THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE RENAISSANCE

CONTENTS

CONTENTS.....................................................................................................................3

FOREWORD...................................................................................................................6

OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE........................................................................................8

General Background....................................................................................................................8

The Anglo-Saxons.........................................................................................................................9Anonymous Old English Poetry..............................................................................................11

Didactic Elegies...................................................................................................................11Lyrical Poems......................................................................................................................12Heroic Legends....................................................................................................................13

Non-Anonymous Old English Poetry......................................................................................17Caedmon..............................................................................................................................17Cynewulf..............................................................................................................................18

Old English Prose.....................................................................................................................18Aldhelm...............................................................................................................................18Bede.....................................................................................................................................18Alfred the Great...................................................................................................................20The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle................................................................................................21Aelfric..................................................................................................................................22Wulfstan II...........................................................................................................................23Other Saints’ Lives..............................................................................................................23

MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE................................................................................23

Anglo Norman Literature..........................................................................................................26The Anglo-Norman Chroniclers..............................................................................................26Prose Other than the Chroniclers: Philosophy.........................................................................27

Roger Bacon........................................................................................................................27Medieval Metrical Romances..................................................................................................28

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight........................................................................................29The Owl and the Nightingale...................................................................................................44Pearl.........................................................................................................................................45

The Age of Chaucer....................................................................................................................46The Land of Cockaygne...........................................................................................................46John Gower..............................................................................................................................46William Langland....................................................................................................................47

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Prose Writers............................................................................................................................49Geoffrey Chaucer.....................................................................................................................49

The French Period................................................................................................................52The Italian Period................................................................................................................54The English Period..............................................................................................................62

Chaucer through the Years.....................................................................................................125

15th Century Literature............................................................................................................132Sir Thomas Malory................................................................................................................132The English Popular Ballads..................................................................................................133The Medieval Drama.............................................................................................................136

THE RENAISSANCE..................................................................................................141

General Background................................................................................................................141

Renaissance Philosophy...........................................................................................................144Francis Bacon.........................................................................................................................145Thomas More.........................................................................................................................146

First Attempts in Literary Criticism......................................................................................149

Drama in the First Half of the 16th Century...........................................................................152

16th Century Poetry..................................................................................................................157Thomas Wyatt........................................................................................................................159Henry Howard........................................................................................................................159Sir Philip Sidney....................................................................................................................160Samuel Daniel........................................................................................................................162Edmund Spenser....................................................................................................................164Walter Ralegh........................................................................................................................168

16th Century Prose....................................................................................................................170Neo-Hellenic Arcadian Romances.........................................................................................170

Sir Philip Sidney................................................................................................................170Neo-Hellenic Euphuistic Romances......................................................................................173

John Lyly...........................................................................................................................173Robert Greene....................................................................................................................174Other Euphuistic Romances..............................................................................................174

Realistic Novels.....................................................................................................................175Thomas Nashe...................................................................................................................175Thomas Deloney................................................................................................................176

Drama from 1570 to Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Contemporaries...................................177

Christopher Marlowe...............................................................................................................189

APPENDIX 1...............................................................................................................203

APPENDIX 2...............................................................................................................208

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APPENDIX 3...............................................................................................................209

APPENDIX 4...............................................................................................................210

APPENDIX 5...............................................................................................................210

APPENDIX 6...............................................................................................................224

BIBLIOGRAPHY.........................................................................................................226

Index of Authors........................................................................................................231

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Old English Literature

General Background

Middle English Literature

Old English literature did not completely disappear with the Norman Conquest in 1066. Many sermons and works continued to be read and used partly or wholly until the 14 th century, and were further catalogued and organised. However, starting with 1066, criticism no longer speaks about Old English literature, but Middle English literature.

Middle English is the name given to different forms of the English language spoken between the Norman invasion in 1066 and the mid-to-late 15th century, when the Chancery Standard started to become widespread. In the 1470s, William Caxton introduced the printing press into England. Another important event to mention by this time is the tranformation of the Ynglis language dialect into Scots language.

After the Norman Conquest, England was trilingual: Latin was the language of the Catholic Church, Anglo-Norman (French) was the official language, the language of courtly life, literature and documentation, and Middle English was the spoken language of the majority.

The fact that English lost its official status as the learned tongue of the court, does not mean that it completely cease to be used in the court or as a literary language. While it was still being used in royal charters as a language of literary production, Old English homilies, saints' lives, devotional manuals, encyclopaedias, histories and grammatical texts, continued to be reproduced and adapted by scribes.

On the one hand, it is worth noticing that even nowadays, after almost one millenium, we may contrast words derived from Old English: pig, cow, sheep, wood, house, worthy, bold to their Anglo-Norman French counterparts: pork, beef, mutton, forest, mansion, honourable, courageous, or we may notice the multitude of French-derived words that are used in connection to crown matters: court, judge, jury, appeal, parliament. On the other hand, we may see that trilingual activity brought about a triplicate synonymity in modern English, as we can see in the case of adjectives that roughly mean of or relating to a king: kingly from Old English, royal from French and regal from Latin.

The Old English grammar contained a complex system of inflectional endings, which after the Norman Conquest were gradually lost and simplified in the dialects of spoken English. In the later fourteenth century, Chancery Standard (or London English) introduced more conformity in English spelling. The only possibility to do away with so many dialects and ambiguous forms of English was to develop a standard English; this is precisely what King Henry V did from 1413 to 1422, in response to his order for government officials to use English rather than Anglo-Norman or Latin. Henry V’s decision to introduce the Chancery standard is believed to have contributed in a significant way to the development of the English language that we use today. The Chancery Standard was largely based on the London and East Midland dialects. By the mid-15th century, Chancery Standard was used for most official purposes except the Church (where Latin was used instead) and some legal matters (where French was the predominant language).

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Often described as the jewel of medieval romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the only poem that could be equal to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Leon Leviţchi considers Sir Gawain and the Green Knight a poem that ranks as a first-rate creation through

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many excellencies, of which a major one lies in the fact that a high ethical ideal is made the central theme to which everything else is subordinated.1

The romance describes a sort of semi-religious quest which illustrates various notions: man’s quest of death (Zimmer), the annual death and rebirth of nature, seen in the vegetation myth of the Green Man.

The poem is written in North-West Midland dialect, which makes the reading extremely difficult. This is why a translation, however inadequate, is worth attempting.

Despite objections that the dating of the poem to the last ten or fifteen years of the fourteenth century rests on details of armour and equipment which would not preclude an earlier date of composition, such evidence does not offer conclusive proof of any earlier date. Equally, though the area of composition has been more narrowly defined as the Cheshire/ Staffordshire border and a number of individuals identified as possible authors of the poem – most notably, perhaps, John Massy of Cotton in east Cheshire, a Lancastrian retainer – no name, as yet, commands general acceptance.2

In Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (Cambridge, 1983), Michael J. Bennett spoke of the presence at court of a large group of Cheshire notables during the later reign of Richard II. Another critic, Elizabeth Salter, in her Fourteenth Century English poetry; Contexts and Readings (Oxford, 1983), investigated the cultural context in which the poem was produced.

The poem has a symmetrical structure, largely based on sharp contrasts and it is divided into four parts. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight begins as a romance should begin at a high festival in Arthur’s court, on New Year’s Day, one of the periodic renewals of Round Table unity, idealism and loyalty to the king.3 At that time, the king and his knights were in the middle of their celebration, the Green Knight rode into the feasting hall on a green horse and challenged those present to behead him. The Green Knight suggested that if he had remained unscathed, he should have the right to give a blow in return. Criticism has differently interpreted the symbolical meanings of the Green Knight. For instance, John Speirs sees the Green Knight as a recrudescence in poetry of the Green Man who in turn is a descendant of the Vegetation god of almost universal and immemorial tradition,4 H. A. Krappe considers the Green Knight death itself ... the Lord of Hades,5 while Dale B. J. Randall maintains that the knight's behaviour is fiend-like.6 The Green Knight’s challenge is addressed to the society as a whole, but traditionally it is the king who responds against the reputation of the Round Table. By convention Arthur must be the initiator and stimulator of the chivalric adventure, the arbiter in

1 Leon Leviţchi (1974), p. 1462 W.R. J. Barron (2001), p. 253 W.R. J. Barron (2001), p. 44 John Speirs (1957), p. 219.5 Quoted in Frances Gibbons, "Sir Gawain’s Mentors", PsyArt, An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of Arts, 1998, article no. 970929, retrieved from the site: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/articles/art_vargas_gibbons01.shtml, consulted on February, 3, 20066 Quoted in Frances Vargas Gibbons, "Sir Gawain’s Mentors", PsyArt, An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of Arts, 1998, article no. 970929, retrieved from the site: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/1998_vargas_gibbons01.shtml, consulted on February, 3, 2006

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affairs of honour7 and the one who rewards knights for their achievements. This is why he accepted the challenge in order to save the reputation of the other knights who hesitated to react to The Green Knight’s words. Individual knights act as representations of knighthood itself.8

Yet, as the king was already an initiated knight who had to take care of other affairs, and who, first of all, had to protect his country from enemies, after some hesitation the one who accepted the challenge was King Arthur’s nephew, Sir Gawain. Gawain’s intervention is phrased with all the courtesy of a true knight, yet there is implied criticism of the king for taking up so foolish a challenge, and of the court for allowing him to become involved in an adventure which threatens his destruction.9 Gawain suggested that his own life would be the least loss to the society, and this is why all his fellow courtiers hastily agreed that the king had to be exempted. Sir Gawain managed to behead the Green Knight, yet the latter, endowed with miraculous powers, picked up his head and, holding his severed head in his hand, calmly asked Sir Gawain to meet him a year later at the Green Chapel, in North Wales. The survival of the Green Knight placed Gawain in a dilemma; this is what W.R. J. Barron calls the familiar dilemma in romance, where characteristically the hero must choose between apparently certain death on one hand and some shameful breach of the chivalric code on the other.10

Returning to the chivalric code, we may see that it implied that a true knight had to be courageous, and both cowardice and compromise were unacceptable.

After the disappearance of the Green Knight,11 the knights continued their feasting as if nothing had happened. To some extent, the narrative tension is maintained; it suggests that the Green Knight’s Christmas game, proposed in the midst of drinking and merry-making, may be an ill omen for the future, and that the once idle court is now occupied with serious business whose outcome may be unhappy. Throughout the passage the nouns and the pronouns are so interchanged as to suggest that not only are Arthur, Gawain and the court equally involved in this ambiguous adventure but that it relates to the common experience of mankind: ’for though men may be light-hearted when they have drunk strong drink, a year passes very quickly, and never brings back like circumstances, the beginning is very seldom like the end’.12

The remorselessness of time is demonstrated in the passing of the year, which proves that natural time is somewhat circular, in nature death is followed by rebirth, yet in a man’s life everything is linear and there is no rebirth after death and no end similar to the beginning.

Embarked on this test and quest, Sir Gawain prayed for shelter and crossed himself, and, as if in answer to his prayer, a refuge appeared. He arrived at a castle on the next Christmas Eve. Camelot and Hautdesert [the castle] appear as opposed spaces, balanced in the weight of their significance. Some possible interpretive pairs assignable to the two spaces might be margin/center; normative/perverse; Christian/pagan; masculine/feminine; real/faery.13

In the castle he was warmly greeted by Lord Bertilak-de-Hautdesert and his lovely lady. Bertilak’s title, de Hautdesert has been translated as of the high hermitage. Disert in Celtic languages means hermitage, whereas desert (with the meaning of deserted or solitary place) is a familiar element in French names denoting places and here it undoubtedly refers to the Green Knight’s castle.

7 W.R. J. Barron (2001), p. 58 ibidem.9 idem., p. 710 idem., p. 5 11 To what land he went none there knew, any more than they knew where he had come from. (p. 57)12 W.R. J. Barron (2001), p. 913 Heide Estes, "Bertilak Reads Brut: History and the Complications of Sexuality in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’", in Allen J. Frantzen, John Zedolik (eds.), Essays in Medieval Studies, vol. 17, The Uses of the Past, Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association, 2000, p. 69, retrieved from the site: http://www.luc.edu/publications/medieval/vol17/17ch5.html

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Following romance tradition, we may allow various receptions behind the same façade: there are castles where knights errant are honourably entertained in a society like their own, sharing their chivalric values; others where they are imprisoned by malicious wizards or beset by seductive enchantresses, agents of evil, bent upon the downfall of the Round Table. Gawain’s reception suggests the former.14

Initially, Gawain was impressed with the servants kneeling to welcome him, the knights and squires who conducted him to the hall. In this Christian household, Gawain fulfilled his religious duties and he met the ladies of the castle, one young and beautiful, the other old and ugly. Gawain passed the festive season with all the pleasures of the previous Christmas at Camelot. Finding out from the lord that the Green Chapel was less than two miles off, Gawain agreed to stay until New Year’s morning. The lord suggested that they should initiate a Christmas sport: as long as Sir Gawain remained in the castle all day long, they should exchange what they might get by hunting or otherwise. Sir Gawain agreed.

On the first day, while the lord went hunting, his wife entered Sir Gawain’s bedroom and tried to seduce him, yet the only thing that she managed to do was to kiss Sir Gawain. Therefore, when the lord presented Sir Gawain with the dear he had killed in the forest, Sir Gawain kissed him once, which happened on the second and on the third day as well, with a slight change in the number of kisses, as on the second day, when the lord presented him with the boar he had killed in the forest, Sir Gawain kissed him twice and on the third day, when he got the fox from the lord, he kissed him three times.

Yet on the third day, the noble princess renewed her attacks more keenly: For that noble princess pressed him so hard, urging him so near to the limit, that he must needs either to accept her love there and then, or refuse offensively; he was concerned for his courtesy, lest he should behave like a boor, and even more for his plight if he should commit a sin, and be a traitor to the man who owned that castle.(p. 127) Gawain found a polite excuse – the preoccupation of a knight on his mission, therefore saying that he could not have a sweetheart at that moment. At parting, the lady asked for a trifle, a glove perhaps, as a keepsake; but as Gawain understood that a glove might have represented a love token, he made a polite excuse, rejecting in turn both the ring and the green girdle which the lady wished to give him. Gawain refused the ring, a universally acknowledged value15 since he had nothing with him with which to pay for it. Gawain refused the girdle too, yet the lady pressed the girdle upon him, telling him that it had the power to protect the wearer from death. At this point, as death had never been far from his thoughts, it occurred to him that it would be a godsend for the perilous adventure which was assigned him: if, when he came to the chapel to meet his doom, he managed to escape being slain, it would be an excellent device. (p. 131) Thus, he accepted the girdle and he hid the truth from Bertilak. If he had given the girdle to Bertilak, he would have betrayed the lady to her lord (which would have been a breach of cortaysye towards the lady), yet the moment he decided to keep it, he did not obey felawschyp towards the lord.

