Old English Literature (AD 450 – 1066) The Middle English literature (1066 – 1485)

Old English Literature (AD 450 – 1066) The Middle English literature (1066 – 1485). The Renaissance literature.

1. Analysis of Beowulf.

An Analysis of Beowulf: Symbiosis of Hero and Monster.

Beowulf is the quintessential Anglo-Saxon hero. He 
symbolises the manners and values dictated by the Germanic 
heroic code, such as loyalty, courage, courtesy, honour and 
discipline. His ironclad commitment to the heroic code with 
it's emphasis on glory in life and after death leads him 
beyond heroic necessity to excess and pride. However, for 
Beowulf to achieve immortal fame after death his heroic 
abilities must be challenged. Therefore, heroes and monsters 
must exit symbiotically in order to define each other as 
heroic or monstrous.

Seamus Heaney argues that Beowulf's encounters with 
the three monsters in the poem (essentially Grendel, 
Grendel's mother, and the dragon) "as the three agons in the 
hero's life" (xxvii) . The protagonist, Beowulf, is 
evaluated by these three antagonists and it could be argued 
that the poet exploits these three enemies as figures to 
exhibit Beowulf's physical strength and his superb ability 
as a warrior. "The monsters (in Beowulf) are not an 
inexplicable blunder of taste; they are essential, 
fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem." 
(Tolkein, Page 115). They are the perfect enemies for a 
young glory-hunter who ultimately lives for the preservation 
of earthly glory after death.

Our first impression of the great thane, Beowulf, is 
that he is the absolute antithesis of the malicious Grendel; 
indeed, even before his name is mentioned in the poem he is 
declared as "the mightiest man on earth, highborn and 
powerful". The disparity between Beowulf and Grendel is 
established immediately within the poem, but their 
relationship is symbiotic in ways. Although Beowulf is 
elevated to hero status by his people, he requires Grendel 
to exist in order for him to be heroic and to ensure this 
long-lasting fame even after his death. Similarly, Grendel 
requires Beowulf to exist in order for him to be defined as 
a monster. Beowulf is loved by the Danes, Grendel is feared. 
Grendel embodies everything that Beowulf is not, and he acts 
as an ominous reminder to all men of the importance of 
remaining true to one's lord, and of the severe, 
irrevocable implications that are thrust upon anyone who 
dares to betray one of their tribe, as Cain did when he 
slaughtered Abel.

However, perhaps there is also evidence in the poem to 
suggest that Beowulf and Grendel may not be completely 
dissimilar as would initially appear. In his battles, 
Beowulf displays his supernatural strength. In his fight 
against Grendel, even though Grendel is renowned worldwide 
for his ferocity and brutality: "he grabbed thirty 
men...blundering back with the butchered corpses" 
(122-125), he insists in fighting without the aid of 
weapons. This mysterious action can be interpreted in many 
ways. One may suggest that it is evidence of his 
"ofermod", like what the poet attributes to Byrthtnoth 
in The Battle of Maldon, that he can be as monstrous and 
bestial as Grendel, possibly even more so based on his 
victory.

Furthermore, Robin Hood is also notorious for displaying 
"ofermod" as is evident in Robin Hood and the Monk. The 
hero attempts to enter Nottingham alone, without his 
disguise and band of yeomen, and thus places himself in 
mortal danger. The hero's imprudent attitude to his own 
safety, his devotion to the Virgin, his courage and his 
determination echo the heroic scene in Beowulf, when Beowulf 
enters the dragon's lair alone. Robin Hood, like Beowulf, 
is intellectually blinded by his stringent adherence to the 
heroic code.

Seemingly, Beowulf's mission in life is to ensure the 
immortalisation of his fame at all costs. This is apparent 
from the final line of the poem, when he is remembered as 
being "the keenest to win fame" (3182). Therefore, it 
appears implausible that Beowulf would have ventured into 
battle against a deadly monster, without weapons, if he 
believed there was a strong possibility that he may be 
defeated. The likelihood of him risking his life at a 
relatively young age, and thereby putting his precious fame 
in jeopardy seems quite unlikely.

The boundary between Beowulf and the monsters is 
considerably less definite than one may have imagined. Some 
critics argue that the fearsome she-monster, Grendel's 
mother, can be seen in some ways as representative of this 
apparent merge between humans and monsters within the poem. 
In one sense, she is nothing more than another repulsive 
monster, a "monstrous hell-bride" (1259), a 
"tarn-hag" (1519). Yet, at the same time, we also see 
her as a bereaved mother, overwhelmed with sorrow and anger 
after her only son's violent death, who is determined to 
avenge his murder, a practice which would have been quite 
acceptable in those times. Perhaps then it is possible that 
she is not a typical monster and that her human attributes 
are profoundly distorted to make her less human and 
effectively more acceptable to kill despite her gender.

