Тема 2. Рассказы и легенды средневековой Англии
(1066 – 1476)
Распространение французской литературы. Сосуществование трех языков в общественной жизни и литературе. Народное сатирическое творчество в среде низшего духовенства: вольнодумные стихи на латинском языке. Народные баллады.Жанровое многообразие средневековой английской литературы. конецформыначалоформыДжефри Чосер как основоположник реализма и литературного английского языка. Микрокосм средневековья в «Кентерберийских рассказах». Влияние Чосера на развитие английской литературы. Начало книгопечатания. «Смерть Артура» Томаса Мэлори как синтез средневекового этапа развития романов артуровского цикла. Происхождение средневековой драмы,конецформыначалоформы конецформыначалоформыэтапы её развития и основные жанры (мистерия, моралитэ, фарсы). Жанровое своеобразие.
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02 MERRY OLD ENGLAND: STORIES AND LEGENDS (1066 – 1476)
2.1. Распространение французской литературы. Сосуществование трех языков в общественной жизни и литературе. Народное сатирическое творчество в среде низшего духовенства: вольнодумные стихи на латинском языке. Народные баллады.
The first four hundred years of the second millennium were hard for England. It remained a backyard of Europe, and was torn apart by greedy lords and rival feudal families. The written work of the period is much better documented than that of the earlier period. At the beginning though, it was largely written in French or Latin.
Most of the literary pieces are religious in character. Material in English appears as a trickle in the 13th century, but within 150 years it became a flood. There was a marked increased in the number of translated writings during the 14th century. Guild records, proclamations, proverbs, dialogues, allegories, and letters illustrate the diverse range of new styles and genres. Middle English poetry was influenced by French literary traditions, both in content and style. Later works include romances in the French style, secular lyrics, bestiaries, ballads, biblical poetry, Christian legends, hymns, prayers, and elegies.
The most puzzling episode in the development of later Middle English literature was the sudden reappearance of unrhymed alliterative poetry in the mid-14th century. Debate continues as to whether the group of long, serious, and sometimes learned poems written between about 1350 and 1410should be regarded as an "alliterative revival" or rather as the late flowering of a largely lost native tradition stretching back to the Old English period.
Among the poems central to the movement were three pieces dealing with the life and legends of Alexander, the massive Destruction of Troy, and the Siege of Jerusalem. The fact that all of these derived from various Latin sources suggests that the anonymous poets were likely to have been clerics with a strong, if bookish, historical sense of their romance "matters." The "matter of Britain" was represented by an outstanding composition, the alliterative Morte Arthure, an epic portrayal of King Arthur's conquests in Europe and his eventual fall, combining a strong narrative thrust with considerable density and subtlety of diction. The poem was later used by Sir Thomas Malory as a source for his prose account, Le Morte Darthur (completed c. 1470).
The alliterative movement would today be regarded as a curious but inconsiderable episode, were it not for other poems now generally attributed to a single anonymous author. One of them is the chivalric romance Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, miraculously preserved in a single manuscript dated c. 1400. The poet of Sir Gawayne far exceeded the other alliterative writers in his mastery of form and style, and though he wrote ultimately as a moralist, human warmth and sympathy (often taking comic form) were also close to the heart of his work. It is likely that alliterative poetry, under aristocratic patronage, filled a gap in the literary life of the provinces caused by the decline of Anglo-Norman in the latter half of the 14th century. Alliterative poetry was not unknown in London and the southeast, but it penetrated those areas in a modified form and in poems that dealt with different subject matter.
William Langland's long alliterative poem Piers Plowman (c.1370) begins with a vision of the world seen from the hills in Worcestershire, where, tradition has it, the poet was born and brought up, and where he would have been open to the influence of the alliterative movement. If what he tells about himself in the poem is true (and there is no other source of information), he later lived obscurely in London as a cleric. The poem takes the form of a series of dream visions. Realistic and allegorical elements are mingled in a phantasmagoric way, and both the poetic medium and the structure are frequently subverted by the writer's spiritual and didactic impulses. Passages of theological reasoning mingle with satire, and moments of sublime religious feeling appear alongside political comment. This makes it a work of the utmost difficulty, but at the same time Langland never fails to convince the reader of the passionate integrity of his writing. His bitter attacks on political and ecclesiastical corruption (especially among the friars) quickly struck chords with his contemporaries.
