Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics

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T E X T UA L S U B J E C T I V I T Y

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Textual Subjectivity The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics A. C . SPE ARING

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York  A. C. Spearing, 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Spearing, A. C. Textual subjectivity : the encoding of subjectivity in medieval narratives and lyrics / A. C. Spearing. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0–19–818724–6 (acid-free paper) 1. English poetry—Middle English, 1100–1500—History and criticism. 2. Subjectivity in literature. 3. Narrative poetry, English (Middle)—History and criticism. 4. Narration (Rhetoric)—History—To 1500. 5. Rhetoric, Medieval. I. Title. PR317.S82S66 2005 821 .109353–dc22 2005019759 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–818724–6

978–0–19–818724–0

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Preface T book has taken too long to write. One reason for this is the difﬁculty I had in formulating its subject: I spent years supposing that I wanted to write about medieval representations of subjectivity (as in Spearing 1995) rather than about the encoding of subjectivity in the language of medieval texts. A second reason is that, having deﬁned my topic, I saw that I needed to learn, as best I could, about linguistic approaches to literature that had formed no part of my previous education. Because I have been feeling my way through unfamiliar intellectual territory, I am particularly grateful to the colleagues and friends who have told me what to read and have patiently read and generously criticized drafts of the chapters that follow (and also of some that were discarded along the way). To give an exact reckoning of my debts would ﬁll many pages, but let me at least mention some of my leading creditors: Alison Booth, Cristina Cervone, Monika Fludernik, Elizabeth Fowler, James Goldstein, Kevin Gustafson, Clare Kinney, Barbara Nolan, Lisa Samuels, Maura Tarnoff, Chip Tucker. It goes without saying that they cannot be held responsible for my errors and misunderstandings. I am also indebted to several classes of graduate students at the University of Virginia for letting me try out on them a series of versions of the book and for suggesting many improvements. I hope that, besides the obvious audience of medievalists, the book’s argument will be of interest to theorists of narrative and of lyric who are not medieval specialists and who, as I venture to claim, have often aimed at general validity for their theories while completely disregarding pre-modern examples. To make it easier for non-medievalists to follow, I have translated medieval English quotations, except those from Chaucer, into modern English. All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated; I have tried to make them as literal as is compatible with readability. In medieval quotations I modernize spelling to the extent of removing obsolete characters, regularizing the use of i/j and u/v, and making other small changes such as Pit´e for Pite. Editorial punctuation is sometimes silently modiﬁed.

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I am grateful for permission to reprint in revised form material from the following articles: to Duke University Press for ‘Prison, Writing, Absence: Representing the Subject in the English Poems of Charles d’Orl´eans’, Modern Language Quarterly 53 (1992): 83–99; to Oxford University Press for ‘A Ricardian ‘‘I’’: The Narrator of Troilus and Criseyde’, in Essays on Ricardian Literature: In Honour of J. A. Burrow, ed. A. J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Clarendon Press, 1997): 1–22; to Boydell and Brewer Ltd. for ‘Poetic Identity’, in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (D. S. Brewer, 1997): 35–51; to Johns Hopkins University Press for ‘Narrative Voice: The Case of Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale’, New Literary History 32 (2001): 715–46. A.C.S.

Contents 1. Subjectivity and Textuality ‘Writing is nothing but the representation of speech’ ‘There can be no narrative without a narrator’ Did Subjectivity Emerge? The Following Chapters

1 5 17 31 34

2. Romances King Horn Havelok

37 37 48

3. Troilus and Criseyde The Narrator in Troilus Criticism Is There a Fallible Narrator? Is There a Distinct Narratorial Discourse? The Narrator and Criseyde

68 68 77 87 95

4. The Man of Law’s Tale Narrators in Canterbury Tales Criticism The Man of Law as Fallible Narrator Subjectivized Narration The Achievement of the Man of Law’s Tale

101 101 106 123 130

5. Narration in the Pearl Poet ‘Third-Person’ Narration ‘First-Person’ Narration

137 137 147

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6. Lyrics What is a Lyric? ‘Lovers that kan make of sentement’ Lyric as Dramatic Monologue? Chaucer’s Complaint Unto Pity

174 175 181 189 198

7. Epistolary Poems Ovid’s Heroides Two Middle English Epistolary Lyrics Charles of Orleans

211 212 221 225

Bibliography

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Index

267

1 Subjectivity and Textuality My aim in this book is to investigate how subjectivity is encoded in some medieval English poems, chieﬂy narratives and lyrics. By this I mean not how the poems express or represent individual subjectivities, whether of their writers or of ﬁctional characters, but how subjectivity is encoded in them as a textual phenomenon—hence my title, Textual Subjectivity. What has led me to write the book is a growing sense that current understandings of medieval poetry, and especially of Chaucer, are shaped and distorted by a cluster of assumptions about textuality that became increasingly dominant in the twentieth century and are now so universal as to be virtually imperceptible. At their heart is the belief that any text coming within the scope of literary interpretation has to be regarded as the utterance of a speaking subject, so that in it a human consciousness is given a voice, and evaluation of that voice and identiﬁcation of its origin will form the necessary guidelines for interpretation. In the case of narratives, my chief concern in this chapter, this implies that interpretation will begin from the identiﬁcation and evaluation of a narrator. As Manfred Jahn (1983: 23) puts it, in order to locate the unity, meaning and point of view of a third person text, most critics posit a narrator, in analogy to the narrator in ﬁrst person narration, even if there is no overt ‘I’ in the text . . . Even an ‘effaced’ narrator would still be endowed with a shadowy presence as selector, arranger or simply, and conveniently, as unifying principle.

The method is spelt out in a recent book review by a successful novelist: If you think of a novel as a complicated machine, then one of the best ways to understand how it functions—to determine what makes its component parts cohere and smoothly whir along—is to ask yourself a simple question: ‘Who is telling us this story?’ The answer, nine times out of ten, provides an entry to the novel’s inner workings. (Boyd 2004)

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Both these passages illustrate another expectation, likely to be shared by most novel-readers, that the component parts of a narrative should indeed cohere and smoothly whirr along (rather than being held up by such extended non-narrative elements as the account of the pentangle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 623–65 or the formal descriptions of Diomede, Criseyde, and Troilus in Troilus and Criseyde . 799–840). The connection between this expectation and the idea of the narrator as ‘unifying principle’ subtending the entire text is signiﬁcant. If we take for granted that to understand a narrative we need to identify a narrator as its principle of coherence, we shall be led to attend closely to certain of its aspects at the price of blindness to others: we shall tend, for example, to attribute to authorially devised ‘speakers’ or ‘narrators’ (rather than to authors themselves) whatever seems disruptive or merely unappealing in the texts we read, while disregarding whatever will not ﬁt into this pattern. Among medieval writers this approach has especially affected the way Chaucer is read, because in the Canterbury Tales what we assume as novel-readers appears to be conﬁrmed by the framing ﬁction of the collection. Every tale has its own teller, and so it seems natural to read each of them as the expression of a discrete consciousness in a distinctive voice, and to suppose that that must have been what Chaucer intended. The assumption that literary texts are to be read as the expression of human consciousnesses has not gone unquestioned, but the most principled and penetrating challenges have been concerned with more recent writings than those of the Middle Ages, and have been largely unnoticed by medievalists. They have come from theorists of narrative and of the ways in which subjectivity inhabits language; but these theorists, though aiming at comprehensiveness, have characteristically disregarded medieval writing. Paul Hernadi (1984: p. ix), in his preface to the English version of F. K. Stanzel’s Theory of Narrative, observes that ‘Stanzel attempts . . . to delineate a comprehensive typology of all conceivable narrative structures,’ yet the book’s database consists almost entirely of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century narratives. Dorrit Cohn (1978: p. v), in her inﬂuential book Transparent Minds, begins by confessing to an even narrower scope: ‘My textual repertoire rarely departs from the corpus of narrative literature most familiar to students of ﬁctional form. A century of psychological realism . . . provides the majority of illustrations, with some additions from as far back as

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Sterne and as far forward as Sarraute.’ (This ‘textual repertoire’ consists, of course, entirely of prose writings, something that is also generally true of modern studies of narrative, whereas verse is the norm for English narratives until the very end of the medieval period. What difference this may make to theories of ‘ﬁctional form’ is rarely considered.1 ) Monika Fludernik, one of the few important narrative theorists to pay serious attention to medieval examples, states that in Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology she is attempting to ‘rescue diachronic considerations for the study of narrative and to make possible a discussion of narrativity and narrative structure that spans the entire range of available narrative discourses’. She is genuinely committed to the comprehensiveness to which other theorists pay lip-service, but she sees the ‘the rise of the consciousness novel’ in the twentieth century as ﬁrst enabling narrative to achieve its full potential, and her general conception of narrative as ‘constituted by . . . experientiality, namely by the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘‘real-life experience’’ ’, seems to be inﬂuenced more by her wish to incorporate modern ‘plotless narratives’ within her narratology than by her understanding of the medieval cases to which she devotes a chapter (1996: 51, 27, 12, 311). If modern theories of narrative have been little inﬂuenced by the distinctive characteristics of medieval narratives, medievalists have shown equally little interest in the kinds of theory that might help them to think more ﬂexibly about the ways subjectivity is encoded in medieval texts, and have almost always taken for granted that they must be regarded as having speakers or narrators. The days of general resistance to theory in medieval studies are largely past, and many who profess the study of medieval English literature now do so from a perspective consciously informed by theory of some kind—new historicism, feminism, postcolonialism, queer studies, deconstruction—yet for nearly all of us what was identiﬁed some thirty years ago as ‘the narrator theory of narrative’ (Kuroda 1976: 109), far from being a theory, is a fact of nature. That is the situation this book is intended to remedy. I hope it may be read by some theorists of narrative and lyric who are prepared to 1 For discussion speciﬁcally of verse narrative, see Kinney (1992). Fludernik (1993a: 246), in the course of a detailed analysis of syntactic expressions of subjectivity, notes when discussing word-order that ‘Poetic inversion is excluded from the present analysis’. This shows a welcome awareness of possibilities outside prose, but perhaps assumes a clear-cut distinction between prose and verse styles not applicable to medieval narrative.

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venture further back than the novel and the dramatic monologue and to discover that some of their assumptions do not apply to medieval texts (and I have tried to make things easier for them by translating quotations from medieval writers other than Chaucer into modern English); but my main audience is likely to be medieval specialists who are prepared to reconsider their existing assumptions about the ways in which subjectivity inhabits the texts they read. My aim is not to establish a global theory of narrative, of textuality, or (still less) of subjectivity, but only to identify and clear away some of the obstacles to adequate reading of medieval texts that are set up by current presuppositions. This introductory chapter contains little that is original, and I cannot even claim to offer a comprehensive survey of existing thought: my discussion focuses on the theoretical writings that I personally have found most helpful in rethinking the subjective dimensions of medieval texts. The purpose of my ramble through the theoretical landscape is not to trace any chain of causes or of logical entailments, but to establish conceptual possibilities for the analyses in the following chapters, above all by loosening the grip of habitual assumptions. I want to encourage my readers to try thinking differently about medieval poems. I do not introduce theories of textual subjectivity because I believe them to possess absolute validity, but to encourage the realization that our normal, commonsense assumptions are also based on theories, of which we may not be aware and to which there may be alternatives. To take one small example, Carolyn Dinshaw (1999: 123) observes in a recent book that much current teaching of Chaucer has its theoretical basis in the century-old criticism of George Lyman Kittredge. A reviewer has expressed doubt that this can be true (Evans 2001: 550), but I believe Dinshaw is right, even though Kittredge may rarely be mentioned by Chaucer critics, and those who rely on his theories may be unaware of doing so—may indeed be unaware of relying on any theories at all. In the following chapters, I frequently quote statements by recent theorists in order to deny that they are true of medieval narratives, and I may sometimes seem to be meanly scrabbling through footnotes to ﬁnd fault with current interpretations by medievalists;2 my justiﬁcation is that 2 See e.g. my discussion in Ch. 5 of Blanch and Wasserman’s suggestions about the supposed ‘narrator’ of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Their ideas have probably had little inﬂuence, but they remain telling instances of the implausibility into which learned scholars can be led by dead theories.

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these procedures help to identify the unstated assumptions underlying the general academic discourse on medieval literature. In the present chapter I am chieﬂy concerned with questions of language and of narrative; I return to theory in the middle of Chapter 5, in relation to homodiegesis, and at the beginning of Chapter 6, in relation to lyric.

‘Writing is nothing but the representation of speech’ At least since Plato,3 the commonsense view has been that language is essentially speech, used as a means of communication between a speaker and listeners, and that writing is no more than an auxiliary technology developed to extend the range of speech. The originary status of speech would seem to be conﬁrmed by certain features of language itself, and especially by the primary means it uses to encode subjectivity, deixis. Deictics are terms that have no objective referential meaning but are used to describe objects or events in their spatio-temporal (and, by extension, emotional) relation to the person who uses them—I, you, here, there, this, that, and so on.4 (I, here, and this are proximal deictics, you, there, and that distal deictics.) As Sylvia Adamson puts it (1998: 669), ‘The system of deixis provides the strongest evidence for claims that conversation is the fundamental form of language, with its special nomenclature for conversational participants (I-you) and its verbal equivalents of pointing gestures for picking out objects in their spatio-temporal environment (this v. that; here v. there)’. The assumption that ‘conversation is the fundamental form of language’, and thus that for all normal purposes the written represents the spoken, apparently rooted in the language itself, is shared, explicitly or tacitly, not just by ordinary readers but by most of the thinkers who have shaped the discourse of linguistics. This is the case argued by Jacques Derrida in his essay ‘Linguistics and Grammatology’ (1976), which has as its epigraph Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s uncompromising statement: ‘Writing is nothing but the representation of speech.’ ‘Linguistics and Grammatology’ partly takes the characteristically Derridean form of a deconstructive reading of an existing text, here the founding text of modern linguistic thought, 3

e.g. Phaedrus. This is not a complete deﬁnition. For a useful brief study that takes account of varying views and problems, see Fludernik (1993a: 42–53). 4

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Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. Here we ﬁnd, writes Derrida, ‘in the very movement by which linguistics is instituted as a science, a metaphysical presupposition about the relationship between speech and writing’ (28), a ‘reduction of writing to the rank of an instrument enslaved to a full and originarily spoken language’ (29). For Saussure, Derrida claims, writing is to be understood merely as ‘representation of the self-present voice’ (30); and in support of this assertion he is able to quote explicit statements from the Course in General Linguistics, such as: ‘Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second exists for the sole purpose of representing the ﬁrst’ and ‘The linguistic object is not deﬁned by the combination of the written word and the spoken word: the spoken form alone constitutes the object’ (30–1; italics in original). What Saussure authoritatively stated continues to be taken for granted by most subsequent writers in the main tradition of linguistics; as Derrida wearily asks, ‘has it ever been doubted that writing was the clothing of speech?’ (35). A full demonstration of how rarely it has been doubted would be intolerably tedious, but here are a few representative examples from twentieth-century discussions of deixis and associated means of encoding subjectivity in language. Benveniste’s pithy deﬁnition (1971: 224) is often cited: ‘ ‘‘Ego’’ is he who says ‘‘ego.’’ ’ He continues, ‘I use I only when I am speaking to a someone who will be a you in my address,’ and later, questioning a dictionary deﬁnition of the present tense as that which expresses the time at which one is, adds that in language ‘there is no other criterion and no other expression by which to indicate ‘‘the time at which one is’’ except to take it as ‘‘the time at which one is speaking’’ ’ (227; italics in original). John Lyons, moving from deixis to the connected problem of free indirect discourse, generally associated with the written language,5 explains that ‘the speaker can project himself, in memory or imagination, to a point of reference different from that of the situation of utterance and, from that point of reference, describe situations in the experiential mode as if they were currently taking place’ (1982: 119; my italics)—and by ‘the speaker’ he means not a character quoted in a text but the text’s supposed point of origin. A written text, for him, must be interpreted as the expression 5 But see ibid. (ch. 2), for demonstration that free indirect discourse also ‘occurs pervasively in the spoken language’ (84).

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of a speaker’s consciousness, his ‘memory or imagination’. Anna Fuchs (1993: 48), attempting to redeﬁne the contexts from which deictics take their meaning, wishes to ground them still more ﬁrmly in the ‘speech situation’ considered not just linguistically but pragmatically, in an interactional context, a ‘moment in life’. She adds parenthetically, ‘(I am using speech in a broad sense, of course: any kind of verbal action, including, mutatis mutandis, those in print and on stone.)’. The ‘of course’ is a telling sign of the unimportance for Fuchs, as for most linguists, of the fact that an inscription in print or on stone, or indeed in ink on vellum, while it may recall the speciﬁc ‘moment in life’ at which it was made, also in an important sense escapes from it. Its I and you can no longer be deﬁned in relation to that moment, for, as Roland Barthes puts it (1977b: 142, ﬁrst published in French 1968), ‘writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.’ To take an extreme instance, in the inscription on Christopher Wren’s tomb in the vault of St Paul’s Cathedral, ‘Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice’ (Reader, if you seek a monument, look around), the I implied as the origin of the imperative circumspice has no ﬁxed identity, no certain body from which its voice emerges (is it the personiﬁed tomb, the carver of the inscription, the inscription’s author, Wren himself?), and the you addressed as lector is a gap that can be ﬁlled by innumerable readers unimaginable to the original inscriber. If the cathedral offered as Wren’s monument had not escaped destruction by bombing in 1940, the tomb might well have survived it, in which case the interactional context would now be utterly changed. Perhaps all such differences are covered by Fuchs’s ‘mutatis mutandis’, but if so they surely warrant more than a parenthesis and an ‘of course’. And, to give a last pair of illustrations, Elena Semino, in an article signiﬁcantly entitled ‘Deixis and the Dynamics of Poetic Voice’ (1995: 146), states that ‘The construction of a ﬁctional speaking subject whose existence is limited to the conceptual space projected by the text can . . . be seen as one of the features that characterise the poetic use of deixis . . .’ Semino is concerned with contemporary poetry, but a similar point is made by Jane Hedley (1988: 30–1) about Renaissance poetry: ‘We render a poem’s message intelligible by producing a hypothetical context for its ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘you,’’ its present and present-perfect tenses, its time and place adverbials,

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its demonstrative pronouns. A poem uses deictics to carry a context around with it . . .’ Most readers would, I think, take these statements as accepted truths, technical formulations of what can scarcely be doubted. Derrida’s analysis of the accepted subordination of writing to speech, more fully developed in a notorious controversy with J. A. Searle, is so well known (however little regarded by most medievalists) that I need do no more than refer to it (see Derrida 1988). For my present purpose, too, I need not pursue Derrida’s argument beyond this diagnosis of phonocentrism at the heart of linguistics to his more radical critique of the Western tradition of logocentric metaphysics; nor need I consider his denial of any ultimate opposition between speech and writing, on the grounds that even speech is not, as we imagine, ‘the pure self-present representation of unmediated thought’ (Howells 1999: 48), but is itself a form of archi-´ecriture. The diagnosis of phonocentrism is what concerns me. It ought to interest medievalists, given that the material with which we work never survives as speech but always as writing; yet it appears to have had no signiﬁcant effect on the reading of medieval texts. As I illustrate in subsequent accounts of the interpretation of writings by Chaucer and others, these are almost invariably regarded as representations of speech, and thus as expressions of the consciousness of a speaking subject; and that conception has real consequences for understanding. Perhaps it is not surprising that we critics of medieval literature, appropriately conservative in our habits of thought, should have paid little attention to Parisian antimetaphysical metaphysics; but it is more surprising that a similar argument about phonocentricity, put forward by an impeccably traditional Anglophone medieval philologist, has met with equal disregard. In 1969 Angus McIntosh (40–1), apparently quite independently of Derrida,6 wrote: There is . . . a fairly prevalent feeling that the approach to spoken manifestations of language is in some fundamental sense a more linguistically rewarding—not to say reputable—pursuit than that to written texts. A spoken manifestation of language is felt to be ‘the real thing,’ a corresponding written manifestation is felt to be no more than a dim and distorted reﬂection or derivative . . . there is evidently a very strong feeling that anything connected with utterance is in some way much more part and parcel of the ‘fabric of the language’ 6 McIntosh could have read Derrida, because De la grammatologie had been published in French in 1967, but it seems unlikely that he did.

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than ink-marks on paper or parchment can ever be. Phonetic features are felt to be peculiarly, almost mystically, bound up with the physiological and psychological make-up of a person; anything written is felt on the other hand to be much more ‘external’ and artiﬁcial, presumably because it involves such extraneous and tangible things as pens and ink and vellum instead of transitory mouth-positions and puffs of air.

The ‘almost mystical’ connection felt to exist between speech and the human person is precisely the underlying idea found by Derrida in thought about language from Plato to Saussure, ‘the living self-presence of the soul within the true logos, the help that speech lends to itself’ (1976: 34). McIntosh (1969: 41 n. 24) ﬁlls in some of the gap between Plato and Rousseau with statements of the doctrine that underlies this ‘feeling’ about language, from Aristotle’s ‘Spoken language symbolizes mental experience or things that go on in the mind and anything that is written symbolizes spoken language,’ to Sir Thomas Smith’s ‘writing is an imitation of speech as a picture is of a body’.7 McIntosh and Derrida both mention the same rare instances of awareness among twentiethcentury linguists of the phonocentric obsession: Uldall’s remark (1944: 12–13) that ‘the substance of ink has not received the same attention on the part of linguists that they have so lavishly bestowed on the substance of air’ and Hjelmslev’s reminder (1953: 67 n. 1) of Bertrand Russell’s observation (1927: 47) that ‘we have no means of deciding whether writing or speech is the older form of human expression’. Neither Derrida nor McIntosh, though, is explicitly concerned with the consequences of these insights for the interpretation of speciﬁc literary texts, still less for that of medieval literary texts. The former has in view the larger beast of logocentric metaphysics, while the latter is more narrowly concerned with the best way of ‘sifting . . . graphic data’ (47) to establish the texts themselves. It remains to be seen what effect the assumptions they diagnose have had on readings of medieval English poetry. Are we justiﬁed, though, in emphasizing the writtenness of that poetry? It is well known that literacy was less common and books rarer and more expensive in the Middle Ages than in subsequent periods, and that medieval poetry was often orally delivered, sometimes orally composed (even though, before the invention of sound recording, oral compositions could survive only in written transcription). Moreover, 7

Aristotle, De Interpretatione; Smith, De recta et emendata Linguæ Anglicæ scriptione.

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recent work has demonstrated that, even as literacy became more widespread, listening to the auditory performance of the written word remained in favour not as a necessity but as a social pleasure (Coleman 1996). Scholars have become increasingly aware that literacy and orality themselves are far from simple concepts (Stock 1983), and that both the structure and the local effects of medieval poetry must have been designed with listeners as well as readers in mind. Teachers of medieval literature are surely right to encourage their students to read aloud the works of Chaucer or the Pearl-poet with as accurate a reconstruction of Middle English sounds as they can manage. On the other hand, we need to remember the strongly textual nature of medieval intellectual culture, especially in the age of bureaucracy and scholasticism that began in the twelfth century. The rarity of books necessitated reliance on memory, but for the literate learning by heart was a matter of retaining mental images of the pages of books: not ‘the oral repetition of phrases until their sounds became a recording, but the visual scanning of a page until its images were imprinted in the mind’s eye like a photograph’.8 The formulation is that of M. T. Clanchy (1997: 327), who goes on to discuss the textuality of the legal documents that gradually began to replace oral testimony as proof of ownership of land or entitlement to privileges. Twelfth-century charters are often addressed to posterity as well as to contemporaries, ‘all those seeing and hearing these letters, in the future as in the present’. Clanchy continues: ‘In the opening words of the Winchcombe Abbey cartulary, ‘‘when the voice has perished with the man, writing still enlightens posterity’’. Writing shifted the spotlight away from the transitory actors witnessing a conveyance and on to the perpetual parchment recording it’ (383). In the cartulary’s words there is a clearer distinction between ‘voice’ and ‘writing’ than we usually ﬁnd in modern literary criticism.9 Writing can be heard when 8 Similarly, Carruthers (1990: 224) observes that Dante in the Vita Nuova and Lydgate in his ‘Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Mary’ both describe their poems as laid out in their memories as written ‘pages with text, rubrics and paraphs’. 9 Failure to make this distinction is one reason why the inﬂuence of Bakhtin’s work on the study of medieval writing has been almost entirely harmful. For one attempt to read Chaucer in Bakhtinian terms, see McLellan 1989: he ﬁnds three ‘narrative voices’ in the Clerk’s Tale, but why stop there? Why not four, or a dozen? ‘Narrative voice’ is a metaphor, and any reader can hypothesize as many narrative voices as he or she chooses. (See discussion in Ch. 4 of the part played by ‘voice’ in interpretation of The Man of Law’s Tale.)

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read aloud—‘You will have heard, my lords, from the verses in the parchment, how the noble Aalof came to his end,’ as the Anglo-Norman poet Thomas writes in his Romance of Horn (Weiss 1992: 1)10 —but it can also be seen, and, since parchment is remarkably long-lasting, seen by those for whom the voice is long since lost. The conceptual implications of this situation, in which ‘a land conveyance becomes strictly the act of writing and not just some other kind of act that writing records’, have been so brilliantly drawn out by Jeffrey Kittay that it is worth quoting him at length: Such writing seems to impose other kinds of deictic demands, that is, references have to be made in the document itself to the where, the when, and the who of the act it puts forward, but then the question becomes, in what terms? . . . In what sense may the pragmatic indices . . . used within writing differ from those which speech demands? . . . Writing slowly moves away from the attempt to replicate the circumstances surrounding a particular speaker or writer in a particular time and space and into a new order of circumstantiality. Let us speculate that putting a date on such a document can be seen as taking the act of which that document is a marker and drawing it . . . out of the circumstantiality and presence concurrent to speech and characteristic of it (who heard these words and saw these actions, who can stand for them, testify to them?) and into alignment with a set of coordinates that may potentially do away with the current spatiotemporal horizon. What are the circumstantial coordinates of the written as such? Is the horizon newly situable, or has it become a vanishing point? We begin to sense an opportunity not just to record an act of speech more precisely, to pin it down as it were by putting it in writing, but also to possibly reconceive and reconstrue acts once they are understood as only written . . . From a technique of rendering permanent certain aspects of other acts, writing has also become that which can originate a class of utterances that are peculiar to it and do not exist elsewhere. This is not to say that anything written cannot be spoken, but rather that one does not draw understanding of that writing exclusively from one’s understanding of the situation of speaking. (Kittay 1988: 212, 214)

Kittay notes two changes in the visual appearance of the written page that mark this new awareness of textuality as something more than a conﬁrmatory supplement to the spoken word. One is the ‘marking 10 Cited by Clanchy (1997: 392) in a different translation. Signiﬁcantly, in medieval rhetoric the ‘speaking voice’ is treated under the heading of enunciatio, not as part of literary style.

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of word boundaries’ in manuscript, which aided silent reading and, he suggests, enabled ‘a writing that could extend beyond limitations intrinsic to some of the aspects of the act of speech’ (215). The other is the development of biblical glossing, for it is in the twelfth century that the text of the Bible became most visibly disarticulated, as the continuity that might still represent a real-time of speaking was broken by a division into chapters . . . References in the glosses to scriptural passages were less frequently repeated word-for-word (as if reuttered) and were more frequently given a numerical reference that made the reader turn elsewhere in the book, a movement inimical to the audition of a speaker. (219)

He points out that a compilation of glosses such as the Glossa Ordinaria is ‘composite as only a writing can be, a feature that could easily have been seen as a disadvantage in some other era that would demand that someone, engaged in some continuous act, stand behind the utterance . . . The gloss, then, is not just a technique of interpretation. It had . . . staked out a new place from which utterances could be made’ (220). The implications of this fact for the elements of commentary and self-glossing in medieval poetry are obviously important (see Rouse and Rouse 1982). The insights of Clanchy and Kittay into the way these technical developments made possible new understandings of textuality bring us back to the vernacular literary texts that are this book’s subject. The legal documents and glossed Bibles they discuss were in Latin, a language that was probably never spoken by those unable to write it, except in the parrot fashion of Chaucer’s Summoner’s Questio quid juris.11 It may have been harder for writers in the mother tongue, spoken before it was written, to gain a similar sense that their productions might last as writing beyond the point at which the speaking voice had perished, but that sense had clearly emerged by the fourteenth century. Chaucer’s prayer near the end of Troilus and Criseyde, as he sends his ‘litel bok’ (. 1786) out into the world, that future scribes and readers should not ‘myswrite’ or ‘mysmetre’ it ‘for defaute of tonge’ (. 1795–6), underlines its written status. He imagines it being read aloud, certainly, but read from a text from which the poet is absent; it is separated from himself, it may outlive him, and will then certainly cease to be under 11 Chaucer quoted from L. Benson (1987), with references in text; here General Prologue . 648.

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his control. A recent expositor of Derrida’s thought remarks, ‘I have absorbed the Derridean lesson: this book is out of my hands and my control once it has reached the public domain, so my desire to hold the reader’s hand and guide her through, explaining as I go, can be no more than a nostalgic aspiration to recover the long-gone and illusory authority of the writer’ (Howells 1999: 5). That lesson could also have been learned from Chaucer and from earlier users of the ‘Go, little book’ topos from Ovid to Boccaccio, a topos that appears to have originated in a kind of absence more manifest than that inherent in writing itself, the absence of exile.12 Derrida spells out for modern readers what those earlier writers could still take for granted. When composed in writing, vernacular poems, like Latin legal documents, do not represent speech, but take its place, and thereby receive both the advantage of being carried down to posterity and the disadvantages of the loss of a speaker’s presence and of his ability to adjust his words to their recipients. In English, even before Chaucer’s time, we ﬁnd a marked concern on the part of vernacular poets with some pretension to learning to record the scene of writing, and thus to establish the textual nature of their work. A striking early example is found in Layamon’s prologue to his Brut. This long poem, composed about 1220, is a translation of Wace’s Anglo-Norman Roman de Brut, a fanciful ‘history’ of Britain from its Trojan origins down to the Saxon conquest, itself a translation from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin Historia Regum Britanniae. Layamon’s prologue identiﬁes him as a priest who lived and ‘bock radde’ (5)13 (meaning either ‘said his mass’ or ‘read his Bible’, in either case a reminder of his literacy) at King’s Areley on the river Severn. It then describes how he decided to recount the story of Britain’s earlier rulers, travelled widely to ﬁnd material, and chose three books as his sources—an English version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, a second that is now unidentiﬁable, and a third by Wace, ‘a Frenchis clerc . . . the wel couthe writen’ (20–1) (a French scholar who was skilled at writing). Whether or not Layamon’s listing of his sources is reliable, it emphasizes his own clerkly status (he is no mere minstrel singing a traditional tale), 12 See Tatlock (1920–1: 627–30), who traces the topos back to Ovid’s late poems from Tomi, the Tristia and Ex Ponto. Cf. also Leicester (1987), and see discussion in Ch. 7 of absence as a theme in the lyrics of Charles of Orleans. 13 Quoted from the Cotton Caligula text in Brook and Leslie (1963).

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and there follows a little scene in which he is vividly represented ﬁrst as a book-lover, then as a writer: Layamon leide theos boc and tha leaf wende; He heom leoﬂiche bi-heold, lithe him beo Drihten. Fetheren he nom mid ﬁngren, and ﬁede on boc-felle, And tha sothere word sette to-gadere, And tha thre boc thrumde to are. (24–8) (Layamon set down these books and turned their pages; he beheld them lovingly (may God be gracious to him). He took quills in his ﬁngers, and wrote on parchment, and put together the truest statements, and compressed the three books into one.)

Here, manifestly, there is no concern with ‘transitory mouth-positions and puffs of air’ but only with production by the material means of quill-pens and parchment of the text as a material object: it is as if the most reliable parts of the three source books are physically ‘thrumde to are’, compressed into one—the one that we are reading. Unlike the textuality of the electronic age, that of the age of manuscript is not disembodied or immaterial; it is frequently imagined in material and bodily dimensions, as letters and other signs, often alongside or incorporating pictures, inscribed by a labouring body on a surface that is also strongly material—for parchment, boc-felle, is bodily in origin and is itself produced by bodily labour.14 Clerkliness, however digniﬁed and authoritative, also involves manual labour. And in the earlier of the two manuscripts of the Brut the opening initial, the A of ‘An preost wes on leoden, Layamon wes ihoten’ (There was a priest in the country, who was called Layamon), contains a picture of a tonsured cleric writing in a book: not an individual likeness, of course, but a marker of the poet’s literate status and the textual status of his composition.15 14 As Jean Leclercq (1978: 222) remarks about monastic letter-writing, ‘The very terms which serve to describe the writing of a letter tell us what time and resolution had to be devoted to it: one ‘‘engraved’’ a letter or ‘‘sculptured’’ it, as if by striking (cudere) the parchment from which the letter was extricated as if by plowing or digging (exarare); the parchment . . . always offered a certain resistance to the goose quill or the pen’. Examples in English include Chaucer’s grumble in his poem to ‘Adam Scriveyn’ about how he has to ‘rubbe and scrape’ to correct the scribe’s errors; Hoccleve’s lament about the pain writing causes to stomach, back and eyes (Blyth 1999, lines 1016–22); and Bokenham’s complaint about tired hands, bleary eyes, and blunt pen (Serjeantson 1938, lines 896–908). 15 Reproduced as frontispiece to Dickins and Wilson (1951) and to Brook (1963). Cf. Kerby-Fulton’s reference (1997: 106 and n. 132) to the illustration of ‘the clerkly

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Correspondingly, the Brut’s prologue has a writer but no single ‘speaker’. Layamon is ‘he’ throughout, as if being observed from outside, though he must presumably be the implied grammatical subject as well as the explicit object of the twice-repeated prayer ‘lithe him beo Drihten’ (2, 25). At line 29—‘Nu biddeth Layamon alcne aethele mon’ (Now Layamon prays every noble man)—with the proximal deictic ‘Nu’ the tense shifts from past to present to make a more explicit request that everyone who reads this book and learns from these writings should repeat this prayer for the souls of Layamon and his father and mother (evidently envisaging readers in a future when the poet will be as dead as his parents). ‘This’ prayer is the very words we are reading; ‘now’ must be interpreted as textual deixis, referring to a point in the text that will be reached at different moments by different readers. There have been earlier proximal deictics in the past-tense section of the prologue, but these have referred to location rather than time, the place, England, which is ‘here’ both to the writer who has travelled widely through it and to all conceivable readers of a book written in English: the Flood killed all living creatures ‘her’ (11) and Augustine of Canterbury brought baptism ‘hider’ (18). I am reading this prologue more closely than Layamon could have intended; irritatingly closely, perhaps, for most of my own readers. But such microscopic reading is necessary to demonstrate the artiﬁciality and illusoriness of what has come to seem natural, the construction of a single speaking subject for the literary text, and I shall continue to engage in it. We think we understand how to read such texts, but my aim, to borrow Derrida’s words (1976: 70), is ‘To make enigmatic what one thinks one understands’. Subjectivity inhabits Layamon’s prologue, to be sure, but is encoded in it as a text, as the writing as which it presents itself even if read aloud, and in such a variety of mutually incompatible ways as to forbid the recuperation of any single subject-consciousness. Much could be learned from a comprehensive analysis of the encoding of subjectivity in clerkly vernacular prologues, but I will examine only one more case, in another ‘history of England’ written about a century after the Brut. This is the prologue to Robert Mannyng’s Chronicle of 1338. It begins with the ﬁction of oral delivery and of the speaker’s dreamer’s long body’ within the initial Y of MS Douce 104 of Piers Plowman. She observes that ‘clerkly author portraits’ are relatively rare in vernacular English poems, but mentions the Layamon manuscript as an exception.

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presence as clerkly mediator between learned writings and an unlearned audience: Lordynges that be now here, if ye wille listene and lere alle the story of Inglande als Robert Mannyng wryten it fand and on Inglysch has it schewed, not for the lerid bot for the lewed.16 (Gentlemen now present, listen if you wish and learn the whole history of England as Robert Mannyng found it written and has presented it in English, not for the learned but for the ignorant.)