Similarly, this distortion of the human attributes of 
the enemy is noticeable in The Battle of Maldon. This poem 
embodies the conflict of heroism and cowardice as seen in 
the Anglo-Saxons' battle against the Vikings. The poet 
distinguishes the Vikings from the Anglo-Saxons by 
exemplifying them as "the wolves of war" (Hamer 97). The 
poet's purpose for doing this can be analysed in numerous 
ways. Perhaps the poet is attempting to dehumanise the 
Vikings by depicting them in terms of their animalistic and 
bestial qualities in order to disassociate the Anglo-Saxons 
from them. Hatred of the enemy is magnified when the 
self-other boundary is enlarged, and perhaps this is one of 
the reasons why the enemy must always be categorised on a different level.

This creation of the self-other division with the enemy 
is still evident in society today, for example if we 
consider the 9/11 terrorist attacks. "One man's 
terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". Before 9/11, 
terrorists would have been viewed, in a more positive light, 
as freedom fighters. At present, as a result of the power of 
media, freedom fighters are not seen as people attempting to attain 
freedom, but as a source of evil in itself terrorising 
humanity. The enemy's human qualities are distorted beyond 
reality in order to make it tolerable to hate and kill them.

Consequently, the symbiotic relationship which exists between Beowulf  
and the monsters in this poem cannot simply be dismissed as a simple case  
of "good versus evil", the humans being "good" and the monsters being 
"evil". By allowing us to see the complexity of these 
creatures, the author of Beowulf uncovers a newfound depth 
to the conventional stereotype of monsters. However, one 
must remain unbiased and question the presentation of the 
enemy because, as the poem illustrates, humans can be just 
as capable of carrying out the same horrific actions as beasts.

2. The Middle England. Medieval genres.

Middle English Genres:

Courtly Romance--Knight's, Man of Law's, Squire's Tale  
Breton Lay (short romantic poem, not a song)--Franklin's Tale  
Fabliaux (fable-like short story with a snappy ending)--Miller's, Reeve's, Merchant's Tale  
Tragedy (through medieval eyes, at least)--the Monk's Tale  
Exempla--Pardoner's, Wife of Bath's Tale  
Sermon (or didactic treatise)--Parson's Tale  
Beast Fable--the Nun's Priest's Tale 

About Misogynic Literature in the Middle Ages:

The Wife of Bath's complaint that literature is anti feminist because it is written by men has more recently been made a literary history. Feminist criticism has pointed out that literary history, though not outspokenly misogynist like some medieval literature, has nevertheless presented female experience and creativity from a predominantly male point of view. Because traditional literary history excludes many women writers from the canon and because it starts chronologically with periods when only a few highly privileged women could write at all, which did in fact prevail until very recent times, that authorship is essentially a male prerogative.

The ideal of virginity and Antifeminism:

Medieval literature reveals two diametrically opposed stereotypes of women, one represented by Eve, who caused the Fall of man, and the other by Mary, sometimes referred to as the Second Eve, who bore the Savior of man. The Latin Ave, the angel's salutation to Mary (Ave, Mary), it was noted at that time, is "Eva" spelled backward; and as the Fall was associated with Eve's sexuality, so salvation was associated with Mary's virginity. The medieval cult of the Virgin is closely connected with the ideal of chivalry. The image of Mary is pictured on the inside of Sir Gawain's shield (I, lines 648-50), and he is "her knight" (I, line 1769). Her power is a function of her purity: virginity is the force that enables the weak to control the strong. The mystery and idealism that surrounded virginity is very much in chivalric culture. At the other extreme, woman is seen as the seducer and betrayer of man. In the first shock of shame, when the Green Knight confronts Sir Gawain with knowledge of the green girdle, Gawain bitterly accuses the ladies who have tricked him and launches into a diatribe against women, starting with eve. Although the speech is a typical example of antifeminism, we need not take it at face value because, in the case of sophisticated writers like the Gawain poet or Chaucer, characters and even narrators don't necessarily speak for the author. The very existence of the extreme views, moreover, creates opportunities for irony that cuts in more than one direction. By making Sir Gawain, hitherto the model of chivalry, churlishly condemn women like a medieval clerk, the poet, with humor and understanding, lets us see his hero's human imperfections and the instinct of even the best of knights to blame his failure on a woman, just as Adam did. Sir Gawain, it should be noted, recovers his poise and accepts the blame for his own fault along with the green girdle as a reminder of it. 