The fragment requires a detailed analysis, as its meanings represent the key to decode the poem. In Commercium in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, R. Allen Shoaf, analyses Gawain’s speech when the lady tries to tempt him and he concludes that Gawain is enmeshed in the market and the marketability of chivalric manners.16

`Bi God, I were glad, and yow god þoʒt,

14 W.R. J. Barron (2001), p. 1315 R. Allen Shoaf (1999), p. 4316 idem., p. 37. The book is an extremely interesting analysis of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. At the end of his book, R. Allen Shoaf makes a list of occurrences of commercial terms; his list contains seventy-three terms of marketing that he found in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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At saʒe oþer at seruyce þat I sette myʒtTo þe plesaunce of your prys--hit were a pure ioye.' (1245-47)

can be translated in contemporary English as By God, I would be glad if it seemed good to you -I mean, it would be a pure joy -if I might do something or other, in word or deed, which would be. Older editions of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight indicated that prys and the referent of your prys from the phrase to þe plesaunce of your prys represent a polite expression for you, yet critics have remarked quite numerous occurrences in the poem of the word prys and they have concluded that in the context it must mean something like evaluation, estimate or esteem; and the phrase to þe plesaunce of your prys must be the satisfaction of your esteem.

When rejecting the lady’s proposal, Gawain did his very best to be polite, but R. Allen Shoaf considers that he was repeatedly forced to be polite in the Lady's terms, which are commercial terms involving Gawain more and more in the market of relativity.17 Thus, in a very subtle manner, the Lady who was not shy at all, was trying to convince Gawain that he had a price and that he was marketable. R. Allen Shoaf carefully analyses the commercialism of lines 1266-67. The lady said Mary yow 3elde- Let Mary repay you for your generosity which implied: "I hope I don't have to repay you for all this lush flattery." 3elde as well as other forms of the word (for3elde, for example), though in appearance harmlessly idiomatic, often function in the poem to betray the extent to which commercialism is part of the fabric of feudalism and chivalry.18

Interpreting the lady’s speech, R. Allen Shoaf underlines the words which mean to buy, or its synonyms and discovers the gradual intensifying of the commercial rhetorics:

`Bi Mary,' quoþ þe menskful, `me þynk hit an oþer; For were I worth al þe wone of wymmen alyue, And al þe wele of þe worlde were in my honde,And I schulde chepen and chose to cheue me a lorde, For þe costes þat I haf knowen vpon þe, knyʒt, here, And þat I haf er herkkened and halde hit here trwee, þer schulde no freke vpon folde bifore yow be chosen.(1268-75; emphasis added by R. Allen Shoaf)

The lady’s speech means that she inspected his cost(es) and found them trwee to their advance billing (þat I haf er herkkened); and were she to barter and to dicker (chepen) for a mate, she would spare nothing in the world (1269-70) as long as it were hers in order to buy Gawain. Once she discovered that she could not buy him with sex, Bertilak’s wife was interested in finding out the cost(es) of Gawain:

`Iwysse, worþy,' quoþ þe wyʒe, `ʒe haf waled wel better, Bot I am proude of þe prys þat ʒ e put on me, And, soberly your seruaunt, my souerayn I holde yow, And yowre knyʒt I becom, and Kryst yow forʒelde. (1276-79; emphasis added by R. Allen Shoaf)

Gawain made her think that he had a price, thus being proud, and this human sin is an assertion of personal value to the exclusion of the Maker of that value.19 Even if Gawain told Bertilak's

17 idem., p. 3918 ibidem.19 idem., p. 40

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Lady, my souerayn I holde yow, doubtless he still assumed that in fact he was being only courteous and mannerly. The moment he committed his first serious mistake was when he accepted the oath the lady suggested to him. At this point, Gawain should have known that oaths are powerful and have a way of binding a man.20 This oath is precisely what had bound Gawain to the Lady, up to the point of jeopardizing his soul. [...] So far from saving his life, the green girdle costs Gawain his lewté and becomes the syngne of surfet, where surfet, as excess, is a kind of pride. Proud of the price his human maker puts on him, Gawain ultimately pays the price of pride at the Green Chapel and bears the mark of it for the rest of his life.21

R. Allen Shoaf regards the lady as a successful seductress who, by means of her high-pressure bisinesse tactics, succeeded in seducing Gawain into believing that value lies only in the subjectivity that prices it. By convincing Gawain that she is a very good judge of knight's flesh, she also convinced him that she is to be trusted in all her pricings, including that of the green girdle.22 When Sir Gawain turned around and accepted the girdle, a piece of cloth tricked out in gold, he saw the green girdle as simple and less worthy than the ring. Yet as R. Allen Shoaf suggests, its cost(es) by which it is (ap)praised at a high prys is (are) no less than a man's life. The green girdle costs a man's life; that is its price.23 This is the way that Gawain priced his life, to the extent that in order to buy his life, he spent his loyalty (lewté).

At this point in the story, Gawain became everything that a knight should never be: he was proud, he was coward, and he was covetous, and by keeping the girdle he was also idolatrous, in R. Allen Shoaf’s terms, he deliberately confused the sign and what it signifies.24 For him, the girdle, in Saussure’s terms, the signifier, a piece of cloth, has become identical with his life, the signified. In fact, the relationship of identity between the green girdle and what it signifies is arbitrary and, in Gawain's case, wholly subjective; and this he ignores.25

Coming back to the significance of colours and their repetitive appearance in the romance, we may see the repetition of reds in the second Fitt, when the narrator describes Gawain’s red pentangle on his shield, red gold on a red background, and on his coat; his horse has red studs on its armour, and the bedroom Bertilak gives him has red-gold bed-curtain rings. Red is the colour that is linked to Bertilak' s wife, his temptress: Just as the Gawain-poet never gives her a name, he never allows her to acquire definition in terms of his color structuring. Instead, she shares the red color already so strongly connected with Gawain.26 There are exactly five greens in the third Fitt, again echoing the pattern of repeated fives, and it is here that Gawain chooses green over red. In stanza seventy-three, during the third temptation scene, he rejects a red ring offered to him by his temptress, but when she then presents the green girdle a few lines later he weakens and, in the following stanza, accepts it.27

Earlier on his last day in Bertilak’s castle, Gawain had made the final, vitally important preparation by going to confession, where he confessed himself fully and laid bare his sins, both big and small, imploring forgiveness, and begging the priest for absolution; and he absolved him fully and made him as pure as if Judgment Day were to fall upon the following day. (p. 133); yet his confession was practically invalid without the restitution of the green girdle. The strange thing about the significance of colours is the fact that at the moment of his confession, Sir Gawain was dressed in blue, and normally blue is the traditional colour of

20 idem., p. 4221 ibidem.22 idem., p. 4523 idem., p. 4424 idem., p. 6725 ibidem.26 Elizabeth A. Hoffman, "A Re-Hearing of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’", in Mark D. Johnston, Samuel M. Riley (eds), Essays in Medieval Studies 2/ 1985, p. 70, retrieved from the site: http://www.luc.edu/publications/medieval/vol2/hoffman.html27 ibidem.

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faithfulness. This is in fact the only moment in which Gawain wore blue clothes in the whole romance. His confession may be interpreted as Gawain’s attempt to save his guilty conscience, yet the fear of death was much stronger than his real wish to be sincere.

The fact that the next day he was going to face a creature endowed with supernatural powers makes the retention of the green girdle equally understandable in human terms: with death facing him next day, an apparent means of escape offers itself, he snatches at it instinctively  – and falls prey to the temptress whom he has so long eluded by every wily shift in his power. 28

According to R. Allen Shoaf, the error of Gawain, however, is to have refused nostram humanitatem. R. Allen Shoaf compares Gawain’s gesture of keeping his life with the sacrifice of Christ and emphasises that Gawain’s mistake is one that any human being would do, as every man eventually must, lay his life down.29 Accepting the girdle, Sir Gawain exchanges his ‘prys’ for his life; he pays for his life with his ‘prys’. But, as he soon learns, without his ‘prys’ his life is precisely worthless. Gawain's refusal of ‘nostram humanitatem’, his fear of death or his belief that he must live at all costs, finally surprises and disheartens him more than anyone else.30

Yet, in spite of the fact that Sir Gawain’s fear is normal for a man of his youth, as soon as Gawain tied the green girdle across his red pentangle, the colour structure of the poem shifted out of the world of contrasts, back to one of undisturbed green no longer given specific definition by its former contrast with red.31

While Gawain was confessing, far away in the forest, a hunt came to an end: the artful fox, having evaded the hounds all day was suddenly killed when the lord appeared in its path with his drawn sword. The hunt, whose thematic parallel to the temptation has been pleasantly remote while its atmosphere of natural, outdoor activity contrasts agreeably with the unnatural pursuit of male by female going on indoors, suddenly becomes acutely relevant, the fox’s end suggesting a fateful paradox: he who seeks to save his life shall lose it. But Gawain unconscious that the lord’s gift of the fox skin is a memento mori, goes to bed secure in his possession of the girdle and conscious of absolution - though for him Judgment Day is to fall upon the following day.32

By coveting the girdle, Gawain was guilty of having sinned against fraunchyse, and by false confession, against spiritual purity (clannes) and Christian duty (pité). In one word he was guilty of untrawe and thus his perfect pentangle was fatally flawed.33

On New Year’s Day Sir Gawain went to the Green Chapel, guided by a member of Bertilak’s household who warned him that the guardian of the Green Chapel was massive, malicious, and he preyed on all those who passed, knights, priests, and peasants. He even advised Sir Gawain to give up his mission and escape, promising to conceal the fact, but Sir Gawain refused. Once again Gawain has met with a tempter and been challenged to choose between cowardice and death; once again his choice is complicated with ambiguities. The guide’s description of the Green Knight develops one aspect of the ambivalent figure who appeared at Arthur’s court, ignoring the courtly, ironic challenger but extending and darkening his Wild Man characteristics until, as slayer of all three social orders, he seems like Death himself.34

The Green Chapel was a threatening place itself and the Green Knight appeared in the same armour that he had worn at Arthur’s court, his head restored. The Green Knight attempted to 28 W.R. J. Barron (2001), p. 1829 R. Allen Shoaf (1999), p. 2130 idem., pp. 21-2231 Elizabeth A. Hoffman, "A Re-Hearing of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’", in Essays in Medieval Studies 2, p. 80, retrieved from the site: http://www.luc.edu/publications/medieval/vol2/hoffman.html, consulted on February, 2, 200632 W.R. J. Barron (2001), p. 1833 idem., p. 1734 idem., p. 19

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behead Sir Gawain but he only managed to graze his neck. The Green Knight revealed his identity as he was lord Bertilak and told Sir Gawain that in collusion with his wife, he had put him to a test. Obviously, he reprimanded Sir Gawain for not telling the truth to the end. Stunned, racked by shame and mortification, Gawain replied: Because I feared your blow, cowardice led me to have to do with covetousness, to forsake my true nature, that generosity and fidelity which is proper to knights. Now I am lacking in fidelity and guilty of breach of faith, I who have always abhorred treachery and dishonesty… I here humbly confess to you, sir, that my behaviour is very sinful; let me understand your pleasure with respect to penance, and henceforth I will be on my guard. (p. 159) As Gawain had already made restitution of the girdle and resolution not to sin again, his confessor responded unhesitatingly: I consider you absolved of that offence and purged as clean as if you had never sinned since the day you were born. (p. 159). Gawain’s persistence in treating the issue as a serious moral one appears increasingly at variance with the conventional romance conclusion as Bertilak reveals the underlying motivation of the adventure, the traditional enmity of the enchantress Morgan le Fay towards Arthur’s court (2439-70).35 Therefore, the challenge was to Arthur’s court, yet Gawain interpreted it as a personal failure which was inexcusable.

Elizabeth A. Hoffman notes that in the fourth Fitt, the colour structure's correspondence with the numerological patterns based on five and twenty-five breaks down, with one red and twelve greens, neither colour in any way related to five or its multiples. But then, the five-pointed knot of the red pentangle has collapsed as Gawain's symbol, unable to withstand the loss of even one element of its five clusters of virtues. The little blood that falls on the snow after the token "tappe" on Gawain's neck, while never referred to as red, is visually powerful enough to associate itself with the first red thread beginning to unravel from that essentially fragile knot. The much tougher green one, the knotted sash, will now take its place.36

Abashed and swearing never to break his word again, Sir Gawain refused Bertilak’s invitation to return to the castle and reconcile with his wife. Bitterly he inveighed against both ladies in the castle who have so cleverly deceived their knight with their trickery (p. 161), against the feminine sex in general, responsible for the downfall of many great and wise men, Solomon included, and against himself as a fool brought to grief through the wiles of women (2407-38). As Henrietta Leyser notes, Gawain’s diatribe shocks not least because it is gratuitous; his failing has been to accept from his hostess the secret gift of a green girdle whose magic powers will protect him in his forthcoming fight against the Green Knight. It is his love of his own life, not of a woman, that leads him to act deceitfully in not disclosing his gift when called upon to do so; the “uncourtliness” of his behaviour is compounded rather than excused by his misogynistic tirade.37

When Bertilak prices Gawain -when he comparat militem Arthuri -on this day of admirabile commercium, he reminds Gawain of that exchange, that commerce, between Deus and Homo, between deity and humanity, between spirit and flesh, which in his youthful idealism he had ignored. Although Gawain is a superior man, he is still a man, not yet a deity, and therefore he is still subject to the market-place of this world where the commerce between deity and humanity goes on. When Gawain looks hereafter to the syngne of surfet, he will see the weight of the flesh and thus also that concupiscence which is the reatus of original sin.38

This time he accepted the girdle as a badge of dishonour and returned to Arthur’s court. He recounted his story, admitting that the green girdle represented the blazon of this guilty scar I

35 Idem., p. 2136 Elizabeth A. Hoffman, "A Re-Hearing of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’", in Mark D. Johnston, Samuel M. Riley (eds), Essays in Medieval Studies 2/ 1985, p. 80, retrieved from the site: http://www.luc.edu/publications/medieval/vol2/hoffman.html, consulted on February, 2, 200637 Henrietta Leyser (1996), p. 25038 R. Allen Shoaf (1999), p. 24

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bear in my neck, this is the badge of the injury and the harm which I have received because of the cowardice and covetousness to which I there fell prey. (p. 165) All knights decided to wear green girdles as a symbol which would always remind them of their chivalrous duties. The outcome, however, is not the conventional reaffirmation of the chivalric values but the bitter disappointed idealist who has fallen short of his own absolute standards.39

Among the earlier readings of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, Donald R. Howard’s view was that the hero’s failure could be interpreted in terms of the conflict between Christian ideology and the secular idealism of chivalry.40 Later readings, starting with the ‘80s underlined that these were seen as complementary values integrated in the figure of the pentagle, symbol of trawthe. There is a strong interrelation between the bedroom scenes and the hunting scenes, as each hunt ended with a different version of the penalty for treason, thus relating Gawain to the archetypal Aeneas. According to W.J. Barron, the opening stanza to Sir Gawain and The Green Knight contains a characteristic combination of the verbal and thematic ambiguities and it describes the foundation of European civilizations by noble refugees from fallen Troy and also the appearance of medieval chivalry.(see Appendix 3). The tulk of line 3 in the poem (þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wro3t/ Wat3 tried for his triecherie, þe athel, and his highe kynde – p. 32) must surely be Aeneas who, for the Middle Ages, represented the archetypal founding father. According to the medieval versions of the Troy legend, Aeneas helped Antenor betray the city to Greeks, yet out of compassion, concealed from the princess Polyxena, whom they wished to sacrifice on Achilles’ tomb; Antenor revealed her hiding place and the Greeks angry at Aeneas’ treason sent him to exile.