Mannyng goes on to list his sources, in a way that comes closer than Layamon does to modern notions of scholarly responsibility. Like Layamon, he follows Wace’s Roman de Brut, while making it clear that Wace was turning a Latin source into rhyme; but he also follows Piers Langtoft’s later Anglo-Norman Chronicle, which, he explains, omits much that is in Wace while adding an account of the subsequent ‘Inglis dedes’ (66) (deeds of the English) that followed the Saxon conquest: ther Mayster Wace of the Brute left ryght begynnes Pers eft and tellis forth the Inglis story. (67–9) (Where Master Wace left off writing the Brut, just there Piers resumes and continues telling the history of the English.)

Mannyng explains that he did not compose his work to be delivered by entertainers such as minstrels, reciters, or harpers, but for educational purposes; that is why he chooses simple octosyllabic couplets as his verse-form rather than more complex ear-pleasing stanzas. So far the ‘speaker’ of the prologue is in the present, the here-and-now of oral communication, while its composition is in the past. But then, when the moment comes to request the usual prayer on the writer’s behalf from the audience for whose beneﬁt he has laboured, the perspective abruptly changes. The anonymous I identiﬁes himself with Robert Mannyng, providing a fuller context for that identity (birth in Bourne, location 16 Quoted from Sullens (1996). There are useful discussions of this prologue in Turville-Petre (1996: 34–7) and Wogan-Browne et al. (1999: 19–24).

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at Sixhills Priory, subordination to Robert of Malton), but also putting himself in the past, as he and the still-living Edward III will be for future readers who see his name written: Of Brunne I am if any me blame, Robert Mannyng is my name. Blissid be he of god of heven that me, Robert, with gude wille neven. In the thrid Edwardes tyme was I when I wrote alle this story. In the hous of Sixille I was a throwe; Danz Robert of Malton that ye know did it wryte for felawes sake whan thai wild solace make. (135–44) (Should anyone wish to blame me, I am from Bourne and Robert Mannyng is my name. May he who mentions me, Robert, with good will be blessed by the heavenly God. I was in the time of Edward III when I wrote this whole history. I was for a while in the priory of Sixhills; Master Robert of Malton, whom you know, ordered it to be written down for the beneﬁt of the brothers when they wished to have entertainment.)

The I that speaks in the present to request prayers has become an I that wrote in the past, a name found in his own written text, presumably that of someone who is dead, and whose soul is therefore in a position to beneﬁt by those prayers. ‘Robert Mannyng’ has become written words, part of the historical text he composed. The effect is moving; and only by being willing to relinquish the illusion of the originary and unitary speaking voice can we sound the emotional depth of the textual moment.

‘There can be no narrative without a narrator’ Just as the commonsense view is that a text must have a speaker, so it is that a narrative must have a narrator, ‘narrator’ being what we call the supposed speaker of a narrative. Recognizing this may help us to overcome the almost universal assumption that a narrative simply has to have a narrator. A small but telling sign of the apparent unquestionableness of this assumption is the way we can ﬁnd it afﬁrmed in two very different intellectual milieux in the same year. In 1966, on one side of the Atlantic, Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg (1966: 240) wrote in their inﬂuential and still standard The Nature of Narrative

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that ‘By deﬁnition, narrative art requires a story and a story-teller,’ while on the other side of the Atlantic Roland Barthes (1977a: 109, ﬁrst published in French 1966) was writing even more ﬁrmly that ‘there can be no narrative without a narrator’.17 This position may appear to be in accord with common sense: stories have to be told by somebody—they do not grow on trees—and decades later it remains the case, as Richard Walsh puts it (1997: 495), that ‘most literary critics are happy to regard the narrator as an inherent feature of narrative’. But the accepted truth may rest on a confusion between two senses of the word ‘narrator’, which means both the person in the real world who tells a story and the agent within a narrative text by whom its story is told. Of course an oral narrative must have a narrator in the sense of a living person who delivers it, but that person is not a part of the narrative itself; he or she stands outside it, as the origin of its spoken words. The narrator in this sense, as the performer of an oral narrative, has a real life outside the tale, and that is a fact that Dell Hymes has rightly urged anthropologists and folklorists to take more seriously. Discussing two versions of a Native American myth told by two different performers, he writes (2000: 11): To say that stories exist only in performance is to say that between performances narrators do not think. That they are prisoners of presence of an audience. That they go about in their daily lives, encountering nothing that makes them remember a story. Or think of how a story might or ought to have gone. That the stories they know never pose them problems, from perceived incompleteness to contradictions, with one another or with their own experience. That in short, they have very limited minds.

None of this is true of the ‘narrator’ who is allegedly ‘an inherent feature of narrative itself’. There need be nothing in the text of a narrative to correspond to the life and thoughts of an oral performer, reduplicating within the text the circumstances of its delivery; it is possible for an author to create in the words of a story some ﬁctive textual equivalent to an oral performer (and nothing in this book is meant to deny that possibility), but it is certainly not necessary for him to do so. Alongside the many narratologists and others who have articulated and conﬁrmed the general assumption that the narrator is an inherent feature 17 Scholes and Kellogg (1966: 240); ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’, ﬁrst published in Communications 8 (1966), here quoted from Barthes (1977a: 109).

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of narrative, there have been certain other theorists, often concerned to ground narratology in linguistics, who have resisted this assumption. The work of this much smaller group has been largely ignored by Anglo-American critics of medieval literature—but then, as I have mentioned, these theorists have themselves largely ignored medieval narrative.18 The apparently impenetrable wall between those who aim to theorize narrative and those who aim to interpret the narratives of one of the great ages of storytelling has impoverished the work of both. A case in point among the theorists of ‘narratorless narrative’ is K¨ate Hamburger, whose penetrating study in The Logic of Literature has not just remained unnoticed by medievalists but, as Dorrit Cohn (1999: 23) observes, ‘has failed to enter the mainstream of anglophone narrative poetics’. Hamburger (1973: 136) suggests a different parallel for textual narration: not oral storytelling, but painting. Just as a painted landscape exists only in its own medium, so ‘the product of narration’ does not exist independently of being narrated. ‘In other words, whereas a real reality is because it is, a ﬁctive reality ‘‘is’’ only by virtue of its being narrated . . .’ What this means, she clariﬁes by once more using an analogy with pictorial art: the act of narration is a function, through which the narrated persons, things, events, etc., are created: the narrative function, which the narrative poet manipulates as, for example, the painter wields his colors and brushes. That is, the narrative poet is not a statement-subject. He does not narrate about persons and things, but rather he narrates these persons and things; the persons in a novel are narrated persons, just as the ﬁgures of a painting are painted ﬁgures. (136; italics in original)

Because narrative ﬁction is not a form of statement, it has no statementsubject (Aussagesubjekt, the term Hamburger uses to refer to the sujet de l’´enonciation of a statement about reality); and just as in a painting 18 A rare exception is Fleischman 1990, in her important book Tense and Narrativity, a linguistically oriented study of medieval as well as modern French literature. She summarizes the objections to narrator theories of narrative made by Hamburger and Banﬁeld, but then, in a move conﬁrming the apparently ineradicable dominance of phonocentricity among medievalists, simply brushes them aside as incompatible with ‘the pragmatic structure of ﬁction’ and concludes, ‘We have established that every text has a Speaker’ (109). She has established nothing of the kind, only reafﬁrmed her preference for the accepted view. That preference is shared by Fleischman’s pupil Sophie Marnette (1998).

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we have no need to refer to the painter or his surrogate as part of what is painted, so in a narrative ﬁction we have no need to refer to a narrator as part of the ﬁction itself—all we need to refer to is ‘the narrating poet and his narrative acts’ (140). This insight is of special importance in an age when novelistic realism is taken as the norm for narrative, for realism produces what Seymour Chatman (1978: 166) calls ‘narratives purporting to be untouched transcripts of characters’ behavior’ and thus the illusion (which Chatman himself evidently shares) that a narrator is necessary to convert an imaginary reality into a textual ﬁction. I ﬁnd the analogy with painting helpful as a way of seeing that ‘the narrator’ is not such an obvious necessity as he may appear; but an important part of Hamburger’s theory will not apply to medieval narrative. This is the concept of ‘reality statement’ to which she opposes ‘ﬁctional narrative’. Reality statement claims to report what is really the case, and ﬁctional narrative, she states, is marked by linguistic features that are absent from reports of reality. The most important of these is that in ﬁctional narrative it can be afﬁrmed that a character thought or felt or believed something: such ‘verbs of inner action’ invite us to experience the inner life of a third person in the terms in which in reality we can only experience our own inner lives. Fictional narrative, as Hamburger puts it, ‘is the sole epistemological instance where . . . the subjectivity of a third-person qua third-person can be portrayed’ (83). We are so accustomed to this effect in ﬁctional narratives such as novels that it no longer strikes us as strange. As Cohn (1978: 7) remarks, ‘Most writers on the novel have taken the transparency of ﬁctional minds for granted’; Hamburger is ‘the ﬁrst literary theorist who has fully explored its meaning’. Hamburger persuasively observes that a sentence such as she quotes from Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, ‘At this moment she remembered the words she had spoken to him,’ must come from a novel, because only there could verbs of inner action such as ‘remember’ be used of third persons (‘she’) to portray them ‘in the Here and Now of their living and experiencing, in their I-originarity, i.e., in their subjectivity’ (138–9). This claim is supported by S.-Y. Kuroda (1976: 119, 120) with evidence from Japanese which, he writes, ‘shows that ﬁctional narration has a different grammar from discourse’, because in discourse (that is, communicational statement, approximately equivalent

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to Hamburger’s ‘reality statement’) ‘one may not take someone else’s point of view’.19 Hamburger’s distinction between the characteristics proper to reality statement and to ﬁctional narrative is powerful and productive when applied to literature from the eighteenth century onwards, and Cohn (substituting the terms ‘referential’ and ‘non-referential’ narrative) shows in The Distinction of Fiction how helpful it can be in exploring the generic status of a wide variety of modern writings, including Freud’s case-histories, Hildesheimer’s Marbot: Eine Biographie, and Proust’s A` la Recherche du temps perdu. If we attempt to apply it to medieval narratives, however, we are forced to recognize the chronological limits of its validity. In the following chapter I show how important a part is played in the Middle English romance Havelok by statements about the characters’ inner lives. For Hamburger and Cohn this would presumably mean that Havelok must be deﬁned as ﬁctional or nonreferential narrative, but the problem is that, while we may have no difﬁculty in categorizing Havelok as ﬁction, it is not at all clear that the poet and his readers would have done so. The same is true of Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, both poems taken from sources that claim to be historical. In Troilus, the story of the lovers is presented as part of the greatest of all classical histories, the matter of Troy; and though Chaucer must have known that his purported Latin source, ‘Lollius’, was a mask for his actual Italian source, I see no reason to suppose that his audience would have penetrated this deception, or would have been expected to do so. Modern scholars have been too ready to imagine medieval audiences to be as knowledgeable as themselves about medieval poets’ sources, and as sceptical about their historical authenticity. Medieval poets characteristically did not invent the stories they told, even if they changed certain details in the existing material, and in this respect Hamburger’s Romantic conception of stories or characters being ‘created’ (erzeugt) by the writer is misleading. The medieval poet characteristically does not create but recounts,

19 Cf. Kuno (1987: 269), citing Kamio (1979): ‘Japanese is a language which requires the speaker to overtly mark a sentence with respect to whether the information that is represented in it belongs to his territory or not . . . Japanese requires the speaker to represent information that does not belong to his territory by using nondirect forms such as rasii ‘‘it appears that,’’ soo da ‘‘I hear that,’’ daroo ‘‘I suppose,’’ and so on.’

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retells, often with commentary, a pre-existing story about pre-existing characters, performing actions that have been established at least in outline in previous versions. This function of the medieval poet as a reteller and commentator marks a fundamental difference from the role of the novelist. The consequences of this fact are, perhaps inevitably, missed by theorists whose conception of ‘ﬁction’ is shaped by the novel, a genre whose very name indicates a claim to originality. It is not too much to say of most medieval stories that they always already existed, in a realm as little in need of explanation or justiﬁcation as that of jokes in our time. When someone tells a light-bulb joke, it does not occur to modern listeners to question whether it is true or on what authority it is told; so it seems to have been in general with stories in the Middle Ages. And if a story already existed in writing, it was halfway to being ‘history’.20 When a story was taken from any kind of source, its events, including inner events, were evidently felt to have a real existence of their own. The poet might ﬁnd some repugnant, and might say so, but he did not feel able to change or omit them. When a medieval writer did invent new details for an existing story, they tended to be in explanation of the ‘facts’ already established in previous versions. Thus Beroul in the twelfth century, telling a story in which a love-potion evidently already existed to explain the irresistible attraction between Tristan and Yseut, then realizes that he needs a further explanation for the ‘fact’ that the lovers parted and Yseut returned to her husband. So he shamelessly inserts an explanatory detail when the need emerges: ‘My lords, you have heard of the wine they drank which caused them to suffer greatly for so long. But you do not know, I think, the duration of the efﬁcacy of the love-drink . . . Yseut’s mother, who brewed it, made it for three years of love’ (Fedrick 1970: 95). It is a striking fact, one that is well known but whose implications are generally disregarded, that it was not until about 1500 that Robert Henryson asked, of the story of Troilus and Criseyde, ‘Quha wait gif all that Chauceir wrait was trew?’ (Fox 1981, line 64) (who knows if all that Chaucer wrote was true?), and then ventured to change its overall shape as transmitted by Chaucer, making Criseyde die before Troilus. Henryson’s is apparently the ﬁrst use in 20 Cf. Field (1991: 168): ‘History . . . is the creation of the clerk: it is less a matter of what happened in the past than of what events defy time and are preserved in written memorial.’

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English of the term inventioun (line 67) to apply not to the ‘ﬁnding’ of material in existing sources but to a poet’s ‘making-up’ of an untrue story (MacQueen 1967: 55); but even he could not bring himself to admit that he had invented his new version of the story, and instead attributed it, in a stanza where the lines’ initial letters read ‘O FICTIO’, to an unnamed ‘uther quair’ (line 61) (other book), which appears not to have existed. I cannot pretend to have a complete grasp of the ways medieval poets thought about the relations between history or reality and ﬁction, but I am convinced that to assume the naturalness of our own categorization and to impose it on medieval narrative can only lead to misunderstanding. Fleischman (1983: 305), having analysed a wide range of medieval narrative texts, concludes that there was a concept of history which was distinct from ﬁction, and which was linked to a particular criterion of truth. But historical truth did not imply, as it does for us, the authenticity of facts and events . . . History was what was willingly believed . . . For the Middle Ages and even well beyond, historical truth was anything that belonged to a widely accepted tradition.

To Hamburger the distinction between ‘ﬁctional narrative’ and ‘reality statement’ seems perfectly clear; if her material had included that studied by Fleischman, or in my Chapters 3 and 4, she would surely have found it less so. And, to avoid misunderstanding, let me add that it was not that medieval poets were consciously blurring an existing distinction, as with recent writers of narratives that mingle documented fact with artistic invention (such as Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song or Don DeLillo’s Libra). For medieval writers a distinction that seems obvious to us but is now beginning to dissolve did not yet exist, or was only just beginning to come into existence. In this respect as in others, we are experiencing their history in reverse. This does not mean, however, that Hamburger’s denial of the necessity for a narrator as an element in every narrative is invalid. Wherever it stands in the ﬁction/reality spectrum, it is as true of Havelok as of the novels she discusses that the characters are ‘narrated persons’, and no more demand the hypothesis of a narrator within the work to explain the narration of their actions, outer or inner, than the painted persons in a representational work of pictorial art require a painter within the work to justify their existence. And other linguistically orientated theorists of narrative have convincingly challenged the supposed necessity for a

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narrator on other grounds. Kuroda (1976: 107) shows the dependence of ‘the narrator theory of narration’ on a more general theory of language, again one that most literary critics simply take for granted, and which is the fundamental dogma of speech-act theory: that language is intrinsically and in all its normal uses ‘a phenomenon of communication’, in which a message is ‘communicated by the addressor to the addressee’. As an explicit statement of the connection between the two theories, Kuroda gives a fuller context for the statement by Barthes quoted above: ‘narrative as object is the point of a communication: there is a donor of the narrative and a receiver of the narrative. In linguistic communication, je and tu (I and you) are absolutely presupposed by one another; similarly there can be no narrative without a narrator and a listener (or reader)’ (1976: 109). But Barthes, like most modern theorists, then goes on to assert, I believe misleadingly, that the subject of his analysis will not be the author and any actual reader, but ‘the code by which narrator and reader are signiﬁed throughout the narrative itself’, for ‘the (material) author of a narrative is in no way to be confused with the narrator of that narrative’ (1977a: 110–11). Kuroda points out that if we take the communicational theory of language seriously, then every sentence in a narrative has to be regarded as ‘a message communicated by the narrator’ (109). This leads to awkward questions, such as: ‘What is the narrator presumed to be doing when a character is addressing the reader?’ (111). Such difﬁculties are either glossed over or ﬁnessed by theorists and critics who are unwilling to question the communicational theory (often, indeed, cannot conceive of the possibility of doing so). But the major difﬁculty is that noted by Hamburger, concerning the attribution of ‘inner actions’ to third persons. Kuroda writes: Grammatically speaking, we do not know the grounds on which the narrator makes his assertions about the inner acts of characters. But we must, so long as we follow the performative [i.e. communicational] analysis, accept that he does make such assertions. One could just assume that he directly perceives the mental states of his characters. Thus we are led to the notion of an omniscient narrator . . . But leaving the narrator in the dark and marvelling at his subtlety and elusiveness21 in secret is not better. Either we have to accept the 21 An example of such ‘marvelling’ is Cohn’s comment (1978: 52) that ‘a narrator’s magic power allows him to see into sleeping minds quite as readily as into waking ones’.

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epistemological or metaphysical opaqueness of the narrator theory of narration, or else we have to examine and question the basic assumptions of linguistic thought underlying this theory. (114)

And this Kuroda proceeds to do, drawing on Hamburger’s analysis and (as noted above) adding material from his own native language. A sentence of narration simply creates that which is narrated (as in Hamburger’s analogy with painting); it does not represent ‘the content of an act of judging by the narrator’ (123). We gain from the sentences of the story a (kind of) knowledge of a ﬁctive event; but ‘the question as to how the knowledge of the event has come to the author’s consciousness cannot and may not be answered’ (137) within the bounds of narrative theory. Kuroda’s general conclusion is: This theory of narration rejects the notion of omniscient narrator in the sense that it rejects the assumption that a narrative is necessarily a discourse by the narrator. It does not of course contradict the existence of narratives by narrators, even by those who might be qualiﬁed as omniscient. Furthermore, a narrative may be partially narrated by a narrator. (140 n. 8)

I accept both elements of this statement: that narrative does not require a narrator, but that it is possible for a writer of narrative to create a narrator as part of his ﬁction, whether one of whom we are always aware, or one who functions only intermittently (for example, at the beginning and end of a narrative, or in interludes separating its episodes). The questions whether a writer actually does create a narrator in any particular case (which usually means, whether any explicit indications of narration are to be understood by readers as the utterances of an individual person), and where and how that narrator functions in the text, will need to be settled by historically informed interpretation of what is written, not by presupposition. For me, the most important element in Kuroda’s work is his recognition that the ‘narrator theory of narrative’ is associated with the communicational theory of language. The narrator theory assumes that a human consciousness comes ﬁrst, and narrative comes afterwards, as a message to be conveyed to another consciousness. Kuroda does not attempt to put this in a medieval context, but to do so would strengthen his case. This is so because, as I have suggested, the medieval premise seems to be that stories simply exist in their own right. Adapting

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Marx’s famous dictum, we might say that in medieval culture it was not the consciousness of men that determined narrative, but narratives that determined their consciousness. An exaggeration, perhaps; but I do not think it too much of an exaggeration to say that whereas the modern assumption has been that consciousness precedes narrative, the medieval assumption appears to have been that narrative preceded consciousness. There are exceptions. In the scholarly world, we begin to ﬁnd them in commentaries on classical and biblical texts: commentaries on Ovid’s Heroides distinguish between the views expressed by the writers of the letters and those attributed to Ovid himself, and scriptural commentaries distinguish between the word of God and the words of the human beings through whom it is transmitted. There are exceptions, too, with vernacular writings, for example in the addition to collections of troubadour poetry of vidas and razos purporting to show how the poems express the poets’ own lives and feelings; and by the fourteenth century we begin to ﬁnd manuscript collections of the works of individual poets, the written œuvre evidently being taken as expressive of the poet’s consciousness (Brownlee 1984; Huot 1987). These developments, which were eventually to lead to the now-predominant assumption that every text must be interpreted as giving voice to a human consciousness, occurred earlier with the lyric and other forms of ﬁrst-person writing than with narrative (see Ch. 6). But we shall ﬁnd the priority of narrative itself to consciousness beginning to be explicitly questioned by Chaucer, perhaps most strikingly when the Wife of Bath’s Prologue claims that if the history books had been written by women rather than by male clerics they would tell very different stories from the ones they do: For trusteth wel, it is an impossible That any clerk wol speke good of wyves, But if it be of hooly seintes lyves, Ne of noon oother womman never the mo. Who peyntede the leon, tel me who? By God, if wommen hadde writen stories, As clerkes han withinne hire oratories, They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse Than al the mark of Adam may redresse. (. 688–96)

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Cultures are shaped by their stories, and Chaucer could see fallible and prejudiced human consciousnesses behind the apparently objective cultural authority of the stories found in old books (Aers 1980: 83)—the authority that led an anonymous French contemporary to explain in the book he wrote for his young wife’s guidance that, though he did not really believe the story of Walter and Griselda, and did not think it provided a good model for marital relations, still ‘thus the tale runs [l’istoire est telle], and I may neither correct it nor make another, for a wiser than I compiled and told it’ (Power 1992: 92; Brereton and Ferrier 1994: 232). It is perhaps not by accident that in Chaucer too, in The House of Fame, we ﬁnd a keen sense that speech, which is only ‘eyr ybroken’ (765)—McIntosh’s ‘puffs of air’—somehow turns into its speaker when it reaches Fame’s palace: Hyt wexeth lyk the same wight Which that the word in erthe spak, Be hyt clothed red or blak; And hath so verray hys lyknesse That spak the word, that thou wilt gesse That it the same body be. (1076–81)

(Though here presumably the red or black ‘clothing’ of the spoken words implies that they have also become written letters, some rubricated (Minnis 1995: 197–8).) But even for Chaucer ‘thus the tale runs’ remained an overwhelmingly powerful consideration, and, advanced thinker though he was, he certainly could not reverse the existing relationship of narrative and consciousness, and leap straight into the more recent perspective that assumes the presence of a narratorial consciousness at every point in every narrative. The consequence of accepting a narrator theory of narrative is that we are obliged to begin narratological analysis with narratorial epistemology, asking, ‘How does the narrator know what he knows?’ It may be that the rise of this way of thinking about narrative, so that it now seems perfectly natural, could be correlated with the rise of the empirical philosophy that begins from epistemology, from the question ‘What do I know for certain?’, to which the cogito of Descartes was one powerful answer. In post-Cartesian metaphysics, as one recent writer puts it, the subjectum, the ultimate foundation or beginning point for an understanding of entities . . . is no longer claimed to reside in a form, substance, or deity

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outside of the human intellect but is rather found in the human being understood as subject; Heidegger writes, ‘Man has become the subjectum’ . . . The human subject—as self, ego, or conscious, thinking thing—becomes the ultimate foundation upon which entities are rendered intelligible. (Critchley 1996: 15)

By contrast, it might be suggested, the worldview predominant in the Middle Ages took for granted the objective existence of certain realities, such as God or stories, regardless of how or whether I or anyone else might come to know about them. But I cannot offer that as anything more than speculation. The fullest and most cogent opposition to the narrator theory of narrative, and the most discussed (though again almost never by medievalists), is that of Ann Banﬁeld, in her 1982 book Unspeakable Sentences, and in a series of articles from 1973 onwards. The earliest of these inﬂuenced Kuroda, and she has been a powerful inﬂuence even on those who cannot accept all her conclusions, such as Brian McHale and Monika Fludernik.22 She too relates narratology to the theory of language itself, claiming that ‘it is narrative which provides the crucial ‘‘experiment’’ for deciding between a communication and a non-communication theory of language and, by extension, of literature’ (1982: 10). And she too denies the need to think in post-Cartesian epistemological terms about the product of narration, writing that ‘The sentence of narration bears witness to the possibility of an objective knowledge—statements without the intervention of a knowing subject’ (270). Her critique of current literary interpretation deﬁnes what seems to me to be the general situation in medieval studies, in which ‘a ‘‘sophisticated’’ metaphysics, a ‘‘sophisticated’’ theory of knowledge . . . masks with the familiar face of the speaker certain simple, brute facts, subsuming all grammatical distinctions under the totalising voice of a narrator, standing in for the author’ (1987: 278). I have found Banﬁeld’s the most challenging of the theoretical writings that have helped me to rethink the encoding of subjectivity in medieval texts. I 22 Her earliest article is Banﬁeld 1973. Kuroda (1976: 107, footnote to title) notes, ‘I am grateful to Ann Banﬁeld for conversations we have had on the problems of narrative.’ For critical analyses of Banﬁeld’s thought, see McHale (1983) and Fludernik (1995); also Jahn (1983), Violi (1986), and Yamaguchi (1989). Fludernik describes her Fictions of Language as having been ‘conceived as a reaction to Ann Banﬁeld’s theory of represented speech and thought’ (1993a: 78).

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do not discuss her work in any detail partly because Hamburger and Kuroda have already allowed me to take up the issues most relevant to my subject, and partly because the exciting logical purity of her argument, the strictness of its conﬁnement to linguistics, with an almost contemptuous downgrading of pragmatic issues (but see 1990: 22 n. 3), and the intensity of her focus on the technical analysis of examples from relatively modern texts, make it hard to adapt her work to my purpose. When she states that ‘the author’s role in writing, in composing, need not, cannot, receive a linguistic representation uniﬁed around the notion of a voice’ (1990: 27; my italics), the movement from ‘need not’ to ‘cannot’, justiﬁed in her own terms by the limiting adjective ‘linguistic’, cuts off the possibility of adaptation to poetic analysis. And Banﬁeld has been criticized, not unjustly, for giving a simpliﬁed account of the history of narrative, reducing it to ‘a single moment: the moment when the potential inherent in ‘‘universal grammar’’ is actualized by the discovery of writing—writing, that is, as a self-sufﬁcient and ‘‘originary’’ activity and not the mere recording of speech—and the ‘‘unspeakable sentences’’ of narrative begin to appear’ (McHale 1983: 43). This too means that the bearing of her work on medieval texts can only be indirect. I must mention, though, the helpfulness for readings of medieval poetry of her conception of ‘sentences with a deictic centre but without any explicit or implicit representation of an observer’, which make it possible to conceive of ‘the existence of the unobserved, of an inﬁnite number of perspectives, not necessarily occupied by any human subject, enclosing each a moment and a place, sensations, events, unlike any others’. She regards the style marked by such sentences as ‘uniquely novelistic’ and as ﬁrst exploited by Flaubert (1987: 273, 278), but in reality we can also ﬁnd it in medieval narrative, as the untheorized and unsystematic practice of poets who could take for granted the existence of ‘an inﬁnite number of perspectives’ not occupied by individual human subjects because they would all be potentially present in God’s impartial vision. I have emphasized that recent theorists of narrative such as Hamburger, Kuroda, Banﬁeld, and Cohn have disregarded medieval examples. Their ways of thinking can largely be seen as responses to developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing, and especially to the modernism of which Virginia Woolf is a paradigmatic case. Woolf, after all, developed a kind of writing in which, as she put

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it, ‘the world is seen without a self’ (1931: 204). Many critics, still in thrall to the supposed necessity of a narrator, have struggled to ﬁnd any way of acknowledging this ‘subjectless subjectivity’. One, for example, claims that in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse ‘There exists . . . the presence of what Seymour Chatman calls ‘‘covert narration’’ by way of which ‘‘some interpreting person must be converting the characters’ thoughts into indirect expression’’ ’ (Saunders 1993: 196; Chatman 1978: 197). But there is no such person in the text; indeed, as another Woolf critic observes, the period in which modernism emerged from realism is one in which ‘perception looses itself by degrees from its personal anchoring and becomes increasingly disembodied’ (Ryan 1980: 858). As Adamson puts it (1998: 674): ‘Whereas nineteenth-century writers had attempted to overcome the condition of textuality to create the illusion of a personality speaking through the printed page, with a credible voice and a coherent viewpoint, the Modernists took over the techniques on which this illusion was constructed and deconstructed them.’ It is no accident that this is also the period of the emergence of cinema, a form in which, more obviously than in writing, the appearance of things can be revealed when there is no voice speaking of them and no person within the cinematic ﬁction through whose consciousness they are being perceived. Correspondingly, there has developed a conception of the subject itself not as ‘primary, uniﬁed, self-present, self-determining, autonomous, and homogeneous’ (Hawthorn 1994: 287) but as no more than the shifting position where a variety of impersonal systems intersect; or, in another formulation, ‘consciousness is not regarded as a unitary or indivisible substance, but as a fractured and fragile set of processes’ (Giddens 1979: 38). The formerly sovereign self, the I thought to be present in every literary text as the speaker who warrants its identity and continuity, has begun to dissolve. I put the matter in this melodramatic way not to endorse this mode of thought as an account of reality but to clarify a suggestion made above—that we may be in a good position, at the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century, to imagine what was happening to writing in Chaucer’s time because we are living through a reversal of the process experienced in the later Middle Ages. For us, the notion that every text must have its speaker, every narrative its narrator, may be beginning to dissolve; for late-medieval writers, far from being the received idea it has been for twentieth-century Chaucer criticism, it was a new discovery, just beginning to crystallize. Narrative, traditionally

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accepted as existing objectively, without any anchoring in personal perception, gradually began to acquire signs of such anchoring. If in this book I question the doctrine of the speaker or narrator as key to the interpretation of some medieval texts, and attempt instead to develop a conception of textual subjectivity, it is not out of any wish to dethrone the sovereign subject or to ‘undo humanist self-congratulation’ (Altieri 1990: 193); it is because I believe such questioning to be necessary in order to reconstruct the cultural-historical context in which the texts were written, and thus to understand them better.

Did Subjectivity Emerge? Finally, I must repeat that this book is not about the history of subjectivity itself. My working assumption is that we do not know how to write such a history, and this seems to be conﬁrmed by the great variety of historical moments at which subjectivity is said to have emerged, and the common confusion of subjectivity with individuality. Caroline Bynum (1982: 106), proposing the twelfth century as turning point, draws an appropriate distinction: ‘If the twelfth century did not ‘‘discover the individual’’ in the modern meaning of expression of unique personality and isolation of the person from the ﬁrm group membership, it did in some sense discover . . . the self, the inner mystery, the inner man, the inner landscape.’ A phrase such as ‘inner landscape’ reminds us that allegorical representations of the ‘inner man’ imply the possibility of generalization: the symbolic landscape of the Roman de la Rose, for example, peopled with personiﬁcations, represents not experiences peculiar to an individual lover but those in which all young aristocratic males are supposed to share. Michel Zink, well though he is aware of this, and admirably learned and perceptive as his account of ‘the invention of literary subjectivity’ in French writing undoubtedly is, still seems to me to be involved in a certain confusion when he writes that literary subjectivity is ‘what marks the text as the point of view of a consciousness. In this sense, literary subjectivity deﬁnes literature. The latter truly exists only the moment a text . . . designates itself as the product of a particular consciousness, hesitating between arbitrary individual subjectivity and the constraints of language’s forms’ (1999: 4). And this leads him to choose not the twelfth century but the thirteenth as the turning point: ‘The widespread recognition of subjectivity (as previously deﬁned) in literary expression—or in expression that thereby became speciﬁcally

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literary—was essentially a thirteenth-century phenomenon’ (1999: 11). Against Zink, Sarah Spence (1996: 15) argues for the reinstatement of the twelfth century: Focusing as Zink does on the importance of the present to subjectivity he occludes a transition which occurs prior to that. The present, in other words, could not support the emphasis he discovers in thirteenth-century works if the shift from a temporal to a spatial perspective had not occurred before that. It is only because time becomes measured in spatial terms by the twelfth century that the present can take on the dimension necessary for its subjective literary development.

Franc¸ois Rigolet (1996: 156), by contrast, sees ‘modern literary subjectivity’ as beginning to emerge only in the early sixteenth century, in the poetry of Jean Lemaire de Belges, of whom he writes that ‘le d´esir qu’il manifesta a` inscrire son ‘‘moi’’ dans le texte de ses œuvres le situe d´ej`a a` l’horizon d’une e´mergence de la subjectivit´e litt´eraire moderne’ (the desire he showed to inscribe his ‘I’ in the text of his works already places him on the horizon of the emergence of modern literary subjectivity). These are only a few, arbitrarily chosen opinions, and the argument might be continued indeﬁnitely, but at least it is clear that Zink, Spence, and Rigolet are all discussing literary subjectivity. Others, evidently lacking or repressing any detailed knowledge of medieval or earlier evidence, place the emergence of subjectivity itself, the inner life as lived, far later. Jacques Lacan (1978: 223) describes the beginning of the seventeenth century as the ‘inaugural moment of the emergence of subject’, and a historical narrative that puts this inaugural moment still later can probably be derived from Foucault. Often under their inﬂuence, along with that of a crude Marxism, literary scholars have propounded similar views, associating the emergence of subjectivity with the rise of economic individualism, capitalism, and the bourgeoisie. Catherine Belsey (1985: 18), for example, declares ﬂatly that ‘In the ﬁfteenth century the representative human being has no unifying essence . . . Disunited, discontinuous, the hero of the moralities is not the origin of action: he has no single subjectivity which could constitute such an origin; he is not a subject.’ The movement here from a particular kind of literary representation to human representativeness is notably rapid. And Francis Barker (1984: 52, 63, 23, 68) writes of ‘the newly

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interiorated subject’ of the early seventeenth century as belonging to the ‘new order’ of ‘modern subjectivity’ inaugurated by Descartes, the alleged originator of ‘the tradition of subject-centred discourse’. For Barker, even Hamlet’s ‘inwardness’ is somehow earlier than it ought to be, ‘anachronistic’, preceding as it does ‘what was done to us in the seventeenth century’. Even Sylvia Adamson, an altogether more serious scholar, seems content to accept this strange notion, when she writes of ‘empathetic narrative’ that ‘I contest the standard account, which associates its ﬁrst appearance with the nineteenth-century novel, and argue instead for . . . a historical origin in the emergence of modern subjectivity in seventeenth-century epistemology’ (1995b: 195). In the course of a sharp critique of such views, David Aers (1992) rightly reminds us that we do not need to stop at the Middle Ages in looking back to ﬁnd material that will controvert them, for where is evidence of an ‘interiorated subject’ to be found if not in Saint Augustine’s Confessions? I know of no evidence for doubting the truth of Lee Patterson’s statement (1991: 12) that ‘subjectivity is a human characteristic that has always been part of our history’, but here I am concerned not to establish or dispute that that is so of lived subjectivity but, as I have indicated, only to analyse ways in which subjectivity is encoded as a textual phenomenon in speciﬁc medieval English writings. My aim will be to read medieval writings with an eye to the subjectivization diffused throughout the text in linguistic phenomena such as deixis, without the preconceived expectation that these markers will form a uniﬁed pattern designating the text as (in Zink’s phrase) ‘the product of a particular consciousness’, or that the presence of any such pattern will be an index of the writer’s success. The medieval writings that we regard as literature are indeed permeated with subjectivity, but it is often what may be called, on the analogy of narratorless narrative, ‘subjectless subjectivity’. In Chaucer and some of his successors there is an important movement towards a conception of the literary text as ‘the product of a particular consciousness’, but that is by no means the whole story, and it will emerge, I think, that attempts to extend that conception to other medieval writings, and even to the majority of Chaucer’s works, lead to distortion—and, I would add, to a lessening of the pleasure to be gained from reading. An important feature of the texts to be discussed in this book is that they are poems, artistic structures of words designed, as Coleridge put it in Biographia Literaria, to give ‘such delight from the

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whole, as is compatible with distinct gratiﬁcation from each component part’. The professionalization of the study of old literature, coinciding with the marginalization of poetry in modern literature, has brought a disregard for pleasure as the object of reading, and especially for the pleasure to be gained from verbal beauty. Modern readings of Chaucer in particular have tended to focus on psychology and ideology, even where these obscure or explicitly deny the qualities that have made it a pleasure to read his work and have kept it alive over the centuries. One thing that emerges from a study of interpretations of Troilus and Criseyde and the Man of Law’s Tale is that many recent scholars do not allow their judgements to be guided by the pleasure-giving power of Chaucer’s poetry, and sometimes seem actively to resist and dislike it. I hope the present investigation will not lose touch entirely with the primitive and indispensable goal of pleasure.

