1. LITERATURA INGLESA MEDIEVAL

Después de los Pilares, pasamos a la unidad 2 - Renaissance literature. Necesitaremos los textos de Sidney, Spenser y Shakespeare (de éste hay varios).

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Un interludio en los Pilares: PREMIOS NOBEL RECIENTES (EN INGLÉS)

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Terminamos la Edad Media con una panorámica de los siglos XIV y XV: The Age of Chaucer.

 

Recordad que, simultáneamente a las clases presenciales, seguimos avanzando por la SECCIÓN B del curso, el siglo XX. Hay nuevos materiales sobre la unidad 6 en el enlace correspondiente de la columna derecha (Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, etc.).

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Última semana antes del Pilar:

Necesitaremos en clase los textos de:
-Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

- Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

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Si queréis optar por hacer trabajos de curso, quizá os interese leer unas notas sobre cómo hacer un comentario de texto.
 

 

1. LITERATURA INGLESA MEDIEVAL

 

Siguen aquí notas sobre el tema 1. En la columna derecha irán apareciendo los enlaces a los demás temas, tanto de la Sección A (presencial) como de la Sección B (no presencial).
 

LATE MIDDLE AGES:

Battle of Agincourt (Henry V, 1415)
End of 100 Years' War and Wars of the Roses under Henry VI and Edward IV (Lancaster vs. York)
1476: Caxton's printing press
1485 Richard III (of York) defeated by Henry VII (House of Tudor)

Middle English literature: 15th century

John Skelton, Colin Cloute. Satire.
____. Magnificence. Morality play. 1515
 
Cycles of Mystery Plays (York, Wakefield, Chester, East Anglia)
Morality plays: Mankind, Everyman, The Castle of Perseverance

First women writers:
Julian of Norwich
Margery Kempe


John Lydgate (c.1370-c.1451):
- Troy Book
- The Siege of Thebes
- The Fall of Princes

Sir Thomas Malory, Morte Darthur, ed. by William Caxton, 1485.


Scottish literature:

Robert Henryson (1425-1508):
- The Testament of Cressid
- Moral Fables of Aesop
William Dunbar (late 15th)



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Una introducción a la sociedad de la Inglaterra medieval y al Middle English:

- vídeo titulado "Historical context for the Canterbury Tales" https://youtu.be/1epKYZURHB8
 

- y "Chaucer's England":

 

 

 

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Middle English Literature: 14th century


 

GEOFFREY CHAUCER     (c. 1343-1400)

Chaucer, Geoffrey. ?  The Romaunt of the Rose. Trans. from Guillaume de Lorris. C. 1368-72.
_____. The Book of the Duchess. Poem. 1368-72.
_____. "The Monk's Tale."  c. 1372-80. Later included in The Canterbury Tales.
_____. The House of Fame. Poem. 1378-80.
_____. The Parlement of Foules [The Parliament of Fowls]. Poem. c. 1380-82. _____. The Legend of Good Women. Poem.  1380-87.
_____. Boece. Trans. of Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy. C. 1380-87.
_____. The Knight's Tale. Romance, based on Boccaccio. C. 1380-87. Later included in The Canterbury Tales. 

_____. Troilus and Criseyde. Narrative poem. c.1382-86. (From Boccaccio's Filostrato).
_____. Treatise on the Astrolabe. Scientific prose. 1391.
_____. The Canterbury Tales. Verse narrative. Written 1388-1400.



Rhyme Royal stanza: ababbcc


SOBRE CHAUCER:

Unos apuntes introductorios a Chaucer, y otros A NIVEL AVANZADO

También aquí. una introducción a su obra.



Y en audio: 

© ''IntelliQuest World's 100 Greatest Books''* 1995:

Geoffrey Chaucer (/ˈtʃɔːsər/; c. 1343 -- 25 October 1400), known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. While he achieved fame during his lifetime as an author, philosopher, alchemist and astronomer, composing a scientific treatise on the astrolabe for his ten year-old son Lewis, Chaucer also maintained an active career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Among his many works, which include The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde, he is best known today for The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer is a crucial figure in developing the legitimacy of the vernacular, Middle English, at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were French and Latin.

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the 14th century. The tales (mostly written in verse although some are in prose) are told as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return.

Following a long list of works written earlier in his career, including Troilus and Criseyde, House of Fame, and Parliament of Fowls, the Canterbury Tales was Chaucer's magnum opus. He uses the tales and the descriptions of its characters to paint an ironic and critical portrait of English society at the time, and particularly of the Church. Structurally, the collection resembles The Decameron, which Chaucer may have read during his first diplomatic mission to Italy in 1372.

*This audio collection contains a treasury of 100 classic books and includes info on the life and times of the author, the theme of the book, the characters, the story outline, a concise yet detailed abridgement of the story and a discussion of the values that make each book one of the great classical works of literature.

 



An introductory video lesson on The Canterbury Tales:






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A nivel avanzado:

Chaucer: NIVEL AVANZADO


Some notes on John Gower
 
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14th century:

1336- Edward III begins Hundred Years' War
1348- Black Death
1381- Peasants' Revolt
1399- Deposition of Richard II by Henry IV


Geoffrey Chaucer    (c. 1343-1400)

John Gower (1325?-1408):

Speculum meditantis (Le Miroir de l'Homme)

Vox Clamantis
Confessio Amantis (in English)


Gawain poet:
Cleanness, Patience, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14th c.)

The plot of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

William Langland, Piers Plowman (1362-92)

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NIVEL AVANZADO:

Un audio sobre Piers Plowman (In Our Time).

