The Contrafacta of Thomas Watson and Simon Goulart: Resignifying the Polyphonic Song in 16th-Century England and France

Abstract

Examining the polyphonic contrafacta of two late 16th-century writers—the Calvinist pastor Simon Goulart (1543-1628) and the English poet Thomas Watson (1555-1592)—I consider how these two authors employed the practice of song re-texting to make prestigious music from another culture accessible and acceptable to a new community of singers. Focusing on the Sonets Chrestiens (1578-80) of Goulart and the Italian Madrigalls Englished (1590) of Watson, I demonstrate the importance of contrafaction to the development of new poetic genres, as well as to the formation of new religious or national identities. The first chapter investigates various types of contrafactum writing and singing in France. From simple tunes to the complex polyphony of Guillaume Boni and Anthoine de Bertrand, employed in the Sonets Chrestiens, I consider how different musical forms can influence or constrain the re-texting of a song in different ways. In other words, what aspects of rhythm, melody, and harmony make a song “open” to being sung with different lyrics, and how is the sense of a song altered by the use of a contrafactum text? In the second chapter, I establish the Sonets Chrestiens’ crucial role within Goulart’s larger project of inaugurating a Genevan school of learned verse and polyphony in the 1570s and 80s—both an artistic response to the poets and composers associated with the French court, especially the Pléiade, as well as a material response to the luxurious music books of the royal printers Le Roy & Ballard. By judicious replacement of key terms, allied with allusions to the original lyrics by Pierre de Ronsard within the Christian narrative of Goulart’s new texts, the pastor stages an intertextual penitential itinerary through his practice of contrafaction. Ronsard’s Petrarchan love sonnets are first revealed as examples of sin and vanity, then corrected and superseded by contrafacta modeling the path away from these worldly passions. To conclude the first part of the dissertation, I briefly compare the Sonets Chrestiens to Goulart’s final contrafactum collection, the 1594 Cinquante pseaumes de David. In the third chapter, I turn to Thomas Watson. I first situate the poet among his contemporaries in 1580s England, demonstrating how Watson’s verse develops from an aesthetic of “faithfulness” and literal translation of continental and classical models towards a more confidently appropriative and nationalistic practice in his later pastoral works. Contrary to earlier studies of the Italian Madrigalls Englished, the final chapter argues that Watson’s contrafacta, while indeed far from faithful translations, in fact remain deeply invested in the appropriation and subversion of his chosen madrigals’ original verse. Most crucially, the Italian Madrigalls Englished carefully naturalizes the pastoral lyrics employed by the celebrated composer Luca Marenzio—lyrics originally meant at least in part to evoke the Roman milieu of Marenzio’s patron. Watson’s contrafacta equally engage with the madrigals’ representation of characteristic formal elements of Italian verse, manipulating the underlay, phrasing, and rhythms of Marenzio’s madrigals, in order that this music might accommodate the patterns of native English prosody. Ultimately, the Italian Madrigalls Englished argues for both the English language’s capacity to assimilate foreign prosody and verse form, as well as the Italian madrigal’s capacity to accommodate native English rhythms, and native English topical concerns.