The American critic Victor Yelverton Haines, in his Fortunate Fall off Sir Gawain: The Typology of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' (Washington, 1982) went even further, suggesting that Sir Gawain’s fault is similar to Adam’s felix culpa, which brought redemption for mankind.

Another possible interpretation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight consists in analysing the journey that Gawain takes from Arthur's court to Bertilak's castle, then to the Green Chapel, and back to Arthur's court as peregrinatio. As Sidney E. Berger points out in his Gawain's Departure from the Peregrinatio, the Middle Ages abounds in peregrinatios or pilgrimages to describe spiritual progress through a worldly metaphor. […] Dante's journey to Beatrice and Chaucer's from the sinful Tabard Inn to the tomb of St. Thomas Beckett, a place where the pilgrims can receive absolution for their sins, obviously represent spiritual as well as literal movements in the traditional peregrinatio.41

As Donald R. Howard suggests, it seems that by the end of the fifteenth century the pilgrimage was in decline. Reform and counter-reform and the complex of medieval institutions to which [Protestantism] was crying out for reform were already existent in Chaucer's time.42

The Age of Chaucer

The 14th century marked the formation of the English nation. Feudalism disintegrated rapidly, the first element of bourgeois society appeared on the stage of English history, the various regions of the country were unified in one state.

39 W.R. J. Barron (2001), p. 2240see Donald R. Howard (1966)41 Sidney E. Berger, "Gawain's Departure from the Peregrinatio", in Mark D. Johnston, Samuel M. Riley (eds), Essays in Medieval Studies 2/ 1985, p. 86, retrieved from the site: retrieved from the site: http://www.luc.edu/publications/medieval/vol2/berger.html, consulted on January, 6, 200642 Howard, Donald R (1980), p. 104

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An extremely important element concerning the 14th century English literature is that the works of this age were written primarily in English. This resulted from the fact that law courts and schools started to use English instead of French.

Irrespective of the way literature was being produced in England during this time and, whatever was written in England, expressing English thought and reflecting English social and intellectual conditions can rightly be considered a part of the national literature. Medieval literature was highly didactic, since almost everything written had a moral purpose, and it was highly impersonal.

Most of the fourteenth century works was anonymous and the main interest was in the poem rather than in the poet and reproduction by hand gave literature a communal character. The use of old, authoritative sources was considered something that added value to books.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400) is honoured as England’s first poet of world stature. He brings a new spirit to 14th century English literature, a spirit equally opposed to the theological and scholastic interpretation of the phenomena and to the traditional versification of medieval poetry.43

When Chaucer was born, Edward III of the House of Plantagenet was on the throne. Edward III was the son of the weak Edward II and of Isabella of France, who had both misruled the country. Although guilty of breaches of good faith, frivolity, extravagance, and self-indulgence, Edward III made a sincere effort to reform the government and we may say that to a large extent he managed to be a fairly good ruler.

Because of the royal house’s interest in warfare and its willingness to employ innovations instead of the traditional methods of fighting, England in Chaucer’s century became the dominant military power of Europe; it achieved its supremacy in the fourth decade of the century and held it for a hundred years.44 The feudal system was based on the idea that the king was the owner of lands, yet he did not hold the entire realm but apportioned it out to the most important lords on the basis of favour and friendship. In their turn, the lords usually granted their lands to sub-tenants. The other social class was represented by peasants. There were peasant freemen, some of whom owned their own land, but most of whom held land from superior lords under certain conditions, there were also villains (called in this

way as they were attached to a vill or a manor), who were neither free nor slave.

At the time of Chaucer’s birth, according to critical and historical accounts in 1343, England was inhabited by less than 3,000,000 people. Among the important landowners were the monasteries, as the clergy constituted an important element of the feudal system. As continuing corporations, monasteries never relinquished what they owned; and, by no means of gifts and purchases, they constantly increased the size of their estates. But not all of the land of England was in large holdings, for the peasants had a tremendous hunger for property. Slowly, but with almost a constant acceleration, many peasants rose from near slavery to full freedom.45

An important unfortunate event which occurred between 1348 and 1349 was the first visitation of the Black Death, a combination of pneumonic and bubonic plagues, a dreaded disease which

43 Valeria Alcay (ed.) (1972), p. 6344 Edwin J. Howard (1964), p. 1745 idem., p. 21

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killed between a third and a half of the whole population of England during the fourteenth century. The immediate result of so many deaths was a great shortage of labour, which brought about a consequent increase in wages after 1349. This made it possible for the villains to desert their ancestral lands to look for better working conditions and better wages, in spite of the fact that Edward II tried to keep the wages stable by issuing an ordinance in 1349, in cohesion with the Parliament that enacted a Statute of Laborers in 1351 to fix the price of labour at the rate that prevailed before the plague.

Another event to be mentioned is the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, which has been described by Edwin Howard as an effort to get rid of unjust taxation (characterized by the hated poll taxes initiated by the Chancellor, Archbishop Sudbury), to commute labour services into a payment of 4 d.a an acre and to allow the serf to work for wages.46

Many books hold the view that the Middle Ages was a time of great spirituality. Just by taking a glance at The General Prologue of The Canterbury Talesone can easily notice that, with the exception of the Parson, who is rather an atypical character, the representatives of the church had their eyes very much on things of the terrestrial world. In fact, in Chaucer’s time mysticism had been replaced by the steady growth of materialism and the great religious movements, with their contempt for the joys and sorrows of earthly life, were a thing of the past.47

We know almost nothing of Chaucer’s education, with the exception that at an early age he learned French, as it was the language that he had to speak at school, and that he also studied Latin. He must have learnt Italian as well, as several sources of his poems are to be found in Italian literature and they were not available in translation at the time.

The starting date for The Canterbury Tales is 1387, which is believed to be the year of his wife’s death. It has even been suggested that Chaucer made a pilgrimage to Canterbury in connection with Philippa’s death, although we do not have any proof. We would rather adopt the second theory concerning his trip to Canterbury, that he had often travelled the Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury when passing between London and Dover to Calais, the first important town in France which was after crossing the Channel.

According to the inscription on his tomb, at Westminster Abbey, Chaucer died on October 25, 1400, when he was fifty-six or fifty-seven. This is also the year of a plague which struck, yet we cannot connect Chaucer’s death to it. Therefore, we may say that the keynotes of Chaucer’s life are its variety and comparative comfort. First a page, then a squire, and then one of King Edward III’s own personal attendants, later on a soldier fighting in the Hundred Years’ War with France, in he became a Controller of the Custom on wool and later wine in the port of London.

The sheer variety of his experience of life, the world of books mingling with the world of affairs, the tactful subservience of the diplomat, the elegant refinement of the courtier, the more straightforward

46 idem., p. 2547 idem., p. 33

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practicality of the businessman, the expectations of a sensitive yet privileged medieval male – all these must figure in any full estimation of who Chaucer the man was.48

The French Period

French was reigning supreme at court, and at this time Chaucer may have written French verses. The French period in Chaucer’s creation lasts up to 1372. Chaucer embarked on translating Le Roman de la Rose into English. At a certain point he broke off his work in order to start working on The Book of the Duchesse, a poem whose influences may be traced back to La Fontaine amounanuce and Remède de Fortune by Guillaume de Machault.49 At first glance, the poem seems somewhat badly organized and disjointed, but actually it has a neat structure and a subtle unity woven around the theme of love-longing. For the narrator’s opening reflection on his long-continued sleeplessness, the cause of which was an unattainable lady, Chaucer drew directly on Froissart, who in turn had drawn on Machaut. Chaucer, however, imparted such a complete authenticity to his plaint that many critics believe it to be autobiographical.50

The Book of the Duchess is in Rob Pope’s terms a dream poem,51 meaning a poem that starts from one of the poet’s dreams (there will be several such creations written by Chaucer).

Complaynt unto Pite is a poem probably composed in the same year (1369) and it contains the verse-form which will become later the Chaucerian stanza, stanzas made up of seven iambic pentameters rhyming ababbcc.

The Italian Period

The Italian period (1372-1384) marked a step forward; this is the period when Chaucer learnt the art of poetry from his Italian contemporaries, Dante, Petrarch, and their predecessor Boccaccio.

With Troilus and Criseyde we become intensely involved in the dense texture of human emotions and the real consequences of people acting (or failing to act) in certain ways.52

Troilus and Criseyde seems to be the most representative work of this period, even if it is greatly influenced by Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato. Troilus and Criseyde takes place in ancient Troy, yet the characters fight and love according to late fourteenth-century ideals. This is just one feature of Chaucer’s works which is to be discovered later on in The Canterbury Tales.

The English Period

The English period (1384-1400) is the most significant period of Chaucer’s creation as this is the period in which he composed The Canterbury Tales.

48 Rob Pope (2001), pp. 8-949 We do know that Chaucer had an avid and omnivorous appetite for reading. (See Rob Pope, p. 174). Thus, in the presentation of his work, we will try to point out the main sources he used in his creation. We will therefore see the five kinds of material in Chaucer’s work: works of classical philosophers, poets and historians, such as Socrates, Ovid, Vergil, Boethius, biblical stories from the Old and New Testaments, romances, heroic poems and lyrics by more modern writers such as Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung, the French authors of ‘Le Roman de la Rose’, and contemporary Italian writers such as Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch, learned epigrams (sententiae) and their colloquial folk equivalents (proverbs) drawn from a wide variety of sources and expert and specialized knowledges in such areas as astrology, alchemy, law, medicine, mathematics and music, again drawing on ancient and modern sources. (adapted from Rob Pope, p. 173)50 Edwin Howard (1964), p. 5851 Rob Pope (2001), p. 14652 Rob Pope (2001), p. 191

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Chaucer’s idea of writing a collection of stories for a specific fictional audience was not new in the Late Middle Ages. Thus, we will mention some of the other collections of tales in order to show Chaucer’s outlook in The Canterbury Tales. The first collection of tales worth mentioning is John Gower's Confessio Amantis, a collection of tales, told by Genius, the Priest of Love, for the instruction of an unsuccessful lover (Gower himself). The First Day of Boccacio's Decameron resembles The Canterbury Tales more closely than the works of Gower. It begins with a chilling description of the Plague, which provides the impetus for the journey in which the tales are told. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales has many speakers, rather than just one (as in The Confessio Amantis), and it differs from Boccaccio's Decameron, the closest analogue, in that the speakers are not from a single social class (as are Boccaccio's elegant young Florentines), but are drawn from a broad range of society, from the noble knight to the drunken rascal of a Miller and the impoverished Parson.

The main features of The Canterbury Tales are, according to Rob Pope, variety and complexity: on the one hand there is the flexibility and variety of the speaking voice; on the other there is the underlying order of the verse form. Sometimes Chaucer opts for an essentially formal style, and sometimes he opts for a more familiar, colloquial one. And often he mixes formal and informal styles to produce an ever more complex texture. Again, the key to an understanding of the smaller as well as the larger effects of Chaucer’s verse is its sheer’ variety’.53

Having accepted Chaucer’s statement that he joined twenty-nine other Pilgrims at the Tabard Inn, and that each pilgrim was supposed to tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two tales on the way back, the total number of stories should be one hundred and twenty. There are only twenty completed tales, and there is an additional tale told by the Canon’s Yeoman, who was not an original member of the band. We have no information whatsoever regarding the reasons that Chaucer may have had to allow such a grand project to die. And, as Howard points out, it must always be sincerely regretted that the project did fail, because the stories we assume to be of late composition show a heightened sense of drama in comparison with the earlier stories.54 The work survives in ten fragments, labelled with Roman numerals in most editions. In my presentation I will use the latest edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, namely The Riverside Chaucer.55 (The alphabethical designations added in parentheses belong to the Chaucer Society, adopted by Skeat in his edition on The Canterbury Tales.)

The linking element between the different tales is the Host, who gives a unity of character, almost as great as the unity of frame-story, to the whole work, inviting, criticising, admiring, denouncing, but always keeping himself in evidence.56 Thus, Chaucer’s first person narrator (as we have previously mentioned an alter-ego of Chaucer) was the one who handled only the first

53 Rob Pope (2001), p. 2154 Edwin Howard (1964), p. 12555 Edited by Larry D. Benson, The Riverside Chaucer is at present the best edition on Chaucer (3rd edition, 1987, New York: Houghton Mifflin Co). It has been the result of many years of study by very famous Chaucerian scholars and it contains all of Chaucer’s completely re-edited works, with added glosses alongside the text, textual notes, explanatory notes, and bibliography. The Riverside Chaucer may be partially retrieved from the site: http://www.librarius.com/amazon/riversid.htm, consulted on December, 12, 2005

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part of The Canterbury Tales, namely The General Prologue. He set the time, he explained where the characters started their pilgrimage from, he introduced each character, he excused himself for speaking too plainly, as his purpose was to record exactly what each character said. He told us how many tales the book would contain, he told us about the prize the best teller would get: a dinner at Tabard Inn, and now it is time the Host introduced each character. Thus, the Host must create and mediate conflicts.