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (vídeo, NIVEL AVANZADO)

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Other religious works:

Cursor Mundi (encyclopedic poem, Northumbria, c. 1300) 

The South English Legendary
Dan Michel, The Ayenbite of Inwit

Religious Reformers: Wyclif and the Lollards

 

Other (anonymous) works:
William and the Were-wolf (from the French, c. 1350)
Morte Arthure & Le Morte Arthur (note that these anonymous romances are not the later work by Malory)
King Alisaunder
The Destruction of Troy   (Continental sources, the Troy stories)




Chroniclers: 

Robert of Gloucester, Robert Mannyng of Brunne

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Middle English Context (NIVEL AVANZADO)

The History of the English language: An overview
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El martes 28 hablaremos algo más de literatura medieval, y leeremos algo de Beowulf. Traed la primera selección de lecturas de esta obra, Beowulf, en las fotocopias, y también las hojas que repartimos en clase.

 

Empezamos también a poner materiales de la SECCIÓN B de la asignatura (siglo XX, no presencial), que se irán añadiendo en los enlaces de la columna de la derecha. Empezando por el tema 6, Literatura Inglesa y Norteamericana 1900-1960. 

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13th century:

Verse narrative:

Layamon. Brut. c. 1205.  (Arthurian Cycle)
Guy of Warwick
King Horn
Havelok the Dane c. 1280.

Moral works:
The Owl and the Nightingale. c. 1200.
The Seven Sages of Rome
Barlaam and Josaphat


Devotional works:
Orm. Ormulum. c. 1200.
Ancrene Riwle    c. 1215.
Kentish Sermons
Hali Meidenhad


Latin churchmen: 

Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus (philosophers)
Walter Map, De nugis curialum (c. 1200);  ? prose Lancelot
Roger of Wendover, Flores Historiarum (Flowers of History) (1235)
Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora (1259)





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12th century

NIVEL AVANZADO:

The Twelfth Century: Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Latin literature



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Anglo-Saxon Literature (up to the 11th c.)

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Beginning of the Middle English period:
Norman Invasion (Battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror: 1066)

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NIVEL AVANZADO:

 

- From Old English to Middle English

- MIDDLE ENGLISH: THE LANGUAGE OF THE CANTERBURY TALES

 

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Para este primer tema (LITERATURA MEDIEVAL) es muy recomendable empezar por este capítulo de la Penguin Short History of English Literature: OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE.

 

Nuestra lectura principal para esta semana: Beowulf.  Para completar el tratamiento de estos temas, recomiendo acudir a los manuales. Por ejemplo, así trata el capítulo de Beowulf el manual de Michael Alexander. También tenéis aquí unos apuntes y lecciones adicionales, algunos a nivel más avanzado.  (NIVEL AVANZADO: Beowulf).

Aquí un vídeo sobre The language of Beowulf. Parte de una serie de lecciones muy útiles que se encuentran en YouTube.

Y aquí una breve película de dibujos animados sobre Beowulf:

En conjunto, la mejor película sobre Beowulf es la de Robert Zemeckis (2007), Beowulf—aunque no es nada fiel al original, como tampoco lo son otras que se han hecho con este título, sí es recomendable.

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RECAPITULACIÓN DE LA PRIMERA SEMANA

- Actividades de la primera semana


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OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE c. 500-1066


Celtic Britain

-   Rebellions vs. Rome: Boadicea

  The Roman occupation (c. 43-420)
       Julius Caesar, then Claudius  
 
Anglo-Saxon conquest c. 450
       Germanic tribes: Angles, Saxons, Jutes
       English kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, Sussex, Essex, Kent...
 
c. 600 Christianization (Ethelberth's laws)
       Monasteries: Iona, Jarrow, Winchester, Abingdon, Canterbury, Peterborough... 
 
Caedmon's Hymn (7th c.) (in Bede's work:)


The Venerable Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum. 732.

The Danish invasions

871-899 King Alfred

1066 The Norman conquest

- Manuscripts:
The Lindisfarne Gospels
The Exeter Book
The Vercelli Book
The Beowulf Manuscript
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Some authors and works

- Saints' lives (Judith, St. Guthlac, Andreas)
 
- Biblical poems and translations (Genesis, the Gospels) - The Dream of the Rood, The Phoenix
 
- Popular sermons (Blickling Homilies)

- Religious poets: Caedmon, Cynewulf (Christ, Juliana, Elene, The Fates of the Apostles - early 9th c.), 
 
- Bestiaries, Riddles...

- Elegiac poems: Deor, Widsith, The Seafarer, The Wanderer, The Ruin, The Wife's Lament, The Husband's Message, Wulf and Eadwacer.
 
- Epic poems: Beowulf, The Battle of Brunanburh, The Battle of Maldon
 
 
Poetic style: 
The kennings. Alliterative verse. Understatement.

- Learned literate culture: 

    - In Latin: Aldhelm, Bede, Alcuin of York.

    - In English: Aelfric and Wulfstan (Homilies)
    

 - King Alfred (trans. of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Psalms)

- The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

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- Old English and the Anglo-Saxons: NIVEL AVANZADO



- THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH (NIVEL AVANZADO)

The 'Pearl' Poet

From A Literary History of England (ed. A. C. Baugh), ch. XIV, "The Alliterative Revival", by Kemp Malone and A. C. Baugh.



