 497.

3. The novel first appeared in English as The Princess of Cleve; The Most Famed Romance. Written in French by the Greatest Wits ofFrance. Rendred into English by a Person of Quality, at

? 2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2003/10002-0002$10.00

196



Tara and Philip Collington o Princess of Cleve and Its Sources 197

Thomas Betterton as the Duke of Nemours and Elizabeth Barry as the Princess of Cleve, few performances are documented in The London Stage and the play has not been performed since the late seventeenth century.4 In short, Lee is accused of producing an uncomprehend- ing adulteration of La Fayette's masterpiece: as Clifford Leech puts it, "The adaptation, in fact, suggests not only haste and indifference but an incapacity to recognize the character of the French original."5

What troubles us about the reception of Lee's play is not the fact that so many critics have taken offense (the play is quite offensive), but rather that so few have bothered to substantiate their complaints by examining the play's complex relationship to its continental sources, by which we mean both La Fayette's novel and the historical writings upon which La Fayette relied, some of which, we shall argue, would have been familiar to Lee. Such an examination suggests that the play was carefully crafted and that the playwright did understand the "character" of La Princesse de Chlves. The play's debauchery, we argue, makes explicit that which is already implicit in La Fayette's original.

Lee's changes are more elaboration than interpolation, more eluci- dation than adulteration. As such, we are continuing a critical project suggested by Hume when he promised to show "beyond reasonable doubt ... [that] Lee makes skilful and purposeful use of his source." Disappointingly, Hume's important article devotes scant attention to the novel, falling back on the now familiar claim that the play is a radical "depart[ure] from the original."6 A reading of Lee alongside both La Fayette and her historical sources forces one to reconsider the degree to which the French novelist also depicts the myriad obscenities of the Valois court, though these are expressed in a more elegant and circumspect manner. Rather than being a major departure from, let alone a "radical" degradation of, La Fayette, we will demonstrate, Lee's work differs in style more than in substance. Hume wonders, "Why does he travesty his source?" and Knutson asserts that "admirers

the Request of some Friends (London, 1679). This version preserves the restrained tone of the original, so Lee's controversial changes do not stem from a "bad" translation.

4. The play debuted as part of the Duke's Company's 1680-81 season and may have been revived in 1696-97. For details on performances and the cast, see William Van Lennep, ed., The London Stage 1660-1800, pt. 1, 1660-1700 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), pp. 290-91, 467; and Michael Cordner, ed., Four Restoration Mar- riage Plays (Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. xxii-xxxi.

5. Clifford Leech, "Restoration Comedy: The Earlier Phase," Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 165-66.

6. Hume, "Satiric Design," pp. 118, 123. Similarly, Knutson closes his article on Lee's play by wondering "whether it differs that much in its essence from Madame de la Fay- ette's own image of the court," but does not explore the possibility in detail (pp. 503-4).



198 MODERN PHILOLOGY

of the French narrative would call the work a travesty, so brazenly altered is the content and spirit of the original"; even Michael Cordner, in a generally sympathetic account of Lee's "method and purpose," perpetuates the view that Lee "transforms his source ruthlessly": "Any- one approaching the play in expectation of a faithful theatrical version of the original will be bitterly disappointed."7 At issue for these critics is the degree to which Lee altered the content of his source. We contend that both Lee and La Fayette engaged in forms of "travesty" in their use of source materials, but that this is a creative and interpre- tive process, rather than one of destruction or desecration.

According to Gerard Genette's classification of processes of adaptation, parody alters the substance, whereas travesty alters the style, of sources: "Le travestissement burlesque modifie donc le style sans modifier le sujet; inversement la 'parodie' modifie le sujet sans modifier le style."8 A careful reading of Lee's version beside La Fayette's original reveals the surprising degree to which "burlesque travesty" permeates both works. Lee's play presents a "low burlesque" of La Fayette, diminishing her lofty novel by recasting it in a grotesquely familiar style.9 Yet Lee's play reveals that the loftiness of the subject matter has been exaggerated in the original, which raises a disconcerting possibility: namely, that La Fayette is also actively engaged in distorting source materials, in her case by using the opposite process, "high burlesque," by which ignoble or mean subject matter is elevated to appear better than it actually is.10 These stylistic distortions are analogous to what Mikhail Bakhtin, in his discussion of carnivalizing genres, calls the fun- house mirror "elongating, diminishing, distorting in various directions and to various degrees" the reflected subject. No matter how grotesque the inverted image may be, nothing appears in the crooked glass that is not already present outside of it. Instead, the grotesque new forms direct our critical attention back to reconsider the con- tours of the reflected original."

For example, Lee's quip about lusty English wives and their un- happy husbands, "o' my Conscience Cuckoldom is the Destiny of above half the Nation" (1.2.132-34), is simply a crude distension of what the

7. Hume, "Satiric Design," pp. 123, 118; Knutson, p. 497; Cordner, ed., p. xxii. 8. G6rard Genette, Palimpsestes: La littfrature au second degri (Paris: Editions du Seuil,

1982), p. 35 (emphasis in original); see also Simon Dentith, Parody (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 194-95.

9. See Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern (Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1993), pp. 55-57; see also Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teach- ing of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 40.

10. Rose, p. 65. 11. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 122-28, quotation on p. 127.




novel couches in more delicate terms when a dying Prince de Cleves reproaches his wife for confessing her passion for another man: "Que ne me laissiez-vous dans cet aveuglement tranquille dont jouissent tant de maris?" (p. 291). Complacent cuckoldom is the destiny of half the French nation, too. Earlier Mme de Chartres makes a similar point in her deathbed admonition to the Princesse de Clkves: "Songez ce que vous devez 't votre mari. ... si quelque chose etait capable de troubler le bonheur que j'espere en sortant de ce monde, ce serait de vous voir tomber comme les autres femmes" (p. 172). Mme de Chartres's lifelong mission to elevate her daughter above the sordid intrigues in- dulged in by other ladies of the court is analogous to critical traditions that sanitize La Fayette's novel and distinguish it from the de-idealized reflection presented in Lee's play. Just as La Fayette's Princesse comes to realize that her mother's absolute distinction is impossible to main- tain-'"je me trouve comme les autres femmes" (p. 262) -a close com- parison of play, novel, and the continental sources of both likewise collapses the comforting distance between La Fayette and Lee.

The degree to which La Fayette's intricate plotting and subtle characterization provide the raw materials for Lee's play has not been fully explored, largely because so few drama critics have acknowledged the eroticism and pointed humor of La Fayette's portrait of the Valois court.12 Her celebrated opening sentence may serve as a litmus test of how the novel's sexual content is frequently whitewashed, making Lee's dramatic elaborations seem more grotesque than they actually are: "La magnificence et la galanterie n'ont jamais paru en France avec tant d'&clat que dans les dernieres annees du regne de Henri second" (p. 129). K. B. Kettle points out that here 'galanterie' de- notes courtly "elegance, distinction [and] flirtatious behaviour," but he acknowledges that elsewhere the term is a code word for love affairs (as in the sentence, "M. de Nemours avait une galanterie depuis longtemps").13 However, Terence Cave translates 'galanterie' as 'manners', effectively erasing the French term's sexual connota- tions from the scene.14 Cave later glosses La Fayette's description of

12. One notable exception is J. M. Armistead, whose book Nathaniel Lee (Boston: Twayne, G. K. Hall, 1979) provides indispensable French historical contexts for several of Lee's plays, though the chapter on The Princess of Cleve does not examine La Fayette's novel in depth (pp. 144-62).

13. K. B. Kettle, ed., La Princesse de Cleves (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 181, n. 4; quotation from his glossary, p. 156.

14. Terence Cave, trans. and ed., The Princesse de Clives (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 3. In modern French, 'galanterie' has a double sense of 'chivalry' and 'love affair', but in an additional, seventeenth-century usage the term had darker connota- tions: "Gallanterie, fourberie, tour, affront" (i.e., "Gallantry, treachery, trick, insult"); see the editor's lexicon in Pierre de Bourdeille, Seigneur de Brant6me, Oeuvres Completes, ed. Ludovic Lalanne, 11 vols. (1868; reprint, New York: Johnson, 1968), 10:271.




the promiscuous Duc de Nemours, "il avait plusieurs maitresses, mais il 6tait difficile de deviner celle qu'il aimait v6ritablement" (p. 132), thus: "mistresses: this word should be taken in its older, less explicitly sexual sense."15 Yet in this novel mistresses are sexual, such as when Frangois I juggles his "little group" of court ladies: "Ce prince n'avait pas une fidelite exacte pour ses maitresses... les dames que l'on ap- pelait de la petite bande le partageaient tour a tour" (p. 158). When the King asks his favorite mistress, Diane de Poitiers, to render his son "plus vif et plus agr6able," this is a sexual initiation, not a refinement of Henri's manners; as La Fayette wryly observes, "Elle y r6ussit comme vous le voyez" (p. 158). Editorial bowdlerizing notwithstanding, as the profusion of Henri II's bastard children attests, the novel's extramari- tal liaisons are sexual, not platonic: "de tous ses enfants, il n'y avait que les naturels qui lui ressemblassent" (p. 157).16

The two most common complaints voiced in criticism of the play concern its "degradation" of La Fayette's noble characters, and its "adulteration" of her story with farcical plot elements and characters invented by Lee.17 In their introduction to the play, Thomas B. Stroup and Arthur L. Cooke highlight Lee's "degradation" of Nemours, one that transforms a "tender and delicate love story into a tale of sordid lust," and Derek Hughes accuses Lee of "debas[ing]" La Fayette's noble duke, "turning Nemours into a faithless cynical rake."'8 As for the coarse comic subplot involving the cuckolding of St. Andre and Poltrot by Nemours and the Vidam of Chartres, Knutson mistakenly argues that Lee's St. Andre has "only a name in common" with his novelistic counterpart, and that Lee dehistoricizes the play: "the elements of the action drawn from the French novel are pulled away from their setting in history to become relatively generalized." Hume

15. Cave, trans. and ed., p. 206, n. 6. 16. Lucien Romier provides a less euphemistic summary than the novel's opening

sentence: "La cour de Henri II fut le thiatre d'intrigues particulierement complexes et immorales." See his La Carriure d'un favori: Jacques D'Albon de Saint-Andre, Marichal de France (1512-1562) (Paris: Librairie Acad6mique--Perrin et Compagnie, 1909), p. 166.

