''Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion'' is reputedly the earliest French secular play with music, written in around 1282 or 1283,
['' Hutchinson Encyclopedia'' (1988), p.10] and is the most famous work of
Adam de la Halle. It was performed at the
Angevin Court in Naples around this time.
Plot and music
The story is a dramatization of a traditional genre of medieval French song, the
pastourelle
The pastourelle (; also ''pastorelle'', ''pastorella'', or ''pastorita'' is a typically Old French lyric form concerning the romance of a shepherdess. In most of the early pastourelles, the poet knight meets a shepherdess who bests him in a bat ...
.
This genre typically tells of an encounter between a knight and a shepherdess, frequently named Marion. Adam de la Halle's version of the story places a greater emphasis on the activities of Marion, her lover Robin and their friends after she resists the knight's advances.
It consists of dialogue in the old
Picard dialect
Picard (, also , ) is a ''langue d'oïl'' of the Romance language family spoken in the northernmost part of France and Hainaut province in Belgium. Administratively, this area is divided between the French Hauts-de-France region and the Belgian ...
of de la Halle's home town,
Arras
Arras ( , ; pcd, Aro; historical nl, Atrecht ) is the prefecture of the Pas-de-Calais Departments of France, department, which forms part of the regions of France, region of Hauts-de-France; before the regions of France#Reform and mergers of ...
, interspersed with short refrains or songs in a style which might be considered popular.
The melodies to which these are set have the character of folk music, and seem more spontaneous than the author's more elaborate songs and
motets. Two of these melodies in fact appear in the motets, ''Mout me fu gries de departir/Robin m'aime, Robin m'a/Portare'' and ''En mai, quant rosier sont flouri/L'autre jour, par un matin/He, resvelle toi Robin''. The attribution of these motets to Adam de la Halle is unconfirmed.
History
Adam de la Halle wrote the Jeu de Robin et Marion for the
Angevin Court of
Charles I of Naples. He originally went to Naples in the service of
Robert II of Artois.
The play was first performed there and it has been suggested that the choice of genre was particularly poignant for those members of the court homesick for France.
Although it is tempting to link the characters of French medieval ''pastourelle'' and ''Le'' ''Jeu de Robin et Marion'' with the early history of
Robin Hood and
Maid Marian, there has been no link proved between the two. The function of these characters within their respective societies was similar: to offer a form of escapism through the imagination into a world of innocent rustic play or heroic greenwood bravery.
An adaptation by
Julien Tiersot
Julien Tiersot (5 July 1857, in Bourg-en-Bresse (Rhône-Alpes) – 10 August 1936, in Paris), was a French musicologist, composer and a pioneer in ethnomusicology.
Biography
Tiersot was first keenly interested in popular French music, on which ...
was performed at Arras in 1896 at a festival in honour of Adam de la Halle, by a company from the Paris
Opera Comique.
References
{{Authority control
Medieval French theatre
1282 works