The alliterative movement was over before the first quarter of the 15th century had passed. The other major strand in the development of English poetry from about 1350 proved much more durable. The cultivation and refinement of human sentiment with respect to love, already present in earlier 14th-century writings, took firm root in English court culture during the reign of Richard II (1377-99). English began to displace Anglo-Norman French as the language spoken at court and in aristocratic circles, and signs of royal and noble patronage for English vernacular writers became evident. These processes undoubtedly created some of the conditions that encouraged and gave direction to the genius of one author who eventually established English as a literary language. His name was Geoffrey Chaucer.
A wonderful phenomenon in early English literature is its balladry. British ballads, which form a particularly rich and artistic canon, most often consist of a series of quatrains having the stress pattern 4 3 4 3 (such quatrains were originally 7-stress couplets), but a 4 4 4 4 stress pattern is also popular. The quatrains are rhymed and often have refrains to comment on the action or to emphasize mood. Dialogue often proceeds without identification of the speakers, and conversation and action often build incrementally to a dramatic conclusion. Some ballads move in what has been described as a “lingering and leaping” style, focusing on one vignette, then suddenly jumping to a completely different scene. Much of the language and action are stylized: Cliches are frequent (“rosy-red lips,” ”lily-white hands,” ”milk-white steeds”), as is conventionalized conduct (a lover opening a casket to kiss the “cold, clay lips” of a corpse; a man taking a girl on his knee to hear an explanation). Stories may even share standardized conclusions.
Ballads differ greatly in their themes, of course. If to scrutinize their subjects attentively, one will see that by far the largest group of ballads deals with the stuff of tabloid journalism – sensation tales of lust, revenge, and domestic crime. Unwed mothers slay their newborn babies; lovers unwilling to marry their pregnant mistresses brutally murder the poor women. Brothers kill one another out of jealousy or in rivalry over a girl. Incest is surprisingly frequent. Some ballads treat the relations of supernatural beings and human folk, which is the concern of some of the finest English ballads. As for humourous ballads, these with monotonous regularity have to do with the shabby dealings of incompatible married couples: the cuckold, the shrewish wife, the discontented spouse who is frustrated in the attempt to "do in" the other partner.
Somewhat artificially, scholars divide the English-language ballads into traditionalballads, broadside ballads, and native ballads of former British colonies. The traditional ballads are also known as Child ballads after the American scholar Francis James Child, who, in his book The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (5 volumes, 1882-98), compiled what he considered a canon of 305 ballads the histories of which date from or nearly from the Middle Ages. Although only eight ballads can be traced in manuscript and print to the Middle Ages, and although Child missed some ballads ,his canon has been so widely accepted that to call a ballad a Child ballad is to say that it represents the oldest British tradition. “The Sweet Trinity” (commonly sung in America as “The Golden Vanity”), “The Elfin Knight” (commonly sung in America as “Scarborough Fair”) are all Child ballads.
Are you going to Scarborough Fair
Parsley sage rosemary and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine
Tell her to make me a cambric shirt
Parsley sage rosemary and thyme
Without no seams nor needlework
Then she’ll be a true love of mine
Tell her to find me an acre of land
Parsley sage rosemary and thyme
Between the salt water and the sea strand
Then she’ll be a true love of mine
Tell her to reap it with a sickle of leather
Parsley sage rosemary and thyme
And gather it all in a bunch of heather
Then she’ll be a true love of mine
(The above is a modernized version of The Elfin Knight sung by Simon and Garfunkel in the 1967 Oscar-winning movie, The Graduate)
Broadside ballads are those that appeared, normally without music, on the broadsheets that printers sold as a form of early newspaper to capitalize on hangings, battles, and other sensationalism. A printer who ran out of copy might well put an old ballad on the sheet. Broadside ballads flourished in Britain from as early as the 1500s until they were superseded by modern songbooks, sheet music, and records.