17. See Armistead, pp. 144-62; Richard E. Brown, "Heroics Satirized by 'Mad Nat. Lee,' " Papers on Language and Literature 19 (1983): 385- 401; J. Douglas Canfield, "Poetical Injustice in Some Neglected Masterpieces of Restoration Drama," in Rhetorics of Order/ Ordering Rhetorics in English Neoclassical Literature, ed. J. Douglas Canfield and J. Paul Hunter (Newark, N.J.: University of Delaware Press, 1989), pp. 28-36; Hume, "Satiric Design" (n. 2 above), pp. 117-38; Knutson (n. 2 above), pp. 497-504; and Harold Weber, The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth- Century England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), pp. 69-78.

18. Stroup and Cooke, eds. (n. 1 above), 2:149; Derek Hughes, English Drama 1660- 1700 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 313-14. Armistead agrees that "the comic action degrades the heroic" (p. 147), and Knutson also writes of the "degredation which Ne- mours undergoes in Lee's hands" (p. 498).




describes the genesis of Lee's comedy thus: "onto Madame de La Fay- ette's delicate and aristocratic tale he grafts an apparently disjunct middle-class cuckolding plot."19 Most recently, Paulina Kewes observes that, for Restoration theatergoers familiar with the French novel, "the pleasure of recognition [was] dispelled by the adapter's divergence in focus and characterization." In short, through its degraded characters and interpolated events, Lee's version "compelled [them] to re- examine their assumptions about the original in light of what was made of it on the stage, and [they] did not like the result."20

Yet the critical charges of degradation and adulteration do not bear close scrutiny when Lee's play is read alongside La Fayette's novel. By comparing the characterization of key figures (Nemours, Tournon, the Vidam, Poltrot, and St. Andre) and the complex interweaving of main and subsidiary plots in the play to figures and episodes in the novel and in widely circulated French historical gossip (as preserved, for example, in one of La Fayette's major sources, Pierre de Bour- deille, Seigneur de Brant6me's memoirs of the Valois court), we will demonstrate that Lee is a much more astute reader of his continental sources than has hitherto been acknowledged.21 Critical misunder- standings may have been prompted by the dedication to the 1689 edition of the play. There Lee recalls, "The Play cost me much pains, the Story is true, and I hope the Object will display Treachery in its own Colours. But this Farce, Comedy, Tragedy, or meer Play, was a Revenge for the Refusal of the other; for when they expected the most polish'd Hero in Nemours, I gave 'em a Ruffian reeking from Whetstone's- Park."22 This admission of anger over the censorship of another French-inspired play, The Massacre of Paris, should not be interpreted as proof that Lee deliberately distorted La Fayette's novel.23 Instead, in adapting The Princess of Cleve he set out to correct popular miscon- ceptions concerning the novel ("they expected the most polish'd Hero") by depicting for London playgoers the subterfuge and debauchery of the sixteenth-century French court ("Treachery in its own

19. Knutson, pp. 500-501; Hume, "Satiric Design," p. 117. 20. Paulina Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation: Writingfor the Stage in England, 1660-

1710 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), p. 79. 21. In addition to The Massacre of Paris (1679) and The Princess of Cleve (1680-81),

Lee collaborated with John Dryden on another play set in Valois France, The Duke of Guise (1682). Armistead suggests that a young Nathaniel Lee could have gained his ex- pertise by reading no fewer than four histories of France cataloged in his father's library (see Armistead, p. 184, n. 6, p. 198, n. 16, pp. 208-9, and sources cited there).

22. Lee, dedication to The Princess of Cleve, in Stroup and Cooke, eds., 2:153. 23. On The Princess of Cleve as a response to the suppression of The Massacre at Paris,

see Cordner, ed. (n. 4 above), pp. 361-62; Armistead (n. 12 above), pp. 155-56; and Hume, "Satiric Design," pp. 118-23.




Colours") stripped of La Fayette's decorous phrasing, subtle wit, and delicate irony.

The dedication's defiant "they expected" suggests that Lee's Princess of Cleve was penned to satisfy popular demand to see the glamorous French Duke of Nemours on the English stage. As Kewes documents, European novels, romances, and above all histories were common sources for English dramatists, who in turn used dedications, prologues, and epilogues to justify their "appropriative strategies" in order to counter critical censure for plagiarism or unoriginality.24 Increasingly, playwrights came under fire for translating, reproducing, or "rehash- ing" sources because of nascent emphases on literary originality and propriety. In order to appease critics, dramatists employed strategies ranging from plot alterations to the "extensive stylistic revisions" characteristic of John Dryden's notorious "improvements" of Shakespeare. 25 One widespread appropriative strategy was to assert a play's "historical authenticity," but this merely exacerbated a kind of catch-22 in which dramatists were either attacked for slavish imitation of sources or ex- coriated for taking creative liberties with these-especially by adulter- ating serious plots with romantic intrigues.26

Another appropriative strategy simply entailed naming a play after a familiar source, thus simultaneously acknowledging a dramatist's indebtedness to, and capitalizing on audiences' anticipation of, that source. Yet unlike the prefatory materials to the 1678 adaptation of Oedipus by Lee and Dryden, which identify Sophocles as the play's source, none of the prefatory materials to The Princess of Cleve speci- fies the French novel as its source. The preface was obviously penned in response to the 1679 translation, so Lee's failure to mention the novel is less evidence of attempted plagiarism than a signal that his play would transcend mere slavish reproduction of La Princesse de Clives in dramatic form.27 His would be a radical attempt to recreate a de-idealized version of the Valois court and counter widespread mis- perceptions held by readers who failed to see beneath the refined surface of La Fayette's novel. When Dryden's epilogue sums up the play as an exposure of "what fate followed the saint-like fool" who chose "a

24. Kewes, pp. 76, 40-46, quotation on p. 41. 25. Ibid., pp. 46-60, 76, 85, quotations on pp. 48, 57. 26. Dryden defended from censors his collaboration with Lee on another dramatiza-

tion of sixteenth-century French history, The Duke of Guise, on the grounds of its "ex- ceptional faithfulness ... to its historical sources" (see Kewes, p. 171; for a contemporary view of "adulteration," see p. 77).

27. See the editors' introduction in Stroup and Cooke, eds., 2:149; on Dryden and Lee's Oedipus, see Kewes, pp. 155-62.




husband for [her] confessor," it becomes apparent that Nemours is not the only French figure whose "polish" has been overestimated by English playgoers and readers.28

Just as La Fayette's novel represents a groundbreaking generic hybrid, composed of history, fiction, memoir, and romance, Lee's play seems an incongruous mixture of distinct dramatic forms.29 Its main plot follows that of the novel in which the newly wed Princesse, in spite of her mother's admonitions, falls in love with the Duc de Nemours and confesses it to her husband. However, Lee makes several plot changes: (1) the play opens in media res on the couple's wedding night; (2) Ne- mours and the Princess are already in love; (3) neither Madame de Chartres (the Princess's mother) nor Marie Stuart (the novel's "reine dauphine") appear onstage; (4) the novel's famous lost letter actually belongs to Nemours, as opposed to being claimed by him to protect the Vidame de Chartres; (5) the scene of the stolen portrait is omitted; and (6) Lee invents a melodramatic duel in which Cleve challenges and is disarmed by Nemours. This plot has been likened to sentimental drama, to eighteenth-century French tragidie larmoyant, to heroic tragedy, and to bombastic melodrama that satirizes the "heroic / precieuse ethos of Restoration tragedy."30

In his comic second plot, Lee begins his supposed descent into degradation and adulteration. La Fayette's Mme de Tournon reappears as Lee's "Tournon," agent for the shadowy offstage Catherine de Medici, who is promoting the wedding of her son, the Dauphin, to Princess Marguerite of Jainville. Because Marguerite is already betrothed to Nemours, Tournon's assignment is to procure sexual partners to dis- tract Nemours and enrage his jealous fiancee. Unlike his novelistic counterpart, Lee's Nemours continues his rakish seductions long after being smitten by the Princess: he has a bisexual lover, Bellamore; he seduces a masked woman (actually Marguerite in disguise); and he plots to seduce a newly arrived English bride, Celia. Like George Etherege's Dorimant or William Wycherly's Horner, Nemours behaves like the hero of a libertine sex comedy in prose, juggling lovers and engineering intrigues with his cynical wit and inexhaustible sexual

28. Dryden's epilogue is reproduced in Cordner, ed., p. 172. 29. See the editor's introduction in Cordner, ed., pp. xxii-xxiii. 30. Thomas B. Stroup, "The Princess of Cleve and Sentimental Comedy," Review of En-

glish Studies 11 (1935): 200-203; Knutson (n. 2 above), p. 500; Armistead, p. 147; and Hume, "Satiric Design" (n. 2 above), pp. 130-35, quotation on p. 135.




appetite.31 But this plot ends with the reformation of Nemours and his implicit reconciliation with Marguerite whom he embraces and to whom he "Swear [s] a whole Life's Constancy" (5.3.289).