Complex irony also qualifies the antifeminism in the "Wife of Bath's Prologue." We can easily see the irony that, by her own account, the Wife is herself the domineering, lustful, and calculating shrew painted by the antifeminist writers. That portrait, though, has been humorously exaggerated, in part by the Wife herself, whose intention, she tells the pilgrims, "nis but for to pleye" (line 198). In addition to her less admirable traits, Chaucer has endowed the Wife with humor, generosity, an irresistable zest for life, and, not least, a stubborn refusal to let herself be exploited in a world where women have no education and few rights, and where rich old men acquire young girls as property. Her "Prologue" can be read as an indictment of the culture that caricatures women and denies them any human dignity. In the Wife's marriage to her fifth husband, the former Oxford clerk who torments her with anecdotes from his "book of wikked wives" (line 691), Chaucer humorously, but also with much poignancy, portrays the clash between Woman and "Auctoritee," the clerical establishment that condemns her.  
    Fabliaux such as "The Miller's Tale" stereotype women as cunning and faithless. At the same time, the comedy creates sympathy for them, and their male victims usually deserve their fate. Like Alison and the Wife of Bath in her first three marriages, fabliau heroines are often spirited young women coupled with old husbands, and the authors sympathize with their natural impulses and desires for a freer life.  
    In The Second Shepherd's Play (which I did not assign your class to read), the Wakefield Master has created a delightful counterpoint between the two types of womanhood. Gill's and Mak's constant breeding keeps the family poor and hungry; when Mak steals a lamb, Gill, with typical female cunning, devises the scheme of disguising it as her newborn baby. The plot of the stolen lamb is followed by the Nativity scene with Gill's counterpart, the Virgin, and the true Lamb of God, the Christ Child. This juxtaposition has none of the stern opposition of "Eva" and "Ave." In the context of Christmas play, Gill and the Virgin share a common humanity with each other and with the male characters that draws our sympathy.

Noble or gentlewomen: when the noble or gentle widow happened to survive her husband or children who had died  
through violence and disease and lived herself to and advanced age, she had exceptional opportunities and motives to pursue a more consistent life of seclusion, reading, reflection, and prayer, approximating to that of a nun or a solitary, sharing their circumstances and even taking their vows. 

Courtly love  
    In theory "courtly love" has been seen as the other side of the coin of antifeminism. Scholars have used the term to designate a set of literary conventions that supposedly idealizes women and makes them into objects of worship. The lady is wooed, usually at a distance, by a knight who fights in her honor, calls himself her "servant," and suffers insomnia, anorexia, pallor, chills and fever, and other symptoms that, he insists, will be his death if he does not obtain her "mercy." (Ex. St. George, the Redcross Knight, is Una's protector, her knight. Sir Philip Sidney's lyrics is based on courtly love.) The relationship between the knight and the lady is an inversion of the relationship between lord and vassal under feudalism. Because aristocratic women were married off for rank and property, and husbands enjoyed total authority over their wives, it has been argued that courtly love was incompatible with marriage and thus necessarily clandestine, although in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" and "Franklin's Tale" courtly suitors woo and marry their ladies. Whether courtly love had any bearing on actual social custom in the Middle Ages is a vexed question, but one may safely assume that the literature reflects a new deference toward "ladies" that still governs much of our social behavior.        

Chaucer almost always treats courtly love tongue-in-cheek. In "The Miller's Tale" the wooing of both Nicholas and  
Absolon parodies the language and gestures of courtly lovers, and of course the heroine is no lady. The Gawain poet stands courtly love on its head by having the lady woo the knight and reproach him with failing to behave like knights in romances (lines 1515-34). As with the antifeminist stereotype, the cliches about courtly love tend to dissolve when they are subjected to humor.  
        The only serious affair in the medieval section is that of Lancelot and Guinevere, but it is certainly no idealization of love or of woman. Throughout the Morte Darthur, Malory has portrayed Guinevere as imperious, passionate, and jealous. He reluctantly endorses Lancelot's loyalty to his lady, not so much because Lancelot loves her as because his honor demands it. Although forewarned, Lancelot visits her on the fatal night "Because the Queen has sent for me." On the other hand, once the adultery is made public, Arthur must have Guinevere burned at the stake because his honor requires it. Of Lancelot's rescue, Sir Gawain says, "he hathe done but knightly, and as I would have done myself and [if] I had stood in like case." What Gawain cannot forgive is Lancelot's inadvertent killing of Gawain's brothers in the course of the rescue. Lancelot's conflicting loves for Guinevere and for his brother knights ultimately destroys the Round Table. It is a conflict between love for a woman and male bonding, and the woman would be expendable were it not for the overriding consideration of honor. As Arthur ruefully confesses: "Much more I am sorrier for my good knights' loss [the loss of my good knights] than for the loss of my fair queen; for queen I might have enough, but such a fellowship of good knights shall never be together in no company."

