The Auctor in the Paratext: Rubrics, Glosses, and the Construction of Vernacular Authorship
2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 115; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/691556
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)Byzantine Studies and History
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeThe Auctor in the Paratext: Rubrics, Glosses, and the Construction of Vernacular AuthorshipCarolynn Van DykeCarolynn Van DykeLafayette College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAlastair Minnis makes two seminal points in Medieval Theory of Authorship (1984): that for medieval thinkers, “a book worth reading had to be the work of an auctor,” and that “no ‘modern’ writer could decently be called an auctor in a period in which men saw themselves as dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, i.e. the ‘ancients.’”1 Minnis goes on to explore but not resolve some attendant questions: How, when, and to what degree did texts by those dwarfish “modern” writers come to be “worth reading”? Scholars have supplied answers from various sources—ideological and political writing about secular authority, scholarly commentaries on vernacular texts, descriptions and self-representations of vernacular poets—but have devoted scant attention to another source of insight. In certain carefully produced and widely circulated late medieval manuscripts, rubrics and glosses tie vernacular utterances explicitly to the very agent traditionally regarded as authoritative: an auctor.In traditional usage, an “author gloss” directs readers’ attention to a source or allusion. Glosses in Chaucer’s prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale, for instance, provide excerpts from misogamist and misogynous auctores to counterpoint the narrator’s proud recital of her experience. But that kind of authorization cannot be the function of glosses and rubrics annexed to passages with no known canonical or scriptural pre-text. I refer to the headings “Laucteur” or “Lacteur” in the Romance of the Rose (ca. 1230 and 1280) and Guillaume de Machaut’s Judgment of the King of Navarre (1349?), and to the gloss “auctor,” “actor,” or “autor” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde (1386–1400). The rubrics appear in many Romance manuscripts and nearly all those of the Judgment of the King of Navarre; the glosses are in fourteen early manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales and two of Troilus. None of these annotations or headings accompanies material that might be associated with an external authority. Whoever wrote a(u)ctor or a(u)cteur must have meant to refer to some agent or quality in the vernacular text itself.At a minimum, those glosses and rubrics confirm that in late medieval culture, auctor did not refer exclusively to those “Latin authors … whose writings were granted special recognition or authority (auctoritas) by medieval scholars.”2 Cynthia Brown, whom I have just quoted, observes that the meaning of auctor broadened even among scholastic philosophers. In particular, Saint Bonaventure (1221–1274) used the term for anyone who writes “with his own [words] forming the principal part,” with comments from others “being annexed merely by way of confirmation.”3 The text that occasions those remarks is by a canonical author, Peter Lombard, but Bonaventure’s definition of auctor might apply to vernacular works. Perhaps scribes and annotators applied auctor and aucteur to a writer’s first-person utterances as opposed to parts of his text taken from others, even from canonical auctores.To test that hypothesis—which, to anticipate my conclusions, will need significant revision—I turn now to a reading of these rubrics and glosses. Their placement will suggest that the copyists and annotators whom Kathryn Kerby-Fulton calls “medieval professional reader[s]” were no less alert than modern scholars to narratological complexity.4 Moreover, the locations of the annotations will indicate something more specific about the perceptions of those early readers. In context, the agent marked as auctor provides not authority but authenticity.I. I begin by building on Sylvia Huot’s invaluable work on the Romance of the Rose. In several important publications, Huot surveys and analyzes two rubrics used “from a very early period in the [manuscript] tradition,” l’Amant and l’A[u]cteur.5 Noting that similar rubrics name personified speakers in the poem, she suggests that all such headings may be cues for oral performance.6 In any case, they were most likely “designed by scribes who assumed the responsibility for ‘packaging’ the poem.”7 As possible precedents, Huot considers the auctor headings in vernacular compendia and in the Speculum maius of Vincent of Beauvais, but she regards the rubrics in the Romance as innovative.8 She is surely correct about that. The auctor rubrics in earlier texts are systematic and functional: they mark unambiguous changes of source. In contrast, those in the Romance