The farcical third plot features what appear to be Lee's most significant departures from the novel, as it combines only one of La Fayette's characters, the Marechal de Saint-Andre, with three new ad- ditions: St. Andre's wife Elianor, his friend Poltrot, and Poltrot's En- glish bride Celia. While the two husbands plan amorous intrigues and sing bawdy songs, their wives plot to revenge this neglect by cuckolding them. Suspicious, St. Andre and Poltrot disguise themselves as fortune-tellers to entrap their lusty wives. Later that night, while a sleepwalking St. Andre leaves his room, Poltrot sneaks in to take his friend's place in bed-only to find Elianor already occupied with the Vidam. Poltrot hurries back to his room and finds Celia busy with Bel- lamore, a bed-trick substitute for Nemours who is off chasing the Princess. Stroup and Cooke dismiss this plot as having no source ex- cept Lee's own imagination; Knutson calls it "brawling" and "tasteless tomfoolery"; and Hume complains, "The omnipresent subplot ... degrades the heroic element in the play. St. Andre and Poltrot are dolt- ish cit cuckolds; their wives . .. are witty but sex-mad sluts."32 Yet as we will demonstrate below, these husbands are not citizens, and there is nothing intrinsically bourgeois about "sluttish" promiscuity. Further- more, bedding a woman right under her husband's nose would not be out of character for La Fayette's Vidame. Nemours teases his friend for his audacious juggling of four mistresses, including the Queen: "On m'a accuse de n'etre pas un amant fidele et d'avoir plusieurs galanteries a la fois; mais vous me passez de si loin que je n'aurais seulement ose imaginer les choses que vous avez entreprises" (p. 225). Coming from Nemours, this is a significant indictment of the Vidame's behavior.

The explicit sexuality contained in Lee's secondary plots and characters elicits a critical controversy analogous to one that has dogged the reception of La Fayette's novel; that is, while La Fayette's main narrative concerns the unconsummated passion of a princess who would rather flee the court and confess to her husband than succumb to her would-be seducer, the novel is punctuated with narrative digressions describing sordid and consummated sexual intrigues. One early critical response to the novel, Valincour's "Letters to the Mar-

31. The term "sex comedy" is borrowed from Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), pp. 97-104; see also his brief discussion of Lee's play (pp. 355-57).

32. Stroup and Cooke, eds. (n. 1 above), 2:149-51; Knutson, p. 502; Hume, "Satiric Design," p. 132.




quise" of 1678, complained of "superfluous" stories that interrupted the flow of the novel's main narrative.33 Two eighteenth-century com- mentators likewise complained that some digressions were "des hors d'oeuvre"-"appetizers," but also literally "out of the work," foreign elements contaminating the purity of the novel.34 In an important early article, J. W. Scott defended the novel against detractors upset by the "alleged irrelevance of the so-called 'digressions' of the work." Scott argued that the digressions are linked to the main plot in several ways: formally, they presage the experiences of the Princesse; psycho- logically, as cautionary tales about women punished for adultery, they function as part of her social and sexual "indoctrination"; thema- tically, they explore issues of fatal passion, trust, and betrayal; and historically, they recreate a vivid setting, a "seductive but spiritually bankrupt environment" against which the Princesse will define herself. Scott concluded that "with such a sense of unified purpose... the integrated episodes cease to be digressions at all."35

Those who divide La Princesse de Cleves structurally into two parts- fledgling psychological novel on the one hand and loosely connected peripheral episodes on the other-may have been prompted by the novel's apparent thematic dichotomy of main-plot Platonic love ver- sus the consummated sex of its digressions; as Janet Raitt and Jules Brody have suggested, the novel explores distinctions between spiritual love and numerous sorts of physical love.36 Lee's adaptation has drawn fire because it seems to subordinate the spiritual to the sexual; yet in doing so, it radically questions the exaggerated moral distinction between the heroic passion of La Fayette's Prince and Princesse and the sexual rapacity of France's courtiers.

For example, in the novel, the Prince's jealousy of his wife is largely sexual in nature, and therefore Lee's elaborations on the subject are in keeping with the spirit of his source. Initially Mlle de Chartres is not physically attracted to her future husband: "elle l'epouserait meme

33. Valincour's letters are excerpted and translated in Marie-Madeleine de La- fayette, The Princess of Clkves, trans. and ed. John D. Lyons (New York: Norton, 1994), pp. 126-27.

34. For a survey of such complaints, see J. W. Scott, "The 'Digressions' of the Prin- cesse de Clhves," French Studies 11 (1957): 315-16, and sources cited there.

35. Ibid., pp. 315-20. For more recent studies of La Fayette's "peripheral episodes," see Susan W. Tiefenbrun, A Structural Analysis of "La Princesse de Clves" (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), pp. 87-116; and John D. Lyons, "Narrative, Interpretation and Para- dox: La Princesse de Cloves," Romantic Review 72 (1981): 383- 400.

36. Janet Raitt, Madame de Lafayette and "La Princesse de Clives" (London: Harrap, 1971), pp. 63-89. Jules Brody argues that the novel erases distinctions between the "carnal and spiritual" in "La Princesse de Clkves and the Myth of Courtly Love," University of Toronto Quarterly 38 (1969): 114 ff.




avec moins de repugnance qu'un autre, mais [elle] n'avait aucune in- clination particuliere pour sa personne" (pp. 148- 49). Thereafter the Princesse dutifully performs her marital debt to him, but her continued failure to reciprocate his passion spoils his enjoyment of their physical union: "La qualit6 de mari lui donna de plus grands priv- ileges; mais elle ne lui donna pas une autre place dans le coeur de sa femme. Cela fit aussi que, pour &tre son mari, il ne laissa pas d'etre son amant, parce qu'il avait toujours quelque chose a souhaiter au-dela de sa possession" (p. 151). Lee elaborates perceptively on these tensions in the balcony scene that occurs the morning after their wedding night. The farcical Poltrot and St. Andre infiltrate the heroic plot when they sing a randy aubade for the Prince, teasing him about how often the newlyweds shared "Joy" last night by holding up three and five fin- gers (see the stage direction at 1.3.34-35). As it happens, Lee's Prince had a disappointing night of "cold Embraces" (lines 65-70).

Unrequited desire prompts the novel's Prince to behave toward his wife in a manner no better than that displayed by Nemours. For example, Nemours repeatedly uses his friendship with the Prince de Clkves as a pretext to visit the Princesse, such as during the illness of Mme de Chartres (p. 171), or later, when the Prince and Duc both fall ill: "sur le pretexte d'etre encore faible, [Nemours] y passait la plus grande partie dujour" (p. 194). La Fayette's Prince likewise frequents the apartment of his ailing mother-in-law, ostensibly to support his wife in a time of crisis, but really "pour avoir aussi le plaisir de la voir; sa passion n'6ta[n]t point diminube" (p. 171). Lee transfers this modus operandi to the farce plot, when Poltrot visits his friend St. Andre: "I keep him company and lye at his House, because I intend to lye with his Wife" (1.2.131-32). Thus the play's displays of predatory oppor- tunism are not farcical interpolations. Nemours's cynicism when he confides to Bellamore his attraction to Cleve's bride is frequently cited as a degradation of La Fayette's Duc's character: "I sav'd his Life, Sweet-heart, when he was assaulted by a mistake in the dark, and shall he grudge me a little Fooling with his Wife, for so serious an Obli- gation?" (2.3.7-9).37 Yet Lee takes his cue from the novel, where the Prince demands that his wife reveal the identity of her secret lover, even if he should be a close friend of his: "je connais trop le monde pour ignorer que la consideration d'un mari n'empeche pas que l'on ne soit amoureux de sa femme" (p. 242).

The irony La Fayette sets out is that despite all the talk of merit, es- teem, virtue, and Platonic love, what the Prince really wants is love in its most physical sense: "Vous Stes ma femme,je vous aime comme ma

37. For example, Hume cites this passage as evidence that Nemours is a "goatishly insatiable whoremonger" in "Satiric Design," p. 124.




maitresse etje vous en vois aimer un autre" (p. 276). While he is jealous of his wife's spiritual infidelity, it is ultimately the Prince's misperception of her physical infidelity that kills him. When his manservant returns from Coulommiers with the news that Nemours spent the night there, the Prince falls into a fever from which he never recovers. Shortly before his death, he accuses her of having "passe des nuits avec un homme," of having committed "crimes," in other words, of consummated adultery (p. 292). La Fayette's distinction between the love of a wife and mistress-and the novel's implicit approval of the married Princesse for being "si eloign [e] de la galanterie" (p. 151) and criticism of her husband for blurring the two-stem from a common assertion, articulated for example by Brant6me, that conjugal sensuality is tantamount to adultery: "Qui se monstre plustost desbord6 amoureux de sa femme que mary, est adultere et peche."38 Here again, Lee takes a subtle detail from the novel and elucidates it in his play; as St. Andre explains, "A Wife dares not assume the Liberty of pleasing like a Miss, for fear of being thought one. A Wife may pretend to duti- ful affection, and bustle below, but must be still at night. 'Tis Miss alone may be allow'd Flame and Rapture, and all that" (2.2.34-35).