Fragment I (Group A)The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, the most admired and commented upon according to Leon Leviţchi, is essentially descriptive rather than narrative. There is a story of situation, but really the bulk of the poem is taken up with the description of some thirty people: rich and poor, secular and religious, good and bad.57 Rob Pope calls The General Prologue an estates satire, a survey of various classes or estates of late medieval society,58 and he mentions that the satire aspect comes from the fact that these are often figures of fun. They are there to be ridiculed or censured, and occasionally admired.59 The General Prologue has been criticised for the fact that at first glance, this is not much short of miraculous, as it consists of little more than apparently unsystematic descriptions of about thirty ill -assorted people and a plan for a trip.60 Howard uses the term ill-assorted people to mean that one could hardly find so many representatives of so many social classes travelling together at the same time, and obviously Chaucer’s plan was rather to create a cross-section of Medieval middle-class society than to describe a mere pilgrimage to Canterbury.

The members of the Middle Ages society not present in The General Prologue are the representatives of the nobility and the serfs and villains. The latter represented almost three fourths of the social layer represented on the pilgrimage At the same time, with the exception of the narrator, Chaucer’s alter ego who was a writer, the many branches of artistry that flourished in the Middle Ages are not present in The Canterbury Tales. The reasons for Chaucer’s choice are not hard to find, as the higher aristocracy and clergy went on pilgrimages with their own private retinues, while the great mass of the population could not afford to go on pilgrimages at all. The result is therefore that The General Prologue covers a much narrower range of late medieval society than most readers first think. Its variety is great, but far from comprehensive when compared with actual life.61

Rob Pope distinguished six types of stories in The Canterbury Tales: court romances, fabliaux, sermons, holy lives, confessions and moral tracts.

Court romances are tales which explore refined notions of love and war in a court setting. The plot usually revolves around the competition between two noble men for one noble woman. Court romances are characterized by elaborate, highly idealized forms of courtship (sometimes called “courtly love”) and elaborately ritualistic behaviour in general.62 Thus, The Knight’s Tale, The Squire’s Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, The Merchant’s Tale, The Franklin’s Tale may be considered court romances.63

56 A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller (eds), VII. Chaucer, § 11. The Canterbury Tales, in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21), Volume II. The End of the Middle Ages, retrieved from the site: http://www.bartleby.com/212/0710.html, consulted on January, 14, 200657 Rob Pope (2001), p. 2358 ibidem.59 ibidem.60 Edwin Howard (1964), p. 11961 Rob Pope (2001), p. 3962 Rob Pope (2001), p. 8

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Fabliaux are exactly at the opposite end: stories dealing with an extended joke or trick, usually set amongst the lower orders of combinations of raw sex and knockabout violence, and by the end everyone has received a kind of justice.64 Obviously, while court romances are sublimely abstract and idealized, fabliaux are grotesquely concrete and physical.65 While court romances draw on stories of solemn knights and ladies, fabliaux take as their main characters tradesmen, minor clerics and the peasantry

Critics decided that the fabliaux were not tavern fare, composed by the vulgar for the vulgar, yet it must be admitted that, just as the fabliaux's action of cuckoldry and physical aggression breaks the rules of polite peacetime behavior, so the raw vocabulary of many fabliaux infringes the rules of polite and courtly speech to which respectable bourgeois or courtly audiences would ordinarily conform.66

The main concern of the fabliaux is cuckoldings, beatings, and elaborate practical jokes. Greed, hypocrisy, and pride are invariably punished, but so too are old age, mere slow-wittedness, and, most frequently, the presumption of a husband, especially an old one, who attempts to guard his wife's chastity.67 The protagonists of fabliaux, who are always both witty and young, are the people whom society ordinarily scorns - dispossessed intellectuals (lecherous priests, wayward monks, penniless students), clever peasants, and enthusiastically unchaste wives.68 Their victims are exactly the opposite: prosperous merchants, hard-working tradesmen, women who try to remain chaste.

The Reeve’s Tale takes the basic form of the fabliau, such as The Miller’s Tale does. The Cook’s Tale (fragment), The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, The Friar’s Tale and The Summoner’s Tale are fabliaux as well.

Rob Pope divided Chaucer’s religious writings into four major categories: sermons, holy lives, confessions and moral tracts.

Medieval sermons were basically exhortations to embrace and shun vices. Essentially oral and often highly rhetorical, they were the main way in which Christian doctrine was communicated.69 Rob Pope discusses the four types of material that usually represented the composition of a medieval preacher’s sermon: an abstract theme (such as gluttony, avarice or charity), a biblical story or quotation (for instance the story of the Good Samaritan), popular stories and proverbs, or classical stories and maxims for a more learned congregation and a contemporary event (such as for instance a local riot or a bout of plague).70 The three full sermons appearing in The Canterbury Tales are The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, The Nun’s Priest’s Prologue and Tale and The Parson’s Tale. In each case we carry with us a strong image of the preacher. As well as the sermon he delivers. We see him both as a human individual and as a divine authority figure.71

Holy lives resemble court romances, with the exception that the heroes and heroines are holy people, not knights or ladies. Holy lives were one of the most popular of medieval literary genres and they told of the life, miracles, and martyrdom of the hero or heroine. Like knights, saints have adventures, often involving long journeys through exotic places, and they too meet

63 According to Rob Pope, The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of fowls, Troilus and Criseyde and The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women can also be seen as court romances. 64 Rob Pope (2001), p. 965 ibidem.66 Laura Kendrick (1988), p. 74 67 The Riverside Chaucer, p. 8 68 ibidem.69 Rob Pope (2001), p. 1070 The classification belongs to Rob Pope (2001), p. 1071 Rob Pope (2001), p. 11

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and overcome enemies and obstacles, usually winning through to some kind of triumph at the end. [...] The final triumph is not a knight winning a fight or the hand of his lady, but a holy person- often a woman- defeating the devil and his supporters. Significantly, this usually means martyrdom for the heroine, being stoned or boiled in oil, and there is often at least the threat of rape.[...] For all their apparent piety, they often strike the modern reader as sensationally sadistic.72 Chaucer used the holy life as his main base in the following tales: The Clerk’s Tale, The Man of Law’s Tale, The Physician’s Tale, The Prioress Tale and The Second Nun’s Tale. There are elements of the holy life in The Knight’s Tale and The Franklin’s Tale.

Confessions are not often used by Chaucer. To be more precise, there is only one confession in The Canterbury Tales: The Parson’s Tale. The Parson instructs the other pilgrims how to recognise, confess and renounce each of the seven deadly sins in turn. Rob Pope interprets The Parson’s Tale as a confession manual, concluding with a prayer from Chaucer himself. This prayer is sometimes called the “retraction” and is itself a kind of confession. In it the author (presumably towards the end of his life) looks back over all his writings, recognizing that some may help him to heaven, whereas others certainly will not! He concludes with a prayer to “Lord Jesus Christ and his blessed Mother, and all the Saints of heaven, beseeching them that they from henceforth to the end of my life may send me grace to be sorry for my sins and to look to my salvation”.73

Thinking of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue for instance, we may notice that she looks back over her life and confesses openly to past loves and her sins, so we may conclude that there are several tales which use confession as their main base such as The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, as well as other tales and prologues in which the characters confess about the tricks of their trades and sins in general: The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale and The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale.

The moral tracts are, according to Rob Pope, the common type of writing used by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales. The critic defined them as similar to sermons, that lack the oral style of the latter. Like the sermon, it tends to be concerned with virtues and vices, the trials and tribulations of the world, heaven and hell, and so forth. Unlike the sermon it is not particularly diversified by incidental stories or direct address to the reader/audience. In short, moral tracts are high on analytical distinctions and low on dramatic impact. They often have the broken-up, schematized and labeled look of reference books (which they often were) rather than works you would sit down and read all the way through.74 Thus, we may see that the moral tract represented the main base of The Monk’s Tale and The Parson’s Tale.75

As it has previously been mentioned, Chaucer does not use these six forms in a pure form, but he rather tends to mix them. This mixing of different materials and perspectives is one of the chief features of Chaucer’s art and […] the overall result is one of sheer variety.76

The Renaissance

General Background

It would be difficult to clearly delineate the frontiers separating The Middle Ages from the Renaissance. The medieval civilisation was dying out, in a society where everything was in a process of continuous changing: the role of religion in everyday life stopped being so important,

72 ibidem.73 idem., p. 1274 idem., p. 1375 Caution is required in the case of the Parson’s Tale, as this is the tale that straddles three of the four religious types: sermon, confession and moral tract.( ibidem.) 76 idem., p. 16

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the relationship between the king and his barons changed; the Monarchy no longer depended so much on the Church. At the same time serfdom was gradually disappearing. Linguistically speaking, the main rival of the English language was no longer French but Latin. The growing economy seemed to prepare the island for happier times, and the security of this new epoch was to be ensured by Henry Tudor.

As early as the fourteenth century a new movement appeared in Italy which was called Il Rinascimento (Renaissance- re-birth).77 It spread to other European countries, England included in the late 15th century. The movement was called). The Renaissance was an influential cultural movement which brought about a period of scientific revolution, religious reform and artistic transformation and which marked the transitional period between the end of the Middle Ages and the start of the Modern Age. The main principles underlying this new movement were, above all: the autonomous development of the individual; advocacy of well-being for all; philological criticism of the ancient texts (study of complete works, not of fragmentary excerpts).78

The most prominent Renaissance political figures in England were the Tudors who laid the firm foundations for the monarchy and wielded the absolute power of the Prince:79 Henry VII, Henry VIII (1509-1547), a figure of Renaissance England – matching his French rival François I in the ambition, dynamism and boldness that characterised their private and political decisions, who continued his father’s (Henry VII’s ) work80 and Elizabeth I (1558-1603), whose name became emblematic of all the manifestations of the 16th century England, a powerful political state keeping the European balance in an age of expansion and of increasing material and cultural prosperity.81 Queen Elizabeth’s reign, one of the most stable historical periods in England transformed the country into a political force, materially cumulative in full territorial expansion, leading to high expressive qualities in the fields of science and culture,82 which made poetry and drama to undergo beneficial changes.

The two faces of Renaissance were the Reformation of the Church and humanism. Henry VIII’s courageous gesture of reforming the Church and disobeying the Pope who did not agree to the king’s divorce from Catherin of Aragon brought the British people more boldness and the capacity to depart from doctrines and dogmas. The Reformation is closely linked to many of the texts printed in the sixteenth-century section of the Norton Anthology: Book 1 of Spenser's Faerie Queene (NAEL 1.628–772), for example, in which a staunchly Protestant knight of Holiness struggles against the satanic forces of Roman Catholicism, or the Protestant propagandist Foxe's account of Lady Jane Grey's execution (NAEL 1.551–53), or the Catholic Robert Southwell's moving religious lyric, The Burning Babe (NAEL 1.956–57).83

77 The term Rebirth (Rinascita), to indicate the flourishing of artistic and scientific activities starting in Italy in the mid 1300's, was first used by the Italian artist Giorgio Vasari in the Vite, published in 1550. The term Renaissance is the French translation, used by French historian Jules Michelet in the 1860s, and expanded upon by Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. Rebirth means on the one side the rediscovery of ancient classical texts and learning and their applications in the arts and sciences and on the other one, it means that the results of these intellectual activities created a revitalization of European culture in general. Thus, it is possible to speak of the Renaissance in two different but meaningful ways: A rebirth of classical learning and knowledge through the rediscovery of ancient texts, and also a rebirth of European culture in general. 78 Leon Leviţchi (1974), p. 19979 Doina Zaharia, "Italian Cultural Influences upon England in the Period of the Renaissance", in American, British and Canadian Studies, vol. I, October, 1999, p. 780 Livia Deac, "The Background to Renaissance and Restoration Literature", 1. "The Socio-Historical Setting" in Ioan Aurel Preda (ed.) (1983), p. 881 idem., p. 982 idem., p. 1083 Annina Jokinen, 1996, last updated on September 25, 2002, retrieved from the site: http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/16century/welcome.htm, consulted on December, 12, 2005

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By humanism we understand the new spirit rejuvenating Europe through the study of the rediscovered texts which had once been the glory of ancient Greece and Rome.84 In its narrow sense, humanism refers to the study and imitation of the Latin classics, and in its broad sense, it means the affirmation of the secular. In contrast with scholasticism, the early humanists espoused a return to study of the original texts, rather than a reliance on the glosses and commentaries produced by scholasticists. Criticism generally associates humanism with the name of Thomas More (Morus) who is by far the most representative man in the history of English humanism. His well-known Utopia was written in Latin in two books and was to be translated into German in 1524, into French in 1530, into Italian in 1548, and into English in 15551. Monica Botez mentions More’s fight against scholasticism: Granting attention to a healthy development of both body and mind, the Utopians praise the senses and define virtue as ‘life ordered according to nature… by reason’, a doctrine that Rabelais borrowed for his abbey of Thélème in Gargantua and Pantagruel.85

Renaissance did not change the view of the Middle Ages which placed man in The Scale of Being in the middle, as he was half dust, half spirit, yet the big change was that the centre shifted from the Church to Man: The Renaissance thought conceived man as an image of the universe, a microcosm, in which were focused all the antinomies of being. ‘in the little world of man’, as J. W. Lever has put it, ‘the inimical powers of the elements and stars, the social anarchy of war and usurpation, the diseases and vices of body and soul were co-present with postulations of order and degree, of natural beauty and cosmic truth.’86

In the Tudor age, stronger political relationships with the Continent were developed, increasing England's exposure to Renaissance culture. These forces produced during the reign (1558–1603) of Elizabeth I one of the most fruitful eras in literary history. The energy of England's writers matched that of its mariners and merchants. Accounts by men such as Richard Hakluyt, Samuel Purchas, and Sir Walter Ralegh were eagerly read.87