The Following Chapters The medieval texts to be discussed in the following chapters fall into two large groups, narratives and lyrics. In Chapter 2 I begin the discussion of narratives with two romances, King Horn and Havelok. In King Horn a narrating subject appears very rarely, and we encounter a story that seems to tell itself, so that narration, though often strongly subjectivized, is almost never personalized. In Havelok a narrating ‘I’ emerges more frequently, and there is strong and conscious empathy with the characters, but still no single subject-position, no personal narrator. Chapters 3 and 4 concern narration and the ways it has been interpreted in two poems by Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde and the Man of Law’s Tale —major works of literature that, in my view, have suffered particular damage from having imposed on them conceptions of ‘the narrator’, a narrator who invariably turns out to be fallible, unreliable, even obtuse. In Chapter 5 I turn ﬁrst to three poems of the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where, I shall argue, we ﬁnd a subjectivization of storytelling that operates without any impersonation of a particular narrator. Then, in the same chapter, I turn to the fourth poem in this manuscript, the ﬁrst-person or homodiegetic narrative Pearl. In the interpretation of this intensely subjective poem, which never refers to its own writtenness, I believe harm has been done by an unquestioning acceptance of ‘the narrator’ as a unitary element of the ﬁction. We need to recognize,

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difﬁcult though it may be, that while an experiencing ‘I’ is strongly characterized in Pearl, there is no such characterization of a narrating ‘I’. In the last two chapters I move from the quasi-lyrical homodiegesis of Pearl to actual lyrics, in the sense of short stanzaic poems purporting to express the subjectivity of an ‘I’ or, as one deﬁnition puts it, ‘organized around a ﬁrst-person voice’ (France 1995: 476). I begin by surveying attempts to theorize the lyric, and move on to consider courtly lyrics of love, including cansos by the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn and a variety of later English poems—some in which the ‘I’ functions as an empty grammatical space to be occupied by any reader or user, others which seem to lend themselves to interpretation as dramatic monologues. Chapter 6 concludes with a detailed analysis of a courtly lyric by Chaucer that resists such interpretation because part of it is presented explicitly as a written text. Tracing a movement by which lyrical writings become increasingly explicit about their own writtenness, I focus in Chapter 7 on epistolary poems, in which it must be recognized that the textual ‘I’ and ‘you’ mark the absence or separation of those whom the text purports to join. I show that such an awareness is already manifest in Ovid’s Heroides, widely studied in medieval schools. My chief examples, though, are taken from ﬁfteenth-century English poetry and especially from the English lyric sequence attributed to Charles of Orleans, which includes poems about writing as well as verse epistles. My choice of poems for analysis is to some extent arbitrary, and many others pressed for inclusion. At one stage in this book’s long gestation I had hoped to include a section on texts belonging to a genre not usually recognized as such in English but deﬁned by French scholars as the dit (J. Cerquiglini 1980; Poirion 1980; Rib´emont 1990; Burrow 1997). One of its crucial features is a paradox: it purports to be the utterance of a single speaker, expressing his own experience, yet it incorporates much material originating outside that experience, and it exists only in writing. Examples would have included some of the longer Chaucerian prologues, along with post-Chaucerian dits in which the spoken is caught at its moment of transition into the written, such as Hoccleve’s Series and the prologues to Bokenham’s Legends of Holy Women—texts where the poets ‘speak’ as writers and construct textual selves out of fragments of Chaucerian writing. An approach to this topic is published elsewhere (Spearing 2004), but I could not ﬁnd room for a more detailed treatment in the present book. Another absentee is Piers

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Plowman. I would have included it if I could: I think it the greatest of all medieval English poems, and one of those in which the status of the textual subject, the intermittent and elusive ‘I’, is most intriguingly questionable. I omitted it for several reasons, one being that it deserves a book to itself and would have demanded disproportionate space here, and another that its ‘indeterminate, ﬂexible, and dynamic’ textual subject (Lawton 1987: 1), satisfactorily deﬁnable neither as the poet’s self-representation nor as a ﬁctional blunderer, has been provocatively discussed by David Lawton in an essay on which I could not improve. No reader will wish my book longer, so regrets about this omission are likely to be mine alone.

2 Romances In existing discussion of Middle English romances the concept of ‘the narrator’ has not been especially prominent: the term has been accepted, apparently without much thought, as a handy means of circumventing a simplistic biographical identiﬁcation of the ‘I’ of a text with its author. This is in keeping with a general tendency in modern criticism simply to replace the apparently discredited term ‘author’ with ‘narrator’ as the supposed source of the narrative text. In many discussions of romances ‘author’ and ‘narrator’ are not distinguished; thus we ﬁnd Havelok described as ‘probably written for a broad bourgeois audience by a partisan, highly intrusive narrator’ (Finlayson 1992: 41; my italics), while in one of the best critical accounts of the same poem the terms ‘poet’ (or sometimes ‘author’) and ‘narrator’ alternate ﬂexibly, and within a single paragraph there are references to the ‘voice of the narrator’ of Havelok and to the ‘voice of poets such as Chr´etien’ (Ganim 1983: 37). Because use of the term ‘narrator’ has made little difference to the way the romances have been interpreted, there will be no need to discuss the history of their interpretation. In Chaucer criticism, on the other hand, ‘the narrator’ has been an important and sometimes controversial ﬁgure for a least half a century, and so I shall not be able to avoid discussing the history of Chaucerian narrators and their consequences for interpretation, consequences that seem to me often to have been misleading and even disastrous.

King Horn My ﬁrst example has generally been dated about 1225, which would make it the earliest surviving narrative in English that can be called a

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romance;1 a more recent analysis (Allen 1988) places it in the 1270s. The anonymous King Horn retells, in a much abbreviated form, and in very short lines rhyming in couplets, a story also found in an Anglo-Norman poem of about 1175, Thomas’s Romance of Horn. In the opening and closing lines of King Horn a narratorial ﬁrst person manifests itself, addressing an audience in the second person. The poem begins: Alle beon he blithe, That to my song lythe! A sang ihc schal you singe Of Mury the kinge. (1–4)2 (May all those who listen to my song be joyful! I shall sing you a song of King Murry.)

These lines imply that the story does indeed have a storyteller, a singer of its song to listeners. It is possible that King Horn was really performed by being chanted to musical accompaniment, though song in Middle English is regularly used to mean a composition in verse; when Chaucer near the end of Troilus and Criseyde referred to his written text as being ‘red . . . or elles song’ (. 1797) in the future it is hard to believe that he really imagined musical performance as a possibility. The narrating ‘I’ of King Horn soon reappears with its corresponding ‘you’ in a formula introducing the poem’s ﬁrst narrative event: Hit was upon a someres day, Also ihc you telle may. (29–30) (It was on a summer’s day, as I can tell you.)

Some ﬁfteen hundred lines later the story is brought to an end with closural gestures of a kind typical of Middle English romances: crowning, marriage, and death. In the ﬁnal lines there is no explicit ‘I’ or ‘you’, but poet and audience are merged into a plural ﬁrst person, while a series of optatives or imperatives (may Christ lead the hero and his bride to 1 I bracket off the generic status of the two poems discussed. As Field writes (1999: 152), ‘The genre of romance is resistant to deﬁnition’, and scholars (e.g. Finlayson 1992) have rightly questioned whether these two, though frequently paired, are really narratives of the same kind. For the purposes of this chapter, I take ‘Middle English romances’ to comprise the texts usually discussed under that heading. 2 King Horn quoted from Fellows (1993); italics in quotations are always mine.

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heaven, let us rejoice, may Jesus bless us) imply a narratorial ‘I’ as their origin: Nu ben hi bothe dede— Crist to hevene hem lede! Her endeth the tale of Horn, That fair was and noght unorn. Make we us glade evre among, For thus him endeth Hornes song. Jesus, that is of hevene king, Yeve us alle his suete blessing! Amen. (1525–32) (Now they are both dead—may Christ lead them to heaven! Here ends the tale of Horn, who was handsome and not ugly. Let us rejoice continually, for thus the song of Horn comes to its end. May Jesus, who is king of heaven, grant us all his sweet blessing! Amen.)

Here the proximal deictic Nu implies the passage of time since some then in the past, but the temporal location of that starting point is hard to determine: is it the beginning of the song (imagined as having unfolded in the real time of a listener or reader), or is it the more remote past in which Horn and Rymenhild are supposed to have lived their real lives, the past as evoked, for example, in the ﬁnal stanza of Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes?—‘And they are gone—aye, ages long ago | These lovers ﬂed away into the storm’ (Allott 1975: 479). Whatever the answer to that question, the second proximal deictic, Her, pointing to place rather than time, must refer to a written text: here, on this page, the tale ends. As Suzanne Fleischman puts it (1991: 293), ‘the spatial metaphor comes into play only in conjunction with the institution of writing, i.e., with a discourse that unfolds across the space of the page and remains permanently accessible through the tangible, material artifact of the book’.3 Between the beginning and end of King Horn the narrating ‘I’ has shifted roles, from a singer addressing listeners to a writer addressing readers. We could reconcile the two by imagining a storyteller reciting the poem from a written text to which he points when he reaches the 3 Fleischman also notes (1991: 304) that in French narrative ci (here) gradually comes to replace or (now) as ‘the predominant deictic trafﬁc signal for marking the current position in a discourse’ in the course of the thirteenth century. Perret (1982) associates this change to spatial terms in French with the transition to prose as the medium for romances; prose romance came later in English, but spatial terminology preceded it.

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end (‘Look, that’s all there is’), but if we bear in mind that a written text is what we are interpreting, it seems easier to accept that the reason why this ‘I’ is hard to pin down to any speciﬁc role is that the pronoun does not refer to any being equivalent to a real person, but is simply part of the formulaic rhetoric of narration. No individualizing characteristics are attributed to it, any more than to the textual ‘you’ and ‘we’; it is no more than an empty space to be occupied by any user of the poem, whether as reciter or as reader. This explanation is supported by the fact that between the opening and closing lines of the poem there are no other appearances of a narrating ‘I’. Fludernik (1996: 115) writes that ‘What is particularly noteworthy in King Horn is the involvement of the narrator with the story and its protagonists’, but this involvement is strictly limited. The story is told, but there is no indication of anyone telling it, and nothing that evokes a speciﬁc narratorial ‘voice’. This narratorial absence is especially noticeable in the way that changes in the focus of attention, as the story moves repeatedly across the sea among its various pseudo-geographical settings, are never given any narratorial explanation. There is nothing in King Horn corresponding, for instance, to the ‘managerial’ interventions so common in Chaucerian narrative, as in Troilus and Criseyde —‘Now lat hire slepe, and we oure tales holde | Of Troilus’ or ‘Now lat hem rede, and torne we anon | To Pandarus’ (. 932–3, 1709–10).4 Instead, the poet cuts directly from one setting or character to another, often with startling abruptness. The effect corresponds to Benveniste’s deﬁnition of histoire as opposed to discours: ‘No one speaks here; the events seem to narrate themselves.’5 Benveniste has in mind the situation in French, where, as he puts it, strictly ‘historical utterance’ is ‘reserved to the written language’, and is distinguishable by the fact that its ‘fundamental text is the aorist’ (1971: 206, 208; italics in original). In English no such clear-cut distinction obtains as that between the pass´e simple and pass´e compos´e, and most later Middle English romances vary among past, present, and perfect as 4 For historical analysis of these devices and their functions, see Fludernik (2003); this, however, considers narrative only from Chaucer onwards. 5 That situation had long been seen as characteristic of the epic. As Fleischman notes (1983: 295, citing Jauss 1963: 74), ‘Epic narration in general, as Grimm and Hegel had observed, gives the impression of singing itself, autonomously, without an author’s guiding hand’.

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the tense of narrative. These variations are not random and can have important subjectivizing effects; but between the opening and closing lines quoted above the narrative of King Horn shows remarkably little variation of tense. It nearly always employs the past, usually the simple past but sometimes the periphrastic preterite with gin as auxiliary, as in lines such as ‘Rymenhild up gan stonde’ (399) (Rymenhild stood up) or ‘The knight hire gan kesse’ (583) (the knight kissed her). The almost complete absence from King Horn of the present and perfect as narrative tenses may reﬂect its early date, before what has been called the ‘spectacular increase in the occurrence of the historical present about the middle of the 14th century’ (Mustanoja 1960: 486); but it is appropriate that this romance, where there is no glimpse between beginning and end of any narratorial ‘I’, should conﬁne itself almost exclusively to the past tense, which, in Benveniste’s words (1971: 208), ‘is the tense outside the person of the narrator’ or, in those of Fleischman (1990b: 31), ‘is felt to be the vehicle of objective discourse, from which all traces of speaker subjectivity have been eradicated’. Tense switching between past and present is characteristic of oral narrative in its ‘natural state’, and it has been suggested that the extent to which it is preserved in a manuscript may be ‘an index of that manuscript’s proximity to its oral origin’ (Fleischman 1990b: 24 n. 19, summarizing Tristram 1983). If so, the absence of tense switching in King Horn (and, as we shall see, in Havelok) presumably indicates its distance from speech. The story told in this way is largely a narrative of outward actions, omitting much of what the Anglo-Norman poem reveals—often at great length—of the characters’ thoughts and feelings; yet it does include a good many brief glimpses of what no external observer could perceive, narrated as directly as the outward actions. Thus, when the young Horn and his companions are set adrift at sea, we are told, The children dradde therof: Hi wende, to wisse, Of here lif to misse. (120–2) (The children were frightened of it: they supposed, certainly, that they would lose their lives.)

When Rymenhild falls in love with Horn but cannot openly reveal her feelings, the poet reveals them for her:

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He was mest in thoghte; Heo lovede so Horn child That negh heo gan wexe wild, For heo ne mighte at borde With him speke no worde . . . In heorte heo hadde wo, And thus hire bithoghte tho: Heo sende hire sonde. (250–65) (She was in the greatest anxiety; she loved Horn so much that she nearly went mad, because at table she couldn’t exchange a single word with him . . . She was distressed at heart, and then she made this plan: she would send a message.)

When she proposes marriage to Horn, he is worried because his social position is much lower than hers, and ‘Horn tho him bithoghte | What he speke mighte’ (411–12) (Horn then thought to himself what he could say to her). At a later stage, when Horn comes disguised as a poor pilgrim to a feast intended to celebrate Rymenhild’s forthcoming marriage to King Modi, we ﬁnd a passage giving quite a subtle analysis of Rymenhild’s thought. The supposed pilgrim addresses her, alludes cryptically to a dream she had earlier of catching a ﬁsh in her net, and urges her to ‘Drink to Horn of horne’ (1147) (drink to Horn from [a vessel of] horn). At this, Hire heorte bigan to chelde. Ne kneu heo noght his ﬁssing, Ne Horn hymselve nothing; Ac wunder hire gan thinke Whi he bad to Horn drinke. (1150–4) (Her heart began to grow cold. She didn’t recognize his [reference to] ﬁshing, and she didn’t at all recognize Horn himself. But it seemed surprising to her that he told her to drink to Horn.)

Besides such statements about what is going on in the characters’ minds (their hearts, as the poet frequently puts it), presented as conﬁdently as objective truths, the narratorial element in King Horn includes other kinds of subjectivizing material. One consists of explanations or justiﬁcations of narrated events, often in the form of statements beginning ‘For . . .’, as if answering the question, ‘Why did this happen?’ or ‘Why are we being told this?’ When King Murry is riding by the

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seashore, he ﬁnds that Saracens have landed, and they tell him they intend to kill all Christians in his land, starting with himself. The kyng alighte of his stede— For tho he havede nede— And his gode knightes two. (47–9) (The king dismounted from his horse—for then he was obliged to do so—and so did his two good knights.)

The young Horn and his companions are carried by their drifting boat to Westernesse; they meet King Almair, who questions them, and Horn replies on their behalf: He spak for hem alle, Vor so hit most bivalle: He was the faireste, And of wit the beste. (171–4) (He spoke on behalf of all of them, for so it should happen: he was the fairest and the smartest of them.)

When Rymenhild, acting as her own Pandarus, orders her steward to tell Horn that she is sick and he must pay her a private visit, ‘The stuard was in herte wo, | For he nuste what to do’ (275–6) (The steward was distressed at heart, because he did not know what to do). When the visit eventually occurs, Horn, always concerned about propriety, leaves Rymenhild’s bower before dark: ‘Horn tok his leve, | For hit was negh eve’ (463–4) (Horn said farewell, because it was near to evening). At the wedding feast, Horn in his disguise as a poor pilgrim urges Rymenhild to bring him beer to drink, because beggars are often thirsty, and she obligingly pours a gallon into his bowl, ‘For heo wende he were a glotoun’ (1126) (because she supposed he must be a glutton). As the last three examples indicate, what these interventions explain is often the characters’ motives for their actions. The form in which they are expressed, not as independent narrative statements but as explanatory glosses, would seem to imply the play of a narrating consciousness upon the events of the story, yet it is hard to identify any such consciousness as that of a speciﬁc person. Another kind of subjectivizing material included in the narration is evaluative rather than explanatory; it conveys emotional responses to the characters and their situations, encouraging such responses on the part

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of readers or listeners. Sometimes brief prayers, like those in the closing lines, are inserted into the narrative, as when Horn and his companions arrive in Westernesse: Hy metten with Almair king— Crist yeven him his blessing!— King of Westernesse— Crist yive him muchel blisse! (155–8) (They met with Almair the king (may Christ grant him his blessing!), the king of Westernesse (may Christ grant him great blessedness!))

Sometimes these evaluative comments take other forms. Horn tells King Ailmar how he and his companions were set adrift by the Saracens, and Ailmar’s reaction is sympathetic: ‘Thanne spak the gode kyng | (Iwis, he nas no nithing)’ (195–6) (Then the good king spoke (he was certainly not a villain)). As Ailmar is described as a good king, so Rymenhild as one point is referred to as ‘Rymenhild, that swete thing’ (443), while we are told that Fikenhild was ‘the wurste moder child’ (648) (the worst man born of woman). Horn kills the Saracens who slew his father Murry, and the comment made is, ‘His fader deth wel dere hi boghte!’ (886) (they paid very dearly for his father’s death!). Horn’s ship arrives at Westernesse just in time for him to intervene in Rymenhild’s enforced marriage to Modi, and the poet remarks, ‘Horn was in the watere—| Ne mighte he come no latere!’ (1021–2) (Horn was in the harbour—he couldn’t have got there later [i.e. he arrived just in time]!). The gatekeeper of Modi’s castle refuses to let him in (doubtless because of his disreputable disguise), and we are told: Horn gan to the yate turne, And that wiket unspurne. The boye hit scholde abugge— Horn threu him over the brigge. (1075–8) (Horn turned towards the gate, and kicked open the wicket. The knave would pay for it—Horn threw him over the bridge.)

Here emotional participation in the scene is so strong that the line ‘The boye hit scholde abugge’ could easily be interpreted as an instance of free indirect style, conveying not just a narratorial anticipation of what is to come but Horn’s own thought—‘The knave shall pay for that!’—absorbed into the past-tense form of the narration. The simpler

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instances of evaluation—admiration for good characters and contempt for bad ones—are of a kind common in Middle English romances, which regularly invite their audiences to cheer the heroes, sigh for the heroines, and hiss the villains, but this is one of a number of places in King Horn where the boundary between emotional participation and revelation of a character’s inner life is somewhat blurred. How then are we to interpret the method of narration in King Horn? There is no conspicuous inconsistency among the comments and exclamations to prevent us from attributing them to a single internal narrator, and many of the details I have given, especially perhaps the glimpses of the characters’ inner lives, would seem to indicate that this is a case of an ‘omniscient narrator’. Yet since in real life there is no such thing as an omniscient narrator, reference to this ‘enigmatic personage’, as Kuroda points out, explains nothing but requires the invocation of a literary convention that itself needs explaining. There is no need for me to repeat Kuroda’s more fundamental arguments (1976: 114–15) against the ‘communicational theory’ of narrative; it is enough here to state that nothing in King Horn serves to individualize any narrating person as part of the poetic text. Even the emotional interventions are as formulaic as the brief appearances of a storytelling ‘I’ at the beginning and end. The narratorial material we have been examining, like the objective events of the story, is all part of what was created by the poem’s author, the human being, now long dead, who actually composed King Horn—created by him not ex nihilo but out of the common resources of vernacular storytelling, and often, of course, out of speciﬁc existing material such as the Anglo-Norman romance. Given that writing severs discourse from its context of origin, there is no way of telling whether the subjectivizing elements in the text really corresponded to that author’s feelings—whether, for example, he personally thought Rymenhild sweet and Fikenhild the worst of men—or whether he included statements to that effect merely so as to provoke emotional engagement on the audience’s part.6 (And if we could tell, it would surely add nothing to our understanding of the poem.) It seems clear, though, that the author did not create a 6 While most obviously true of writing, this is also true of speech (hence Derrida’s categorization of speech as archi-´ecriture): even if the author were in our presence, afﬁrming the sincerity of the narratorial elements in his text, we could still not be perfectly sure that he was telling the truth; but at least we could question him further.

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textual narrator to whom those feelings could be attributed, nor yet one who had the mysterious power of reading the characters’ hearts. Yet subjectivity is diffused throughout King Horn, and it might still seem that we need to identify some person whose subjectivity it is. In an earlier study of the poem’s narrative style (Spearing 1987a: 24–43; cf. Spearing 1984), I suggested that a cinematic analogy might help modern readers to respond to the way it works. The style of King Horn, conspicuously bare, lacks the richness of texture that later periods have come to see as requisite for poetry itself (for example, it is almost completely lacking in verbal metaphors), but, as I showed, it is especially marked by synecdoche. Events are graphically evoked not by any kind of comparison, explicit or implied, but by the substitution of some detail for the whole. When the Saracens seize young Horn and his companions to set them adrift, the poet writes, ‘The children hi broghte to stronde, | Wringinde here honde’ (111–12) (They brought the children to the shore, wringing their hands)—thus substituting the single detail of wringing hands for a full description of the children’s grief and terror. Later, when the adult Horn meets invading Saracens who boast that they will seize Suddene and slay its inhabitants, all we are told of his response is: ‘Horn gan his swerd gripe, | And on his arme wype’ (605–6) (Horn gripped his sword, and wiped it on his arm). Those two actions effectively epitomize the businesslike determination of his resistance. And, to give a slightly longer example, Rymenhild, awaiting her forced marriage to King Modi, sends a messenger to Horn asking for help; the messenger delivers her appeal, but is drowned on the return journey. The poet writes: Rymenhild undude the dure-pin Of the hus ther heo was in, To loke with hire ighe If heo oght of Horn isighe. Tho fond heo the knave adrent, That he hadde for Horn isent, And that scholde Horn bringe; Hire ﬁngres he gan wringe. (975–82) (Rymenhild unlocked the door-bolt of the house where she was staying, to look with her eyes whether she could see anything of Horn. Then she found drowned the knight whom she had sent for Horn and who was to bring Horn with him. She wrung her ﬁngers.)

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What would be a lengthy sequence of events in reality is reduced to a series of vivid textual details: the unbolting of the door, the casting of her eyes over the sea, the wringing of her ﬁngers. The modern equivalent to this synecdochic narrative style is to be found, I suggested, not in literature but in cinema, in the use of close-up shots to compress events into vivid pictorial images. Thus in the last example we have the verbal equivalent to a series of elliptically edited close-ups: Rymenhild’s ﬁngers drawing back the bolt, her eyes gazing out over the water, the corpse of the knight, and then her ﬁngers again as she wrings her hands in anguish. The difﬁculty modern readers sometimes experience in following the abrupt transitions of the medieval poem might be paralleled in the difﬁculty those unaccustomed to ﬁlm and television would have in grasping the narrative content conveyed by a cinematic language, developed over a century, of close-ups and long shots, alternating camera angles and elliptical cutting. If this analogy holds good, it can be extended to explain the source of the subjectivization of the narratorial element in King Horn. Discussion of narrative over the last decades, almost invariably taking for granted that ‘there can be no narrative without a narrator’, has made it hard to imagine how a narrative can be pervaded with subjectivity without there being some ﬁctive person from whom that subjectivity originates. King Horn has not been much discussed by critics, and I do not know of any study that reads it strictly as a story told by a textual narrator whose attitudes are intended to be distinguishable from those of the poet. Likely enough, some such study is in preparation even as I write, but I cannot claim in this case, as I shall when discussing Chaucer, that the medieval poem needs to be rescued from a modern tradition of misreading. But perhaps I can make a pre-emptive strike by proposing in advance a way of reading it suggested by the cinematic analogy. What we ﬁnd in most parts of nearly all cinematic narratives is that each shot or sequence of shots is pervaded with subjectivity (often through some visual equivalent to deixis, as in the proximal–distal effect of close-up followed by long shot), yet what is observed does not usually imply some continuous observing consciousness responsible for telling the story. In ﬁlm, as Andrew Gibson writes (1996: 148), ‘we readily conceive of a non-human narrator at work, precisely in the fact, for instance, that ﬁlm can reveal the appearance of things when no-one is actually present. Film can give us sensibilia, objects that have the same status as sense-data

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without necessarily being data to any mind.’7 In watching a ﬁlm we may sometimes understand that we are being shown what one of the characters sees, but in general the point of view is constantly shifting and cannot be identiﬁed with that of a character, or of anyone else at all. In that sense the narrative is subjectivized yet impersonal. We may be aware of the director’s attempts to affect us in certain ways, yet, unless a speciﬁc narrator is indicated by some such device as voice-over, we are not tempted to hypothesize a human narrator, na¨ıve or sophisticated, reliable or unreliable, as a feature of the ﬁlm text itself. And that is surely how King Horn works. Subjectivity was textually encoded in the poem in the words of the unknown and now dead poet (as transmitted by a series of equally unknown and now dead scribes); it pervades the text without having any speciﬁc source or centre within it. This, then, though it conveys subjectivity, is what Barthes and Scholes-and-Kellogg declare to be impossible, a story without a storyteller, a narratorless narrative, a poetic narrative that works like a ﬁlm.

Havelok My second example of a Middle English romance dates from about 1300. It survives in a complete (or almost complete) form only in a single manuscript—as it happens, one of the three containing King Horn. It has several things in common with King Horn: it is anonymous and retells in a strongly partisan spirit a story taken from earlier AngloNorman writings (in this case Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis of 1135–40 and the anonymous Lai d’Haveloc of 1190–1220), the life-history of a man of royal birth who is the victim of injustice in childhood and has to endure ‘hungre and . . . cold’ and ‘mani hevi swink’ (many heavy labours) (2454–6)8 in the struggle to regain his inheritance. But Havelok, as we shall see, is unlike King Horn in that it is far from appearing to be a narratorless narrative. It is also a longer poem than King Horn, and one written in longer lines—vigorous four-stress couplets—and it gives far more concrete and practical detail, often 7 Gibson is summarizing Banﬁeld’s proposal in Banﬁeld (1987), in which she reconsiders one element of the narrative theory expounded in Banﬁeld (1982). See also Banﬁeld (1990: 29). There are theorists who argue for the necessity of hypothesizing a narrator for ﬁlm (e.g. Chatman 1990, reversing the view taken in Chatman 1978), but this seems contrary to most people’s experience of viewing ﬁlms. 8 Havelok quoted from Shepherd (1995).

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relating to work, trade, and the means of earning a living, so that at times it seems an epic of the daily life of the third estate, through which Havelok has to rise to regain his kingdom. Earlier scholars often assumed that it was a minstrel composition for a popular audience, but now it is generally thought that the poet was ‘more probably a trained cleric than a wayside entertainer’ (Barron 1987: 72)—a cleric of some importance, learning, and literary awareness, who was writing for a knightly or baronial public. The picture of life he gives includes not only the work of ﬁshermen and cooks but ‘much of the legal and feudal processes and of the local administration of his time’ (Smithers 1987: p. lix), and it seems probable that Havelok was meant to appeal to readers and listeners who were familiar with such matters and would, for example, sympathize with the reaction of the hero’s ally, the Danish nobleman Ubbe, after he has ﬁrst met him and received from him the gift of an enormously valuable ring: ‘Deus!’ hwat Ubbe, ‘qui ne were he knith? I woth that he is swithe with; Betere semede him to bere Helm on heved, sheld and spere, Than to beye and selle ware— Allas, that he shal ther-with fare! Goddot, wile he trowe me, Chaffare shal he late be!’ (1650–7) (‘Lord!’ said Ubbe, ‘why couldn’t he be a knight? I know that he is very strong; he would be better suited to bear a helmet on his head, a shield and a spear, than to buy and sell goods—alas, that he must busy himself with that! God knows, if he chooses to trust me, he will give up trade!’)

Like King Horn (and many other romances), Havelok begins with a narratorial ‘I’ addressing an audience as ‘you’: Herknet to me, gode men— Wives, maydnes, and alle men— Of a tale that Ich you wile telle, Wo-so it wile here and ther-to duelle. (1–4) (Listen to me, good men—wives, maidens, and all people—concerning a tale I intend to tell you, for whoever wants to hear and will tarry to do so.)

Then comes a brief ‘trailer’ of the story itself, and this is followed by more lines addressed to listeners before the narration really gets under way:

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That ye mowen nou y-here And the tale ye mowen y-lere, At the biginning of ure tale Fil me a cuppe of ful god ale, And wile drinken, her I spelle, That Crist us shilde alle fro helle: Krist late us hevere so for to do That we moten comen Him to, And, wit that it mote ben so, Benedicamus Domino! Her I schal biginnen a rym (Krist us yeve wel god fyn!): The rym is maked of Havelok. (11–23) (So that you may now hear and may learn the tale, at the beginning of our tale ﬁll me a cup of very good ale, and, before I tell the story, I will drink to this: that Christ may protect us all from hell. May Christ grant us always to act in such a way that we may come to his presence, and, in order that it may be so, let us bless the Lord! Here I shall begin a rhyme (may Christ grant us a good ending!): the rhyme is composed about Havelok.)

It is easy to see from these lines why Havelok should once have been thought of as a minstrel composition, but what follows indicates that the poet is imitating an already stylized minstrel manner, in a way that will evoke for readers (and for listeners too, for the poem was no doubt intended to be read aloud) the jollity and unsophisticated piety of a convivial gathering. That does not mean that he created a minstrel narrator as part of his text; or, if he did, it is a narrator lasting for only a few moments. Michael Swanton (1987: 196) asserts that ‘The minstrel ﬁgure is clearly sustained throughout’, but better guidance is provided by Rosalind Field (1999: 168) in some more general comments on Middle English romances: ‘the romantic image of the minstrel is internalized into the romance genre to provide the audience with a sense of the past and of community. It is a powerful narrative device, blocking the view of a more prosaic actuality—that of the lone reader, the clerics using their library, the family book.’ The narrative style of Havelok varies strikingly from one passage to another; and even when there are further glimpses of the ‘minstrel ﬁgure’ they tend to be self-cancelling. An instance of this occurs in the account of the celebrations when Havelok is acknowledged as king of Denmark. They include jousting,

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wrestling, ‘Romanz-reding on the bok’ (2328) (reading of romances from manuscript) alongside minstrel performances, the baiting of bulls and boars, and lastly gifts of clothes (a common medieval form of generosity from social superiors). Of these the poet adds, Ther was so mike yeft of clothes, That, thou I swore you grete othes, I ne wore nouth ther-offe trod— That may I ful wel swere, bi God! (2336–9) (There were such large gifts of clothes that, though I swore you great oaths, I would not be believed—that I may very well swear, by God!)

At ﬁrst sight these lines could be read, as commentators have suggested, as a minstrel’s attempt to stimulate his audience’s generosity (Smithers 1987: 138; Shepherd 1995: 58 n. 7). Yet they can only be part of the bookish poem’s intermittent ﬁction of minstrelsy (for what minstrels do in the preceding lines is beat tabours, not read 3,000-line narratives aloud from manuscript); and the lines possess an intricacy of paradox—I can swear that if I swore how generous the gifts were you wouldn’t believe me—that undermines the illusion of a narrator’s presence to listeners as creator of the words they are hearing, and of their presence to him as recipients of what those words communicate. One striking illustration of a style different from that of the minstrellike opening occurs not far into the story. Birkabeyn is described as a happy and successful King of Denmark, but then, the poet adds, He that wile non forbere, Riche ne poure, king ne kaysere— Deth—him tok than he best wolde Liven; but hyse dayes were fulde. (352–5) (He who will spare no one, rich or poor, king or emperor—Death—seized him when he most wished to live; but his days were complete.)

Here the poet combines rhetorical devices to produce an elevation of style extremely unusual in Middle English romance, and perhaps indeed unique before Chaucer: personiﬁcation of death, ﬁrst conveyed indirectly through circumlocutio (‘He who . . .’) and then made explicit.9 9 Smithers (1988: 197) notes the frequency of ‘periphrastic apostrophe’ in Old French and Anglo-Norman narratives and its occurrence in Havelok, but does not mention this unusual combination of periphrasis with personiﬁcation.

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A Chaucerian parallel, though much more elaborately developed, might be the proem to Book III of Troilus and Criseyde, which addresses Venus in a long series of periphrases before ﬁnally naming her. And in Havelok this rhetorical heightening is accompanied by a metrical effect equally unusual in pre-Chaucerian verse, the enjambement that puts a line-ending between the auxiliary wolde and the inﬁnitive liven (seeming to mimic Death’s sudden separation of the will from its goal), and that also marks a heightening of style above the end-stopped jogtrot of normal Middle English rhyming narrative.10 If we try to envisage a narrator as the source of these lines, it must be a very different narrator from that of poem’s beginning. In the lines just discussed there is no narratorial ﬁrst person; but Havelok, unlike King Horn, includes many metanarrative interventions of a narrating ‘I’ as the story proceeds—indeed, it has been observed that ‘the emphasis on the rˆole of the narrator as an intermediary between the story and the audience . . . is more consistently employed than in most other English romances’ (Mehl 1969: 167). As will become clear, though, the poem has less a single narrator than a series of narrating ‘I’s enacting a variety of different roles, with little in common except perhaps an insistent piety, usual enough in Middle English romance but here intensiﬁed by the clerical poet; while between the interventions there are gaps in which ‘the events seem to narrate themselves’—nearly always in the past tense, ‘the tense outside the person of the narrator’.11 Havelok illustrates clearly that the ﬁrst person of a narrative, even when a prominent part of the text, does not necessarily refer to an ontologically consistent human being. The story told, like that of King Horn, requires several shifts of focus from one setting to another (in this case between England and Denmark), but in Havelok these are achieved not by elliptical cutting but by explicit narratorial guidance. These transitional moments, along with the beginning and end, are among the most noticeable points of narratorial intervention. The story 10 For Chaucerian examples of enjambement as a feature of an elevated style, see Troilus and Criseyde . 57–8, 64–5, and 76–7 quoted below, p. 52. The last two examples similarly separate auxiliary from inﬁnitive. 11 One exception may occur in the line referring to Goldeborw’s compelled marriage to Havelok, ‘He ys hire yaf and she as tok’ (1174), perhaps corrupt, but possibly meaning ‘He is given to her and she has accepted him’, with the perfect tenses presumably marking the conclusiveness of the union.

