17th April 2024: The Passing of Arthur

This month, Morgan Lee will be leading our meeting and we will be reading and discussing two different tellings of the death of King Arthur. Both texts – Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Passing of Arthur’ (1885) and Sir Thomas Malory’s telling of the same taken from the end of ‘Sir Mordred’ (1485) – are introduced by Morgan below. The meeting will be held in Rm 2.46 of the John Percival Building from 1-3pm on 17th April.

Tennyson’s imagination was captured by Arthurian myth, and particularly the figure of King Arthur. According to Hallam Tennyson, his father considered Arthur the ‘greatest of all poetical subjects’.[1] Through much of the nineteenth century, Tennyson published several poems based on the legend, including ‘Morte d’Arthur’, ‘Sir Galahad’, and ‘The Lady of Shalott’, before publishing the twelve-volume collection the Idylls of the King. The proliferation of Tennyson’s Arthurian poems in Victorian culture and literary imagination has led him to be dubbed by David Staines as the ‘father of the Arthurian renaissance’.[2] The Idylls is a collection of blank verse poems which were published in various sets between 1859 and 1885, retelling the myth of Arthur’s birth unto his death. The collection was very popular with Victorians, particularly Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert who received a dedication within the collection following his death in 1861.

Tennyson’s primary source for his Arthurian subjects was Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (1485). Tennyson stated that ‘The vision of an ideal Arthur as I have drawn him […] had come upon me when, little more than a boy, I first lighted upon Malory’.[3] Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur was finished in either 1469 or 1470 and first printed in 1485 by William Caxton. The seventh print edition of Malory came in 1816, and this was the edition that Tennyson owned in several copies. Tennyson made the Idylls in twelve individual poems to replicate the twelve books in Malory’s corpus and scholars including Christopher Ricks, have extensively noted the linguistic allusions and echoes throughout the Idylls. However, Tennyson’s and Malory’s portrayals of King Arthur are distinct from one another, not least in their different mediums and language.

The Arthurian legend is one that has repeatedly returned since the sixth century and still haunts British literature and culture. Different versions of King Arthur have been created in various mediums for centuries and each version of the narrative can be considered spectral as the ‘story returns over and over, […] in different registers, each reflecting another perspective entangled in a skein of cultural interests’.[4] My research examines Tennyson’s portrayal of his Arthur as the ‘phantom king’ and how he re-models Malory’s version to reflect Victorian cultural interests. Tennyson sought to make ‘the old legends his own, [restore] the idealism, and [infuse] into them a spirit of modern thought and an ethical significance, setting his characters in a rich and varied landscape’.[5] The Idylls is haunted by its intertextual connections to Malory, but also is occupied with reproducing the myth for a Victorian audience. Given my interest in spectrality and return, the MEMORI session will focus on how Malory and Tennyson portray the death of their respective King Arthurs, in Malory’s ‘Sir Mordred’ and Tennyson’s ‘The Passing of Arthur’.

The texts follow overall a similar structure in which Arthur’s Round Table has fallen into disarray in the wake of Guinevere and Lancelot’s revealed affair. Knights have turned from Arthur to follow Mordred, and the King and the last of his loyal knights are preparing to go to battle. King Arthur has a dream of his late nephew, Gawain/Gawayne, who warns him of his impending death in battle. Despite the warning, Arthur goes to fight and whilst in combat with Mordred, Arthur kills him, but is also receives a mortal blow. The half-dead Arthur is carried from the battlefield by Sir Bedivere/Bedewere (and his brother Sir Lucan in the Malory) to a nearby chapel.

Once away from the battle, the dying Arthur commands Bedivere/Bedewere to take his sword, Excalibur, and throw it into a nearby body of water. The last knight of the Round Table leaves, but he cannot face throwing the sword, so he hides it and returns to Arthur. When Arthur asks for a description of how the sword sank below the water, Bedivere lies that the sword simply sank. The wounded King accuses Bedivere of betrayal and sends him out, three times in total, until Bedivere eventually obeys his King and Excalibur is caught by a hand from the water. Bedivere returns to Arthur, who knowing he is dying, asks the knight to carry him to the waterside. A barge or ship appears bearing three Queens and Arthur is taken aboard, and the boat sails away.

Whilst the two texts follow this same plot, there are significant differences between Tennyson’s King Arthur and Malory’s. What my research and the seminar will consider is how Tennyson re-models Arthur and his death differently to Malory. In particular, the presence of ghosts within the two texts, and how the cultural expectations surrounding masculinity and war affects the presentation of Arthur as a king and knight.

Areas for discussion:

• What are the main similarities between Malory’s and Tennyson’s portrayal of King Arthur’s final battle and death?
• What are the differences?
• How is King Arthur portrayed as a king in Malory and Tennyson’s accounts?
• How do the two describe their battle scenes?
• What is the significance of the appearance of Gawain/Gawayne’s ghost?

Written by Morgan Lee.

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[1] Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir Volume 1, Cambridge Library Collection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 125.

[2] David Staines, ‘Tennyson’ in The Arthurian Encyclopaedia, ed. Norris J. Lacy (New York: The Boydell Press, 1986), p. 543.

[3] Christopher Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson in Three Volumes. Vol. 3, ed. Christopher Ricks, Longman Annotated English Poets (Harlow: Longman, 1987), p. 259.

[4] Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 4.

[5] Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir Volume 2, Cambridge Library Collection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 122.

21st February 2024: The Awntyrs off Arthure

This month, Margaret Finlay will be leading our meeting and we will be reading the Gawain romance, Awntyrs off Arthure, introduced by Margaret below. The meeting will be held in Rm 2.46 of the John Percival Building from 1-3pm on 21st February.

The Awntyrs off Arthure is a late fourteenth century or early fifteenth century romance set near the border of England and Scotland. The romance, which survives in four manuscripts, centres on the tensions of geopolitics and the morality of chivalrous and courtly life. Variously described as two separate romances roughly sewn together or else a finely crafted diptych, the Awntyrs poses many questions to the reader through its structure. What place does the supernatural have in the real and violent world of medieval life? Who owns land and by what authority?

The Awntyrs has many classic tropes of medieval romance, and especially Arthurian romance: there is a supernatural occurrence in a body of water in a forest, a knight comes to challenge Arthur’s court when they have sat down to feast. Both these tropes, however, are troubled. Despite Tarn Wathleyne already having enough supernatural connotations by being a lake in the middle of a forest, the ghost of Gaynor’s mother appears in fire and water, and warns Gaynor of the coming ruin of the Round Table. Where is Arthur to receive this message, and why is it heralded in such a disturbance? Further, Galeron’s appearance in this text breaks the romance barrier between literature and fiction: in his claim to the Scottish lands Gawain claims as his own, he troubles the romance trope with the real political troubles on the Anglo-Scottish border of the period. How does the author contend with bringing in the geopolitics of 1380-1415 to Arthur’s (fictional) England?

In my own research, I focus on Gawain as protagonist in this text as a representation of the socio-political moment. In the first adventure of the Awntyrs, when Gawain and Gaynor are separated from King Arthur’s hunting party in Inglewood Forest, the knight is present at a private and vulnerable meeting between Gaynor and her revenant mother who warns her daughter, and Gawain, of earthly greed and excess. His chivalry here is shown both in his bravery in confronting the ghostly corpse face-to-face and in his care for both his Queen and her mother. In the second adventure, Gawain takes up a quest offered by the stranger knight Galeron. When this Scotsman enters the hall to demand a battle with one of Arthur’s knights over rights to lands he claims as his own, Gawain is the first and only of Arthur’s knights to offer to engage. When he wins the gruesome battle, he generously relinquishes the contested lands to Galeron after Gawain receives the dukedom of two counties of south-west Wales, lordship of two cities in Ireland, and a number of impressive castles (664-72).^[1] Possibly in response to rising taxes to cover costs of waging war or even the excesses of Richard II’s court, in the first part of the Awntyrs Gawain listens to and is chastened by the warning and prophecy of the revenant against greed and excess, demonstrating his idealised character. Indeed, the moral and spiritual lessons given by the revenant speak to the late 1300s gathering storm of religious upheaval. It is impossible to tell whether the author of this text was speaking for or against the protestant Lollard religious rebellion of this period, but the text appears concerned with earthly excesses and the greed of the nobility. Later, in the second part of the Awntyrs, this concern over earthly greed reappears more subtly: Gawain’s immediate decision to grant his northern lands to Galeron goes against the assumed desire for power and status through the accumulation of lands and lordships – instead, Gawain seems content with his new duchies of Glamorganshire and Carmarthenshire, and is at liberty to cede his previous holdings of Galloway and other contested Northern English and Scottish land. It is the contest between Galeron and Gawain in the second part of the Awntyrs that demonstrates the immediate concerns of the Anglo-Scottish tension in the second half of the fourteenth century. The violence and persistence of Galeron, the Scottish knight, and Gawain, the English knight, as they fight each other to claim lordship over borderlands mirrors the on-going skirmishes and violent incursions from both the English and Scottish military into enemy territory for the right to these contested lands. It is in this charged moment of religious upheaval and violence on the Anglo-Scottish border that this text places Gawain as a focal point in the ‘awntyrs’ of this border romance.