In the last few chapters—on the romance, the religious omnibus, the lyric, and the writings of the mystics—we have become increasingly aware of the intense literary activity that marks the whole fourteenth century, and activity that reaches its culmination for most readers today in the great narrative poetry of Chaucer. It is an activity that extends from one end of England to the other, an activity in which London and the court participate to no overwhelming extent but rather share along with many other sections of the country. The widespread distribution of the ferment that was at work is indicated perhaps nowhere more plainly than in the emergence about 1350 of the Old English alliterative tradition after it had lain hidden for nearly two hundred years.

Alliterative verse

Roughly between the years 1350 and 1400 there appeared a score of poems, ranging from a few hundred lines to several thousand, in a metre which had clearly evolved in an unbroken development from the old four-beat alliterative measure of Beowulf and Cynewulf. It is not an antiquarian revival, but the reappearance of a metrical pattern which has undergone considerable change. The line has become in most cases the unit of thought, and the alliteration is therefore not so much structural as decorative. With some poets hunting the letter becomes a passion, and the alliteration falls on three syllables in a half-line or is carried through several consecutive lines. Verse of this sort was obviously associated in Chaucer's mind with the north, as is indicated by the well-known words of the Parson:

But trusteth well, I am a Southern man,
I can not geste—rum, ram, ruf—by lettre.

And most of the poems in the alliterative revival belong to the north and to the northwest Midlands. While one of the most important—Piers Plowman—has its origin in the west Midlands, we may think of the alliterative revival as occurring in the north and more particularly the northwest of England.

Three of the earliest poems in the revival, Alexander A, Alexander B, and William of Palerne, have already been discussed in the chapters on the romance. There we have likewise treated other later romances in alliterative verse, such as The Wars of Alexander, The Destruction of Troy, the Morte Arthure, and the religious romance The Destruction of Jerusalem. It is not practicable to include them again here, where as part of the alliterative movement they would be fully entitled to a place. (NOTE 1)  We shall have to be content with this brief reference, and confine ourselves in this and the following chapter to the other classes of alliterative poetry. In the present chapter we shall treat the works of the Pearl poet and one or two poems in some ways related to his. In the chapter which follows we shall consider a group of poems concerned with social and ethical questions, of which the most important is the great social document Piers Plowman.

NOTE 1: See above, pp. 182 ff. On the later alliterative movement in Scotland see Sir William Craigie, "The Scottish Alliterative Poems," Proc. Brit. Acad. xxviii (1942): 217-236.

The Pearl Poet

Of the many unique manuscripts gathered together in the seventeenth century by the famous antiquary Sir Robert Cotton, among which are the Beowulf codex, the two texts of Layamon's Brut, the Ludus Coventriae and others less famous, one is a modest quarto volume known as Nero A. X. (NOTE 2). The contents consist of four alliterative poems in a hand of the end of the fourteenth century. Acoompanying the text are twelve illustrations of quite crude workmanship depicing episodes in some of the poems. None of the texts is accompanied by any title, but they have been named, in the order of their occurrence in the manuscript, the Pearl, Purity (or Cleanness), Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

NOTE 2. It is reproduced in facsimile in EETS, 162 [Early English Text Society series].

The Pearl (NOTE 3) is not only first in the manuscript but shares with the Gawain the first place in the interest of modern readers. In a hundred stanzas of twelve lines each (NOTE 4), ingeniously linked in groups of five by repetition and a refrain, the poet tells how a lovely pearl, smooth and white, slipped from his hands into the grass and was lost in the ground. In his grief he often visits the spot which covers his pearl, and one August day, lulled by the fragance of herbs and flowers, he falls asleep on the little mound. There as he slumbers he dreams that he is in another world, a world of crystal cliffs, bright woods, and strands pebbled with precious stones. Such sights make him forget his grief, and he wanders about in sheer delight. Finally he comes upon a stream, clear and sparkling, beyond which he thinks must be Paradise. It is backed by a crystal cliff, at the foot of which sits a child—

A gracious maiden full debonaire;
Glistening white was her robe:
I knew her well; I had seen her before.

NOTE 3. Edited by Richard Morris (2ed, 1869; EETS, I). Sir Israel Gollancz (1891; 1921) and Charles C. Osgood (1906; Belles-Lettres Ser.). A translation is included in Gollancz's edition, and there are modern renderings by G. G. Coulton (1907), Osgood (1907), Sophe Jewett (1908), and Stanley P. Chase (1932).

NOTE 4. The rime scheme is abababab bcbc. There are 101 stanzas, but one is considered spurious or was canceled by the author.

The longer he looks at her the better he knows her. He has an impulse to call her, but seeing her in so strange a place deters him. She is spotless, and her dress is trimmed profusely with pearls. She wears a crown, from beneath which her hair falls loosely on her shoulders. No tongue could fittingly describe the sight:

So clean was it and clear and pure,
That precious pearl where it was set.

Thus arrayed she comes down to the brink. She was nearer to me, he says, than aunt or niece. Finally she speaks to him and he then addresses her:

O Pearl, quoth I, in pearls bedight,
Art thou my pearl that I have 'plain'd,
Regretted when all alone at night?
Much longing for thee have I restrained
Since into the grass thou didst from me glide.

Grown in stature and in wisdom, she reveals to him her life as spouse of the Heavenly Bridegroom. The dreamer's pearl was not lost when it was put in a coffer so comely as is this gracious garden. Along with thousands of others she shares a most happy lot. When the poet objects that she did nothing to deserve so great a reward, since she "lived not two years in our land" and knew neither her Paternoster nor Creed, she enters upon an elaborate discourse on the part played by merit and grace in salvation and the equality of the saved before God (NOTE 5), illustrating her views at length by biblical parables. The poet is finally granted a view of her abode—the New Jerusalem—vividly adapted from the Apocalypse. His effort in trying to cross the stream and reach the heavenly city wakens him from his dream, and he rises from the mound on which he had slumbered, filled with a new spiritual strength.