In creating a husband who dies of grief over the misperception of his wife's physical adultery, La Fayette ironically reverses details about the Prince's possible historical counterpart, Frangois de Cleves, second Duc de Nevers. According to Brant6me, after telling his wife he lost a diamond ring belonging to her while playing tennis, Nevers gave this ring to his mistress, who proceeded indiscreetly to wear it in public. When the duchess saw the ring on her hand, she deduced the identity of her husband's mistress but concealed her grief at the discovery: "Elle fut si sage et si fort commandant a soy que, changeant seulement de couleur et rongeant tout doucement son despit, sans faire autre semblant, tourna la teste de l'autre coste, et jamais n'en sonna mot ' son mary."39 La Fayette incorporates key elements of this anecdote, such as by having the Prince and Princesse first meet in a jeweller's shop; by including an incriminating love-token (the Vidame's letter) lost while playing tennis; and by turning the discretion of a duchess who blushes angrily at her husband's infidelity into the indis- cretion of a princess who blushes guiltily at her own. Readers familiar with the real-life Nevers's cruelty could spot the irony of the novel's Prince, jealously inducing a confession by his wife by presenting his own infidelity as a strictly hypothetical situation, then melodramati- cally dying of grief following her confession: "si ma maitresse, et meme ma femme, m'avouait que quelqu'un lui plhit,j'en serais afflig_ sans en

38. Brant6me (n. 14 above), 9:51. 39. Ibid., 9:514-15.




etre aigri.... Ces paroles firent rougir Mme de Clkves" (p. 181). Lee's Prince perceptively identifies this physiological response as "that Face of flush'd Hypocrisie" (3.2.121). Brant6me concludes his account of Nevers's ring fiasco with the moral observation, "Voila comment la modestie en telles choses y est fort n&cessaire et tres-bonne"-the presence or absence of modesty becoming a crucial thematic concern in both the novel and play that followed.40 Thus, when Lee's Nemours, on the hunt for mistresses in the park, asks Tournon, "when and where shall I see the Gems thou hast in store?" (1.2.52-53), his question seems less a crass interpolation than a suggestive reworking of narrative details found in the play's sources.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Lee's adaptation is his supposed degradation of La Fayette's Nemours from "un chef-d'oeuvre de la nature ... l'homme du monde le mieux fait et le plus beau" (p. 132) to a coarse, amoral, bisexual rake. As Dryden puts it in his 1688 prologue to Lee's play, Nemours is "a filthy beast," a man "that's false to love, that vows and cheats, / And kisses every living thing he

meets!'"41 The bisexuality of Lee's Nemours is commonly interpreted

as forming part of the play's topical satire on the recently deceased Earl of Rochester,42 yet this aspect of Nemours's character can be traced back to suggestive details in the novel. La Fayette guardedly describes Nemours's attractiveness to both sexes: "il avait un enjoue- ment qui plaisait egalement aux hommes et aux femmes.... il avait plusieurs maitresses" (p. 132). During the wedding masque for Ma- dame de France and her proxy groom, the Duc d'Albe, Nemours is costumed to play "&chanson" (cupbearer) to King Henry II's Jupiter (p. 265). In other words, Nemours plays the court's Ganymede. Again, Lee makes explicit what is implicit in the novel, concocting an all- male love triangle in which Nemours has a regular partner Bellamore ("my Spouse, my Hephestion, my Ganymed" [2.3.1-2]) but makes amorous overtures to the Prince of Cleve, to parallel the heterosexual triangle in which the Princess neglects her husband because of her desire for Nemours. But where the Prince is jealous of his wife's attention elsewhere, Nemours enjoys a more "open" relationship with Bel- lamore-sending him as a proxy for an assignation with Celia when the Duke finds himself double-booked: "Hell! can't I be in two places at once? Heark thee, give her this, and this, and this" (4.1.264-65).43

40. Ibid., 9:515. 41. Dryden's prologue is included in Cordner, ed. (n. 4 above), p. 92. 42. For a discussion of Nemours's "polymorphous desires," see Weber (n. 17 above),

pp. 70-73; and the editor's introduction in Cordner, ed. (n. 29 above), pp. xxiii-xxxi. 43. Cordner's Oxford edition includes an interpolated stage direction, "[embracing

and kissing Bellamore] " (4.1.282-83 in that edition).




When Lee's Prince confronts Nemours about his interest in the Prin- cess, what begins as a heroic declaration of friendship soon switches into lewd double entendres. Nemours declares that he loves Cleve for his "manly Grace and shining Vertue" and wishes that one "Add yet the bloom of Beauty to his Youth, / That I may make a Mistress of him too" (4.1.280-82). Nemours collapses distinctions between spiritual and carnal love, wishing that "our Souls may kindle, / And like two Tapers kindly mix their beams" (lines 283-84). That Nemours's seductive "tapers" have phallic implications is supported by his earlier fond- ling of another husband, "wanton" Poltrot, bringing the latter to near climax: "Nay, I protest my Lord ... you'll make me run to a Whore" (1.2.158-63).

With respect to Nemours's character, Lee merely continues a process which begins in La Fayette's novel. As Brody has demonstrated, La Fayette made skillful use of her own source materials, especially the works of Brant6me, to depict an amoral seducer and to debunk the myth of courtly love.44 For example, Nemours's boast to friends about his powers of seduction in Brant6me-"il disoit que ... infail- liblement il emporteroit la forteresse de sa dame"45 -becomes the Duc's assertion, late in La Fayette's novel, that the now-widowed Prin- cesse will eventually submit to his advances: "il demeura d'accord avec M. le vidame qu'il &tait impossible que Mme de Cleves demeurat dans les resolutions oui elle &tait" (p. 309). Lee's Nemours simply takes the cynicism one step further, saying to the Vidam: "I'll Wager my State, I Bed her eighteen months three weeks hence, at half an hour past two in the Morning" (5.3.254-56). If Brant6me's Duc sees women as "for- tresses" to be conquered, La Fayette's Duc sees the Princesse de Cleves as "un si grand prix" that he begins to neglect his other mistresses (pp. 162-63)--a sentiment Lee echoes in Bellamore's description of her: "She is a prize, my Lord" (1.1.36).46

44. Brody, pp. 105-35. On La Fayette's use of historical sources, including her indebtedness to Brant6me, see H. Chamard and G. Rudler's two-part article on "Les Sources Historiques de La Princesse de Clives," Revue du Seizieme Siecle 2 (1914): 92- 131, 289-321; Janet Letts's detailed account of Legendary Lives in "La Princesse de Clives" (Charlottesville, Va.: Rookwood, 1998); Michael G. Paulson, Facets of a Princess: Multiple Readings of Madame de La Fayette's "La Princesse de Clives" (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 57-67; and, most recently, Louise K. Horowitz, "Primary Sources: La Princesse de Clives," French Forum 25 (2000): 165-75.

45. Brant6me, 4:166. 46. For a detailed examination of Nemours's predatory behavior, see Peggy Trzebia-

towski, "The Hunt Is On: The Duc de Nemours, Aggression, and Rejection," Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 25 (1998): 581-93, especially her discussion of the Princesse's role as "'quarry' or 'prize' " (p. 582).




One notorious episode La Fayette discreetly omits from her portrait of Nemours is of such extraordinary vulgarity that it would not be out of place in Lee's play: "une fois, estans de bons compagnons 'a la cour ensemble, comme M. de Nemours, M. le vidame de Chartres... et autres, ne sachans que faire, allkrent voir pisser les filles un jour, cela s'entend cachez en bas et elles en haut." Delighted with their voyeuris- tic discoveries, these men proceeded to describe the "labies longues et pendantes" of various ladies to the King "qui en rit pour sa part son saoul."47 Thus when Lee alludes to urinating genitalia in St. Andre's boast that he and Poltrot are such notable "Marks-men" (i.e., seduc- ers) that they "never miss hitting between Wind and Water" (3.1.156- 57), the playwright is merely evoking the well-known sexual antics of Henri II's courtiers.

Lee's Nemours is relentless in his pursuit of pleasure, but here too his single-mindedness derives from the novel's Duc, who spends much of book 4 stalking the Princesse in her secluded garden at Coulom- miers.48 The leitmotif of hunting links the play's heroic and comic plots, but also links the play itself to La Fayette's novel, where Ne- mours "feignit une grande passion pour la chasse" (p. 194) to absent himself from court when the Princesse enters into seclusion. While hunting on his sister's estate, he makes a detour and overhears the Princesse's confession to her husband from a hiding spot in her garden pavilion (pp. 238-39). Lee strips these actions of the glamour of courtly love and the rhetoric of the suffering lover: "how it fires my Fancy to steal into a Garden, to rustle through the Trees, to stumble up a narrow pair of back stairs, to whisper through the hole of the door [and] to kiss it open" (4.1.19-22). Lee's Nemours bluntly hunts the Princess "like a bleeding Quarry" (2.3.215) in a play that, taking its cue from the novel, equates sexual infidelity with trespassing. According to Poltrot, cuckolding is tantamount to poaching, as husbands "take pleasure to go a Deer-steeling that have fine Parks of their own" (2.2.28- 29).

Nemours's rakish behavior reaches a fever pitch during a ball that he throws in honor of the play's King's birthday. La Fayette punctuates her novel with several important ball scenes: one in which Nemours dances with the Princesse; a second ball hosted by Saint-Andre from which the Princesse absents herself after overhearing someone remark

47. Brant6me, 9:268-69. On La Fayette's suppression of such details, see Chamard and Rudler, pp. 99, 104.

48. On Nemours's "penetration" of this private space, see J. David Macey, Jr., "'Where the World May Ne'er Invade'? Green Retreats and Garden Theatre in La Prin- cesse de Clives, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, and Cecilia," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12 (1999): 78-81.




that Nemours would only consent to his mistress's presence at a ball if he were the host (p. 165); and a third ball, hosted the previous year by Nemours, to which his mistresses came in droves: "II y avait alors un si grand nombre de femmes ta qui il donnait cette qualit6 [i.e., de maitresse] que, si elles n'y fussent point venues, il y aurait eu peu de monde" (p. 166). Lee condenses these scenes into his own fourth-act ball at which Nemours is host and the Princess is conspicuously absent, but numerous other mistresses are in attendance. During this scene Nemours arranges one assignation for later with Celia ("there's one in the Fernbrake"), then turns his attention to a new arrival, Tournon masked and dressed in black ("why what have we here? A Hugonot Whore" [4.1.28-29]). By the scene's end, he is vowing eter- nal love to another masked dancer, Marguerite, who angrily confronts him with his infidelity, cutting through the polished rhetoric and ex- posing his ruthless modus operandi: "you say the same thing to every one you meet.... Villany, Treachery, Perjury, all those Monstrous, Di- abolical Arts, that seduce Young Virgins from their Innocent homes, to set 'em on the High-way to Hell and Damnation" (lines 169-70, 185-87).49 This is merely an angry elaboration of the rakish con- quests "des gens qui, en vous temoignant de l'amour, ne cherchent que l'honneur de vous s duire" about which La Fayette's Prince warns his wife (p. 291).