Areas for discussion:

• What place does the supernatural have in the real and violent world of medieval life?
• Who owns land and by what authority?
• How does the author contend with bringing in the geopolitics of 1380-1415 to Arthur’s (fictional) England?
• Why is Gawain’s foregrounded in a text ostensibly about the adventures of Arthur?
• What is the purpose of the diptych structure, if any? Do the two halves seem connected at all?

Written by Margaret Finlay.

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[1] For a discussion of the more oblique names of places in the grant that Gawain is given, see Andrew Breeze, ‘“The Awntyrs off Arthure”, Caerphilly, Oysterlow, and Wexford’, Arthuriana, 9.4 (1999), 63-68 and Rosamund Allen, ‘Place-Names in The Awntyrs Off Arthure: Corruption, Conjecture, Coincidence’, in Arthurian Studies in Honour of P.J.C. Field, edited by Bonnie Wheeler, Arthurian Studies LVII (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2004) pp. 181-98.

13th December 2023: The Middle Breton Dialog between Arthur and Guynglaff

This month, Jess Shales will be leading our meeting and we will be reading ‘The Middle Breton Dialog between Arthur and Guynglaff’, introduced by Jess below. The meeting will be held in Rm 2.46 of the John Percival Building from 1-3pm on 13th December.

The earliest version we currently have of the Middle Breton poem An Dialog etre Arzur, Roe d’an Bretounet, ha Guinglaff (‘The Dialog between Arthur, King of the Bretons, and Guynglaff’) is preserved in a copy made, in 1716, by the Breton linguist Dom Louis Le Pelletier, in his Dictionnaire de la langue bretonne (‘Dictionary of the Breton Language’). Le Pelletier had access to two manuscript versions of the text — both now lost, but one of which dated from 1619. The Dialog is a vaticinatory poem and, as its name suggests, it takes the form of a dialogue between King Arthur and the Breton prophet and Wild Man Guynglaff — who is to be numbered among other Celtic Wild Men such as the Welsh Myrddin, the Scottish Lailoken, and the Irish Suibhne.

In words which could equally be applied to most of the corpus of Middle Breton texts (with titles modified as required), not a lot is known for certain about the date and authorship of the Dialog. Regarding location, the majority of the poem’s dialectal markers point to Léon, in the North West of Brittany, as the place of origin (Bucher-Durand: forthcoming). Regarding date, Le Pelletier helpfully provided one: the Dialog in his Dictionnaire is preceded by the rubric Ecrit ainsi en François l’an de Notre Seigneur mil quatre cent et cinquante (’Written thus in French: the year of our Lord
1450’).

The current prevailing view among Breton scholars is slightly more complicated, however. It may be summarised as follows. First, the Dialog text in its preserved state is the result of many layers over time of scribal interventions — the result of copyists’ misunderstanding and incompetence — and these interventions are evinced by irregularities in the poem’s metre; internal rhyme; syllable-count per line; and its significant proportion of Middle French loanwords, which would not have been in use earlier in the Middle Breton period. Second, the poem’s core was written at two very different (but unspecified) points in time, with the first ten lines having been composed at an early date, and the rest written later. Under this view, it seems, the Dialog was put together as a whole by a ‘redactor’ around the year 1450 (Émile Ernault: 1926; Hervé Le Bihan: 2013).

More recently, however, I have been doing my best to set a cat among the pigeons by attempting to claim for the Dialog an original date of composition around the last decade of the sixteenth, or the early stages of the seventeenth, century. My argument is based on four main factors. First, problems with the 1450 date in the Dialog MS. Le Pelletier relays that his source in fact bore the date 450, preceded by a crossed-out mil (‘one thousand’). The author of the Dictionnaire read this erasure as the intervention of a mischievous scribe who desired to make the poem seem one thousand years older than it actually was — and thus from the (supposedly) authentic Arthurian age. But there is no evidence either to support this hypothesis, or to suggest that the original writer of the date had not in fact intended the (certainly fanciful) year 450 all along, had not mistakenly begun with mil, and accordingly corrected his work immediately by crossing out the mil. If this were to have been the case (as, in the light of the evidence as a whole, I think probable) it would mean that the 1450 date was Le Pelletier’s accidental invention, with no further relevance to the poem. Second, that the Prevailing View described above is both insufficiently supported by evidence from the text, and also somewhat circular — beginning (as it seems to do) with the premise that the poem is of an early date, and on this basis constructing further arguments for the Dialog’s greater antiquity, which in turn are used to confirm the text’s early date. Third, that the linguistic evidence — most notably innovative forms — are consistent with the late sixteenth century. And finally, that the poem’s overarching structure seems to reflect the turbulent events which took place in France and Brittany from around 1550 onwards.

This overarching structure may be summarised thus. The poem begins with what could be described as a prologue, which presents to the reader Guynglaff — who leads a solitary, sylvan existence — before introducing An Roe Arzur (‘The King Arthur’), who seizes the prophet and forcibly compels him to predict what will happen in Brittany before the world ends. Guynglaff agrees to expound almost anything Arthur asks, and launches into his prophecies. These prophecies occupy the majority of this 247-line poem; they are punctuated only three times by Arthur repeating with very slight variation his original question. Broadly speaking, Guynglaff’s vaticinations deal first with religious corruption in Brittany (ll. 24–61); second with catastrophic events in Brittany in the 1570s and 1580s (ll. 66–159); and third with the threat of an English invasion of Brittany (ll. 160–247). It is however striking that the first of these themes seems to underpin all of the prophecies, reoccurring in various forms throughout.

Il serait puéril de chercher à interpréter ces prophéties (‘It would be puerile to look to interpret these prophecies’), wrote René Largillière, the Dialog’s first modern editor, in reference to Guynglaff’s forecasts (Largillière: 1928, p. 630). To some extent, this view is justified: the overarching themes of Guynglaff’s prophecies mentioned above may be viewed as generic, common to much (especially Welsh) vaticinatory literature until the end of the seventeenth century. Historical parallels must therefore be approached with caution. Yet this has not stopped various scholars from trying to find particular historical events reflected in Guynglaff’s words. While J. Tourneur-Aumont has argued that the Great (Papal) Schism of 1378–1417 and the ‘Hussite’ uprising of 1429 feature among these historical events, I am unable to find any evidence to suggest that these occurrences concerned the Bretons to any noticeable degree around the date of composition which he espouses (Tourneur-Aumont: 1930). Instead, I find much more plausible that Guynglaff’s ‘heresy’ refers to reformed Protestant doctrine, which began its ascendancy in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century and reached peak popularity in Brittany in the 1560s. As for the rest of the predictions, a notable number of these find striking correspondences with identifiable occurrences in Brittany at the end of the sixteenth century. On contextual historical grounds, therefore, I suggest a date of composition falling at some point between 1594 and the terminus ante quem — which one of Le Pelletier’s two MS sources provides — of 1619. Many avenues for further investigation remain with regard to the Dialog. Notably,comparative literary work between the Dialog and other Brittonic — or, more widely, European — prophetic literature could yield fruitful results.