NOTE 5. The orthodoxy of the poet's views was questioned by Carleton F. Brown, "The Author of The Pearl Considered in the Light of His Theological Opinions," PMLA, XIX (1904), 115-53, and defended by James Sledd, MLN, LV (1940), 381. While his attitude toward grace has been shown to be good doctrine, equality of reward appears to be stressed beyond medieval orthodoxy.

The Allegory

This beautiful and seemingly transparent allegory has been interpreted in various ways and has led to considerable controversy. The traditional view sees in the poem an elegy in which the poet grieves for the death of a two-year-old daughter and is consoled by her in a vision of a common medieval type. This view was challenged by Schofield in 1904, who denied the autobiographical interpretation and suggested that the poet was merely upholding the virtue of purity under the symbolism of a pearl, with appropriate personification (NOTE 6). While his view has not found much favor (NOTE 7) his example has led others to attempt new explanations and various modifications of the original interpretation. The Pearl has been taken as symbolizing the Eucharist (NOTE 8) and more recently as recording a state of "spiritual dryness" experienced by the poet and not unknown to religious and to mystics (NOTE 9). Still others have sought to reconcile the elegiacal and symbolical interpretations (NOTE 10). There is symbolism, to be sure, in incidental ways in the poem, and the problems of divine grace and the equality of heavenly rewards constitute the major theme for discussion, but there are too many features which are meaningless on any other assumption than that the poet mourns the loss of a real child (NOTE 11). The poem treats certain aspects of salvation in the framework of a personal elegy, employing the medieval conventions of vision and debate.

NOTE 6. W. H. Schofield, "The Nature and Fabric of The Pearl," PMLA, xix (1904). 154-215; "Symbolism, Allegory, and Autobiography in The Pearl," PMLA, xxiv (1909). 585-675.

NOTE 7. Schofield's interpretation was opposed by Coulton in MLR, ii (1907). 39-43.

NOTE 8. R. M. Garrett, The Pearl—An Interpretation (Seattle, 1918; Univ. of Wash. Pub. in English, (Vol. iv., No. 1).

NOTE 9. Sister M. Madeleva, Pearl: A Study in Spiritual Dryness (1925).

NOTE 10. Jefferson B. Fletcher, "The Allegory of the Pearl," JEGP, xx (1921). 1-21., and René Wellek, "The Pearl: An Interpretation of the Middle-English Poem," Studies in English (Charles Univ., Prague), iv (1933). 1-33. Both these papers stress the complex character of the symbolism.

NOTE 11. For an attempt to identify the child, see Oscar Cargill and Margaret Schlauch, "The Pearl and Its Jeweler," PMLA, xliii (1928), 105-123.

A personal elegy

Viewed as a personal elegy the Pearl is a poem of deep feeling, the poet's grief yielding gradually to resignation and spiritual reconciliation. In its sensuous beauty, its artistic restraint, its skilful manipulation of a complex and difficult metrical pattern, and its imaginatively beautiful descriptions of the garden, the pearl-maiden, and the New Jerusalem, it is in its best parts unsurpassed by anything in Middle English poetry.

Purity

In two respects Purity (NOTE 12), the second poem in the manuscript, resembles the Pearl—in its preoccupation with an ethical question and in its predilection for extended paraphrases of biblical incident. For here we have a discourse on purity, showing how impossible it is for one who is unclean to approach God's pure presence, and enforcing the point by the parable of the man without a wedding garment. This and other episodes such as the fall of Lucifer and the Expulsion from Paradise are merely preliminary, however, to the main purpose, which is to tell the stories of the Flood, the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the profanation of the holy vessels in Belshazzar's Feast. The homiletic purpose is plain, and at the end the poet not only reminds us that "upon thrynne wyses" he has showed the sorrow that uncleanness causes our Lord but he closes with a prayer for grace. The stories are vividly told, but the poem suffers by comparison with the Pearl through the lack of any framework or artistic motivation.

NOTE 12.  Edited by Richard Morris (2ed., 1869; EETS, i)., Robert J. Menner (1920; Yale Stud. in English, 61), and Sir Israel Gollancz (1921).

Patience
 
This is also true of its companion piece, Patience (NOTE 13), which devotes all but the first sixty of its 531 lines to the story of Jonah and the whale. But concentration upon a single subjet gives greater unity to the piece, and the poet has allowed his imagination freer rein in embellishing his theme. He shows us the activity in getting under sail, describes vividly the storm at sea, pictures with realistic detail the slimy insides of the whale, and reports dramatically Jonah's conversations with God. God's rebuke of Jonah for his impatience leads the poet to his closing reflection. He who is too hasty in tearing his clothes will often sit sewing them up. Even poverty must be borne with patience, which "is a noble point, though it displease oft." In both Purity and Patience the poet's principal indebtedness is to the Bible, and the Pearl not only draws its parables from the same source but derives its description of the New Jerusalem from the Apocalypse. Other sources in Tertullian, an eclogue of Boccaccio, and even the Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry have been suggested but with the possible exception of Boccaccio's eclogue, must be described as very doubtful. The poet refers once to Jean de Meun and his part of the Roman de la Rose, and he has drawn scattered details in Purity from Mandeville's Travels in their French form. But while the author of these poems was apparently well read, we have not been very successful in tracking down the sources of his inspiration outside of the Scriptures.