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begins in England, where Goldeborw, daughter of King Athelwold, is imprisoned after his death by the treacherous regent Godrich in order that his son can usurp the kingdom. The ﬁrst transition takes us from England to Denmark, where a similar course of events is going to lead to the exile of Havelok, son of the late king Birkabeyn. The poet writes: Of Goldeborw shul we nou laten, That nouth ne blinneth for-to graten Ther sho liggeth in prisoun. (Jhesu Crist, that Lazarun To live broucte fro dede-bondes, He lese hire wit his hondes— And leve sho mote him y-se Heye hangen on galwe-tre That hire haved in sorwe brouth, So as sho ne misdede nouth!) Say we nou forth in hure spelle. In that time, so it befelle, Was in the lond of Denemark A riche King and swythe stark. The name of him was Birkabeyn. (328–42) (Now we must leave Goldeborw, who never ceases to weep where she lies in prison. (May Jesus Christ, who brought Lazarus to life from the bonds of death, release her with his own hands—and grant that she may see hanging high on a gallows the man who brought her into sorrow, even though she had done no wrong!) Now let us proceed with our story. At that time it so happened that in the land of Denmark there was a rich and very powerful king; his name was Birkabeyn.)

Here the ﬁrst-person plural in lines 328 and 338 refers, like those of the poem’s opening, to a teller and his listeners. The prolonged optative construction between 328 and 338 implies a teller emotionally engaged in reporting a story that exists outside his control; and the rare present tense of lines 329–30 (Goldeborw never ceases to weep where she lies in prison) implies a story proceeding in the same temporal frame as its narration, so that the outcome must be uncertain and can therefore be an appropriate topic of prayer. But the poet immediately reverts to his normal past tense, and proceeds to relate the hero’s enfances. Godard orders the ﬁsherman Grim to set the young Havelok adrift in a boat, but Grim and his wife take pity on him, see on him physical marks

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of royalty, and keep him with them. When Grim asks Godard for the reward he was promised for disposing of the child, Godard treats him contemptuously, and so Grim prepares a ship and sets sail with his family and Havelok. Now the second transition occurs, because at once a wind springs up, And drof hem intil Engelond (That al was sithen in his hond, His that Havelok was the name; But or, he havede michel shame, Michel sorwe, and michel tene— And yete he gat it, al bidene!— Als ye shulen nou forthward here, Yf that ye wilen ther-to here). In Humber Grim bigan to lende. (725–33) (And drove them to England (which was subsequently all in the hands of him whose name was Havelok; but before that, he suffered great shame, great sorrow, and great afﬂiction—and yet he possessed it completely!—as you shall hear from now on, if you will listen to the story). Grim settled in Humberside.)

Here a narratorial intervention might seem unnecessary, because the story’s movement from Denmark to England could be conveyed simply by following the journey of a group of characters, but the poet intervenes all the same, addressing listeners (‘you shall hear from now on’) to tell in advance what is still to come, but doing this in reverse order, summarizing ﬁrst the ultimate outcome (Havelok’s possession of England) and then the sufferings the hero must undergo before that can come about. And the summary is in the past tense (England was in his possession, he suffered much trouble, yet he possessed it completely), implying that the entire story already exists in the past, as history, and cannot be changed—just the opposite of what was implied by the tense-structure of the previous transition. How the poet dealt with the third transition, from England to Denmark, we cannot tell, because it must have occurred in a missing part of the text, a leaf of approximately 180 lines having been cut out of the only manuscript. After this there is one more transition, to bring the story ﬁnally back to England, and this is handled in a way that superﬁcially resembles the cross-cutting of King Horn but is in fact much more complicated. Godard is defeated and captured by Havelok’s men,

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and is savagely executed for his treachery, with the poet commenting, ‘Datheit hwo recke; he was fals!’ (2511) (Cursed be anyone who cares; he was a traitor!). Havelok now rules Denmark, and he vows that he will found a Benedictine priory ‘for Grim’ (2521), that is, to provide prayers in perpetuity for the beneﬁt of Grim’s soul, in gratitude for all he did for him when he was a helpless boy. Havelok had learned of Grim’s death over a thousand lines earlier, but now the poet leaps ahead to a time when Grim is buried at the port named after him, Grimsby, and then turns back to Havelok’s landing there to regain England, which is his through Goldeborw. It is as though the mention of Grimsby has provided an associative link; and even then, in this highly sophisticated, syntactically complex, and oblique transition, the invasion is narrated not directly but only as something of which Godrich has received news: (And ther-of held he wel his oth, For he it made, God it woth, In the tun ther Grim was graven, That of Grim yet haves the naven— Of Grim bidde Ich na more spelle.) But wan Godrich herde telle, Of Cornwayle that was Erl— That fule traytour, that mixed cherl!— That Havelok was King of Denemark, And ferde with him, strong and stark, Comen Engelond withinne, Engelond al for-to winne, And that she that was so fayr, That was of Engelond rith eir, Was comen up at Grimesbi, He was ful sorful and sori. (2526–41) ((And he fulﬁlled his vow to do that, for he built it, God knows, in the town where Grim was buried, and which yet bears Grim’s name—and of Grim I wish to tell no more.) But when Godrich, who was Earl of Cornwall—that foul traitor, that shitty churl!—heard the news that Havelok was King of Denmark, and had entered England with a strong and powerful army to conquer England, and that she who was so beautiful, and who was the true heir to England, had landed at Grimsby, he was very dismayed and distressed.)

The proleptic narration in the past tense of the founding of the priory, which must of course be supposed to happen after the invasion of

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England and the defeat of Godrich, once more implies that the events of the story belong to a history beyond the poet’s control.12 There is one other, non-transitional, point at which the poet anticipates what is to come. When Havelok gives Ubbe the ring so as to ensure his support, the poet inserts a proverbial generalization and then hints at what is to follow to conﬁrm its truth: He was ful wis that ﬁrst yaf mede, And so was Havelok ful wise here; He solde his gold ring ful dere— Was nevere non so dere sold Fro chapmen, neyther yung ne old: That sholen ye forthward ful wel leren Yif that ye wile the storie heren. (1635–41) (He who ﬁrst gave a reward was very wise, and so was Havelok very wise here; he sold his gold ring at a very high price—none was ever sold so dearly by merchants, whether young or old: you will learn that in due course if you choose to hear the story.)

The reference to hearing the story (or history) indicates oral delivery, but the here of line 1635, like that at the end of King Horn, suggests a position in a written text. (It is striking how often apparently incompatible references to orality and textuality are juxtaposed in medieval narratives;13 such juxtapositions ought to discourage us from taking literally the idea of narration as speech.) After this, in the second half of the poem, there are several other points at which the poet refers

12 Smithers (1987: 144) notes that the founding of the priory is not mentioned in the Anglo-Norman sources and that there is no record of any such priory at Grimsby (though there was one at Lincoln). My concern is with the way the poet treats his material as history, not with whether it can actually be documented. It should be added that the obliqueness of this transition as it stands in the received text could conceivably be a result of scribal abbreviation. Though there is only one manuscript (Bodleian Laud Misc.108) in which Havelok is found (almost) complete, there exist fragments of another manuscript (Cambridge University Library Add. 4407(19)) containing 57 lines, which correspond to only 45 lines in Laud. This might imply that Laud generally gives an abbreviated version; and since ten of the additional Cambridge lines contain proleptic narration of the punishment of Godard, it could be that it was in the vicinity of such prolepsis that omissions were most likely to occur. It is equally possible, though, that the Cambridge text was lengthened by scribal additions. 13 A famous example occurs in Chaucer’s Miller’s Prologue: ‘whoso list it nat yheere, | Turne over the leef’ (. 3176–7).

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more brieﬂy to his handling of the story, usually in order to assure listeners or readers that he will not take up more of their time than necessary. At the feast given by Ubbe for Havelok and Goldeborw, he lists some of the dishes, and then breaks off with: Of the mete for-to telle, Ne of the win, bidde I nout dwelle; That is the storie for-to lenge— It wolde anuye this fayre genge! (1732–5) (I do not wish to linger in telling of the food or of the wine; that is to prolong the story—it would be tedious to this fair company!)

The courtliness of this deference to a fair company implies a different cultural setting and narratorial role from those of the poem’s opening, with its noisy drinkers, and equally from those suggested by the clerkly rhetoric of lines 352–5. It seems clear that we need to think not of any consistent ﬁction of a narrator within the text, but rather of a poet moving ﬂexibly from one textual role to another as he tells his story. A last illustration of narratorial intervention to comment on the telling of the story can be found in the poem’s closing lines, and here again the poet textualizes himself as a different ‘I’: Nu have ye herd the gest al thoru Of Havelok and of Goldeborw— Hw he weren born, and hw fedde, And hwou he woren with wronge ledde In here youthe, with trecherie, With tresoun, and with felounye; And hwou the swikes haveden tith Reven hem that was here rith; And hwou he weren wreken wel, Have Ich seyd you everil del— And forthi Ich wolde biseken you That haven herd the rim nu, That ilke of you, with gode wille, Seye a Pater Noster stille For him that haveth the rym maked— And ther-fore fele nihtes waked— That Jesu Crist his soule bringe Biforn his Fader at his endinge. (2984–3001)

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(Now you have heard from beginning to end the saga of Havelok and Goldeborw—how they were born, and how nourished, and how in their youth they were led astray by treachery, by treason, and by felony; and how the traitors had planned to deprive them of what was rightly theirs; and I have told you in full detail how they were well avenged—and so I would beseech you who have now heard the rhyme that each of you should say with good will a silent paternoster for him who has composed the rhyme—staying awake many nights to do so—that Jesus Christ should bring his soul before his Father at his death.)

Now you have heard the whole story which I have said : these lines revert to the opening picture of oral delivery, yet they are part of a complex and clerkly summarizing sentence, neatly holding together the story’s threads and themes (treachery on the one hand, just vengeance on the other) by the ﬁvefold repetition of clauses beginning ‘how . . .’ And the poem ends with the poet’s thought of his own future ending (a redoubling of the closural effect), and with his request for prayers for the beneﬁt of his soul at that last moment—prayers to reward his labour not as a teller but as a maker standing outside what he has made, the composer of the poem, not its performer. In this epilogue he presents himself in a new role, as a worker, like those with whom his royal hero identiﬁed earlier in the poem when he exclaimed, Swinken Ich wolde for mi mete; It is no shame for-to swinken. The man that may wel eten and drinken That nouth ne have but on swink long— To liggen at hom it is ful strong. (798–802) (I would wish to work for my food—there is no shame in working! The man allowed to eat and drink well ought not to have those things except in proportion to work—to lie around at home is very shameful.)

The poet’s swink, his labour, which receives the poem’s ﬁnal emphasis, has not been to say anything, but to produce a written text by candlelight. Beside these interventions to comment on the process and product of narration, a narratorial ‘I’, explicit or implied, frequently intrudes to serve other purposes. One of the most important has already been exempliﬁed in lines quoted above, about Godrich—‘That fule traytour, that mixed cherl!’ (2533)—and about the hanging of Godard: ‘Datheit hwo recke; he was fals!’ (2511). Similar dismissive interjections about Godard’s sufferings as he gets his reward for treachery occur shortly

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before this, when Havelok’s ally Robert stabs his right arm—‘Ther-of was ful litel harum!’ (2409) (There was little to regret in that!)—and when the traitor is being tightly bound: Godard begs for mercy, but ‘Datheit that on that ther-fore let!’ (2447) (Cursed be the man who lets that stop him!). This kind of partisanship, noted above as a feature of King Horn, appears repeatedly in Havelok in the form of prayers or curses, sometimes quite lengthy and fervent, in which the ‘I’ is understood rather than explicit. On the death of King Birkabeyn, the poet prays: Jesu Crist, that makede mone On the mirke nith to shine, Wite his soule fro helle-pine, And leve that it mote wone In heveneriche with Godes Sone. (403–7) (May Jesus Christ, who created the moon to shine in the dark night, protect his soul from the pain of hell, and grant that it might dwell in the heavenly kingdom with the Son of God.)

And shortly afterwards, when Godard, appointed regent as Birkabeyn’s supposed friend, begins to show his villainy towards the young Havelok and his siblings, the poet calls down an elaborate curse on him: Have he the malisun today Of alle that evre speken may— Of patriark and of pope, And of prest with loken kope, Of monekes and hermites bothe . . . [one or more lines missing] And of the leve holi Rode That God himselve ran on blode. Crist warie him with His mouth! Waried wrthe he of north and suth, Offe alle men that speken kunne, Of Crist that maude mone and sunne! (426–36) (May he have the malediction today of all those capable of speech—of patriarch and of pope, and of priest in fastened cloak, of both monks and hermits . . . and of the precious holy Cross on which God himself shed His blood. May Christ curse him with his own mouth! Let him be cursed by the north and the south, by all men able to speak, and by Christ who made the moon and the sun!)

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The well-informed and authoritative ecclesiastic who has to be imagined as source of this comprehensive malediction and of a later prayer for vengeance on Havelok’s behalf— Jesu Crist, that makede to go The halte, and the doumbe speken, Havelok, the of Godard wreken! (542–4) (May Jesus Christ, who made the lame walk and the dumb speak, avenge you, Havelok, on Godard!)

—is obviously very different from the minstrel of the opening lines, humbly requesting attention and a drink. But one thing these various narrating and commenting ‘I’s have in common is that they occupy spaces distinct from that of the story itself. The story constitutes a certain reality, past and yet paradoxically present, separate from the other reality of narration, which occurs today (426) and yet can address the hero as thou (544) and can hope to inﬂuence the past to which his story belongs by pleas for divine intercession. This ambiguous relation between the narration and what is narrated is at its hardest to interpret when it concerns the inner lives of the story’s characters. The general topic of the narration of subjectivity has been of great interest to narratologists, but study of a medieval narrative such as Havelok illustrates the inadequacy of narratologies that claim universal validity while being based on assumptions that apply only to relatively recent texts. One such assumption is that a clear distinction can be drawn between ﬁctional narrative and what K¨ate Hamburger calls ‘reality statement’. For Hamburger, as we have seen, a distinctive feature of ﬁctional narrative is that it permits ‘the use of verbs of inner action with reference to the third-person, and derivable from this the narrated monologue [erlebte Rede]’ (1973: 134).14 (I shall return shortly to ‘narrated monologue’.) As Hamburger remarks, if we consult our experience we shall ‘recall that we can never say of another real person: he thought or is thinking, felt or is feeling, believed or believes, etc.’ (1973: 82). The attempt to ﬁnd markers of ﬁctionality in language 14 The supposedly universal distinction between ‘narrative ﬁction’ and ‘non-ﬁctional narrative’ has recently reappeared in Culler (2004: 27): ‘The basic convention of literature is that narrative sentences not produced by characters are true, whereas in nonﬁction similar statements would have a different status.’

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itself is of obvious importance, but, as I have argued, it depends on assumptions about the difference between ﬁction and history that do not seem to correspond to medieval thought or to apply to medieval narratives. Thorlac Turville-Petre has written that, ‘Though we are accustomed to classing Havelok as a romance, it would be closer to the medieval view of the work to call it a history’ (1994: 121; see also Field 1991). In the one manuscript that gives more than a fragmentary text the poem is headed (as if it were a saint’s life, not to be understood as ﬁction) Incipit vita Havelok, quondam Rex Anglie et Denemarchie (Here begins the life of Havelok, formerly King of England and of Denmark), and much local detail of the setting in Grimsby strongly suggests that for the poet it was more than ﬁction. Smithers reproduces an early thirteenth-century Grimsby town seal depicting Havelok along with two other characters from the poem, Goldeborw and Grim; he also notes that Mannyng in his Chronicle seems to distinguish between oral tales told about Havelok by ‘lowed men’ (uneducated people) and the (presumably authentic) ‘story that we writen fynde’, perhaps in the poem itself (1987: ﬁg. 1 and 160–7).15 As with most medieval romances, Havelok’s story is not invented—not told but retold. One of the earlier versions, in Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, tells it as part of the history of the English; another ‘summary but skilfully told version’ (Smithers 1987: p. lxv) occurs in an Anglo-Norman prose legendary history of Britain; and the Havelok poet’s linking of Grim with Grimsby, ‘That of Grim yet haves the naven’ (which still bears the name of Grim) (2529), underlines the claim to historicity. The Lincolnshire connection, grounding history in a familiar topography, is ﬁrst stressed in an earlier passage in the poem: on landing in England, ‘In Lindeseye, rith at the north ende’ (734) (in Lindsey [a district of Lincolnshire], right at the northern end), Grim built a cottage a little way inland, And, for that Grim that place aute, The stede of Grim the name laute, So that Grimesbi it calle That ther-offe speken alle— 15 Story in medieval English (as in Mannyng’s prologue, lines 69 and 140, and Wife of Bath’s Prologue, line 693, both quoted in Ch. 1) tends towards the ‘history’ end of the ‘history’/‘tale’ spectrum.

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And so shulen men callen it ay, Bituene this and Domesday. (743–8) (And because Grim possessed that spot, the place received Grim’s name, so that it is called Grimsby by all who speak of it—and so shall men always call it, from this time to Doomsday.)

Havelok may be quite unhistorical to our eyes in its blending of recollections of the earlier Viking ascendency with thirteenth-century ideals of kingship, but the poet clearly expected his poem, for all the folktale conventionality of its underlying plot, to be read as an account of events that had really happened in the past, and to which the present bore tangible witness. This blurring of the supposedly clear-cut frontier between ﬁction and history is reﬂected in Havelok’s varying treatments of ‘inner action’. At one extreme, the characters’ thoughts and feelings are expressed outwardly in soliloquies, conveyed by the poet in oratio recta, and therefore in the ﬁrst person. Thus, when he realizes how the English admire Goldeborw, Tho bigan Godrich to sike, And seyde, ‘Wether she sholde be Quen and levedi over me? Hwether sho sholde al Engelond, And me and mine, haven in hire hond? Datheit hwo it hire thave— Shal sho it nevere more have! Sholde Ic yeve a fole—a therne!— Engelond, thou sho it yerne?’ (291–9) (Then Godrich began to sigh, and said, ‘Is she to be queen and lady over me? Is she to have all England, and me and mine, under her control? Cursed be he who would allow it to her!—never shall she have it! Am I to give England to a fool—a mere girl!—just because she desires it?’)

Linguistically this is in keeping with Hamburger’s rules for ‘reality statement’; the only problem raised by this and other soliloquies is not linguistic but epistemological (how could the narrator know what a character says when soliloquizing, presumably in private?), and that problem exists only for those who adhere to a narrator theory of narrative. Such soliloquies stand in place of representations of ‘inner action’, and indeed at times the poet introduces them with ‘he thought’

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rather than ‘he said’. They belong to the category sometimes deﬁned as ‘quoted interior monologue’, which, according to Cohn (1978: 58), ‘became a fully established technique about the middle of the nineteenth century’—another statement that illustrates the danger of theorizing about narrative on too narrow a historical basis, since this technique was already fully established in medieval romance. An interesting example is Godard’s parallel soliloquy about Havelok, a speech that even more clearly presents the process of his thought, not just its product: Thoucte he, als he him bi-stod, Starinde als he were wod, ‘Yif I late him lives go, He micte me wirchen michel wo— Grith ne get I neveremo; He may me waiten for-to slo— And yf he were brouct of live, And mine children wolden thrive, Loverdinges after me Of al Denemark micten he be. God it wite, he shal ben ded— Wile I taken non other red! I shal do casten him in the she; Ther I wile that he drenth be, Abouten his hals an anker god That he ne ﬂete in the ﬂod.’ (507–22) (He thought as he stood alongside him, staring as if he were mad, ‘If I let him go alive, he might do me great harm—I shall never be safe; he may lie in wait to kill me—and if he were killed, and my children should prosper, they might be lords of all Denmark after me. May God be my witness, he shall die—I’ll follow no other course! I shall have him thrown into the sea; there I wish him to be drowned, with a heavy anchor about his neck, so that he won’t ﬂoat in the water.’)

First comes a relatively crude notation of the outward sign of inner turmoil, as it might have appeared in any Middle English romance—‘Starinde als he were wod’—but this is superseded by a much subtler account of the way Godard arrives at his decision. The interior monologue convincingly imagines Godard’s train of thought, as the need to ensure his own safety and his children’s success leads him to decide to have Havelok drowned, with the anchor to weigh the

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body down and prevent its discovery coming as a happy afterthought. Hamburger, like other narratologists, would presumably never have encountered, in the post-medieval literature on which her narratology is based, any such case of a third person’s thought represented as if it were oratio recta, so it is hard to know how she would classify it. But immediately before this we ﬁnd a clear instance of ‘the use of verbs of inner action with reference to the third-person’ which for her is a marker of ﬁctionality. In the four lines preceding Godard’s ‘soliloquy’ the poet had written: Of Avelok rewede him ful sore— And thoucte he wolde that he ded wore, But on that he nouth wit his hend Ne drepe him nouth—that fule fend! (503–6) (He felt great pity for Havelok—and thought that he wished he were dead, except only that he couldn’t kill him with his own hands—that foul devil!)

The psychological insight is persuasive: Godard wants Havelok dead, yet cannot bring himself to kill the boy with his own hands. Pity, or self-deception, or cowardice? The complexity is perhaps more than the poet can bear, or more than he thought his audience could bear, and he dismisses it impatiently with the exclamation that reduces Godard once more to a stereotyped villain. (The coexistence in Havelok of crude stereotyping with subtle analysis of inner life is manifestly not to be attributed to a textual narrator controlled by the poet; it is rather the textual trace of the poet’s own struggle to go beyond the existing norms of Middle English romance, and to carry his audience with him.) In content as well as grammar, Hamburger might well have written of this passage that it ‘immediately shows itself to be a sentence from a novel, a sentence occurring in ﬁctional narration and not in statement’. There are other passages in Havelok that portray the characters as ‘third-person subjects’, narrating their thouht or inner life in this novellike way,16 and still others that exemplify what Hamburger regards as a further distinguishing feature of ﬁctional narrative, which she calls 16 e.g. at 828–37, telling of Ubbe’s anxiety about how to support the growing Havelok—‘On Havelok was al hise thouht’ (all his thought was about Havelok)—and at 2778–87, narrating Havelok’s intention to test whether the English would acknowledge Goldeborw as their rightful queen—‘swilk was his thouth’ (such was his thought).

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‘narrated monologue [erlebte Rede]’. This is the phenomenon more commonly known in French as style indirect libre and in English as ‘free indirect style’. It consists of sentences containing deictics whose origin is ambiguous or contradictory, so that they cannot be related to a single subjectivity or point of view. A simple example would be a statement such as ‘It was now midnight’, in which the past (distal) tense of the verb and the proximal adverb imply two different temporal points of view within a single brief narrative sentence. The style has been discussed in various terminologies within a variety of different theoretical frameworks (Bally 1912; Lips 1926; Pascal 1977; Banﬁeld 1982; Adamson 1995a and 2001), but I do not intend to embark here upon a theoretical analysis. Over the last century the free indirect has been becoming increasingly common in ﬁctional writing: it is now virtually the norm in commercial prose ﬁction, but is widely thought to be characteristic only of narratives from the early nineteenth century onwards, with Jane Austen as its ﬁrst gifted exponent, and Flaubert as its master.17 More detailed scholarly study pushes it further back: Bernard Cerquiglini (1984) has shown convincingly that French examples can be found as early as the twelfth century, and Cerquiglini’s pupil Manuel Bue˜na Cuevas (1988) has demonstrated that no fewer than 250 instances occur in the works of Marie de France alone. Whenever the free indirect style originated, there can be no doubt that it is to be found in Havelok. I will give two examples. The ﬁrst occurs at the moment when the villainous Godrich threatens to execute Goldeborw unless she agrees to marry Havelok (whom they both suppose to be a mere kitchen knave): Sho was adrad, for he so thrette, And durste nouth the spusing lette, But, they hire likede swithe ille, Thouthe it was Godes wille— God, that makes to growen the korn, Formede hire wimman to be born. (1163–8) 17 This was the view promulgated by early theorists such as Bally 1912 and Lips 1926; it is still to be found in contemporary theorists such as Cohn, who attaches the appearance of what she calls ‘narrated monologue’ to ‘a speciﬁc moment of the novel’s development: the moment when third-person ﬁction . . . begins to focus on the mental and emotional life of its characters’ (1978: 113). Jane Austen is the ﬁrst writer she mentions.

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(She was terriﬁed because he so threatened her, and she did not dare to hinder the marriage, but, though it pleased her very little, she thought it was the will of God—God, who makes the wheat grow, shaped her to be born as a woman.)

The power of the last statement depends on its indeterminacy of ‘point of view’: does it express Goldeborw’s perception of the God-given roles of the sexes, or does it come from some other, more objective source? What we have to suppose on the poet’s part, and what such a statement demands from us, is an ability to empathize with the subjectivity of others—an empathy not attributable to any speciﬁc ‘narrator’ but intermittently encoded within the whole narrative text. In my second example, the uncertainty of ‘point of view’ can be conveniently illustrated by the differing interpretations of two modern editors. Havelok’s royal birth is eventually revealed when he is sleeping in Ubbe’s house and Ubbe is woken at night by a mysterious light, which turns out to be emerging from Havelok’s mouth. Ubbe summons his household to see it, and the poet writes that it was: a glem, Rith al swilk so the sunne-bem, That al-so lith was thare, bi hevene, So ther brenden serges sevene And an hundred serges ok— That durste hi sweren on a bok. (2122–7) (. . . a gleam exactly like the sun’s rays, so that, by heaven, there was as much light there as if seven candles were burning and a hundred candles more—that they dared swear on a Bible.)

I have translated the text as interpreted by Shepherd 1995, for whom the last line indicates that the subjectivity encoded in line 2127 is that of Ubbe’s household: they dared swear on a Bible that the light was so extraordinarily bright. Smithers 1987, however, takes the hi of the ﬁnal line to represent not ‘they’ but ‘I’, so that the line resembles one quoted above, ‘That may I ful wel swere, bi God!’ (2339); thus it becomes a narratorial asseveration, and retrospectively suggests that the encoded subjectivity is that of the poet. Effects like this would probably seem less surprising in Chaucerian narrative, in which also the free indirect style is a commoner feature than is generally supposed. Donald Howard (1970) long ago brilliantly analysed a passage from Book II of Troilus and Criseyde to show to

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what extent the complexity of Criseyde’s inner life as she falls in love is something created by us, the readers, at Chaucer’s incitement, out of our own empathy with her. And Chaucer manifestly possessed a concept of empathy: he called it pitee, and deﬁned it in the Squire’s Tale as the capacity of the noble heart to feel ‘his similitude in peynes smerte’ (. 480) (his counterpart in sharp pain)—to feel not his own pain, but another’s.18 In Havelok this may be more unexpected; but the fact is that the poet not only composes an empathetic narrative but deﬁnes something approaching empathy in the represented world of his story shortly after the last passage quoted. Havelok is roused from sleep when Ubbe’s household kiss his feet in joy at discovering his royal nature, and he turns pale at this unexpected intrusion, For he wende he wolden him slo, Or elles binde him and do wo! Quoth Ubbe, ‘Loverd, ne dred the nowth; Me thinkes that I se thi thouth.’ (2166–9) (Because he believed they intended to kill him, or else bind him and do him harm! Ubbe said, ‘Lord, don’t be afraid; it seems to me that I see your thought.’)

That ability to see the thouth, the inner life of another person, including the emotions associated with thoughts, is something that characterizes the whole narrative. It does not have to be attributed to a single perceiving and narrating self which is somehow part of the poem. Its source outside the poem is of course the poet, but within the poem, diffused throughout the poetic text, it resembles the kind of empathetic subjectivity that we ﬁnd encoded in the whole text of many ﬁlms; and if we wonder about the sources of Chaucer’s ability to charge narrative with feeling, romances like Havelok would be one place to look. 18 Adamson (2001: n. 3) notes ‘a continuous semantic slippage’ by which ‘sympathy’, deﬁned in Johnson’s Dictionary as what would now be called empathy, has now become ‘a virtual synonym of pity’, while ‘among younger speakers’ ‘empathy’ in its turn ‘is now often used as a synonym of pity’. The slippage, then, would seem to be returning to a Chaucerian use of ‘pity’.

3 Troilus and Criseyde The Narrator in Troilus Criticism ‘The narrator’ has played little part in discussion of Havelok, but that is far from being true of Troilus and Criseyde, written nearly a century later, between 1381 and 1386. Indeed in most current readings of Chaucer’s greatest poem ‘the narrator’ is so prominent that it seems scarcely believable that it could once have been discussed without reference to him; yet this apparently indispensable ﬁgure was invented only half a century ago.1 In 1915 George Lyman Kittredge identiﬁed the ‘I’ of The Book of the Duchess as a ﬁctional narrator who, he wrote, ‘is not Geoffrey Chaucer’ (1915: 50), and, as we shall see in Chapter 4, he had previously laid great emphasis on the various narrators of the Canterbury Tales; but he nevertheless continued to refer to the ‘I’ of Troilus and Criseyde simply as ‘Chaucer’. That practice was followed in other standard studies. Robert K. Root wrote of ‘Chaucer’s assumed ignorance’ and of how the poet, like Troilus, was ‘captivated’ by Criseyde’s ‘loveliness and charm’ (1922: 111–12; my italics). John Livingston Lowes declared that ‘Criseyde, though frail, is dear’ to Chaucer and that the poem ends with an unparalleled ‘access of personal feeling’—the poet’s own (1934: 140, 152–3). C. S. Lewis wrote an inﬂuential chapter on Troilus and Criseyde in The Allegory of Love without once mentioning the narrator, who is equally absent from the Troilus chapter in Nevill Coghill’s The Poet Chaucer. All this changed in the 1950s, the period when, as a leading theorist of the novel has pointed out, ‘The differentiation of the ﬁgure of the authorial narrator from the author . . . began to become accepted,’ 1 The one exception, L¨udeke (1928), is largely concerned to demonstrate that narrators are more prominent in Chaucer than in his sources and predecessors, and had no immediate inﬂuence in the English-speaking world. For a helpful analysis of recent understandings of the Troilus narrator, see Børch (1995–6).

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along with the reconception of this narrator as ‘an independent character who has been created by the author (just as the other characters of the novel have been)’ (Stanzel 1974: 13). In 1954 E. Talbot Donaldson published his elegant paper ‘Chaucer the Pilgrim’, arguing that the ‘I’ of the General Prologue is a ﬁctional persona who is ‘the victim of the poet’s pervasive—not merely sporadic—irony’. He mentioned in passing that ‘the teller of Chaucer’s story of Troilus and Criseide . . . performs some of the same functions’ (Donaldson 1970: 3, 9).2 In a series of further essays, Donaldson (1958: 1129–34; 1963) turned this Troilus ‘teller’ into a full-blown fallible narrator whom he made responsible for many of the features that earlier critics had attributed to the poet, from the captivation with Criseyde’s ‘loveliness and charm’ (1970: 91) to the ‘nervous breakdown in poetry’ (as Donaldson put it) manifested in what Lowes (1934: 153) had called ‘the tumultuous hitherings and thitherings’ of the poem’s conclusion. Donaldson’s writings about Troilus and Criseyde became extraordinarily inﬂuential, and I want to interrupt this historical sketch to ask what made them so attractive. The general foregrounding of narratorial consciousness in literature and theory from the later nineteenth century onwards, mentioned in Chapter 1, must have been one factor, with the result that, as William Riggan put it, ‘the twentieth century has largely adopted . . . unreliable narration . . . as its own special child’ (1981: 31). A more speciﬁc attraction was that, unlike most Chaucer criticism published then and since, Donaldson’s essays, urbane and witty, could be read with pleasure. Donaldson wrote, for example, that ‘in order to understand Criseide properly we should ﬁrst have to send the narrator to a psychoanalyst for a long series of treatments and then ask him to rewrite the poem on the basis of his increased self-knowledge’ (1970: 68). The fantasy is amusing, and also revealing in its acceptance of the distinctively American development of psychoanalysis into an ego psychology. It assumes that both Criseyde and ‘the narrator’ possess ﬁxed, unitary selves, egos, which can ultimately be ‘known’ and ‘understood’; and even since the decline of psychoanalysis from the position it held when Donaldson wrote those words, American 2 Shortly after this Baldwin also distinguished between Chaucer the Pilgrim with his ‘bias and inadequacies’ and Chaucer the Poet with his ‘unlimited knowledge’ (1955: 68); but his study had far less impact than Donaldson’s.

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culture has continued to be dominated by an individualism that gives a special value to individual consciousnesses (as opposed, for example, to stories). That is surely part of the reason why theories of Chaucerian narrators have particularly ﬂourished in America. It is important to grasp that the opposition between ‘poet’ and ‘narrator’ on which this mode of interpretation relies does not correspond to the ontological opposition between the real poet as ﬂesh-and-blood person and the ﬁctional narrator as part of an ink-and-vellum poem. That opposition is unquestionable (of course the written ‘I’ of a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer ‘is not Geoffrey Chaucer’ as he once lived); but Donaldson and his followers rely on a much more questionable opposition between two ﬁctions, a ﬁctional narrator (who evidently wrote the poem, if he could be expected to rewrite it) and a ﬁctional poet. Another delightful passage from the same article (1970: 68–9) throws this into relief: At some of the moments when his narrator is striving most laboriously to palliate Criseide’s behaviour, Chaucer, standing behind him, jogs his elbow, causing him to fall into verbal imprecision, or into anticlimax, or making his rhetoric deﬁcient, or making it redundant—generally doing these things in such a way that the reader will be encouraged almost insensibly to see Criseide in a light quite different from the one that the narrator is so earnestly trying to place her in.

The ‘Chaucer’ who is said to be standing behind ‘his narrator’, jogging his elbow, is obviously as much a ﬁction as the narrator: they stand on the same ontological plane or they could not be imagined to interact in this way. A feature that has made Donaldson’s version of the poet/narrator opposition seem so plausible is that it blurs the distinction between the poet as writer of the text and the poet as a ﬁction implied by the narratorial elements within the text. And one result of that blurring is not just intellectual confusion but the loss of an important dimension of the poem itself. In an essay which began as a critique of Donaldson’s reading of Troilus and Criseyde, Elizabeth Salter (1988b: 232–3; ﬁrst published 1982) wrote what I believe to be true, that ‘readers are given some access, from the very beginning of the poem, to the inner drama of its growth’; and we cannot take that ‘inner drama’ seriously if we assume that it is merely a ﬁction. Salter remarks that Donaldson is right to identify special problems in the ﬁnal section of Troilus and Criseyde, but reminds us that those may be not the problems of a ﬁctional narrator

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but the textual evidence of Chaucer’s problems, the ‘quandaries’ of ‘the poet himself, as he makes his difﬁcult way through a major recasting of his Italian sources and ‘‘annotates’’, both for his contemporaries and for posterity, his progress’ (ibid. 232). The quandaries of the poet himself are not literally an internal part of the poetic ﬁction, but that is where their traces are to be read, and it is a mistake to assume that such traces have to be interpreted as characteristics of a ﬁctional person, the narrator. I suggested in Chapter 2 that such traces are occasionally to be found in Havelok, in the coexistence of stereotyped comments on the characters alongside subtler analyses of their motivation; they are far more prominent in Troilus and Criseyde, a more innovative and ambitious work and one in which we can see abundant evidence of the poet’s struggle with a more challenging array of sources. To return to the history of the Troilus narrator: in the 1950s other critics, many to become leading ﬁgures in Chaucer studies, were working along similar lines to Donaldson. In 1957 Morton W. Bloomﬁeld, noting a debt to Donaldson, wrote that ‘Chaucer takes pains to create himself as a character in his poem and also to dissociate this character continually from his story’ (1957: 14 n. 1, 21–2), and in the same year Charles Muscatine, while not centrally concerned with the narrator, gave him a capital ‘N’, saw him as descended from ‘the ﬁrst-person Narrators of the dream visions’ (such as The Book of the Duchess), and referred to his ‘apparent obtuseness’ (1957: 135–6). The following year brought the ﬁrst systematic unfolding of the implications of Donaldson’s theory for Troilus and Criseyde: Robert M. Jordan, arguing that Bloomﬁeld had understressed ‘the distinction between the narrator’s point of view and that of the poet’, claimed that ‘The character through whose consciousness we witness the events of Troilus and Criseyde is more elusive but no less palpable than the characters he tells us about’, and even proposed that ‘the real subject of the poem is not Troilus but the narrator’ (1958: 237–8, 249).3 Something approaching that proposition has been the underlying assumption of much interpretation of Troilus and Criseyde in the last half-century, especially in North America.

