Riassunto esame Cultura e Letteratura Inglese I, prof Polopoli, libro consigliato English Literature. A short history, Bertinetti

The beginnings of English literature

From old English to Middle English

The beginnings of English literature date back to the Medieval period, which runs from the fourth century, with the fall of the Roman Empire in Britain, to the English renaissance of the late fifteenth century. Specifically, the first literature in English goes back to the Early Medieval period, which spans from 450 (Anglo-Saxon period) to 1066 (the Norman conquest). It refers to the Anglo-Saxon period when Britain suffered the invasions of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes among others. These Germanic invaders can be considered as the true founders of the English nation; they established the tribal dialects that would become the basis for contemporary English. They spoke different languages, but the language that prevailed among these dialects is the so-called Anglo-Saxon or Old English.

From the point of view of a literary history, Anglo-Saxon literature or Old English literature was an extension of a pre-existing oral tradition – then written down by monks. It includes epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles, riddles, and others. Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity in the seventh century (the survival of this literature is due to the Church – unfortunately, most of the Old English literature has been lost, because the manners in which it had been written have not survived this day).

Almost all surviving texts were written by monks or nuns. There are almost 1000 surviving manuscripts from Anglo-Saxon England. Most were destroyed by time, fire, or war. Old English poetry is preserved in only four manuscripts, but what has survived is not necessarily the best or most representative (the one we know is not the original version with the original dialect, because it has been manipulated over time).

The manuscripts

• The Exeter Book is kept in Exeter Cathedral library in the south-west of England. It contains some shorter poems (The Seafarer, The Wanderer, riddles, and so forth).
• The Vercelli Book is kept in the Cathedral library of Vercelli in northern Italy. It contains several sermons.
• The Beowulf manuscript is kept in the British Library. It is also known by its shelf mark, BL Cotton Vitellius A xv.
• The Junius manuscript is kept in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. It is illustrated and contains Old English versions of Genesis and Exodus.

The Old English literature is usually divided into Pagan literature and Christian literature – these two groups co-existed until the Norman conquest:

• Pagan Poetry: it includes Pagan Epic Poetry and Pagan Lyrical Poems (Elegies). Elegy is no more than a label of convenience applied to a small group of six poems: in Saxon poetry, the lyric mood is always the elegiac. The topic itself of these poems is loss: of a loved one, of a lord… (The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Ruin, The Wife’s Lament…). They are all to be found in the Exeter Book. These elegies constitute a unique document of the time.

Beowulf

Beowulf is the longest epic poem in Old English (probably written during the 8^th century). More than 3,000 lines long, it relates the exploits of its eponymous hero who defeated a horrible monster named Grendel and later its vengeful mother. Fifty years after, Beowulf, now Lord of the Geats, his people, has to fight a dragon which was guarding a hoard of a treasure. He defeats it but he is mortally wounded. The poem ends with Beowulf’s funeral.

Beowulf is set in the pagan world of sixth-century Scandinavia, but it also contains some echoes of Christian tradition because the poet knew that Christianity was a recent addition to English culture, so he didn’t stress too much on this subject. The poem must have been passed down orally over many generations and modified by each successive bard until the existing copy was made at an unknown location in Anglo-Saxon England. Some critics think that it may have been composed as an elegy for a king who died in the seventh century. The poem has a legendary tone, typical of the epic and it contains the values of the Germanic warrior world. These values are positive and derive from the archaic society in which honour, obligations to lord and guest, and bonds between the lord and his people are important.

• Christian Poetry and Prose: much of this religious poetry is anonymous; the first two poets to write in Old English are Caedmon (670 A.C.) and Cynewulf (also spelled Cynwulf or Kynewulf) – late eighth or early ninth century. The only great prose writer of the Anglo-Saxon period is King Alfred (849-901) who translated the works of Pope Gregory the Great, Bede, Boethius from Latin into English, establishing the latter as a literary language. His most important contribution was the compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which constitutes one of the most important historical, cultural, and literary works of the Early Middle English. It begins with his reign and records even the Danish invasions.

The Norman Conquest (1066) was the invasion of the kingdom of England by William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy (1066-1087) in 1066 at the battle of Hastings and the subsequent Norman control of England. Edward the Confessor was the last king of the Anglo-Saxon royal line. The Norman Conquest resulted in profound political, administrative, social, and cultural changes in the British Isles. Also, their habits were strikingly different from the ones of the Anglo-Saxon tribes, and the consequences of the Norman Conquest were:

