Lecture 3

THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD (1066-1485)

PLAN:

1. Medieval literature: The Romance

2. Geoffrey Chaucer

MEDIEVAL LITERATURE: THE ROMANCE

The form of literature much favored by the Anglo-Normans was the romance. Medieval romance consisted largely of tales of chivalry to which were added a love interest and all sorts of wonders and mar­vels—fairy enchantments, giants, dragons, wizards, and sor­ceresses.

The medieval concept of romantic love came from France. Indeed the first English romances —verse, and later prose tales relating the quests knights undertook for their ladies —were translations from the French. These romantic tales came from three principal sources -Britain (the story of King Arthur and his knights), France (the court of Charlemagne), and Rome (classical stories such as the conquest of Troy). In the famous legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, collected and retold by Sir Thomas Malory in his Morte d'Arthur, chivalry and romance play equal parts.

King Arthur's Britain is based on Celtic folklore and has almost no historical basis. The Round Table is not the usual military and polit­ical alliance, but an ideal aristocratic brotherhood. Its knights ride forth to realize themselves through individual feats of arms and acts of courtesy. Their adventures are often novel and unexpected, but they are alike in illustrating the chivalric ideals of honor, courage courtesy, and service to women. The finest verse romance in English, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is about one of the knight at Arthur's court.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER 1347-1400

The first truly great figure in English literature was Geoffrey Chaucer (13407-1400). Although ready to traffic in the fashion at romance of the day, he obviously was quite skeptical about it, being as sharply realistic as a modern novelist in much of his work. Because Chaucer is so far removed from us, and his manner and gauge, especially in the original Middle English, seem so quaint, can easily underestimate this astonishing man. He was not only great poet and a fine storyteller but also the first of the humorists. There is just a twinkle in his eye as he gravely, of ironically, adds one descriptive stroke to another, never failing, if are alert, to make his points. This man, whether moving as a diplomat from one royal court to another or lounging about an inn among people, missed nothing. And his greatest work belongs not to romance but to poetic and humorous realism. With Chaucer, the writer is no longer anonymous but emerges in all the variety and subtlety of an impressive individual. To William Caxton, England's first printer, Geof­frey Chaucer was "the worshipful father and first founder and embellisher of ornate eloquence in our English." Perceptive as this praise was in its time, today Chaucer is acclaimed not only as "the father of English poetry" but also as the father of English fiction — in short, as the father of English literature. In addition, we are indebted to him for the most vivid contemporary description of fourteenth-cen­tury England.'

A man of affairs as well as a man of letters, Chaucer's development as the one was closely par­alleled by his development as the other. Born into a family that belonged to the rising middle class, he obtained through his father, a successful wine merchant, a position as page in a household closely associated with the court of King Edward III. His mastery of Latin, French, and Italian, in addition to equipping him for diplomatic and civil service, also enabled him to translate literary works in all three languages, an important factor in his development as a writer.

A court favorite, Chaucer rose quickly in the world. Before he was twenty he served as a soldier in France and, upon being captured, was ransomed by his king. Thereafter, throughout his life, he served his country loyally —as courtier, diplomat, civil administrator, and translator. Entrusted with important and delicate diplomatic missions, he traveled on several occasions to France and Italy, and his journeys abroad played an important role in his literary and intellectual development. Subse­quently, he served as Comptroller of Customs for the Port of London; Member of Parliament; Justice of the Peace; Clerk of the Works at Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, and elsewhere; and finally as a sub-forester of one of the king's forests. He was, in fact, a highly valued public servant and was fortunate to enjoy for most of his life the pa­tronage of the influential John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and uncle of King Richard II. During his long public career, he became acquainted with the most important men of his day —diplomats and rulers as well as writers. At his death, his reputa­tion as a man of affairs and his genius as a poet were well established. Today, in the history of Eng­lish literature, Chaucer's name stands second only to that of Shakespeare.