In this country, the first English folk ballads to get wide popularity due to translation into Russian were the ballads about Robin Hood. Originally, those were quite a common commodity as early as the end of the 14th century. In the 15th century several chroniclers, both Scottish and English, allude to the popularity of the ballads about Robin Hood and his merry men. But none of the early chroniclers has anything to say about the outlaw as a historical person. Using poetic license, perhaps, Sir Walter Scott, in his Ivanhoe, casts Robin Hood (his Locksley) as the leader of Saxon guerillas still holding out against the Norman regime.
Diligent searches in ancient manorial rolls and court records have unearthed a number of Robin Hoods, several of them plausible prospects for the outlaw. Anyway, it is obvious that the real biography of such a man, if it could be reconstructed, would be pale stuff beside the exploits of the legendary character.
Stylistically the Robin Hood ballads are in a class by themselves. The older ballads seem to have been composed not by folk singers but by professional minstrels. The ballads dwell lovingly on the forest scenery, for example. Everywhere the minstrel intrudes into the story. This is quite unlike popular balladry.
2.2. конецформыначалоформыДжефри Чосер как основоположник реализма и литературного английского языка. Микрокосм средневековья в «Кентерберийских рассказах». Влияние Чосера на развитие английской литературы.
In the Middle Ages English literature experienced a great breakthrough which is associated with the name of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343?-1400). He is one of the greatest English poets, whose masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, was one of the most important influences on the development of English literature. His life is known primarily through records pertaining to his career as a courtier and civil servant under the English kings Edward III and Richard II.
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Chaucer wrote for and may have read his works aloud to a select audience of fellow courtiers and officials, which doubtless sometimes included members of the royal family. The culture of the English upper class was still predominantly French, and Chaucer's earliest works were influenced by the fashionable French poets and by the great 13th-century dream allegory Le Roman de la Rose.The common theme of these works is courtly love.
Chaucer claimed to have translated Le Roman de la Rose, but if he did, all that survives is a fragment. His first important original work, The Book of the Duchess, is an elegy for John of Gaunt's first wife, Blanche, who died in 1369. In a dream the poet encounters a grieving knight in black (Gaunt) who movingly recounts his love and loss of “good fair White” (Blanche). The House of Fame and The Parlement of Foules, also dream poems, show the influence of Dante and of Giovanni Boccaccio, whose works Chaucer probably encountered on his first journey to Italy. The unfinished House of Fame gives a humorous account of the poet's frustrating journey in the claws of a giant golden eagle (the idea is from Dante) to the palace of the goddess Fame. In The Parlement he witnesses an inconclusive debate about love among the different classes of birds. All three dream visions, written from about 1373 to about 1385, contain a mixture of comedy and serious speculation about the puzzling nature of love.
In this period, Chaucer also translated and adapted religious, historical, and philosophical works: a life of Saint Cecilia; a series of medieval “tragedies,” brief lives of famous men cast down by adverse fortune; a translation of De Consolatione Philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), written by the Roman philosopher Anicius Boethius to proclaim his faith in divine justice and providence. The latter work profoundly influenced Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (1385?) and The Knight's Tale, both adapted from romances by Boccaccio.
Troilus, a poem of more than 8000 lines, is Chaucer's major work besides The Canterbury Tales. It is the tragic love story of the Trojan prince Troilus, who wins Criseyde (Cressida), aided by the machinations of his close friend, her uncle Pandarus, and then loses her to the Greek warrior Diomede. The love story turns into a deeply felt medieval tragedy, the human pursuit of transitory earthly ideals that pale into insignificance beside the eternal love of God. The poem ends with the narrator's solemn advice to young people to flee vain loves and turn their hearts to Christ. Chaucer's characters are psychologically so complex that the work has also been called the first modern novel.