The Italian Renaissance influenced the English learning and new classical and scientific learning found auspicious home at Oxford and Cambridge, as leaning and intellectual life were, in the 15th century, mainly confined to these universities where Italian lectures and rhetoreticians came to teach Greek and Latin.88 At the beginning of the 15th century, the son of Henry IV, Duke of Gloucester acted as a Maecenas, donating a collection of manuscripts from France and Italy to Oxford. The English Renaissance philosophers and scholars started to travel to Italy: Lineacre, Groceyn and Latimer travelled to Florence, Bologna, Padua, Venice and Rome. The 16th century scholars and Churchmen introduced the study of Greek, Latin and Hebrew into the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. The various messengers of Italian culture and civilisation in England where people of various careers, as Doina Zaharia calls them, quoting Lee Eistein: musicisti, sschermitori, artisti, ciarlatani, dotti medici, affaristi, avventurieri italiani, bazzicano per la via din Londra e si danno grande dattare per emergere e riuscire.89

84 Leon Leviţchi (1974), p. 20185 Monica Botez, "The Literary Scene. Prose" in Ioan Aurel Preda (ed.) (1983), p. 4286 Ioan Aurel Preda, "The Background to Renaissance and Restoration Literature", "Intellectual Developments" in Ioan Aurel Preda (ed.) (1983), p. 1587 The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright© 2004, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved, p. 15603, retrieved from the site: http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=101242783, consulted on January, 6, 200688 Doina Zaharia, "Italian Cultural Influences upon England in the Period of the Renaissance", in American, British and Canadian Studies, vol. I, October, 1999, p. 789 Quoted in Doina Zaharia, "Italian Cultural Influences upon England in the Period of the Renaissance", in American, British and Canadian Studies, vol. I, October, 1999, p. 13

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Christopher Marlowe

Born in the same year as Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was his greatest rival. In spite of his talent and the clearness of his ultimate vision, Marlowe’s plays were not as successful as Shakespeare’s at the time they were publishing their work. As Ellis-Fermor noted, in reality, Marlowe speaks of things no less profound and no less universal than Shakespeare. Wherever men are preoccupied with the 'why?' rather than the 'how?' in whatever periods of history thought turns back to question the nature of man's being and the part he plays in the universe, there the thought of Marlowe will be found to be at the heart of man's most vital experience.90

Born in the family of a Canterbury shoemaker, in 1579, Christopher Marlowe went to King's School, Canterbury, on a scholarship, from which we judge that the arts of reading and writing and elementary Latin must then have been familiar to him. Like most young Elizabethan boys, he had probably attended an 'elementarie' school - these were kept in many cases by the parish clerk-where the rudiments were given to children whose parents were not of a position to have private tutors.91 At that time, King's School enjoyed a brilliant reputation, and it was a centre of theatrical interests. The school contained a large library filled with a number of volumes which have been claimed as sources for Marlowe's plays. In December 1580, Marlowe moved to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he studied for the next six years. He received a scholarship founded by Mathew Parker, master of the college from 1544 to 1553 and later archbishop of Canterbury. The scholarship was for six years and was granted to those who were supposed to join the clergy after graduation. Marlowe's academic career was uneventful, except for mysterious and increasingly long absences after his second year. It is now assumed that Marlowe was absent from college for weeks even months at a time due to the fact that he was involved in government service either as a secret agent or as a confidential messenger. His education from the age of seventeen to that of twenty-three, when he took his Bachelor degree in divinity, and left Cambridge for London, must have been narrow, over-disciplined and over-specialised, as the Elizabethan universities provided an education with a strong theological bias.92 However, at Cambridge, Marlowe became familiar with classical texts. This is why his works abound in classical allusions and his sentences are constructed with so close an observance of the rules of rhetoric.93

Paradoxically, instead of joining the clergy after graduation, he became a free-thinker and he joined Sir Walter Ralegh’s School of Atheism, thus making the Privy Council accuse him with atheism. In 1587, Christopher Marlowe became an actor and dramatist for the Lord Admiral's Company. In 1593, Marlowe was stabbed in a barroom brawl by a drinking companion. A coroner's jury certified that the assailant acted in self-defense, yet Marlowe’s biographers think that the murder may have resulted from Marlowe's activities as a government agent.

90 Ellis-Fermor (1927), p. XI91 idem., pp. 1-292 idem., p. 293 Leon Leviţchi (1974), p. 335

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Among Christopher Marlowe’s early interests we may mention his translations, for instance Lucan’s Pharsalia and Ovid’s Amores.

His first play was The Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage (1593? published 1594); it aroused Shakespeare’s criticism who parodied the description of Priam’s death in his Hamlet. Dido is the embodiment of passion, dignity and courage, making us think of a sort of Elizabethan feminine titan – if Dido actually was Marlowe’s earliest play, the heroine may be said to inaugurate the gallery of titans.94 The tragedy has not been seen by critics as one of Marlowe’s literary achievements until recently when several studies of the politics of gender, nationality, and race have focused on its relation to the development of English imperialism. Queen Dido is a female ruler from North Africa who is brought down by her love for a male voyager intent on founding an imperial dynasty. William Godshalk has suggested that Queen Elizabeth's abortive marriage negotiations with the Duke of Anjou in the years 1579-81 seem to have been on the playwright's mind, though their exact relation to the details of the play has never been worked out.95 As founder of an empire that rivaled that of ancient Rome, Dido was a convenient analogue for Elizabeth in her challenge to the sixteenth-century Roman imperium controlled by the Pope and his powerful allies in France and Spain. Interest in the myth at the English court appears as early as 1564, when Edward Halliwin ell staged a Latin play entitled Dido (now lost) before the Queen at Cambridge.96 In Marlowe’s play, Dido shows off her private portrait gallery to Aeneas and his men- the gallery displays images of her many former suitors, of whom the Queen boasts complacently, All these and others which I never sawe,/ Have been most urgent suiters for my love,/ Some came in person, others sent their Legats:/ Yet none obtained me (3.1.150-53). Dido’s suitors include rival kings of Aeneas from Greece, Troy, Persia, and other lands, yet Aeneas, a traveller who lacks experience, unlike his men, does not recognise any of them. Unlike Virgil's Dido who had only one suitor, Iarbus, Marlowe's evidently has a large and distinguished following, including prominent men from opposing sides in every major regional conflict in recent memory.97 Donald Stump considers that in transforming Dido into a collector of love trophies, Marlowe almost certainly had Elizabeth in mind. One point that he stresses is her general strategy of entertaining numerous foreign suitors in order to maintain the delicate balance of power between rival states in Europe.98 Within this general framework of topical allusions to the Anjou affair, Marlowe’s play becomes more interesting for the philologist who has acquired some knowledge in British culture and civilisation.99

94 idem., p. 34195 W.L. Godshalk (1974), 57-5896 Donald Stump, "Marlowe's Travesty of Virgil: Dido and Elizabethan Dreams of Empire", Comparative Drama, Vol. 34, 2000 on the site: http://freessays.0catch.com/marlowestump.html, consulted on February, 23, 200697 ibidem.98 ibidem.99 In fact, with the exception of Edward II, all Marlowe’s plays represented a starting point in colonialist interpretations. As Lisa Hopkins has suggested, all of his plays except one, 'Edward II', are set abroad -two, 'Doctor Faustus' and 'Tamburlaine', in more than one country; and many of them also involve heroes, or other characters, who are foreign visitors or residents. [...] 'The Jew of Malta' boasts a whole complement of invading Turks as well as the inherently exiled Jew himself (the Knights themselves are also not indigenous inhabitants but of foreign origin); and 'Dido, Queen of Carthage' features the man who in many ways can stand for the ur-coloniser, Aeneas. Running through all of these works is an concern with alienness, with the viability of normative perspectives, and with the problematics of the relationship between personal and national identities. (Lisa Hopkins, "And shall I die, and this unconquered?': Marlowe's Inverted Colonialism", Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996): 1.1-23, retrieved from the site: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/02-2/hopkmarl.html, consulted on February, 26, 2006)

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Tamburlaine the Great (first acted in 1587 or 1588, published in 1590) represented Christopher Marlowe’s first literary achievement, and Marlowe’s contemporaries and audience hailed the play enthusiastically.

Part I is full of bloodshed, treachery, and ambition of a kind which was as unequivocally condemned by sixteenth-century as by twentieth-century moral orthodoxy100. In The Prologue to the first part of Tamburlaine the Great we are immediately informed of Tamburlaine's racial origin: he is a Scythian. In Elizabethan ideology, the term Scythian demarcated an absolute otherness, a being so sharply inferior to civilised Western man that his very membership of the same species was open to doubt.101 The Scythian Shepherd, Tamburlaine, moved by an ambition far beyond the circumstances of his humble birth, had made himself leader of a gang of brigands that prey successfully on the rich merchant trains that cross Persia. In one of their raids, the brigands capture the party escorting Zenocrate, daughter of the Sultan of Egypt, to her nuptials with the King of Arabia. Tamburlaine promptly falls in love with her. Meanwhile, Mycetes, the not too bright King of Persia, has heard that Tamburlaine might have designs on the throne of Persia. He, therefore, sends one of his lords, Theridamas, with a thousand horsemen to take Tamburlaine prisoner. Theridamas and his cavalry join Tamburlaine's ranks. Hearing this, Mycetes' brother, Cosroe, decides that the help of such a powerful man as Tamburlaine might make his own chances of seizing his brother's crown. Tamburlaine and his followers do so, yet they also turn on Cosroe and dispatch him, taking Persia for themselves.

Tamburlaine’s insatiable ambition impels him next to try his fortunes against the all-powerful Bajazeth, emperor of Turkey. In spite of Zenocrate's pleas, Tamburlaine also marches against her native Egypt, which her father, the Sultan, and her former betrothed of Arabia, prepare to defend. The Arabian is killed, but, true to his promise, Tamburlaine spares the Sultan and makes him one of his tributary kings. With such a valiant start toward conquering the known world Tamburlaine feels that his crown is now worth Zenocrate's acceptance and the play closes with the wedding rites.

Part II of Tamburlaine was evidently written at a later date due to the immense popularity of Part I; the second part deals with Tamburlaine's subsequent victories and inglorious death from illness.

Taking Alexandru Olaru’s theories102 as reference points, Leon Leviţchi analyses Tamburlaine’s paranoid consciousness in his article, Christopher Marlowe, the Scourge and the Book. Thus, among the specific signs of a paranoid constitution are the pathological overrating of the self, haughtiness or vanity…; the falseness of judgment which worsens as a result of a passion for logic, which supports the paranoid’s opinions with increased obstinacy…; disdain, voluntary isolation, active revolt etc. The form of the paranoid’s reactions is determined by the main delirious theme: claiming, megalomaniac, mystical, erotic, reforming, etc.103

According to Roy W. Battenhouse, Marlowe uses the “scourge” declaration both earlier and later in the story and with such frequency as to make it the running theme of the drama. A dozen times in the play the protagonist calls our attention to his title.104

100 J. C. Maxwell, "The Plays of Christopher Marlowe", in Boris Ford (ed) (1991), p. 261101 Lisa Hopkins, "And shall I die, and this unconquered?': Marlowe's Inverted Colonialism", Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996): 1.1-23, retrieved from the site: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/02-2/hopkmarl.html, consulted on February, 26, 2006 102 See Alexandru Olaru (1976)103 Quoted in Leon Leviţchi, "Christopher Marlowe, The Scourge and the Book", in Ioan Aurel Preda (ed) (1983), p. 86104 Roy W. Battenhouse (1966), pp. 132-133

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Trying to search through several of the occurrences of the epithet scourge of God, we may see the way in which Tamburlaine deepens his paranoid delirium. Tamburlaine is called the scourge of God from the very beginning (line six in Act I):

… you shall hear the Scythian TamburlaineThreatening the world with high astounding terms,And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. (I, I, 1, 6)

Later on, when Tamburlaine humiliates awfully the kings of Trebizon and Soria by compelling them to draw his chariot while he “scourgeth them” with a whip, he thinks he has reached an acme of his triumph.105 This time it is no longer another character who calls Tamburlaine the scourge of God, but Tamburlaine himself who does it, overrating his self:

Thus I am right the scourge of highest Jove;And see the figure of my dignity,By which I hold my name of majesty! (II, IV, 3, 24-26)

By the end of the first part of the play, Tamburlaine still considers himself a messenger of God, the God of wrath which punishes people, as can be seen in The Old Testament:

There is a God, full of revenging wrath,From whom the thunder and the lighting breaks,Whose scourge I am, and him will I obey. (V, 1, 191-193)

The main delirious theme is still claiming, but it evolves immediately to megalomaniac, as several lines further, Tamburlaine takes a further step. At this point in the play, he no longer considers himself the representative of God on earth, but God himself, as he claims to be immortal:

Sickness or death can never conquer me. (V, 1, 230)

The climax of his paranoid delirium takes the form of the delirious reforming theme, when Tamburlaine, a God on Earth threatens to kill the God in Heaven:

Come, let us march against the powers of heaven,

And set black streamers in the firnament,To sign the slaughter of the gods. (V, 3, 48-50)

At this point, in his mind, Tamburlaine replaces the God in Heaven, as he claims to represent life itself:

Come, let us charge our spears, and pierce his breastWhose shoulders bear the axis of the world,

105 Leon Leviţchi, "Christopher Marlowe, The Scourge and the Book", in Ioan Aurel Preda (ed) (1983), p. 86

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That, if I perish, heaven and earth may fade. (V, 3, 58-60)

Line 60 in Act V, scene 3 represents for Leviţchi the total eclipse of the moral sense (total lack of concern for anyone else besides him) and the total eclipse of consciousness (the belief that with his disappearance universal life may or will disappear too).106

At this point, God needs to send him a sign that He still exists, and thus Zenocrate dies in the second Act, part II. This is the first time that Tamburlaine’s sleeping consciousness awakens and he realises that just like Zenocrate, he can perish.

The death of Zenocrate unbalances Tamburlaine’s already disordered mind. The evidence of what he sees is too hard for him to come to terms with it:

What, is she dead? Techelles, draw thy sword,And wound the earth, that it may cleave in twain,And we descend into th’eternal vaults,To hale the Fatal Sisters by the hair,And throw them in the triple moat of hellFor taking hence my fair Zenocrate. (II, III, 3, 96-101)

When he himself is threatened by annihilation, he utters a number of questions prompted by his refusal to accept reality.107 His fear of death grows as he goes on asking one question after another:

The one who claimed to be God himself understands that God is still present in heaven and torments his body.

What daring god torments my body thusAnd seeks to conjure mighty Tamburlaine? (II, V, 3, 42-43)

The fact that he is still not convinced of God’s existence relies in his speaking about himself in the third person.