are reactive—signs of reader response. Huot finds the responses reflected in aucteur and amant particularly interesting. Scribes use the first of those rubrics, she writes, for utterances by the “authorial narrator,” and the second for references to the je who becomes, with the God of Love’s attack, implicated in the action.9 Bonaventure wrote that auctor refers to the writer as opposed to interpolated speakers; here the other speaker is a persona of the writer himself.Huot investigates the distinction primarily in one of about three hundred extant manuscripts. Even in that manuscript—Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 378—Laucteur and Lamant rubrics introduce passages of the same type:Ci parole li aucteursLors s’est Bel Acueil esfreez,et me dit: “Frere, voz beeza ce qui ne puet avenir.”10[Then Bel Accueil is frightened and says to me: “Brother, you aspire for what cannot happen.”]Li amant paroleBel Acueil ne sot que respondre,ançois se fust alez repondres’el ne l’eüst ilec trovéet pris ovec moi tot prové.(Fol. 23v, lines 3535–38)[Bel Accueil didn’t know how to reply; he would have preferred to go and hide if [Jalosie] had not discovered him there and found him in fact with me.]The passages are similar in terms of Huot’s distinction: in both, the narrator speaks. And as Huot anticipated, other manuscripts further blur the distinction; for instance, some attribute both passages to “Lamant.”11 Conversely, although BnF fr. 378 and several others place the climactic final narrative under “Lamant”—a justifiable choice, by Huot’s criteria, because the lover persona plays a central role there—another early witness attributes it to “Laucteur.”12Those inconsistencies might confirm David Hult’s appraisal that “at least toward the end of Guillaume de Lorris’s poem, … amant and auctor/actor are frequently interchanged in an arbitrary fashion.”13 But rubrications in the early manuscripts that I have examined in digital facsimile do fall into patterns, most of which reveal not a discrimination between persona and poet-narrator but a search for an authorizing agent.I will trace patterns of rubrication primarily in six texts that Ernest Langlois assigned to different classes: BnF fr. 378 (Langlois’s class θ); BnF fr. 1559 (class L); BnF fr. 1569 (class J); Arsenal 3338 (K and N); Montpellier H 438 (Mon and B); and Bodmer 79.14 At least in those manuscripts, rubrication changes involving amant and aucteur are particularly abundant at three points: the protagonist’s submission to the God of Love, the passage from the God of Love’s prolepsis to the self-representation of False Semblance, and the poem’s conclusion. At each of those junctures, scribes confront an interpretive crux regarding the identity or reliability of the first-person speaker.The initial response of some annotators to the first crux, the speaker’s enamorment, is the strategy that Huot describes: a split between narrator and protagonist. In BnF fr. 378, for instance, after three interlinear rubrics attribute expository narration to the aucteur, others identify an amant as the subject of the aucteur’s narration: “Cist devise li aucteurs comment li diex / d’amours navra l’amant des saietes” (Here the aucteur tells how the God of Love wounded the amant with arrows).15 Similarly, in BnF fr. 1569, in folios 10–27, Laucteur consistently designates the narrating voice and Lamant the intradiegetic agent; if that scribe is “unintelligent,” as Langlois writes, he registers changes between protagonist and retrospective narrator in a way that seems modern.16 Montpellier H 438 represents the same narrator-protagonist distinction more succinctly: “lauctour” appears twice (at fols. 5r and 7v) before the God of Love’s attack, at which point the protagonist is “lamant” through the end of Guillaume’s section (fols. 9v–20v, lines 1652–3759).But many other scribes recognize no such distinction. In BnF fr. 1558, BnF fr. 1559, and BnF fr. 1569, it is Lamant who negotiates entrance into the garden in which he will become an amant (fol. 6r in each). Arsenal 3338 and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 5210 inscribe “amant” above the very first line of narrative, “El vintieme an de mon aage” (In my twentieth year) (fol. 1v in each, line 21), and in Arsenal 3338, the poet-narrator and the protagonist are almost always the same agent, Lamant. Those scribes imply that amant is that agent’s essential identity—as it is, given the fictional, or oneiric, premise that he tells his story after his permanent subjugation by the God of Love. They do introduce aucteur later, for reasons to be stated below, but not to distinguish the poet-narrator from the protagonist.Moreover, the narrator/protagonist distinction is not maintained in the enamorment passage even by the annotators who use both terms. In yet a third pattern, the choice of aucteur over amant coincides with a change not in narrative perspective but in subject matter. Among the witnesses in that category is BnF fr. 378, which does not