Areas for discussion:

• Writer’s purpose.
• Comparisons with other prophetic literature.
• Affect of the Dialog on perceptions of the Arthurian legend.
• Characterisation of each interlocutor.
• The Dialog’s themes and their significance.
• Literary or thematic parallels.

Written by Jess Shales.

18th October 2023: Chaucer’s ‘The Legend of Ariadne’

Theseus and Ariadne, from ‘Game of Mythology’ (Jeu de la Mythologie) by Stefano della Bella, 1644. Source.

Welcome to the first meeting of the reformed MEMORI reading group.

The meeting will be held in Rm 2.46 of the John Percival Building from 2-4pm on 18th October. This month, we will be reading ‘The Legend of Ariadne’ from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women.

The Legend of Good Women was written between 1380-1387, and so is roughly contemporaneous with ‘The Knight’s Tale’ (c.1386), Chaucer’s other exploration of vaguely Thesean myth. In terms of its broader Chaucerian chronology, the Legend pre-dates The Canterbury Tales, but was written after TheBook of the Duchess (c.1368), The Parliament of Fowls (c.1374-1380), House of Fame (c.1374-1385), Troilus and Criseyde (c.1382-1387), and the continuation of The Romaunt of the Rose. At approximately 2700 lines, the Legend is the third longest of Chaucer’s works, and it survives in ten manuscripts.

For much of the twentieth century, the Legend was subject to critical censure and condemned as not very good. Much of the critical attention that was directed at the Legend focused on ‘the problem of the two prologues’, known as the F-Prologue and the G-Prologue: the question of which came first and, more nebulously, which version Chaucer himself might have preferred. Towards the end of the twentieth century, however, interest in the Legend shifted away from the prologues and towards the women of the Legend themselves, and the poem began to receive a reputational rehabilitation. Since the 1990s, there has been a continued and persistent interest in The Legend of Good Women, particularly given towards reading the text from a feminist perspective, although it remains one of the lesser regarded of Chaucer’s works and is still seldom taught.

Regardless of the version of the prologue that you might read, the Legend is presented as a work of poetic recompense or penance. The God of Love appears to the poet-narrator in a dream, accusing him of treachery. The charge levelled is that in his previous poetic works, specifically Troilus and Criseyde and the Romaunt of the Rose, the poet-narrator has ‘mysseyest’, and misrepresented Love himself and the women faithful to love. Alceste, consort to the God of Love, intervenes on the poet-narrator’s behalf and charges him with the redemptive task of writing a ‘glorious legend’ of true women if he wants to live:

Thow shalt, while that thou lyvest, yer by yere,
The moste partye of thy tyme spende
In making of a glorious legend
Of goode wymmen, maydenes and wyves,
That weren trewe in lovyng al hire lyves;
And telle of false men that hem bytraien,
That al hir lyf ne don nat but assayen
How many women they may doon a shame;
For in youre world that is now holde a game.
And thogh the lyke nat a lovere bee,
Speke wel of love; this penance yive I thee.[1]

Although the poet-narrator is being compelled to write for his life, the Legend is unfinished, and tails off abruptly during the final tale. Much of the criticism the Legend received in the twentieth century suggested that the reason for its incomplete state was authorial boredom at the telling and retelling of such similar tales (so inconsiderate for narratives of female heartache and abandonment to remain so uninterestingly similar) and resentment towards Alceste and her ladies for the enforced creative direction. More recently though, Sarah Harlan-Haughey has suggested that rather the reverse is true – instead of being bored and attempting to hurry the project along to its end, she argues that Chaucer is using the repetition of the women’s depressing(ly similar) stories to create a true and emotive response.[2] Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Ariadne’, in Harlan-Haughey’s reading, becomes ‘a prime example’ of the tragic recurring history that is ‘so deeply troubling in its recurrence that it really might make one sick at heart and not simply bored with dull “rehersings” of tragedies long passed’.[3]

‘The Legend of Ariadne’ is the sixth legend to be included in the collection. Altogether, the Legend retells the stories of ten mythic women across nine tales, and the reader is told that ‘trewe of love thise women were echon’ (F-Prologue, 290) and that they are all examples of the ‘trouthe of womanhede’ (F-Prologue, 297). Ariadne’s textual companions in the Legend are Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Hypsipyle, Medea, Lucrece, Philomela, Phyllis and Hypermnestra; some members of this group have raised more questions as to the designation of ‘good’ than others. Dealing as it does with tales of women abandoned, the Legend has long been considered a Chaucerian version of Ovid’s Heroides, and Chaucer identifies the ‘epistel of Ovyde / Of trewe wyves’ (G-Prologue, 305-06) as his primary source of auctoritas. However, the Heroides are just one of a number of sources Chaucer draws upon, and ‘The Legend of Ariadne’ in particular is curious amalgamation of sources, myths, and genres. Ariadne herself does not make an appearance until midway through, and the first half of her legend is occupied instead with the doomed love of another mythic woman, that of Scylla for Ariadne’s father, Minos. The inclusion of the Metamorphosean myth of Scylla points to the alternative Ovidian influence, while also acting as a forewarning to the reader that gestures towards the inevitable conclusion of Ariadne’s tale.

When she does appear, Ariadne is the chattiest of the women, a distinction that has contributed to her legend having been the most critically disparaged of all the women included. Writing in the 1970s, Robert W. Frank declared that the tale of Ariadne failed because it was ‘almost a conversation piece’; silent Lucrece, on the other hand, who has no words in the aftermath of her rape, Frank viewed as the roaring success of the collection.[4] However, in constructing Ariadne as a strident conversationalist, Chaucer grants her agency and a sense of subjectivity. In her spoken exchanges with Theseus and her sister, Phaedra, Ariadne voices her own desires and expresses her intentions as to how she will go about achieving her aims. Lucy Allen-Goss calls the Legend ‘the most radically disruptive’ of Chaucer’s poems because it establishes a mode of interrogating women’s emotions, desires, and aversions, thereby forging a connection with Middle English Romance; in the figure of Chaucer’s Ariadne, these features are clearly legible.[5]

Areas for discussion

• If you are familiar with any other versions of the Ariadne legend, how does Chaucer’s version compare? Is there anything particularly surprising or unexpected about the Chaucerian version?
• What genre would you say ‘The Legend of Ariadne’ is? Is it romance, fabliaux, or something else?
• What do you make of the Minos/Scylla episode in the first half of the tale?
• What is the role of Phaedra in this text?
• How does Phaedra’s speech compare with Ariadne’s, in terms of tone and content?
• What does Ariadne want?
• How convincing is the portrayal of Ariadne and Theseus as a couple? How do they compare against other Chaucerian couples or couples from Middle English romance?
• For those of you familiar with any Ovid, how Ovidian is this particular legend? Or if it isn’t Ovidian, is there anything else it resembles more?

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[1] Geoffrey Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women in The Riverside Chaucer, 3^rd edn, ed. by Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), F-Prologue, ll. 481-91 / G-Prologue, ll. 471-81.

[2] Sarah Harlan-Haughey, ‘The Circle, the Maze, and the Echo: Sublunary Recurrence and Performance in Chaucer’s Legend of Ariadne’, The Chaucer Review, 52,3 (2017), p. 345.

[3] Harlan-Haughey, ‘The Circle, the Maze, and the Echo’, p. 345.

[4] Robert W. Frank, Chaucer and The Legend of Good Women (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 170.

[5] Lucy M. Allen-Goss, Female Desire in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020), pp. 7-8.

Middle English Ariadne – a Chaucerian Heroide (20th November 2019)

Theseus abandons the sleeping Ariadne. The goddess Athene watches, while Hypnos drops water from the River Lethe across Ariadne’s brow. Source: Red Apulian Greek vase (ca. 400 – 390 B.C) held the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Link.

Next meeting: Wednesday 20 November, 15.10 – 17.00, in Room 1.02 of the John Percival Building.

Ariadne – daughter of King Minos of Crete and half-sister to the Minotaur – is known for her long symbolic association with the labyrinth and spools of thread, and for her decision to help the iconic hero, Theseus, escape the former using the latter. After being famously deserted by Theseus, she became the wife of the god, Dionysus, who immortalised her in the stars. As a princess of Crete and granddaughter of the sun god, Helios, Ariadne is also part of a family of complex female characters, all of whom are powerful and unafraid to transgress the bounds of nature – most notably, her mother Pasiphae, whose desire resulted in the conception of the Minotaur. Other female relatives include her sister, Phaedra; her aunt, Circe; and her cousin, Medea.

