LATE MIDDLE AGES, OR PRE-RENAISSANCE, OR EARLY RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
ANGLO - SAXON CULTURE AND LITERATURE
While the romances depicted the morals of the nobles, the common people presented their life in short stories known as fabliaux (sing. - fabliau). They portrayed townspeople - burghers: merchants, tradesmen, craftsmen, students, etc. They are described as prudent, practical, mocking at the nobles & churchmen. The most famous fabliaux are called "The Land of Cockaigne" ("Страна бездельников"). Fabliaux were very often quite frivolous; women in them were described as cunning, quarrelsome, ready to cuckold their husbands (a cuckold - "рогоносец").
Still another genre that emerged at that time was the genre of bestiary. Bestiaries were stories that had animals for their characters, which were endowed human features.
(THE 14th CENTURY)
The 14 century was the period of the formation of the English nation and the English language. From the historical point of view it was quite a turbulent period in England, marked by the 10 0 Years' War with France (1337-1453), three epidemics of plague that killed half of England's population. In the country new social phenomena began to appear: the towns and their population were growing, the village was changing, the trade was developing, etc. As a result the townspeople - the tradesmen and craftsmen - were becoming more and more powerful, giving birth to a new social class -bourgeoisie.
The 100 Years' War brought many hardships to common people, besides the oppression of the lower classes by the nobles was also growing. The second half of the 14th century was also marked by the growing protest against the Roman-Catholic church and the demand of a church reform. It led to the famous Peasants' Revolt in 1831. The leader of the revolt was Wat Tyler (Уот Тайлер), a craftsman, and the ideological leader of the revolt was John Ball (they often called him "mad priest" - "безумный священник"). The common people demanded the equality of the social classes, to stop the abuses (злоупотребления) of the church and to quit the privileges of the feudals. In the end the revolt was severely suppressed.
The scholastic Latin Church literature still occupied an important place, but a new spirit was already felt in the cultural life in the country. The new spirit was marked by an optimism unknown to the Middle Ages. Speaking about the literature of the 14th century, one could mention John Wycliffe, William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer. William Langland, according to his style and genres, is fully associated with the Middle Ages, while Geoffrey Chaucer can be regarded the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first English poet who opened the way to English realistic literature, free of the influence of the Church.
The genres of the period were quite diverse. Some of the genres belonged to the Middle Ages, others were new ones, more characteristic of the next periods. The main genres were allegorical poems of didactic character, chivalrous poetry, madrigals, messages, odes, poems (поэмы), visions, etc.
JOHN WYCLIFFE (ДЖОН УИКЛИФ) (1324 - 1384)
As it has already been said, the second part of the 14th century was marked by the growing desire of a new reform of the Catholic Church. It was the result of the struggle against the feudal order of life (and the Catholic Church was closely connected with feudalism).
John Wycliffe was a priest. He attacked many of the religious ideas of his time. He was at Oxford but had to leave as his attacks on the Church could no longer be bourn. One of his beliefs was that anyone who wanted to read the Bible ought to be allowed to do so. But how could it be done by uneducated people when the Bible was written in Latin, the official language of the Roman-Catholic Church? Some parts had indeed been put into Old English long ago, but Wycliffe arranged the production of the whole Bible in English. He himself translated part of it. There were two translations (in 1382 and 1384), of which the second was better.
It is surprising that Wycliffe was not burnt alive for his attacks on religious practices. After he was dead and buried, his bones were dug up again and thrown into a stream which flows into the River Avon (which itself flows into the River Severn):
The Avon to the Severn runs, The Severn to the sea
And Wycliffe's dust shall spread abroad, Wide as the waters be.
WILLIAM LANGLAND (УИЛЬЯМ ЛЕНГЛЕНД) (1330 - 1400)
We know very little of the author. He was a peasant by his descent, got some church education, was rather poor but very independent. They believe that he used to say about himself that he was "too high to bend low".
Langland is mostly known as the author of the allegorical didactic poem "The Vision of Piers the Plowman" ("Видение о Петре Пахаре") which is written by means of alliteration. In this poem the writer mostly attacks the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church in England. In the poem there are many abstract personages, but there is also one character whom the very life in the country gave birth to - this is Piers the Plowman, who has the features of a typical English peasant of the 14th century. And in the long run this name became a kind of symbol of a true hardworking person.
The poem consists of two parts and a prologue. There are 11 visions in the poem all in all.
In the 1st part the writer tells of the people's quest for "Holy Truth" ("Святая П p а в д a "), in the 2nd part different abstract personages tell of their lives.
