The Gendering of the Lute in Sixteenth-Century French Love Poetry

Renaissance Quarterly, Autumn, 2000 by Carla Zecher

Labe's Evvres (1555) include two lute-sonnets, which can be read as female ripostes to texts by her male contemporaries. In sonnet 12 she reprises the "joy to mourning" motif of Sceve's dizain 344 and uses it to revisit the ancient theme of the rebellious lyre. Here the subject actually engages in a struggle for pre-eminence with her lute, to which the text attributes an unprecedented degree of poetic agency. [35] After the requisite invocation of the lute as a faithful confidant, its player complains in the second quatrain that the instrument has been so accustomed to lament with her, in perfect accord with her melancholy, that when she attempts a joyful song the lute thwarts her impulse by flatting a pitch that should be natural, thereby creating a mournful effect. 'When she persists in her intent to change moods, the instrument compels her to silence by putting itself out of tune:

Lute, my companion in misfortune,

Faultless witness to my sighs,

True narrator of my troubles,

You have often lamented with me.

And the pitiful weeping has so afflicted you,

That beginning some delightful song

You suddenly made it mournful,

By altering the pitch that had been sung as plain.

And if I wish to persuade you otherwise,

You slacken your strings and thus constrain me to silence.

But seeing myself tenderly sighing,

Looking favorably on my sad lament,

I am compelled to take pleasure in my sorrow,

And hope for a sweet end to sweet suffering. [36]

Recent editors of Labe's works have interpreted the second quatrain of this sonnet as referring to transposition from a "major" to a "minor" mode. [37] But sixteenth-century music theorists do not speak of transposing from major to minor. [38] Labe in fact employs precise Renaissance musical terms in line eight: feignant, which denotes the introduction of an accidental into a musical line, to modify a particular pitch; and plein, to denote an unaltered pitch. Thus, the quatrain alludes to a specific compositional practice -- that of lowering a pitch that should be natural (in the given mode), so as to suggest weeping. A classic example is found in the second phrase of Jacques Arcadelt's madrigal "Il bianco e dolce cigno" (contemporary with Labe and well-known in Europe), where the composer flats the harmony on the word piangendo (fig. 3). [39]

In Labe's sonnet the lute's capriciousness creates a dissonance between singer and instrument, mind and body. It can be inferred from her allusion to strings that slacken (line 10) that in taking up the lute this female subject has appropriated a phallic symbol for her own use and that her attempts to control it have caused it to lose potency. [40] She can only restore the phallus. and thereby recover her poetic voice by returning to the Petrarchan convention of weeping, one that she had first practiced diligently, then hoped to abandon. But this temporary concession does not signal a metapoetic defeat. On the contrary, in her fourteenth sonnet Labe manipulates this topos to constitute a female poetic self.