Appendix G - The ethos of the guitar in sixteenth-century France

Summary

The gittern playing of sixteenth-century England was especially indebted to practice in France, and it is French sources of the period that reveal, with especial vividness, the kind of ethos for the renaissance guitar that we glimpse, here and there, through the words of Thomas Whythorne.

In a manner that Whythorne certainly does not care to acknowledge, guitars were widely associated in the sixteenth century with itinerant musicians, as revealed in a poem by the laureate Mellin de Saint-Gelais (1491–1558). This is the angry soliloquy of a guitarist whose serenade has failed. He is half frozen to death; the midnight bell rang some hours ago and the temperature has fallen. He can only remain staring at a closed wooden door:

Et quel grand Diable est cecy?

Veult-on que je couche icy?

Seray-je encores longtemps

En ce maigre passetemps?

Mynuict est pieça sonné.

Par Dieu, c'est bien promené.

Je fay bien de leur vallet,

D'icy trembler le grelet …

Adieu, belle, je m'en vois.

Par Dieu vious n'aurez de l'an

Moy ny ma Guiterre, bran!

And what the devil is this? Is it intended that I sleep here? Will I have to keep up this poor game much longer? Midnight sounded long ago. By God, I have been led here and there. I am certainly playing their servant to stand here shivering with the cold … Good bye, fair one, I'm going; by God, you will have neither me nor my guiterre again this year, merde!

This poem bears an unexpectedly discursive title: ‘Cecy est sur la chanson des neigres sur la guiterre: Se lo commo non me dan’ (‘This is [based] on the song of the blacks on the guitar: Se lo commo non me dan’). Saint-Gelais has apparently modelled his poem upon a pre-existing lyric, and perhaps he intended that his poem should be sung to the melody of this model accompanied by a guitar; one of the scribes who copied the poem certainly thought so, and duly added the explanatory title ‘Pour chanter sur la guiterre’. Saint-Gelais gives the incipit of the model poem in the original language which is essentially Spanish or a romance argot meaning perhaps ‘If I eat it, it does me no good/it does not bother me’.