ABSTRACT
Sometime in late 1564 Ronsard addressed a poem to Catherine de Médicis, then traveling with the court in the south of France on the way to Bayonne. In it, the poet longs for the return of the queen, once again sounding the pastoral note, predicting that spring will not come to the Île de France until Catherine returns home. He also underscores the importance to Catherine and the court of entertainment and pleasure, something the queen believed in. Life may be filled with pain, writes Ronsard, but pain can be tempered by pleasure, the sweet mixed with the bitter.1 He then reminds Her Majesty of the pleasures provided earlier that year at Fontainebleau. When, he asks, will we again hear morning serenades, when will we see a new tournament, masquerades and fireworks, white face and black face clowns? And finally:
Quand voirrons nous une autre Polynesse Tromper Dalinde ... 2
[When will we see another Polynesso betray Dalinda ... ]
What Ronsard is remembering here is a production of what Brantôme identifies as “a comedy on the subject of the ‘belle Genièvre,’” that is, a dramatization of the story of Ginevra from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso that served as part of the entertainment offered by Catherine during her Queen’s Day festival at Fontainebleau.3 The text of this dramatization has apparently not survived, but the published record, that includes the two trophées that Ronsard wrote for a finale, a spoken epilogue, also by Ronsard, and four “intermedies qui furent en la comedie que la Royne feit iouer a Fontainebleau 1564” [interludes that were in the comedy that the Queen had performed at Fontainebleau 1564] found in a recueil kept by Brantôme, confirms that the performance was carefully arranged.