In the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women (1386?), another dream vision, the god of love accuses Chaucer of heresy for writing of Criseyde's unfaithfulness and assigns him the penance of writing the lives of Cupid's martyrs—faithful women who died for love. After completing eight of these legends, Chaucer probably abandoned the work and by 1387 was engaged on his masterpiece.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories set within a framing story of a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, the shrine of Saint Thomas а Becket. The poet joins a band of pilgrims, vividly described in the General Prologue, who assemble at the Tabard Inn outside London for the journey to Canterbury. Ranging in status from a Knight to a humble Plowman, they are a microcosm of English society of the time. Host proposes a storytelling contest to pass the time; each of the 30 or so pilgrims (the exact number is unclear) is to tell four tales on the round round trip. Chaucer completed less than a quarter of this plan. The work contains 22 verse tales (two unfinished) and two long prose tales; a few are thought to be pieces written earlier by Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales, composed of more than 18,000 lines of poetry, is made up of separate blocks of one or more tales with links introducing and joining stories within a block.
The tales represent nearly every variety of medieval story at its best. The special genius of Chaucer's work, however, lies in the dramatic interaction between the tales and the framing story. After the Knight's courtly and philosophical romance about noble love, the Miller interrupts with a deliciously bawdy story of seduction aimed at the Reeve (an officer or steward of a manor); the Reeve takes revenge with a tale about the seduction of a miller's wife and daughter. Thus, the tales develop the personalities, quarrels, and diverse opinions of their tellers. The prologues and tales of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner are high points of Chaucer's art. The Wife, an outspoken champion of her gender against the traditional antifeminism of the church, initiates a series of tales about sex, marriage, and nobility (“gentilesse”). The Pardoner gives a chilling demonstration of how his eloquence in the pulpit turns the hope of salvation into a vicious confidence game. Although Chaucer in this way satirizes the abuses of the church, he also includes a number of didactic and religious tales, concluding with the good Parson's sermon on penitence; this is followed by a personal confession in which Chaucer “retracts” all his secular writings, and those Canterbury tales that “incline toward sin.” The retraction is a reminder that Chaucer's genius was always subject to orthodox piety.
Chaucer greatly increased the prestige of English as a literary language and extended the range of its poetic vocabulary and meters. He was the first English poet to use the seven-line stanza in iambic pentameter known as rhyme royal and the couplet later called heroic. His system of versification, which depends on sounding many e's in final syllables that are silent (or absent) in modern English, ceased to be understood by the 15th century. Nevertheless, Chaucer dominated the works of his 15th-century English followers. For the Renaissance, he was the English Homer. Edmund Spenser paid tribute to him as his master; many of the plays of William Shakespeare show thorough assimilation of Chaucer's comic spirit. John Dryden, who modernized several of the Canterbury tales, called Chaucer the father of English poetry.
2.3. Начало книгопечатания. «Смерть Артура» Томаса Мэлори как синтез средневекового этапа развития романов артуровского цикла.
Book printing in England was started by William Caxton (1422?-1491). He was born probably in Tenterden, Kent. In 1441 Caxton moved to Brugge (Bruges), Flanders (now part of Belgium), where he opened his own textile business, and about 1471 he moved to Cologne, Germany, where he learned the art of printing. At this time Caxton was also translating into English a popular French romance, which he printed in Brugge as The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1474?). It is famous as the first book printed in English. Returning to England in 1476, Caxton set up a printing press at Westminster Abbey. His first publication there was an indulgence, which was distributed in December 1476. During his career Caxton printed nearly 100 publications, about 20 of which he also translated from French and Dutch. Among the more notable books from his press are The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Caxton also wrote prefaces and epilogues to many of the works he published, notably the preface to the prose epic Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. In this, as in all his original writing, he displayed a lively, humorous style that considerably influenced 15th-century English literature.
Sir Thomas Malory ( ?—1471?) is an English translator and compiler, who is generally held to have been the author of the first great English prose epic, Le morte d'Arthur (The Death of Arthur). It is believed that he was an English knight of Warwickshire, that he saw military service in France, and that he spent many years in prison for political offenses and civic crimes.Le morte d'Arthur (1469-1470) was supposedly composed while the author was in prison. It was published in 1485by the first English printer, William Caxton. It is a compilation and translation from old French sources (with additions from English sources and the compiler's own composition) of most of the tales about the semilegendary Arthur, king of the Britons, and his knights. One of the outstanding prose works of Middle English, it is divided into 21 books. The work is imbued with compassion for human faults and nostalgia for the bygone days of chivalry. The poetic prose is noted for its color, dignity, simplicity, and melodic quality.
