ABSTRACT
I begin with a well-known sonnet of Pierre de Ronsard as it appeared in his first collection of love poems, the Amours of 1552/1553. The discussion to which it will give rise in the following pages will take us from a consideration of sixteenth-century fashions to early libertine licentious verse, in particular that of Marc Papillon de Lasphrise, via classical pederastic poetry and the question of how the Renaissance read this aspect of ancient culture. We will find that homoerotic scenarios figure frequently in Ronsard’s poetry, but that, in general, their disturbing potential remains largely implicit, or else is variously channelled through recuperative heteronormative
1 Pierre de Ronsard and Marc-Antoine Muret, Les Amours, leurs Commentaires, texte de 1553, ed. Christine de Buzon and Pierre Martin (Paris: Classiques Didier Erudition, 1999), sonnet 90, p. 128: ‘Whether her golden hair slowly curls, / Or whether it roams in two gliding waves, / Which wandering here and there over her breast, / And on her neck, swim wantonly. // Or whether a fastening, brightly wound round / With many rubies and many spherical pearls, / Binds the flow of her two blond tresses, / I am satisfied in my contentment. // What pleasure is it, rather what a marvel, / When her hair, gathered above her ears / Imitates the style of Venus? // When with a cap she makes her head resemble Adonis, / And no one knows (so well does she disguise / Her indeterminate head) whether she’s a girl or a boy?’. Cf. Pierre de Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1993-1994), I, pp. 71-2, where the text, slightly modified, is as it appeared in the poet’s collected works of 1584. Primary references to the 1553 Amours will be to the Buzon/Martin edition, with secondary references to the Pléiade edition. All references to other works by Ronsard will be to the Pléiade edition, unless stated otherwise.