maintain a narratological distinction after the protagonist’s initial address by the God of Love. The BnF fr. 378 rubricator reverts to Laucteur repeatedly, particularly for the agent who answers the God (“Ci respond l’aucteur au dieu d’amours”), becomes his man, and asks for his precepts.17 That is, aucteur heads passages in which the speaker endorses Love’s sovereignty. Similarly, the annotator of Bodmer 79, who uses Lamant from the interchange with Idleness through Love’s drawing of his bow (fols. 5r–12r), changes to Laucteur for the protagonist’s reception and execution of Love’s commands, including his defiance of contrary directives from Reason (fols. 13v–21r). If the change from aucteur to amant in BnF fr. 1569 and Montpellier H 438 confirms the narrator’s transformation, a change in the other direction in BnF fr. 378 and Bodmer 79 authorizes the doctrines of fin amour.Neither change in rubrication marks a later passage that modern readers recognize as a crux, the authorial transition around line 4000. Annotators refer to the speaker only as Lamant during the complaint to Fair Welcoming that ends Guillaume’s Romance and well into the section by Jean de Meun, where Lamant invariably heads contributions by the narrator/protagonist to colloquies with Reason, Friend, Riches, and so forth.18 As Huot observes, a separately named protagonist can persist through a change of narrator; more important, this passage consists of dialogue with very little narration.19 As speech designations, Lamant and the other headings highlight a change here from first-person narrative to dialectic, with explicit discursive agents and ideological perspectives.Somewhere around line 11,000, that relative stability gives way to a rhetorical maelstrom. The changes begin with a deconstruction of authorial agency. In a narrative passage still headed Lamant in all six manuscripts, the God of Love agrees to besiege Jealousy’s castle. As he summons his “barons” to the attack, Love reaches outside the fiction to name his interlocutor and his two creators:Vez ci Guillaume de Lorriz,cui Jalousie sa contraire,fet tant d’angoisse et de deul traire. . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Et plus oncor me doit servir,car por ma grace deservirdoit il conmancier le romantou seront mis tuit mi conmant. . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Puis vendra Johans Clopinel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .car quant Guillaumes cessera,Jehans le [le Roman] continuera,enprés sa mort, que je ne mante,anz trespassez plus de .xl, …(Lines 10,496–98; 10,517–20; 10,535; and 10,557–60)[Here is Guillaume de Lorris, whom Jealousy, his opponent, causes to endure so much anguish and pain… . And he is to serve me even better, for in order to deserve my mercy, he should begin the Romance where all my commands will be placed… . Then will come Jean Clopinel… . For when Guillaume will stop, Jean will continue [the Roman] after his death, as I do not lie, more than forty years having passed …]The passage doubles backward and forward in time, identifying its originator in four mutually incompatible ways. To name just two anomalies, it returns to life (“vez ci”) a writer whose death has occasioned it, and it predicts the birth of its own author. In Guillaume’s section of the Romance, alternations of Lamant and Laucteur acknowledged a first-person voice that is variably within and outside the fiction, more and less authoritative. Now Jean has broadened and compounded those equivocations, parodying the implausible truth claims of first-person dream visions. And he proceeds to surrender control of the action and discourse to the epitome of unresolvable equivocation, False Semblance. Accepted as master strategist for Love’s barons, False Semblance enacts his name recursively by declaring that he does not tell the truth about his acts and dwelling places. When Love nonetheless demands the truth, what ensues is two thousand lines of inextricably honest and fraudulent self-disclosure.Copyists react to Jean’s metafictional gymnastics by reaching for stable ground, which they mark with the long-neglected Laucteur. The annotator of Montpellier H 438 does so as soon as the God of Love discovers False Semblance and Constrained Abstinence among his “barons”: “Ci raconte lauctour,” reads the rubric, “comment le dieu damors mandant barons” (Here the aucteur recounts how the God of Love orders his barons); and, shortly thereafter, “Ci raconte lauctour comment faus semblant vint devant amors et comment il paroles” (Here the aucteur recounts how False Semblance comes before Amours and how they speak) (fol. 54v, lines 10,409 and 10,445). Similarly, the annotator of BnF fr. 1559 interpolates “laucteur” midline, between Love’s summons to False Semblance and the statement “Et cil acort” (And he ran up) (fol. 89v, line 10,900). Both copyists re-identify a neutral, narrating voice. Manuscripts BnF fr. 378 and Bodmer 79 not only identify that voice but also distinguish it from the