ABSTRACT
John Donne’s ‘Satyre III’ concerns the pursuit of religious faith. In it, he cautions his reader to ‘doubt wisely’, to ‘stand’, not to sleep or run, on the unfamiliar path ‘inquiring right’. 1 In the second ‘movement’ of the poem, the satire proper, Donne explores the trivial reasons why men adopt or eschew particular religious forms. He likens the quest for ‘Mistresse faire Religion’ (line 5) to the search for a bride and rails against man’s erring tendency to homogenise the heterogeneity of the female sex, to regard one as all, all as one. 2 In this paper, I will re-apply Donne’s insistence on intellectual scepticism in the pursuit of both religion and brides to the question of the interpretation of Medea, Briseyda, and Helen in a fourteenth-century þrench ballade. Readings of the literary content of the enigmatic ballade Medee fu en amer veritable have tended either to ‘sleepe’ or ‘runne wrong’. Consistently, where these analyses stray is in their understandings of the poet’s curious use of classical allusion. As critics hasten to homogenise their heterogeneous histories, Medea, Briseyda, and Helen are either adored or scorned. Medieval þrench lyric poetry written in the formes fixes (ballade, rondeau, and virelai) has, likewise, long been the victim of the homogenising tendencies of literary scholarship. 3 Commonplaces and clichés incarcerated in rigid poetic structures lead inevitably, it is argued, to a sterility of both form and content. Literary critics, stifled by the conventions of their own díscourse, are thus apt to dísmiss this lyric poetry as unworthy of much attention. What I will suggest, in my exploration of the poet’s use of classical allusion in a single ballade, Medee fu, is that some forme fixe poems, at least, are not, as some critics have asserted, mérely the ‘dustiest bottles’ filled with the ‘same old wine’. 4 By demonstrating the scope for enigmatic play in the realm of literary allusion, I hope to contribute to the small but growing voice of díssent, of doubt.