3 Jordan (1967: ch. 4), inﬂuenced by Bronson (1960), later arrived at a different view of the narrator.

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Some critics indeed continued to refer to the poem’s ‘I’ as ‘Chaucer’ or ‘the poet’: among these, to mention three of otherwise strikingly dissimilar views, are D. W. Robertson (1963: 472–502), P. M. Kean (1972: i. ch. 4), and Stephen Knight (1986: ch. 2). Others (e.g. Ganim 1983: ch. 3; Mehl 1986: ch. 6) adopted the term ‘narrator’ to refer not to a ﬁctional being but to the poet, at least in the sense of what Robert Durling (1965: 3) called ‘the author thought of as internal to the work’. And a common habit has been to use the terms ‘poet’ and ‘narrator’ with apparently random interchangeability, as in Patterson (1991: ch. 2) and, more confusingly, in Hansen (1992: ch. 6).4 But by 1970 it could be written of Donaldson’s ‘Chaucer the Pilgrim’ that ‘The concept of the Chaucerian persona developed in this seminal essay is second nature to many Chaucerian scholars today’ (Watts 1969–70: 229 n. 3); and most subsequent criticism has simply taken for granted, as an obvious and undeniable fact, that in Troilus and Criseyde the ﬁrst person of the narration refers to a ﬁctive individual clearly distinct from the poet, and that the poem, as Patterson puts it (1991: 26), is ‘delivered by an unavoidable narrator’. That narrator, unavoidable indeed in the criticism, is variously characterized as ‘fallible’, ‘unreliable’, ‘naive’, ‘glib’, ‘obtuse’, ‘imperceptive’, ‘self-deceived’, and ‘wayward’. The pilgrim Chaucer was described by Donaldson (1970: 11) as being, in his well-meaning na¨ıvet´e, ‘the representative of all mankind’, but in more recent writing about Troilus and Criseyde that conception of a fallible Chaucerian narrator has been exaggerated and coarsened, so that, to take a single example, one 39-page chapter contains over 130 references to ‘the narrator’, often in forms such as ‘our naive narrator’, ‘the detached narrator’, ‘Our ‘‘objective’’ narrator’, the ‘earnest but erring narrator’, and ‘our self-styled objective narrator’; and the wretched fellow is denounced as ‘deluded’, ‘confused’, ‘foolish’, ‘presumptuous’, ‘condescending’, ‘superior’, ‘blithely unaware’, ‘frantic’, and ‘blind’.5 My own ﬁrst acquaintance with the persona theory of Troilus and Criseyde was as a graduate student in the late 1950s. I have a vivid 4 Patterson (1991: 105) refers to a single stanza as justifying ‘the poet’s lack of interest in the martial deeds that comprise the public record’ and as illustrating ‘the narrator’s dehistoricizing of the Troy story’ (my italics); Hansen (1992: 143, 182, etc.) repeatedly uses phrases such as ‘the narrator and/or author’. 5 I refer to Kiser (1991), borrowing from Spearing (1994). The epithets in the previous sentence come from a variety of sources.

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mental image of myself coming upon this theory as I sat in the old Reading Room of the British Museum; I no longer recall which version I ﬁrst encountered, though I suppose it must have been Donaldson’s. Like many other readers, I had found Chaucer’s poem enthralling while being bafﬂed by its seeming uncertainties of tone and point of view, and the persona theory promised immediate clariﬁcation. Now I could see how to position myself as reader, enjoying the poet’s irony at the expense of his narrator’s misunderstandings; and some years later I in turn was writing conﬁdently of how ‘The idiot-dreamer of The Book of the Duchess develops into the idiot-historian of Troilus and Criseyde’ (Spearing 1965: 121). In time, though, I became increasingly dissatisﬁed with this bold resolution of the poem’s difﬁculties. Few would deny that the storytelling method of Troilus and Criseyde encourages questioning and independent thought on the part of its readers, yet the theory that converts this intriguing effect into a single fallible narrator has in practice been used to simplify the poem—to resolve ambiguity, to stabilize what in reading feels mobile, to claim knowability for what feels obscure, and often to reduce a work, which Chaucer in his Retractions listed ﬁrst among those requiring divine forgiveness, to rigid religious orthodoxy and ungenerous antifeminism. One critic writes that ‘It is to the narrator that we must turn . . . if we are to understand the poem’s ambiguous evaluation of the nature, function, and worth of poetry’ (Rowe 1976: 153); another that ‘the narrator plays a role of major importance in providing the clue to the signiﬁcance of the ambiguities of its surface structure’ (Hupp´e 1981: 194); a third that ‘At the end, Chaucer as narrator arrives at Augustine’s position about the tears he had shed over Dido, and attains the wisdom of Peter of Blois’ (Bestul 1979–80: 375).6 Carolyn Dinshaw in her inﬂuential book Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics has shown how the ‘concept of an omniscient poet’ in Troilus and Criseyde, equally present in Robertson’s alleged historicism and in Donaldson’s apparently opposing formalism, underpins a ‘concern to authorize, legitimate, and, ﬁnally, delimit meanings’ (1989: 37). Yet Dinshaw too takes for granted the concept of ‘the narrator’, and that concept surely belongs to the very project she is aiming to diagnose and unmask. 6 Cf. Mehl (1986: 83): ‘Many studies of the poem only express the understandable desire of readers and critics for a simple reading that resolves all the contradictory elements . . .’

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‘Omniscient poet’ and ‘unreliable narrator’ form an interdependent pair, functioning as an interpretative mechanism to produce univalent meaning; only by dissolving that binary could Dinshaw truly achieve her desired escape from what she calls ‘reading like a man’. Underlying many readings of Troilus and Criseyde in these terms is a wish not just to delimit meaning but to safeguard the poem’s perfection by shifting apparent faults to a narrator whose unreliability is part of the omniscient—and evidently omnipotent—poet’s fully achieved plan. This emerges clearly from one of the most carefully argued persona readings, by Monica McAlpine. She warns against the ‘disdainful superiority’ towards the narrator exempliﬁed in the epithets I have quoted, but for her his ‘most signiﬁcant deﬁciency’ is ‘the absence of a unifying vision’, and she adds that ‘A narrator who goes through a process of development is necessarily a fallible narrator; a capacity for change is also . . . a capacity for imperfection’ (1978: 133, 41, 124). The unwritten implication, that the poet and his poem are free of this fallibility and capacity for imperfection, has only to be stated for its dubiousness to become apparent. Human beings are not in perfect conscious control of any but the simplest of their intellectual and imaginative productions. The greatest poets are fallible, and some of the greatest works lay no claim to perfection. Dante and Racine perhaps seek and perhaps achieve the nearest to a perfect art that lies within human reach, but would it make sense to judge King Lear in these terms—a poetic drama whose greatness depends on its very imperfection, if assessed by established moral and aesthetic standards? Troilus and Criseyde is a genuinely exploratory poem, one in which Chaucer struggled to ﬁnd ways to evoke the reality of a past that was pagan but none the less fully human, and to give sufﬁcient value to a merely human and ultimately betrayed love; and even after whatever revision he gave it, the traces of that struggle remained really present—not a mere ﬁction enacted by a fallible narrator. Salter (1988a: 216; ﬁrst published 1966) suggests that ‘the very magnitude of what Chaucer attempted to do in Troilus was the guarantee of some measure of failure’; if so, he resembles some of the greatest writers of his own and other ages. I was one of Salter’s students, but it took me a long time to grasp the force of her critique of the narrator theory of Troilus and Criseyde, even though in 1966 she was already reading the poem’s ﬁrst-person discourse as a record of Chaucer’s own ‘conﬂicting purposes, unresolved

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difﬁculties’ in responding to Boccaccio’s Filostrato (1988a: 216); and I am far from being the ﬁrst to feel dissatisﬁed with the consequences of an approach that initially seemed so promising. As early as 1960, Bertrand H. Bronson, deploring the ‘rash of talk about Chaucer’s persona’, saw his poetic self-representation as more like the ‘self-mockery’ found in friendly conversation (1960: 26, 30); and there are have been many subsequent questionings of the narrator theory, often by some of the most distinguished writers about Chaucer. Dieter Mehl emphasizes the variety of the poem’s narrative stances and that variety’s value in inciting sympathetic participation and individual response among its audience (1974; 1986: ch. 6). Derek Brewer associates the variety with the multiple, often inconsistent viewpoints of oral poetry and Gothic painting, and suggests that the ‘multiplicity of narrative points of view almost becomes . . . a multiplicity of narrators . . . who appear to surge up and fall away in Troilus’ (1985: 14).7 Lee Patterson (1987: 21–2) diagnoses Donaldson’s approach as a means of placing ‘character’ at ‘the center of Chaucer’s poetry’, and thus of interpreting him ‘according to the values of liberal humanism’. Derek Pearsall (1992: 173–4) writes emphatically, ‘The narrator is not separate from Chaucer, someone other than Chaucer whose responses are engineered for the purposes of delivering sets of messages that can be received and decoded and dismissed as non-authoritative. The narrator, in the most literal sense, is Chaucer . . .’ I have already denied that the last statement can be true ‘in the most literal sense’, but Pearsall adds perceptively that ‘his presence contributes to an undoing of systematic or predetermined interpretations, especially those associated with a dominant cultural or ideological group. He keeps us guessing.’ More theoretically developed interrogations of the persona theory have come from David Lawton (1985) and Robert Edwards, who both propose that ‘the narrator is not an object of imitation, much like the story he tells, but part of the narrative code’ (Edwards 1989: 43).8 There have been still other sceptics, and Donaldson himself eventually came to question the constrictive consequences of his liberating insight, and to believe that ‘many of us, myself included, have been too anxious to separate the narrator from the poet Chaucer’ (1985: 128). 7 8

See also the neglected Brewer (1990). Note also the implications of Lawton (1987).

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Why then resurrect a question that several decades of criticism would seem to have buried for good? One reason is the absence of effective dialogue from the existing discussion. Whether the sequence of narratorial ﬁrst persons in Troilus and Criseyde is or is not to be interpreted as referring back to a single fallible narrator must substantially affect one’s understanding of the whole poem; yet studies questioning the validity of the narrator theory have largely fallen on deaf ears (I know of no response, for example, to Salter’s fundamental challenge), and what might be called ‘normal’ Chaucer criticism, on the analogy of Kuhn’s ‘normal science’, has proceeded as if that theory were an unshakeable axiom. Meanwhile, some of the most perceptive developments of the theory have also been disregarded and had virtually no inﬂuence on discussion. Among these I include, for example, Geoffrey Shepherd’s account of Chaucerian storytelling as a stylization of ‘the ephemeralness of a living entertainment and the mobility of actual delivery’ (1966: 72), and John Lawlor’s reading of the narrator’s ‘growing and involuntary involvement’ in a story that deﬂects him from his ‘initial poise’ as testimony to the unbearable yet unalterable painfulness of Chaucer’s undertaking (1968: 64–5). I must add that such disregard, while especially noticeable in the crowded ﬁeld of Chaucer study, is certainly not peculiar to that ﬁeld. It reﬂects a general tendency in academic literary studies, and perhaps more broadly in humanistic studies, for new publication to proceed without regard to the existing work that either provides or questions its foundations. Recognizing this tendency, a Shakespeare scholar notes that ‘the professionalized study of ‘‘English,’’ instead of resembling other disciplines where opposed theories and paradigms supersede each other in a structured way, now resembles an amusement park for protected species’ (Bradshaw 1993: 298 n. 49), while a famous social historian has similarly contrasted historiography with ‘older and more mature disciplines’ in which ‘the signiﬁcance of earlier hypotheses and theories is preserved as a step on the way to later hypotheses and theories, because these later steps would not have been possible without the earlier ones’ (Elias 1983: 7). Literary interpretation is not a science, and we cannot hope for the collaborative progress that comes from testing hypotheses, discarding those proved false, and developing those with strongest explanatory power; but it is hard to survey discussion of the ‘I’ of Troilus and Criseyde since the 1950s without feeling that we could collectively have done a better job in thinking about this issue. Hence this reconsideration of the ﬁrst person

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in Chaucer’s greatest poem, in which I aim not at yet another wholly new interpretation but at least in part at reassessing the implications of what others have written.9 If what I recover sometimes seems outdated and merely tedious, its usefulness often lies in its explicitness about assumptions that have subsequently come to be taken for granted and forgotten. My chief purpose, though, is to study more closely the ways in which subjectivity is encoded in the details of Chaucer’s language—language which, of course, was far from being entirely Chaucer’s invention or entirely under his control. As I hope I have made clear, I do not wish to deny that such encoding can amount to the creation of a narrator as part of the narrative ﬁction, but we should not suppose that it must work like that. In the last half-century ‘the narrator’ has become an assumed necessity in discussion of narrative of any kind, and that ‘there can be no narrative without a narrator’ has come to seem an unquestionably obvious truth.10 That need not mean that narrators were equally regarded as a necessity by the writers of medieval narratives and their readers. There can be small need to argue for the importance of the narratorial element in Troilus and Criseyde or to point to apparent indications of its uncertain reliability. Taking these as given, I begin by examining two other aspects of the poem: one that makes it hard to see ‘the narrator’ as fallible by design and another that complicates the possibility of distinguishing a narratorial element from the rest of the poem. I start with the former.

Is There a Fallible Narrator? Most critics who ﬁnd a single ﬁctional narrator in the poem have focused on his alleged deﬁciencies in sensibility and in wisdom, seeing him as na¨ıvely idealistic in responding to the characters’ emotions and foolish in failing to relate them to a larger philosophical scheme. Since ‘narrator’ draws its meaning from opposition to ‘poet’ or ‘author’, that may be why less attention has been given to passages where an ‘I’ presents himself 9 Space forbids a comprehensive survey of existing criticism; in particular I omit consideration of the relation of the ‘I’ of Chaucer’s writing to Chaucer’s social and political situation in his lifetime. 10 To take a single example, Toolan (1988: 1, 3), in a textbook for students, begins by stating that just as there is ‘always inherently a speaker, separate from what is spoken’ in ‘any speech event’, so it is ‘a truism that any tale involves a teller’, and he goes on to refer to ‘the narrator’ as the ‘necessary source’ of all narrative.

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not just as speaker but as author, and indeed speciﬁcally as poet—not a mere entertainer or ‘maker’, but the vessel of a higher inspiration. Such passages are prominently placed; they include the very ﬁrst stanza— The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen, That was the kyng Priamus sone of Troye, In lovynge, how his aventures fellen Fro wo to wele, and after out of joie, Mi purpos is, er that I parte fro ye, Thesiphone, thow help me for t’endite Thise woful vers, that wepen as I write. (. 1–7)

—and indeed the openings to all ﬁve of the poem’s books, and also passages such as this— In May, that moder is of monthes glade, That fresshe ﬂoures, blew and white and rede, Ben quike agayn, that wynter dede made, And ful of bawme is ﬂetyng every mede, Whan Phebus doth his bryghte bemes sprede Right in the white Bole, it so bitidde. (. 50–5)

—or this: Thow lady bryght, the daughter to Dyone, Thy blynde and wynged sone ek, daun Cupide, Yee sustren nyne ek, that by Elicone In hil Pernaso listen for t’abide, That ye thus fer han deyned me to gyde— I kan namore, but syn that ye wol wende, Ye heried ben for ay withouten ende! (. 1807–13)

The conception of the vernacular poet as inspired was new in fourteenthcentury England. Kevin Brownlee (1984: 7) notes that the earliest French use of the word po`ete for a vernacular writer was by Deschamps in the 1370s, writing of Machaut as ‘Noble poete et faiseur renomee’.11 In English the earliest comparable uses are Chaucer’s somewhat later praise 11 Brownlee was apparently unaware of the valuable earlier studies by Tatlock (1920–1) and Olson (1979). See also Schmidt (1987a: appendix) and Patterson (1989: 119) on the distinction between ‘the humanist ‘‘poete,’’ who claimed a transhistorical prospect’ and ‘the courtly ‘‘maker’’ ’, who ‘offered a ritualistic rehearsal . . . of familiar tropes of socially valuable modes of speaking and feeling’.

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of Dante as ‘the grete poete of Ytaille’ (Monk’s Tale, . 2460) and ‘the wise poete of Florence’ (Wife of Bath’s Tale, . 1125), and of Petrarch as ‘the lauriat poete’ (Clerk’s Prologue, . 31). Chaucer was the ﬁrst English writer to adopt an idea already emergent in Italian and French—that a vernacular writer could be a modern classic, the exponent of a poetic vocation comparable to that of the great masters of antiquity.12 Near the end of Troilus and Criseyde this idea is explicitly formulated, when the poem’s ‘I’ addresses not the sources of inspiration but the book that is their product, urging it, no makyng thow n’envie, But subgit be to alle poesye; And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace. (. 1789–92)

Chaucer, though, much as he admired Dante, was temperamentally closer to Machaut, and could never commit himself completely to a ‘Renaissance’ exaltation of the vernacular poet. In what he writes pride and humility coincide, as do inspiration and imitation: the book is to vie proudly with no makyng, no mere vernacular entertainment (such as King Horn or Havelok), but is to subject itself humbly to poesye, the body of lasting classical achievement. Glending Olson rightly notes the dangers of ‘the unacknowledged carryover of modern ideas of ‘‘poet’’ and ‘‘literature’’ into a period which did not categorize discourse as we do’ (1979: 286); Chaucer’s use here of poesye may mark the very ﬁrst emergence in English of a category approximating what we now call ‘literature’. To claim inspiration is to follow those who have done so in the past; it is also to declare an inability to match one’s subject-matter without such assistance. This the poem’s opening stanzas make clear: Thesiphone, thow help me for t’endite Thise woful vers, that wepen as I write. To the clepe I, thow goddesse of torment, Thow cruwel Furie, sorwynge evere in peyne, Help me . . . (. 6–10; my italics)

12 Cf. Pearsall (1977: 197): Chaucer is ‘the ﬁrst English poet to have a share in the classical concept of ‘‘the poet’’ ’.

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But whatever Chaucer’s misgivings, the style of such self-presentations— elevated, learnedly allusive, elaborately ﬁgured, difﬁcult and yet melliﬂuous, with diction and word-order divergent from those native to English—seems designed precisely to authenticate the poetic vocation they assert. How can the ‘I’ of such passages possibly be thought to refer to a fallible narrator? Adherents of the persona theory generally disregard them altogether or attribute them arbitrarily to ‘poet’ rather than ‘narrator’;13 and the few brave attempts to do otherwise are instructive in their very implausibility. McAlpine, recognizing the need to apply her view of Troilus and Criseyde as ‘an extended speech by the [fallible] narrator’ not selectively but to the poem as a whole, claims that the opening lines of Book II— Owt of thise blake wawes for to saylle, O wynd, o wynd, the weder gynneth clere; For in this see the boot hath swych travaylle Of my connyng that unneth I it steere. This see clepe I the tempestuous matere Of disespeir that Troilus was inne. (. 1–6)

—‘dramatize the narrator’s lack of feeling as he describes Troilus’ sorrow in tired Petrarchan conceits and then ﬂatly explicates his own metaphors’ (1978: 36, 126);14 but it is hard to see how the images of the boat as the poet’s skill and the sea as Troilus’s stormy despair could have been perceived as ‘tired Petrarchan conceits’ when they had never before been used in English and there is no evidence that any fourteenth-century Englishman other than Chaucer himself knew any of Petrarch’s Italian poetry. Donald W. Rowe similarly regards the proem to Book III, where Chaucer’s poetic style reaches its height in a magniﬁcently sustained periphrastic apostrophe to Venus, as indicating ‘the narrator’s confusion and lack of control’; and he believes the poem’s 13 For a recent example of this arbitrariness of attribution, see Utz (1997): ‘at the end of the poem . . . the author, not the narrator, ﬁnalizes the poem with a clarity of vision which the pagan narrator’s involved perspective simply does not allow for’ (141). Why Utz thinks of the narrator as pagan is not made clear; his view amusingly reverses that of Frankis, who sees the poem as a ‘humanist story’ told by a ‘Christian narrator’ (1979: 72). 14 Wetherbee (1984) reads the same lines as revealing the narrator’s ‘lack of control’ and ‘utter confusion’ (147–8).

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epilogue to reveal the narrator’s ‘inadequate, ambiguous, and often comic’ efforts ‘to deal with the poem he has created’ (1976: 159, 164).15 Suspicion and plain dislike of Chaucer’s poetry are regrettably common among Chaucer critics, but even critics as unimpressed as these by the verbal grandeur of places where the ‘I’ of Troilus and Criseyde ﬁgures as a poet need to acknowledge that they represent a claim to inspiration and a correspondingly elevated style hitherto unknown in English, except in a few passages by Chaucer himself. Could he possibly have expected such passages to be understood as revealing a narrator’s incompetence and confusion? It is true that the elevated ‘poetic’ style can be inﬂected by a playfulness suggesting reservations about its absolute validity, as when Chaucer writes: ‘The dayes honour, and the hevenes y¨e, | The nyghtes foo—al this clepe I the sonne’ (. 904–5). Even in a passage like that, though, he may well also have felt the need to explicate a metaphorical richness absent from earlier poetry in English and unfamiliar to his audience. They really might not have grasped what the day’s honour, the heaven’s eye, and the night’s foe was; one of Chaucer’s tasks was precisely to create an English-reading audience for poesye. Unprepared to risk glossing his own poetry as Dante and Boccaccio in their different ways had done, and as scribes began doing for Chaucer himself after his death, he often incorporated explanations in the text, just as he did when annotating classical mythology (so that, for example, Criseyde explains, apparently to herself, that ‘the feld of pit´e, out of peyne’ where she envisages being reunited with Troilus after death ‘highte Elisos’ (. 789–90)). The logical conclusion of attempts to read the poem’s most exalted poetry or even its classical learning as the product of a fallible narrator is that the text we have is a Sir Thopas-like travesty produced by a ﬁctional parody of a poet, and that the Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer really intended exists only in the minds of enlightened modern academics.16 15 Waswo (1983: 20) similarly sees . 1828–32 and 1849–55 as ‘the hollowest sort of table thumping’, though this is after he has replaced ‘the narrator’ with ‘Chaucer’ as responsible for what is in the poem. Hupp´e (1981) adopts a similar position, taking it for granted that all the poem’s instances of ﬁrst-person narration must originate from a single ﬁctive being, and that the critic’s task is to decide what kind of ﬁctive being and why Chaucer created him. 16 Cf. Pearsall (1992: 86): ‘The cult of the persona has . . . become a technique for systematically ironizing the text and appropriating it to the service of particular kinds of programmatic interpretation’ (86).

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Not all the passages where ‘I’ represents the poem’s composer involve these high claims to inspiration. In many that ‘I’, like the narratorial ‘I’ of Havelok, is no more than an unobtrusive compiler or organizer of existing material, as in ﬁrst-person clauses such as these from Book IV: ‘as I shal yow devyse’ (238, 735); ‘which that I yow devyse’ (259); ‘and seyde as I shall telle’ (686); ‘I shal yow tellen soone’ (1127); ‘As I seyde erst’ (1134). Such clauses clarify narrative structure without evoking either an inspired poet or an unreliable narrator. They often give the second person equal emphasis to the ﬁrst, summoning us into the poem’s ﬁctional space to attend to its events. Such interventions may not relate to the ‘I’ as poet at all; yet they merge readily into longer metanarrative passages in which the ﬁrst person discusses problems of poetic composition. In Book I after a four-stanza digression concerning love’s power comes a stanza recalling the poet’s obligation to keep to the point, and using the technical terms collateral and matere: But for to tellen forth in special Of this kynges sone of which I tolde, And leten other thing collateral, Of hym thenke I my tale forth to holde, Both of his joie and of his cares colde; And al his werk, as touching this matere, For I it gan, I wol therto refere. (. 260–6)

A little later, introducing Troilus’s song, allegedly translated from ‘myn auctour called Lollius’ (. 394), ‘I’ mentions the two traditional modes of translation, by sentence and by word, and ends with an expanded ‘managerial’ locution referring speciﬁcally to his literary medium and to the textual mode in which readers receive it: ‘and whoso list it here, | Loo, next this vers he may it fynden here’ (398–9). Similar expansions deﬁning the ‘I’ not just as storyteller but speciﬁcally as writer occur elsewhere: ‘And what she thoughte somwhat shal I write, | As to myn auctour listeth for t’endite’ (. 699–700) or ‘His resons, as I may my rymes holde, | I yow wol telle, as techen bokes olde’ (. 90–1). First-person passages of this kind, far from claiming inspiration, may disclaim it, as in elaborations of the inexpressibility-topos: Who koude telle aright or ful discryve His wo, his pleynt, his langour, and his pyne? Naught alle the men that han or ben on lyve.

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Thow, redere, maist thiself ful wel devyne That swich a wo my wit kan nat diffyne; On ydel for to write it sholde I swynke, Whan that my wit is wery it to thynke. (. 267–73)

Do we come closer here to a fallible narratorial persona? So it might seem, yet the very next stanza displays Chaucer’s elevated style in an exquisitely beautiful chronographia: On hevene yet the sterres weren seene, Although ful pale ywoxen was the moone, And whiten gan the orisonte shene. (. 274–6)

Read separately, those two stanzas seem expressions of two different ﬁrst persons; put together, the ﬁrst becomes rhetorical self-depreciation designed not to reveal an incompetent narrator but to emphasize the intensity of Troilus’s suffering and invite readers to share in imagining it. As these examples illustrate, passages where ‘I’ refers to the poem’s writer tend to introduce concepts from medieval ars poetica. Burrow has remarked on the sparseness of ‘technical literary vocabulary’ in the poetry of Chaucer’s age; this may be an exaggeration where Chaucer himself is concerned, for the vocabulary of Troilus and Criseyde in fact includes virtually all the terms necessary to analyse its own poetic technique. But Burrow valuably proceeds to explain one such technical term used by Chaucer: poynte, meaning describe in detail (1971: 69–72). It would be ‘a long thyng for to here’, ‘I’ observes, if he were to poynte ‘every word, or soonde, or look, or cheere’ of someone in Troilus’s distracted condition (. 491–7). The extraordinary and, as we may now see it, novelistic detail in which Chaucer recounts the development of the love affair is, as Burrow observes, quite uncharacteristic of earlier English romances; certainly nothing comparable can be found in King Horn or Havelok. The detail expands in Books II and III, and it seems likely that this intensiﬁed ‘pointing’ in the representation of the lovers’ private behaviour and inner lives arose from Chaucer’s imaginative engagement with Boccaccio’s story as he was retelling it, not necessarily from any preconceived plan. He was proud of this technical innovation and eager to call attention to it—‘I have naught herd it don er this | In story non, ne no man here, I wene’ (. 498–9)—but he could well have been concerned to reassure his audience that the ampliﬁed scale of the resultant scenes did not mean that he had forgotten the main

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narrative outline. Many passages of poetic self-presentation, easily taken by modern readers to indicate the na¨ıve enthusiasm or incompetence of a fallible narrator, are probably better understood in this light. The second half of Book II is especially full of ﬁrst-person refusals to describe, promises of brevity, and summaries of what will not be ‘pointed’: What sholde I lenger sermoun of it holde? As ye han herd byfore, al he hym tolde. (965–6) Of which to telle in short is myn entente Th’effect, as fer as I kan understonde. (1219–20) What sholde I make of this a long sermoun? (1299) And al this thyng he tolde hym, word and ende. (1495)

or simply ‘To telle in short . . .’ (1266, 1493). At 1541 begins a whole stanza of occupatio—‘What nedeth yow to tellen . . .’—soon followed by an emphatic promise of brevity, including another technical term: But ﬂe we now prolixitee best is, For love of God, and lat us faste go Right to th’effect, withouten tales mo.

(1564–6)

Book III contains similar ﬁrst-person intrusions, designed to assure the reader or listener (and even perhaps Chaucer himself) that he has not lost control of the story. This large metanarrative element might be expected to have a distancing effect, deﬂecting attention from the love story to its teller’s consciousness; but in practice this is not so. In Book II, as Chaucer diverges from Boccaccio to enter more deeply into Criseyde’s inner life, the difﬁculty and interest of imagining that life and of representing it seem scarcely distinguishable, and the third-person representation is deeply intertwined (‘plited . . . in many fold’) with ﬁrst-person references to the compositional process: And, Lord! So she gan in hire thought argue In this matere of which I have yow told, And what to doone best were, and what eschue, That plited she ful ofte in many fold. Now was hire herte warm, now was it cold; And what she thoughte somwhat shal I write, As to myn auctour listeth for t’endite. (. 694–700)

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Later the same applies to Troilus’s feelings. Sympathy with the bashfulness that deprives him of words merges into engagement in the task of ﬁnding words, a task that is the poet’s as well as the protagonist’s: But Lord, so he wex sodeynliche red, And sire, his lessoun, that he wende konne To preyen hire, is thorugh his wit ironne . . . But whan his shame gan somwhat to passe, His resons, as I may my rymes holde, I yow wol telle, as techen bokes olde. (. 82–4, 89–91)

The task is ours too. ‘I’ and ‘yow’ are constantly juxtaposed, and many critics (Gordon 1970: 90; Bestul 1979–80: 373; Mehl 1986: 75), whatever their view of ‘the narrator’, have noted the narratorial method’s effectiveness in making us sympathetic participants in the story and contributors to its meaning. On numerous much-discussed occasions the poem’s ‘I’ conveys ignorance or uncertainty, usually about Criseyde: But wheither that she children hadde or noon, I rede it naught, therfore I late it goon. (. 132–3) Nought list myn auctour fully to declare What that she thoughte whan he seyde so. (. 575–6) Kan I naught seyn, for she bad hym nought rise, If sorwe it putte out of hire remembraunce, Or elles that she took it in the wise Of dewet´e, as for his observaunce. (. 967–70) But trewely, I kan nat telle hire age. (. 826) Men seyn—I not—that she yaf hym hire herte. (. 1050)

Whatever, if anything, we may feel about ‘the narrator’ on such occasions, these expressions of uncertainty summon our imaginations to ﬁll the gaps thereby created in the story material. (At times it really was a matter of creating gaps: it has often been pointed out, for example, that Chaucer would have read in Boccaccio that Criseyde had no children. Modern scholars who see such misleading remarks as evidence of Chaucer’s creation of a fallible narrator need to recall that that can scarcely have been so for Chaucer’s readers. He was almost certainly writing for an audience who had never read Boccaccio, and

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probably never even heard of him.17 ) Sometimes the summons to our imaginations is explicit, as with Troilus’s bashful silence, when the ﬁnal line of Book II invites us, as ‘ye loveres that ben here’, to consider, ‘O myghty God, what shal he seye?’ (. 1751, 1757). The question seems gleeful, and to focus on ‘the narrator’ and his inadequacies is to disregard the imaginative pleasure revealed in the innumerable ﬁrstperson references to the compositional process. Here too the invitation to share in that process is occasionally explicit, as when Pandarus’s planning for the affair’s consummation approaches its climax, and the past tense is suddenly replaced by the present and ‘I’ by a ‘we’ incorporating the audience (compare Carton 1979: 55 and Waswo 1983: 10): Now al is wel, for al the world is blynd In this matere, bothe fremde and tame. This tymbur is al redy up to frame; Us lakketh nought but that we witen wolde A certeyn houre, in which she comen sholde.

(. 528–32)

Here house-building, initially a metaphor for planning a love affair, becomes one for planning the poem itself. This is a reversal of an earlier development, Pandarus’s analogy between planning a love affair and planning a house (. 1065–71), the source of which was a passage about planning poems from Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria Nova. Parallels between the craft of love and the craft of poetry were familiar to Chaucer, as the opening of The Parliament of Fowls witnesses; in Troilus and Criseyde such parallels are always near the surface, holding narrative and metanarrative together even as they threaten to diverge. These ﬁrst-person admissions of ignorance and uncertainty are doubtless the seed of the conception of a ‘fallible narrator’ through whose consciousness the whole story is told; and yet, as we have seen, they coexist within the poem’s ﬁrst-person discourse with claims to the proud status of a modern classic, along with various other kinds of self-presentation. And this brings me to a second barrier to any

17 Chaucer never mentions Boccaccio’s name, and his Italian writings, like those of Petrarch, appear to have been unknown in England. In the early ﬁfteenth century Lydgate, one of Chaucer’s greatest admirers, knew that Troilus and Criseyde was translated from a work ‘In Lumbarde tunge’ (Fall of Princes, Prologue 285), but he got its title wrong and did not mention its author (Windeatt 1992: 4).

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interpretation of the poem’s ‘I’ as a distinct ﬁctional person, namely the indeﬁniteness of the boundary to the poem’s ﬁrst-person discourse.

Is There a Distinct Narratorial Discourse? How can we decide what in the poem should be attributed to ‘the narrator’? In theory we might hope to apply some principle such as the one stated by Ann Banﬁeld: ‘Within the ﬁction sentences of pure narration cannot be false; they can only contribute to the ‘‘facts’’ of a story’ (1978: 308). In practice, however, the very category of narrative ‘fact’ is undermined by Troilus and Criseyde’s recurrent emphasis on the origin of ‘pure narration’ in individual understanding of documents of uncertain authority—‘Take every man now to his bokes heede’ (. 1089), as Chaucer urges us if we want to know exactly how long it took Criseyde to forsake Troilus for Diomede. Karla Taylor, seeing the poem as ‘not simply a history of things past, but also an account of the narrator’s experience of reading about them’, argues that ‘it is almost always possible to tell the difference between the ‘‘world of the story’’ and the ‘‘world of the commentary’’ ’ (1989: 128, 17). Yet, if the poem has a single narrator, that narrator must surely be held responsible for everything in it. In Troilus and Criseyde the ‘world of the commentary’ recurrently foregrounds an ‘I’ gathering material from written sources, material that includes the words allegedly spoken and written by the characters. If that ‘I’, besides the moral incapacity so often attributed to him, is epistemologically unreliable, how can we know that in doing so he transmits the ‘world of the story’ without distortion?18 To avoid being deluded, we need to doubt everything, and once we have adopted this hermeneutic of suspicion, interpretation of anything but ‘the narrator’ himself becomes impossible, and Troilus and Criseyde will have to be read as one of those ‘long speeches expressing, directly or indirectly, the [speakers’] characters’ that Kittredge found when he inaugurated the dramatic theory of the Canterbury Tales (1915: 155).19 Few would follow McAlpine in going so far; but if many accounts of ‘the narrator’ are arbitrary in deciding which ‘I’s are to count as 18 For a valuable critique of the ‘unreliable narrator’ concept, emphasizing among other things the need to distinguish between ‘moral’ and ‘epistemological’ shortcomings, see N¨unning (1999). 19 The idea goes back to Kittredge (1893).