variably inauthentic discourse of False Semblance himself: they revert to Laucteur to head narrative passages that immediately precede speeches headed Faus Semblant (BnF fr. 378, fol. 44v, and Bodmer 79, fol. 72r–v; lines 10,973 and 11,053). Earlier, Laucteur rubrics in those manuscripts authorized the dictates of the God of Love; here they validate the narrator’s integrity.The authentication thus established is short-lived. From the beginning of Jean’s continuation, monologues sometimes overextend the remit of their speech-attribution rubrics, an attenuation compounded by long quotations within monologues. False Semblance’s discourse adds polyvalence to polyvocality, for his two-thousand-line “sermon” includes pronouncements on laziness, rapaciousness, fraud, and hypocrisy—vices that he both denounces and flaunts (e.g., lines 11,287–322, 11,507–22, 11,879–89). Copyists react to the narratological and ideological confusion not by dropping Laucteur but by using it idiosyncratically. During the tirade of the Jealous One as quoted by Friend, the copyist of BnF fr. 1569 jumps two levels out of context by attributing some totalizing and derogatory statements about women to Laucteur (fols. 57r and 58r, lines 8656–60 and 8858–60). He uses that term again when False Semblance alludes to the hypocrisy of scribes and Pharisees; it is unclear whether the current scribe means to defend his profession, side with False Semblance against friars, or denounce False Semblance himself (or itself).20 Meanwhile, the Arsenal 3338 copyist, who has used Lamant exclusively, switches to Laucteur at a similarly interesting point: to head two parts of False Semblance’s monologue that impugn mendicant privileges and claims.21Discourse that acknowledges seeming false can be both false and true. That conundrum, which has attended the patently specious truth claims of the Romance from the outset, becomes increasingly conspicuous following False Semblance’s monologue, as the poem moves through cutting cynicism, authoritative cosmography, and Christian pastoral, each impugning the others’ sincerity. Like the God of Love, readers must take their chances that something trustworthy issues from the poses and claims. Temporarily hedging their bets, the early annotators suspend all rubrication for the monologue of the Old Woman, who openly advocates subterfuge rather than indeterminate fraud. Then the amant reenters the action and dominates the paratext: for nearly a thousand lines, copyists use Lamant almost exclusively for the protagonist’s narration of his reconciliation with Fair Welcoming, his assault by Fear, Shame, and Dangier, and his rescue by the “barons” of Amours.22 Apparently the early annotators find nothing particularly authentic in the voicing or content there. Equally striking is the period of complementary consensus that follows: all of my annotators revert to Laucteur within some three hundred lines and then use it exclusively for over four thousand lines. That change is, I believe, doubly motivated, by authoritative content and narratological shift: this long Laucteur segment includes the discourse of Nature and Genius, borrowed in large part from Latin auctores, and it begins when the narrator reaches outside the diegetic frame to address lovers (line 15,105), “dames honorables” (line 15,185), and “biau seigneur” (line 15,721). Responding to potential accusations “que je di fables” (that I tell fables) (line 15,186), and merging the fictional time of his dream with the fair lords’ experiences (line 15,721), he speaks as vernacular author, his readers’ peer.Thus it may seem odd that he ends the poem, in all but one of my manuscripts, as Lamant. That change, my third rubrication crux, begins in some texts after the address by Genius (line 19,408) and is nearly universal when the narrator undertakes a “pilgrimage” to a sort of “shrine” between two “silver pillars” (lines 20,765–70 and 21,316). Only BnF fr. 1569 retains Laucteur, using it for the last time at a graphically self-referential point—“Tout mon hernois, tel con jou port, / se porter le puis jusqu’ou port, / voudrai au reliques touchier” (With the whole harness that I carried, / If I could carry it to the port, / I wanted to touch the relics) (fol. 138v, lines 21,553–55)—but that choice is puzzling in that the same annotator had labeled the speaker Lamant even before the fictional enamorment. Conversely, we might expect the scribes of BnF fr. 378 and Montpellier H 438 to acknowledge the narratorial voice with Laucteur, as they did at the outset.But the previous change in rubrication has undermined the difference between the roles. In the section in which all the annotators resume using Laucteur (roughly lines 15,105–19,375), the speaker simultaneously defends what he has written and urges the applicability of his own erotic actions. Those passages redefine the rubric that they elicit, merging poet with protagonist. Laucteur has assimilated Lamant.In fact, then, it matters little which rubric the copyists choose