The mysterious Pentangle  
The pentangle is a symbol of natural perfection. Gawain is said to be "faultless in his five senses" (line 640) and unfailing in his "five fingers" (line 641). (That is, he possesses the virtues of generosity or magnanimity, fellowship, chastity, courtesy, and pity or compassion). His faith in the five wounds of Christ and five joys of Mary suggests that he is the ideal Christian knight; loyalty to his lord, the cornerstone of feudal culture, is combined with devotion to Christ. Besides, it is said to be a token of truth (line 625). In accepting the magic girdle, Gawain fails a crucial test of virtue and reveals how difficult it is for a man to be the ideal Christian knight.

3. Medieval romances (Sir Thomas Malory's work, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight").

Middle English romance was the principal form of secular literature in later medieval England. More than eighty verse romances (metrical and alliterative), composed between c.1225 and c.1500, survive, often in multiple manuscript versions and, later, in early modern prints. The single most important literary legacy of the English Middle Ages - the ancestor of the modern novel as well as almost all contemporary popular fiction, in print and on screen - the Middle English romances provide us with a provocative insight into the medieval imaginary and they repeatedly challenge our assumptions about medieval English culture and its preoccupations.

The Database of Middle English Romance seeks to make this rich body of literature more readily accessible to the modern reader, both academic and lay. Key information, including (where known) date and place of composition, verse form, authorship and sources, extant manuscripts and early modern prints, is provided for each romance, as is a full list of modern editions, and a plot summary designed to allow readers to negotiate more easily the extraordinary diversity of the genre. There are direct links to all of the modern editions that are available online. The database is searchable by manuscript, by a set of fifty 'key words' (representing common motifs and topics found in more than one romance), by verse form, and by plot summary.

STORYTELLING was the great art of the Middle Ages, and the romance was a special form of this art. It was a long-continuing and popular SIR THOMAS MALORY form; the stories that Malory told were also in substance many hundreds of years old. They were ennobled by long tradition; they were, too, believed to be true history. But they represented at the same time an enlarged picture of contemporary life. This seems one way of defining the romance. It gives an idealized version of the life of the knightly class; it is the warrior's daydream, designed for recreation (or "solace"), not instruction (or "doctrine"), and representing the average sensual man's point of view. Such stories might also reflect and celebrate contemporary events; Malory in The Tale of the Noble King Arthur that was Emperor himself through Dignity of his Hands seems to shadow the glorious campaigns of Henry V, as his sourcepoem had those of Edward III and the Black Prince. But it is quite exceptional for romances to carry religious overtones, as in the great fourteenth-century poem of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In Malory, the Tale of the Sankgreal is a separate story, in which the religious is simply a particular department of the marvellous. Miracles or legends of the saints are the religious equivalent of the knightly romance; the marvellous was allowed a very large share in both kinds. Romance differs from epic in its readiness to include the fantastic, magical, and wishful elements largely within the action. In epic, though the world presented is enlarged and ennobled, it remains the world of everyday. It has been suggested that the epic material of one race or culture becomes romance when it is handed over to another race or culture and needs to be reinterpreted; when it has lost its social roots. Romance therefore presupposes epic; Malory recreated an epic story from romance. The hero of a medieval romance, whatever the age in which he lived, always becomes a knight. In the romances of Troy, Hector is described as a knight, the "root and stock of chivalry"; Alexander becomes a medieval king. So, too, Arthur the Romano-British chieftain was seen as a contemporary ruler surrounded by his chivalry, the knights of the Round Table. The heroic early French epic of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers of France underwent a similar transformation. The medieval epic poem, such as Beowulf or the Song of Roland, dealt with the war leader and his band or comitatus; ultimately the structure of feudal society was based upon such bands, united by personal oaths of fidelity which bound vassal to lord and lord to vassal. The strong personal unity of a group of fighting men, in which unshakable loyalty and courage were essential for survival, developed into the feudal state in which the barons were bound to their lord the king, the lesser tenants to their own lords, and the whole structure depended upon a network of loyalties, all of a personal kind. The society depicted in the romances is the uppermost stratum of this social order. There is very little sense of the underlying and supporting levels of society. In Malory this is particularly noticeable. The churls who appear are churlishly treated, as when Lancelot strikes an uncooperative carter "a reremain," a blow over the back of his neck with a mailed fist, and summarily stretches him dead. Manners consist in giving each man his due; and the Lady Lionesse thinks a kitchen knave deserves nothing but insults. The characters in romance are elected by age as well as class. They consist almost entirely of fighting men, their wives or mistresses, with an occasional clerk or an enchanter, a fairy or a friend, a giant or a dwarf. Time does not work on the heroes of Malory; they may beget sons who grow up to manhood, without seeming to change in themselves: it is impossible to think of an old age, still less a late middle age, for Lancelot or Guinevere. There are very few old men or women, almost no infants or children. It is also a world in which family relationships, though they exist, are usually of comparatively little significance. Fathers are finally supplanted by sons (Lancelot by Galahad, Arthur by Mordred); the relation of husband to wife is a feudal and not a personal one. Brothers are related chiefly as brothers-in-arms; sisters and mothers hardly exist. The deep relationships in this world are those of knight and vassal, or its mirror image of lady and lover; and of these, the former is in Malory the most important, the last exhibiting the same virtue of fidelity which is more amply mirrored in the comradeship of arms. There is no doubt that even in the loves of Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere, the masculine loyalties triumph. It is the mature recognition of responsibility for their guilt toward society that keeps Lancelot and Guinevere apart in the end. So later still Sir Lancelot laments over the two he had loved.

