The Wrath of Priapus: Rémy Belleau's "Jean qui ne peult" and its Traditions

Abstract

In recent decades scholars have occasionally turned, with less distaste or embarrassment than earlier in the twentieth century, to a set of poems describing that not uncommon but dismaying condition: impotence.1 Sometimes this embarrassing sexual poverty a Hell, Aphra Behn sue* cinctly calls it with the crispness of one who will never go there is the result of spending too much too soon; sometimes the sufferer realizes, like George Gascoigne, that age or misfortune has deprived him of the needed pence.2 More often he claims to be young, vigorous, and puzzled. Sometimes he suspects that his problems are his partner's fault. European poets wrote of both sorts of impotence, that due to speedy excess and that caused by defect, sometimes in the same poem. The topic itself is compelling for obvious reasons, but its ruefiil poetic treatments from antiquity to the Restoration have considerable literary and cultural interest as well. Several informative articles have already traced the history of the imperfect enjoyment poems from Ovid to Nashe to Behn and Rochester, that series of sometimes interrelated texts in which the afflicted lover (usually, if not quite always, also the narrator) fails to stand stiffly to his task. The poor man's dysfunction is sometimes left mysterious, but more often he ascribes it to sorcery, his own overeager desire, the lady's excessive or insufficient attractiveness, or the wrath of the gods although never, so far as we know, the wrath of the Christian God. Because one of us, Roger Kuin, has recently been examining the three manuscript versions of a witty poem in this series by Remy Belleau (15281577), and because this poem Jean qui ne peult, or John Who Can't has been noted only in passing and never examined in detail,