NOTE 13.  Edited by Richard Morris (as above), Hartley Bateson (Manchester, 191; 2ed., 1918), and Israel Gollancz (1913).

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

There seems to be no reason to doubt that the three poems the Pearl, Purity, and Patience are the work of one man. The fourth poem in the transcript is of such a different kind that if it were not found in association with the others we might well hesitate to attribute it to the same authorship, in spite of obvious stylistic resemblances (NOTE 14). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (NOTE 15) is a courtly romance, the finest Arthurian romance in English. Though it exemplifies the knightly virtues of courage and truth, it is in no sense a story told to enforce a moral. It is quite in the spirit of French romance, told for its own sake.

NOTE 14. Apart from the stylistic features common to all four poems, there are noteworthy parallels between Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Purity. It should be remembered, however, that the romance also shows many striking parallels in phrases and lines with the Wars of Alexander.

NOTE 15. There are older editions by Sir Frederic Madden for the Bannatyne Club (1839) and Richard Morris (1864; EETS, 4); revised by I. Gollancz (1897 and 1912), but the romance is best studied in the edition of J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon (1925) or the new edition of Sir Israel Gollancz with introductory essays by Mabel Day and Mary S. Serjeantson (1940; EETS, 210). Modern renderings by Jessie L. Weston (1898), often reprinted, T. H. Banks (1929), G. H. Gerould (1934), etc. are available separately or in anthologies.

Subject Matter and Treatment

 The plot itself is so well known as to need no retelling. The main adventure is the challenge, which Gawain accepts of an exchange of blows with the Green Knight, in which he beheads the challenger but must submit to the same hazard a year later. With this is combined the adventure at Bertilak's castle, in which Gawain is tempted on three successive mornings by his host's wife and in which his only fault is concealing the magic girdle which she gives him. Both of these stories are found separately either in Celtic or in Old French romances (NOTE 16). They are first found combined in the English poem (NOTE 17), and whether we owe the combination to the English poet or to his source we must grant that it was a happy inspiration which tied the three temptations to the three blows offered Gawain at the Green Chapel and made the wound received from the third blow the result of his concealing the girdle. Accepting the supernatural as a prerogative of medieval story, we have a skilfully contrived plot (NOTE 18), a feature always worthy of remark in medieval romance. But it is only one, and that perhaps the least, of the qualities which give this remarkable poem its high place among English romances. From the beginning almost to the end it proceeds by a succession of scenes and situations full of color and movement and vivid detail. We begin with the New Year's feast, the guests exchanging greetings and gifts, the maidens laughing and making mirth till it is time to eat, then washing and seating themselves at tables. Just as the music ceases and the first course has been served the Gren Knight enters. He is fully described—stature, appearance, dress, armor, horse, trappings—as he rides straight up to the daïs. And so it goes from episode to episode like a succession of tapestries or medieval illuminations. The descriptions of the seasons as they mark the passing of the year and bring Gawain to the time when he must set out to keep his pledge are no mere literary exercises, and the hunting scenes have all the excitement and lifelikeness of first-hand experience or observation. Striking, too, is the poet's mastery of dialogue, always easy and natural, but particularly skilful in the extended conversations between Gawain and the lady of the castle, as she seeks an opening and he adroitly evades and parries each thrust. Finally, one should remark the dexterous way in which the poet keeps the various actions moving forward simultaneously, passing from the dalliance of the lady to the husband's adventures in the chase and back again to the bed chamber until all parties are brought together naturally at the end of the day. But there is no end of things to exclaim over and we can only hint at the enjoyment to be had from reading and rereading this fine romance (NOTE 19).

NOTE 16. The fullest study of the sources of the romance is George L. Kittredge, A Study of Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, Mass., 1916). The challenge or beheading game is found in an episode inown as The Champion's Bargain which closes the Irish romance (at least as old as the eleventh century) of Fled Bricrend, or Bricriu's Feast. From there it passed into French where it was embodied independently into four separate romances (the Livre de Caradoc, incorporated in the first continuation of Chrétien's Perceval, the short thirteenth-century romance La Mule sanz Frain, the prose Grail romance known as the Perlesvaus in which the adventure is attributed to Lancelot, and another thirteenth-century romance entitled Gawain et Humbaut in which the ending has been completely changed). Parallels to the temptation motif are not so close, but in one form or another it is found in the Old French Ider, in the late English Carl of Carlisle, and elsewhere.

NOTE 17. There are many theories accounting for this combination. Kittredge believed that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was based on a lost French romance in which the adventures were combined. J. R. Hulbert, "Syr Gawayn and the Grene Knygt," MP, XIII (1915-16). 433-462, 689-730, believes they were originally joined in a Fairy Mistress story as the conditions which the hero must fulfill. Else von Schaubert, "Der englische Ursprung von Syr Gawayn and the Grene Knygt," ESt, LVII (1923). 330-446, maintains that they were first combined by the English poet. This is also the view of Miss Day in the essay noted above. O. Löhmann, Die Sage von Gawain und dem grünen Ritter (Königsberg, 1938), likewise believes in the English origin of the romance, but argues that a Fairy Mistress story has been changed into a test of the hero.

NOTE 18. The idea that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is connected in some way with the Order of the Garter is most fully advocated in Isaac Jackson, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight considered as a 'Garter' Poem," Anglia, XXXVII (1913). 393-423, and opposed by J. R. Hulbert in the article already referred to (MP. XIII, especially pp. 710 ff.).