Where La Fayette's first ball scene presents one woman (the Prin- cesse) demurely entertaining two male admirers (the Chevalier de Guise and the Duc de Nemours), Lee presents one man juggling trysts with three mistresses. Yet as decorous as La Fayette's noble appears when juxtaposed with Lee's rakish scoundrel, she includes a subtle barb to convey the ruthlessness of her Nemours when it comes to courting mistresses. Arriving fashionably late, Nemours makes a grand entrance: "M. de Nemours ... passait par-dessus quelques sieges pour arriver ofi l'on dansait" (p. 153). Translations that have Nemours trav- eling around the chairs,50 instead of clambering over them, eradi- cate the humorous manner in which La Fayette presents Nemours's

49. Marguerite's attribution of "treachery" to Nemours may have a sound basis in fact, if reports are true that the queen, consumed with jealousy over Henri II's mistress, plotted to have Nemours throw acid at Diane de Poitiers to disfigure her famed beauty. The plan was not realized, but it is significant that Catherine selected Nemours. See Frederick J. Baumgartner, Henry II King of France 1547-1559 (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni- versity Press, 1988), p. 99; and Jean Heritier, Catherine de Medici, trans. Charlotte Hal- dane (New York: St. Martin's, 1963), p. 81.

50. For example, Walter J. Cobb's translation renders the passage, "She turned and saw a man making his way around the seats to the dancing floor" (The Princess of ClIves [New York: Meridian Classics/Penguin, 1989], p. 22).




eagerness to dance with the newest arrivals at court. Elsewhere, the novel's Nemours's indiscretions are described as "grossieres et peu po- lies" (p. 263), and when he is finally rejected by the Princesse, "M. de Nemours 6tait inconsolable; sa douleur allait au d6sespoir et a l'ex- travagance. Le vidame eut beaucoup de peine 'i l'empecher de faire voir sa passion au public" (p. 313). La Fayette's portrait hints at what was common knowledge to her contemporaries and what modern his- torians are at greater liberty to point out, namely that Nemours was a graceless debauchee.51

Lee's presentation of other characters is similarly grounded in a close reading of the novel and its sources. Mme de Tournon's apparent transformation into a bawd in the play is likely prompted by the novel's narrative digression, recounted by the Prince to his wife, about her simultaneous promises to marry two men, Sancerre and Estoute- ville. Recently widowed, Mme de Tournon has vowed never to remarry; yet she strings along her lover of two years, Sancerre, for whom her passion has diminished, while entertaining a new flame, Estoute- ville. When she dies suddenly, Estouteville unknowingly confides his grief and a packet of love letters to his rival Sancerre, thus revealing to both men her infidelity. At the conclusion of his tale, the Prince primly observes, "L'adresse et la dissimulation.. . ne peuvent aller plus loin qu'elle les a port6es" (p. 186), traits that may have inspired Lee to condense within her single character aspects of several sexual intrigues in the novel. The novel's lost letter from Mme de Th6mines to the Vidame de Chartres becomes a love letter from Tournon to Nemours in the play. In the novel, Nemours's most recent love interest is Marie Stuart, who spreads the rumor that he is the lover of the as-yet unidentified woman who confessed to her husband. In the play, Tournon is his former mistress and she spreads the rumor. The motif of two best friends competing for a woman's love presages Nemours's courtship of Cleves's wife. Moreover, the motif of a widow's empty vows never to remarry reappears in the Princesse's ambiguous rejection of Nemours after her husband's death, "Attendez ce que le temps pourra faire" (p. 309); Lee translates this almost verbatim, as his Prin- cess directs Nemours to "have patience, / Expect what time, with such a love as mine, / May work in your behalf" (5.3.231-33). The play's condensation of these character functions can be summed up by the Vidam's assessment of Tournon as an "Ubiquitary Whore" (2.3.17).

Lee's Tournon frankly admits, "We are the lucky Sieves, where fond men trust their Hearts, and so she [i.e., the Queen] sifts 'em through us" (1.1.47-49). Tournon's willingness to pimp for the Queen links her with the Valois court's notorious "Flying Squadron" of beautiful

51. Romier (n. 16 above), p. 205.




ladies who seduced men in order to secure political alliances for Catherine de M6dici.52 For example, in order to prevent the historical Nemours from marrying into the powerful de Guise family, Catherine provided him with the beautiful Frangoise de Rohan as mistress.53 When Nemours proceeded to marry the widow of Frangois de Guise anyway in 1566, Mlle de Rohan was "infuriated," in part because she loved Nemours, but also because she had failed in her mission on behalf of the Queen.54 The play's jilted termagent, Marguerite, who spends much of the play pursuing Nemours across the stage, may have been inspired by the jealousy of Mlle de Rohan. The Flying Squadron is again suggested when Lee's Tournon distracts Nemours from the Dauphin's future bride by whetting the Duke's appetite for Celia (1.1.54-82).

Like Tournon, the farce plot's cuckolded husbands also participate in structural analogues to the novel's digressions, as both provide thematic emphases on consummated sexual infidelity and contrast with the more subtle explorations of jealousy and desire contained in the main plot. Lee's fourth-act sleepwalking and the fortune-telling scenes appear to contain the play's most pronounced departures from La Fayette. Yet, on closer inspection, the sleepwalking hijinks merely elaborate a seemingly innocuous passage in the novel: "[Nemours] dor- mait d'un sommeil tranquille; ce qu'il avait vu, le jour prc6dent, de Mme de Clkves, ne lui avait donne que des idees agreables. II fut bien surpris de se voir 6veill6 par le vidame de Chartres; et il lui demanda si c'6tait pour se venger de ce qu'il avait dit pendant le souper qu'il venait troubler son repos" (p. 215). The association of dreaming and desire is best expressed in the play by Nemours's credo: "let me Dream of nothing but dimpl'd Cheeks, and laughing Lips... Venus be my Star, and Whoring my House" (3.1.128-33). Lee's preservation of La Fayette's agreeable dream and vengeful awakening occurs during St. Andre's somnambulistic monologue about seducing a chambermaid (4.2.64-75), from which he is rudely awakened when the Vidam "shoots off a Pistol" at Poltrot (see the stage direction at line 102).

Lee connects the subplot to La Fayette's main plot by having his Princess describe an erotic dream she enjoyed while lying "upon a flow'ry Bank" on the verge of a "Rockless Stream." In the dream, she sees a drowning Nemours rescued by "Naked Nymphs" and brought to the surface to kiss her lips: "I found a Pleasure I ne'er felt before, / Dissolving Pains, and Swimming shuddering Joys, / To which my Bridal

52. Heritier, pp. 306-7. 53. Mark Strage, Women of Power: The Life and Times of Catherine de' Medici (New York:

Harcourt, 1976), p. 99; see also Armistead (n. 12 above), p. 151. 54. Heritier, p. 236.




Night with Cleve was dull" (2.3.83-85, 97-99). The startling appearance of sensuality in the heroic plot may take its cue from a parallel episode in the novel where Nemours secretly indulges in similar transports of joy: "I1 s'61oigna le plus qu'il lui fut possible, pour n'etre vu ni entendu de personne; il s'abandonna aux transports de son amour" (p. 284). The suggestive imagery used in the novel's description of his retreat differs in degree, but not in kind, from that employed in the play's autoerotic fantasizing. The forest's weeping willows ("saules") and bubbling brook ("ruisseau qui coulait") break down Nemours's inhibitions, eliciting a monologue in which he surrenders to love ("Je sais mon bonheur; laissez-m'en jouir") and its own unique form of shuddering joys: "il fut contraint de laisser couler quelques larmes; mais ces larmes n'6taient pas de celles que la douleur seule fait r6pan- dre, elles 6taient m l6es de douceur et de ce charme qui ne se trouve que dans l'amour" (pp. 284-85). The hints of masturbation here are further supported by the episode that prompted Nemours's retreat: "Il se rangea derriere une des fenetres, qui servaient de porte, pour voir ce que faisait Mme de Cleves.... I1 faisait chaud, et elle n'avait rien, sur sa tate et sur sa gorge, que ses cheveux confus6ment rat- tach6s" (p. 281). Thus La Fayette delicately transforms the scatalogical voyeurism of Brant6me's Duc into Nemours's fleeting glimpse of the Princesse's breasts ("gorge"). Lee's play does not sexualize and con- taminate a chaste love affair but merely reveals the strong undercur- rent of eroticism that is already present in the novel.