It is difficult to date the Heroides exactly due to Ovid’s habit of returning to and revising his texts, but it is thought to represent some of his earliest work, estimated as between 25-16BCE. Sequentially, the epistolary collection is thought to come after the Ars Amatoria. In the Heroides, Ovid gives the women control of writing their own stories at a crucial juncture in their narratives, providing insight into the psychological trauma each of the women are experiencing at that moment. The letter from Ariadne to Theseus is the tenth included in the Heroides. It focuses on one specific moment in the Ariadne myth, that when Ariadne awakens to find herself abandoned on Naxos and her subsequent lament as she watches Theseus’ ship depart. The epistle in the Heroides is not the only time Ovid tells the Ariadne myth, but it is the longest version. The profound intertextuality of the Heroides is demonstrated in the manner the Ariadne story in the Ars Amatoria is split: it begins with the introduction of Ariadne and narration of her desertion on Naxos by Theseus (Ars, ll. 1.527-36); an interruption follows, describing Silenus and the Maenad, and introducing the god, Dionysus (Ars, ll. 1.537-48). The myth concludes with Dionysus’ appearance to the abandoned Ariadne and the offer of marriage that saves her (Ars, ll. 1.549-64).[1] Notably, it is from the moment Ovid leaves Ariadne weeping in Heroides X that he recommences with her story in the Ars Amatoria, creating a clear narrative link between the two. Ovid also briefly recounts the Ariadne myth in theMetamorphoses, where she bridges the gap in Book VIII between the longer tales of Minos and Scylla, and of Dedalus and Icarus (Met., Bk. VIII, ll. 169-182).

The Heroides has long been considered the major source for Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women (c. 1380-87), an assessment apparently supported by the poet-narrator of the Legend when he identifies the ‘epistel of Ovyde / Of trewe wyves’ (TLOGW G-Prologue, ll. 305-6) as a primary source of auctoritas. This is reinforced again in the ‘Legend of Ariadne’, readers are again directed to Ovid’s versions of women, ‘In hire Epistel Naso telleth al’ (TLGOW, l. 2220). Nonetheless, while all but one of the women in the Legend are found in Ovid, four of them are not in the Heroides – demonstrating that the Heroides are just one of a number of sources Chaucer draws upon in crafting his own versions of the legends of classical women. In the same way the Legend constructs itself as a response to the anti-feminism of Chaucer’s earlier Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1381-86), the Heroides were viewed in the Middle Ages as a response to Ovid’s ‘arguably anti-feminist’ Ars Amatoria.[2] Both texts have been considered among the less impressive works of their respective authors.

Due to its many paradoxes and difficulties, Chaucer’s Ariadne has been on the receiving end of more dedicated criticism than any of the other women in the Legend. Observing that the sole reason for Ariadne’s inclusion in the Legend is because she has been abandoned, Simon Meecham-Jones writes, ‘It is curious, then, that the woman whose conduct, albeit fortuitously, adheres most closely to medieval and Christian models of female patience has been so roundly condemned by critics.’[3] Unlike other figures in the Legend (such as Medea or the sisters, Philomela and Procne, who violently enact revenge upon their male abusers) Ariadne’s reaction to her abandonment is limited to her lament. Perhaps this is because she is confined to the island, or perhaps it is because she will shortly be rescued by the wine god, Dionysus. Regardless, her inaction has not protected her character – R. W. Frank viewed Chaucer’s Ariadne as a ‘grotesque’, and twenty years later, Sheila Delany reinforced that notion in her description of Ariadne’s exaggerated physical reaction as ‘more appropriate to a village girl than to a princess’.[4] The critical condemnation and neglect suffered by the Chaucerian Ariadne is not dissimilar to the decline suffered by her character in the Middle English period. In contrast to her influential Latin predecessors, the Middle English Ariadne is a minor character, leaving Chaucer’s Ariadne (for all the challenges it presents) as her most pronounced appearance.

Topics/questions for discussion:

1. What is the purpose of the extended opening of Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Ariadne’ that focuses on Minos?
2. What genre is the ‘Legend of Ariadne’? Is it hagiographical? Romance? Dream vision?
3. Is Phaedra’s speech in the Legend a surprise? What difference does it make to our idea of the typical version of the Ariadne myth to have Phaedra be the one to come up with the plan to free Theseus?
4. What do we think of the poet-narrator?
5. What is the role/purpose of the gaoler?
6. One of the criticisms that has been often levelled against The Legend of Good Women is that it just is not good. Does this criticism stand up either:
   1. As poetry?
   2. As a version of the Ariadne myth?
   3. As a retelling of the Heroides?
7. Consider Ariadne waking up in the Legend Ariadne waking up in the Heroides – Sheila Delany describes the Ovidian version in the Heroides as ‘little short of farcical’ and suggests Chaucer successfully captures and reproduces the comic effect Ovid intended.[5] Is it comical, or something else?

---

[1] Despina Keramida, ‘Heroides 10 and Ars Amatoria 1.527-64: Ariadne crossing the boundaries between texts’, (2010), p. 50.

[2] Florence Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 173.

[3] Simon Meecham-Jones, ‘Intention, Integrity and ‘Renoun’: The Public Virtue of Chaucer’s Good Women’, The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception, ed. Carolyn P. Collette (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), p. 145.

[4] R. W. Frank, Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 122; Sheila Delany, The Naked Text (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 209.

[5] Sheila Delany, The Naked Text (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 209.

 

Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan (20th February)

Portrait of Gottfried von Strassburg from the Codex Manesse (f. 364r)

Next Meeting: 20th February 2019 / Room 2.46 / 3-5pm

Very little is known about Gottfried’s life. He died in 1210 before finishing Tristan. Along with Hartman von Aue, who translated two of the romances of Chretien de Troyes into German, and Wolfram von Eschenbach, who is best known for the Parzival, Gottfried is one of the great writers of German Arthurian romance. W. T. H Jackson writes that

[o]f all the German courtly poets, he [Gottfried] gives immeasurably the greatest evidence of formal learning – his knowledge of the classics, his skill in the formal style which some rather unwisely persist in calling rhetoric, his acquaintance with French literary, and his grasp of mystical theology and its terminology – all these stamp him as formally trained, as a magister or dominus.[1]

Later writers and Gottfried’s continuators referred to him as meister (master) – rather than hêr (sir) – which designates educational or social status. Gottfried’s occupation is uncertain: he was probably a member of the urban patriciate of Strassburg, but he could have also been a local urban or episcopal secretariat.

 

Overview

Gottfried’s Tristan ‘is the most ambitious and sophisticated treatment of the story in German’.[2] The story begins with the romance of Tristan’s parents, Rivalin and Blancheflor (King Mark’s sister). Gottfried also dedicates a large portion of the text to Tristan’s youth, including his education by his tutor Governal, his arrival at King Mark’s court, and his adventures in Ireland. The main narrative focuses on the tragic love story of Tristan and Isolde.

Like many Tristan texts, Gottfried’s version is incomplete. The poem (19,416 lines) breaks off as Tristan is contemplating marriage to Isolde of the White Hands. The remainder of the plot, including Tristan’s marriage, his return to Isolde, and the deaths of Tristan and Isolde, can be reconstructed from Gottfried’s Anglo-Norman source, the Tristan of Thomas (1170-5). Two later poets, Ulrich von Türheim (1235) and Heinrich von Freiburg (1290), continued Gottfried’s narrative in Tristan; however, they used Eilhart von Oberge (1175) as their main source rather than the Tristan of Thomas.

Gottfried’s Tristan is extant in fourteen complete manuscripts (including three now lost), as well as twenty-one fragments from seventeen manuscripts. The manuscripts were produced between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, primarily in the Upper Rhineland and Central Germany.

 

Selected Extracts

In addition to the prologue, we are reading a selection of chapters from the Penguin edition of Tristan translated by A. T. Hatto.