Later on, the one who claimed once that he could not be conquered by sickness, and by death, realises that he is only human, and just like any human being, he can get sick:

Tell me what think you of my sickness now? (II, V, 3, 81)

Yet, as a conqueror of the world, he would still accomplish his plans before he dies, as he asks twice the same question:

And shall I die, and this unconquered? (II, V, 3, 149 and 157)

As Leon Leviţchi remarked, it is yet too late for Tamburlaine to become a philosopher, or at least a common thinking man.108 His work may be accomplished by his two warrior-sons, as symmetrically, six lines before the play ends, his will has been already expressed, For Tamburlaine, the Scourge of God must die.

106 Leon Leviţchi, "Christopher Marlowe, The Scourge and the Book", in Ioan Aurel Preda (ed) (1983), p. 87107 ibidem.108 ibidem.

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He therefore became again a human being, keeping his initial status, that of the representative of God on earth. The one who thought that he was God himself, becomes again only the scourge of God.

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1592?) was considered Marlowe’s masterpiece; it concentrates on the world-old opposition between good and evil, between the forces of “light” and the forces of “darkness” that the symbolic contract of man with the devil had its roots and, on the soil of medieval Christianity, made the legend of Faustus possible.109

On the surface, Doctor Faustus is a powerful and extremely effective dramatic entertainment made for the Elizabethan stage, with many of the popular traditional elements which earlier English drama had evolved: an exciting story, the constant use of stage-effects, anti-Pope satire, farcical episodes and, equally attractive to the contemporary audience, that high-sounding, evocative theatre poetry which Marlowe had already used so impressively in the two Tamburlaine plays.110

All Marlowe’s plays are concerned with power of various kinds, and Dr. Faustus, like all the main characters of Marlowe’s looks for power, by means of the magic aid of Lucifer. Tamburlaine intended to get power with his sword, in a murderous career. He killed the virgins of Damascus, he killed his own son, as he had no desire to fight. He used his scourge to conquer the world. Dr. Faustus looks for another type of power, he looks for infinite knowledge, and he can do this by means of his books:

O, what a world of profit and delight,Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,Is promis’d to the studious artisan.All things that move between the quiet polesShall be at my command: emperors and kingsAre but obey’d in their several provinces,Nor can they raise the wond or rend the clouds;But his dominion that exceeds in thisStretches as far as doth the mind of man. (I, 52-60)

Faustus speaks with a fine exaltation akin to Tamburlaine’s, but his ringing aspirations are merely a desire for wealth, privilege and power; when, just after this speech, Valdes and Cornelius encourage Faustus to use magic, the results they offer him are also power and wealth. All that he seeks throughout most of the rest of the play until the last phase (that is, about three-quarters of the whole) is the knowledge and its special power that magic seems to promise.111

On the one side, statistically speaking, the occurrences of the thematic key-word book in Dr. Faustus exceed the occurrences of the thematic key-word scourge in Tamburlaine the Great. On the other side, Christopher Marlowe uses not only book, but various synonyms: art, Scripture, study, etc.

Although “book” does not appear at the beginning of the tragedy, it is an easy substitute for “learning” in a line uttered by Chorus: “/he is/ glutted now with learning’s golden gifts.” (Prologue, 20) – “the golden gifts of books”, or, without pushing the paraphrase too far, “the golden gifts of good books”, the books that allow men to advance along the path leading to a scientific knowledge of the world.112

109 Leon Leviţchi (1974), p. 358110 Boorman (1987), p. 271111 idem., pp. 273-274

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In his attempt to overreach his condition, Dr. Faustus compares two texts from The Bible, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, VI, 23 which says: the reward of sin is death and The First Epistle General of John that says if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and there’s no truth in us. The two sentences, taken out of their context, contradict each other, and by logical deduction, Dr. Faustus understands that irrespective of the course of his actions, he will go to hell anyhow. Thus, it is worth trying to play with eternity by the help of Mephistopheles who offers him the book wherein he might behold all spells and incantations. (V, 166-167)

Disagreements in matters of religion were nothing new to the English of the 1580s, for the effects of the Reformation were still felt by people; Christians were not only divided into Catholics and Protestants but also into varieties of Catholicism and Protestantism. Catholics were divided into two main directions: some considered themselves primarily English subjects and placed loyalty to the monarchy above obedience to the pope, others believed that true Catholicism could not be practiced without accepting the pope's role. Protestants, too, could be more or less Calvinists.

As a result of this disorder, many Christians felt bewildered, alienated from their God. For some, the loss of the spiritual comfort afforded by the Catholic belief in Purgatory, or in the effectiveness of prayers for the deceased, or in the practice of Confession was made even more painful by the desecration of churches and by the elimination of ritual elements from the service113. This was the religious crisis that Marlowe himself experienced, when he created Dr. Faustus. And these are exactly the controversies that Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus engages. Yet, when comparing the two texts from the Bible, Dr. Faustus commits two essential sins: pride and despair. Pride makes Dr. Faustus, reject the authority of God, and look for that knowledge which would allow him to perform miracles and to raise people from death. Despair functions as a kind of inverted pride—the assumption that no one has hope of winning divine grace and mercy.

Dr Faustus’ tricks are yet superficial, they are nothing but empirical evidence, and in fact Dr. Faustus still lacks control of the ultimate nature and causes of Creation.114 In fact, he thought he would get true wisdom, true understanding of the nature of Man and of the universe he inhabits,115 and did not understand that they needed more than the type of knowledge that Mephistophilis could offer him. Faustus understands the essence of the power that he got too late, when he shows himself that he is still unsatisfied with the authority of books and of Mephostophilis.

The ending of the play deserves close attention, for it focuses explicitly on the conflicting Calvinist and anti-Calvinist views. According to the Old Man, Faustus can still be saved: he has only to "call for mercie and auoyd dispaire" (line 1323). Just such a line of reasoning would be held by Perkins's opponent, Peter Baro, who argued that "to each and every man God desires to give grace sufficient for salvation, for Christ died for each and every man." 116 The saving grace is supposed to be available to all, as we can hear from the Old Man's encouragement to Faustus in the lines: I see an Angell houers ore thy head, / And with a violl full of precious grace, / Offers to powre the same into thy soule (V, 1320-22). Only by rejecting the grace, men shut

112Leon Leviţchi, "Christopher Marlowe, The Scourge and the Book", in Ioan Aurel Preda (ed) (1983), p. 88113 G.M. Pinciss, "Marlowe's Cambridge years and the writing of Doctor Faustus", Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 33, 1993, from the site: http://freessays.0catch.com/marlowepinciss.html, consulted on February, 26, 2006114 Boorman (1987), p. 274115 idem., p. 275116 G.M. Pinciss, "Marlowe's Cambridge years and the writing of Doctor Faustus", Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 33, 1993, from the site: http://freessays.0catch.com/marlowepinciss.html

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themselves out of heaven.117 Thus, the ending of the play holds the non-Calvinist view that Faustus can still attain salvation by an act of faith, by repentance and prayer.118 Yet, Faustus cannot save himself, as his faith proves too weak and insufficient: I do repent, and yet I do dispaire (V, 1330). He is not a believer, so he cannot be forgiven by God, as he hath abjurde ... whome Faustus hath blasphemed.119 When Dr. Faustus appeals against damnation, he is in a way already in hell, as Hell has already become his state of mind.

The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta (first performed in 1592? or in 1591?), a five-act play, concentrates on Barabas’ murderous career; its climax is at the point when he kills his own daughter, Abigail, for fear he might lose his gold.

The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second (written in 1592?, printed in 1594) was often compared to Shakespeare’s Richard II, due to many similarities between the heroes of the plays. The first complete edition of Edward II was printed in 1594 with the statement that the play had been acted by the Earl of Pembroke's players. The source of the play is Holinshed's Chronicles. Edward II represents a great advance over the known plays on English history that preceded it, and is the best of Marlowe's work in construction, in characterization, and in sustained tone. Against a background of the fierce feudal barons, Marlowe has drawn a very effective picture of the sentimental and weak but stubborn king.120

Christopher Marlowe's Edward II is generally applauded as an aesthetic achievement, as it is a history play that brings form and meaning to the incoherent material of its chronicle source by retelling the king's slightly dull, twenty-year reign as the fierce and deadly struggle of a few willful personalities. Within the development of Elizabethan drama, Edward II is granted a crucial role in bringing to the English "chronicle play" - including Shakespeare's Henry VI plays and Richard III - the unity and purpose of the mature "history" play, epitomized by Shakespeare's later, more aesthetically sophisticated tetralogy.121 Joan Parks finds these readings of Edward II, however, as relying upon too superficial an understanding of the chronicle tradition, as we cannot keep the play's formal success separate from the Elizabethan debates about historiography.122 Therefore, Joan Parks proposes another approach on the ultimate meanings of the play, which should not be read as mere "material" but as a coherent and influential projection of national identity and historical process.123 From this perspective, we can see that Marlowe's play significantly redefines the nation and the forces of historical change; in Edward II, Marlowe delineates and focuses on a private realm, which he sets up in opposition to the public as a volatile source of decisions affecting the state.124

The Masacre at Paris (1592?) describes the facts connected with the bloody massacre of more than two thousand French Protestant Huguenots in Paris on August 23/24, 1572. The

117 Quoted in G.M. Pinciss, Marlowe's Cambridge years and the writing of Doctor Faustus, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 33, 1993, from the site: http://freessays.0catch.com/marlowepinciss.html, consulted on February, 26, 2006118 Quoted in G.M. Pinciss, Marlowe's Cambridge years and the writing of Doctor Faustus, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 33, 1993, from the site: http://freessays.0catch.com/marlowepinciss.html, consulted on February, 26, 2006119 Quoted in G.M. Pinciss, Marlowe's Cambridge years and the writing of Doctor Faustus, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 33, 1993, from the site: http://freessays.0catch.com/marlowepinciss.html, consulted on February, 26, 2006120 http://www.theatrehistory.com/british/marlowe001.html, consulted on January, 2, 2006121 Joan Parks, "History, tragedy, and truth in Christopher Marlowe's 'Edward II.'", Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 39, 1999 on the site: http://freessays.0catch.com/marloweparks.html, consulted on January, 7, 2006122 ibidem.123 ibidem.124 ibidem.

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massacre was contrived by the Catholic Catherine of Medici, the mother of the French king Charles IX, she being discontented with the growing authority of Admiral Coligny, one of the Huguenot leaders. It extended all over France and gave rise to the religious wars which were put an end to by Henry IV, king of Navarre and supreme leader of the Huguenots, who was crowned king of France in 1589.125

Apprehension-comprehension. An epistemologic question in Shakespeare’s plays

We always wonder what we know or how much we know or if the things that we assume that we know are or aren’t true. Every intellectual knows that he can’t assume ultimate knowledge up to a certain extent and the one who will assume that he knows everything knows nothing in fact. In his plays, Shakespeare did not pretend to be possessor of the truth. What he did was to prove that our knowledge of the external world is built upon an element of uncertainty and it must be placed in the realm of possibility. He just suggested a method of approach, by ordering our data on reality into forms of literary representations. The medium Shakespeare chose is the Protean world of the theatre, an illusion like many others which at least does not pretend that it can deliver ultimate truth.If we refer to knowledge and the way human beings beget knowledge we may speak about two possible steps which are necessary for a better understanding of the world that surrounds us. A child who discovers the world will start knowing it by means of the sense perceptions: he will understand the world by means of touch, seeing, hearing, smell and taste. He will convert his visual images into affections and emotions. A grown-up will use his senses as well, yet he will be able to process the information he gets by means of comprehension, which is the second step into the understanding of the world. If sensory perception, the act of apprehending whereby images of reality are imprinted in the mind represents the first step of the process of man’s search for knowledge, the second one is therefore comprehension by means of which we understand an operation of the understanding involving a fuller grasping of a meaning or idea, and it relies on the intellect in the search for truth. Knowledge is thought to be justified true belief, and it is expected to be reached by the inductive method of observation and experiment, or by the deductive inference or logical reasoning.The problem of sense-perception was an important Renaissance concern, originating in a radical questioning of the accuracy of man’s image of the external world. Ludovick Bryskett, in a Discourse of Civil Life (1606) declared the five senses to be responsible for man’s perceptions, and the eyes and ears to be vehicles of first impressions: For these two senses, of all the rest, are of most importance in this life: for that the images of things are represented to the mind by the eyes, and by the eares do the conceits of the world enter into the same. [Apud. 2, p. 34]Applying the theories of apprehension to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we may speak about the way in which the visual and auditive sensations are given a prior importance in the text. As Hermia points out to the importance of sense data, especially of seeing, the visual perception of reality is replaced by other senses in case it cannot be fulfilled and in case other senses, mainly hearing are heightened by contrast.Hermia: Dark night, that from the eye his function take,The ear more quick in apprehension makes.Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense,It pays the hearing double recompense. (3.2.178-183)

125 Leon Leviţchi (1974), p. 37730

Yet sense cannot be trusted as they may lead man into confusion. Many times characters suggest they assume as certain many things which, on closer scrutiny are full of apparent contradictions, so that they no longer can be sure of what it is that they may believe: Demetrius: These things seem small and undistinguishable,Like far-off mountains turned into clouds. (4.1.186-187)Hermia suggests that complete certainty of the subject’s sensory perception and of truth is not to be reliable. Therefore it is impossible for her to build firm grounds for thinking that what she sees is true: Hermia: Methinks I see these things with parted eyes,When everything seems double. (4.1.188-189)Puck’s enchanted flower produces a lot of confusion as Lysander deserts Hermia for Helena, Demetrius falls in love with Hermia, Titania falls in love with Bottom – the weaver whose head turns into an ass-head. According to Helena, who is envious with Hermia, the latter makes Demetrius fall in love with her, as she attracts him with her eyes, which are blessed and attractive (2.2.197) and bright (2.2.198). That is why Helena brings up the problem of a sense transfer from Hermia to herself, shift which would be enough for her to make Demetrius fall in love with her: My ear should catch your voice, my eye should catch your eye,My tongue should catch your tongue’s sweet melody. (1.1.188-189)Oberon: That very time I saw, but thou couldst not. (2.1.155)If we think of these examples we may see, that Shakespeare seems to point out to the fact that due to different reasons (in the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because of the love-juice that is dropped into the characters’ eyes), human beings’ response by means of apprehension may lead them into confusion.Theseus lists among those possessed of the apprehensive faculty of imagination the lunatic, the lover and the poet. (5.1.7) Thus Theseus is making the case that in those of strong imagination the activity of “apprehension”, involving the imaginative generation of an emotion, leads almost immediately to its “comprehension”, by means of concrete actualization of the material world. This, he then claims, applies equally well to the two opposed spheres of joy on the one hand and fear on the other. [3, p. 43]Thinking of the latter, we may think of Macbeth’s vision of the dagger which fractures his split personality, re-shaping the schizoid frame of his mind:Is this a dagger which I see before me,The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.Art thou not fatal vision, sensibleTo feeling as to sight? (2.1.33-37) Macbeth believes that either he lost his visual senses or on the contrary, his visual perception has a premonitory quality:My eyes are made the fools o’th’other sensesOr else worth all the rest. (Macbeth, 2.1.44-45)Macbeth also proves that by means of sense we may easily deceive the others and dissimulate. When he sees that Banquo is suspicious about Duncan’s murder, he advises his wife to deceive Banquo by means of polite gestures and false words:Macbeth … present him eminenceBoth with your eye and tongue: unsafe the while that weMust lave our faces visors to our heartsDisguising what they are. (3.2.32-33)The language of Macbeth is essentially the language of murder and revenge. Shakespeare uses a great concentration on language which is based on metaphor. As Macbeth said Macbeth was saying My way of life