In the prologue the author tells of his dream: on a May day he fell asleep on a high hill and saw a dream. He saw "a field full of folk". There were different kinds of people on the field: some of them were poor, others were rich, some of them were working, others - wandering, etc. ("одни ходили за плугом, редко предаваясь веселью; насаждая и сея, они несли очень тяжёлую работу и добывали то, что расточители прожорливо истребляли"). On one side of the field there was a beautiful tower - the home of T r u t h . On the other side of the field there is a grim prison - the home of E v i 1 . The very field is the symbol of the whole mankind. So we may say that this is an allegory of life in general. But at the same time the people on the field are like the English people of that epoch: they show the features of English people who represent different layers of society - peasants, ploughmen, monks, knights, vagabonds, pardoners, churchmen, etc. And the author manages to find a very precise description to each of the person.
In the 1st vision the story tells of a beautiful woman - "Holy Church" ("Святая Церковь") - she speaks with the poet and says to him that the most valuable thing in the world is Truth. The Truth's friends are Love and Conscience. Her enemies in the poem are Lie, Hypocrisy, Bribe (Мзда)and Treachery (Коварство).
Bribe appears in the 2nd vision. She is very, very beautiful and can seduce anyone she wants. Then follows the description of the wedding between Bribe and Deceit (Обман). Various statesmen gather to this feast. Bribe and Deceit are given a special document, according to which they have the right to lie, to boast, to curse and do many other bad things (the writer skillfully imitates the business language of that time). But the marriage was not concluded as Theology (Теология) is against this. Then the King proposes the knight Conscience to marry В r ib e but the knight would disagree. In the next scenes many other allegorical personages appear: Peace, Wisdom, Reason (Разум), Lie, etc.
Langland's poetic mastery is especially bright in the scene when the seven deadly sins appear before
us: Pride (Гордыня);
Anger (Гнев);
Gluttony (Невоздержанность, Обжорство,
Чревоугодие); £nvy (Зависть);
Covetousness (Жадность);
Lust (Похоть);
Sloth (Леность, Праздность). The episode which unites the whole poem is the theme of the quest for Holy Truth. The people on the field are called to seek Truth by Reason. But they do not know the way to Truth. And the only person who knows the way is Piers the Plowman as Conscience and Common Sense (Здравый Смысл) told him about it. The allegorical message of the poem is quite simple but profound - only those who work hard, know the true way in life.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER (ДЖЕФФРИ ЧОСЕР) (1340 -1400)
Geoffrey Chaucer lived in an eventful age. He was born, they believe, in 1340 or thereabouts, when the Hundred Year's War with France had already begun. Three times in his life the plague known as the Black Death smote the country. When he was in his twenties the English language was established, for the first time, as the language of the law-courts. When Geoffrey Chaucer was in his late thirties the young & unfortunate Richard II ascended the throne, to be deposed & murdered a year before Geoffrey Chaucer's death by В о 1 i n g b г о к e, the rebel who became Henry IV. In 1381 there came the Peasants' Revolt, and with it a recognition that the labourers & diggers had human rights quite as much as the middle class & the nobility. Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, about 40 years before a really important event in English literary history - the invention of printing.
Geoffrey Chaucer belonged to that growing class from which, in the centuries to follow, so many great writers sprang. He was not a peasant, not a priest, not an aristocrat, but the son of a man engaged in trade: his father was a wine merchant. But young Geoffrey Chaucer was to learn a lot about the aristocracy through becoming a page to the Countess of Ulster. His promotion & foreign service as a young soldier (he was taken prisoner in France in 1359 & was ransomed by the King of England himself), his marriage into an aristocratic family of the great John of Gaunt, his diplomatic service in Europe since 1370 & his services at the King's court gave Geoffrey Chaucer plenty of opportunity to observe polite manners, to study the sciences & the arts, the literatures of France & Italy. In Italy at that time he could have met Petrarche (Петрарка) & Boccaccio (Боккаччо). At least he got acquainted with their works. So, all this made Geoffrey Chaucer one of the best-equipped of the English poets of that time. And his own first literary works were the translations from French & Italian.
Among Geoffrey Chaucer's first original (собственных) works was "The Parliament of Fouls" (about 1377 - 1382) ("Птичий парламент"). This poem combines two medieval genres of vision & b e s t i a ry . At the beginning of the poem the author tells how he once fell asleep & saw a dream: he found himself (очутился) in a garden on a high hill. It was the 14th of February (St. Valentine's Day). There he saw a beautiful woman dressed in white. This was the figure of N a t u r e . In her hand she had a female eagle (орлицу). And two male eagles were courting (ухаживали) the female one. But Nature did not know which of them she should give the female eagle. So she decided to call up an assembly of birds (созвать собрание) to solve the problem. Among the birds there was a H a w k (ястреб), a D о v e (голубь), a Goose,a Turkey,a Duck, etc. Nature asked the birds for their opinions. The Hawk said that the eagles should hold a tournament (турнир) & the winner should get the female eagle as he would be the worthiest among the two. The Goose added that even if one of the eagles did not get the female eagle he should not be too much upset because there are always so many other female eagles in the world. The Dove interrupted him saying that one should be devoted to his love till the end of his days, even if he was not rewarded (вознаграждён). The Turkey argued: what is the use of love then if it is no use at all? The argument went on & on. In the end Nature decided to postpone (отложить) the final solution till the next St. Valentine's Day.
