Introduction

In the early 1520s, a ship of remarkable proportion was built in Le Havre, commissioned by François I in response, in part, to the size, success, and renown of Henry VIII’s Mary Rose. The story of the Grande Françoise, reported locally as the largest vessel ever witnessed, demonstrates the rich cultural and political symbolism (intentional or otherwise) of the ship in the sixteenth century, and the significance of its potential failure, destruction, and recuperation. This Introduction moves from the example of the Grande Françoise, including its swiftly traceable literary reception, to survey the classical, biblical, and medieval traditions that inform the writing of shipwreck in the sixteenth century, before turning to previous critical study of shipwreck, with particular focus on Hans Blumenberg’s essay Shipwreck with Spectator. The Direful Spectacle is in some senses a response to Blumenberg, offering a ‘close-up’ on French culture of the sixteenth century, and a challenge to his separation of the aesthetic from the moral or ethical in shipwreck texts. Situating this new study in relation to previous scholarship, the Introduction then proceeds to set out its distinctive themes and arguments, before concluding with an outline of the structure and summaries of the contents and argument of each chapter.

‘À deux doigtz prés de la mort’

This chapter tackles perhaps the most salient near-shipwreck in Renaissance French literature to the modern reader: Rabelais’s storm scene of the Quart Livre, situating it between two of its closest relatives within the broader family of Renaissance shipwreck texts: one of them familiar, the other perhaps less so. First, some important features of one of Rabelais’s major sources (Erasmus’s ‘Naufragium’ dialogue) are set out, both in order to show how the latter responds to the ship of fools tradition, and to establish the ways in which it too establishes conventions for writing about shipwreck. The reading of the famous Rabelaisian storm scene itself is focussed on the figure of Panurge, arguing that it is this character more than any other element that sets Rabelais’s (near-)shipwreck scene apart from its Renaissance relatives. Staying with Panurge, we then turn to what may be thought of as a rewriting or re-imagining of the Quart Livre storm scene: the beaching of the Thalamège in the Cinquiesme Livre. In this third section, the dynamics of co-operation may be seen to inform our understanding of shipwreck survival (whether in the sense of narrowly avoiding it, or of recovering from it) both as it is dramatised directly in Rabelais’s text(s), and as it, in turn, stages the relationship between author, text, and reader.

‘Shipwreckful’ Afterlives

This chapter examines the dynamics of shipwreck as played out in Renaissance travel writing. Through a reading of the work of Jean de Léry and the lesser-known Jean-Arnaud Bruneau de Rivedoux, it shows how in eyewitness or recently passed-on first-hand accounts of shipwreck, very real events were marked and shaped by the conventions established earlier in the century by allegorical, fictional and polemic shipwreck texts. But the extreme conditions of (actual) shipwreck place great strain on these otherwise persistent tropes, and both Léry’s and Bruneau’s Histoires generate new incarnations of once-familiar figures. Léry, for example, offers both a conventional narration of the storm at sea modelled on Psalm 107 and Erasmus’s ‘Naufragium’, and, later, several rearranged versions that point to the limitations of proverbial, classical, and biblical commonplace in such extraordinary circumstances. These texts, both written by Reformists intent on foregrounding their empirical approach, present the most forceful vindications of sea travel of all the texts studied here. While they describe vividly and often distressingly the suffering endured by seafarers and the victims of shipwreck, they also emphasise the value of such experience, and its power to affect even those who are spectators to it from dry land.

‘Cet universel naufrage du monde’

This chapter marks the transition from portent to actuality, addressing the prospect of political shipwreck in the troubled latter part of the sixteenth century by considering not only incarnations and reconfigurations of the suave mari magno commonplace but also shipwrecks that are narrated from the inside. It explores the distinction between the struggling ship in Lucretius and the eagerly spectated shipwreck of a political enemy in Cicero’s letters, taking account of the model of the ship of state as elaborated in Plato, Cicero, and medieval sources. It argues that the role of the spectator is most often not at a safe distance, and that the ethical relationship between the spectator and those on board is significantly developed from that in Lucretius. Through the work of three writers (Michel de L’Hospital, Pierre de Ronsard and Michel de Montaigne), it shows that the powerful metaphor of the ship of state struggling on troubled waters is itself articulated in a variety of ways during the political storm of the late sixteenth century—ways that, ethically speaking, variously implicate or exonerate the politician, poet or author. This chapter poses a series of questions concerning the difference between public and private spheres, the unique moral implications of civil war, and the author or poet’s own position, be it personal, political, or philosophical—or all three—with relation to what Montaigne calls ‘cet universel naufrage du monde’.

‘Le naufrage de ce mortel monde’

Over the course of the sixteenth century, the Old French word for ship—‘nef’—gradually fell out of use, being replaced by ‘navire’ and ‘vaisseau’. This chapter explores an important strand of this story; the persistence of a symbolic, literary ‘nef’, whose origins can be traced from medieval tradition through to the first decade of the sixteenth century. A mini-genre, the Nef book, capitalized on the popularity of Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff, and over the course of just a few years, this genre developed and changed, generating de-nauticalized compendia on a range of subjects. These compendia are significant with respect to (among other things) the beginnings of the commonplace book; two of the authors examined in this chapter (Jodocus Badius and Symphorien Champier), played important roles in the emergence of this tradition. Shipwreck often represents the fate of the sinner’s soul, but as the concerns of the Nef books become more worldly, and less spiritual, partly by contact with the Fürstenspiegel (mirrors for princes) tradition, so too the significance of shipwrecks shifts; the prospect of bodily shipwreck, in particular, comes increasingly to the fore. Besides identifying and analysing this previously neglected family of books, this chapter sheds light on several important conventions that will continue to inform the dynamics of shipwreck throughout the century. In particular, it shows that seafaring was the subject both of curiosity and of moral anxiety; it is this tension that makes the family of Nef books a particularly rich cluster of texts with which to open this study of shipwreck.

Conclusion

From the midst of France’s civil wars, and in their aftermath, the constellation of shipwreck, its victims, and its spectators is re-imagined in theatrical terms. Famously employed by Agrippa d’Aubigné in his Tragiques to disabuse complacent speculators of their illusion of distance from the disaster of civil catastrophe, the dramatic potential of earlier shipwreck texts is more fully realised in theatrical and meta-theatrical terms, as explored in this Conclusion. But whereas the shipwreck of Shakespeare’s Tempest demonstrates the power of compassion to produce embodied affect in its spectator, conversely a French tragedy that dramatizes a real-life tale of Portuguese shipwreck explores the troubling possibility of the spectacle failing to touch its intended audience. Drawing together the study’s thematic strands of corporality and narrative with this theatrical aspect, and pointing to questions of compassion and ethical responsibility that hold new weight in the light of Europe’s twenty-first-century refugee crisis, the Conclusion points to the new narrative position of shipwreck in the early decades of the seventeenth century: it lies at the beginning of the story, and begs the question of how readers, spectators, and their communities will respond.