Sunday, October 2, 2011

Louis le Doux = Lodovico Dolce by Edward G. Clybourn

Peter Farey and A.D. (Dolly) Wraight made the case for the agent "Le Doux" mentioned in the papers of Anthony Bacon in 1595-1596 being Christopher Marlowe. See chapters 2 and 3 of Farey's A Deception at Deptford for a summary of the evidence for this argument as it has stood until now. Farey argues that Le Doux's first name may have been Louis (also spelled Lois or Loys or Louys) based on a 16th-century wax seal in the British Library of a man in Elizabethan clothing with a baboon's face, with the name "LOIS LE DOULX".

Farey put forward some ideas about where the name Louis le Doux came from. Recently I discovered another very likely source of the name: It is the French rendition of the name of the mid-16th century Italian author Lodovico Dolce.

The key find is the book Anciens Inventaires et Catalogues de la Bibliotheque Nationale, Volume 1. On pp. 404-408 of this book is the "Catalogue de Poetes Italiens," which includes both Latin and Italian poets. On p. 406 are two items under the heading "Loys Le Doux": Le sacripant de Loys le Doux, en rithme and Les transformations de Loys le Doux. The appearance of the name in a list of Italian poets pointed me toward Lodovico Dolce: "Louis le Doux" is precisely how his name would be translated into French. Farey clinched the case by pointing out to me that both Sacripante (a "chivalric romance") and Le Transformationi (a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses) were indeed works by Lodovico Dolce.

The next question is, naturally, are there any connections to link Lodovico Dolce to Christopher Marlowe? Indeed there are. Dolce wrote a tragedy Didone in 1547, four decades before Marlowe wrote his play on the same topic. The book Christopher Marlowe: the Plays and Their Sources by Vivien Thomas and William Tydemam gives Dolce's play as the 5th of five sources for Dido, Queen of Carthage. (As an aside, Dolce's Didone itself was influenced by the work of Giovanni Giraldi Cinthio on the same topic. That is of interest to Shakespeareans because Cinthio's Hecatommithi contains tales that anticipate the plots of Measure for Measure and Othello. They were translated from Italian into French and Spanish by Shakespeare's time, but not into English. That raises the question of how William Shakespeare of Stratford could have accessed them, but there is no question about Marlowe's access to them if he was Le Doux: Hecatommithi was one of the books listed in the Bacon papers as belonging to Le Doux.)

There is another connection between Dolce and Marlowe that is particularly relevant because it relates directly to another nickname for Marlowe that is already well known. Dolce's most famous work was L'Aretino or Dialogo della Pittura. "L'Aretino" refers to his close colleague Pietro Aretino. This name will be familiar to scholars of Marlowe: On pp. 54-55 of Charles Nicholl's The Reckoning: the Murder of Christopher Marlowe, there is a long passage about Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (completed 27 June 1593) explaining how "Nashe's tribute to the great Italian dramatist, Pietro Aretino, proves to be a sidelong epitaph for Christopher Marlowe." Nicholl cites the same comparison already made by Gabriel Harvey in Four Letters in 1592, an attack on both Nashe and Marlowe: Harvey refers to Nashe by the nickname "the Devil's Orator" and to Marlowe by the nickname "Aretine." Harvey continued this tirade against Marlowe as "Aretine" in another work dated April 1593 but not published until after Marlowe's reported death. Nicholl concludes Nashe's references to "Aretine" in The Unfortunate Traveller would have been clearly understood by his audience as a tribute to Marlowe.

Thus we have a connection between an already well-known nickname for Marlowe and the name "Louis le Doux," via Dolce's famous work L'Aretino. Since Marlowe had already been given as a nickname an English version of the name of an Italian author who inspired him, it would have been entirely in his witty character to adopt as a pseudonym a French version of the name of another Italian author who inspired him and who had a connection to Aretino. Marlowe's friends in his literary circles would get the reference, but other people would not — an excellent choice for a pseudonym!

The Italian origin of the name Louis le Doux fits well with the existing evidence for the Marlovian theory. Marlovians believe it is likely Marlowe went to Italy in the years immediately after his faked death, since Shakespeare's Italian-themed plays begin appearing around that time. Marlowe's adoption of an Italian poet's name, in the guise of a French translation, when he returns to England two years later, fits this theory well.Emmerich  Shakespeare kill Marlowe?