So on the one hand the poem is a vision because it tells the reader of a dream, on the other hand it is a bestiary because the main personages here are animals (the birds in this case). Besides, the birds with their different views allegorically showed the classes & layers of the real society of that time: the Hawk & the Dove - the aristocracy, the Turkey, the Duck, the Goose - the newly emerged class of bourgeoisie. Geoffrey Chaucer even used the very word "bourgeois" while describing one of the birds.
Yet Geoffrey Chaucer's greatest work is "The Canterbury Tales" (about 1387) ("Кентерберийские рассказы"). He was probably influenced by Boccaccio's "Decameron" ("Декамерон") in this book because Geoffrey Chaucer's poem (like that of Boccaccio's) is also a collection of stories told by various people. But while Boccaccio's story-tellers were all nobles, Geoffrey Chaucer's personages represented different levels & layers of society.
So "The Canterbury Tales" - a long work, but still unfinished at Geoffrey Chaucer's death- is partly a new idea, partly an old one. Collection of short stories had been popular for a long time on the Continent. So Geoffrey Chaucer's masterpiece is no more than a collection of stories, and very few of them are original. That is one way of looking at "The Canterbury Tales". But what had never been done before was to take a collection of human beings - of all temperaments & social positions - and mingle them together, make them tell stories, and make these stories illustrate their own characters. Geoffrey Chaucer's work sparkles with drama & life: temperament clash, each person has his own way of speaking & his own philosophy, and the result is not only the picture of the Late Middle Ages - in all its colour & variety - but of the world itself.
The poem opens with a Prologue in which the author tells us that on a fine April Day he stopped at the Tabard Inn where he met 28 pilgrims who were going to Canterbury to pray at the Tomb of a Catholic saint. Chaucer decided to join them, and so did the innkeeper Harry Bailey. So all in all there were 30 pilgrims, going to Canterbury.
Pilgrimages (паломничество) were as much a part of Christian life in Geoffrey Chaucer's time as they are today in Muslim & Hindu life. When spring came, when the snow & frost and, later, the floods had left the roads of England & made them safe for traffic again, then people from all classes of society would make trips to holy places. One of the holy towns of England was Canterbury, where the Archbishop of Canterbury lived & where Thomas Becket,the "blissful holy martyr" murdered in the reign of King Henry II, had his resting-place (могила). It was convenient & safer for such pilgrims to travel in companies, having usually met each other at some such starting-point as the Tabard Inn at Southwark, London.
So, the 30 pilgrims start their travel. And Harry Bailey proposes (in order to make the journey more interesting) to tell stories on their way (he suggests that everyone should tell 2 stories on their way to Canterbury & 2 stories on their way back). So, there should be 120 stories in "The Canterbury Tales", but Geoffrey Chaucer managed to finish only 24 of them before he died.
To the best story-teller Harry Bailey offers a free supper at the Tabard Inn on their way home. We never find out who it is who wins the landlord's prize; we can only be sure that it is not Geoffrey Chaucer himself. He, a shy pilgrim, tells a verse story so terribly dull that Harry Bailey stops him in the middle of it. Then Chaucer - the great poet - tells a prose story hardly less dull. (This, we may guess, is the first example of that peculiar English humour which takes delight in self-derision. It is a kind of humour which you find at its best in the British Army, with its songs about "We cannot fight, we cannot shoot" and its cry of "Thank heaven we've got a navy". The Englishman does not really take himself very seriously.) The other tales are delightful & varied - the rich humour of the Carpenter's Tale & the Miller's Tale, the pathetic tale of the P r i о r e s s , the romantic tale of the Knight, and all the rest of them.
The Prologue to the tales is a marvelous portrait gallery of typical people of the age - the corrupt M о n k , the dainty P r i о r e s s , the gay young S q u i r e , the greedy Pardoner (продавец индульгенций) - people whose offices for the most part do not exist any longer, for the society that produced them no longer exists. We do not have Summoners & Maunciples & Pardoners nowadays, though we do have Physicians & Parsons & Cooks & Students. But beneath the costumes & the strange occupations, we have timeless human beings. There are no ghosts in Geoffrey Chaucer. "The Canterbury Tales" palpitates with blood; it is as warm as living flesh. So on the one hand we can investigate the mode of life of that time (as each of the storytellers tells his or her story according to the morals of the social class he or she belongs to), on the other hand the personages are so bright & universal that even nowadays we can come across such a poor but cheerful student, such prudent townspeople, etc.