Chapters 15 and 16

In ‘Chapter 15’, Tristan and Isolde mistakenly drink the love-potion (or liebestrank) that Queen Isolde – Isolde’s mother – intended for King Mark and Isolde. Gottfried was the first writer to make Tristan offer the cup to Isolde before he drank it. ‘Chapter 16’ describes the anguish and pain of the lovers before they succumb to their desires; it also includes one of Gottfried’s commentaries or discourses.

Chapter 22

In this chapter, Melot and King Mark hide in an olive tree to discover Tristan and Isolde’s adultery; however, Tristan recognises their shadows and alerts Isolde. The lovers deceive Melot and Mark and disprove the rumours of their relationship. In the following chapter (not included), Melot and Marjodoc trick Tristan and provide evidence of adultery. Isolde is subsequently tried by the Bishop of the Thames and at the final judgement she convinces the court of her innocence.

Chapters 25 to 28

These four chapters describe the banishment of Tristan and Isolde from King Mark’s court, their refuge in the Cave of Lovers, their discovery by King Mark’s huntsman, and the return of Tristan and Isolde and their final parting. In the final chapter (not included), Tristan flees to Brittany and the text breaks off as he is considering marriage to Isolde of the White Hands.
Questions for discussion

• How does Gottfried’s Tristan compare to other versions of the legend? (Béroul, for example). Why does Gottfried choose to follow the Tristan of Thomas?
• How does Gottfried address his audience in the prologue?
• Denis de Rougement proposes that the Tristan story ‘set passion in a framework within which it could be expressed in symbolical satisfactions’.[3] How are love and desire described and articulated in Gottfried’s Tristan?
• What is the function of the love-potion – or liebestrank – in Gottfried’s Tristan?
• Is Mark a jealous husband or a pathetic figure?
• How do the discourses on love (pp. 202-4) and surveillance (pp. 275-9) comment on the narrative of the text?
• What is the significance of sight and vision in the text?
• Gottfried appropriates represents various discourses from religious allegory, hagiography, mysticism, Ovidian love-discourse, classical historiography, medieval Platonism, Christian salvation history, and Arthurian romance (among others). How do these discourses function in dialogue with each other?
• William D. Cole describes the Cave of the Lovers as a ‘bizarre, multivalent, and ultimately undefinable symbol’.[4] Is it possible to interpret the meaning of the Cave? What could it signify?

 

References

[1] W. T. H. Jackson, ‘Tristan the Artist in Gottfried’s Poem’, in Tristan and Isolde, ed. by Joan Tasker Grimbert (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 125-146 (p. 125).

[2] Mark Chinca, ‘Tristan Narratives from the High to the Late Middle Ages’, in The Arthur of the Germans: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval German and Dutch Literature, ed. by W. H. Jackson and S. A. Ranawake (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), pp. 117-134 (p. 120).

[3] Denis de Rougement, Love in the Western World, trans. by Montgomery Belgion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 22-3.

[4] William D. Cole, ‘Purgatory vs. Eden: Beroul’s Forest and Gottfried’s Cave’, The Germanic Review, 70.1 (1995), 2-8 (p. 2).

Ovid’s Medea in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (12th December)

Medea crashes Jason’s wedding party. Source: Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, Royal MS 20 D I, f. 37v.

To jump right into discussing the various ways Medea was fashioned and re-fashioned throughout the Middle Ages is tempting but ultimately a shallow and unfulfilling approach. To read her medieval versions without understanding the social, religious and cultural background that generated them is not to read her at all.[1]

Over the course of a long history that stretches back to Greek mythology, there have been many versions of Medea, all overlapping with and building upon each other. Predominantly, it is as the archetypal murderous mother that she is most often remembered, but this is not the only label she has borne. Treacherous daughter, murderous sister, enchantress, potioneer, and wronged wife are also titles she has counted among her own.

The daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis and a granddaughter of the sun-god, Helios, Medea fell in love with the hero, Jason, helping him to outwit her father and steal the Golden Fleece. It is Jason’s betrayal of her love for him that prompts the extreme acts of infanticidal revenge that made her name synonymous with ‘wickedness itself’.[2] However, this betrayal also paves the way for the depiction of a more sensitive, emotional Medea that writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer capitalised upon to recast her in a more fitting, less threatening, manner.

Whatever else she may be, Medea is indisputably a cause of fear. In the medieval period, she became particularly menacing to an English audience in period that was undergoing seismic social and cultural shift. Her actions capture the attention of writers through the ages, almost reluctantly so. The Elizabethan poet and playwright, Thomas Achelley, dismissed the transgressive behaviours of Medea and her ilke as the actions of “ethnicke examples”, emphasising the distance between her and the women of Protestant England – the implication being women should be grateful for this distance.[3] And yet, for all Achelley dismisses Medea as unimportant, he and others are incapable of leaving her alone. Her narrative is not one that easily allows the author / reader to move on, being as reluctant to let go as Medea herself was over Jason. Beyond the apparent end of her own tale, Medea crosses over into roles in the tales of other characters. In the Metamorphoses, for instance, she reappears at the beginning of the Theseus narrative as the wicked stepmother, trying to arrange Theseus’ poisoning to guarantee the furtherance of her own son’s prospects.

She is the subject of plays by Euripides and Seneca (which survive) and one by Ovid (which does not), but as access to surviving Greek tragedies was limited through the medieval and early modern period, it is Ovid’s version of her, found in Book VII of the Metamorphoses and Heroides XII, that is most important to her medieval and early modern presence. This month, we will be looking at two translations of the Medea narrative in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Chaucer’s retelling within The Legend of Good Women; and the very end of William Caxton’s The History of Jason.

This months texts:

1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, reis. 2008), ll. 1-402.
2. Ovid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, 1567, J. F. Nims, trans. A. Golding (Paul Dry Books, Inc, new edn. 2000), ll. 1-513.
3. Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Legend of Hypsipyle and Medea’, The Legend of Good Womenin The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1580-1679.
4. William Caxton, History of Jason, John Munro (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1908), ll. 19-40.

The Latin poet Publius Ovidius Naso – Ovid – was born in 43 BC and was the only one of the great Latin poets to see the beginning of the Christian era. Ovid is one of the most influential poets in Western literature, and the fifteen books of the Metamorphoses, counting approximately 250 stories and spanning from the first chaotic moments of creation to the rise of Rome, is his most ambitious work. Ovid was banished from Rome in 8 AD for immorality before the Metamorphoses was completed, and issues of speech and silencing run through the tales like a thread, always reminding the reader of their storyteller’s unjust exile to Tomis. Almost twenty percent of the tales Ovid tells recount silencing of a kind and speech loss has long been identified by scholars as a key aspect of the transformations.[4]

Arthur Golding was born in Essex in 1536, and although he dropped out of university during the reign of Queen Mary, he read the classics thoroughly as a young man and their translations from the Latin and French became his life’s work. His 1567 translation of the Metamorphoseswas the first to translate directly from Latin into English, and it rapidly became the standard Ovid in English, remembered now as “Shakespeare’s Ovid”. Its popularity inspired a wave of Elizabethan translations of Ovid’s works, and its significance to the English literary canon was seemingly confirmed, when in 1915, Ezra Pound deemed it, “The most beautiful book in the language”. Golding also produced numerous volumes of John Calvin’s sermons and treatises, a translation of Caesar’s Commentaries, an account of a 1573 murder that took place in London, and an account of the London earthquake of 1580.

Of all the women in The Legend of Good Women, it is Medea who gets the shortest shrift. Her tale is not even given its own space, instead compressed into one alongside Hypsipyle (her predecessor in Jason’s affections). The entire episode spans a mere 310 lines and at barely one hundred lines, Medea’s legend is reduced to a footnote in what is essentially ‘The Legend of Jason’. The passionate, emotional Medea who Ovid first depicts in the Metamorphoses debating so hard with herself as she is torn between her familial duty and her overpowering love for Jason is absent in Chaucer’s retelling.

The Legend of Good Women is thought to have been written between 1380-1387 at the behest of Queen Anne of Bohemia, the consort of Richard II.  It follows Troilus & Criseyde in the chronology of Chaucer’s works (purportedly as an atonement for the wrongs Chaucer-the-poet did to women in general in his portrayal of Criseyde) and is usually regarded as a critical paradox: despite having had great time and effort expended upon it, it was apparently abandoned and is viewed by some as a failure. The Legend survives in twelve manuscripts, and there are two different versions of the prologue.