for the poem’s conclusion, but it matters a great deal that either applies. As amant, the je internalizes False Semblance, performing the same avowedly fabricated sexual charade familiar to the “worthy ladies” and “fair lords” in his audience (lines 15,165 and 15,721). As aucteur, meanwhile, he forgoes the authority of the canonical auctor, but he lays a large claim to interpersonal authenticity.II. The Romance of the Rose clearly influenced the way both poets and annotators represent first-person agents.23 The poetic and scribal influences were probably connected—indeed, mutually reinforcing: other important medieval texts similarly combine complex authorial self-representation with a textual apparatus that calls attention to voicing, among them Dante’s Vita nuova (1292–94), Boccaccio’s Teseida (1339–40), and much of Chaucer’s work. But the narratological and textual legacy of the Romance is clearest in the works of Guillaume de Machaut, particularly in his Judgment of the King of Navarre.Like Romance scribes, those who produce manuscripts of the Judgment of the King of Navarre use aucteur rubrics along with another that seems to refer to a narratorial persona. Here the alternate term is not Lamant but “Guillaume,” the name of a character who is initially represented as lover but also, explicitly, as a poet known to readers.24 Ardis Butterfield affirms that Machaut scribes “dr[ew] on the practice of the Romance of the Rose copyists, who consistently distinguish between ‘L’acteur’ and ‘L’Amant’ in their rubrication.”25 Elsewhere Butterfield writes that the distinction “indicat[es] a separation between the named persona of the poet and the voice of the writer.”26 I have argued that the Romance copyists do not in fact distinguish the two rubrics consistently and that their inconsistencies imply different perceptions of content and structure. The same is true of the Judgment of the King of Navarre, though with important variations: the text itself plays more conspicuously with combined but opposing authorial roles; moreover, that interplay corresponds to a similar relationship between two frames of reference. And the rubrics suggest that copyists recognized the significance of both kinds of complexity. The passages that they label Guillaume and Lacteur all proceed from the writer, but the latter acknowledges a wider biographical and ethical perspective.Early in the 4200-line poem, the first-person narrator crosses an imperceptible border into an allegorical realm. Riding out to hunt after a winter of plague, he encounters a squire who leads him to a lady “of great nobility” whom the narrator apparently knows and honors; the squire tells the lady, “C’est la Guillaumes de Machaut” (That’s Guillaume de Machaut there).27 She accuses the narrator of sinning against Love and against women in his earlier poem The Judgment of the King of Bohemia, which ends by adjudging a lady’s infidelity more grievous to her lover than her death. Presently he will be tried before the King of Navarre, with testimony by Knowledge, Liberality, Sufficiency, and other personifications (lines 1131–3364); the lady will be identified as Bonneürté, a name variously translated as (among others) Happiness, Good Fortune, and Goodness. The poem slides back into history when the narrator begins carrying out the king’s sentence: to compose a lay, a chanson, and a balade (lines 4181–4212).Even that bare summary suggests the narrator’s ambiguous position. As author of the Judgment of the King of Bohemia, he now composes the narrative in which he also acts, recalling the recursive representation of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean Clopinel when the God of Love names them as his authors. And the discourse of Machaut’s narrator is oddly bifocal: he reports details of a conversation between the lady and her squire that he later acknowledges not having heard (lines 597–634).In six of the seven Machaut manuscripts containing the Judgment of the King of Navarre, internal rubrics begin at line 760 (fol. 27r), during dialogue between the narrator and the lady.28 For over seven hundred lines, they are speech markers, La Dame and Guillaume. The latter identifies the protagonist as an agent within the story, perhaps distingushing persona from poet, but it has also been marked as the poet’s name. The fifth Guillaume, at line 1401 (fol. 31r), heads a retrospective summary, like the unrubricated text that began the poem; the passage thus introduced includes long quotations from other characters, with no intervening rubrics (lines 1401–1548). If “Guillaume” voices all of this, he does so not as persona but as authorial narrator.The narratorial ambiguities sharpen when the rubricators bifurcate Guillaume’s voice. After the first exchanges between the lady and “Guillaume,” two manuscripts—the manuscript now known as Ferrell-Vogüé (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS Ferrell 1) and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 9221—head the next utterance