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characterizing him, nearly all fail to observe that narrational subjectivity is manifested in many passages lacking an explicit ﬁrst person. To illustrate this subjectivization of narrative, we need to examine a sequence rather closely, and I choose the ﬁrst such sequence in the poem, near the beginning of Book I. Yt is wel wist how that the Grekes stronge In armes with a thousand shippes wente To Troiewardes, and the cit´e longe Assegeden, neigh ten yer er they stente, And in diverse wise and oon entente, The ravysshyng to wreken of Eleyne, By Paris don, they wroughten al hir peyne. Now fel it so that in the town ther was Dwellynge a lord of gret auctorit´e, A gret devyn, that clepid was Calkas, That in science so expert was that he Knew wel that Troie sholde destroied be, By answere of his god, that highte thus: Daun Phebus or Appollo Delphicus. So whan this Calkas knew by calkulynge, And ek by answer of this Appollo, That Grekes sholden swich a peple brynge, Thorugh whiche that Troie moste ben fordo, He caste anon out of the town to go; For wel wiste he by sort that Troye sholde Destroyed ben, ye, wolde whoso nolde. For which for to departen softely Took purpos ful this forknowynge wise, And to the Grekes oost ful pryvely He stal anon; and they, in curteys wise, Hym diden bothe worship and servyce, In trust that he hath konnynge hem to rede In every peril which that is to drede. Gret rumour gan, whan it was ﬁrst aspied Thorugh al the town, and generaly was spoken, That Calkas traitour ﬂed was and allied With hem of Grece, and casten to be wroken On hym that falsly hadde his feith so broken, And seyden he and al his kyn at-ones Ben worthi for to brennen, fel and bones.

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Troilus and Criseyde Now hadde Calkas left in this meschaunce, Al unwist of this false and wikked dede, His doughter, which that was in gret penaunce, For of hire lif she was ful sore in drede, As she that nyste what was best to rede; For bothe a widewe was she and allone Of any frend to whom she dorste hir mone. Criseyde was this lady name al right. As to my doom, in al Troies cit´e Nas non so fair, forpassynge every wight, So aungelik was hir natif beaut´e, That lik a thing inmortal semed she, As doth an hevenyssh perﬁt creature, That down were sent in scornynge of nature. This lady, which that alday herd at ere Hire fadres shame, his falsnesse and tresoun, Wel neigh out of hir wit for sorwe and fere, In widewes habit large of samyt broun, On knees she ﬁl biforn Ector adown With pitous vois, and tendrely wepynge, His mercy bad, hirselven excusynge. Now was this Ector pitous of nature, And saugh that she was sorwfully bigon, And that she was so fair a creature; Of his goodnesse he gladede hire anon, And seyde, ‘Lat youre fadres treson gon Forth with meschaunce, and ye youreself in joie Dwelleth with us, whil yow good list, in Troie. ‘And al th’onour that men may don yow have, As ferforth as youre fader dwelled here, Ye shul have, and youre body shal men save, As fer as I may ought enquere or here.’ And she hym thonked with ful humble chere, And ofter wolde, and it hadde ben his wille, And took hire leve, and hom, and held hir stille. And in hire hous she abood with swich meyn´e As til hire honour nede was to holde; And whil she was dwellynge in that cit´e, Kepte hir estat, and both of yonge and olde Ful wel biloved, and wel men of hir tolde.

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Troilus and Criseyde But wheither that she children hadde or noon, I rede it naught, therfore I late it goon. The thynges fellen, as they don of werre, Bitwixen hem of Troie and Grekes ofte; For som day boughten they of Troie it derre, And eft the Grekes founden nothing softe The folk of Troie; and thus Fortune on lofte And under eft gan hem to whielen bothe Aftir hir course, ay whil that thei were wrothe. But how this toun com to destruccion Ne falleth naught to purpos me to telle, For it were a long digression Fro my matere, and yow to long to dwelle. But the Troian gestes, as they felle, In Omer, or in Dares, or in Dite, Whoso that kan may rede hem as they write. But though that Grekes hem of Troie shetten, And hir cit´e biseged al aboute, Hire olde usage nolde they nat letten, As for to honoure hir goddes ful devoute; But aldirmost in honour, out of doute, Thei hadde a relik, heet Palladion, That was hire trist aboven everichon. And so bifel, whan comen was the tyme Of Aperil, whan clothed is the mede With newe grene, of lusty Veer the pryme, And swote smellen ﬂoures white and rede, In sondry wises shewed, as I rede, The folk of Troie hire observaunces olde, Palladiones feste for to holde. And to the temple, in al hir beste wise, In general ther wente many a wight, To herknen of Palladions servyce; And namely, so many a lusty knyght, So many a lady fressh and mayden bright, Ful wel arayed, both meeste, mene, and leste, Ye, bothe for the seson and the feste. Among thise othere folk was Criseyda, In widewes habit blak; but natheles, Right as oure ﬁrste lettre is now an A,

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Troilus and Criseyde In beaut´e ﬁrst so stood she, makeles. Hire goodly lokyng gladed al the prees. Nas nevere yet seyn thyng to ben preysed derre, Nor under cloude blak so brighte a sterre. As was Criseyde, as folk seyde everichone That hir behelden in hir blake wede.

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This extract includes some explicitly metanarrative passages in the ﬁrst person (lines 132–3 and the complete stanza 141–7), but I want to concentrate mainly on the narrative itself, so as to examine the many less obtrusive ways in which that too is subjectivized. Much of it seems at ﬁrst glance like ‘pure narrative’, yet if we could apply to it a device analogous to a geiger counter, which would record traces not of radiation but of subjectivity, we would surely ﬁnd it clicking at every stanza. Book I has opened with an expansively ﬁrst-personal proem, followed by the markedly concise passage of historical scenesetting with which my extract begins. Cohn proposes that ‘all surveys of a temporal span signal the existence of a narrator with a distanced, bird’s-eye view’ (1978: 37), but this stanza is formally impersonal (‘Yt is wel wist . . .’) and we could well adopt Benveniste’s formulation that in such passages ‘there is no longer a ‘‘narrator’’ . . . The events seem to tell themselves.’ Given the striking difference in style between this and the proem, a contrast between ampliﬁcatio and abbreviatio, we may sense some efﬁcient summarizing agency at work to produce the very conciseness that occludes it, but if so the agency is surely that of the poet, not of a narrator. Moreover, the present tense of the stanza’s main clause (‘Yt is wel wist’), to which all the past-tense clauses are subordinate, itself evokes the world shared by poet and audience in which the story is being told. The information about Calchas’s god inserted in lines 69–70 might have appeared in an impersonal form as a marginal gloss, but incorporated as it is in the text itself it takes on a certain conﬁdingness (‘that highte thus’) that makes it seem more personal. An agency controlling the story and us as audience is implied by the Now of stanza-openings at lines 64, 92, and 113, a proximal deictic that must have the storytelling rather than the characters as its focus. Even quite neutral conjunctions such as For (76, 78, 95, 97), And (127, 155, 162), But (141, 148, 152), also frequently heading stanzas, and still more the less neutral ‘but natheles’ (170) and formulas

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such as ‘And so bifel’ (155), cannot help conveying the existence of narratorial agency at the level of basic articulation. Other examples of deixis that organize the narrative sequence for the beneﬁt of the audience, to whom what has previously been mentioned is still near at hand, are anaphoric phrases using proximal deictics such as ‘this Calkas’ (71), ‘this Appollo’ (72), ‘this forknowynge wise’ (79), ‘this meschaunce’ (92), ‘this false and wikked dede’ (93), ‘this lady’ (99, 106), ‘this Ector’ (113), ‘thise othere folk’ (169), ‘this Troilus’ (183).20 A personalized narratorial ﬁgure addressing an audience is strongly implied by the asseveration, ‘ye, wolde whoso nolde’ (77), and even by the tiny insertion later of ‘ye’ (168), and one surfaces explicitly in ‘As to my doom’ (100)—but his managerial power has been implicit throughout, especially perhaps in the narrative’s frequent hypotaxis.21 He surfaces again in a whole metanarrative stanza at lines 141–7, now manifesting the organizational power (shown especially in selection and omission) latent in the very structure of the poem’s sentences, and the corresponding grasp of rhetorical concepts such as matere and digression; and at the same time making explicit the interpellation of his public as impatient listeners (‘it were . . . yow to long to dwelle’) or diligent readers (‘Whoso that kan may rede hem’)—interpellation that, as we have seen, so frequently accompanies narratorial appearances. Narratorial agency is implied even in asseverations such as ‘out of doute’ (152). Burrow notes the persistence in ‘literary’ Middle English narratives of ‘a minstrel manner, full of tags and formulas, appeals to the audience and heavily marked narrative transitions’ (1971: 14) (exactly what we found in Havelok); in Troilus and Criseyde such effects contribute to a general subjectivization of storytelling—which is not the same as the characterization of a ﬁctional narrator possessing the ontological consistency of a person in the real world. 20 Such uses of this are described by Mustanoja (1960: 174) as ‘in a sense approximating that of the deﬁnite article’ and as ‘mainly a feature of vivid, colloquial, and often chatty style . . . particularly common in Chaucer’s and Gower’s works’; but, while true enough, this disregards the more strongly proximal sense of this than of the, drawing the audience into a conﬁdential relationship. 21 Cf. Chatman’s observation (1978: 223): ‘Summary implies that someone has felt a ‘‘problem of transition’’ or the like—and who can that ‘‘someone’’ be if not a narrator? . . . An account cannot but draw attention to the one who felt obliged to make such an account.’ Chatman, however, sees such textual implications as pointing beyond language to a ﬁctive reality.

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Again, consider the remark that in the Trojan–Greek conﬂict ‘The thynges fellen, as they don of werre’ (134). It exempliﬁes what Roland Barthes calls the ‘cultural codes’ of narrative (1974: 18), areas of tacit agreement supplied by a shared extratextual culture (and therefore conveyed in a present tense denoting omnitemporality), to which narratives appeal for support. When we are told that Criseyde seemed like an immortal being, ‘As doth an hevenyssh perﬁt creature’ (104), the present tense again implies an appeal to a conception shared by the medieval poet and his readers. When Chaucer adds that she was ﬁrst in beauty ‘Right as oure ﬁrste lettre is now an A’ (171), the proximal deictics oure and now allude more precisely to knowledge shared by poet and audience, and is has both an omnitemporal force (‘A’ is always the ﬁrst letter of the alphabet known to all) and a genuinely present and proximal force (‘Anne’—of Bohemia—whose name begins with that letter is currently queen over them all). So too with ‘And yet as proud a pekok kan he pulle’ (210): the deictic yet (meaning ‘still’ or ‘even now’) refers to a time that has narration and audience jointly as its anchors, and asserts a quasi-proverbial truth about love to which assent is assumed. Such cases must imply narratorial agency and audience response, yet ‘the narrator’ evoked is elusive: he is no particular person, neither the inspired creator of poesye nor the ‘self-styled objective’ (but perhaps really ‘deluded’) compiler of historical material, but simply the mouthpiece of what Barthes (ibid.) calls ‘a collective and anonymous voice originating in traditional human experience’. Finally, though in this extract the predominant tense of the narrative proper is overwhelmingly the past, we can also ﬁnd some instances of the so-called ‘historic present’, and they too encode subjectivity in the text. One instance comes in lines 83–4, where the present tense indicates a momentary adoption of the point of view of the Greeks, entered into at the moment when they welcome Calchas: he has the wisdom needed in every danger that is to be feared. And another instance occurs in the shift from past to present in lines 90–1, adopting the viewpoint of the Trojans in the present moment of their discovery that Calchas has deserted: they said (that) he and his kin are deserving to be burnt. In the latter case, we may have one of those unprompted switches from reported into direct speech that are so common in medieval vernacular

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narrative.22 The very distinction between the two categories of speech is often created by the quotation marks that do not exist in medieval manuscripts, and a modern editor might equally well punctuate the lines: ‘And seyden, ‘‘He and al his kyn at-ones | Ben worthi for to brennen, fel and bones!’’ ’ But the subjectivizing effect would be the same, however an editor decided to resolve the ambiguity: the text would momentarily enter into the perspective of the Trojans. This kind of analysis might be continued almost indeﬁnitely, but I hope my point has already emerged. Middle English narrative, as in Havelok and other romances, is often warmly personal, offering and demanding emotional response to the events and feelings recounted. Chaucerian narrative continues this tradition; it also incorporates more complex effects such as skilful summary and ironic exaggeration, but these too in their different ways create a diffused subjectivization quite opposite to any notion of ‘pure narrative’, if that implies objective neutrality. Yet on the other hand this pervasive and ﬂexible personalizing does not necessarily imply impersonation of a narrator. The many deictic elements in the extract have no ﬁxed point of origin; the passage is richly subjective, yet has no single subject. Given the reciprocal relation noted by Mehl and others between the ﬁrst and second persons of the narrative, it is hard to see why Troilus’s ﬁrst person should refer more deﬁnitely to a unitary individual than its second person does; and its second person, even if we set aside apostrophized deities, shifts rapidly among ‘ye loveres that ben here’ (. 1751), ‘Thow, redere’ (. 270), ‘litel bok’ (. 1786), ‘yonge, fresshe folkes, he or she’ (. 1835), ‘the [Gower] and . . . the [Strode]’ (. 1857), and other addressees, none of them more literally present than the ‘I’. And the multiplicity will involve self-contradiction, because at the very least, in a narrative of such explicit textuality, we must construct the ﬁrst person as existing both inside and outside ‘Thise woful vers, that wepen as I write’ (. 7)—a line attributing double agency and double proximality to the verses of the poem and to the ‘I’ who writes them. Chaucer was more interested than most medieval poets in the ways that stories may be relatable to those who tell them (what is told may be revealing or unrevealing about the teller, surprising or predictable, and so on), and this interest culminates 22 I am inﬂuenced here by Moore (2002), and am indebted to her for discussing the topic with me and providing me with a text of her paper.

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in the Canterbury Tales, with its provision of varied tellers for the varied stories told. But it does not follow that even there he felt under any obligation to shape the ﬁrst-person narratorial devices into consistent human narrators. Still less does it follow that he was more interested in deﬁning a consciousness envisageable as the origin of a story than he was in the story itself. When we look closely at almost any narrative passage in Chaucer, we ﬁnd not a single shaping subjectivity but the traces of many different centres of consciousness.

The Narrator and Criseyde In the case of Troilus and Criseyde, when a single shaping subjectivity within the poem has been envisaged by the critics of the last halfcentury, it has nearly always been limited and fallible23 —indeed, it is hard to see how it could be otherwise, since a narrator of whom we have no external knowledge could hardly be represented as knowing more and understanding better than the poet who created him, and if his knowledge and understanding were simply on the same level as the poet’s, what need would there be for a narrator at all? In Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer, like the poets of King Horn and Havelok, and indeed like almost all medieval narrative poets, was not inventing a new story but retelling an old one, and he felt able to modify or amplify or abbreviate it in detail but not to change it in any fundamental way. As with Havelok, the story of Troilus and Criseyde, told before by Benoˆıt de Sainte-Maure (who may really have invented it), Guido delle Colonne, Giovanni Boccaccio and others, was incorporated in a body of materials thought to constitute a national history, that of Troy, and to mark the origin of the European national histories.24 It had the force of history and would have been known as such (though not in Boccaccio’s version, which was Chaucer’s main source) to the readers he could most easily imagine. It had to end, therefore, with Criseyde’s inﬁdelity followed by Troilus’s death. In Chaucer’s time, no such radical change as that made by Henryson, with Troilus outliving Criseyde and writing her epitaph 23 An exception is Knopp (1981), who ﬁnds in the poem a ‘superbly competent narrator’ (324) and writes that ‘Although the narrator may not be identical with the poet, he probably comes closer in temperament and philosophy than any other ﬁgure in Chaucer’s works’ (325). In that case it is hard to see any justiﬁcation for referring to a narrator at all, other than the dogma that every narrative must have one. 24 On the signiﬁcance of Trojan history in Chaucer’s time, see Patterson (1991: ch. 2).

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after she has been abandoned by Diomede and has died as a leper, would have been possible.25 The predestinarianism for which Troilus argues in a soliloquy in Book IV is true, not because history could not have been otherwise but because he is a character in a (hi)story that has already been written.26 Perhaps the most emphatically recurrent theme in the narratorial discourse of Troilus and Criseyde is defence of the poem’s heroine against accusations or suspicions (arising from knowledge of how the story must end) of being ‘light’ or ‘easy’—too quick to fall in love, too quick to change from one lover to another. That was how she had been represented in the earlier versions, in accordance with misogynistic clerical stereotypes—which was why the defence was needed. So, after Criseyde has seen Troilus riding past her window, glamorously wounded, and asked herself whether she has succumbed to a love-potion, Chaucer writes, Now myghte som envious jangle thus: ‘This was a sodeyn love; how myght it be That she so lightly loved Troilus?’ (. 666–8)

and proceeds to defend her against that accusation—a defence more fully justiﬁed by the following 250 lines, in which he shows the extraordinarily complex processes in Criseyde’s inner life by which she comes to allow herself to love Troilus. When Pandarus arranges for Criseyde to visit the supposedly sick Troilus at Deiphebus’s house, Chaucer insists that she was ‘al innocent of this’ and asks, ‘who is that ne wolde hire gloriﬁe, | To mowen swich a knyght don lyve or dye?’ (. 1562, 1593–4). When her uncle’s skilful manœuvrings eventually bring Troilus into Criseyde’s bed, Chaucer does not pretend that Criseyde, desiring Troilus and in love with him, was entirely unaware of what was happening and the possible outcome, but he repeatedly conveys an uncertainty that invites us to imagine for ourselves the shimmering complexity of her inner life: 25 See Ch. 1, pp. 22–3. Henryson’s poem in its turn has been the victim of narrator readings, e.g. Fox (1968: 53), sees an ‘unintelligent, low-minded and agreeable’ narrator who foolishly excuses Cresseid, while Harty (1982) sees a reversal of the supposed Chaucerian roles, ﬁnding a narrator who condemns Cresseid and behind him a poet who shows her to be redeemed. 26 Thus in my view, Utz is mistaken in suggesting that readers are led to believe that ‘things could very easily turn out completely otherwise if someone with unlimited authority behind the narrator had only chosen to change them’ (1997: 139). I see no indication of this in the poem.

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‘Nought list myn auctour fully to declare | What that she thoughte whan he seyde so . . .’ (. 575–6).27 And even when Criseyde has been unwillingly exchanged for Antenor, ‘sold’ to the Greeks as Hector implies (. 182), and then betrays Troilus by turning to Diomede as her protector and lover, Chaucer does not wish to add to the reductive condemnations of the earlier versions: Ne me ne list this sely womman chyde Forther than the storye wol devyse. Hire name, allas, is publysshed so wide That for hire gilt it oughte ynough sufﬁse. (. 1093–6)

The storye is what it is, and the line Chaucer takes in retelling it (to put it in merely judicial terms) is not that the facts must have been different or that Criseyde was an entirely innocent woman betrayed by men; it is that, if we consider all the factors involved in the characters’ inner as well as outer lives, we shall see that she was something far more complex and interesting than the stereotype of female deception in the versions his audience could have known. Benoˆıt de Sainte-Maure had made Troilus sum up his experience like this (Gordon 1964: 21): ‘He called ladies faithless and maidens false. He said it was an evil thing to put your trust in them, for there were very few of them who were faithful in love and free from ﬁckleness and disloyalty.’28 Chaucer’s Troilus avoids all such generalizations about female untrustworthiness, and can only say that, knowing Criseyde has cast him out of her mind, he still cannot bring himself to ‘unlove’ her (. 1695–8). That shows the depth of his ﬁdelity, but it is surely also intended to remind us that their love was once mutual. Chaucer’s defence of Criseyde arose from a deeper pitee than any earlier writer had shown for her vulnerability to external pressures, as a 27 Cf. Nuttall’s recent suggestion (2003: 34–5) that the uncertainty conveyed by Chaucer here produces an effect corresponding to Freud’s Verleugnung: ‘The Freudian vocabulary is not available to him, yet he has somehow reached the point of wishing the reader to hold two possibilities in mind: Criseyde knows and yet innocently does not know. With a brilliance born, we may guess, of obscure desperation, Chaucer projects the doubleness of motivation as an equivocation in the pretended literary source. The effect, in a prolix medieval narrative, is that ten minutes later the reader or auditor will retain the vague thought: ‘‘She knew and yet she didn’t.’’ ’ We do not have to imagine the psyche of a ﬁctional narrator as the focus for this disavowal. 28 See Mieszkowski (1971) for detailed documentation of the pre-Chaucerian stereotype of Criseyde as ‘a standard example of a ﬁckle woman’ (79).

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beautiful young woman in a city under siege, whose husband was dead and whose father had abandoned her, and whose only available male relation was involved in a conspiracy to seduce her. It also arose from what Pearsall calls Chaucer’s engagement with ‘the barely imaginable possibility of a fully realized female subjectivity, a woman with the selfawareness, the moral and emotional self-consciousness, the elusive and enigmatic self-communing, that it was orthodox to deny to women as a sex’ (1992: 172).29 That engagement produces in the telling of the story many shifts and nuances of tone and much scarcely deﬁnable irony, but the predominant effect remains one of empathy. What happens, though, when the expression of this empathetic defence of Criseyde comes to be attributed not to the Chaucer who wrote Troilus and Criseyde but to a fallible narrator within the poem? What happens was already apparent in Donaldson’s 1970 paper ‘Criseide and Her Narrator’. In this inﬂuential account, the narrator ‘loves Criseide’ with an ‘avuncular sentimentality’ so extreme that Chaucer persistently gives us hints to correct for it. The narrator ‘does his best to maintain his belief that so lovely a woman as Criseide could do no wrong’, while ‘Chaucer interferes with the work of his narrator’ so as to convey the underlying ‘reasons for us to distrust and hate her’. Here already we ﬁnd the dislike for aspects of Chaucer’s poetry now so commonly acknowledged in narrator readings of his works, and justiﬁed by arbitrary attribution to a ﬁctional character, so that only what is to the modern critic’s taste need be read as coming from Chaucer himself. The following stanza is described as ‘egregiously sentimental’ (1970: 68, 83, 76): In al this world ther nys so cruel herte That hire hadde herd compleynen in hire sorwe That nolde han wepen for hire peynes smerte, So tendrely she weep, bothe eve and morwe. Hire nedede no teris for to borwe! And this was yet the werste of al hire peyne: Ther was no wight to whom she dorste hire pleyne.

(. 722–8)

Wisely, perhaps, Donaldson only alludes to these lines without quoting them, for there is much Chaucerian poetry that a modern reader might 29 Some of this—more perhaps than Pearsall allows—is to be found in Boccaccio; but in any case, as I have stated, in England Boccaccio’s version was probably known only to Chaucer.

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ﬁnd more sentimental than this.30 Heightened emotionalism, often associated with women, is a common feature of late-medieval poetry, found in Chaucer in other rhyme-royal compositions such as the tales of the Prioress and the Second Nun; and critics have seized on the narrator theory to remove responsibility for these too from Chaucer himself. Donaldson’s student Mieszkowski goes into more detail about this stanza: she does quote it, and ﬁnds in it ‘the narrator’s rhetorical ineffectiveness’ and his ‘poetic clumsiness’ (in the use of the tag ‘bothe eve and morwe’), and sees ‘[t]he narrator’s concluding suggestion’ as ‘rather silly’. She concludes that ‘in the last analysis what the stanza really conveys is that urgent wish of the narrator . . . that Criseyde’s real but ephemeral feelings could have such value and warrant such sympathy’ (1971: 146–7).31 There are perhaps few stanzas that would not succumb to such analysis by a critic who began from the assumption that the poem’s words were the responsibility of a fallible narrator. And what is made possible by the insertion of this fallible narrator into Troilus and Criseyde is the re-emergence of an antifeminism almost as extreme as in any of the earlier versions of the story—versions whose bias must surely have helped to provoke Chaucer’s pitee for Criseyde. Donaldson quotes the beautiful chronographia in . 1016–22: The brighte Venus folwede and ay taughte The wey there brode Phebus down alighte; And Cynthea hire char-hors overraughte To whirle out of the Leoun, if she myghte; And Signifer his candels sheweth brighte Whan that Criseyde unto hire bedde wente Inwith hire fadres faire brighte tente.

He cannot deny its beauty, so what he does is to deny its appropriateness to the story Chaucer is telling: ‘all this celestial machinery in grandiose motion merely in order to get a sorry little woman, loving but no 30 The fallible narrator generally serves to protect modern readers against absorption into what they perceive as emotional excess: note, for example, the ‘tendency not to take Troilus’ repeated expressions of the death wish altogether seriously’ observed in the poem’s ‘ﬁnest critics’ by Goldstein (n.d.: 187). 31 Chaucer’s poetic style incorporates many tags, as Burrow notes, and there is no more reason to ﬁnd clumsiness here than in the statement that when Troilus ﬁrst fell in love with Criseyde ‘It shewed in his hewe bothe eve and morwe’ (. 487).

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Venus, bright-haired but no sun, to bed in the security of her father’s tent’ (1970: 79). Is the good poetry Chaucer’s, and its application to the occasion the narrator’s? Or does even the good poetry count as bad poetry so that it can be a means of patronizing and denigrating the ‘sorry little woman’ Criseyde? Donaldson claims that he too loves Criseyde, but his attitude towards her and the narrator who supposedly loves her is ultimately contemptuous. The impoverishment of Chaucer’s work that is almost always a consequence of narrator readings can take and has taken other forms than it does in Donaldson, but his criticism remains an exemplary instance of the dangers involved in attributing to an imaginary narrator all that seems to the critic to detract from the poem’s perfection.

4 The Man of Law’s Tale Chaucer’s own heightenings of Trivet’s wooden chronicle1 suggest that he was interested in adapting the narrative rhetorically to some individual voice (not his own). (Miller 1975: 51) Chaucer permits the narrative voice to assume the narrower, more philistine, point of view, and in doing so he invites us to see such crudity as unsatisfactory. (Delany 1983: 39) the exclamatory narrative voice we are hearing in The Man of Law’s Tale is simultaneously creating the persona of the speaker and exposing his emptiness. (Astell 1991: 87)

Narrators in Canterbury Tales Criticism For obvious reasons, narrators have played an even larger part in interpretation of the Canterbury Tales than in that of Troilus and Criseyde. In Troilus and Criseyde, if there is a ﬁctional narrator, all we can know about him has to be deduced from the narrative itself, so that circularity of argument is almost inevitable; whereas the Tales include the General Prologue and numerous linking passages, in which we are given information about the tellers before they start on their stories: we are told at least their genders and professions, and sometimes much more. And then many of the tales have their own prologues, in some of which we learn still more about the tellers; so that with the Tales it makes sense in principle, as it does not with the Troilus, to think in terms of the appropriateness of a story to its teller, and to suppose that we need to judge it by making allowances for its teller’s bias. This approach seems to be encouraged by the ordinatio of the most 1 This is the immediate source of the Man of Law’s Tale, the early fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman chronicle by Nicholas Trivet; another probable source is the version in Gower’s Confessio Amantis, . 587–1598.

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famous of the early manuscripts, the Ellesmere, in which portraits of the pilgrims, based on their descriptions in the General Prologue, are placed not alongside these descriptions but alongside their respective tales. To read the tales in relation to their pilgrim tellers has been the dominant mode of interpretation for over a century; and this mode has been associated with a powerful idea arising with seeming naturalness from the collection’s ﬁction of oral delivery—that of narrative voice, illustrated in the three quotations that head this chapter. In one sense this idea can be traced as far back as Dryden, who wrote in 1700 of Chaucer’s pilgrims that The matter and manner of their tales, and of their telling, are so suited to their different educations, humours, and callings, that each of them would be improper in any other mouth. Even the grave and serious characters are distinguished by their several sorts of gravity: their discourses are such as belong to their age, their calling, and their breeding; such as are becoming of them, and of them only. (Watson 1962: . 284)

But this notion that each tale is not only ‘proper’ and ‘becoming’ in every way to its teller but is told in a voice unmistakably issuing from that teller’s ‘mouth’, stated by Dryden in the general terms of a neoclassical aesthetic, was ﬁrst given more speciﬁc application in the late nineteenth century by George Lyman Kittredge. In an article published in 18932 Kittredge began from what he saw as the then-current view, that Chaucer, for all his skill as a storyteller, sometimes ‘grossly violated dramatic propriety’. The two examples he gives from the Tales are Nature’s ‘self-satisﬁed’ soliloquy in the Physician’s Tale in which she boasts of the tale’s heroine as ‘her artistic masterpiece’, and the Pardoner’s self-exposing ‘harangue’. But such apparent incongruities, Kittredge argues, must be considered in the light of this principle: ‘It was Chaucer’s artistic duty, in the Canterbury Tales,—as it has clearly been his purpose,—not only to select stories appropriate to the several pilgrims, but to make the method of delivery correspond to the character of the teller.’ (The basis for that ‘artistic duty’ Kittredge never expounds, presumably because he regards it as obvious.) In the case of the Physician’s Tale, we have to take account

2 Kittredge (1893) is quoted from the more accessible reprint in Wagenknecht (1959: 117–25; page numbers in text).

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of ‘the character of the doctor’ who tells it: he is ‘a very formal person, from whom a degree of prosiness is to be expected’ (117). Kittredge’s main subject is the Pardoner, and here he starts from a somewhat similar principle, again evidently assumed to be obvious. Chaucer must intend dramatic consistency, because ‘His aim is not to reconstruct the Church or to ameliorate humanity, but to depict certain characters, and to let them tell stories. He has no right to resort to conventions which, permissible to one who depicts a character ad hoc, are unjustiﬁable in one who depicts a character for its own sake’ (118–19). Kittredge then proceeds, with great ingenuity, to explain the apparent incongruities in the Pardoner’s performance in terms of a ‘conﬂict of feelings’ (123–4) within the Pardoner. He can risk revealing his own sinfulness because ‘he need fear no disagreeable consequences’ (120); he is himself unexpectedly moved by the story he tells, ‘though he has told it a thousand times before in the way of his profession’ (122); and this leads him to ‘an ejaculation profoundly affecting in its reminiscence of the Pardoner’s better nature, which he had himself thought dead long ago’ (123), namely his assertion that Christ’s pardon is best and his prayer that the pilgrims may receive it. Thus an apparent violation of dramatic propriety is revealed to be ‘the subtlest piece of character delineation the poet has ever attempted’ (124). What deserves attention in this epoch-making article is not just the repeated elevation of individual ‘character’ as the goal of Chaucer’s art, but more particularly the underlying assumptions—that Chaucer shaped stories in order to delineate the characters of their ﬁctional tellers, and that this fact can be used to explain both his successes and his apparent failures. If the Physician’s Tale is prosy, that is because it was Chaucer’s ‘artistic duty’ to delineate the prosy character of its teller; if the Pardoner’s performance seems to include incongruities, they can be explained away by the subtlety of Chaucer’s delineation of the performer’s conﬂicted inner life. Kittredge gave more general application to this idea twenty-one years later in a famous passage from Chaucer and His Poetry, when he could still state about the Canterbury Tales that ‘Very seldom do we venture to regard the several stories from the dramatic point of view. Yet that is manifestly our paramount duty’ (1915: 151). Duty again!—and he

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introduces as follows his own fulﬁlment of his duty to interpret what it was Chaucer’s duty to write: The Canterbury Pilgrimage is . . . a Human Comedy, and the Knight and the Miller and the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath and the rest are the dramatis personae . . . From this point of view, which surely accords with Chaucer’s intention, the Pilgrims do not exist for the sake of the stories, but vice versa. Structurally regarded, the stories are merely long speeches expressing, directly or indirectly, the characters of the several persons. (154–5)

The double idea set out in those well-known words, that in each tale we can recognize the voice of its individual narrator, and that that was why Chaucer wrote them, proved to be enormously fruitful. Throughout the twentieth century it was worked out in detail in relation to one tale after another—and indeed not only to the Canterbury Tales, for which Chaucer himself devised the ﬁctional scheme of a taletelling competition, but to virtually all Chaucer’s poems, in most of which the ‘narrator’ or ‘speaker’ is simply ‘I’. As we have seen, the ‘narrator’ of Troilus and Criseyde has become a crucial ﬁgure in most readings, but the same is true of the ‘narrator’ of The Legend of Good Women3 and the ‘dreamers’ of The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, and The Parliament of Fowls; and critics have even proposed interpreting Chaucer’s lyrics along the same lines.4 The popularity of narrative voice as a means of interpretation has been such that it has ceased to be regarded as a device based on a theory and is now simply accepted by most readers of Chaucer as an obvious reality. If Dinshaw is right to claim that ‘Kittredge’s criticism is still the basis of much teaching of Chaucer’ (1999: 123), this is not to be attributed simply to Kittredge’s persuasiveness, any more than the acceptance of the narrator theory of Troilus is due simply to Donaldson’s. Kittredge offered this idea as a general truth about the Canterbury Tales in an age when the dramatic monologue was recently established as a prestigious poetic form and the questionable narrator was coming to be regarded as a 3 This goes well beyond Kittredge’s view: while believing that The Book of the Duchess had a ﬁctional narrator who ‘is not Geoffrey Chaucer’, he stated that in The Legend of Good Women ‘Dramatic presentation is not attempted, or even thought of, all the stories being told by . . . the poet himself’ (1915: 50, 152). 4 e.g. Stephens (1986–8); see discussion of his account of Chaucer’s Complaint Unto Pity in Ch. 6.

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crucial element in sophisticated prose ﬁction—a cultural moment, that is, that regarded individual human consciousnesses as prior to, and in a fundamental way more interesting than, stories. That moment has not passed, and I am surely not alone as a teacher of literature in ﬁnding that those I teach almost invariably see writing’s expressive function as being of paramount importance. They can quite readily be brought to think of a piece of writing as expressing the consciousness of a ﬁctional person distinguishable from its actual writer, but they ﬁnd it almost impossibly difﬁcult to avoid assuming, beyond any possibility of question, that all writing must be regarded as the representation of speech, issuing from the mouth of a human individual and expressing that individual’s consciousness in a distinctive voice. In Chapter 1 I set out some reasons for questioning this assumption, and in Chapter 3 I hinted at the cultural pressures that may account for its special strength in America.5 A further reason for the predominance of narrative voice in Canterbury Tales criticism is that it supplies a ready means of engaging the imagination and ingenuity of critics in the production of new interpretations. Given the assumption that each tale is to be understood as spoken in the voice of an individual pilgrim, and given that we seem to have in the General Prologue and other prologues and linking passages information about most of those pilgrims, the questions why a tale is assigned to its speciﬁc teller and what it reveals about that teller beyond what we are explicitly told can be answered in a variety of ways limited only by the powers of human fantasy. No reader need ever be at a loss for new theories about the connections between a tale and its teller, and thus the supply of original articles and books need never dry up—an obvious advantage when the great majority of readers of Chaucer (again especially perhaps in America) are academics whose careers depend on their production of articles and books that purport to give original readings.6 A third reason why narrative voice has been so inescapable 5 Of non-American Chaucer scholars who question this way of reading the Tales, I quote Pearsall and Cooper below; others are Lawton (1985), Mehl (1986), and Brewer (1985; 1990). American scholars who question the assumption of narrative voice include Jordan (1967) and Benson (1986; 2003). Both have written interestingly about the Man of Law’s Tale: Jordan (1995) and C. Benson (1987). 6 For a more charitable explanation, see Benson 2003: this approach ‘will persist . . . if for no other reason than that it is so convenient for presenting the Canterbury Tales to students’ (n. 2).

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an assumption is one we have encountered in considering readings of Troilus and Criseyde: by separating the teller whose ‘voice’ we hear in a tale from the poet Chaucer, it provides a means of rejecting anything that a modern reader ﬁnds disagreeable as the responsibility not of Chaucer but of that teller. Kittredge wrote that ‘Chaucer always knew what he was about’ (1915: 151), and his italics emphasize the importance of this interpretative principle. (It strikingly anticipates a central axiom of the ‘New Criticism’, as in Cleanth Brooks’s assertion (1947: 159) about Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, that ‘the poet knows precisely what he is doing’.) If we do not like what Chaucer seems to be about we can use the doctrines of the omniscient poet and of narrative voice to persuade ourselves that it is really a ﬁctional teller who is about it; thus Chaucer will remain blameless, and we shall have the satisfaction of thinking that we agree with him (or perhaps that he agrees with us). In practice this approach has had both good and bad consequences: it has enabled critics to respond to tensions that may really be present within the tales, but has prevented them from considering the possibility that those tensions derive from Chaucer himself.7 Chaucer must always be supposed to remain above the struggle, like Matthew Arnold’s Shakespeare, ‘Outtopping knowledge’, omnisciently and omnipotently free of the conﬂicts and failings that make up actual human experience.