William Caxton is thought to have been born around 1422. After a period living and working as a merchant in Bruges and observing the development of new printing technology in Cologne, he partnered with a Fleming called Colard Mansion to open his own printing press. Their first publication was an English translation of the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye in 1473, which Caxton himself translated. Upon his return to England, he is credited with opening the first printing press in 1476.

The History of Jason was first published c. 1477 and is Caxton’s English translation of a French romance by Raoul Lefèvre from c.1460. The History of Jason constructs Jason as a typical romance hero, and places a great deal of emphasis upon his previous marriage contract with the Queen Mirro to nullify his bond with Medea. However, once Mirro has died (shot with an arrow through the throat by Patroclus on the orders of King Aeson), the way is opened for Jason and Medea’s reunion.

Topics for discussion
• Thinking about translation, to what extent do the two versions of Ovid’s Medea count as different texts? Where are the differences? Why might these differences exist? Or has little enough changed in the approx. 450 years that they are still recognisably the same text?
• How do the beginnings of the Ovidian Medea and Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Hypsipyle’, set up different expectations for the texts?
• How is Jason portrayed throughout these texts, and how does that influence how we perceive Medea?
• Consider the three different endings these texts present for Medea. Is the ‘Happily Ever After’ Caxton gives Jason and Medea convincing in the light of the other versions of her tale?
• What tensions, fears, and anxieties might the figure of Medea have played upon and incited in the medieval and early modern period?
• Medea is foremost remembered as the mother who killed her sons. How useful are the various labels that have been attached to Medea – ‘murderess, necromancer and sorceress’[5] – when considering her construction as a character?
• What do we think of Medea? Is she a villain? A victim? Is she ever sympathetic?

References
[1] Siobhan McElduff, ‘The Multiple Medeas of the Middle Ages’, Ramus, Vol. 40, No. 2 (2012), p. 191.
[2] Geoffrey of Vinasuf, as quoted in Florence Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 203
[3]Katherine Heavey, The Early Modern Medea: Medea in English Literature, 1558–1688, p. 1.
[4] Bartolo A. Natoli, Silenced Voices: The Poetics of Speech in Ovid(Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin press, 2017), p. 11.
[5] Florence Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 203.

King Arthur and Glastonbury (18th April)

Next Meeting: 18th April 2018 / Room 3.62 / 3-5pm

Glastonbury is a village situated in a secluded spot in the marshes, though it can be reached both on horseback and on foot. It affords pleasure neither by its situation nor by its beauty.[1]

Located in Somerset, Glastonbury Abbey is a site of popular myth and legend. In the Middle Ages, the Abbey claimed to have been founded by Joseph of Arimathea, and it is also the legendary burial site of King Arthur.

Hagiography and Historiography

In the 1129, the monks at Glastonbury commissioned William of Malmesbury to write the official history of the Abbey, as well as the life of Saint Dunstan, who was the first abbot of Glastonbury (and later became the Bishop of Worcester, Bishop of London, and Archbishop of Canterbury).

William’s original version of De antiquitate Glastoniensis ecclesie has not survived. The text is extant in two thirteenth-century manuscripts. Both manuscripts include several interpolations relating to the legend of Joseph of Arimathea, the relics of Saint Patrick and Saint Dunstan, and the exhumation of the bodies of Arthur and Guinevere. These interpolations were introduced into the text between 1171 and 1247.

In the 1130s, the Welsh cleric Caradoc of Llancarfan, who was a contemporary of Geoffrey of Monmouth, composed the Vitae Gildae for the Glastonbury monks. Caradoc claims that the sixth-century British monk ‘Gildas Sapiens’ – or ‘Gildas the Wise’ – wrote De excidio et conquestu Britanniae while at Glastonbury. Caradoc was also the first writer to associate King Arthur with Glastonbury, and the Vitae Gildae includes the earliest version of the story of the abduction of Guinevere.

The Exhumation of King Arthur

By the late twelfth century, Glastonbury Abbey ‘was in a state of financial and ecclesiastical crisis’.[2] In 1184, a great fire at Glastonbury destroyed the monastic buildings. Reconstruction began almost immediately, and the Lady Chapel was consecrated in 1186 or 1187; however, work on the abbey was postponed by the death of Henry II (1189), which ended financial support and royal patronage.

In order to raise funds, the monks of the abbey commenced a series of propaganda exercises, and used holy relics and the bodies of saints to promote Glastonbury as place of pilgrimage. The bodies of Arthur and Guinevere were discovered in the cemetery at Glastonbury in 1190 or 1191. In both of his accounts of the exhumation, Gerald of Wales recalls how a Welsh bard had told Henry II about the location of Arthur and Guinevere’s bodies. Gerald was the first to explicitly identify Avalon – the resting place of Arthur – with Glastonbury.

Arthur and Guinevere’s bodies were re-exhumed in 1278. At Easter, Edward I visited the Glastonbury with his wife, Eleanor of Castile, and on the 19^th April he instructed the bodies to be moved to the high altar. The exhumation asserted that Edward I ‘was a legitimate successor to the Arthurian imperium’.[3] Following the conquest of Wales in 1282, Edward took possession of Arthur’s crown in 1283, and held a Round Table at Winchester in 1284. His grandson, Edward III, also visited Arthur’s tomb with his wife, Philippa of Hainault, in 1331. 

The Legend of Joseph of Arimathea

The legend of Joseph of Arimathea was popularised in thirteenth-century French Arthurian romance. In the first part of his trilogy of Arthurian romances, Robert de Boron describes how Joseph of Arimathea used the Holy Grail to catch the last drops of blood from Christ as he hung on the cross. Robert also claims that the descendants of Joseph brought the Grail to Britain.

In the mid-thirteenth century, the story of Joseph of Arimathea was interpolated into William of Malmesbury’s De antiquitate Glastoniensis ecclesie. These revisions asserted that Joseph was the original founder of Glastonbury, which subsequently bolstered the reputation of the abbey. John of Glastonbury also expanded the story of Joseph in his Cronica sive antiquitates Glastoniensis ecclesie, using the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus – also known as The Acts of Pilate – and the first part of the Lancelot-Grail cycle, L’estoire du Graal, as his main sources for the apostle’s life.

The legend of Joseph of Arimathea also survived into the later middle ages. In the fifteenth century, John Hardyng included the story of Joseph of Arimathea in the two versions of his Chronicle (1457 and 1464). As Edward Donald Kennedy points out, ‘[t]he account of Joseph afforded Hardyng an ideal story to use to counter Scotland’s claims to preeminence as a Christian nation’.[4] Hardyng’s Chronicle also contains a grail quest – which is unprecedented in the chronicle tradition – and Galahad’s achievement of the Grail occurs before Arthur’s war against Rome and the final battle between Arthur and Modred.

Texts

Gerald of Wales

Gerald wrote two accounts of the exhumation of King Arthur and Guinevere at Glastonbury. The first account is contained in De principis instructione (c. 1193), while the second – and more detailed – account is included in Speculum ecclesiae (c. 1216). Gerald claims that he was an eyewitness of the exhumation, but Richard Barber has challenged his claim to authority.

Ralph of Coggeshall

Ralph was abbot of Coggeshall, near Colchester in Essex. He wrote his Chronicon Anglicanum in around 1223, and the entry for 1191 includes an account of the exhumation of Arthur and Guinevere.

Adam of Damerham

Adam was a monk of Glastonbury Abbey in the thirteenth century. He wrote a history of the abbey entitled Historia de Rebus gestis Glastoniensibus, which is a continuation of William of Malmesbury’s De antiquitate Glastoniensis ecclesie from 1126 to 1291. Adam was also an eyewitness of Edward I’s visit to Glastonbury in 1278 when the tomb of Arthur and Guinevere was opened and their bones were moved to the high altar.

