The game of love: Troubadour Wordplay (review)

156 Reviews reinterpretation. There is no extended or systematic exploration of the key issues regarding York's career; such as, for example, M . K. Jones has recendy provided with regard to the nature of York's bitter feud with Somerset Perhaps Johnson is justified in his scholarly caution. Perhaps, knowing so much, he appreciates better than most both the complexity of the man and the limits to our knowledge of him. Yet he should have made his views on such matters plain. It is somehow symptomatic that his book has neither an introduction nor a conclusion. It begins with a birth in 1411 and ends with a death in 1460. Richard, Duke of York, still awdts his crown. Michael Bennett Department of History University of Tasmania Kendrick, L., The game of love: Troubadour Wordplay, Berkeley, U. of California P., 1988; pp. xiv, 237; 37 plates; R.R.P. ? This is an important book because the author points scholars and students towards a new way of reading troubadour poetry, searching for the equivocd, be it pun, vulgar innuendo, burlesque, rich rhymes, or scribal transcription as discerned in spelling and word division. The scribe, who reproduced a text from aural images which he heard, rather than from visual images which he read, gave an interpretation, but not to the exclusion of others which an audience or reader might understand from their own context or experience. Various interpretations of a poem co-exist in a play of variations and contradictions (pp. 47-8). To this changing aesthetic is added the notion of 'competitive exegesis' (p. 65), a schoolish performance, as is suggested in the vida of Ferrari de Ferrara. Serious, 'didactic' troubadours, such as Giraut de Bomelh, treated the written text as a permanent representation of the poet's intentions. 'Facetious' troubadours, such as Guillaume IX and Raimbaut d'Orange, considered the text 'a mdleable matter to be shaped' by each new interpreter (p. 73). It is the potential of the latter possibility which Kendrick has explored, drawing evidence from the Vidas, Razos, Flors del gay saber, Leys d'amors, illustrations in the chansonniers and liturgical manuscripts, the tradition of Latin poetry of devotion to the Virgin Mary, Guillaume IX's parody of liturgical tropes and hymns, and the lyric poetry itself. Select lyrics by Guillaume IX and Bernart de Ventadour are presented to show how the thesis of multiple interpretation in serious and foolish performance contexts applies, together with discussion of performance, the role of the jongleur and the superimposed personae of jongleur and lover. The study of the song-book transcription and illustrations (chapter 5) is novel and persuasive. It is here that there are signs of facetious wordplay and multiple meanings in the copying of the texts as well as humorous and equivocd depictions of troubadours and jongleurs, and the margind droleries and Reviews 157 en-bas-de-page sketches which point to a playful subversion or equivocal interpretation of a lyric text. Comparison is made with liturgicd manuscripts where a secular or non-sensicd feature occasionally appears. But in the case of the troubadour lyrics, it is taken not as evidence of diversion, but of scribd interpretation, and has become an integrd part of the equivocd meaning of the text In the conclusion, new meaning has been given to the ided ofpretz, 'merit, esteem'. The purpose of the poetic contest and game of love is 'to win with words' (p. 184), to use language artfully, to interpret meaning fully. It is debatable whether the broad social and cultural conclusions adumbrated on the last page are fully justified, but up to that point the thesis has been solidly constructed. Accuracy and completeness of detail are apparent. A few tiny errors show up, such as the fact that nebles is a plural form of the objective case (p. 27), that D. R. Sutherland's tide should be 'L'Element theatre/...' (pp. 170, 223, 224). There is an apparent discrepancy in the folio number ('fol. 20v') given in the text (p. 105) and in the caption to figure 12. Quotations from the work of French and German scholars have been translated into English, presumably by the author, but appear without this acknowledgement...