The Man of Law as Fallible Narrator The third reason has been an especially powerful motive over the last half-century in interpretations of the Man of Law’s Tale, the ﬁrst story in Fragment II of the Canterbury Tales. This sombre narrative tells of the many tribulations, injustices, and wanderings in exile undergone by the blameless Custance, from the time her father, the Emperor of Rome, marries her to the Sowdan of Surrye in return for his conversion to Christianity, to her reunion in Rome with her father and her second husband, Alla, also a Christian convert, and the crowning of her and Alla’s son Maurice as emperor—a happy ending limited by the ﬁnal reminder that they live only ‘Til deeth departeth hem’ (. 1158). It 7 Well exempliﬁed in Wetherbee (1989), one of the best ‘narrator’ readings of the Man of Law’s Tale; he sees internal tensions in the tale, deriving from an ‘unwieldy combination of public and private motives’ (85), but attributes these to the Man of Law, not to Chaucer.

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has never, at least in modern times, been a favourite: one writer places it ‘Among that select group of disliked Canterbury Tales’ (Weissman 1979: 133), and another notes that ‘few critics seem to like Custance very much’ (Dawson 1991–2: 294). It is among the longest and most elaborate of the verse tales, but perhaps only one of its 147 rhyme-royal stanzas is widely remembered, stanza 74, placed at the mathematical centre—a chilling evocation of Jesus, or a condemned man of some later time, led through a crowd to execution: Have ye nat seyn somtyme a pale face, Among a prees, of hym that hath be lad Toward his deeth, wher as hym gat no grace, And swich a colour in his face hath had Men myghte knowe his face that was bistad Amonges alle the faces in that route? So stant Custance, and looketh hire aboute. (. 645–51)

The tale’s unpopularity meant that for many years it was hardly interpreted at all, but was simply dismissed as an early and immature work, provisionally used to ﬁll a gap in the collection and perhaps later to be revised or replaced.8 In its introductory link a pilgrim, called on by the Host as ‘Sire Man of Lawe’ (33) to tell the next tale, ﬁrst expresses lengthy regret that ‘Chaucer’ (here treated as if he were not one of the pilgrims) has already rhymed all the ‘thrifty’ tales there are (46), but then concludes by saying that he doesn’t care, because ‘I speke in prose, and lat him rymes make’ (96). Since the tale of Custance is in verse, this would seem to indicate that its ‘I’ is most unlikely to have been intended to express the character of the Man of Law, and many earlier critics simply accepted what one of them called its ‘absolute incongruity’ to its teller (Lounsbury 1892: iii. 436).9 But from

8 More recent scholarship (Lewis 1966) places it not earlier than 1390, on account of its use of Innocent III’s De Miseria and Gower’s Confessio Amantis. 9 Numerous attempts have been made to overcome the verse/prose discrepancy (e.g. by suggesting that the Man of Law means that he usually speaks in prose when pursuing his profession). The most ingenious, though in my view among the least convincing, is an argument designed to show that by ‘prose’ Chaucer means stanzaic verse: see Stevens (1979). Stevens thus shifts the blame for a tale he particularly dislikes from Chaucer to the Man of Law, that ‘prime specimen of limited human wit’ (1979: 72), reinterpreting it as a ‘perfect dramatic exposition of an inept narrator’ (n. 34). For a survey of early criticism, see Hamilton (1966: 153–5). She notes that in 1908 William H. Browne

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the middle of the twentieth century, when Donaldson was persuasively applying the theory of narratorial voice to the ‘I’s of the General Prologue and Troilus and Criseyde, a new solution emerged: the Man of Law’s Tale could be read, as Kittredge had suggested about that other unfavourite, the Physician’s Tale, as expressing the character of an unsatisfactory narrator. The tale contains an exceptionally prominent and pervasive narratorial element, including numerous occurrences of a narratorial ‘I’. (In this last respect it contrasts sharply with Gower’s version of the story, where the interpretative commentary, while very noticeable in itself, scrupulously avoids all explicit ﬁrst-person forms.) The Man of Law’s Tale comments, often for several stanzas, on the destinal and providential forces at work behind the events it recounts, exclaiming at the lessons to be learned from them, and demanding emotional response from readers; and there were no obvious candidates to ﬁll the role of narrator other than the Man of Law, described in the General Prologue in terms of admiration for his expert skills, but with hints of something less attractive behind the professional fac¸ade: Discreet he was and of greet reverence— He semed swich, his wordes weren so wise . . . Nowher so bisy a man as he ther nas, And yet he semed bisier than he was. (. 312–13, 321–2; my italics)

As I trace some of the earlier suggestions (many no longer current) that the Man of Law’s Tale is delivered in a ‘narrative voice’ belonging to the Man of Law as described in the General Prologue, I would ask the reader to bear in mind the claim made in Chapter 3 about my unearthing of the corpses of earlier discussions of the Troilus narrator: that if we forget our predecessors, we may also forget the principles that they explicitly defended and that we inadvertently continue to take for granted. The corpses may be buried, but their ghosts can still be active in our own minds. One of the earliest ‘narrator’ interpretations of the Man and in 1924 Edgar C. Knowlton both brieﬂy indicated some appropriateness to a trial lawyer in the tale’s rhetoric. She herself, even while establishing parallels between the trial scene in the Man of Law’s Tale and medieval legal procedures, comments that ‘Chaucer . . . would in all likelihood be puzzled by our insistence on a rather strict consonance between individual Canterbury Tales and the characters and preoccupations of those who tell them’ (1966: 163).

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of Law’s Tale was put forward in 1948, in a note on the implications of the poem’s marriage of its Christian heroine to a pagan. ‘The Man of Law,’ wrote Father Beichner, ‘ﬁrst thinks of the proposed marriage as a problem of canon law . . . and thus reveals the interest of his own legal mind’; and he went on to suggest that in the scene describing the discussion of this problem in the Sowdan’s privy council (lines 204–17) the Man of Law is ‘trying rather patronizingly to impress his fellow pilgrims’ with his technical knowledge of the issues involved (Beichner 1948: 70, 71). Some years later, in 1967, the narrator was moved to the centre of the tale’s meaning in a substantial study by Chauncey Wood, which is especially concerned with the astrological elements in the narratorial commentary (Wood 1970).10 Wood’s approach can best be illustrated by extended quotation: the disparity between the reactions of Custance and the Man of Law to her vicissitudes points up Custance as a paradigm of Constancy whereas the Man of Law is shown to be a less constant ﬁgure. His analyses of the story are as much a gloss on his own character and the events of his world as they are a commentary on Custance and the phenomena of her environment. Because of the importance of the Man of Law as an interpreter it will be argued here that he is best approached through a study of his interpretations, which, by mediaeval standards, are mainly misinterpretations. The confounding of immediate pleasure with ultimate satisfaction puts the Man of Law at variance with the personiﬁcation of Constancy and leads him to take a materialistic, legalistic view of astrology, religion, literature, and everything else . . . It seems scarcely credible that the Man of Law’s anti-Boethian, anti-humanistic, antireligious approach to life should be credited to Chaucer, so it will be further argued here that the Man of Law’s Tale as a whole is a satire—not on Custance but on the Man of Law . . . [A]n approach to the Man of Law’s Tale that admits the possibility that the Man of Law’s and Chaucer’s views may not be the same could account for the co-existence of the seemingly irreconcilable elements of the saint’s legend and the romance within this tale. (1970: 194–5)

Here we ﬁnd a collection of assumptions that pervade later interpretation of the tale: that Chaucer is likely to have written one of his longer tales in order to satirize its pilgrim-narrator (even though in this case we are far from certain who the intended narrator was); that ‘mediaeval standards’ can be readily identiﬁed and applied to the interpretation of 10

Originally published in Traditio 23 (1967): 149–90.

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any medieval poem;11 and that the coexistence of conﬂicting elements within a tale must be a fault, to be explained away by separating the narrator from the poet. To these should be added another emerging later in Wood’s article, that when Chaucer ‘misquotes’ or ‘misuses’ any text, it indicates his narrator’s fallibility, rather than that (possessing a library much smaller than that available to any modern medievalist) he is quoting from memory, or that he chooses to borrow and adapt a speciﬁc passage for his own purpose, regardless of its original context.12 Wood goes on to describe the narrator of the Man of Law’s Tale as ‘glaringly obtuse’ (206), and to refer to his ‘short-sightedness’ (207), ‘morbid determinism’ (219), and ‘blindness’ (230). Any stick is good enough to beat a blind (or short-sighted) man, and Wood concludes that ‘Chaucer wished to show the Man of Law as overly optimistic as well as overly pessimistic’ (238). What can only be described as hatred and contempt for the tale as Chaucer wrote it are thus safely displaced on to the wretched teller. Wood recognized that his discussion belonged to a growing trend in the use of narrative voice to interpret the Tales, noting that, if his approach was accepted, ‘the Man of Law’s Tale could be added to the Franklin’s Tale and the Squire’s Tale, both of which have recently been described as tales that exceed their ostensible teller’s capacity to understand them’ (196, referring to Gaylord 1964 and Haller 1964–5). The same awareness of critical fashion is found in another passionate assault on the Man of Law, by Rodney Delasanta (1970–1). Mentioning an article by Alfred David (1967) as arguing that ‘Chaucer has constructed a faultless moral tale in order to fault its narrator’ (288), Delasanta continues: We have seen this kind of thing before in Chaucer with different Tales serving their own didactic ends while compromising by means of distinct modes the 11 Signiﬁcantly, Loomis 1979 gives an entirely different account of these supposedly objective standards; for her the belief in astrology evinced in the narratorial commentary is Chaucer’s own and requires no ﬁctional narrator to explain it; even if hard to reconcile with Christian faith, it was, she claims, normal in Chaucer’s time. I ﬁnd this argument persuasive in relation both to the Man of Law’s Tale and to Chaucer’s cultural milieu, and note with interest that I have not encountered a single reference to this article in any subsequent discussion. 12 Like most critics, Wood (1970: 206–9) sees Chaucer as misusing Innocent III’s De Miseria in the Man of Law’s Prologue, and also as misquoting Bernardus Silvestris.

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characters of their narrators. Certainly, the Pardoner’s perfect sermon and exemplum have always been read as serving this double intention. The Wife of Bath’s Tale ﬁts this pattern more loosely. Recent criticism has demonstrated similar, but less obvious intentions operating in the Prioress’s Tale, and the Monk’s Tale, perhaps the Franklin’s Tale.13 In each instance, Chaucer’s choice of genre has served to edify the larger audience while he has demolished for his private amusement a different species of peccator narrator: the religious charlatan, the self-justifying nymphomaniac, the gentle bigot, the philosophical lummox, the bourgeois gentilhomme. (288–9)

(In Delasanta’s reference to the Pardoner’s Tale, ‘always’ must mean since Kittredge; and he fails to note that the Pardoner’s explicit description of himself as a hypocrite differentiates him from the other tellers mentioned.) The opposing view, Delasanta claims, in a passage that makes clear his sense of the way the wind was blowing, ignores all that Chaucerian criticism has taught us in recent years . . . about point of view and the unreliable narrator, and blurs the ironic distinctions that operate at the very heart of The Canterbury Tales between Chaucer the poet, Chaucer the pilgrim, and the individual narrator of each Tale. Chaucer is not the Man of Law; he is quite obviously not fond of the Man of Law; and it is inconceivable that he would have allowed the Man of Law to shine in a story chosen for him without the attendant Chaucerian undercuttings. (290)

Delasanta goes on to note a whole series of ‘errors’ that for him conﬁrm the Man of Law’s function as an untrustworthy narrator. His Introduction (. 57) refers to The Book of the Duchess as ‘Ceys and Alcione’, thus showing that he can have read only its beginning; he wrongly imagines that Nineveh is a seaport (487); he calls Goliath ‘unmesurable’ (934) although the Bible speciﬁes that he measured ‘six cubits and one span’. The rhetorical piety of the narratorial commentary must be suspect, because ‘Chaucer showed remarkable restraint about bandying the central truths of Christianity . . . Whenever one ﬁnds a voluble Christianity rhetorically ﬂourishing in his work, therefore, it is safe to assume that Chaucer had other than the obvious catechetic intentions’ (1970–1: 297). (It is hard to see how this distinction between what ‘Chaucer’ does and what ‘one ﬁnds . . . in his work’ can be other than arbitrary, because it begins from a generalization about Chaucer 13

References to Schoeck (1961), Delasanta (1968), and Gaylord (1964).

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that excludes some of Chaucer’s writing, so that what Chaucer does in the Man of Law’s Tale is somehow not what Chaucer does.) The Man of Law is given to ‘intellectual posturing’ (294), is ‘pharisaical’ (303) and indeed suffers from ‘pharisaical schizophrenia’ (304). Even Kittredge might have felt that this went too far. Not all critics, however, believed that sufﬁcient progress had yet been made in recognizing the unsatisfactoriness of the tale’s narrator. A few years further on, in 1975, Robert P. Miller offered his own survey of recent interpretations, still ﬁnding, with regret, ‘substantial agreement’ that the Man of Law’s Tale was a seriously intended celebration of constancy and its triumph over Fortune, though noting that Wood and Delasanta formed ‘excellent’ exceptions. For him the Man of Law is someone who misunderstands Boethius, who mistakenly sees Custance’s life as ‘a success story within the province of Fortune’, and who persistently imposes his own sentimental materialism on the tale he tells (Miller 1975: 50, 52 n. 18, 65). In the 1960s and 1970s, then, we ﬁnd a cluster of readings of the Man of Law’s Tale that are energized by a sense of the power of narratorial voice, once recognized, to allow us to attribute all that we dislike about the tale and its heroine to its narrator rather than to Chaucer. That sense has continued to activate most interpretations of the tale down to the present, though the denunciatory passion of the earlier critics has subsequently been toned down and sometimes subtilized. To take one recent example, Ann W. Astell ﬁnds in the tale two voices, neither of which is Chaucer’s own: the voice of ‘the short-sighted narrator’, marked by apostrophe, and that of Custance, marked by prayer: ‘The apostrophe marks the narrator’s distinctive style, deﬁnes his voice, articulates his worldview, and sets him apart . . . from the tale he tells and its characters whose voices, recorded in direct discourse, remain distinct from the narrator’s own’ (Astell 1991: 82, 83). This narrator shows an ‘overt sympathy for Custance’ which, however, opposes ‘true identiﬁcation with her’ (91), while Chaucer, behind the scenes, thus ‘makes a powerful comment on the popular piety of his time . . . with its misdirected veneration of the saints’ (96). It is unclear, though, how Astell is able to distinguish between the narrator’s voice and the concealed Wyclifﬁte intention she attributes to Chaucer, because she also writes that ‘The narrator’s own explicit and arbitrary division of the tale into three parts—pars secunda beginning at line 386 and pars tercia beginning at line 876—shows his

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ignorance of literary-logical criteria for marking sections in a narrative’ (84). Thus she regards even the Latin rubrics in the manuscripts as the responsibility of the Man of Law rather than of Chaucer or his scribes, and presumably must imagine him speaking them as he delivers his tale.14 The main interpretative tendency in the late twentieth century was to regard as ﬁrmly established both the Man of Law’s role as unreliable narrator and Chaucer’s contempt for him, and to use these now selfevident truths as a basis for more specialized studies attributing to Chaucer a wide variety of the opinions popular among late twentiethcentury academics. I will mention four examples. In 1989 Carolyn Dinshaw connects the Man of Law’s joking remark in the introductory link about Chaucer’s avoidance of tales of incest with the fact that in many of his own tale’s analogues the heroine is in ﬂight from her father’s incestuous lust, and proposes that as narrator he is the spokesman of English common law, a law which, expressing ‘patriarchal ideology’, is committed to the prohibition of incest. At several points in the tale she ﬁnds ‘trace[s] of incest gaping through the patriarchal text’—the illicit desire not only of fathers for daughters but also of mothers for sons—and she sees the Man of Law’s ‘overexcited syntax’ as evidence of his inner turmoil at being unable to impose the law of patriarchy as completely as he would wish (1989: 89, 101, 106). Since Dinshaw attributes these symptoms to the narrator, not the poet, we are left to suppose that she regards Chaucer as standing outside the patriarchal ideology embodied by the Man of Law, and as able, like herself, to adopt a diagnostic attitude towards it.15 Laurel L. Hendrix in 1994, stating her acceptance of Astell’s view that the Man of Law ‘is incapable of understanding providence as God’s plan for eternal salvation’, focuses on the prevalence of commercial language in his tale, which she sees as part of the ‘cultural aftermath of the commercial revolution’ of the previous century and a half, with its ‘increased emphasis on the commercial metaphors associated with redemption doctrine’ (Hendrix 1994: 154,

14 Contrast N¨unning’s more sophisticated treatment of such ‘textual paraphernalia’ in George Eliot’s novels as ‘not ascribable to a narrator’, as described by Fludernik (1993b: 732). 15 In a more recent survey of current interpretations of the tale, including her own (Dinshaw 2003), she no longer distinguishes between the narrator and Chaucer.

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142). For her, the Man of Law is imprisoned within this ‘quantiﬁcation’ of redemption and ‘commercialization of grace’ (151); it is he who handles Custance as ‘a saleable object’ (154) and ‘a grace-engendering commodity’ (158), while she ‘appears to resist the Man of Law’s efforts to ﬁx and commoditize her’ (157); but ‘at the instant where Custance threatens to rise above the nexus of verbal signs and images which tend to restrict and reduce, the Man of Law employs his rhetorical skills to reassert his notion of providence as purveyance and to ﬁx Custance once more within the framework of proﬁtable penance’ (158). So presumably either Custance is somehow outside Chaucer’s control or (what I take to be Hendrix’s position) Chaucer arranges for his heroine to resist his narrator. I do not know how Hendrix or anyone else can be in a position to tell where these different agencies are at work in the narrative; but in any case the implication is that Chaucer stood disapprovingly above the ‘host of religious practices’ in his time that ‘seem to depend on essentially commercial exchanges’ (Georgianna 1990: 86).16 In 1996 Susan Schibanoff focuses on another aspect of medieval culture for which she sees the Man of Law, but not Chaucer, as spokesman, namely ‘orientalism’ in Edward W. Said’s sense.17 She writes: I shall argue that the Man of Law uses a discourse of orientalism to issue a clarion call for unity—not among the general communitas of the faithful but speciﬁcally among the Christian men of his audience . . . It is a project that Chaucer eventually subverts by exposing its self-interested hypocrisy . . . I hear in the Man of Law ‘the voice of orthodoxy’ from which Chaucer disassociates himself. (Schibanoff 1996: 60–1)18

As ‘Chaucer exposes the Man of Law’s dehumanizing rhetoric’ (96), so the tale ‘exposes, hence questions, a central dynamic of patriarchal Christianity’ (95). ‘Exposes, hence questions’ is a turn of phrase especially revealing about the mode of interpretation in these recent studies: what 16 Hendrix refers to Georgianna’s article, but without observing that it offers fundamental disagreement, abundantly substantiated, with her own assumption that Chaucer must be satirizing the use of commercial concepts to convey religious values. 17 Said (1978). Recent concern with orientalism in the context of post-colonial studies is leading to a welcome revival of interest in the Man of Law’s Tale in ways not linking it to its teller; see e.g. Davis (2000) and Heng (2003: ch. 4). 18 More recently, Elizabeth Robertson has somewhat similarly attributed to the Man of Law a ‘rhetoric . . . inadequate to the understanding of the ineffable, which Chaucer assigns in this tale to Christianity and Constance’ (2001: 176).

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the narrator conveys, because spoken in a voice identiﬁable as his and not Chaucer’s, can be assumed to be what Chaucer questions. In my fourth recent example, from 1998, James Landman takes as his starting point Chaucer’s addition to his sources of a three-line scene in which a messenger is tortured to make him disclose that the letters he carried about Custance’s newborn child could have been tampered with (. 885–7). Torture was not permitted under English common law, and Landman suggests that the addition might have been motivated by ‘torture’s alluring promise of certainty’ and might deﬁne ‘a legal mentality open to, perhaps even attracted by’, this promise (1998: 2–3). Landman is more cautious than most recent critics about attributing this motive speciﬁcally to the Man of Law, but he nevertheless ends by proposing that Custance ﬁgures as ‘the enigmatic emblem of the stability and certainty the Man of Law craves’ (35), with the Man of Law himself as her ‘ultimate torturer’ (38). To ﬁnd this convincing we have to believe either that the Man of Law is a real person working on the sources regardless of Chaucer’s intentions or that Chaucer’s readers had as much knowledge of those sources as modern scholars do—for how otherwise could they know that, in order to characterize its teller, he had added three lines to the story? I have surveyed only a small sample of interpretations of the Man of Law’s Tale, and have omitted for the moment some that deny the possibility of identifying the Man of Law as an unreliable narrator clearly distinguishable from Chaucer. I have also omitted some discussions that, while not hostile to the tale or its supposed narrator, use the narrator as a means of justifying interpretations of an ideological complexity that their authors might hesitate to attribute to the poet.19 But when the above examples are put alongside each other a clear pattern emerges: a tale and a heroine that ‘few critics seem to like . . . very much’ are rescued for modern readers by the device of narrative voice, but at a heavy price. The interpretations, like almost all interpretations proposed by medievalists, are presented as historical—none of the critics openly 19 A recent example is Lavezzo (2002), a study from which much can be learned, but which uses ‘our lawyerly narrator’ and his ‘decision to tell’ this particular tale (156) as a way of not enquiring into the implications of Chaucer’s decision to tell it. A more general instance (not concerned with the Man of Law’s Tale) of the use of narrators with extraordinarily complex motivation as barriers between the tales and their readers is Leicester (1990).

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says anything like ‘This would be an interesting way to read the Man of Law’s Tale, even though it’s not likely to have been what Chaucer meant or how anyone in his own time would have read him’20 —but precisely as historical interpretations they seem improbable, and in some cases, it must be said, absurd. Any reader who begins from the conviction that a story has a fallible narrator will certainly be able to ﬁnd in it evidence to support that conviction; and I am tempted to turn the critics’ methods against themselves, and to read the ‘errors’ in some of their writings as evidence that they use fallible narrators as means of exposing, hence questioning, the views ostensibly conveyed in their academic ﬁctions.21 Guided by Wayne Booth’s explanation (1974: 47–86) of the signs of unreliable narration, we could easily recognize the predominant role in late twentieth-century academic discourse of the unreliable scholar, whose errors very subtly serve to point us to what the real scholars mean. Behind these ﬁctional narrators must be concealed the real, professorial ﬁrst persons who possess a correct understanding of the Man of Law’s Tale —an understanding that I am pleased to ﬁnd happens to coincide with my own. It is not enough to point, as I have been doing, to some consequences of the doctrine of narrative voice in readings of the Man of Law’s Tale. The doctrine has the obvious attractions mentioned above, and clearly not everyone would agree that its consequences tend to be improbable, or some at least of these readings would never have been published. The doctrine has been criticized often enough in the past, to little avail. Let me mention in particular the sceptical comments of Derek Pearsall, Elizabeth Fowler, and Helen Cooper. Pearsall observes that, after the ‘legal-sounding language’ of the Man of Law’s response to the Host’s

20 This is not an objection to interpretations that seem historically improbable but to my fellow-medievalists’ habit of writing as though their interpretations could always claim historical probability. 21 e.g. Dinshaw (1989: 96) interprets tythes in Piers Plowman B . 105 to mean ‘tidings’ rather than ‘tithes’; Hendrix (1994: 150) interprets apayde in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations (Long Text, ch. 23) to mean ‘paid’ rather than ‘pleased’; Schibanoff (1996: 66) remarks, ‘As Augustine argued in the City of God, ‘‘heresies are necessary, to show which of you are in sound condition’’ ’, when in fact Augustine is not arguing this but quoting Saint Paul (I Corinthians 11: 19) to make a somewhat different point. My purpose here is not to demonstrate my superiority over these scholars (I must be guilty of at least as many errors), but to argue that failure to achieve perfection is characteristic of human authors, not merely of ﬁctional narrators.

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request for a tale, the former at once ‘falls into the role simply of a person who has to tell a story, not a Man of Law who has to tell a story, and there is nothing that can be discerned in the remainder of the Introduction, or the prologue, or the Tale, that has speciﬁcally to do with a lawyer’. After characterizing several interpretations based on narrative voice as ‘extremely far-fetched, though pleasing to modern tastes that despise both the rhetorical high style and passive virtue’, Pearsall concludes that the evidence of imperfect revision in Fragment II ‘provides good reason for treating the tale as an independent poem rather than as a means of characterising the Man of Law as an inadequate narrator and thereby making the point of the tale to satirise him’ (1985: 257, 259). Treating it as ‘an independent poem’, it is worth adding, could mean not only focusing on its intrinsic qualities but also regarding it in different contexts (for example, putting it alongside work by Langland or the Pearl poet that engages with some of the same themes), something that has too rarely been done. Fowler, recognizing in the Man of Law’s Tale a concern with fundamental legal and political issues such as ‘the limits of consent in its capacity to establish and justify dominion’, points out that the scholars who have noted this concern have failed to grasp its scope because of their obsession with its supposed role in ‘characteriz[ing] the sergeant and his habits of mind’ (2000: 58, 56). Cooper notes the tale’s ‘abundance of Latin glosses, which appear in more manuscripts than those of any other tale’, and which may well ‘originate with Chaucer’, as evidence of the seriousness with which it was intended. More generally, she recognizes a certain incoherence in the Man of Law’s Tale, and comments: ‘One way out of the problem is to ascribe such instabilities to the failings of the Man of Law. Assigning the weakness of a tale to the weakness of the teller is a widespread, and comfortable, critical practice, but raises the awkward question of how many bad tales the complete work can hold; there is no question here of downright parody, as there is with Sir Thopas’ (1989: 126, 131–2).22 The question is indeed awkward, since if we were to collect in a ‘book of wikked narrators’ all the narrative voice readings of the Canterbury Tales published since Kittredge, we would ﬁnd that almost every tale in the collection, from the Knight’s to the Parson’s, had been seen as 22 That the glosses had a Chaucerian origin is urged by Lewis (1967). Presumably Astell would attribute the glosses too to ‘the narrator’, as indeed Caie (1984) does.

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bad in itself and justiﬁed only by satire directed against its teller—a fact that would seem to conﬁrm what is indicated by the criticism of Troilus and Criseyde, that many Chaucer critics do not much like Chaucer’s work, and see their task as being to ﬁnd explanations for its unsatisfactoriness. Yet a striking phenomenon in interpretation of the Man of Law’s Tale is that the questions posed by sceptics are never answered, while the production of ever more readings in which the Man of Law ﬁgures as an obtuse narrator continues as if they had never been asked. A rare exception among the critics discussed above is Astell, who mentions various sceptics, noting that one of them ‘was among the ﬁrst to discredit the dramatic model by shifting emphasis away from the voices of the pilgrims’ (1991: 81 n. 1); yet she then proceeds to follow the model that she herself describes as discredited. This would seem to indicate that, if the narrative voice production-line is ever to be halted, different questions may need to be asked. Many of the sceptics accept that it is possible to distinguish in the Man of Law’s Tale a speciﬁc narratorial element, often described in terms of ‘presence’ and ‘voice’; their disagreement with believers in narrative voice doctrine is that they are not willing to identify the presence and voice as the Man of Law’s. Cooper (1989: 132), for example, remarks that ‘The presence of the narrator is pervasive in the Tale’ and that ‘the narrating voice seems unaware of the contradictions’ in what it narrates; and Paul M. Clogan (1977: 220, 224, 227), ﬁnding in the tale a ‘clerkly narrator ﬁgure’ typical of hagiographic narratives, claims emphatically that ‘the narrator is present to witness the scene for us’ and that ‘his presence in the story is real’. What underlies these claims is the assumption questioned by Derrida, that writing is necessarily a ‘representation of the self-present voice’. That is clearly one of the implications of the use of ‘voice’ in the interpretation of literary texts. Textual mimesis of an individual voice is of course always possible and, in post-medieval literature, quite common, but this fact needs to be distinguished from the assumption that all texts must have voices. The ‘I’ of most medieval narratives does not represent a speaking individual, real or ﬁctional, but is merely one element in the rhetoric of storytelling;23 it is a textual phenomenon, to which we cannot apply Benveniste’s deﬁnition that 23 Cf. Lawton (1985: 92) on the Man of Law’s Tale: ‘here as elsewhere the ‘‘I’’ proves to be no more than a product of the Tale’s rhetoric’.

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‘ ‘‘Ego’’ is he who says ‘‘ego’’ ’ without risk of misunderstanding. In the Canterbury Tales Chaucer created a ﬁction of oral storytelling, designed to conceal the reality of written composition based largely on textual sources. It would be na¨ıve to suppose that the real creative process by which he produced the collection followed the sequence represented in the ﬁction—ﬁrst came a company of pilgrims, then a collection of stories; ﬁrst he imagined the tellers, then he imagined a series of tales, each shaped as the product of an individual teller’s consciousness. And yet this na¨ıvet´e has been on the increase among Chaucer scholars: whereas in 1966 Hamilton suggested only that the occurrence of a trial scene could have been ‘a major consideration in assigning the tale to the Sergeant of the Law’ (156), more recent critics have attributed to the Man of Law even additions to the source material, as though he, and not Chaucer, were really the tale’s author.24 We know that nearly all the tales are retellings of stories that existed before Chaucer, and that the present Knight’s Tale and Second Nun’s Tale were once separate works by Chaucer himself (because they are mentioned as such in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women), and it seems overwhelmingly probable that in most cases he began with a tale and then decided to which of the pilgrims it could best be assigned. In many cases it would not much matter, though he seems always to have followed the medieval tendency to associate narrative genre with social rank and education. This was a formal association, not one based on real-life probability: thus the fabliaux are assigned to cherles of the kind who enact their plots, even though in reality fabliau texts appear in clerkly and courtly manuscripts, and even though Chaucer’s fabliaux incorporate learning that cherles would be most unlikely to possess. In some cases, such as the Shipman’s Tale and, it would appear, the Man of Law’s Tale, Chaucer had not settled on a pilgrim teller. This suggests that the most important purpose of the narratorial framework of the Canterbury Tales might have been not the assignment of speciﬁc tales to speciﬁc tellers but the general effect obtainable by a withdrawal of authorial responsibility. Chaucer gains a welcome freedom, and grants that freedom to his readers, if he 24 For belief in the Man of Law’s responsibility for changes in the source material, see e.g. Landman (1998) and Cooney (1998–9). Weissman (1979: 134), seeing the tale as Chaucer’s ‘exposure of the publicly sentimentalizing sensibility of his age’, nevertheless refers repeatedly to ‘the Lawyer’s alterations’ of his sources, rather than Chaucer’s alterations.

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can accompany every tale with an implicit ‘Blameth nat me’ (Miller’s Prologue, . 3181)—an effect achieved in Troilus and Criseyde not by the invention of a ﬁctional narrator but by frequent reference to the sources that limit the reteller’s freedom by what they contain and stimulate it by what they omit. But my point is not simply that we need not associate the speaker of a tale very closely with what we are told elsewhere about the pilgrim to whom it is assigned, but that we do not have to think of most tales as having a speaker or a voice at all, in the sense of a ﬁctional individual to whom the ﬁrst-person pronouns of the narratorial discourse consistently refer. It may be hard to hold on to this realization, especially where narrative is concerned, because, as we have seen, both common sense and theorists of very different persuasions join in assuring us that stories have to be told by someone. But it is only our assumption of the priority of speech to writing that makes us believe this to be so, and in the medieval period—an age of stories and of the oral storytelling that Chaucer represents in the ﬁction of the Canterbury Tales —the normal assumption, as I have argued above, seems to have been not that every story emerges from an individual human consciousness but that stories have an existence in their own right outside human consciousness. When he compiled the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer himself was beginning to question that assumption, as is indicated by some remarks in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, coming shortly after those quoted in Chapter 1. The misogynistic ﬁctions that were so common in his time, and so seemingly authoritative, do not descend from heaven, the prologue states; they have a speciﬁc human origin in the bitter imaginations of old and impotent male scholars: Therfore no womman of no clerk is preysed. The clerk, whan he is oold, and may noght do Of Venus werkes worth his olde sho, Thanne sit he doun, and writ in his dotage That wommen kan nat kepe hir mariage! (. 706–10)

Insights like that were doubtless one reason why Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales rather than another Legend of Good Women or an English Decameron. He was truly interested in the possibility of connections between stories and their tellers, and voiced narratives and unreliable narrators are the ultimate outcome of the process he set going; but we must not suppose that Chaucer in the late fourteenth century could

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make an immediate transition into the world of the dramatic monologue (or would have wished to do so), and we cannot without gross distortion project the assumptions and expectations of our own time back into the early, exploratory stages of the development that he was only beginning. After these sweeping assertions it may be helpful to return to the Man of Law’s Tale and focus on a more speciﬁc question. As with Troilus and Criseyde, those who read the tale as revealing the voice of an inadequate narrator need to have some theory as to which parts of the text can be counted as narratorial. Is every word of it to be regarded as voiced utterance by the Man of Law? If so, and if he is an untrustworthy narrator, then interpretation surely becomes impossible, because all we can know is that Chaucer probably meant something different from what the tale says, but we have no idea what that might be because there is nothing undistorted against which to detect or measure the narrator’s distortions. We cannot even know that the narrative ‘facts’ are in accordance with his account of them (perhaps the messenger was not really tortured). In practice, most readers probably assume that narrative ‘facts’ and the direct speech of the characters are reliable or ‘neutral’ elements unaffected by the narratorial subjectivity found elsewhere. As we have seen, though, the narrative voice interpreters of the Man of Law’s Tale disagree as to where the boundary of the narratorial element is to be drawn. Most would probably ﬁnd it only in the passages explicitly constituting ﬁrst-person commentary, but Landman suggests that we should hold the narrator responsible for an addition to the story as told in the source,25 while Astell attributes even the manuscript rubrics to the narrator. There is a further problem, comparable to that raised by narrator readings of Troilus and Criseyde. Those who detect a distinctive narratorial voice in the tale almost invariably ﬁnd that it belongs to a narrator whose moral and intellectual weaknesses the tale reveals: he is, as we have seen, a patronizing, short-sighted (or possibly blind), materialistic, legalistic, anti-religious, pharisaical, ignorant, empty, overexcited, hypocritical torturer. Yet, wherever the boundary is drawn between narratorial and non-narratorial elements, no one could deny that the memorable ‘Have ye nat seyn somtyme a pale face . . .?’ stanza quoted above must be on the narratorial side of the 25 Similarly, Cooney (1998–9) sees the Man of Law as responsible for the ‘addition to Trevet of scenes which underline the pathos of his heroine’s sufferings’ (273).

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border (Weisberg 1992–3: 60–1). Somehow, Chaucer has given some of his ﬁnest poetry to a storyteller whose fallibility the tale supposedly exists to uncover. This should be an embarrassing fact for narrative voice interpreters; they usually deal with it by not quoting this stanza,26 and indeed by not allowing themselves or their readers to notice the tale’s positive qualities as Chaucerian poetry at all. Narrator interpretations in general discourage any direct appreciation of the formal properties of the poetic medium, that is, of the verbal beauty that has been a major reason why readers through the centuries have continued to be drawn to Chaucer’s work. Hazlitt, almost two hundred years ago, could praise the ‘beauty’ and ‘pathos’ of the ‘Have ye nat seyn’ stanza, and Mackail, a century later, could see that it was ‘noble’ and ‘piercingly vivid’, while also praising the ‘splendid eloquence’ of narratorial passages such as the following,27 which more recent scholars have been quick to condemn for their supposed revelation of the Man of Law’s ‘anti-Boethian, anti-humanistic, anti-religious approach to life’: Paraventure in thilke large book Which that men clepe the hevene ywriten was With sterres, whan that he his birthe took, That he for love sholde han his deeth, allas! For in the sterres, clerer than is glas, Is writen, God woot, whoso koude it rede, The deeth of every man, withouten drede. (190–6)

What has protected some modern scholars from the temptation to read the tale as satirizing its narrator seems to have been precisely their sensitivity to its poetry, which has led them to notice, for example, that ‘Throughout the poem Chaucer allows us moments of insight into a woman’s inner experience that are as ﬁne as anything he ever wrote’ (Kolve 1984: 303), and that in those very passages that allegedly show up the narrator as ‘glaringly obtuse’ we can ﬁnd a sombre eloquence of extraordinary power, expressing a vision of the universe as ‘crooked, 26 Cooney (1998–9) is an exception; she quotes it but sees its point as being its faultiness: for her, its failure to state explicitly that the ﬁgure described is ‘Christ as an exemplum of innocent suffering’ (279) is one of the many ‘distortions and evasions’ (285) that reveal the Man of Law’s inadequate religious understanding. 27 William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets (1818), no. 2; J. W. Mackail, The Springs of Helicon (1909); see Brewer (1978: i. 279; ii. 289).