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Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf. (V.3.22) The witches’ speeches is full of absurdities, but it must be so, for they embody that element of life in which reason is helpless, where the ruler is blind passion and man is a puppet of dark and primitive instincts which await the fatal moment when they can get complete hold of his soul. …. The poetic symbolism of the tragedy points out from the very beginning the fight between the good and the evil principle. [1, p. 321] Macbeth decides to kill Malcom in order to reign in Scotland yet he is afraid to commit murder at daylight: Stars, hides you fires,Let not the light see my black and deep desires;The eye that wink at the hand; yet let that heWhich the eye fears, when it is done, to see. [1.4.50-54]Sometimes Shakespeare’s tragedies are based in such a way on dissimulation, that the deceptive operation of the sense becomes the leit-motif of the whole play, such as in the case of King Lear, which starts from the dissembling quality of human hypocrisy. Both Goneril and Regan pretend to love their father. Their discourse of love acquires a strange sensuous quality: Goneril invokes her sense as a testimony of her love: she says that she loves Lear the same way she loves her eyesight (1.11). Her love makes breath poor; Regan goes even further than that and invokes her heart, the seat of all emotions and affections. In contrast with the two daughters’ hypocrisy, Cordelia says nothing which only enhances the idea of the total annihilation of the false effect of the senses. Lear takes Cordelia’s nothing (1. 82-85) literally, thus committing the mistake of not seeing beyond the surface level of language. Thus, Kent’s piece of advice See better, Lear, and let me still remainThe true blank of thine eye. (King Lear, 1.1.157) seems to point out to the blindness of Lear, who in spite of seeing, proves not to see beyond appearances. We may again notice that in Shakespeare’s plays, affirmation is stressed by means of negation and absence. Cordelia ends her speech when leaving her father and sisters as follows:But even the want of that for which I am richer-A still-soliciting eye, and such a tongue,That I am glad I have not, though not to have itHath lost me in your liking. (1..1.230-233)Thus she defines what she is by means of asserting what she is not. As Alessandro Serpieri commented, the semiotics of the play are dominated by its rhetoric and grammar… based on the opposition between the (false) hyperbole of Goneril and Regan and the (true) reticence of Cordelia. […] Lear attempts the impossible – he aims to assimilate the non-hierarchical, qualitative system of love to the hierarchical, quantitative system of power. [4, p. 86]While Lear cannot see beyond the surface level, in spite of the fact that he pretends to do so, as he may suggest when answering Kent’s piece of advice by invoking Apollo, the sun-god, Cordelia can see the essence of her sisters’ nature: I know you what you are. (1.1.269) Cordelia’s washed eyes at this moment in the play may mean not only eyes filled with tears, as every reader of the play would guess, but also eyes cleared of illusion, as Shakespeare’s glossaries suggested.If senses are false windows opening to truth, and they are essentially misleading, a process which is more reliable is comprehension by means of which the data received through the senses is processed by means of thinking, memory, imagination, etc. Shakespeare’s characters comprehend by means of questioning and problematization as Banquo does in Macbeth or Hamlet in the homonymous play. The fact they are not satisfied with the answers they get comes from the paradoxical features of the modern man. Renaissance man seemed to be half inclined in questioning everything and half in believing into the world of the unreal, the world of prophecies and witchcraft which were reminiscences of Middle Ages.

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As Shakespeare suggested, the early modern mind was almost trapped into the maze of different beliefs and fears and the need for clear investigation of how much human beings knew. When Banquo suspects Macbeth of having killed Duncan, he cannot help himself from submitting to the lure of ambition at the same time; he believes that Macbeth killed Duncan and he also believes what the weird women were saying, as he is weak. He admits that when referring to the frailities of his mind: And when we have our naked frailities hid,That suffer in exposure, let us meetAnd question this most bloody piece of workTo know it further. Fears and scruples shake us. (Macbeth, 2.3.127-129)Without being the victim of his self alienation or a certain type of ideology as criticism may have suggested, the prince of Denmark is also trapped into the maze of relativity. Hamlet understood that what he can see might be a mere ilusion, he understood that seeing does not necessarily mean comprehending. Polonius is the one who is amazed by Hamlet’s finding his way without the help of the visual senses: He seemed to find his way without his eyes;For out o’doors he went without their helpAnd to the last bended their light on me. [2.1.99-101]Yet he comes to terms with the fact that human beings cannot reach absolute knowledge. On the contrary, Polonius does not realize this and he becomes the victim of self-illusion. He thinks for instance that he can find the cause of Hamlet’ madness. Being very sure of himself and trusting his instincts and reason very much he just proves to possess quantitative knowledge which is in total contrast with Hamlet’s search for qualitative knowledge which cannot be expressed by means of language. When Polonius asks him, What do you read, my lord? (2.2.193), Hamlet answers Words, words, words. (2.2.194). Interpreting Polonius’ doubt: What is the matter my lord? (2.2.195). Monica Matei Chesnoiu explains that the confusion lies in the multiple meaning of the word matter. In accordance with Polonius’s incomplete perception of reality, the word means anything engaging the attention, a subject or question. The philosophical connotation implies the essence of things, that which is to be searched for continuously.[2, p. 113]Coming from Shakespeare, this is a very postmodernist approach on language. He who was supposed to handle words as a playwright proved that words were not satisfactory to convey meaning. In fact Juliet herself assumed that names (signifiants) mean nothing when she rhetorically asked What’s in a name?. As indeed, Romeo did not mean anything defining her lover, so did Hamlet understand that words have become […] philosophic lies that conceal the ineffable flux of existence, where they are not lies in a moral sense. Sukanta Chaudhuri suggests that the power of expression is as futile as that of apprehension; there is no relation between language and reality. [Apud. Chesnoiu, p. 113]

Bibliography1. Aniskt, A., Postface to the Russian translation of Macbeth in the eight-volume

works of Shakespeare, vol. III, Moscow, 19602. Chesnoiu, Monica Matei, Knowledge and Truth, Editura Pontica, Constanta, 19973. Hawkes, Terence, Meaning by Shakespeare, Routledge, 1992, p. 434. Serpieri, Alessandro, Shakespearian Tragedy, London, Longman, 1992

Appendix 1

The Prologue to Canterbury TalesWhen the sweet showers of April fall and shoot

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Down through the drought of March to pierce the root,Bathing every vein in liquid powerFrom which there springs the engendering of the flower,When also Zephyrus with his sweet breathExhales an air in every grove and heathUpon the tender shoots, and the young sunHis half-course in the sign of the Ram has run,And the small fowl are making melodyThat sleep away the night with open eye(So nature pricks them and their heart engages)Then people long to go on pilgrimages And palmers long to seek the stranger strandsOf far-off saints, hallowed in sundry lands,And specially, from every shire’s endIn England, down to Canterbury they wendTo seek the holy blissful martyr, quickIn giving help to them when they were sick.It happened in that season that one dayIn Southwark, at the Tabard, as I layReady to go on pilgrimage and startFor Canterbury, most devout at heart,At night there came into that hostelrySome nine and twenty in a companyOf sundry folk happening then to fallIn fellowship, and they were pilgrims allThat towards Canterbury meant to ride.The rooms and stables of the inn were wide;They made us easy, all was of the best.And shortly, when the sun had gone to rest,By speaking to them all upon the tripI was admitted to their fellowshipAnd promised to rise early and take the wayTo Canterbury, as you heard me say.But none the less, while I have time and space,Before my story takes a further pace,It seems a reasonable thing to sayWhat their condition was, the full arrayOf each of them, as it appeared to me,According to profession and degree,And what apparel they were riding in;And at a Knight I therefore will begin.

There was a Knight, a most distinguished man,Who from the day on which he first beganTo ride abroad had followed chivalry,Truth, honour, generous thought and courtesy.He had done nobly in his sovereign’s warAnd ridden into battle, no man more,As well in Christian as in heathen placesAnd ever honoured for his noble graces.………………………………………….And though so much distinguished, he was wise

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And in his bearing modest as a maid.He never yet a boorish thing had saidIn all his life to any, come what might;He was a perfect true gentle-KnightSpeaking of his appearance, he possessedFine horses, but he was not gaily dressed.He wore a fustian tunic stained and darkWith smudges where his armour had left mark;………………………………………….He had his son with him, a fine young Squire,A lover and cadet, a lad of fireWith curly locks, as if they had been pressed.He was some twenty years of age, I guessed.………………………………………….He was embroidered like a meadow brightAnd full of freshest flowers, red and white.Singing he was, or fluting all the day;He was as fresh as is the month of May.Short was his gown, the sleeves were long and wide;He knew the way to sit a horse and ride.He loved so hotly that till dawn grew paleHe slept as little as a nightingale.Courteous he was, lowly and serviceable,And carved to serve his father at the table.There was a Yeoman with him at his side,No other servant; so he chose to ride.This Yeoman wore a coat and hood of green,And peacock-feathered arrows, bright and keenAnd neatly sheathed, hung at his belt the while,For he could dress his gear in yeoman style.His arrows never drooped their feathers low – And in his hand he bore a mighty bow.His head was like a nut, his face was brown.He knew the whole of woodcraft up and down.………………………………………….There also was a Nun, a Prioress;Simple her way of smiling was and coy.Her greatest oath was only “By St Loy!”And she was known as Madam Eglantyne.And well she sang a service, with a fineIntoning through her nose, as was most seemly,And she spoke daintily in French, extremely,After the school of Stratford-at-Bowe;French in the Paris style she did not know.At meat her manners were well taught withal;No morsel from her lips did she let fall,Nor dipped her fingers in the sauce too deep;But she could carry a morsel up and keepThe smallest drop from falling on her breast.For courtliness she had a special zest.And she would wipe her upper lip so cleanThat not a trace of grease was to be seen

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Upon the cup when she had drunk; to eat,She reached a hand sedately for the meatShe certainly was very entertaining,Pleasant and friendly in her ways, and strainingTo counterfeit a courtly kind of grace,A stately bearing fitting to her place,And to seem dignified in all her dealings.………………………………………….And she had little dogs she would be feedingWith roasted flesh, or milk, or fine white bread.Sorely she wept if one of them were deadOr someone took a stick and made it smart;She was all sentiment and tender heart.………………………………………….There was a Monk, a leader of the fashions;Inspecting farms and hunting were his passions,Fit to be Abbot, a manly man and able.Many the dainty horses in his stable;His bridle, when he rode, a man might hearJingling in a whistling wind as clear,Aye, and as loud as does the chapel bellWhere my lord Monk was Prior of the cell.………………………………………….He did not rate that text at a plucked hen Which says that hunters are not holy menAnd that a monk uncloistered is a mere Fish out of water, flapping on the pierThat is to say a monk out of his cloister.That was a text he held not worth an oyster;………………………………………….What! Study until reason last dominionPoring on books in cloisters? Must he toilAs Austin bade and till the very soil?Was he to leave the world upon the shelf?Let Austin have his labour to himself.This Monk was therefore a good man to horse;Greyhounds he had, as swift as birds, to courseHunting a hare or riding at a fenceWas all his fun, he spared for no expense.I saw his sleeves were garnished at the handWith fine grey fur, the finest in the land,And where his hood was fastened at his chinHe had a wrought-gold cunningly fashioned pinInto a lover’s knot it seemed to pass.His head was bald and shone as any glass,So did face, as if it had been greased.He was a fat and personable priest;………………………………………….He was a prelate fit for exhibition,He was not pale like a tormented soulHe liked a fat swan best, and roasted whole.His palfrey was as brown as is a berry.

