Our copy text for du Bellay’s sonnets is the Bibliothèque Nationale copy of the first edition of Songe, published in his 1558 Le Premier Livre des Antiquitez de Rome…Plus un Songe ou vision sur le mesme subject. We have collated this with the British Library copy of Jan van der Noot’s 1568 Le theatre, the French version of The Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings. Time permitting, we will collate the second edition of the 1558 Antiquitez, which Henri Chamard used as the copy-text for the Antiquitez and Songe in his 1908 critical edition of du Bellay’s Œuvres poétiques during the period of the grant.

Spenser’s likely source for his sonnet translations in the 1569 Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings was van der Noot’s Le theatre rather than the earlier version of Songe that appears in the Antiquitez. At 10.14 Spenser concludes the line with a period, which reflects the punctuation of the 1568 Le Theatre, rather than that of the 1558 Antiquitez, which concludes 10.14 with a question mark. We We have not yet established the French source from which Spenser translated sonnets 6, 8, 13, and 14 of the Visions of Bellay, which do not appear in van der Noot’s Le theatre: we have collated Du Bellay’s 1569 Oeuvre francoises here since it represents one sources.

The sigla used in the collational notes below are

1558 Le Premier Livre des Antiquitez de Rome…Plus un Songe ou vision sur le mesme subject 1568 Le theatre auquel sont exposés & monstrés les inconveniens et miseres qui suivent les mondains et vicieux

1569 Oeuvres francoises de Joachim Du-Bellay

Because the Archive will provide facsimiles of both the 1558 Antiquitez and the 1568 Le theatre, we do not record all differences between the two. Substantive variation is recorded, but differences in typeface, case, spacing, and verse format are not; we have, however, expanded abbreviations, including macrons. Differences in punctuation are recorded only when the pointing of the two editions is thought to promote sharply different constructions of a passage.