1 MS: E (155) Marcabru

Attribution

Spanke (Marcabrustudien, p. 101), Köhler (‘Zum Verhaltnis’, p. 205) and Bee (‘Le problème des genres’, pp. 35–36) have questioned the attribution of this poem to Marcabru, Spanke on the unconvincing grounds of its alleged weakness and lack of originality, the others because of the use of the term chansoneta. In the light of our new explanation of chansoneta (see ‘Versification’), we see no reason to question the MS attribution, given the attack onjaufre Rudel, the Marcabrunian themes and hard-hitting satire.

Analysis of the manuscript

Apart from a repeated rhyme-word (45 and 47), the MS offers an apparently sound text. Irregularities of metre (13, 14 and 18), rhyme (40, 41, 54) and morphology (33) may be part of a quasi-improvisatory style (see ‘Versification’ and the notes), rather than evidence of scribal error.

Versification

Frank, Repértoire, 5.18: a7 a7 a7 a7 a7 a7 a7; cohlas singulars. Frank records seven foil stanzas; we see six, followed by two tornados of six and two lines. Of twenty poems with this rhyme scheme, Marcabru’s is the only one with uniquely sevensyllable lines.

Although it might be possible to see Marcabru using the term chansoneta (49) to mock troubadours who wrote love cansos, or to understand it non-generically as simply a little song’, we believe that the poem is a ‘little canso’ of a non-lyric kind (for fuller discussion, see Paterson, ‘Marcabru’s rhetoric’, pp. 421–23). The monorhyme verse structure, the only one of its kind in Marcabru’s corpus, is strikingly analogous to that of epics and saints’ lives. There is a particularly close parallel with the Chanson de Sainte Foy, where the lines are grouped syntactically in pairs, so that each laisse has the structure 2+2+2 […] +3 lines (see the Hoepffher and Alaric edition, I, p. 214). Similarly in Marcabru’s poem every stanza consists of 2+2+2+2 lines, corresponding no doubt to a melodic formula AB or AA’ repeated four times per stanza. Such a quasi-laisse structure would explain the existence, in Marcabru’s pièce, of a six-line first tornado on a new rhyme, followed by a second two-line lomada clinching the structure (see the note to 55–56). Compare the Monk of Montaudon, poem XII, which has four full, six-line, monorhymed stanzas followed by a four-line tornada on a new rhyme (Routledge assumes two lines are missing from the final stanza).