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There was a Friar, a wanton one and merryA Limiter, a very festive fellow.In all Four Orders there was none so mellowAs he in flattery and dalliant speech.He’d fixed up many a marriage, giving eachOf his young women what he could afford her.He was a noble pillar to his Order.Highly beloved and intimate was heWith County folk wherever he might be,And Worthy city women with possessions; For he was qualified to hear confessions,Or so he said, with more than priestly scope;He had a special license from the Pope.Sweetly he heard his penitents at shriftWith pleasant absolution, for a gift.He was an easy man in penance-givingWhere he could hope to make a decent living.………………………………………….Therefore instead of weeping and of prayerOne should give silver for a poor Friar’s care.He kept his tippet stuffed with pins for curls,And pocket-knives, to give to pretty girls.………………………………………….He knew the taverns well in every townAnd every innkeeper and barmaid tooBetter than lepers, beggars and that crew,For in so eminent a man as heIt was not fitting with the dignityOf his position dealing with such scum.It isn’t decent, nothing good can comeOf having truck with slum-and-gutter dwellersBut only with the rich and victual-sellers.But anywhere a profit might accrueCourteous he was and lowly of service too.Natural gifts like his were hard to matchHe was the finest beggar of his batchAnd, for his begging-district, paid a rent;His brethren did no poaching where he wentFor though a widow mightn’t have a shoe,So pleasant was his holy how-d’ye-doHe got his farthing from her just the sameBefore he left, and so his income cameTo more than he laid out……………..This worth’s name was Hubert, it appeared.There was a Merchant with a forking beardAnd motley dress,He told of his opinions the pursuitsIn solemn tones, and how he never lost.The sea should be kept free at any cost(He thought) upon the Harwich-Holland ranges.He was expert at dabbling in exchanges.This estimable merchant so had set

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His wits to work, none knew he was in debt,He was so stately in negotiation,Loan, bargain and commercial obligation.He was an excellent fellow all the same;To tell the truth I do not know his name.There was an Oxford cleric too, a studentLong given to Logic, longer than was prudent;The horse he had was leaner than a rake,And he was not too fat, I undertake,But had a hollow look, a sober stare;The thread upon his overcoat was bare.He had found no Preferment in the churchAnd he was too unworldly to make search He thought far more of having by his bedHis twenty books all bound in black and red,Of Aristotle and philosophy,Than of gay music, fiddles or finery.Though a philosopher as I have told,He had not found the stone for making gold.Whatever money from his friends he tookHe spent on learning or another bookAnd prayed for them most earnestly returningThanks to them thus for paying for his learning.His only care was study, and indeedHe never spoke a word more than was need,Formal at that, respectful in the extreme,Short, to the point, and lofty in his theme.The thought of moral virtue filled his speech.And he would gladly learn, and gladly teach. ………………………………………….A Haberdasher, A Dyer, A Carpenter,A Weaver and a Carpet-maker wereAmong our ranks, all in the liveryOf one impressive guild-fraternity.They were so trim and fresh their gear would passFor new. Their knives were tricked out with brassBut wrought with purest silver, which avouchesA like display on girdles and on pouches.Each seemed a worthy burgess, fit to graceA guild-hall with a seat upon the dais.Their wisdom would have justified a planTo make each one of them an alderman;They had the capital and revenue,Besides their wives declared it was their due.And if did not think so, then they ought;To be called “Madam” is a glorious thought,And so is going to church and being seenHaving your mantle carried like a queen.………………………………………….A Doctor too emerged as we proceeded;No one alive could talk as well as he didOn points of medicine and of surgery,

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For, being grounded in astronomy,He watched his patients’ favourable starAnd, by his Natural Magic, knew what areThe lucky hours and planetary degreesFor making charms and magic effigies.The cause of every malady you’d gotHe knew, and whether dry, cold, moist or hotHe knew their seat, their humour and condition.He was a perfect practicing physician.These causes being known for what they were,He gave the man his medicine then and there.All his apothecaries in a tribeWere ready with the drugs he would prescribe.And each made money from the other’s guile;They had been friendly for a goodish while.………………………………………….In his own diet he observed some measure;There were no superfluities some pleasure,Only digestives, nutritives and such.He did not read the Bible very much.In blood-red garments, slashed with bluish-greyAnd lined with taffeta, he rode his way;Yet he was rather close as to expenses And kept the gold he won in pestilences.Gold stimulates the heart, or so we’re told.He therefore has a special love of gold.A worthy woman from beside Bath cityWas with us, somewhat deaf, which was a pity.In making cloth she showed so great a bentShe bettered those of Ypres and of Ghent.In all the parish not a dame dared stirAnd if indeed they did, so wrath was sheAs to be quite put out of charity.Her kerchiefs were of finely woven ground;I dared have sworn they weighed a good ten poundThe ones who wore on Sunday, on her head.Her hose were of the finest scarlet redAnd gartered tight; her shoes were soft and new.Bold was her face, handsome, and red in hue.A worthy woman all her life, what’s moreShe’d have five husbands, all at the church door,Apart from other company in youth;No need just now to speak of that, forsoothAnd she had thrice been to Jerusalem,Seen many strange rivers and passed over them;She’d been to Rome and also to Boulogne,St. James of Compostella and Cologne,And she was skilled in wandering by the way.She had gap-teeth, set widely, truth to say.Easily on an ambling horse she satWell wimpled up and on her head a hatAs broad as is a buckler or a shield;

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She had a flowing mantle that concealedLarge hips, her heels spurred sharply under that.In company she liked to laugh and chatAnd knew the remedies for love’s mischances,An art in which she knew the oldest dances.………………………………………….The Miller was a chap of sixteen stoneA great about fellow big in brawn and bone. He did well out of them, for he could goAnd win the ram at any wrestling show.Broad, knotty and short-shouldered he would boastHe could heave any door off hinge and post,Or take a run and break it with his head.His beard, like sow or fox, was redAnd broad as well, as though it were a spade;And, as its very tip, his nose displayedA wart on which there stood a tuft of hairRed as the bristles in an old sow’s ear.His nostrils were as black as they were wide.He had a sword and buckler at his side,His mighty mouth was like a furnace door.A wrangler and buffoon, he had a storeOf tavern stories, filthy in the main.He was a master-hand at stealing grain.He felt it with his thumb and thus he knewIts quality and took three times his due –A thumb of gold, by God, to gauge an oat!He wore a hood of blue and a white coat.He liked to play his bagpipes up and downAnd that was how he brought us out of town.………………………………………….He and a gentle Pardoner rode together,A bird from Charing Cross of the same feather,Just back from visiting the Court of Rome.He loudly sang “Come hither love, come home!”The summoner sang deep ascends to this song.No trumpet ever sounded half to this song.This Pardoner had hair as yellow as waxHanging down smoothly like a hank of flax.In driblets fell his locks behind his headDown to his shoulders which they overspread;Thinly they fell, like rat-tails, one by one,He wore no hood upon his head, for fun;The hood inside his wallet had been stowed.He aimed at riding in the latest mode;But for a little cap his head was bareAnd he had bulging eye-balls, like a hare.He’d sowed a holy relic on his cap;His wallet lay before him on his lap,Brimful of pardons come from home all hot.He had the same small voice a goat has got.His chin no beard has harboured, nor would harbour,

40

Smoother than ever chin was left by barber.I judge he was a galding, or a mare.As to his tradem from Berwick down to WareThere was no pardoner of equal graceFor in his trunk he had a pillow-caseWhich he asserted was our Lady’s veil.He said he had a gobbet of the sailSaint Peter had the time when he made boldTo walk the waves, till Jesus Christ took bold.He had a cross of metal set with stoneAnd, in a glass, a rubble of pigs’ bones.And with these relics, any time he foundSome poor up-country person to astoundOn one short day, in money down, he drewMore than the parson in a month or two,And by his flatteries and prevaricationMade monkeys of the priest and congregation.But still to do him justice first and lastIn church he was a noble ecclesiast.How well he read a lesson or told a story!But best of all he sang an offertory,For well he knew that when that song was sung,He’d have to preach and tune his honey-tongueAnd (well he could) win silver from the crowd.That’s why he sang so merrily and loudNow I have told you shortly, in a clauseThe rank, the array, the number and the causeOf our assembly in this companyIn Southwark, at that light-class hostelryKnown as The Tabard, close beside The Bell.And now the time has come for me to tellHow we behaved that evening; I’ll beginAfter we had alighted at the Inn.Then I’ll report our journey, stage by stage,All the remainder of our pilgrimage.But first I beg of you, in courtesy.Not to condemn me as unmannerlyIf I speak plainly and with no concealingsAnd give account of all their words and dealings,Using their very phrases as they fell.For certainly, as you all know so well,He who repeats a tale after a manIs bound to say, as nearly as he can,Each single word, if he remembers it,However rudely spoken or unfit,Or else the tale he tells will be untrueThe things invented and the phrases newHe may not flinch although it were his brother,If he says one word he must say the other.………………………………………….Our Host gave us great welcome; everyoneWas given a place and supper was begun,

41

He served the finest victuals you could think,The wine was strong and we were glad to drink.A very striking man our Host withalAnd fit to be a marshal in a hall.His eyes were bright, his girth a little wide.There is no finer burgess in CheapsideBold in his speech, yet wise and full of tact,There was no manly attribute he lacked,What’s more he was a merry-hearted man.………………………………………….

Excerpts in Middle EnglishTher was also a none, a PrioresseThat of hir smylyng was ful simple and coy;His gretteste oath was but by seinte Loy;And she was cleped madame Eglentyne.Ful weel she soong the service dyvyne,Entuned in hi nose ful seemly.And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetAfter the scole of Stratford ate Bowe,For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe.At mete wel y-taught was she with-alle;She leet no morsel from her lippes falle,Ne wette hir fyngres in hir sauce depe;Wel koude she carie a morsel and wel kepe,That no drope ne fille upon hire breast.………………………………………….A Clerk ther was af Oxenford also,That unto logyk hadde longe y-go.As leen was hors as is a rake;And he ws not right fat I undertake,But looked holwe, and therto sobrely.Ful thredbare was his overeste courtesy;For he hadde geten hym yet no benefice,He was so wordly for to have office.For hym was levere have at his bedded heedTwenty bookes, clad in bak or reedOf Aristotel and his philosophieThan robes riche, or fithele, or gau santrie.But al be that be was a philosopher,Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre;But al that he mighte of his freendes hente,On books and his lernynge he it spente,Ad bisily gan for the soules preyeOf hem that yof hym wherewith to scoleye;Of stuie took he moost cure and moost heedeNoght a word spak he moore than was neede,And that was seyd in forme and reverence,And short, and quyk, and ful of hy sentence;Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche,And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.……………………………………………

42

Now have I toold you smoothly, in a clause,Th’estaat, th’array, the nombre, and eek the causeWhy that assembled was this compaignyeIn Southwerk at this gentil hostelryeThat highte the Tabard, faste by the Belle.

Four simple tips on how to turn Chaucer’s English into reasonable Modern English (see Rob Pope, p. 3):

1. Go for the general sense first.2. When words look familiar but are oddly spelt, keep the consonants, tinker with the

vowels and drop the final ‘e’.3. When the word order feels odd, simply invert it and look for the subject.

GlossaryZephyrus (in Greek mythology) name of the west windThe sigh of the Ram zodiacal sigh that corresponds to the month

of marchsmall fowl birdspalmer pilgrim who returns from the holy land with

palm branch or palm leaf, itinerant monkshire countyCanterbury town in the Soth East of England (Kent) with

old gothic cathedral erected in the 12-th century

wend (archaic) goSouthwark District on the South side of the Thames in

the country of SurreyThe Tabard the knight’s garment worn over armour;

herald’s coat. The Tabard was the sign of the inn where the pilgrims met

hostelry innarray (poetical) dress, outfitapparel (archaic) dress, clothingfustian thick cotton cloth dyed darkcadet young sonlowly humble, modestyeoman independent farmergear equipmentwoodcraft knowledge of forest conditions useful in

huntingprioress superior of an abbey of nunsSt. Loy St. Louisseemly becomingStrattford-at-Bowe A provincial town in Essex, three miles East

and Londonwithal (archaic) moreovercourtliness refined mannerssedately calmlyabbot head of abbey of minksaya alwaysuncloistered out of monastery

43

Austin St. Augustin, the apostle sent in 596 to convert England to Christianity

lover’s knot king of double knotprelate high ecclesiastical dignitarypalfrey a horse for ridinglimiter friar licensed to beg within certain limitsFour Orders monastic ordersat shrift (archaic) while confessing the sinsabsolution forgiveness for sinspenance act of giving absolution for the sins confessedtippet mufflerscum the worst part of societymight accrue might be derived (obtained)lowly humble, modestHarwick, Harwich a harbour in the East of England, passage for

the Netherlandsranges directionexchanges exchange of goodspreferement promotion to an office or position

unimportant mattersat that moreover, into the bargainhaberdasher dealer in small wares (of clothes)livery distinctive clothes worn by members of guildguild medieval corporation of craftsmengear equipment, clothingavouches guaranteespouch small bag inside pocketburgess citizenalderman councilor in cities, next in dignity to mayorrevenue incomemagic effigies image of a person to be hanged or burnthumour (unscientific) one of the four fluids of man’s

body determining his physical and mental qualities

apothecary chemistgoodish while long timeYpres town in Belgium (Flanders) known for its

textile industryground surface worked upon in embroiderypound 0,453 kghose stockingsforsooth in truth, truly (ironical)Boulogne harbour in Northern FranceCologne -  Koln a town in Germany, near BonnSt. James of Compostella a church in Spainambling horse horse moving by lifting two feet on one side

together, Romanian “in buiestru”wimpled up (covering of linen) worn by nuns, formerly

also by women about head, cheeks and chinmantle loose, sleevless cloak

44

(16) stone weight of 14 pounds or 6,350 kgbrawn muscleheave lift (heavy things)gauge measure exactlybagpipes wind instrument with bag as receptacle for airpardoner man licensed to sell papal pardons or

indulgencesCharing Cross Street in the West End of LondonThe Court of Rome The Vatican (the official residence of the

pope)hang of flax coil of flaxyarndriblets small quantitymode fashiongelding castrateBerwick Berwick-on-Tweed, a seaport town at the

mouth of the Tweedware warenham, a town in dorsetshiregobbet (archaic) piecerubble waste fragmentsup-country towards the interior, inlandpreverication evasive speechmade monkeys of shoed contempt of, played tricks withOffertory part of Mass at which offerings are madegirth leather or cloth band tightened round bodymarshal (here) officer of royal household with judicial

functionscheapside a busy market in medieval London and a

place of pageants and sports

Appendix 6

"Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day"

Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day Didst make thy triumph over death and sin, And having harrowed hell, didst bring away Captivity thence captive, us to win: This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin, And grant that we, for whom thou diddest die, Being with thy dear blood clean washed from sin, May live forever in felicity: And that thy love we weighing worthily, May likewise love thee for the same again; And for thy sake, that all like dear didst buy, May love with one another entertain. So let us love, dear love, like as we ought, Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.

"One day I wrote her name upon the strand"

45

One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washed it away: Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide, and made my pains his prey. Vain man, said she, that dost in vain assay A mortal thing thus to immortalize! For I myself shall like to this decay, And eek my name be wiped out likewise. Not so (quoth I), let baser things devise To die in dust, but you shall live by fame: My verse your virtues rare shall eternize, And in the heavens write your glorious name; Where, when as death shall all the world subdue, Our love shall live, and later life renew.

"Fair is my love, when her fair golden hairs"Fair is my love, when her fair golden hairs With the loose wind ye waving chance to mark: Fair, when the rose in her red cheeks appears, Or in her eyes the fire of love does spark: Fair, when her breast, like a rich laden bark With precious merchandise she forth doth lay: Fair, when that cloud of pride, which oft doth dark Her goodly light, with smiles she drives away But fairest she, when so she doth display The gate with pearls and rubies richly dight, Through which her words so wise do make their way, To bear the message of her gentle sprite. The rest be works of nature's wonderment, But this the work of heart's astonishment. 126

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Websites1. http://www.bartleby.com: The Cambridge History of English and American Literature

in 18 Volumes (1907–21), 2. http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/library/oe/texts/asc/index.html3. http://www.members.tripod.com/sicttasd/crit.html4. http://www.marlowe-society.org/research.htm5. http://www.luminarium.org/lumina.htm

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