Читать книгу 30 Great Myths about Chaucer - Stephanie Trigg - Страница 11

Of all the “myths” in this book, of old or of more recent standing, this is one of the easiest to dispel. It is the other side of the coin, as it were, to Myth 1, “Chaucer is the father of English literature.” As we saw there, for better or worse, Chaucer is consistently thought of as the oldest poet to exert a benevolent but deep influence on later poetic tradition in England and by extension, on all Anglophone writing.

But was he the first poet to write in English? This is a very different question. There is one linguistic issue to clear up first, and that is what we mean by “English.” Chaucer’s language is known as “Middle English,” the language written and spoken in England between around 1100 and 1500. The phrase makes a careful distinction from “Old English,” the language spoken by the Germanic tribes who settled in England around the mid‐fifth century after the Romans had withdrawn. Most of the surviving manuscripts in Old English were written in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries. Many of these texts contain a mixture of Christian and pagan Germanic ideas as a result of the Christian missionary program starting in the sixth century, which had a profound influence on both religious and scribal culture.

Old English is the language of Beowulf, as well as a mixed corpus of heroic narratives, saints’ lives, sermons, letters, translations, personal lyrics and other writings. For our purposes, one of the earliest and most important fragments of poetry is preserved in a Latin text, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, translated into modern English as The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written by the monk Bede in 731 CE. Here Bede recounts the story of Caedmon, a cowherd, who would routinely leave gatherings when it was his turn to sing because he had no musical ability. But inspired by God in a dream, he produces a short poem in Old English, using words and expressions he has never spoken before, honoring the Creation:

Nu sculon herigean / heofonrices Weard

[Now must we praise / heaven‐kingdom’s Guardian,]

Meotodes meahte / and his modgeþanc

[the Measurer's might / and his mind‐plans,]

weorc Wuldor‐Fæder / swa he wundra gehwæs

[the work of the Glory‐Father, / when he of wonders of every one,]

ece Drihten / or onstealde

[eternal Lord, / the beginning established.]

He ærest sceop / ielda bearnum

[He first created / for men's sons]

heofon to hrofe / halig Scyppend

[heaven as a roof, / holy Creator;

ða middangeard / moncynnes Weard

[then middle‐earth / mankind's Guardian,]

ece Drihten / æfter teode

[eternal Lord / afterwards made—]

firum foldan / Frea ælmihtig.

[for men earth, / Master almighty.]¹

The language of Caedmon’s poem is substantially different from Chaucer’s Middle English, and we quote the text in its entirety, partly to give a sense of what English poetry looks like without French and Latin vocabulary, and also to show the patterns of non‐rhyming alliterating poetry, with the first stress after the mid‐line caesura often acting as the foundational alliterating syllable. The literal translation also shows the flexible word order possible when a language is more heavily inflected (for example, when variable suffixes do the work of prepositions), and when the verse form proceeds by paratactic phrases in apposition, rather than sentences structured around a controlling principal verb, as most of Chaucer’s sentences are, even in the syntax of his more complex stanzaic forms, like the seven‐line “rhyme royal” stanza. Bede’s narrative similarly draws attention to the strong oral component in Old English poetry, and again, this is closely related to its appositional form.

Old English is classified as a Germanic language, as are Middle English and Modern English, too. Nevertheless, after 1066 and the defeat of the Anglo‐Saxon King Harold Godwinson by William of Normandy, the language changed gradually but substantially, developing in increasingly fluid exchange with Anglo‐Norman, the French spoken in England after William’s victory. It is difficult to underestimate the enormity of this cultural change, though the greatest linguistic effect was felt first among the nobility, as many Anglo‐Saxon lords were dispossessed after this defeat.

So what was poetic writing like between the eleventh century and the 1360s, when Chaucer began to write? A fair amount of poetry in English has survived, though possibly more has been lost. Lyric poems and songs were not always written down or preserved in manuscripts, and while romances were popular in the thirteenth century, few survive from this period. However, romances such as King Horn and Havelok the Dane offer energetic and enthusiastic accounts of complex dynastic and cross‐cultural plots, determined young heroes, resourceful maidens and the popularity of values such as courage, loyalty and determination.² Some of the more improbably complicated plotlines of these and later romances such as Bevis of Hampton give us some idea of the tradition Chaucer was confidently parodying in his Tale of Sir Thopas. Verse forms varied, too, from the rhyming couplets and tail‐rhyme stanzas of the romances and other poems such as the querulous debate poem, The Owl and the Nightingale (late twelfth or early thirteenth century), to the uneven history of unrhymed alliterative verse form that seems to have undergone a kind of “revival” in the mid‐fourteenth century, and the separate history of prose writing in chronicles and various forms of devotional literature. These writings were not always isolated, either. A significant cluster of writing in English, from a range of styles and genres (romances, chronicles, devotional poems, saints’ lives), had been anthologized in the Auchinleck Manuscript (now in the National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS.19.2.1), written in London in the 1340s, and it may be that Chaucer saw and read parts of this manuscript.

Chaucer, then, was very far from the first poet to write in English. Conversely, it seems likely that when he began to write poetry his chosen language would have been French, which was still the dominant language for literary works in England in the fourteenth century, and the language of his first workplaces, the households associated with the royal court. For example, many scholars believe, on circumstantial evidence, that a number of the anonymous French lyrics preserved in the “Ch” manuscript (University of Pennsylvania MS French 15), dated around the 1360s, were written by Chaucer.³

Chaucer was also the first English poet to translate extensively from Italian, though we should always remind ourselves of the great achievement of John Gower, Chaucer’s contemporary, who wrote substantial works in each of English, French and Latin. In many ways, Gower is the more typical example of fourteenth‐century court culture.