Even such lovers as Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, the delicacy and complexity of whose relationship is a matter of finest adjustment, are governed instinctively by the social demands that put marriage between a prince and the widowed daughter of the traitor Calchas quite out of court. Chaucer did not need to explain this; in Malory's day, when Edward IV married Elizabeth Woodville, Warwick the Kingmaker deserted him. For Malory, the story of Lancelot and Guinevere is one of divided loyalties; it is the social results of the love even more than the love itself which concern him, while the passionate story of Tristram and Isold fails to awaken his deeper interest, and remains episodic. Here the tragic end is missing, and the lovers are left happily together at Joyous Garde, Lancelot's castle, whither they have fled: their end is briefly mentioned by Lancelot, as the time of his own fall draws near. This may be quite deliberate; the end of a well-known story could be suppressed to make a particular interpretation clearer, as Chaucer himself suppressed the death of Criseyde. Tristram and Isold are not faced by the same dilemma as Lancelot and Guinevere, since Mark cannot claim loyalty, being himself so treacherous; and the magic potion which they have drunk takes from their love the guilt and the glory of a voluntary choice. Theirs is a blind trancelike passion; Lancelot and Guinevere, though the queen's stormy rages and jealous outbursts may complicate the story and drive Lancelot like Tristram into madness, prove for each other a kind of fidelity that belongs not to the world of fancy but to the world of men. In the great hymn in praise of fidelity in love, which opens Section IV of Lancelot and Guinevere, "The Knight of the Cart," Malory indulges in a rare lyric outburst. True love is likened unto summer; and in words which owe nothing to his "French book," though something perhaps to the joyous French songs that celebrate the coming of spring, he unites the love of man and woman with the great rhythms of the world and the seasons The pathos of Malory's "dying fall," the cadence dropping to a minor chord, is his tribute SIR THOMAS MALORY to those inward feelings which in his masculine world receive so little direct expression. As always, the supreme virtue is truth. The most famous and most magnificent passage in all Malory's work is the lament that closes it, the lament of Sir Ector de Maris over his brother, Sir Lancelot. Here the word "truest," sounds twice, like a tolling bell. It is the final picture of the perfect knight, the summary of all the paradoxical virtues of gentleness and sternness, all the defeated hopes that the knight prisoner had strengthened himself with in his prison IF, then, the inner core of feeling which lies at the center of Malory's world is the masculine bond of fidelity, the old loyalty of the band of fighting men, we should expect him to encounter some difficulty in dealing with the French romances upon which his work is for the most part based, since in these the love of knight and lady was often the leading motif. The elaborate and fanciful code of manners which in theory governed the behavior of courtly lovers, involving the absolute subjection of the knight to the lady, with all the artifice of courtly etiquette, and all the exotic ritual of a mock religion, was never really acclimatized in England. The lovely dream of the garden of the rose, which Guillaume de Lorris wrote and Chaucer translated, had indeed inspired some of Chaucer's love poetry; and early in the fifteenth century also had inspired that of a nobler prisoner than Malory, James I of Scotland, who, looking out of his prison tower, beheld a fair lady walking in a springtime garden. But the courtly manners of royalty required a setting that most readers and writers of romance did not know; they remade the stories, so that the kings, queens, and knights became enlarged versions of themselves, with manners to correspond. Probably the most courtly poem in English about Arthur's knights is the fourteenth century “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”.

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is a late 14th-century Middle English chivalric romance. It is one of the best known Arthurian stories, and is of a type known as the "beheading game". The Green Knight is interpreted by some as a representation of the Green Man of folklore and by others as an allusion to Christ. Written in stanzas of alliterative verse, each of which ends in a rhyming bob and wheel, it draws on Welsh, Irish and English stories, as well as the French chivalric tradition. It is an important poem in the romance genre, which typically involves a hero who goes on a quest which tests his prowess, and it remains popular to this day in modern English renderings from J. R. R. Tolkien, Simon Armitage and others, as well as through film and stage adaptations.