Lee's comic characters also evoke the popularity of fortune-telling in the court of Henri II, which, under the influence of the supersti- tious Catherine de M6dici, was frequented by many famous astrolo- gers, including Ruggieri, Simeoni, and Nostradamus himself.55 The predilection of this court for occult ceremonies was a popular subject in early modern accounts; Edward Grimeston in 1611 reported that "there were two great sins crept into France, Atheism and Magick, whereunto was joyned the corruption of all good learning."56 La Fay- ette details the court's obsession with magical predictions, such as the fateful one that Henri II would die in a duel, but then gently burlesques the phenomenon by having Nemours accost the Princesse with a prediction of his own: "'On m'a predit, lui dit-il tout bas, queje serais heureux par les bontes de la personne du monde pour quij'aurais la plus violente et la plus respecteuse passion. Vous pouvez juger, Madame, sije dois croire aux predictions' " (p. 197). Lee takes La Fay-

55. Jean Orieux, Cathhrine de Midicis, ou, La reine noire (Paris: Flammarion, 1986), pp. 265-66.

56. Edward Grimeston, A Generall Historie of France Written by John de Serres unto the Year 1598, Much Augmented and Continued unto this Present, out of the Most Approved Authors that have Written of that Subject (London, 1611), pp. 719-20.




ette's astrological flirtation to an extreme in his farce plot when Pol- trot and St. Andre disguise themselves as Scottish fortune-tellers to test their wives' fidelity; in the process, the playwright pokes fun at the Princess's overwrought confession to her husband (4.1.65-118). Con- fronted by the mysterious "mute" astrologer (St. Andre), Celia and Elianor confess to the grotesquely exaggerated charges as interpreted by his assistant (Poltrot):

POLTROT. He says you are a couple of Messalina's, and the Stews cannot satisfie you; he says your thoughts are swell'd with a Carnosity; nay, you have the Green Sickness of the Soul, which runs upon nothing but neighing Stallions, churning Boars, and bellowing Bulls-

CELIA. O! I confess, I confess....

(4.1.94-99)

The "sales bourdeleries" of Messalina are described in Brantime,57 and Poltrot's subsequent allegation that their wives' genitals are un- clean and they compulsively masturbate recalls Brant6me's prurient description of court ladies's "labies" discussed above:

POLTROT.... [he says] that you are all Fish downward; that Lot's Wife is fresh to you, and when you were little Girls of Seven, you were so wanton, your Mothers ty'd your hands behind you-

ELIANOR. All this we confess to be true.

(Lines 114-18)

This scene's scabrous humor merely takes to a further extreme images already employed by the enraged Prince after he tricks his own wife into confessing that Nemours is her lover: "the Treason is too gross; / After that most unnatural Confession ... I ... / It Scents too far, the God of Love flies wide, / He gets the wind, and stops the Nose at this" (3.2.156-61).

Lee's crude characterization of a St. Andre obsessed with "carnosity" (4.1.96) embellishes the well-known profligacy of a historical figure whose excesses are hinted at in La Fayette's novel. In the novel's presentation, the Marechal de Saint-Andre is an ostentatious aging fop who can no longer even aspire to the "moindres dignites," but who (thanks to the King's largesse) "cherchait toutes les occasions de faire voir sa magnificence," and who hosts a ball in order to "faire paraitre, aux yeux de Mme de Clkves, cette depense &clatante qui allaitjusqu'ai la profusion" (pp. 134, 163-64). The Princesse does not attend this ball on the pretext that Saint-Andre is paying her unwanted attention (p. 166). Therefore, when Lee's St. Andre expresses a desire to seduce

57. Brant6me (n. 14 above), 9:30.




the Princess-"Gad I'll write to her, and then she's mine directly" (1.1.115-18) -his lines not only link the farce to the heroic plot but also link the play directly to its source. Historically, the Marechal de Saint-Andre prided himself on being a ferocious warrior, a great military strategist, and a fanatic Catholic who received a special benedic- tion from the Pope in 1561 for defending the faith during the religious wars. Yet, according to many, he enjoyed his meteoric rise mostly due to his ingratiating friendship with Henri II.58 La Fayette gently deflates the pretensions of Saint-Andre as she notes that his career was marked by a series of victories, "si on en excepte la bataille de Saint-Quentin"; she then reminds readers that this defeat so demoralized the French that Henri II was forced to negotiate for peace (p. 135). Lee magni- fies this subtle slight when his Marshall boasts of wounding five men including the Prince of Cleve and the Vidam of Chartres at "the Tour- nament of Mete" (1.2.41-53), even though the Prince and the Vidam deny that they were there.

What likely interested Lee most about the historical Saint-Andre was his notorious behavior at court as recounted, for example, by Grimeston. A terrible spendthrift, he lavished money-borrowed from friends or extorted from enemies-on palaces, banquets, masques, mistresses, perfumes, and fancy clothes. 59 A compulsive womanizer and sensualist, he was also accused of indulging in unnatural prac- tices, and he reportedly suffered from a venereal disease for which prescriptions to alleviate his painful urination still exist.60 Lee captures the essence of this belligerent, profligate, bad-mannered cad right from St. Andre's first appearance onstage. He boasts that his previous evening's activities included drinking five bottles, sleeping with six whores, stabbing a link-man in the back, and dueling with a gentleman who beat him with a bottle (1.1.94-107). Later St Andre quarrels with his wife about his foppish excesses:

ELIANOR. Pray, St. Andre, leave trising your Curls, your affected Nods, Grimaces, taking of Snuff, and answer me-Why are we not as pleasing as formerly?

ST. ANDRE. Why, Nell-Gad 'tis special-This Amarum is very pungent-Why, Nell, I can give no more reason ... only this, I love Whoring, because I love Whoring.

(2.2.20-26)

58. Romier, pp. 338, 27-39. 59. Ibid., p. 127. According to Grimeston, "The Marshall of Saint Andrew [was] ad-

vanced by the favours of the deceased King, and made fat by the confiscations of them of the religion [i.e., Huguenots], and by borrowing, which hee never paied againe" (p. 721).

60. Ibid., pp. 189-90n, and sources cited there.




Here Lee invents very little. As several contemporary satires suggest, the historical Saint-Andre was viewed as a pimp ("macquereau"), a de- bauched rake ("vile volupte et pute paillardise"), and a dishonorable cad ("[sans] renom").61 His profligacy and pleasure-seeking earned him the nickname "harquebuzier de ponant" (i.e., "sodomite").62

Lee's portrait of St. Andre's wife, Marguerite de Lustrac, dame d'honneur to Marie Stuart, also has a sound historical basis, although Lee changes her name to Elianor. As ostentatious and hedonistic as her husband, she had affairs with numerous courtiers during her husband's military campaigns. 63 Her most notorious love affair was with the Prince de Conde, who at one point sent the Marechal on a dangerous spy mission in order to enjoy Marguerite in his absence (p. 307). Lee translates these military absences into bouts of comic sleepwalking. This playwright, whose knowledge of biblical harlots such as "Poti- phar's wife" (2.2.101), "Jezabel" (4.1.104), and "Bathsheba" (5.1.57) was extensive, seems to have delighted in reviving this sixteenth-century Uriah for the Restoration stage.64 The abuse Lee's cuckolded St. An- dre heaps upon his wife also has a literary precedent. Six years before the appearance of Lee's play, Edme Boursault wrote Le Prince de Conde, a mediocre nouvelle of sexual intrigue in which Saint-Andre is a senile old cuckold with a fickle wife and a promiscuous daughter who, though engaged to marry a courtier, is discovered by her father in the bed of King Frangois II. We do not know whether Lee ever read Boursault's version of events, but it typifies popular depictions of the moral laxity of Saint-Andre and his family. 65

In light of these historical and literary contexts, when Stroup and Cooke assert that "for the comic subplot of Poltrot, St. Andre, and their wives, there appears to be no source, and it is presumably original with Lee," the editors appear to have given up their search too soon. J. M. Armistead digs deeper and suggests that Lee's cuckold plot functions as historical satire, as Lee brings together two fanatical religious enemies, the Catholic Saint-Andre and the Huguenot Jean de Poltrot, who assassinated the Duc de Guise in 1563. That Poltrot and St. Andre should be "couzens" (1.1.79) who go whoring together seems to suggest that, as Armistead puts it, "something is rotten in the

61. The anonymous "Epigramme au Mareschal de Saint-Andre," "Epitaphe du Mareschal Sainct-Andr6," and an untitled satire recited at court by Catherine de Medici are reprinted in Romier (n. 16 above), pp. 445, 206; see also pp. 383, 189-90, and 190, n. 4.

62. Brant6me, 5:36, cited in Romier, p. 190, n. 4. 63. Romier, pp. 31-32. 64. Armistead (n. 12 above), pp. 152-55. 65. Romier, pp. 393-96.




state."66 But as La Fayette does elsewhere, Lee engages in a careful reading of his historical sources, resulting in an elaborate topical joke. Specifically, we believe that the circumstances leading up to Saint- Andre's death by a pistol shot provide a likely source of inspiration for Lee's farcical events.