• The feudal system;
• A new military system;
• The Doomsday Book (the book in which there is written the number of people living in a specific land; some sort of census);
• Middle English (1100-1450). The language spoken by the Normans was Latin-based. They established the Norman French, which became the language of the court until the 14^th century. Also, the clergy wrote in Latin and spoke in English, but however the literary production in Old English died out. The influence of the Norman invasion completely transformed both the structure and the vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon English: words were accented in different ways, prepositions were introduced, the plural of nouns was marked by the 's' ending. The Conquest linked England more closely to the European continent. At first three languages were spoken: the French-influenced language of the court, the Latin spoken by clerks, and the language of the people. With the growth of hostility between the French and the English, from the 13^th century onwards, and the Hundred Years’ War, French became the language of the enemy and English regained its importance but by now it was a completely different language in terms of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. The language of poetry changed definitively. For convenience, the written and spoken English used between 1100 and 1400 is referred to as Middle English, but no standard literary language existed at all.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a verse romance of 2500 lines, preserved in a manuscript, copied in about 1400, which also contains three religious poems. The story begins with a challenge issued by a Green Knight, who presents himself at King Arthur’s court. Sir Gawain accepts the challenge and a year later he achieved it, after many adventures. The poem is written in alliterative verses and is a compendium of the chivalric vision proper to romance. In the same manuscript as Sir Gawain, there is Pearl, a dream poem. It narrates the dream of the narrator who sees a beautiful woman, the pearl he has mislaid and also the daughter she lost. She then transforms into the bride of Christ and reveals to him the Heavenly City. Piers Plowman is a dream poem, in which there’s Will’s quest for salvation in a corrupted world by government, church, and society. The solution is to create a society in which everyone acts for the common good.

From Anglo-Norman to Middle English: the old metrical system based on alliteration was replaced by regular lines made up of a precise number of syllables and provided with end-rhymes. The Norman introduced the metrical romances, tales in verse dealing with love, chivalry and religion. The Norman nobles liked the deeds of the paladins of the court of Charlemagne, which were celebrated by William’s minstrel, Taillefer. From this derived the expression “chansons de geste” or songs of deeds. Song because it was the form in which the stories were presented; deeds because they celebrated the acts of a character or a lineage in feudal warfare. The most popular was the Chanson de Roland, which was about Roland’s epic fight against the Saracens at Roncesvalles. The values these songs promoted were: heroism, love for the country, loyalty to the king and faith. The Chansons the Roland and the other chansons narrating the deeds of French lords against Saracens, constitute the ‘matter of France’.

In Historia Regum Britanniae are told the adventures of Brutus, descendant of Aeneas and of his successors, in particular of King Arthur and his knights and the Round Table. The Arthurian legends were told in a new genre, known as romance, and they constitute the ‘matter of Britain’. The term romance derived from the word romanz, which meant vernacular, the language in which these poems were written. The themes were those of love stories and chivalric adventures and the knights often meant bravery, honour, and faith in God.

Anonymous ballads (oral compositions versified in very simple language) also flourished, accompanied by music and dances.

The age of Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 – 1400)

Geoffrey Chaucer was born between 1340 and 1345, probably in London. His father was a prosperous wine merchant who had connections with the Court of Edward III. We do not know any details of his early life and education. He soon met the royal family, became a member of the Parliament and was frequently employed on important diplomatic missions and travelled from England to France. In Italy, he became interested in Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. The many ups and downs of his life never prevented him from writing. He was an omnivorous reader: his influences were classical and his wide readings probably gave him plots and ideas (even though the most important source of information was his social experience). Chaucer is credited with having set the style for Middle English literature. Earlier Anglo-Saxon poetry, such as ‘Beowulf’, had been succeeded by a taste for French literature. Even by Chaucer’s day, the royal court was still bilingual. He blended French, Italian and classical influences into a truly English style in his C.T.

He wrote using Middle English (he’s been the first poet who used it), because he wanted to write a book which could be understood by everybody, even the unlettered. In the Canterbury Tales, there is a great number of characters, described in a very meticulous way: the great importance given to the details (even the linguistic ones) made his characters sound real. He could reproduce the language of every social class.

The Canterbury Tales was enormously popular in medieval England because it was written in Middle English, a language understood by everybody and that gradually became standard English. It is a long narrative poem written in verse. Chaucer probably began to work on it in 1386. His long poem follows the journey of a group of pilgrims, 31 including Chaucer himself, from the Tabard Inn in Southwark (London) to St. Thomas à Becket’s shire (reliquary) at Canterbury Cathedral. The narrative strategy (the frame) used by Chaucer to make his pilgrims narrate his stories is that the host at the inn suggests each pilgrim should tell two tales on the way out and two on the way home (The original plan consisted of 120 tales) to help pass time on the road. The best storyteller is to be rewarded with a free supper on their return. The work consists of a General Prologue, which introduces the pilgrims, and 24 tales (some of these tales have their own prologue). The completed tales are grouped into ten Fragments. The most numerous group is made up of the Fabliaux, comic tales in a popular setting, centred around a love triangle. Other tales are close to the romance genre, while others are of a religious character. Each tale focuses on a pilgrim; it is usually preceded by a prologue which introduces the theme of the tale and is sometimes followed by an epilogue. Chaucer conducts two fictions simultaneously, that of the tale and that of the pilgrim to whom he has assigned it: we are given at once a story and a drama (reference to the subject). On the one hand, it introduces the characters, but it also establishes the set and it creates the conditions for the pilgrimage. On the other hand, the prologue – while introducing characters – gives us sketches of intents regarding the pilgrims (the portraits of his society are characterised by a mixture of realism and satire). These features give formal complexity to the Canterbury Tales, and they also make the poem quite like Boccaccio’s Decameron (even though in the Decameron we don’t see such a connection between the character and the story he narrates).