It describes how Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table, accepts a challenge from a mysterious "Green Knight" who challenges any knight to strike him with his axe if he will take a return blow in a year and a day. Gawain accepts and beheads him with his blow, at which the Green Knight stands up, picks up his head and reminds Gawain of the appointed time. In his struggles to keep his bargain Gawain demonstrates chivalry and loyalty until his honor is called into question by a test involving Lady Bertilak, the lady of the Green Knight's castle.

The poem survives in a single manuscript, the Cotton Nero A.x., which also includes three religious narrative poems: Pearl, Purity and Patience. All are thought to have been written by the same unknown author, possibly Cameron of Sutherland, dubbed the "Pearl Poet" or "Gawain Poet", since all four are written in a North West Midland dialect of Middle English.

Most of these English Arthurian romances deal with the adventures of some single knight. Sir Gawain, Sir Percival, Sir Launcefal and the rest are each shown as the center of a series of adventures. Some of the material belongs to the perennial world of the fairy tale; thus, tales of the fairy bride who rewards the knight with riches, with magic means to overcome his enemies, and sometimes with a fairy kingdom, are obviously popular subjects for a masculine daydream. Other tales tell of ordeals, the overcoming of magic obstacles, or war with giants, Sara-SIR THOMAS MALORY cens, devils. These are the two basic forms for the romantic adventures of a knightly hero. In Malory, however, we meet a whole world of knights. Sir Lancelot is its undisputed champion, but Percival, Tristram, Galahad, Gawain, Gareth, and many others take for a while the center of the stage. Malory's great work, as it would appear from the Winchester MS, which came to light in 1934 in the library of Winchester College, is a collection or anthology of tales about the Round Table. It is not a single narrative, but a group of narratives, like the Decameron or the Canterbury Tales; based, however, on a different principle of selection, that of a common subject: all the tales are about Arthur's knights. To see the work in this way enables the reader to measure Malory's progress and his growing power in shaping his material.2 Caxton, when he printed the work as if it were a single continuous narrative instead of an anthology, destroyed the perspective and blurred the outlines of Malory's work. By the recovery of their plan, the stories have acquired new shape and cohesion. First to be written was The Tale of the Noble King Arthur that was Emperor himself through Dignity of his Hands. This is a story of military triumph in which Arthur sets out to conquer Rome; which he does, and is crowned Emperor there, thus anticipating the glories of Charlemagne among epic heroes, and reflecting for Malory the triumphant conquests of Henry V. Professor Vinaver has shown how Malory modifies the course of Arthur's French campaign to correspond with the course of Henry's. This part of Malory's work is based on an English heroic poem, Le Morte Arthur; but here, as in the story of Tristram, Malory has cut out the tragic ending, and uses only the first part of the poem, which deals with Arthur's triumph. At the very end of his work he was to return to another English poem to help him in depicting The Most Piteous Tale of the Morte Arthur Saunz Guerdon. But in the interval he relied on various "French books," prose romances of great length, which he shaped and reorganized with increasing skill. Only for one or two stories, particularly The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkeney that was called Bewmaynes, are the sources of his work unknown. To trace the history of the stories of King Arthur is a lifetime's task; and the majority of scholars who give themselves to the study of Malory or of his originals are concerned mainly with constructing genealogical trees for the stories and disputing various theories of descent. This, though a fascinating game, is sometimes a way of evading the duty— at once more simple and more difficult—of seeing them as literature. But the idea of the Round Table is so central to Malory's work, and in itself so especially English a development of the story, that a brief sketch of it may be attempted.

4. William Langland "The Vision of Piers the Plowman". Pilgrimage as the cultural-historical phenomenon.

William Langland was a peasant by his descent, got some church education, was rather poor but very independent. They believe that he used to say about himself that he was "too high to bend low".

Langland is mostly known as the author of the allegorical didactic poem "The Vision of Piers the Plowman" ("Видение о Петре Пахаре") which is written by means of alliteration. In this poem the writer mostly attacks the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church in England. In the poem there are many abstract personages, but there is also one character whom the very life in the country gave birth to - this is Piers the Plowman, who has the features of a typical English peasant of the 14th century. And in the long run this name became a kind of symbol of a true hardworking person.

The poem consists of two parts and a prologue. There are 11 visions in the poem all in all.

In the 1st part the writer tells of the people's quest for "Holy Truth", in the 2nd part different abstract personages tell of their lives.

In the prologue the author tells of his dream: on a May day he fell asleep on a high hill and saw a dream. He saw "a field full of folk". There were different kinds of people on the field: some of them were poor, others were rich, some of them were working, others - wandering, etc. On one side of the field there was a beautiful tower - the home of T r u t h. On the other side of the field there is a grim prison - the home of E v i 1. The very field is the symbol of the whole mankind. So we may say that this is an allegory of life in general. But at the same time the people on the field are like the English people of that epoch: they show the features of English people who represent different layers of society - peasants, ploughmen, monks, knights, vagabonds, pardoners, churchmen, etc. And the author manages to find a very precise description to each of the person.

