The Fifteenth-Century Prose Cligés: Better Than Just Cutting to the Chase

An analysis of the exchanges between Cligés and Fenice in this prose romance shows with what skill the redactor wove the elements he found most compelling in his model into a narrative—utterly devoid of irony—about two earnest individuals whose faithful hearts guide and justify their actions at every turn.

(JTG)

Chrétien’s Cligés, unlike some of his other romances, did not inspire many retellings, but in 1454 an anonymous redactor produced for the Burgundian court of Philip the Good a prose version entitled Le Livre de Alixandre empereur de Constentinoble et de Cligés son filz. Until recently, the only edition that existed had been published by Foerster as a kind of appendix to his 1884 edition of Chrétien’s Cligés. Maria Colombo Timelli’s fine critical edition, which appeared in 2004, is a virtual invitation to take a fresh look at this curious work.¹

Early assessments of the prose Cligés, including Foerster’s, were hardly glowing, although Doutrepont, who called it ‘une sorte de traduction libre,’ found some merit in the structural and stylistic changes introduced by the redactor.² It was the rationale behind these changes that Martha Wallen set out to discover in her 1972 dissertation.³ Not surprisingly, she found that the adapter’s general purpose was to modernize Chrétien’s story in ways that would appeal to a fifteenth-century courtly and bourgeois audience. Some of the changes are utterly predictable—modernization of the combat tactics and weaponry and less emphasis on certain ‘courtly’ virtues such as largesse.

The transformation of the passages describing the love of Alixandre and Soredamors and of Cligés and Fenice, however, is much more complex. Wallen observes that the adapter presents those loves—both of which have marriage as their object—in an essentially straightforward fashion, reducing or removing in the monologues and dialogues the internal obstacles that seem to bedevil Chrétien’s lovers, who, as we recall, suffer interminably as they ponder the meaning of their beloved’s words or behavior, while calculating the chance that their feelings might be reciprocated. Wallen points out that the redactor, seeking to present both couples in an extremely positive light, removes all possible opprobrium attaching to the adulterous love between Cligés and Fenice by stressing the legitimacy of their love—Fenice had been given in marriage to the emperor of Constantinople, who should have been Cligés not Alix—and by reducing the number of pejorative allusions to the Tristan legend. Building on Wallen’s analysis, Norris Lacy focuses on one particular aspect of the adapter’s work. Drawing his examples mostly from the love intrigue of Alixandre and Soredamors, he shows how the redactor’s minimization of Chrétien’s celebrated irony results in a rather dull version of Cligés.⁴

It is hard to argue with the general assessment that in the prose the story loses much of the piquancy that Chrétien scholars prize in the original. Nevertheless, I believe the redactor demonstrates considerable skill in identifying the elements he finds most important and attractive and fusing them into a rendition that is generally very readable, often clever, and in places quite charming. His presentation of the elements of the passion shared by Cligés and Fenice seems to me particularly well wrought, and it could be that by the time he embarked on the second part of the romance he felt more comfortable with the process of adaptation.

How did the prosateur go about adapting the poem? When I first considered this question, I amused myself by imagining a rather simplistic process whereby he would go through a manuscript of Chrétien’s poem (such as the one we know was in the library of the dukes of Burgundy⁵), excising large chunks of rhetoric in which he found developed at length images describing the symptoms and feelings associated with fin’amor—Love’s arrow, the passage of one’s heart to join that of the beloved, the refusal to speak out for fear...