NOTE 19. In the absence of any objective evidence for determining the order of composition it has seemed best to treat the poems in the order in which they occur in the manuscript. Patience and Purity probably belong together, and since Purity has a number of parallels with the Gawain, it probably stands closer to the latter. On artistic grounds the Pearl and Gawain should follow the homiletic pieces, though this is not a safe criterion for pieces unlike in kind. One could argue for an order which would put the Gawain first, followed by the Pearl, the bereavement in which led the poet to the moral concerns of Purity and Patience. Such an order would have the advantage of putting Patience after Purity, to which it is superior in structure and unity.

The Author

All that we know about the author of these four poems is what can be cautiously inferred from his work, and all attempts to identify him with Huchown, Strode, or any other individual have failed. The dialect of the manuscript, which there is no reason to think differs essentially from that of the author, would indicate that he belonged to the northwest Midlands, probably south Lancashire, and this general locality is supported by the landscape and local allusions in the poems. He need not have been a priest in spite of his preoccupation with theological and moral questions, though a position as chaplain in some nobleman's household would make such an interest natural and account for his familiarity with the ways of courtly life. Naturally, however, such knowledge could be otherwise accounted for. His vocabulary contains a large French element which might result from his social status or his acquaintance with French literature. This was certainly considerable. He impresses us as a man of cosmopolitan taste whose horizon was not bounded by the limits of a provincial neighborhood. That he was at once observant and imaginative is apparent. His literary activity coincides roughly with the earlier part of Chaucer's career, and in the absence of more precise information we cannot do better than to date his work c. 1375.

St Erkenwald

Various other alliterative poems have from time to time been atrributed to the Pearl poet. Among them the one that has found most supporters is St. Erkenwald (NOTE 20), which attributes to the Old English bishop of this name a miracle not otherwise recorded. When St. Paul's in London was being rebuilt a tomb was uncovered in which was the body of a pagan judge. Since he had always been just in his awards, his body and clothing were still as fresh as at the time of his death. At Erkenwald's bidding the corpse reveals its identity, whereupon the bishop's tears fall on the body, constituting baptism and releasing the soul. Bodily decay at once sets in. The story is told in 352 clear and straightforward verses, but the present writer at least cannot accept the attribution to the Pearl poet.

NOTE 20. Edited by Horstmann, Altengliche Legenden (1881), Gollancz (1922), and Henry L. Savage (1926; Yale Stud. in English, 72).

Pistel of Swete Susan

Associated with the poems previously discussed is a short piece of twenty-eight tail-rime stanzas, each with thirteen alliterative lines, called the Pistel of Swete Susan (NOTE 21). It tells the story of Susanna and the Elders from the thirteenth chapter of Daniel (in the Vulgate), with the description of the garden embellished with details drawn from the Roman de la Rose. It is told simply and effectively, at times with the deft touches of an artist. When Susanna, allowed to speak to her husband, has avowed her innocence and fidelity to him,

Thei toke the feteres of hire feete,
And evere he kyssed that swete;
"In other world schal we mete."
     Seide he no mare. (lines 257-60)

A passage in Wyntoun's Orygynale Cronykil (c. 1420) asserts that the author was Huchown of the Awle Ryale (Royal Court), who is there credited also with the Gret Gest off Arthure and the Awyntyre off Gawane (NOTE 22). The attribution cannot be accepted, but the passage has led some to believe that Huchown was not only the Pearl poet but the author of most of the poems in the alliterative revival (NOTE 23).  Naturally such extravagant claims have not met with much favor. While the six poems discussed in the present chapter are linked together by certain features of subject matter and treatment it seems best to hold to the conservative view which limites the work of the Pearl poet to the poems preserved in the famous Cotton manuscript.

NOTE 21. Edited by Hans Köster, Huchown's Pistel of Swete Susan (Strassburg, 1895; Quellen und Forschungen, LXXVI).

NOTE 22.

He made the Gret Gest off Arthure
And the Awyntyre off Gawane
The Pystill als off Swete Swsane....

The Gret Gest off Arthure is believed to be the alliterative Morte Arthure, presumably in its fuller form (see ch. X, above). The Awyntyre off Gawane is identified by those who believe Huchown to be the Pearl poet with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by others with the Awyntyrs of Arthur (see p. 190, note 22).

NOTE 23. George Neilson, 'Huchown of the Awle Ryale', the Alliterative Poet (Glasgow, 1902), who argues that Huchown is to be identified with the "gude Sir Hew of Eglintoun" mentioned by Dunbar in his Lament for the Makaris. In spite of the extravagance of his thesis Neilson's book contains much interesting matter.

HIS110 - The History of English - An Overview

In Search of the Dark Ages (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 

IN SEARCH OF THE DARK AGES. Una serie de la BBC sobre la primera Edad Media y el periodo anglosajón en Inglaterra. Aquí un capítulo sobre Offa, rey de Mercia (en la época de Juego de Tronos de la historia inglesa, allá por el siglo ocho). Habla de él la Anglo-Saxon Chronicle que aquí nos enseñan.

 Hay otros episodios en YouTube.

William Butler Yeats

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS  (1865-1939)

From the Norton Anthology of English Literature (7th ed.):

William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, Dublin. His father's family, of English stock, had been in Ireland for at least two hundred years: his mother's, the Pollexfens, hailing originally from Devon, had been for some generations in Sligo, in the west of Ireland. J. B. Yeats, his father, had abandoned law to take up painting, at which he made a somewhat precarious living. The Yeatses were in London from 1874 until 1883, when they returned to Ireland—to Howth, a few miles from Dublin. On leaving high school in Dublin in 1883 Yeats decided to be an artist, with poetry as his avocation, and attended art school; but he soon left, to concentrate on poetry. His first published poems appeared in the Dublin University Review in 1885.