    In the 1st vision the story tells of a beautiful woman - "Holy Church" - she    speaks with the poet and says to him that the most valuable thing in the world is Truth. The Truth's friends are Love and Conscience. Her enemies in the poem are Lie, Hypocrisy, Bribe and Treachery.

Bribe appears in the 2nd vision. She is very, very beautiful and can seduce anyone she wants. Then follows the description of the wedding between Bribe and Deceit. Various statesmen gather to this feast. Bribe and Deceit are given a special document, according to which they have the right to lie, to boast, to curse and do many other bad things (the writer skillfully imitates the business language of that time). But the marriage was not concluded as Theology is against this. Then the King proposes the knight Conscience to marry Вribe but the knight would disagree. In the next scenes many other allegorical personages appear: Peace, Wisdom, Reason, Lie, etc.

Langland's poetic mastery is especially bright in the scene when the seven deadly sins appear before us: Pride, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, Covetousness, Lust, Sloth.

The episode which unites the whole poem is the theme of the quest for Holy Truth. The people on the field are called to seek Truth by Reason. But they do not know the way to Truth. And the only person who knows the way is Piers the Plowman as Conscience and Common Sense told him about it. The allegorical message of the poem is quite simple but profound - only those who work hard, know the true way in life.

5. Geoffrey Chaucer. Life and works.

Geoffrey Chaucer lived in an eventful age. He was born, they believe, in 1340 or thereabouts, when the Hundred Year's War with France had already begun. Three times in his life the plague known as the Black Death smote the country. When he was in his twenties the English language was established, for the first time, as the language of the law-courts. When Geoffrey Chaucer was in his late thirties the young and unfortunate Richard II ascended the throne, to be deposed and murdered a year before Geoffrey Chaucer's death by В о 1 i n g b г о к e, the rebel who became Henry IV. In 1381 there came the Peasants' Revolt, and with it a recognition that the labourers & diggers had human rights quite as much as the middle class and the nobility. Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, about 40 years before a really important event in English literary history - the invention of printing.

Geoffrey Chaucer belonged to that growing class from which, in the centuries to follow, so many great writers sprang. He was not a peasant, not a priest, not an aristocrat, but the son of a man engaged in trade: his father was a wine merchant. But young Geoffrey Chaucer was to learn a lot about the aristocracy through becoming a page to the Countess of Ulster. His promotion and foreign service as a young soldier (he was taken prisoner in France in 1359 and was ransomed by the King of England himself), his marriage into an aristocratic family of the great John of Gaunt, his diplomatic service in Europe since 1370 and his services at the King's court gave Geoffrey Chaucer plenty of opportunity to observe polite manners, to study the sciences and the arts, the literatures of France and Italy. In Italy at that time he could have met Petrarche  and  Boccaccio. At least he got acquainted with their works. So, all this made Geoffrey Chaucer one of the best-equipped of the English poets of that time. And his own first literary works were the translations from French and Italian.

Among Geoffrey Chaucer's first original works was "The Parliament of Fouls" (about 1377 - 1382). This poem combines two medieval genres of vision and bestiary . At the beginning of the poem the author tells how he once fell asleep and saw a dream: he found himself in a garden on a high hill. It was the 14th of February (St. Valentine's Day). There he saw a beautiful woman dressed in white. This was the figure of  Nature . In her hand she had a female eagle. And two male eagles were courting the female one. But Nature did not know which of them she should give the female eagle. So she decided to call up an assembly of  birds to solve the problem. Among the birds there was a Hawk, a Dоve , a Goose, a Turkey, a Duck, etc. Nature asked the birds for their opinions. The Hawk said that the eagles should hold a tournament and the winner should get the female eagle as he would be the worthiest among the two. The Goose added that even if one of the eagles did not get the female eagle he should not be too much upset because there are always so many other female eagles in the world. The Dove interrupted him saying that one should be devoted to his love till the end of his days, even if he was not rewarded. The Turkey argued: what is the use of love then if it is no use at all? The argument went on and on. In the end Nature decided to postpone the final solution till the next St. Valentine's Day.

So on the one hand the poem is a vision because it tells the reader of a dream, on the other hand it is a bestiary because the main personages here are animals (the birds in this case). Besides, the birds with their different views allegorically showed the classes and layers of the real society of that time: the Hawk and the Dove - the aristocracy, the Turkey, the Duck, the Goose - the newly emerged class of bourgeoisie. Geoffrey Chaucer even used the very word "bourgeois" while describing one of the birds.

 Yet Geoffrey Chaucer's greatest work is "The Canterbury Tales" (about 1387). He was probably influenced by Boccaccio's "Decameron" in this book because Geoffrey Chaucer's poem (like that of Boccaccio's) is also a collection of stories told by various people. But while Boccaccio's story-tellers were all nobles, Geoffrey Chaucer's personages represented different levels and layers of society.