As the characters of "The Canterbury Tales" are very different, the stories they tell are also different: some of them romantic, the other can be quite frivolous (like the one about townspeople & Oxford students - "Town & Gown"), etc. One of the most enjoyable story-tellers is the Wife о f В a t h . By the time she tells her story we know her as a woman of very strong opinions who believes firmly in marriage (she has had 5 husbands, one after the other) and equally firmly she believes in the need to manage husbands strictly. In her story one of King Arthur's knights must give within a year the correct answer to the question "What do women love most?" in order to save his life. An ugly old witch knows the answer ("To rule!") but she agrees to tell him if he marries her. At last the knight agrees, and at the marriage she becomes young again & beautiful.
Taken as a whole "The Canterbury Tales" is an encyclopedia of English life & literature of the 14th century, because on the one hand it depicted the mode of life & thinking of people from different walks of life & on the other hand Geoffrey Chaucer recorded all the existing forms & genres of that time (because the story-tellers were likely to choose that form or genre for their narration which would most correspond to their social position: a knight would choose a romance, a priest - a vision, common people - fabliaux or bestiaries, etc.).
The next greatest work of Chaucer is "Troilus and Criseyde" (about 1372 - 1384) ("Троил и Хризеида"), a love-story from the annals of the Trojan War (Троянская в о й н а), a war which has provided European writers with innumerable myths. Troilus was the son of King Priam (Приам) & Criseyde was his unfaithful beloved. Shakespeare also told a story about these wartime lovers but his С r e s s i d a is less attractive than Geoffrey Chaucer's. Chaucer's version with its moral of the faithlessness of women, is not only tragic but also full of humour, and its psychology is so startlingly modern that it reads in some ways like a modern novel. Indeed, it can be called the first full-length piece of English fiction.
Of Geoffrey Chaucer's other long works we shall say nothing. With some of them, after making a good start, he seems suddenly to have become bored & left them unfinished. But we must not ignore his short love poems, written in French forms, extolling the beauty of some mythical fair one, full of the convention of courtly love which exaggerated devotion to woman almost into religion:
Your eyen two wol slee me sodenly,
I may the beaute of hem not sustene,
So woundeth hit throughout my herte kene. But even in the serious world of love Geoffrey Chaucer's humour sometimes peeps out:
Sin I fro love escaped am so fat,
I never think to ben in his prison lene;
Sin I am free, I counte him not a bene.
If we take Geoffrey Chaucer's work on the whole his achievements are many. First, despite his knowledge of the "politer" languages of the Continent, he patriotically confined himself to using the East Midland dialect of English that was spoken in London. He found that dialect not at all rich in words, and completely lacking in an important literature from which he could learn. In a sense, he had to create the English language we know today & to establish its literary traditions. To do this he had to turn, chiefly, to the literature of France & bring something of its elegance to East Midland English; he had to ransack the tales & histories of Europe to find subject matter. But, finally, in his masterpiece "The Canterbury Tales" he stood on his own feet & gave literature something it had never seen before -observation of life as it is really lived, pictures of people who are r e a 1 (not just abstractions from books) and a view of life which, in its tolerance, its humour, skepticism, passion, and love of humanity, we can only call "modern". Geoffrey Chaucer is a living poet: he speaks to us today with as clear a voice as was heard in his own age. It is this living quality that makes him great.
Besides the fact that Geoffrey Chaucer used London dialect which would become the basis for the English language we speak now (so we may say that he is the father of Modern English), Geoffrey
Chaucer also replaced alliteration by the tonic o-s yllabic classification, i.e. each line (строка) of the poem should have the same number of syllables & stresses as all the rest of the lines. Actually it is the beginning of the rhyme in poetry.
Geoffrey Chaucer opened the way to a new age of literature, but it was a long time before any poet as great as he was to come along to build on his foundations. The year 1400 should, we think, usher in a great century, but it does not. Geoffrey Chaucer seems to have been in advance of his age, never fully appreciated even by the men who called themselves his disciples (последователи). And, unfortunately for Chaucer's work, big changes began to take place in English pronunciation, changes which quite swiftly brought something like the pronunciation of our own times. The final "e" of words like "sonne" & "sote" was no longer sounded. Henceforward people could find no rhythm in Geoffrey Chaucer's carefully-wrought lines; they regarded him as a crude poet - promising but primitive, and dull. In Shakespeare's times, certainly, Geoffrey Chaucer was also not much esteemed, and a hundred years after Shakespeare poets thought it necessary to translate Geoffrey Chaucer, polishing up his "crudities" & make him fit reading for a "civilised" age.