© Edward G. Clybourn, September 2011

Click here for the blog's home page and recent content.THE MARLOWE PAPERS

12 comments:

Maureen Duff said...

Very well done, Edward. A good piece of literary detective work. I think all this is plausible. I am reminded of "Monsieur Le Beau" in As You Like It, who arrives with an important piece of news near the beginning of the play. While the names "Le Doux" and "Le Beau" are not synonyms, they are similar ("gentle" and "fine") and the characters to whom the names belong are both messengers.

Isabel Gortazar said...

Edward:
I am not sure what you are proposing.

For example, you say that “Dolce's Didone itself was influenced by the work of Giovanni Giraldi Cinthio on the same topic.” But Dolce’s Didone was written in 1547, while Cinthio’s book was not published until 1565.

As recorded in Wikipedia, Ludovico Dolce died in 1568, so four years after Marlowe was born. He was a prolific writer, and, like most dramatists of his time, he wrote about popular tragic figures, such as Dido, Hecuba, Ifigenia and Medea, for example.

He translated Ovid, as you say, but he also translated Homer, Euripides, Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Seneca and Virgil. He edited works by Pietro Aretino, but also by Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio among many others.

As for the name Louys Le Doux: a man (and his family) of that name appear in the mid Fifteenth Century In Canterbury, as Peter and others have found; these people seem to have been Huguenot immigrants who escaped from Catholic persecution.

Well after Dolce was dead, “our” Mr Le Doux was at Burley during some months in 1595/6, and, from around 1597 to 99, there is one Le Doux that acted as Courier between the French Secretary of State and his Ambassador in The Hague.

Even if Marlowe used the name Le Doux as an alias, there is no question that the name of Le Doux was a genuine name of a genuine family or families, possibly Huguenots, possibly from Navarre and/or France.

So, I can’t see any possible connection between Marlowe and your Ludovico Dolce (1510-1568).
Unless I am missing something.

Isabel

Peter Farey said...

Isabel said: "I am not sure what you are proposing."

I'm certainly going to let Edward respond to most of your comments, of which I know him to be very capable without any help from me, but it seems crystal clear to me that what he is proposing is that (especially given my coming across the "Lois Le Doulx" wax seal in the BL) the best explanation for Marlowe to have chosen the name Le Doux as a pseudonym may be more to do with it being the French version of Lodovico Dolce's surname than the explanation I gave related to the Lois Le Doux who was an exact contemporary of Marlowe as a boy in Canterbury (and certainly *not* in the mid Fifteenth Century!) Not necessarily the only reason, but a better one.

Incidentally, I can't help wondering who those "others" are that you say also found the Canterbury Le Douxs there!

You say "from around 1597 to 99, there is one Le Doux that acted as Courier between the French Secretary of State and his Ambassador in The Hague". Most of us are familiar with Chris Gamble's interesting discovery of this man. As far as I am concerned, however, the fact that his first name was Jacques, that the first payment to him in this context was "recorded in the Resolution of 28th September 1595," and this discovery of Edward's now make it very unlikely indeed that the two "Le Douxs" were the same person. My argument concerning the Lois Le Doux of Canterbury was based upon how very rare the name was in England at the time, but (as many of my opponents have pointed out to me) it was a very common one in France.

As for why Marlowe might have chosen a French version of Dolce's name, given that he was going to pretend to be French, does it really not occur to you in just what awe Marlowe might have held such a man for his quite incredible achievements - the ones you listed? I think you must be "missing something".

Peter

Isabel Gortazar said...

Good Heavens, Peter! On opposite sides again!

In reply to some of your questions/points:
Either John Hunt or Mike Frohnsdorff (or both) told me about the Le Doux family in Canterbury, long before I read your material. As they have not published their findings, as far as I know, I have to be vague about it. Hence "others".

As this Louis Le Doux was living in Canterbury when Marlowe was a youngster, I thought that the Le Doux family must have fled from France around the time of the massacre of 1572, in the mid Sixteenth Century. (It seems I made a mistake and wrote Fifteenth Century instead; sorry about that).

Religious persecution, whether real or pretended, was the best excuse in those days for a runaway man to live in another country. If Marlowe had to live in England for a time as a foreigner, the safest way (in my opinion), would have been to pretend to be a runaway Huguenot, choosing the name of an exiled Huguenot family.

