Les chants royaux dialogués : typologie d’un hypergenre

Abstract

Written for the Marian Poetry contests at Le Puy de Rouen in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in order to praise the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, some of the chants royaux use the form of a dialogue. Choosing this particular form has its implications for the structure of the poems. In fact, they are subject to the workings of two contrary forces: one imposed by the poetical structure with its stanzas, and the regular recurrence of the last verse as a refrain - called a palinode - ; the other caused by the verbal interaction by which the discourse is jointly developed by the two speakers. From a body of some twenty already - or not published - chants royaux, this article establishes a typology of the poems depending on their dialogical or monological construction. Three groups are distinguished: when the dialogue format creates adjacent pairs of speech acts, the poems will be qualified as dialogical, a group from which two sub-categories are distinguished, polemic poems and didactic poems. When they simply have alternate speeches, they will be considered polyphonic. In each case is studied the progression of arguments and how the dialogical form enters the rules of prosody.