In 1553, a wealthy Parisian named Pierre Perdriel placed in Saint- Andre's trust his newlywed son Jean Perdriel, Seigneur de Mezieres. To secure his son's advancement, the father advised Mezieres to under- write Saint-Andre's massive debts. Years passed, the debts increased, and Saint-Andre seemed about to ruin both houses, when suddenly Perdriel told his son to back out of the arrangement. Infuriated, Saint- Andre ejected Mezieres from his household, and engaged a thuggish gentleman named Saint-Sernin to insult Mezieres, possibly by defaming his young wife. Mezieres reported the incident to Saint-Andre and de- manded reparation, but the Marechal dryly replied that Saint-Sernin did not owe any such thing to "un bourgeois de petite condition." Outraged at this snub, Mezieres attacked and killed Saint-Sernin, and a warrant for his arrest was issued by the Marechal. When Mezieres ignored three court summonses and fled Paris, he was condemned to death and his confiscated lands were turned over to Saint-Andre.67 Nearly a decade later, the two met again on opposite sides of the Battle of Dreux on December 19, 1562. When Saint-Andre's horse fell, he was taken prisoner by his exiled enemy, the former Seigneur de Mezieres, now just plain Jean Perdriel fighting for the Huguenot armies. Delighted by this coincidence, Perdriel thought to ransom the Marechal for the reinstatement of his lands; Saint-Andre agreed to these terms, and swore allegiance to Perdriel. However, when another mortal enemy of Saint-Andre passed by, the Marechal inexplicably attacked him, breaking his prisoner's oath to cease fighting. Conse- quently, Perdriel shot Saint-Andre in the head with a pistol and tossed his body into a ditch. When news of the unpopular Marechal's death reached the court, it prompted the composition of the verse satires cited above.68

Though Jean de Poltrot remains little more than a footnote in the history of the religious wars, Lee's portrayal of him is also less an in- vention than an informed elaboration. Stroup and Cooke suggest that Lee gleaned bare-bones details of the "cunning" Poltrot from En- rico Caterino Davila's account of the French civil wars, translated into English in 1678,69 but the play paints so accurate a portrait of the

66. Stroup and Cooke, eds. (n. 1 above), 2:149; Armistead, pp. 150-52. 67. Romier, pp. 196-97. 68. Ibid., pp. 380-81. 69. Enrico Caterino Davila describes him as "being of a ready wit, and by nature sub-

tile, having lived many years in Spain" in The Historie of the Civill Warres ofFrance (London,




man's essential character that it seems likely that Lee used some other unidentified (or lost) source. Henry M. Baird suggests that Poltrot was an upstart Spanish impostor who claimed to be the Lord of Merey, and whose lifelong ambition was to assassinate de Guise. The play's Elianor may be alluding to this obsession when she complains that every night, "you come home, and swear you'll be reveng'd on this Lord, or that Duke" (2.2.80-81). Viewed by his fellow Huguenot military commanders as an expendable "silly braggart," Poltrot was sent undercover on a suicide mission to infiltrate the enemy camp and assassinate de Guise in 1562.70 After Poltrot's subsequent capture, he was tortured in a Paris prison where he betrayed his fellow Huguenots and was executed, attaining considerable notoriety on both sides of the English channel.71 Lee's Poltrot is likewise a comic braggart who attempts (sexual) subterfuge at the home of a Catholic (St. Andre), is caught, then flees to the safety of his room where his wife is literally sleeping with the enemy. When the Vidam shoots Poltrot and threat- ens him with worse violence, his cowardly acceptance of cuckoldom doubles as an allusion to the drawing and quartering of Jean de Pol- trot: "Lord! Lord! why what pleasure can it be to any Man to rip me open?" (5.1.90-91).

What has the documented treachery of Poltrot and Saint-Andre to do with Lee's comic subplot? If Armistead is correct that Grimeston's General Historie of France was another of Lee's sources of information, then two facing pages in Grimeston may have provided the inspiration for Lee's pairing of two so unlikely figures. 72 On page 742, Grimeston describes the "battaile of Dreux" at which Saint-Andre was captured and killed. His death, combined with significant troop losses, "caused a generall confusion in the Kings army" which was prevented only by the heroic leadership of the Duc de Guise. The next page recounts Poltrot's treacherous infiltration of the Catholic camp, and his assassination of de Guise on February 18, 1563: "'John Poltrot, Seigneur of Mercy, a gentleman of Angoulmois mounted upon a Spanish horse, by

1678), p. 86; Stroup and Cooke identify this source in The Works of Nathaniel Lee, 2:585. Kewes (n. 20 above) also cites Lee's close collaborator, Dryden, as acknowledging that he took materials "' Verbatim out of Davila' " (p. 165); it is reasonable to infer, therefore, that Lee had access to this same source.

70. Henry M. Baird, History of the Rise of the Huguenots of France, 2 vols. (New York, 1889), 2:103-7. Lee alludes to de Guise's assassination by "damn'd Poltrot" in The Mas- sacre of Paris (1.1.135).

71. News of Poltrot's actions and interrogation appeared in an English pamphlet in March of 1563; see J. H. M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), p. 171.

72. Grimeston (n. 56 above), pp. 742-73. On this and various French sources used by Lee, see Armistead, p. 198, n. 16.




his own proper and private, shoots him into the shouldar with a pistoll charged with three bullets, and saves himselfe by flight." Poltrot's treachery did not go unpunished: "having wandered all night, he was taken the next day: soon after, hee was pincht with hot irons, and so drawne in peeces with horses at Paris." Thus on facing pages we get accounts of the ignominious deaths of Saint-Andre and Poltrot. Com- bined with other biographical details (a newlywed husband [also named Jean] taken under the wing of a social superior; possible calumny di- rected toward Perdriel's bride; a trusting protege's betrayal by the Mar&chal; various discharged pistols), the juxtaposition of their demises may have inspired a playwright steeped in French political gossip to create his comic pair. Indeed, by having the Catholic Vidam shoot Poltrot in the guts, Lee creates a parodic inversion by altering the content of the original anecdote and reversing the course of French history. He rescues St. Andre from his nemesis, Jean Perdriel, and de Guise from his nemesis, Jean de Poltrot. Finally, the historical Saint- Andre was not only a notorious cuckold, womanizer, braggart, and spy, but according to Grimeston he was one of two "violent" and "brutish" counselors who attempted to poison the Huguenot King of Navarre at a banquet held in 1560, the year in which La Fayette's novel is set-yet another attack on a Protestant gut.73

II

It is not surprising that Lee should adapt La Fayette's novel for the stage; jealousy and death are, after all, the stuff of Restoration heroic tragedy, whereas cuckoldry and assignations are the stuff of comedy. Furthermore, several critics of La Fayette's novel have highlighted its own deep indebtedness to the theater of her day.74 Yet as Raitt notes, combining three key elements borrowed from disparate forms of writ- ing-a detailed portrait of the court of Henri II (history), a series of narrative digressions (romance), and a psychological portrait of a trou- bled marriage (theater) -La Fayette produces a new, hybrid form, the novel.75 To translate this novel back to the theater without jettisoning its historical and romance elements is a tall order. Simone Ackerman argues that if readers concentrate on the ill-fated marriage of the

73. Grimeston, p. 733. The events at Dreux are also recounted by Davila, though not on facing pages (pp. 83, 86-87).

74. See Charles Dedeyan, Madame de Lafayette (Paris: Societe D'Edition D'Enseigne- ment Superieur, 1955), pp. 143- 45; Roger Francillon, L'Oeuvre romanesque de Madame de La Fayette (Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1973), pp. 191-95; and Raitt (n. 36 above), p. 80.

75. See Raitt, pp. 171, 133, and passim.




Clkves and ignore the narrative digressions, "une piece de theiatre en cinq actes emerge du roman."76

While Lee jettisons the digressions, he adds salacious comic material that critics find so at odds with the tone and subject matter of the main plot. This purported incompatibility brings us to the mot-clef of our title. Defined in the OED as "to render spurious or counterfeit, to falsify, corrupt, [or] debase, especially by the admixture of baser ingredients," 'adulteration' is an important concept in the history of food, such as when unscrupulous distributors water down a product, or sell contaminated goods such as the turpentine gin of eighteenth-century London.77 Of course, 'adulteration' shares the same root with 'adultery,' a link suggesting that in love relationships, as in food production and literary adaptation, the impure ingredients do not belong. Lee makes the link between sex and food when Tournon teases Nemours about his infidelity:

TOURNON. Say then-Hast thou not defil'd thy self with any Dalilah since you last fel[l] upon my Neck and loved much?

NEMOURS. Nay verily- TOURNON. Have you not overheated your Body with adulterate Wines?

Have you not been at a Play, nor touch'd Fruit after the leud Orange Women?

NEMOURS. I am unpolluted. (4.1.40-46)

As we have argued, remaining pure and rising above the "pollution" of common sexuality (e.g., as represented by Mme de Chartres's snide remark about "les autres femmes" [p. 172], or Lee's anachronistic joke about promiscuous London orange women) are of paramount impor- tance for the princesses in both novel and play. The play's Nemours echoes the novel's Mme de Chartres's cynicism about the essential impurity of women: "I know the Ingredients just that make 'em up, /

76. Simone Ackerman, "La Princesse de Clves: Un th6tatre de la verit6 oblique," Actes de Davis, ed. Claude Abraham (Paris: Biblio 17, 1988), pp. 40-41. Lee was not the only playwright to recognize the theatricality of La Fayette's novel. Edme Boursault produced a tragic adaptation for Paris's Gu6n6gaud Theatre, where it was performed in De- cember 1678 but never published; see Henry Carrington Lancaster, A History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century, 5 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 1929), vol. 4, pt. 1, pp. 140-42. A second adaptation was written by Jules Lemaitre for Sarah Bernhardt in 1893, though this version's most noteworthy production was by the nationalist troupe Action Franpaise in 1908; see Germaine Durriere,Jules Lemaitre et le thedtre (Paris: Boivin, 1934), pp. 275-76.

77. Reay Tannahill, Food in History (New York: Stein & Day, 1973), pp. 343- 46.




All to loose Grains, the subtlest volatile Atoms, / With the whole Mish- mash of their Composition" (5.3.260-62). One cannot adulterate something that is already a volatile mish-mash. Lee's Princess falls not because she allows base ingredients into her marriage, but because, as in La Fayette's novel, the purity of the Cleves' union is nothing more than a brittle facade. Early in the play, she idealizes her husband's sweet "Disposition / As if no Gaul had mixt with his Creation" (1.3.114-15), but later his sudden bouts of jealous rage reveal a character as fundamentally flawed as that of the Princess who finds impurity irresistible:

Methinks I see Fate set two Bowls before me, Poyson and Health, a Husband and Nemours; But see with what a whirl my Passions move, I loath the Cordial of my Husband's Love; But when Nemours my Fancy does recal, The Bane's so sweet that I cou'd drink it all.