(NB: Adam’s account of the second exhumation in 1278 is taken from John of Glastonbury’s Cronica)

Vera historia de morte Arthuri (c. 1200)

Written around 1200, the Vera historia de morte Arthuri is extant in four manuscripts. Two manuscripts – London, British Library, Cotton Titus A. xix and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 186 – include materials relevant to Glastonbury, such as excerpts from the works of William of Malmesbury and John of Glastonbury. In Paris Biblioteque de l’Arsenal, 983, the Vera historia is interpolated between chapters 178 and 179 of the First Variant version of the Historia regum Britanniae. Richard Barber and Michael Lapidge have suggested that the Vera historia was originally composed in Wales.

John of Glastonbury, Cronica sive antiquitates Glastoniensis ecclesie (1350s)

The Cronia survives as a complete text in seven manuscripts. The main sources for John’s Cronica are William of Malmesbury’s De antiquitate Glastoniensis ecclesie and Adam of Damerham’s Historia de Rebus gestis Glastoniensibus. John’s Cronia is ‘highly derivative’,[5] and he uses a selection of chronicles, hagiography, and romance to construct a history of Glastonbury Abbey.

Questions for discussion

• What are the motivations for the exhumation in the accounts by Gerald of Wales, Ralph of Coggeshall, and Adam of Damerham?
• What is the significance of royal and ecclesiastical authority in the different accounts of the exhumation of Arthur and Guinevere?
• How does Arthur’s tomb function as a site of public memory?
• Philip Schwyzer classifies the exhumation of Arthur as a sub-genre of the inventio topos that participates in an act of ‘colonial archaeology’.[6] How are the materials and artefacts of British history appropriated in these texts?
• Catherine Clarke argues that local landscapes are ‘central to the fashioning of monastic identity and its connection to images of the nation’.[7] How is the landscape of Glastonbury represented in these texts?
• Why does Gerald of Wales undermine of the myth of Arthur’s return?
• How do the texts – particularly the Vera historia and John of Glastonbury’s Cronica – engage with models of Arthurian history in chronicle and romance?
• How do Gerald of Wales and John of Glastonbury align the story of Arthur’s death by Geoffrey of Monmouth with Glastonbury?
• Can the relocation of Arthur’s resting place to Gwynedd in the Vera historia be read as a response to the growth of Glastonbury legends in the 1190s?

Useful links

Glastonbury Abbey

Digital reconstruction of Arthur’s tomb

Glastonbury in the news

Recent excavations at Glastonbury

[1] William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum: Volume One: Text and Translation, ed. and trans. by M. Winterbottom with the assistance of R. M. Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 2.91.1.

[2] Valerie M. Lagorio, ‘The Evolving Legend of St Joseph of Glastonbury’, Speculum, 46 (1971), 209-31 (p. 210).

[3] John Carmi Parsons, ‘The Second Exhumation of King Arthur’s Remains at Glastonbury, 19 April 1278’, Arthurian Literature, 12 (1993), 173-77 (p. 176).

[4] Edward Donald Kennedy, ‘John Hardyng and the Holy Grail’, Arthurian Literature, 8 (1989), 185-206 (p. 197).

[5] James P. Carley, ‘Introduction’, in The Chronicle of Glastonbury Abbey: An Edition, Translation and Study of John of Glastonbury’s Cronica sive Antiquitates Glastoniensis Ecclesie (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1985), pp. xi-lxii (p. xi).

[6] Philip Scwhzyer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 55.

[7] Catherine A. M. Clarke, Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700-1400 (Cambridge: Brewer, 2006), p. 68.

Queens and Queenship in Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy (9th August)

The Darnley Portrait (c. 1575)

Next meeting: 9th August / Room 2.46 / 3-5pm

In 1592, the pamphleteer, poet and playwright Thomas Nashe wrote that the Elizabethan plays which drew their subject matter from English Chronicles should be celebrated because, through them:

our fore-fathers valiant actes (that have lyne long buried in rustie brasse and worme-eaten bookes) are revived, and they them selves raysed from the Grave of Oblivion, and brought to pleade their aged Honours in open presence: which, what can bee a sharper reproofe, to these degenerate effeminate dayes of oures?[1]

Nashe was referring to those plays which we now call the ‘English history plays’, which enjoyed enormous popularity in the 1590s. Whether a result of nationalistic pride, anxieties about the country’s future, or otherwise, the last decade of Elizabeth I’s reign, in particular, saw a proliferation of plays produced which dramatised events of the country’s ‘glorious’ and often bloody past. These plays were well-attended, making these iterations of history accessible to a vast number of theatre-goers. Nashe articulates a notion that dramatising English history was laudable not only for its celebratory patriotism and memorialisation of the past, but also because such plays could have a particular utility: to help to recall and revitalise traditional chivalric values, and to revive a ‘valiant’ national history for the public eye and imagination.

An additional merit of such dramatic renderings of history, Nashe suggests, derives from the fact that they could provide ‘sharp reproof’ of the more indulgent, less masculine Elizabethan days of the early 1590s. In this view, the valour demonstrated in history plays was made all the more vivid by their contrast to the supposedly ‘effeminate’ contemporary moment of their dramatic construction and production. Carol Banks titles an article after Nashe’s words, and provides some discussion of the broader, sixteenth-century connotations of the term ‘effeminate’.[2] According to Banks, Nashe uses the word ‘effeminate’ to mean not only ‘womanish’ – or, perhaps, ‘unmanly’ – but employs its wider definition as ‘a virtual antonym to military valour and honour’. Indeed, there are numerous moments of nostalgia for this apparently dead or dying chivalric code throughout the first tetralogy (perhaps most notably, but not exclusively, through the person of Talbot in 1 Henry VI).

At almost the same moment that Nashe was writing these words, William Shakespeare (possibly with collaborators, and perhaps even with Nashe himself) was writing some of his earliest plays and contributing to the increasingly popular history play genre. In 1591 to 1592, Shakespeare wrote his ‘first tetralogy’ of history plays. He probably began with The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (more commonly known as The Second Part of Henry VI, or simply 2 Henry VI), then Richard Duke of York (The Third Part of Henry VI, or 3 Henry VI), before returning to First Part of Henry VI (or 1 Henry VI). Though usually performed in isolation, The Tragedy of King Richard III (more commonly just Richard III) follows on from events of the Henry VI plays to complete the tetralogy; this play was also likely to have been written last of the four.[3] The first tetralogy dramatises a telescopic version of the ‘Wars of the Roses’, the period of civil unrest that followed the death of the great English martial king, Henry V. Shakespeare begins with the coronation of Henry VI, depicts the ongoing battles against the French, shows the emergence of a Yorkist line of claimants to the throne and the battles that result from these factionalist divisions, dramatises Richard III’s machinations against his own family, and ultimately concludes with his defeat and the ‘healing’ of ‘civil wounds’ with the union of the Houses of Lancaster and York that is symbolised by the marriage of Henry Tudor (the new King Henry VII) and Elizabeth of York.

Many of Shakespeare’s formative years as a dramatist, then, were spent writing these ‘intensely nationalistic’ (English) history plays.[4] By depicting the rise and eventual victory of the first Tudor king at the beginning of his career, Shakespeare’s earliest plays seem, ultimately, to contribute to the genre’s politically expedient, propagandist aims to contribute to the so-called ‘Tudor myth’ and ‘support the right of the Tudors to the throne’.[5] However, the first tetralogy does not simply serve to straightforwardly glorify the Tudors, aggrandise the past, or offer simple ‘reproof’ to an ‘effeminate’ present in a manner Nashe seems to deem commendable. Rather, these plays explore a number of complex issues that Shakespeare would continue to address throughout his career, for example: what is the nature of divine providence and what happens when it is meddled with? What makes a ruler (a king?) effectual or ineffectual, just or unjust? What role do (and should) women play in political and social action?

Indeed, though the first tetralogy’s primary focus is, as suggested by the plays’ usual titles, on the martial conflicts and political machinations of the kings and key male players of the Wars of the Roses, significant space and importance is also afforded to women: the wives of influential nobleman and the kings’ queen consorts. These figures occupy different and intriguing spaces in a group of plays which dramatise, primarily, a masculine, masculinised conflict. History playwrights ‘remained [largely] committed to a notion of historical truth and are bound by the received record concerning the major events of the past’,[6] ‘records’ referring to (chronicle) accounts by the likes of Thomas More (c. 1519), Edward Hall (1548), and Raphael Holinshed (1577 and 1587) among others. Nonetheless, embellishment of the historical ‘fact’ and/or emphasis on moments the playwright deemed important or interesting was common practice. When Shakespeare writes compelling female characters and addresses the matter of queenship and female rule in the first tetralogy (and in his history plays more generally), therefore, it is difficult to divorce such depictions from the knowledge that they were rendered in a moment of longstanding, independent female sovereignty, of a true Queen Regnant whose (even recent, direct) ancestors were depicted in these plays and their sources.