Yeats's father was a religious skeptic, but he believed in the "religion of art." Yeats himself, religious by temperament but unable to believe in Christian orthodoxy, sought all his life for traditions of esoteric thought that would compensate for a lost religion. This search led him to various kinds of mysticism, to folklore, theosophy, spiritualism, and neoplatonism—not in any strict chronological order, for he kept returning to and reworking earlier aspects of his thought. In middle life he elaborated a symbolic system of his own, based on a variety of sources, that enabled him to strengthen the pattern and coherence of his poetic imagery. The student of Yeats is constantly coming up against this willful and sometimes baffling esotericism that he cultivated sometimes playfully and sometimes as though it were a convenient language of symbols. Modern scholarship has traced most of Yeats's mystical and quasi-mystical ideas to sources that were common to William Blake and Percy Shelley and that sometimes go far back into pre-Platonic beliefs and traditions. But his greatness as a poet lies in his ability to communicate the power and significance of his symbols, by the way he expresses and organizes them, even to readers who know nothing of his system.

Yeats's childhood and early manhood were spent between Dublin, London, and Sligo; and each of these places contributed something to his poetic development. In London in the 1890s he met the important poets of the day; and in 1891 was one of the founders of the Rhymers' Club, whose members included Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, and many other characteristic figures of the 1890s. Here he acquired ideas of poetry that were vaguely pre-Raphaelite: he believed, in this early stage of his career, that a poet's language should be dreamy, evocative, and ethereal. From the countryside around Sligo he got something much more vigorous and earthy—a knowledge of the life of the peasantry and of their folklore. In Dublin he was influenced by the currents of Irish nationalism and, although often in disagreement with those who wished to use literature for crude political ends, he nevertheless learned to see his poetry as a contribution to a rejuvenated Irish culture. The three influences of Dublin, London, and Sligo did not develop in chronological order—he was going to and fro among these places throughout his early life—and we sometimes find a poem based on Sligo folklore in the midst of a group of dreamy poems written under the influence of the Rhymers' Club or an echo of Irish nationalist feeling in a lyric otherwise wholly pre-Raphaelite in tone.

We can distinguish quite clearly, however, the main periods into which Yeats's poetic career falls. He began in the tradition of self-conscious Romanticism, which he learned from the London poets of the 1890s. Edmund Spenser and Shelley, and a little later Blake, were important influences. One of his early verse plays ends with a song:

The woods of Arcady are dead
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy.

About the same time he was writing poems (e.g. The Stolen Child) deriving from his Sligo experience, with a quiet precision of natural imagery, country place names, and themes from folklore. A little later—i.e., in the latter part of his first period—Dublin literary circles sent him to Standish O'Grady's History of Ireland: Heroic Period, where he found the great stories of the heroic age of Irish history, and to George Sigerson's and Douglas Hyde's translations of Gaelic poetry into "that dialect which gets from Gaelic its syntax and keeps its still partly Tudor vocabulary." Even when he plays with Neoplatonic ideas, as in The Rose of the World (also the product of the latter part of his early period), he can link them with Irish heroic themes and so give a dignity and a style to his imagery not normally associated with this sort of poetic dreaminess. Thus the heroic legends of old Ireland and the folk traditions of the modern Irish countryside provided Yeats with a stiffening for his early dreamlike imagery, which is why even his first, "nineties" phase is productive of interesting poems. The Lake Isle of Innisfree, spoiled for some by overanthologizing, is nevertheless a fine poem of its kind: it is the clarity and control shown in the handling of the imagery that keeps all romantic fuzziness out of it and gives it its haunting quality. In The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland he makes something peculiarly effective out of the contrast between human activities and the strangeness of nature. In The Madness of King Goll the disturbing sense of the otherness of the natural world drives the king mad. (Such contrasts are common in the early Yeats; in his later poetry he tries to resolve what he calls these "antinomies" in inclusive symbols; e.g., Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.)

It is important to realize that Yeats had a habit of revising his earlier poems in later printings, tightening up the language and getting rid of the more self-indulgent romantic imagery. The revised versions are found in his Collected Poems, which, therefore, present a somewhat muted picture of his poetic development. For the complete picture one should consult The Variorum Edition edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (1957).

It was Irish nationalism that first sent Yeats in search of a consistently simpler and more popular style. He tells in one of his autobiographical essays how he sought for a style in which to express the elemental facts about Irish life and aspirations. This led him to the concrete image as did Hyde's translations from Gaelic folk songs, in which "nothing was abstract, nothing worn-out." But other forces were also working on him. In 1902 a friend gave him the works of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, to which he responded with great excitement, and it would seem that, in persuading Yeats, the passive love-poet, to get off his knees, Nietzsche's books prompted his search for a more active stance, a more masculine style. Looking back in 1906, he found that he had mistaken the poetic ideal. "Without knowing it, I had come to care for nothing but impersonal beauty . . . We should ascend out of common interests, the thoughts of the newspapers, of the market place, but only so fast as we can carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole." The result of the abandonment of "impersonal beauty," and of the desire to "carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self" into his poetry, is seen in the volumes of collected poems, In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910). The Folly of Being Comforted and Adam's Curse are from the former of them, and one can see immediately how Yeats here combines the colloquial with the formal. This is characteristic of his "second period."