The characters

Chaucer wanted to give a portrait of English society. The pilgrims belong to almost all the social classes of the time and can be divided into three groups: the first one connected to the declining feudal world (a knight, a squire, a pardoner), the second one associated with religious life (a prioress, a monk, a nun, a friar), a third group including townspeople (a wife from Bath, a merchant, a lower, a cook, a student from Oxford, a carpenter). There’s no hierarchy at all in Chaucer’s presentation of the characters, but Chaucer selects the details of his characters he wants the reader to know in a very careful way: this is because he wants to give us an integrated sketch of the figures he describes. He pretends to let the features of each character be noticed by the reader – we have the illusion of being the ones to notice the details of the characters. The narrator describes them, including their defects, with good humour and irony, which is vast and subtle and works as the filter through which Chaucer offers us his picture of the society of his time. A careful examination of his writing reveals that he wants to imitate life, and the way our mind perceives the world. His images convey the impression that these characters are real (he achieves roundness in his characters).

There is a relationship between the characters and their stories: the character itself grows and is revealed by the story and the story takes on overtones (extra information) from what readers have learned from its tellers. There are also links and interchanges among the various stories.

The style of The Canterbury Tales is characterised by rhyming couplets (two consecutive lines rhyming together AABB). That means that every two lines rhyme with each other. It’s also in iambic pentameter (the same style as Shakespeare), meaning that in each line there are ten syllables, and a heavily emphasized (stressed) syllable follows a less emphasized (unstressed) syllable. There is no repetition of the same rhyme (AABBCC AABBCC…) because Chaucer feels the need to keep the narration moving. The original title of the book was The Tales of Canterbury, but some later publishers called it The Canterbury Tales. The narrative voice opens the prologue with the description of the return of the spring, in March. From the beginning Chaucer describes with a lot of details the time of the year in which the pilgrimage takes place. The ‘sweet showers’ give life to the flowers; it’s interesting that we have a new way of looking at nature. March is a particularly wet month, but he describes it as dry: he invented the set of his poem so that he could underline the beauty of spring (the season of pilgrimages, but also of love).

Rhymes: AABBCCDD… Fouls (?): various kinds of birds – he wants to describe the rebirth of nature (new harmony between man and nature). The pilgrimage is also a symbolic journey towards salvation.

The Prioress, G. Chaucer

The Prioress is a good example of a round character, characterised by paradoxes. Through the physical and psychological description of the Prioress, Chaucer gives us information about her way of being. So, among the other pilgrims there is a nun. From line 1 to line 24, Chaucer focuses on the good manners of the Prioress from an external point of view. He also describes her nose (line 7) and her education (line 9), telling us that she is a well-educated woman. The name of this prioress is Madame Eglantine (line 5), and she spoke gracefully in French. The fact that the prioress can speak French and comes from the school of Stratford-at-the-Bowe gives us a portrait of her high culture background. She is not a common pilgrim. She not only knows French, but also the Paris Style: this contributes to underline, once again, the social status of the prioress, and the fact that the status of the prioress is reflected by the language and her manners, and the physical appearance. From line 10 Chaucer describes the Prioress' manners at table, so we have information about her behaviour in that context: obviously, it is perfect.

Line 15: we have to remember that the world depicted by Chaucer is connected to the chivalry world. When Chaucer writes, this world he depicts suffers of the recent past and the feudal system, and from the literary point of view the French world and the feudal system are represented by courtly literature, so the reference is clear, even though the main one should have been the Bible. She seems to belong to a social status quite far from the typical world of prioresses and nuns. In other words, these references are quite strange, because we imagine nuns as readers of holy texts and the Bible, not courtly literature. In the description of the Prioress, in fact, there is a strong contrast between the appearance of the nun as, in fact, a nun and, on the other hand, the fact that she is a lady of high social status. From line 15 to line 19, Chaucer seems to insist on the description of the outward behaviour of the Prioress. This description has an inner meaning: in fact, it goes beyond appearance, so that the result is not only a physical one: readers have both a physical portrait of the Prioress, but also a psychological one. It is also interesting that this complex character is revealed through subtle details and ironic undertones, painting a vivid picture of her personality and societal role.