At the beginning of the 1590s, when Shakespeare was writing his earliest (history) plays, England had been under the rule of a female sovereign for around four decades. Though this was a lifetime for many and, indeed, a lifetime for Shakespeare himself (born in 1564, eleven years after Mary Tudor’s coronation and half a decade into what would become Elizabeth Tudor’s forty-five years on the throne), the question of female rule was no less contentious. When John Knox wrote that ‘to promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature’ in his 1558 pamphlet The first blast of the trumpet against the monstruous regiment of women, he was contributing to a familiar, longstanding discourse about the (in)appropriateness of female power and authority. By dramatising the actions and voices of the women who sat on the throne of England before the Tudor queens so thoroughly, Shakespeare’s first tetralogy appears to contribute to these (continued) questions about the rights and roles of women, and encourages audiences to interrogate the actions and individuals traditionally valued in our historical accounts.

Questions for discussion

1. Are there any significant or particularly interesting departures from, or ‘faithful’ similarities to, Hall’s Chronicle in the Shakespeare extracts?
2. How relevant are Chronicle texts and other sources to the writing of (these) history plays? Is there a sense that Shakespeare is not just striving to represent history, but also to re-present history? If so, why?
3. Is it appropriate to consider the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III as a cogent ‘tetralogy’? Do the portrayals of Margaret and Elizabeth vary between these plays or even between these scenes?
4. Can we identify an aesthetic of queenship in these texts? Or, what makes a queen a queen?
5. Are queens represented positively, negatively, or otherwise in these extracts? Does our reading change/depend on the plays’ late Elizabethan context?
6. A lot of these scenes focus on (women’s) speech and language as a means of accessing power. Why do you think this is? Is it effective?
7. How is marriage presented in these texts? What about love and lust?
8. How do Margaret and Elizabeth respond to the men who proposition, befriend or antagonise them? How do these men respond to them? How are their bodies used (by themselves, or by others)?
9. The queen’s primary responsibility was often considered to be to produce a legitimate (and preferably male) heir to the throne. How do these scenes represent the queen (as) mother or queen regents?
10. And finally, what’s up with John Knox?

 

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[1] Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Divell (1592).

[2] Carol Banks, ‘Warlike women: ‘reproofe to these degenerate effeminate dayes’?’, in Shakespeare’s histories and counter-histories, ed. by Dermot Cavanagh, Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Stephen Longstaffe (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 169-181 (p. 170).

[3] Jean E. Howard’s ‘Introduction to The First Part of Henry the Sixth’ gives a good, concise overview of the first tetralogy’s compositional dates. The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edn, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt et al (New York: Norton, 2008), pp. 465-474.

[4] Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1965), p. 2.

[5] Ribner, The English History Play, p. 2.

[6] Jesse M. Lander, ‘William Shakespeare: The History Plays’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, Volume 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 489-494 (p. 490).

Martin Parker: Ballads and Broadsides (10th May 2017)

Next meeting: Wednesday 10th May / Room 2.46 / 3-5pm

Martin Parker was the most celebrated and famous balladeer of the seventeenth century. His extant corpus contains over eighty ballads, pamphlets, broadsheets, and chapbooks, but it is hard to judge the true size of his canon due to the catastrophic survival rates of cheap seventeenth century texts, the incomplete record of everything that was published during this period, and because of a suspicion that his initials may have been misapplied to the works of less known writers in order to boost sales. His first ballad appeared in 1624, and tells the story of a Cornish murder, while the last text to bear his name was a chapbook entitled The Most Admirable History of that Most Renowned Christian Worthy Arthur, King of the Britaines, in 1660. Before 1660 the last entry in the Stationers’ Register to bear his name was a chapbook published in 1647. This thirteen-year silence coincided with a clampdown on ballads and balladeers by the Government, led by Captain Bethan; Parker is also believed to have died during this period, probably sometime in the early 1650s. A satirical elegy for Parker appears in 1656, within a book entitled Death in a New Dress, OR Sportive Funeral Elegies and references in the 1653 and 1654 editions of Merlinus Anonymous suggest that Parker had died.

It is suspected that Parker was an innkeeper of some kind due to references to this profession in both his own work and that of others. There a few references in other people’s work that Parker may become entangled with the law on a number of occasions. He was singled out for special attention in a puritanical petition, signed by 15000 people and delivered to Parliament in November 1640, which, among other things, said that Parker’s work was ‘in disgrace of Religion, to the increase of all vice, and withdrawing of people from reading, studying, and hearing the Word of God, and other good Bookes’.[1] Parker’s later work certainly contains strong royalist themes, which angered Puritans and earned him the title ‘The Prelates Poet’, not an uncommon insult for the King’s supporters at the time. He is thought to have taken over the running of the royalist newsbook Mercurius Melancholicus after its editor John Hackluyt was arrested and imprisoned.

Although primarily remembered as a balladeer, Parker was proficient in many different forms. His early work mainly concerned the ups and downs of young, married life, often with a rural setting, but he moved on to journalism and current affairs, royalist ballads and pamphlets, adapted old stories and legends into histories, and, on occasion, dabbled in serious poetry. We’re reading quite a broad selection of these different genres and forms to try and get a sense of the range of which Parker was capable. The texts are as follows:

Householde Talke (1629) – One of Parker’s earliest extant ballads. His early work is mainly pastoral and domestic, focusing on marriage and young – mainly rural – lovers. This particular ballad gives advice about jealousy.

The Rape of Philomela (1632) – This is a rendering of Ovid’s account of the rape of Philomela from his Metamorphoses. It is often regarded as Parker’s only extant attempt at ‘real’ poetry. It is prefaced by a few short poems from contemporaries praising the work.

A True Tale of Robin Hood (1632) – An account of the Robin Hood story, which places a strong emphasis on truth. Part of what could be called Parker’s English Heroes series, which include works on King Arthur, St George, and Guy of Warwick, though unfortunately the latter two are not extant. He is also credited with an adaption of the Valentine and Orson romance, of which only eleven lines have survived.

Britaines Honour (1640) – Parker was well known as a writer of current events, and seems to have been considered a generally reliable reporter. This ballad reports on the Battle of Newburn (1640), but is more focused on telling a story of heroism, weaved together with myth, and strong anti-Scottish feelings, not unusual in Parker. It is also a heavily royalist text. By this time Parker had become one of the premier royalist writers working in England.

The Poet’s Blind Mans Bough (1641) – This is the most personal of Parkers many works. It is a text that primarily hits back at critics of Parker and also bemoans the trend of anonymous publication.

Questions

1. Who do we think Parker was writing for? Do each of these texts speak to the same audience? Is there a consistent authorial voice?
2. Is there humour at work in any of these text? If so, how does it work?
3. Why is truth so important to Parker in many of his texts? How does truth work in the selection we have here?
4. What is the purpose of the extended preface, including the complimentary poems, that proceed ‘The Rape of Philomela’? Do we agree with them?
5. Is Parker’s a good translation of Ovid? How closely do we think Parker engaged with the Latin original?
6. How does Parker engage with the legendary material he utilises? Is his Robin Hood what we expect from a Robin Hood text? How does the Galfridian myth enter into ‘Britaines Honour’?
7. Are Parker’s politics on show in all of these texts? In which do they come out most strongly? Are they consistent?
8. Parker employed many different forms and styles over the course of his career, how do each of the forms we’re looking at here affect the texts?
9. What do we make of the woodcuts? Are they what we would expect from woodcuts of this time? Can they tell us anything about the texts?
10. Do we think that Parker was a good writer?

[1] The Third Speech of the Lord George Digby, to the House of Commons, concerning Bishops, and the Citie Petition, the 9th of Febr: 1640