In Myth 1, we discussed briefly the question of Chaucer’s use of English, and the common view, repeated throughout the fifteenth century, that he revitalized the English language and made it worthy of poetry in the high style. As Marion Turner writes of Chaucer’s early poem, The Book of the Duchess, “no one had written this style of poem in English before, and it is extraordinarily interesting that Chaucer now made his intervention into the world of stylized courtly letters in a language that had not previously been a language of literature at the English court.”⁴ Turner stresses Chaucer’s relationship with writers in both France and Hainault (now part of Belgium, and the birthplace of Edward III’s queen Philippa), and argues against the idea that Chaucer might be inaugurating some kind of competitive defense of English to rival the dominance of French. This “could only have seemed ludicrous to a multilingual man such as Chaucer, whose deep and engaged reading of his French and Hainuyer contemporaries is evident in almost every line of the Book of the Duchess.”⁵

Turner follows Ardis Butterfield here, who shows that “there was nothing isolated or autonomous about fourteenth‐century written English.” For Butterfield, to use English in this kind of courtly setting was to be “profoundly aware” of other languages and the relations between languages.⁶ She argues that in its subtle re‐voicings of poems by Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart, this early Chaucerian poem is “brilliantly ambiguous” in its dramatization of poetic subjectivity across cultures and languages: Chaucer is participating in international developments, not striking out for nationalism. As Turner points out, however, after writing The Book of the Duchess Chaucer drew increasingly on the work of Italian writers, especially the poetry of Boccaccio: “Poetically, Chaucer’s consumption of Italian verse was exceptionally productive, generative, and liberating: it energized him and gave him tools and models for innovative literary play.”⁷

The misleading myth of Chaucer inaugurating poetry in English can be read as a symptom of proud nationalist (or English‐speaking) ideology that wants to conflate literary greatness with linguistic inventiveness, and that feeds the idea that English poetry and the English language developed more or less in splendid insular isolation. It also falls prey to the desire to attribute the effects of wide‐ranging social and cultural change to one influential genius, and is part of a self‐perpetuating circle: Chaucer is the oldest poet who regularly finds a place on the English curriculum; and so it therefore appears as if he is the first.

By the late sixteenth century, however, Chaucer’s language was regarded as either intriguingly archaic or hopelessly obsolete, requiring a growing panoply of glossing and commentary to render it legible to all but antiquarians. Larger cultural forces will always be more influential than the work of one writer.

Chaucer’s primacy is bolstered by the fact that his language still seems at least recognizable to modern readers, though this familiarity is a result of the happy accident that the Southeast Midlands dialect spoken by Chaucer was the same language as that of the court’s administration. The stability of London as the capital city meant that modern English has most in common with this dialect of Middle English, rendering Chaucer’s language relatively familiar. The language of the Gawain poet, by contrast, seems far more alien, with different dialectal inflectional forms and a far more specialized and regional vocabulary. Chaucer’s own consciousness of dialect variation (in the Reeve’s Tale) and differences in regional poetic styles (in the Parson’s Prologue) play no small part in this sense that his language represents a kind of “norm” for English.

Nevertheless, Simon Horobin advises us not to make too many assumptions about the similarities and continuities between Chaucer’s language and our own: in syntax, semantics and vocabulary there are still many important structural differences.⁸ On the question of whether Chaucer invented poetic language in English, he did introduce a number of new words (according to J.D. Burnley, Chaucer’s vocabulary was approximately twice as large as Gower’s),⁹ though Horobin advises caution here, too: “it is important that we do not treat all French words used by Chaucer as of equivalent status.”¹⁰ For example, one of Chaucer’s linguistic traits involved moving words from legal or political discourse into other contexts, so while the word may not be “new,” it appears so in this unfamiliar setting. This is particularly the case in what is termed Chaucer’s “high style,” which is characterized by words that stand out stylistically and draw attention to themselves.¹¹

This is one of the areas in which Chaucer’s poetic language was more distinctive, and indeed when his successors praised his innovations, it was often in terms of this more elevated, “laureate” and adorned style, though now we would prefer to praise the subtle and fluid movements between different styles in his work.

Recent work on the linguistic context of fourteenth‐century England also emphasizes its multicultural nature, and many of these words would still have been experienced as borrowings. For Butterfield, for example, there were two vernacular languages in late medieval England: English and French. She also reminds us of the distinction between continental French and Anglo‐French,¹² which was still the dominant language of the English court in the fourteenth century. There is only limited evidence to suggest that the Ricardian court embraced this new English poetic tradition; and indeed, Christopher Cannon suggests that in Chaucer’s time, “the use of English in literature remained rebellious, even if not politically charged,” through its associations with the Wycliffite movement promoting English religious literacy, and the use of English in some political and legal contexts.¹³ Moreover, it has been suggested that poetry in English was really taken up in even a semi‐official way only by the Lancastrians under Henry IV, and more particularly by Henry V, well after the death of Chaucer in 1400.¹⁴

We can confidently “bust” this myth, then. Chaucer was far from the first English poet, and while his own poetic followers were quick to applaud and praise his originality, his apparent primacy in this regard is the effect of much larger historical forces and critical desires.