BTW; as I wrote to several of you at the time, I never believed that the “second Le Doux” discovered by Gamble and mentioned by Hammer, had anything to do with the Le Doux at Burley.Thank you, in any case, for the bit of extra information about his services in 1595.

In view of all this, and in the absence of any real evidence that Marlowe was a fan of Ludovico Dolce, I must disagree about why would he choose the name of Le Doux. That said, if he happened to know about Ludovico Dolce, and had read and admired his work, he might have been delighted with the coincidence.

Thanks anyway, Edward, for discovering Dolce to me; I had never heard of him before.
Isabel

Peter Farey said...

Isabel said..."Good Heavens, Peter! On opposite sides again!"

Hardly that. You appear to be defending a theory of mine against what simply seems to me to be an excellent reinforcement of it.

..."Either John Hunt or Mike Frohnsdorff (or both) told me about the Le Doux family in Canterbury, long before I read your material. As they have not published their findings, as far as I know, I have to be vague about it. Hence "others"."

What makes you think that either of them have any "findings" to publish in the first place? They are both certainly more conveniently located than I am to examine the Canterbury records, which I haven't done. But if any new discoveries had been made I would have thought both Mike and John courteous enough to let me know (just as Edward did on this occasion) before thinking of going public with them.

..."As this Louis Le Doux was living in Canterbury when Marlowe was a youngster, I thought that the Le Doux family must have fled from France around the time of the massacre of 1572",

There is hardly any doubt about this. Although the exact date isn't known, Louis's father came from Thélus, in Artois, just north of Arras. And on 9 July 1592 our Louis married Judith, daughter of Pierre du Jardin, who was originally from Gamaches. All of this is in Chapter 3 of my "A Deception in Deptford" just as it was when I added that bit about the Canterbury Le Douxs in early 1999.

..."BTW; as I wrote to several of you at the time, I never believed that the “second Le Doux” discovered by Gamble and mentioned by Hammer, had anything to do with the Le Doux at Burley."

I know. This why I find it surprising that you are apparently unwilling to accept this evidence which clearly casts further doubt upon their being the same person.

..."Thank you, in any case, for the bit of extra information about his services in 1595."

Well it's Chris Gamble you should thank really, who gave it in his second piece on the subject in 2010.

Peter

Isabel Gortazar said...

Peter:
P: ...You appear to be defending a theory of mine against what simply seems to me to be an excellent reinforcement of it.”

I: I am not sure what you mean by “a theory of yours”. In any case, I was merely questioning Edward’s suggestion that Marlowe chose the Le Doux name because of Ludovico Dolce, instead of the more obvious choice of it being a Huguenot family name that he would have known.

P: What makes you think that either of them (John Hunt or Mike Frohnsdorff ) have any "findings" to publish in the first place? ETC.

I: As you say, both Mike and John live in Canterbury with easy access to local records and they were both Dolly’s colleagues. As to why they did not publish their findings, perhaps because they did not think the information proved anything? After all, according to Edward and yourself this family was not even the cause why Marlowe chose that name! (Joke).

I ..."As this Louis Le Doux was living in Canterbury when Marlowe was a youngster, I thought that the Le Doux family must have fled from France around the time of the massacre of 1572".

P: There is hardly any doubt about this. ETC:

I: So we agree on that. The Le Doux family that Marlowe would have known were Huguenots that had taken refuge in England.

I .."BTW; as I wrote to several of you at the time, I never believed that the “second Le Doux” discovered by Gamble and mentioned by Hammer, had anything to do with the Le Doux at Burley."

P: I know. This why I find it surprising that you are apparently unwilling to accept this evidence which clearly casts further doubt upon their being the same person.

I: Again I am not sure what you mean by this.
My words clearly say I never believed the second Le Doux was Marlowe, and I explicitly thank your for providing further information that confirms my original opinion. The name and dates of Jacques Le Doux are sufficient evidence for me that the second Le Doux was not the man at Burley. However, if you refer to the Dolce theory as "evidence", then I am indeed full of doubts.

Thanks for telling me Chris published a second piece; I did not know. I have been out of touch with him for a while and I have not been following the Online Journal. I’ll read the piece now and I will write to him.

Isabel

Peter Farey said...