So "The Canterbury Tales" - a long work, but still unfinished at Geoffrey Chaucer's death- is partly a new idea, partly an old one. Collection of short stories had been popular for a long time on the Continent. So Geoffrey Chaucer's masterpiece is no more than a collection of stories, and very few of them are original. That is one way of looking at "The Canterbury Tales". But what had never been done before was to take a collection of human beings - of all temperaments and social positions - and mingle them together, make them tell stories, and make these stories illustrate their own characters. Geoffrey Chaucer's work sparkles with drama of life: temperament clash, each person has his own way of speaking of his own philosophy, and the result is not only the picture of the Late Middle Ages - in all its colours of variety - but of the world itself.

The poem opens with a Prologue in which the author tells us that on a fine April Day he stopped at the Tabard Inn where he met 28 pilgrims who were going to Canterbury to pray at the Tomb of a Catholic saint. Chaucer decided to join them, and so did the innkeeper Harry Bailey. So all in all there were 30 pilgrims, going to Canterbury.

Pilgrimages were as much a part of Christian life in Geoffrey Chaucer's time as they are today in Muslim and Hindu life. When spring came, when the snow and frost and, later, the floods had left the roads of England and made them safe for traffic again, then people from all classes of society would make trips to holy places. One of the holy towns of England was Canterbury, where the Archbishop of Canterbury lived & where Thomas Becket, the "blissful holy martyr" murdered in the reign of King Henry II, had his resting-place. It was convenient & safer for such pilgrims to travel in companies, having usually met each other at some such starting-point as the Tabard Inn at Southwark, London.

So, the 30 pilgrims start their travel. And Harry Bailey proposes (in order to make the journey more interesting) to tell stories on their way (he suggests that everyone should tell 2 stories on their way to Canterbury and 2 stories on their way back). So, there should be 120 stories in "The Canterbury Tales", but Geoffrey Chaucer managed to finish only 24 of them before he died.

To the best story-teller Harry Bailey offers a free supper at the Tabard Inn on their way home. We never find out who it is who wins the landlord's prize; we can only be sure that it is not Geoffrey Chaucer himself. He, a shy pilgrim, tells a verse story so terribly dull that Harry Bailey stops him in the middle of it. Then Chaucer - the great poet - tells a prose story hardly less dull. (This, we may guess, is the first example of that peculiar English humour which takes delight in self-derision. It is a kind of humour which you find at its best in the British Army, with its songs about "We cannot fight, we cannot shoot" and its cry of "Thank heaven we've got a navy". The Englishman does not really take himself very seriously.) The other tales are delightful and varied - the rich humour of the Carpenter's Tale and the Miller's Tale, the pathetic tale of the Priоress , the romantic tale of the Knight, and all the rest of them.

The Prologue to the tales is a marvelous portrait gallery of typical people of the age - the corrupt Mоnk , the dainty Priоress , the gay young Squire , the greedy Pardoner - people whose offices for the most part do not exist any longer, for the society that produced them no longer exists. We do not have Summoners and Maunciples and Pardoners nowadays, though we do have Physicians and Parsons and Cooks and Students. But beneath the costumes and the strange occupations, we have timeless human beings. There are no ghosts in Geoffrey Chaucer. "The Canterbury Tales" palpitates with blood; it is as warm as living flesh. So on the one hand we can investigate the mode of life of that time (as each of the storytellers tells his or her story according to the morals of the social class he or she belongs to), on the other hand the personages are so bright & universal that even nowadays we can come across such a poor but cheerful student, such prudent townspeople, etc.

As the characters of "The Canterbury Tales" are very different, the stories they tell are also different: some of them romantic, the other can be quite frivolous (like the one about townspeople and Oxford students - "Town & Gown"), etc. One of the most enjoyable story-tellers is the Wife о f Вath . By the time she tells her story we know her as a woman of very strong opinions who believes firmly in marriage (she has had 5 husbands, one after the other) and equally firmly she believes in the need to manage husbands strictly. In her story one of King Arthur's knights must give within a year the correct answer to the question "What do women love most?" in order to save his life. An ugly old witch knows the answer ("To rule!") but she agrees to tell him if he marries her. At last the knight agrees, and at the marriage she becomes young again and beautiful.

Taken as a whole "The Canterbury Tales" is an encyclopedia of English life and literature of the 14th century, because on the one hand it depicted the mode of life and thinking of people from different walks of life and on the other hand Geoffrey Chaucer recorded all the existing forms and genres of that time (because the story-tellers were likely to choose that form or genre for their narration which would most correspond to their social position: a knight would choose a romance, a priest - a vision, common people - fabliaux or bestiaries, etc.).