Yet many men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of Our Lord Jesu into another place; and many men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the holy cross. I will not say that it shall be so, rather I will say that here in tghis world he changed his life. But many men say that there is written upon his tomb this verse: HIC IACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS. (Here lies Arthur, the once and future king.)
2.4. Происхождение средневековой драмы,конецформыначалоформы конецформыначалоформыэтапы её развития и основные жанры (миракль, мистерия, моралитэ, фарсы). Жанровое своеобразие.
Drama begins at that time. Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually short-lived performance scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century onward two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery or Corpus Christi cycles and the morality plays.
The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and Redemption of mankind, based mostly on biblical narratives. They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain and Abel and Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has a most impressively realized version of Christ's Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative style in verse.
The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of a single character, representing the whole of mankind, from the cradle to the grave and sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and so forth. The single most impressive piece is undoubtedly Everyman, a superb English rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality plays have been frequently revived and performed in the 20th century.
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Check your understanding. Prepare extended answers to the following questions.
· Why was Middle English poetry influenced by French literary traditions, both in content and style?
· What is the difference, if any, between the mystery or Corpus Christi cycles and the morality plays?
· What makes William Langland's Piers Plowman an outstanding composition?
· Why are the following names put together: Homer, Dante, Bocaccio,and Chaucer?
· What are the contributions made by Caxton and Malory?
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ADDITIONAL READING
SELECTION ONE
Read one of Chaucer's poems and say what you think of the text.
TO ROSEMUNDE
A BALADE
Madame, ye ben of al beaute shrine
As fer as cercled is the mappemunde,
For as the crystal glorious ye shyne,
And lyke ruby ben your chekes rounde.
Therwith ye ben so mery and so jocunde,
That at a revel whan that I see you daunce,
It is an oynement unto my wounde,
Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce.
For thogh I wepe of teres ful a tyne,
Yet may that wo myn herte nat confounde;
Your seemly voys that ye so small outwyne
Maketh my thought in joye and blis habounde.
So curteisly I go, with love bounde,
That to my-self I sey, in my penaunce,
Suffyseth me to love you, Rosemounde,
Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce.
Nas never pyk walwed in galauntyne
As I in love am walwed and y-wounde;
For which ful ofte I of my-self divine
That I am trewe Tristam the secounde.
My love may not refreyd be nor afounde;
I brenne ay in an amorous plesaunce.
Do what you list, I wil your thrall be founde,
Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce.
SELECTION TWO
Study the information about a poet of royal blood.
The son of Henry V and Catherine of Valois, Henry was born in 1421, and came to the throne of England and then of France on his father's death, Sept. 1, 1422. John, duke of Bedford, was appointed protector. Henry was crowned in 1437, and married Margaret of Anjou, who was more astute at politics and warfare than her husband, who was pious and deeply concerned with education. For example, he founded Eton and King's College, Cambridge. Henry lost control of France gradually and was subject to periods of mental derangement. Civil war broke out with the Yorkists in the mid-1450s. He was imprisoned by Yorkist nobility, deposed by Edward IV, imprisoned by him, restored to the throne briefly, only to be deposed again. Imprisonment followed the Battle of Tewkesbury when his son, Edward, Prince of Wales, was killed. Henry VI was murdered, perhaps by the future Richard III, in the Tower of London on May 21, 1471.
Kingdomes are but Cares (attributed to Henry VI)
Kingdomes are but cares;
State ys devoyd of staie;
Ryches are redy snares,
And hastene to decaie.
Plesure ys a pryvie prycke
Wich vyce doth styll provoke;
Pompe, unprompt; and fame, a flame;
Powre, a smouldryng smoke.
Who meenethe to remoofe the rocke
Owte of the slymie mudde,
Shall myre hymselfe, and hardlie scape
The swellynge of the flodde.