Isabel,

By "a theory of mine" I mean the theory that the name Marlowe chose for his pseudonym during his stay in England in 1595-6 was Louis Le Doux, even though a Christian name is never given for him in the Bacon papers. I first suggested this in a paper called "Christopher Marlowe and Louis Le Doux" which I unsuccessfully entered for the Hoffman prize in 1998. It was based upon my discoveries of a 16th century wax seal with that name on it, and what I interpreted as a reference to Marlowe in Dekker's Old Fortunatus.

In February 1599, however, I searched through the microfiches of the International Genealogical Index for every county in England, and found that the only Louis Le Doux ever recorded in it was a contemporary of Marlowe's in Canterbury. I therefore followed this up with a search of the Huguenot Society's records and the "History of the Walloon & Huguenot Church at Canterbury" at The Guildhall in London, where further information about the family and its church could be found. I wrote this up and, adding it to the earlier argument, included it as Chapter 3 of my "A Deception in Deptford". I am not aware of anyone finding anything else about the family since then.

You say "So we agree on that. The Le Doux family that Marlowe would have known were Huguenots that had taken refuge in England." I'm sorry, but we do not agree on this. That you accept my evidence that the Le Doux family were Huguenots that had taken refuge in England as valid is nice, but "that Marlowe would have known" them is something we have no way of knowing.

You said quite correctly that there is an "absence of any real evidence that Marlowe was a fan of Ludovico Dolce". But there is no evidence that Marlowe knew the Le Doux boy either, is there? It could be that in each case it is just a huge coincidence, but I doubt it. If we look at the relative probabilities, however, there is no contest. Given the books possessed by Le Doux there must be a very high probability indeed that he knew both of Dolce, and what his name was in French. Against that we have the probability of Marlowe knowing one particular individual in a city of some 4 thousand people, about a third of whom were Huguenots.

It isn't either/or though, is it? There is no need to reject either of the possibilities. What we certainly can say, however, is that Edward's discovery significantly increases the likelihood of my theory (that the first name was Louis) being correct, and that the Le Doux I found at Burley on the Hill was therefore not the same person as the Le Doux found by Chris Gamble.

Peter

Isabel Gortazar said...

Peter:
While I was finishing this, I see you've posted a reply to my previous comment. I will read it later, and answer if necessary. Meanwhile:

I was completely mistaken. It has suddenly dawned on me that throughout the Sixteenth Century, the province of Artois belonged to the Spanish Habsburg Empire, not France.

The former French Province of Artois had been part of the Duchy of Burgundy since 1384. After the death of Charles Le Temeraire in 1477, his daughter and heiress, Mary of Burgundy, married Archduke Maximilian of Austria; two of their children married into the Crowns of Castile and Aragon respectively. In this way the Burgundian possessions, including Artois and the Netherlands, passed to the Spanish Habsburgs.

Artois joined the Dutch Revolt in 1576, but made a separate Peace with Philip II a few years later. It was re-conquered by the French during the Thirty Years’ War and officially became a French Province again in 1659. Though the people from Artois spoke French, the Province was considered to be part of the Netherlands. Its main city, Arras, was called “Atrecht” in Dutch.

Which means that those Le Doux in Canterbury may not have been Huguenots at all; I don’t know which specific religious persuasion (other than generally “Protestants”) may have been adopted by the anti-Catholics in Artois and they may have been Calvinists. In any case, they would have been escaping from the Spanish Catholics, not the French ones.

That said, our Le Doux is described as “a French gentleman” in the passports signed by Essex, which probably means that he at least was pretending to be French and, presumably, a Huguenot.

Anyway, sorry about this historical digression, but I thought you might be interested.
A tout a l'heure.
Isabel

Edward Clybourn said...

Maureen, thank you. The Monsieur Le Beau character in As You Like It is also an interesting lead!

I agree with Peter's comments here.

To answer Isabel's argument about the publication date of Giraldi Cinthio's Didone: The long treatment of Giraldi's and Dolce's works in Ronnie Terpening's _Lodovico Dolce: Renaissance man of letters_ clearly presents Giraldi's work as coming first and Dolce's as being influenced by it. And indeed, Salvatore Di Maria's _The Italian tragedy in the Renaissance_ on p.193 identifies Giraldi's Didone as published in 1541 and reports that Robert Turner suggested Dolce had a general knowledge of Giraldi's Didone. The 1565 date Isabel cites must have been a later edition of Giraldi Cinthio's work.