One of Chaucer's most important contributions to English literature is his development of the resources of the English language for literary pur­poses. In his day, English was still considered primarily a rough peasant language. England's Nor­man rulers had introduced French to England, and this language was still spoken in court circles and by the aristocracy. Church Latin was used in the monasteries, the centers of learning, and was still at the command of the educated. Although earlier poets had written in primitive English, there was very little English literature beyond the range of traditional and anonymous ballads. When he began to write, therefore, Chaucer had to proceed by trial and error, taking his models at first from French and Italian sources and feeling his way toward a full use of his native tongue. Chaucer himself spoke late Middle English, the London speech of his day. By using this language instead of the more fashionable French for his poetry, he added tremen­dously to its prestige and set an example that was followed thereafter.

As a writer, Chaucer was extremely prolific. In his early short lyrics and longer works such as The Book of the Duchess, we see the influence of the French poetry of his day. Later, in works such as Parliament of Fowls and Tioilus and Criseyde, his writing reflected the influence of the Italian mas­ters Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. By 1386, when he began The Canterbury Tales, his most ambitious work, he had become master of his craft.

For The Canterbury Tales Chaucer used the structural device of the frame story, a popular one used in the thousand and one tales of The Arabian Nights' Entertainment and the one hundred tales of Boccaccio's Decameron. As the frame around which to group his tales, Chaucer chose a spring­time pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, the site of the splendid shrine of St. Thomas a Becket, who had been murdered there two centuries before. In Chaucer's day it was customary throughout Europe for members of all classes to travel to religious shrines to seek miraculous cures, to gain remission of their sins, or simply to satisfy their wanderlust. In England the pilgrimage to Canter­bury was by far the most popular, and to this day traces of the old "pilgrims' way" still persist.

Chaucer's choice of frame for The Canterbury Tales, in addition to giving equal scope to his tal­ents as narrator, philosopher, dramatist, and obser­ver, had several other advantages. By using the device of a journey, it was possible to bring to­gether quite naturally persons of varied occupa­tions and diverse social rank, a rarity in medieval society. Thus Chaucer was able to present in his work a cross-section of medieval society, drawing his characters from the three most important groups of his day —feudal, ecclesiastical, and urban. The characters who are members of the feudal system are related to the land: these are the Knight, the Squire, the Yeoman, the Franklin, the Reeve, the Miller, and the Plowman. Those in the ecclesiastical order represent individuals belonging to the medieval church: the Parson, the Sum-moner, the Monk, the Prioress, the Friar, the Par­doner, and the Student. The other pilgrims are pro fessional and mercantile laymen from the fast-growing towns of Chaucer's day: the Physician, the Lawyer, the Manciple, the Merchant, the Shipman, the tradesmen, the Cook, the Wife of Bath (a clothmaker), and the Innkeeper.

Chaucer's plan for The Canterbury Tales was an ambitious one. Each pilgrim was to tell two stories on the way to Canterbury and two on the return journey to London. The poet died, however, before this plan was realized and, instead of the proposed one hundred twenty-four stories, he wrote only twenty-four. The portion of the work that was completed, however, is a masterpiece of vivid and realistic writing. Setting his work in his own time, he established a realistic style of writing that was to persist for centuries. Chaucer's descriptions of the pilgrims in his Prologue are considered by his­torians as our best picture of life in fourteenth-cen­tury England. In these portraits Chaucer's own background and temperament are reflected. A man of the world, large-minded, humane, tolerant, and amused by his fellow human beings, he shows a profound understanding of human motivation, and comments —sometimes seriously, sometimes hu­morously—both on his characters and on some of the most critical social problems of his day. His tone ranges from comic to ironic to satirical, but always he reveals himself as a genial and warm­hearted person who has sympathy for his fellow human beings.

Though The Canterbury Tales is often referred to as the first collection of short stories in English literature, these stories, unlike the modern short story, are written in poetry rather than in prose. In the Prologue, Chaucer experimented with rhymed pairs of five-beat iambic lines, a verse form known as the heroic couplet and popularized three cen­turies later by John Dryden and Alexander Pope. Chaucer's style in The Canterbury Tales is remark­ably flexible. Chaucer died in 1400 and was buried in West­minster Abbey. He was the first English poet to be buried in what has come to be known as the Poets' Corner.