(1.3.195-200) Her dilemma extends to the critical reception of Lee's play, as "the sweet Bane" of its explicit sexuality has left a bad taste in so many mouths.

Hume posits two explanations for this shocking adaptation: "Either Lee has produced a sloppy and pointless amalgam of filth and heroic sentiment, or he has deliberately set out to debase the heroic."78 We have argued the case for a third explanation, one never adequately explored in existing criticism of the play, namely, that Lee's adaptation proves not that he had a foul mouth and a filthy mind, but that he was an astute reader of La Fayette and of French history. The play may lack the delicacy and restraint of the novel, but it is no adulteration. In fact, Lee's heroic plot highlights the extent to which unbecoming pollution cannot be quarantined in "lower" dramatic forms like comedy or farce. The Princess describes her passion for Nemours as "a Gangreen to my Honour" (5.3.62), and she retreats from the world to atone for her sins: "Death will shortly purge my dross away" (5.3.48). Her image recalls Lee's cynical prediction in the prologue that audiences would enjoy the play's immoral comedy more than its heroic tragedy-"They'll take the Dross and through the Gold away" (line 16) -though the play's complex low burlesque of La Fayette proved more successful in print than in performance.79 The sexual "dross"

78. Hume, "Satiric Design" (n. 2 above), p. 133. 79. Lee's printed text seems to have sold respectably well, going through five sepa-

rate editions between 1689 and 1734; see Stroup and Cooke, eds. (n. 1 above), p. 151.




that Lee seemingly adds to La Fayette's mix was always already present, albeit in lower concentrations. Essential to appreciating The Princess of Cleve is understanding the complex machinations of the Valois court, knowledge that the novelist and playwright could assume in their contemporaries but that most modern readers lack. Historical unfamiliarity or inattention to detail can lead to critical errors, such as Hume's demotion of St. Andre to the rank of middle-class "cit,"so80 or Armistead's segregation of "libertine" from heroic characters on the grounds that the former group "consistently speak prose."81

Lee's Princess of Cleve functions on three different levels-as satire, parody, and burlesque-of which only the first has been studied in detail. Armistead, Cordner, Hume, Knutson, and Harold Weber have elucidated the play's satirical exposure of the popular stage figure, the rake; its topical satire of Restoration English politics and the exploits of the Earl of Rochester and Duke of Buckingham; and finally its satiric deflation of the rhetorical excesses of heroic tragedy. According to one widely accepted distinction between satire and parody, satire is corrective, targeting elements external to the text with an aim to re- forming social, historical, or individual excesses, whereas parody is ameliorative, assimilating and then inverting elements of a target text with a view to creating a new, more vibrant aesthetic form.82 Margaret Rose outlines signal tools at a parodist's disposal, several of which are employed by Lee: juxtaposition (e.g., the Princess vs. Tournon, Celia, Elianor, and Marguerite), addition (e.g., the new farce plot materials), condensation (e.g., Tournon's performance of roles found in several of La Fayette's digressions), and discontinuity (e.g., a general disruption of tone between plots, and between the overall play and its source). Perhaps the most distinctive feature of parody is the way it "refunctions" the target text, incorporating its basic features but altering its content to create a new structure (e.g., Lee transforms the novel's digressions into two comic subplots). 3

Linda Hutcheon points out that parody enables formal and generic evolution, and does not necessarily imply contempt on the part of

80. Hume, "Satiric Design," p. 124. Crass behavior notwithstanding, Saint-Andr6 was no "bourgeois" (p. 130), but belonged to a powerful and wealthy elite and lived, as Lee's Tournon reveals, in a "Palace" (2.1.11).

81. Armistead (n. 12 above), pp. 147, 149. This moral/social distinction breaks down in a comic argument between Celia and Poltrot that burlesques the melodramatic ex- changes of the Prince and Princess of Cleve: "Poltrot, behold-Ah! canst thou see me kneel, / And yet no Bowels of Compassion feel? / Why dost thou bluster by me like a Storm, / And ruffle into Frowns that Godlike Form?" (5.1.28-31).

82. Hutcheon (n. 9 above), chaps. 2 and 3 passim; and Rose (n. 9 above), chaps. 1 and 2 passim.

83. Rose, p. 83.




parodists toward their targets. Instead, two possible etymologies for the Greek prefix para as either 'against' or 'beside' render a second translation of parodia 'singing beside'-creating "a suggestion of an accord or intimacy instead of contrast."84 At their best, parodists en- gage in a kind of creative literary criticism, "an active exploration of form" that is both synthetic and analytic.85 Mme de La Fayette employed this method by absorbing an astonishing range of historical detail from her own sources, then refining and embellishing these accounts to produce France's first psychological novel: "she must have worked with these great volumes for ever beside her and referred to them again and again for historical details to incorporate into her tales of love and despair."86

In the same spirit, Lee's parody seems less to ridicule his continental sources than to rework them-demonstrating the potential structural coherence of texts involving multiple plots and discourses and elucidating the thematic coherence of works in which refined manners do not necessarily make for moral behavior. Lee doesn't canni- balize La Princesse de Cleves so much as he carnivalizes it. Where La Fayette's prose style remains even throughout, Lee intensifies the discursive differences between plots; where La Fayette segregates her inimitable Princesse from her sordid surroundings through the con- vention of self-contained narrated episodes, Lee collapses the distinctions and narrows the distance between heroic and comic by having the latter intrude into the former at every opportunity. What critics have generally observed about The Princess of Cleve, that "there are two worlds in the play, one courtly and refined, the other crass and bourgeois,"87 is a kind of misrecognition, prompted by Lee's structural refunctioning of the moral dichotomy between the Princesse and "les autres femmes," that breaks down in the novel. In the play, the two worlds are linked by what Bakhtin terms carnivalistic misalliances: "All things that were once self-enclosed, disunified, distanced from one another by a noncarnivalistic hierarchical worldview are drawn into carnivalistic contacts and combinations. Carnival brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid."88 Carnivalistic mesalliances emerge in the novel as well, where in spite of Mme de Chartres's admonitions and Mme de Clkves's good inten-

84. Hutcheon, p. 32; cf. Rose, pp. 45-47. 85. Hutcheon, pp. 50-53, quotation on p. 51. 86. Raitt (n. 36 above), pp. 147-68, and sources cited there (quotation on p. 157). 87. Hume, "Satiric Design," p. 130. 88. Bakhtin (n. 11 above), p. 123.




tions, La Fayette's Princesse cannot remain above and beyond the sexual infidelity so rife in French court society.

In dramatizing this radical interpretation, Lee's adaptation becomes a pioneering exercise in practical literary criticism of La Fayette's novel. For centuries, her exquisite prose style has overshadowed her cynical moral observations. For example, Hippolyte Taine praised her rhetorical elevation of rather disturbing subject matter: "D'un bout ta l'autre de son livre brille une serenite charmante; ses personnages semblent glisser au milieu d'un air limpide et lumineux. L'amour, la jalousie atroce, les angoisses supremes du corps brise par la maladie de l'Fme, les cris saccades de la passion, le bruit discordant du monde, tout s'adoucit et s'efface, et le tumulte d'en bas arrive comme une harmonie dans la region pure oii nous sommes months."89 Of course one can write about ignoble events in an elevated style without producing a burlesque. What makes a high burlesque is an incongruity between style and substance that creates a comic effect (such as when Nemours leaps over chairs at a royal ball or rents a room opposite the Princesse's garden to act as a Peeping Tom). La Fayette's treatment of the more sexually explicit material found in Brant6me, for example, is usually described as a process of discreet omission, "a euphemistic way of ignoring the mimorialiste's crude remark[s].... The author is too dignified a woman to lower herself to explicit references."90 But if these notorious individuals and historical events were common knowledge, as La Fayette's contemporaries attest they were, then her revisionary process of omission and elevation becomes one of creative high burlesque, not critical censorship.

Nowhere does Taine credit La Fayette for her pointed wit, which, as we have argued, permeates the novel. Following the famous "portrait derob&" incident, the Princesse's husband teases her that "elle avait sans doute quelque amant cache 't qui elle avait donne ce portrait ou qui l'avait derobe, et qu'un autre qu'un amant ne se serait pas con- tente de la peinture sans la boite" (p. 204). As we mentioned above, the Princesse blushes at her husband's near discovery, but her embar- rassment is evoked through La Fayette's wry choice of expression: "elle trouva qu'elle n'&tait plus maitresse... de son visage." This revealing textual parapraxis is repeated in the next sentence's verb construction, "elle n'&tait pas maitresse de s'eloigner" (p. 204). La Fayette doth protest too much that the lady is not a "maitresse." Lee's

89. Hippolyte Taine, Essais de critique et d'histoire (1858), excerpted in K. B. Kettle, ed. (n. 13 above), p. 149.

90. Paulson (n. 44 above), p. 63; cf. Bernard Fontenelle's 1678 letter criticizing the novel for presenting too many "'obvious' historical facts" (cited in Paulson, pp. 57-58).




low burlesque makes an exquisite original seem base, and La Fayette's high burlesque makes a base occurrence seem exquisite; though the two writers shared interests in generic experimentation, social mores, and French history, their most unexpected affinity lies in their sense of humor. As Rose points out, humor is the defining characteristic of burlesque, as the word is derived from the Italian term burla denoting ajoke or trick.9' In foisting a "Ruffian" on playgoers who expected a most "polish'd Hero in Nemours," Lee exposes the elaborate trick La Fayette has played on her readers. Whereas she displayed treachery in beautiful colors, Lee strips it bare and exposes it in its purest, most unadulterated form.

91. Rose, p. 54.



Documents

Adulteration or Adaptation? Nathaniel Lee's Princess of Cleve and Its Sources