The term lai was originally applied to French poems of the 12th and 13th centuries. Some lais were lyric poems, but the best-known were short narrative ROMANCES, also called contes. Some of the earliest lais were those of MARIE DE FRANCE, who composed them for the French-speaking court of King HENRY II and his queen, ELEANOR OFAQUITAINE, probably in the 1170s.Marie’s lais were often called “Breton lais” because they were generally based on earlier Celtic legends preserved and disseminated in the songs of Breton MINSTRELS. Some of these, including Marie’s lai LANVAL, were based on legends surrounding King ARTHUR, the chief Breton hero.
The earlier French lais, like Marie’s, were written in octosyllabic (eight-syllable) lines arranged in couplets. Some lais of the later Middle Ages developed more complex verse forms. This was particularly true of lyric lais, the earliest of which are Provençal lyrics by the poet Gautier de Dargies. These lyric lais were generally addressed to a courtly lady or to the Virgin Mary.However they were composed in stanzas that varied in both rhyme scheme and metrical pattern, and so differed from other such poems. By the 14th century, Guillaume de MACHAUT had standardized the form of the lyric lai. As described in DESCHAMPS’s Art de Dictier (Art of writing poetry), the standard lyric lai consisted of 12 pairs of stanzas of differing meter, all looking at the same idea in different ways. In the 12th section, the meter returned to the same form as the first, so that a circular movement was created.
The variety of metrical form was also the case in England, where a number of 14th-century English poems were written in imitation of French narrative lais, and accordingly were called “Breton lays” in English. Some of these are in short couplets, but many are called TAIL-RHYME ROMANCES because of their distinct verse form. Some of the betterknown Breton lays in English are SIR ORFEO, the SIR LAUNFAL, and CHAUCER’s FRANKLIN’S TALE. Since about the 16th century, the term lay in English has been used more generically to refer simply to a song, although this meaning seems to have been inherent in the term since the 14th century. Certainly the term lay (as opposed to Breton lay) seems to have had such a connotation for Chaucer, whose ideas about lyric poetry owe a great deal to Machaut: In his “Retraction” to the CANTERBURY TALES, Chaucer mentions his writing “many a song and many a lecherous lay,” referring to his short lyric poems.
Bibliography
■ Burgess, Glyn S., ed. The Lais of Marie de France: Text and Context. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.
■ Donovan,Mortimer J. The Breton Lay: A Guide to Varieties. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969.
■ Hanning, Robert, and Joan Ferrante, trans. The Lais of Marie de France. New York: Dutton, 1978.
Encyclopedia of medieval literature. 2013.