By this time Yeats had met the beautiful actress and violent Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, with whom he was desperately in love for many years, but who persistently refused to marry him. The affair is reflected in many of the poems of his second period, notably No Second Troy, published in The Green Helmet. He had also met Lady Gregory, Irish writer and promoter of Irish literature, in 1896, and she invited him to spend the following summer at her country house, Coole Park, in Galway. Yeats spent many holidays with Lady Gregory and discovered the attractiveness of the "country house ideal," seeing in an aristocratic life of elegance and leisure in a great house a method of imposing order on chaos and a symbol of the Neoplatonic dance of life. He expresses this view many times in his poetry—e.g., at the end of A Prayer for My Daughter—and it became an important part of his complex of attitudes. The middle classes, with their Philistine money grubbing, he detested, and for his ideal characters he looked either below them, to peasants and beggars, or above them, to the aristocracy, for each of these had their own traditions and lived according to them.

It was under Lady Gregory's influence that Yeats became involved in the founding of the Irish National Theatre in 1899. This led to his active participation in problems of play production, which included political problems of censorship, economic problems of paying carpenters and actors, and other aspects of "theater business, management of men." All this had an effect on his style. The reactions of Dublin audiences did not encourage Yeats's trust in popular judgment, and his bitterness with the "Paudeens," middle-class shopkeepers—who seemed to him to be without any dignity, or understanding or nobility of spirit—produced some of the most effective poems of his third or middle period. He was now becoming more and more of a national figure. Three public controversies had moved him to anger and poetry; the first over the hounding of Parnell (To a Shade), the second over Synge's play The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, and the third over the Lane pictures (September 1913). In each, the cause for which he fought was defeated by the representatives of the Roman Catholic middle class, and at last, bitterly turning his back on Ireland, Yeats moved to England. Then came the Easter Rising (Easter 1916), mounted by members of the class and religion that had so long opposed him. Persuaded by Gonne (whose estranged husband was one of the executed leaders of the rising) that "tragic dignity had returned to Ireland," Yeats himself returned. To mark his new commitment, he refurbished, occupied, and renamed "Thoor Bayllylee" the Norman tower on Lady Gregory's land that was to become one of the central symbols of his later poetry. In 1922 he was appointed a senator of the recently established Irish Free State and served until 1928, playing an active part not only in promoting the arts but also in general political affairs, in which he supported the views of the Protestant landed class.

Meanwhile Yeats was responding in his own way to the change in poetic taste represented in the poetry and criticism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot immediately before World War I. A gift for epigram had already begun to emerge in his poetry; in the volume titled The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) he has a poem citing Walter Savage Landor (the nineteenth-century poet who wrote some fine lapidary verse) and John Donne as masters. To the precision, and the combination of colloquial and formal, that he had achieved early in the century, he now added a metaphysical as well as an epigrammatic element, and this is seen in the later poems of his third period. He also continued his experiments with different kinds of rhythm. At the same time he was continuing his search for a language of symbols and pursuing and pursuing his esoteric studies. Yeats married in 1917, and his wife proved so sympathetic to his imaginative needs that the automatic writing which for several years she produced (believed by Yeats to have been dictated by spirits) gave him the elements of a symbolic system that he later worked out in his book A Vision (1925, 1937) and that he used in all sorts of ways in much of his later poetry. The system was both a theory of the movements of history and a theory of the different types of personality, each movement and type being related in various complicated ways to a different phase of the moon. Some of Yeats's poetry is unintelligible without a knowledge of A Vision, but the better poems, such as the two on Byzantium, can be appreciated without such knowledge by the experienced reader who responds sensitively to the patterning of the imagery reinforced by the incantatory effect of the rhythms. Some criticism decries attempts by those who are not experts in the background of Yeats's esoteric thought to discuss his poetry and insists that only a detailed knowledge of Yeats's sources can yield his poetic meaning: but while it's true that some particular images do not yield all their significance to those who are ignorant of the background, it is also true that too literal a paraphrase of the symbolism in the light of the sources robs the poems of their power by reducing them to mere exercises in the use of a code.

The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933), from which the poems from Sailing to Byzantium through After Long Silence have been here selected, represent the mature Yeats at his very best—a realist-symbolist-Metaphysical poet with an uncanny power over words. These volumes represent his fourth and greatest period. Here, in his poems of the 1920s and 1930s, winding stairs, spinning tops, "gyres," spirals of all kinds, are important symbols; not only are they connected with Yeats's philosophy of history and of personality, but they also serve as a means of resolving some of those contraries that had arrested him from the beginning. Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward. Though symbolic images of this kind Yeats explores the paradoxes of time and change, of growth and identity, of love and age, of life and art, of madness and wisdom.

The Byzantium poems show him trying to escape from the turbulence of life to the calm eternity of art. But in his fifth and final period he returned to the turbulence after (if only partly as a result of) undergoing the Steinach operation to increase his sexual potency in 1934, and his last poems have a controlled yet startling wildness. Yeats's return to life, to "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart," is one of the most impressive final phases of any poet's career. "I shall be a sinful man to the end, and think upon my deathbed of all the nights I wasted in my youth," he wrote in old age to a correspondent, and in one of his last letters he wrote: "When I try to put all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it' . . . The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Son of Sixpence." When he died in January 1939, he left a body of verse that, in variety and power, makes him beyond question the greatest twentieth-century poet of the English language.

Marjorie Perloff on "Easter 1916"

 

 

 

 

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