Isabel Gortazar said...

Hi Edward:
Abject apologies. Indeed, Cinthio could have written Didone in 1541; I read your article too fast and thought you were referring to his Hecatommithi.

When Marlowe wrote Moor of Venice (and Measure for Measure), perhaps in the summer of 1604, he may have had a copy of Hecatommithi by his elbow, as the expression “odio acerbissimo” (bitterest hatred) might be the reason why Iago in the 1Q “Othello”, uses the adjective “acerb” (“acerb as coloquintida”) a word which did not exist in English; in the FF “somebody” changed it to “bitter as coloquintida”.
(I wrote about this I think in my essay The Swan Song.)

Whoever wrote Portia’s speech in The Merchant, as well as Measure for Measure and Moor of Venice knew his Hecathommithi, in Italian, very well indeed; so, that copy in possession of Mr Le Doux is very tempting. Even if Marlowe spent perhaps some time in Venice, we cannot assume that all three plays were written in the same period, which would take us back to the problematic hypothesis that Marlowe lived in the Venetian Republic at least from around 1596/7 (Merchant) to 1603/4, sending his plays to England by relaying couriers.

A solution of his going backwards and forwards is, I think, not an option since, according to the “mathematics” I promised to Maureen, the trip either way would take no less than two months, possibly three, not to mention the problem of finding traveling companions and the expenses for several horses, food and lodging, passports and other paraphernalia required for such a trip. I am researching this matter.

I will reply to your Dolce theory separately as soon as I can.
Sorry about the mistake,
Isabel

Isabel Gortazar said...

Peter:

You say: “I therefore followed this up with a search of the Huguenot Society's records and the "History of the Walloon & Huguenot Church at Canterbury" at The Guildhall in London, etc”

Before I get on with Dolce, I’d like to follow up on my comment about the Dutch origins of Loys Le Doux, which your findings seem to confirm. Your Le Doux from Artois was probably a Walloon, whether French or Dutch speaking (it could be either). “Huguenot” was the name for the French Calvinists; so the Church in Canterbury was a Calvinist Church for French (Huguenot) and Walloon Calvinists.

Peter: “You said quite correctly that there is an "absence of any real evidence that Marlowe was a fan of Ludovico Dolce". But there is no evidence that Marlowe knew the Le Doux boy either, is there? Etc.”

Well, as you say, it could be both, but where did “Shakespeare”, learn about the Walloons?
"A base Walloon, to win the Dauphin's grace
Thrust Talbot with a spear in the back."
(1 Henry VI. I,1,149)

I agree that it needn’t be “either or”, but I’d say, Marlowe probably knew that “Le Doux” was a good name for an exiled French/Belgian Calvinist refugee in England, whereas I find it difficult to believe that Dolce had anything to do with it.

I will write to Edward explaining my doubts asap. I am doing a bit of research on Dolce, and I might change my mind before I write again.
Isabel

Isabel Gortazar said...

Edward and Peter:
About Dolce, as promised:
I must begin by observing that, as Peter confirms "a Christian name is never given for him (Mr Le Doux) in the Bacon papers."

So, your proposed theory would be that although Marlowe may have never met -or known about- the Loys Le Doux that settled in Canterbury, and although we have no name for Mr La Doux in the Bacon papers, and although there was a "Jacques Le Doux" acting as courier in Holland, Marlowe chose to translate into French the name of Ludovico Dolce out of admiration for this writer. In fact, as we don't know that "our" Mr Le Doux' Christian name was Louis at all, he would have translated the surname while the name, Ludovico, was just a coincidence with the man in Canterbury.

As for the admiration: I have asked three Italian friends of mine: One is a publisher, one is the director of a drama school in Padua, and the third one is a Professor of Modern Literature at the University in Venice. Neither the publisher nor the drama teacher had ever heard of Dolce; the Professor knows him solely as a "historian". Apparently, Dolce is not included in the syllabus of Italian Literature taught in the schools

While there is no denying that Ludovico Dolce was well known in his day, one wonders how good his plays were, as they have not stood the test of time, not even in the Veneto. That said, the plot of "The Shrew" was based in Ariosto's "I Suppositi", edited by Dolce.

Therefore, although coincidences may happen, I stil think that Loys Le Doux had a better chance than the Venetian writer of being the reason for Marlowe's choice of alias.