with Lacteur (fols. 47r and 65v, line 862). Three other manuscripts join those two in using Lacteur to head a passage beginning at line 2561 (fol. 37v in BnF fr. 1584); six use it again before line 2693 (fol. 39v), and five before line 2925.29 Many passages with Lacteur rubrics immediately follow passages headed Guillaume, and the sections with the two headings do not differ in discernible ways; all report acts and statements of the protagonist but also of other characters (lines 2561–74, 2693–98, and 2925–3008). The final Lacteur heads a two-line introduction to a speech by Reason, but the transition to her next speech is rubricated Guillaume (fol. 46r, lines 3725–26, 3763–66).30 In none of its uses, then, does Lacteur signal a change in voicing from protagonist to narrator, as its cognate did in some manuscripts of the Romance of the Rose.Nonetheless, Lacteur marks developments toward greater authenticity. The first of three such developments redefines “Guillaume.” The earliest Lacteur heads a passage that grounds the authorial persona in the author’s corpus, a redefinition that “Guillaume” invites when he demands that the lady specify just how he became “forfais” (guilty of transgression) against women. She counters with a sly metafictional rebuke: if I know about it, you do. That is, she continues, the charge against you comes from something in one of your books (lines 862–67). The Lacteur above her words in Ferrell-Vogüé and BnF fr. 9221 may be a mistaken speech attribution; indeed, the other manuscripts label the passage La Dame. But I see the Lacteur rubric as an annotation alerting readers that the referent here is indeed Machaut the author, not simply his fictional persona. I am particularly inclined to credit the scribes with that motive because the same two copyists (and a third) provide a rubric unique to their respective Machaut manuscripts in a similar context. In a formally and discursively complex love vision titled La fonteinne amoureuse (The fountain of love), Venus is quoting a long speech by Mercury when the speaker digresses to assure readers that he claims no direct knowledge of these events, “For it is known well that I wasn’t born / Before the founding of Troy, / But have written this word for word / Just as I have seen it in writing.”31 Those lines are rubricated only in Ferrell-Vogüé and two texts probably based on it, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 1585 and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 9221; the notation is Lacteur in the first two and Lamant in the last (fol. 210v, fol. 217v, fol. 88v).32 I conclude that the originator of those notations was alert to gaps in the diegetic frame, places where the poet-narrator owns the biography and bibliography of his creator. “Guillaume” answers for Guillaume.Having indexed the persona of the Judgment of the King of Navarre to the author, those rubricators join the others in playing the two voices against each other. The second development in the poem that correlates with Lacteur headings is the gradual self-fashioning of “Guillaume.”From the outset, as R. Barton Palmer observes, the protagonist has fallen short of courtly norms: he is too absorbed in hare hunting to notice the presence of his lady, he resists correction from her, and he disclaims responsibility for misogynist implications of his writing.33 Moreover, his logic in the debate before the king of Navarre is suspect. He defends his earlier poem’s verdict that betrayal causes more pain than bereavement by presuming that a jilted lover’s only recourse is to murder his rival and thus to incur eternal damnation (lines 1741–68); then he belittles the gravity of bereavement by asserting that everyone must die (lines 2031–44). Immediately before the first Lacteur, he expresses disbelief that any lady ever suffered so terribly that she was willing to die (lines 2556–60).That gratuitously antifeminist statement may have prompted copyists finally to distinguish the speaker from the Acteur who will now report a rejoinder from Honesty (lines 2561–2624, 2693–2822). Scribes will continue using Guillaume as well, but its meaning changes after the introduction of Acteur. Initially, as I have observed, the discourse labeled Guillaume indicates both a limited and an omniscient perspective; here, increasingly tendentious arguments widen that epistemological disparity into a difference in credibility. Readers can now infer an author-poet who stages the failings of the poet-persona, with ironic intent. By naming Lacteur, the rubricators reveal their awareness that Guillaume knows better than “Guillaume.”It is significant that the rubrics do not signal a clean break; both Guillaume and Lacteur continue to head some narrative passages. That partial redundancy corresponds to a persistent overlap between the acteurial Guillaume and his persona, not just in name and biography but also in rhetoric. They share a posture of courtly deference, though the former assumes it with greater credib
Referência(s)