Honoré d'Urfé
Honoré d'Urfé (born February 11, 1567 in Marseille , † June 1, 1625 in Villefranche near Nice) was a French officer, courtier and writer. His name is associated with L'Astrée , a shepherd novel that is as extensive as it is successful and influential .
life and work
D'Urfé was born as the fifth of six sons of a noble family in the Marseilles house of his uncle, the Comte de Savoie-Tende, governor of Provence. He spent most of his childhood at La Bastie Castle in the Forez on the upper reaches of the Loire . He was appointed to the Order of Malta at an early age and attended the Jesuit college in Tournon-sur-Rhône until 1584 , where he received a comprehensive education. In the same year, at 17, he published his first shepherd poem , La Sireine . When he was in his early twenties, he had the idea of a shepherd novel based on Italian and Spanish models, that is, above all Sannazaros Arcadia , Tassos Aminta , Guarini's Il pastor fido / The faithful shepherd , Montemayor's Diana and Cervantes ' Galatea .
But initially nothing came of the novel, because in 1590 d'Urfé interrupted his life as a reading and writing (and apparently not exactly monk-chaste) young nobleman and joined the army of the Catholic League , which in 1589 the initially still Protestant new King Heinrich IV. Not recognized and led a civil war against him in alliance with the King of Spain and the Duke of Savoy. He was taken prisoner twice, but was released again through the intervention of relatives. In 1595, after the league was defeated, he went into exile in Savoy , which at that time did not belong to France and whose duke he was related to through his mother.
There, at the court of Turin and in a small castle of his mother, he wrote again: two volumes of Épîtres morales / Moralische Episteln (printed 1598 and 1603) and the beginning of his long-planned novel, L'Astrée . In 1600 he married his childhood sweetheart and ex-sister-in-law Diane de Chateaumorand after their marriage was declared null and void by the Pope and he himself was released from his religious vows. However, the spouses separated fairly soon, albeit amicably. L'Astrée , which tells of the difficult love of the shepherd Céladon for the shepherdess Astrée, in many ways processed d'Urfé's initially forbidden and impossible love for his sister-in-law.
In 1603 he, like many other previously opposition nobles, made his peace with Henry IV and afterwards lived mostly in Paris, where he served the king as a “gentilhomme ordinaire” (a kind of noble domestics ), associated with Malherbe and other writers and the pertinent Salons, for example the Hôtel de Rambouillet , frequented. However, he often stayed in Turin or on his estates.
At the same time he continued his shepherd novel. In 1607 the first volume was printed, in 1610 and 1619 Vols. II and III. In 1624 a part of Vol. IV followed, in 1627 (already posthumously) the whole volume. To this, d'Urfé's longtime secretary Balthasar Baro (1600–1650) added a fifth volume in 1627, which probably corresponds roughly to the original concept. D'Urfé himself had meanwhile taken part in the war of the Duke of Savoy against Genoa and was killed in a fall on his horse. An apocryphal Volume VI came out later. In total, the work (excluding Volume VI) consists of 5 parts with a total of 40 stories, which are divided into 60 books and comprise 5399 pages in the original edition.
As the name of the title character, Astrée, suggests, the plot of the novel does not take place, as in the above-mentioned literary models, in a legendary Arcadia , distant in terms of space and time , but in France, more precisely in d'Urfé's home region, the Forez. After all, it is moved back to the 5th century AD, that is, the time of the Great Migration , from whose turmoil the Forez seems to be excluded. D'Urfé justifies his choice of this epoch with the fact that there were no kings at that time. The work thus implicitly also formulates the reserves of large sections of the aristocracy against the centralistic and absolutistic tendencies of the French monarchy, which were shaken by the religious wars, but ultimately strengthened again.
L'Astrée consists of a main plot in which, according to the drawer principle, several subplots, numerous internal narratives and long discussions between the characters about all aspects of love are embedded. The main plot tells the story of the love of the 14-year-old Céladon for the 12-year-old Astrée, who rejects him because of his alleged infidelity and only accepts him again after lengthy exams. In Vol. III, for example, Céladon, the alleged Druid's daughter, lives with Astrée in close friendship, unrecognized, which often causes him distress.
In terms of technology, L'Astrée is the sum of the novel art of the time. Above all, however, the novel had an enormous and long-lasting success in aristocratic as well as in bourgeois circles because of the psychological sensitivity of the portrayal of the person, the cultured speeches of the people and the beautiful décor in which the plot takes place. It served as a template for other shepherd novels, shepherd poems, shepherd games, shepherd operas and ballets as well as for many paintings, engravings, tapestries, etc. The male protagonist Céladon became the prototype of the languishing, shy lover; his name has entered the French lexicon with the phrase "être un Céladon / to be a (shy) Celadon."
The tragédie lyrique Astrée with music by Pascal Collasse and a libretto by Jean de La Fontaine is based on motifs from d'Urfé's novel. It was premiered in Paris in 1691.
The novel was also distributed in translations in Germany. The name "Celadon" was used as a pseudonym by Georg Greflinger , Michael Behm , Christoph Adam Negelein and Søren Terkelsen .
Works (selection)
- Alfred Noe (ed.): The shepherdess Astrea . Weideler, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-89693-237-3 (4 vols.).
- Laurence Giavarini (Ed.): La Sylvanire, 1627 . Société de littératures classiques, Toulouse 2004, ISBN 2-908728-24-9 .
- Jésus Cascón Marcos (ed.): Le sireine (ensayos y textos de filologia francesa; Vol. 1). Université Salamanca 1979.
literature
- Maxime Gaume: Les inspirations et les souces de l'œuvre d'Honoré d'Urfé . CEF, Saint-Étienne 1977, ISBN 2-85145-032-8 .
- Renate Jürgensen: The German translations of the "Astrée" of the Honoré d'Urfé . Niemeyer, Tübingen 1990, ISBN 3-484-36502-1 (also dissertation, University of Osnabrück 1987).
- Christiane Caemmerer: Honoré d'Urfé, the shepherdess Astrea . In: Editions under criticism. Edition-scientific review organ, Vol. 2 . Verlag Weidler, Berlin 2008, pp. 115–122.
- Kathleen Wine: Forgotten virgo. Humanism and Absolution in Honoré d'Urfe's “L'Astrée” . Droz, Geneva 2000, ISBN 2-600-00393-2 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Honoré d'Urfé in the catalog of the German National Library
- Publications from and about Honoré d'Urfé in VD 17 .
- Internet edition of parts I-VI of Astrée (edited by Reinhard Krüger, University of Stuttgart)
- Internet edition of the first part of Astrée in the 1621 revised version by Honoré d'Urfé (edited by Eglal Henein, Tufts University)
- Article d'Urfé in “Names, titles and dates of the French. Literature " (source)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Urfé, Honoré d ' |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French author |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 11, 1567 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Marseille , Provence , France |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 1, 1625 |
| Place of death | Villefranche , Duchy of Savoy |