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awry, at odds with itself, held together only by violence’ (Mann 1991: 133). For example: O ﬁrste moevyng! Crueel ﬁrmament With thy diurnal sweigh that crowdest ay And hurlest al from est til occident That naturelly wolde holde another way, Thy crowdyng set the hevene in swich array At the bigynnyng of this ﬁers viage, That crueel Mars hath slayn this mariage. Infortunat ascendent tortuous, Of which the lord is helplees falle, allas, Out of his angle into the derkeste hous! O Mars, o atazir, as in this cas! O ﬁeble moone, unhappy been thy paas! Thou knyttest thee ther thou art nat receyved; Ther thou were weel, fro thennes artow weyved.

(295–308)

If we could read those lines for the ﬁrst time, without knowing their context, would we doubt that they were the work of a great poet writing at the height of his powers? In my view, only ideological preconceptions—as to the priority of narrative voice, and perhaps as to the impossibility that Chaucer could have given unironic expression to such a pessimistic view of the cosmos—can prevent competent readers from recognizing in such passages poetry of tormented but magniﬁcent darkness. Not all will agree, and, in any case, many academics are evidently interested in the quality and nature of Chaucer’s poetry only in so far as they can claim that it is intended to be bad; so to support my main point, that the supposedly clear distinction in the Man of Law’s Tale between narratorial and non-narratorial elements is not clear at all in practice, I want now to examine an extract from the tale in closer detail, as I did with Troilus and Criseyde.

Subjectivized Narration Here is a sequence beginning with the second stanza of the tale proper: Now ﬁl it that the maistres of that sort Han shapen hem to Rome for to wende; Were it for chapmanhod or for disport, Noon oother message wolde they thider sende, But comen hemself to Rome; this is the ende.

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The Man of Law’s Tale And in swich place as thoughte hem avantage For hire entente, they take hir herbergage. Sojourned han thise merchantz in that toun A certein tyme, as ﬁl to hire plesance. And so bifel that th’excellent renoun Of the Emperoures doghter, dame Custance, Reported was, with every circumstance, Unto thise Surryen marchantz in swich wyse, Fro day to day, as I shal yow devyse. This was the commune voys of every man: ‘Oure Emperour of Rome—God hym see!— A doghter hath that, syn the world bigan, To rekene as wel hir goodnesse as beautee, Nas nevere swich another as is shee. I prey to God in honour hire susteene, And wolde she were of al Europe the queene. ‘In hire is heigh beautee, withoute pride, Yowthe, withoute grenehede or folye; To alle hire werkes vertue is hir gyde; Humblesse hath slayn in hire al tirannye. She is mirour of alle curteisye; Hir herte is verray chambre of hoolynesse, Hir hande, ministre of fredam for almesse.’ And al this voys was sooth, as God is trewe. But now to purpos lat us turne agayn. Thise marchantz han doon fraught hir shippes newe, And whan they han this blisful mayden sayn, Hoom to Surrye been they went ful fayn, And doon hir nedes as they han doon yoore, And lyven in wele; I kan sey yow namoore. Now ﬁl it that thise marchantz stode in grace Of hym that was the Sowdan of Surrye; For whan they cam from any strange place, He wolde, of his benigne curteisye, Make hem good chiere, and bisily espye Tidynges of sondry regnes, for to leere The wondres that they myghte seen or heere. Amonges othere thynges, specially, Thise marchantz han hym toold of dame Custance So greet noblesse in ernest, ceriously,

150

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175

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The Man of Law’s Tale That this Sowdan hath caught so greet plesance To han hire ﬁgure in his remembrance, That al his lust and al his bisy cure Was for to love hire while his lyf may dure. Paraventure in thilke large book Which that men clepe the hevene ywriten was With sterres, whan that he his birthe took, That he for love sholde han his deeth, allas! For in the sterres, clerer than is glas, Is writen, God woot, whoso koude it rede, The deeth of every man, withouten drede. In sterres, many a wynter therbiforn, Was writen the deeth of Ector, Achilles, Of Pompei, Julius, er they were born; The strif of Thebes; and of Ercules, Of Sampson, Turnus, and of Socrates The deeth; but mennes wittes ben so dulle That no wight kan wel rede it atte fulle.

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In this extract, unlike the one from Troilus and Criseyde analysed in Chapter 3, there are no explicitly ﬁrst-person metanarrative passages of any length, but here too our imaginary geiger counter would register traces of subjectivity almost everywhere. First there is the readily identiﬁable two-stanza passage of sustained commentary at lines 190–203: it lacks explicit markers of the ﬁrst person, but I believe all narrative voice interpreters would agree in identifying it as ‘spoken’ by the Man of Law. Such passages are strikingly frequent in the Man of Law’s Tale: the longest is the ﬁve-stanza passage at lines 470–504 expounding God’s power to save whom he wishes from danger. This begins in the manner of a disputatio—‘Men myghten asken why . . . | And I answere to that demande agayn . . .’ (470–2)—and continues with further questions and answers put more impersonally. Then there are many briefer, often ‘managerial’ comments of a line or two or just a phrase scattered throughout the narrative. In the extract these would include ‘Were it for chapmanhod or for disport, | Noon oother message wolde they thider sende’ (143–4) (narratorial speculation as to the merchants’ motive in travelling to Rome), ‘this is the ende’ (145), ‘as I shal yow devyse’ (154), ‘And al this voys was sooth, as God is trewe. | But now to purpos lat us turne agayn’ (169–70), and ‘I kan sey yow namoore’ (175). In the same

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category we ﬁnd elsewhere in the poem characteristically Chaucerian professions of ignorance, such as ‘Under an hoold that nempnen I ne kan’ (507), ‘But in what wise, certeinly, I noot’ (892), and ‘Of which the name in my text noght I fynde’ (905).28 These fulﬁl several functions: they authenticate the narrative as a whole (for if the poet is willing to admit ignorance of some things, presumably he really knows the things he claims to know); they stimulate participative speculation in the audience; and of course they may convey the fact that Chaucer’s sources really do not tell him all he would like to know and to be able to tell us. Whatever may be thought about passages in the ﬁrst of these categories, those in the second are emphatically not peculiar to this tale or its teller: they belong to Chaucer’s normal narrative manner throughout his work, especially in poems in an elevated and leisured style, including Troilus and Criseyde and also the Knight’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale. And one effect of both kinds of narratorial passage is to foreground the process of narration—not the peculiarities of any particular narrator, but narration itself, its artistry, its difﬁculties, its shortcomings, its reliance on sources that are incomplete or incompletely known, its inevitable failure to correspond precisely to the contours of reality. An explicit purpose of many of these ‘intrusions’ is to draw in the audience and invite them to recognize the poet’s art and its limits, as in passages such as: ‘Now wolde som men waiten, as I gesse, | That I sholde tellen . . . Wel may men knowen that so greet ordinance | May no man tellen in a litel clause . . .’ (246–51); ‘Me list nat of the chaf, ne of the stree, | Maken so long a tale as of the corn. | What sholde I tellen . . .’ (701–3); ‘O Donegild, I ne have noon Englissh digne.’ (778); ‘Ther is no tonge that it telle may’ (899); ‘I may nat tellen every circumstance’ (1011); ‘I may nat telle hir wo until to-morwe’ (1070); some people would say that Alla sent his and Custance’s son with a message to the emperor, but it is best to suppose that he went himself (1086–92). I see here no intention to distinguish a Man of Law’s Tale narrator from a Knight’s Tale narrator or a Troilus narrator, or to characterize any narrator at all, but only a pervasive rhetoric of narration devised to engage the imagination and emotions of the reader or listener. 28 In his prologue the Man of Law states that a merchant long ago ‘Me taughte a tale, which that ye shal heere’ (133), so the reference in line 905 to a written source can scarcely be in the voice of the same narrator. Such inconsistencies are a normal part of Chaucer’s adaptation of written sources to the ﬁction of oral storytelling.

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As with the Troilus extract, an attentive reading of this passage reveals the widely diffused encoding of subjectivity brought about by deixis. This includes syntactical details such as whilom (134), meaning once upon a time (in relation to the now of narration), followed by Now (141), implying narratorial ‘presentiﬁcation’ of the past established by whilom, and a whole series of proximal deictics following this: ‘thise Surryen marchantz’ (153), ‘This was the commune voys’ (155), ‘this voys’ (169), ‘now to purpos’ (170), ‘Thise marchantz’ (171), ‘this blisful mayden’ (172), ‘Now ﬁl it’ (176), ‘thise marchantz’ (176), ‘Thise marchantz’ (184), ‘this Sowdan’ (186)—which, while establishing continuity of discourse, also similarly adopt as present a spatio-temporal moment deﬁned as past. The double now in 170 and 176 has the effect of merging the present of narration into the present of what is narrated, so that both seem to have a single deictic centre. ‘Since tense is a deictic category, the expression of time is always in some sense subjective’ (Adamson 1998: 666);29 and in this passage, in which tense-switching is more prevalent than in the Troilus extract, the many present and perfect tenses interspersed among the simple preterites that are generally understood to be proper to pure narrative also have a deictic effect, because they imply a similar identiﬁcation with an experiential centre which is that of the story, not of the storytelling: ‘Han shapen hem’ (142), ‘they take’ (147), ‘Sojourned han’ (148), ‘han doon fraught’ (171), ‘han . . . sayn’ (172), ‘been they went’ (173), ‘han doon yoore’ (174), ‘lyven’ (175), ‘han hym toold’ (184), ‘hath caught’ (186).30 All but the last of these verbs has as its subject the merchants repeatedly qualiﬁed by the anaphoric proximal demonstrative thise, and if we imagine the effect of the narrative in cinematic terms, what is happening is roughly that in this section we are being shown things from their point of view. The last of the verbs listed, ‘hath caught’ (186), has the 29 Denied by Carruthers (2001), in favour of an explanation in terms of ‘the creative activity of inventive meditation that the medieval monks called memoria’ (146); but her terminology is so confusing (e.g. hatz skyfted as ‘imperfect past’ and haf herde as ‘imperfect present’) that I ﬁnd her argument hard to follow. 30 Cf. Carey (1995: 83): ‘Present perfects are typically characterised as encoding a relation of relevance between a past event and a present moment . . . Current relevance is an inherently subjective notion in that the link between the past event and the current situation is dependent on the attitude/judgment of the speaker.’ Here, however, no ‘speaker’ is involved; what is at issue is the perspective of a set of characters within the narrative.

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Sowdan as its subject, and the switch to his point of view is underlined by the substitution of ‘may dure’ (189) for the ‘myght dure’ that would place his determination to go on loving Custance in the past. When the narrative tense shifts, as it so often does, between preterite and present or present perfect, are we to suppose a ‘speaker’ who is sometimes outside the story and sometimes inside it, or who with childlike na¨ıvet´e imagines himself sometimes in the present and sometimes in the past? Manifestly, what we ﬁnd in the Man of Law’s Tale, as in most Chaucerian narratives, is not a ﬁxed deictic centre but one that is liberated from ﬁxity and enables us to imagine narrative events in a whole variety of different spatio-temporal and emotional perspectives. The ‘I’ implied by the tale’s many deictics and quasi-deictics has no single position; it is not a point of origin from which a voice emerges, a point outside the story or outside language, as a speaker is outside what he says, but is merely part of the process of narration. It is of course easier for modern critics, living after Browning and Tennyson, James and Conrad, Mann and Nabokov, to go on disregarding this and to continue in their comfortable habit of referring every trace of subjectivity in a Chaucerian narrative (or at least every trace they notice) to a single narrator with the ontological consistency of a human individual; but then, as Christina Howells has written (1999: 48), ‘Writing tells us truths about language that we may not want to hear.’ Before leaving the topic of deixis, let me mention one other form it takes in the Man of Law’s Tale. This is the use of ﬁrst-person plural possessive pronouns to claim a joint interest in certain features of the story: oure occian (505), oure wilde see (506), oure lay [i.e. religion] (572), oure creance (915). (The proximal deictic in ‘this ile’ (545), referring to the British mainland, has a similar though less intimate effect.) It is the British and Christian elements in the story that are claimed as ours, and I see no reason to think of the ‘I’ underlying that implied ‘we’ as belonging to an unreliable narrator or referring speciﬁcally to the Man of Law. What is claimed is not legal ownership of an ocean, an island, a religion or a belief, but simply that poet and audience are associated in feeling themselves members of a British and Christian community with its roots in a distant past. The events narrated as occurring in that past have consequences for the Chaucerian present; it is those very events, including the conversion of ‘this ile’ to Christianity and its linkage

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to Rome—the imperial and papal Rome to which Custance and her son eventually return and over which the half-British and half-Roman Maurice eventually rules as emperor—that have created the community to which Chaucer and his readers now belong. A further difﬁculty for narrative voice interpretations is the fact that there are many words and phrases in the tale about which it is hard to be sure whether they emerge from the consciousness of characters in the story or are encoded in the narrative text. These include formulaic phrases such as occur, shortly after the extract given, in the account of the discussion in the Sowdan’s privy council of what can be done about his love for Custance. When Chaucer writes that they argued at length but ‘ﬁnally, as in conclusioun’ (215), agreed that marriage was the only recourse, and then recognized, ‘for to speke al playn’ (219), that the difference in religion might make this impossible, is it a narrator or the Sowdan’s advisers to whose perspective these phrases belong? Again, when Custance arrives in Surrye for her marriage, we are told that The mooder of the Sowdan, riche and gay, Receyveth hire with also glad a cheere As any mooder myghte hir doghter deere. (395–7)

Does this report an objective truth belonging to the ‘cultural codes’ behind the narrative, or are we meant to hear the Man of Law’s ‘voice’ conveying his assumptions (perhaps ﬂawed?) as to how mothers greet daughters? The distinction can scarcely be made. Similarly, after Custance has been falsely accused of murdering Hermengyld, Chaucer writes, ‘For as the lomb toward his deeth is broght, | So stant this innocent bifore the kyng’ (617–18). The comparison, quite apart from the association it carries with Isaiah’s preﬁguration of Christ as a lamb led to the slaughter (and are we to attribute that to Chaucer or to the Man of Law?), draws on material outside the narrative itself, and has to be thought of as in some sense part of the narratorial discourse. So is this to be attributed to Man of Law, and to be open to suspicion? Even the apparently neutral conjunctions linking narrative segments often imply, as we found in Troilus and Criseyde, a certain narratorial interpretation of the narrative. This is surely true, for example, of For in lines 178 and 617 and in many other places: it does not indicate mere sequence but purports to offer an explanation, and this constitutes

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yet another blurring of the distinction between story and storyteller. When Custance ‘Ful pale arist’ and prepares to depart for her marriage, ‘For wel she seeth ther is noon oother ende’ (265–6; my italics), does that explanation, that the reason why she does so is that she sees no alternative, evoke the narrator’s fallible perspective or Custance’s own? As with the Troilus extract, analysis of the means by which subjectivity is encoded in the narrative of the Man of Law’s Tale might continue at far greater length, but I hope I have done enough to make my main point—that subjectivity can inhabit a narrative in many different ways, and that it need not be interpreted as the subjectivity of any individual person. Chaucerian narrative is more generous than this (or if we prefer, more untidy), somewhat as medieval pictorial art can be more generous (or more untidy) than later art in allowing us to enter into many different perspectives on what is represented in a single painting, rather than imposing a single perspective on us. We may refer to ‘the narrator’ if we choose, but that is a shorthand expression for an enormously diffuse process of subjectivization—and, of course, continued reference to ‘the narrator’ discourages us from remembering this, and closes down the text rather than opening it up. The story as Chaucer told it is more interesting and moving than the narrow and distorted individual consciousness that so many modern interpreters have substituted for it.

The Achievement of the Man of Law’s Tale Narrative voice readings of the Man of Law’s Tale may sometimes be amusing in their implausibility, but all the same what I have written so far has been mainly negative in its tendency, perhaps depressingly so. I want to end this chapter on a more positive note, with some remarks about the nature of Chaucer’s achievement in this unloved tale. I begin from the position that, in an elaborately worked poem of over a thousand lines, his intentions are likely to have been mainly serious, a position supported both by Cooper’s comment on the Latin glossing in the manuscripts and by Kean’s reminder (1972: ii. 122) that in the Retractions following the Canterbury Tales Chaucer writes with grateful pride of his ‘bookes of legendes of seintes’ (. 1087), of which this poem must surely be one. This does not mean that Chaucer necessarily achieved the perfect fulﬁlment of a perfectly preconceived intention. Kittredge was wrong to assert that he always knew what he was about, for great poets do not always know what they are about, and they would

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not necessarily be even greater poets if they did. A poet who always knew what he was about would not have left so many poems unﬁnished as Chaucer did; and, even in the grandest of his completed works, he seems to have left himself room for changes, often apparently prompted by spontaneous response to details in his sources. In his most serious works he was rarely entirely serious because, when writing at any length even about solemn matters, he could not resist moments of irreverence such as the remark, in this celebration of a twice-married holy woman, that when the festivities at her wedding to Alla were over, They goon to bedde, as it was skile and right; For thogh that wyves be ful hooly thynges, They moste take in pacience at nyght Swiche manere necessaries as been plesynges To folk that han ywedded hem with rynges, And leye a lite hir hoolynesse aside, As for the tyme—it may no bet bitide. (708–14)

Such moments were necessaries for the poet as much as for his heroine, because, as he saw it, that was what life itself was like—‘it may no bet bitide’, regardless of the rules that may govern the saint’s life as a literary genre. Most female saints, after all, were not married, though by Chaucer’s time more married women were aspiring to holiness; and in this case Custance’s laying aside of her holiness is necessary for the conception of the emperor Maurice (Raybin 1990: 77–8). But such moments, lasting only ‘for the tyme’, do not require an irreverent or insensitive narrator to explain them, and the price paid for inventing one is the disappearance of all that is serious and moving in the tale.31 Several scholars have noted the resemblance of the Man of Law’s Tale to the vitae of saints, and especially of female saints, that were so popular in the Middle Ages. I believe they are right, though in two ways scholarship of this kind has tended to be misleading. First, it is often assumed that the unlikeableness of Custance disqualiﬁes her as a saintly heroine. Dawson, for example, discussing her focus on herself and the ways she turns victimhood into dominance, concludes that we should 31 Cf. the similar comment in the Second Nun’s Tale, with its very different pilgrim teller, on the need for wives, however holy, to go to bed with their husbands: ‘The nyght cam, and to bedde mot she gon | With hire housbonde, as ofte is the manere’ (. 141–2).

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‘rule out the notions that the tale is either straightforwardly hagiographic or pathetic in intent’, because ‘Custance is morally defensible as a saint or sympathetic as a victim . . . only to the extent that we fail to see her as a character’ (1991–2: 303). But it is an error to suppose that fourteeenth-century saints, or those whose vitae were written in the fourteenth century, had to be likeable by secular standards. Female saints as envisaged in Chaucer’s time show a strong tendency to use selfinﬂicted suffering, including even deliberate self-mutilation, as a means of establishing their Christlike victimhood, and thus of gaining attention and power not available to most medieval women. Dawson’s criteria of moral defensibleness are those of his own culture, not of late-medieval sainthood. By the standards of the vitae of holy women in a fourteenthcentury manuscript such as Douce 114—Christina Mirabilis, Marie of Oignies, and especially perhaps Elizabeth of Spalbeek, with her ostentatious daily enactments of Christ’s Passion—Chaucer’s Custance is moderate, intelligent, and highly sympathetic.32 A second misleading element found in some hagiographical scholarship is failure to distinguish between the saints’ lives Chaucer might have known and those written under his inﬂuence, and especially under the inﬂuence of poems such as the Man of Law’s Tale and the Second Nun’s Tale. In a standard and often illuminating study, Michael T. Paull shows that Chaucer’s emphases on his heroine’s high social rank and physical beauty, despite what we might suppose or think relevant to sainthood, are common elements in the vitae of female saints; thus there is no reason to attribute to an unreliable narrator the tale’s supposition that Custance’s standing as ‘An Emperoures doughter’ (655) gives a special edge to the pathos of her adversitee (654). (Nor is this a peculiarly medieval feeling, as the emotions aroused not long ago by the ‘passion’ and death of Princess Diana conﬁrm.) Equally common is the plot-pattern involving the juxtaposition of a series of parallel testings of the heroine’s capacity to suffer, in ‘distinct frames’ that ‘form a typological paradigm of . . . the Passion 32 On fourteenth-century saints, see Kieckhefer (1984): the hagiography of this period tends to ‘accent the darker side of earthly life’ (11) and is intended ‘to shock the reader, to provoke in him a moral reform, to suggest that the way toward perfection was a strenuous path that required as much fervor as one could sustain’ (14). Among the saints he studies is Dorothea of Montau, a married woman who engaged in masochistic extremes of self-torment while showing little fondness for her husband and children; Custance by comparison is a model wife and mother, and none of her sufferings is self-inﬂicted.

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of Christ’ (1970–1: 185). But many of Paull’s illustrations, especially of the rhetorical devices that he regards as typically hagiographic, are taken, not from sources accessible to Chaucer such as the South English Legendary, but from Bokenham’s Legends of Holy Women, composed in the ﬁfteenth century under Chaucerian inﬂuence. It is important, certainly, to recognize that ﬁfteenth-century authors of the verse lives of female saints, such as Bokenham, Lydgate, and Capgrave, were serious admirers and imitators of Chaucer, and especially of the Chaucer who composed celebrations of female suffering such as the Man of Law’s Tale, the Second Nun’s Tale, and the Physician’s Tale —the Chaucer whose appeal to modern Chaucer scholars has been so slight that they have generally been unable to resist reading these tales as ironically intended and as spoken in the voices of fallible narrators. Of course it is possible that these poets, all members of religious orders, may have misread Chaucer by failing to grasp the ironies and narrative voicings so evident to modern readers; but we cannot take this for granted. By the same token, though, we cannot take their works as typical of saints’ legends accessible to Chaucer. It was precisely the stylistic and philosophical elevation of the saint’s legend, to turn it into a more serious kind of poem, that was new in Chaucer’s work and admired by his successors. The novelty of Chaucer’s saint’s-life-like tales was noted by Pearsall in distinguishing between earlier vitae such as those of the South English Legendary, with their adaptation of the style of Middle English popular romances, and ‘the more sophisticated type of saint’s Life—introduced into English by Chaucer—with its elevated style and rhetorical interpolations’ (1975: 121). Having grasped this literary-historical context for the Man of Law’s Tale we can see more clearly what Chaucer’s aim may have been in writing it. And we can do so without straining for any original insight: it is a matter of sifting out from a great mass of improbable chaff the grains of likelihood already on offer. Kolve, in his ﬁne chapter on the tale, sees it, rightly I believe, as a demonstration of ‘what poetry can do at its maximum dignity, in the service of historical fact and Christian truth’ (1984: 299). In the Knight’s Tale, as in Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer had created a poem set in an antiquity imagined (as far as was possible for a fourteenth-century Englishman) in terms of historical truth and historical difference, composed predominantly in a high style that emulated the vernacular emulation of classical Latin poetry by fourteenth-century Italian poets, and exploring a pagan world

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different in important ways from that of Christianity, a world dominated by the ancient gods who were also the planets of the modern science of astrology. It seems likely that in the Man of Law’s Tale he was aiming to do something similar for the early Christian world. The historical setting of Custance’s adventures is imagined with an unusual attempt at accuracy, illustrated most strikingly in the explanation that when her ship was wrecked near a castle on the coast of Northumberland and the constable of the castle came to investigate, she begged him to kill her as a means of escaping from her misery, and ‘A maner Latyn corrupt was hir speche, | But algates therby was she understonde’ (519–20). That sense of historical change in language, coordinated with a larger setting in which northern Britain had been invaded by pagan Saxons who drove the Christian Britons into Wales, is not at all characteristic of pre-Chaucerian saints’ lives. Patricia J. Eberle observes that ‘All three versions of the story, by Trevet, Gower, and Chaucer, present it as the story of the origins of Christian rulership in Saxon England’ (1993: 126). That understanding of the story was something that Chaucer picked up from his sources, underlined by his elevation of its style, and complicated with philosophical questioning of the kind found in his romances of classical antiquity. (Here we should have in mind not only the Knight’s Tale and the Troilus but the Franklin’s Tale, a story set in late-antique Brittany that also explores the interface between paganism and Christianity (Spearing 1999).) The insistent questioning of the meaning and purpose of Custance’s sufferings and her preservation, found throughout the Man of Law’s Tale, focuses especially on her gender. The accepted theological view that it was a woman whom Satan chose to ‘brynge us in servage’ (368) is illustrated by the tale’s two wicked mothers-in-law and is endorsed by Custance herself when she prays to Mary: Sooth is that thurgh wommanes eggement Mankynde was lorn, and damned ay to dye, For which thy child was on a croys yrent. (842–4)

Satan ‘that evere us waiteth to bigile’ (582) hopes to achieve a further triumph by persecuting Custance; in her innocence and constancy, aided by miraculous divine intervention, he meets his match, but the price is paid by Custance herself and her child, in the form of unmerited suffering comparable to Christ’s own. If woman was responsible for

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the Fall, it is also women, ‘born to thraldom and penance’ (286), who come closest to sharing in the suffering of an incarnate God by which human redemption was made possible. Elizabeth Archibald remarks, ‘If the Man of Law’s Tale was deliberately conceived as one of a series of variations on conventional romance themes, how appropriate that it focuses entirely on a woman’s experience in contrast to the masculine world of the Knight’s Tale.’ She notes too that ‘To make the adventures of the heroine central . . . is to emphasize the irreconcilable difference and imbalance between male and female experience,’ and adds an intriguing hypothesis: ‘Perhaps this contributed to Chaucer’s decision to include this disturbing tale among his variations on romance themes, and to adapt it in ways which support Constance’s view of women’s lot as ‘‘thraldom and penance’’ ’ (1995: 165, 175). That seems likely enough, and I think it helpful to consider the Man of Law’s Tale as a companion piece to the Knight’s Tale; but we also need to bear in mind the metaphysical dimension of female suffering noted by Jill Mann. In the Man of Law’s Tale, Mann suggests, ‘just as power dissolves into powerlessness’—in the failures of the wicked mothers-in-law, or of Satan acting through them—‘so powerlessness assumes power; it is through the suffering of the cross that mankind is redeemed’ (1991: 136). What the parallel with the Knight’s Tale brings out is that in the Man of Law’s Tale, so little loved and admired by modern critics, Chaucer actually goes further and risks more than he did in the ﬁrst of the Canterbury Tales, asking searching metaphysical questions of or about the Christian God that in the Knight’s Tale can be asked only by pagans about their false gods. The constable of the Northumbrian castle, confronted after his conversion to Christianity with the problem of evil in the shape of a forged letter cruelly requiring him to set Custance and her son adrift at sea, can only ask questions to which no answer is given: ‘Lord Crist,’ quod he, ‘how may this world endure, So ful of synne is many a creature? ‘O myghty God, if that it be thy wille, Sith thou art rightful juge, how may it be That thou wolt suffren innocentz to spille, And wikked folk regne in prosperitee?’ (811–16)

Such searching questions are quite absent from pre-Chaucerian saints’ lives, and equally from the pre-Chaucerian romances of ‘tormented

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heroines’ that have also been noted as analogues to the Man of Law’s Tale (Keiser 1990: 121). Alongside, say, Emar´e, which gets no further in thinking about the signiﬁcance of its heroine’s sufferings than ‘As hyt was Goddys wylle’ (Mills 1973: line 327) or ‘Wo worth chawnses ylle!’ (ibid. line 684) (cursed be misfortunes!),33 Chaucer’s poem is a work of astonishing ambition and accomplishment, not only in its elevation of style but in its sustained attempt to ﬁnd a meaning beyond traditional narrative pattern in the story it tells. And the questions it asks become all the more disturbing in a world ruled not by Mars, Venus, and Saturn, but by a God we are required to think of as just. To attribute the tale in which such probing questions are asked to the blindness and errors of the Man of Law is to shrink from plumbing the metaphysical depths that Chaucer was prepared to contemplate. I hope it has emerged from this chapter that to read the Man of Law’s Tale as spoken in the voice of a ﬁctional narrator is usually to avoid reading it all. 33

Hanks (1983–4) sees Emar´e as a possible source for Chaucer’s poem.

5 Narration in the Pearl Poet The four magniﬁcent poems that survive in unique copies in British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x—Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, Cleanness (sometimes known as Purity), and Pearl —are usually believed to be by the same anonymous poet. They date from the second half of the fourteenth century, and are generally placed in the century’s last quarter. In this chapter I shall give most attention to Pearl, as an example of a type of narrative not so far discussed—ﬁrst-person or homodiegetic narrative—but only after a briefer study of the encoding of subjectivity in the narrative texts of the other three poems.

‘Third-Person’ Narration The narrating ‘I’ of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, widely acclaimed as the ﬁnest of all Middle English romances, is less prominent than that of Troilus and Criseyde and perhaps about as prominent as that of Havelok. Though in its external form Sir Gawain contains signiﬁcant numerical patterns based on the number ﬁve and its multiples, which could probably be detected only by readers of a manuscript, it was doubtless also delivered orally, perhaps initially at a Christmas feast such as the one where its story begins, and there is much textual mimesis of oral delivery in its manner of storytelling—more, I think, than in Havelok. This occurs, though, without our being incited to identify ‘the narrator’ as a speciﬁc ﬁctional character; and indeed anonymity of narration is appropriate for oral delivery, for the more precisely a narrating ‘I’ is characterized in the text, the less hospitable that grammatical space is likely to be for occupation by a reader-aloud or performer. The subjectivizing of the narration is at its most explicit in the use of ﬁrst- and second-person expressions to foreground processes of telling, judgement, and response that invite our participation: ‘an

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aunter in erde I attle to schawe’ (27)1 (I intend to set forth an adventure), ‘he that wan watz not wrothe—that may ye wel trawe’ (70) (he who won was not angry—that you may well believe), ‘I deme hit not al for doute | Bot sum for cortaysye’ (246–7) (In my judgement, not all out of fear, but some for courtesy’s sake), ‘Wyt ye wel, hit watz worth wele ful hoge’ (1820) (Know well, it was worth a vast amount of treasure), and similar locutions, available in principle to be adopted by any reciter and any listeners. At its extreme, the effect of such subjectivization is to merge the spheres of the ﬁction and of its delivery. The narrating ‘I’ enters the story-space to admonish the hero as ‘thou’— Now thenk wel, Sir Gawan, For wothe that thou ne wonde This auenture for to frayn That thou hatz tan on honde. (487–90) (Now, Sir Gawain, take careful thought that you do not shrink for danger from pursuing this adventure that you have undertaken.)

—or he implies the coexistence of hero and listeners in a silence that makes oral storytelling possible: Let hym lyye there stille; He hatz nere that he soght. And ye wyl a whyle be stylle, I schal telle yow how thay wroght. (1993–6) (Let him lie there quietly; he is near to having what he was seeking. If you will be quiet for a while, I shall tell you what they did.)

These extreme cases of narratorial intrusion have a special function, marking the end of the ﬁrst and third of the four ‘Fitts’ into which the poem is divided. Subjectivization usually occurs less obtrusively, as in uses of the socalled ‘ethic dative’ such as ‘He metez me this godmon inmyddez the ﬂore’ (1932) (He meets [for me] this householder in the middle of the hall). The impossibility of including some equivalent to the ethic me in an idiomatic modern translation of such lines should not lead us to think of it solely as alliterative reinforcement, overlooking its intensiﬁcation 1 All four poems are quoted from Andrew and Waldron 1978; italics in quotations are mine.

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of the immediacy produced by the present tense of the verb and the proximal demonstrative this. And then, given sufﬁcient references to ‘I’ and ‘you’, we become sensitized to the way that many other features of the general rhetoric of narration imply a ﬁction of a storyteller in the presence of listeners. This is true of impersonal constructions that only narrowly avoid the use of ‘I’: ‘Hit were to tore for to telle of the tenthe dole’ (719) (It would be too difﬁcult to recount a tenth part [of them]), or ‘A mensk lady on molde mon may hir calle, | for Gode!’ (964–5) (In God’s name, she may truly be called a charming lady on earth!),2 or ‘Such a sowme he ther slowe . . . to deme were wonder’ (1321–2) (He slew such a number that it would be wondrous to relate). And a multitude of devices offer possible alternatives to what happened in the story, thus suggesting the operation of judgement and choice. The rhetorical ﬁgure known as oppositio is one such device: ‘Haylsed he never one bot heghe he overloked’ (223) (He greeted not a single one but looked high over [them]) or ‘And he baldly hym bydez—he bayst never the helder’ (376) (And he boldly awaits him—he was never the more dismayed). Others are less readily deﬁnable ﬁgures involving comparison, perhaps between two successive events—‘If he hem stowned upon fyrst, stiller were thanne | Alle the heredmen in halle’ (301–2) (If he had stunned them at ﬁrst, all the retainers in the hall were even more silent then)—or perhaps between what could have happened and what did: ‘Hade hit dryven adoun as dregh as he atled, | Ther hade ben ded of his dynt that doghty watz ever’ (2263–4) (If it [i.e. the axe] had hurtled down as forcibly as he [apparently] intended, he who was always brave [i.e. Gawain] would have been dead from his blow). Even after we have taken account of all such places in which a narrating ‘I’ is explicit or implied, a large part of the narrative text of Sir Gawain is not personalized, yet it is subjectivized in ways that are not fully personal. Deixis, we have seen, is the basic means by which subjectivity is encoded in language, and Sir Gawain is enormously rich in deictic terms. A good place to observe this is the poem’s beginning, with its striking contrast between the ﬁrst and second stanzas. The ﬁrst, 2 This concludes a description of the aged chaperone, intertwined and contrasting with one of Sir Bertilak’s beautiful young wife. The description has been in the past tense, and the shift here to the present (may), along with the exclamation, implies the emotional engagement of an eyewitness.

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recounting the legendary Trojan ancestry of the nations of medieval Europe, has only three explicit deictics, all of them distal: ‘The tulk that the trammes of tresoun ther wroght’ (3) (The man who brought about the treasonable plots there), ‘With gret bobbaunce that burghe he biges upon fyrst’ (9) (At once he builds that city with great magniﬁcence), and ‘werre and wrake and wonder | Bi sythez hatz wont therinne’ (16–17) (war and destruction and disaster have dwelt there from time to time). There are no ﬁrst-person constructions in this stanza, and the effect is of distance (Britain being treated as one nation among the others that derive from Troy) and of complete impersonality. The second stanza, on the other hand, focusing on Britain and introducing the Arthurian story to be told in this particular romance, gives an effect of immediacy, not only through the introduction of a narrating ﬁrst person—‘I wot . . . I haf herde telle . . . I attle to schawe . . . I schal telle hit astit’ (24, 26, 27, 31) (I know . . . I have heard tell . . . I intend to set forth . . . I shall recount it at once)—but by other forms of deixis, nearly all proximal: ‘Ande quen this Bretayn watz bigged bi this burn rych . . . Mo ferlyes on this folde han fallen here oft . . . of alle that here bult . . . If ye wyl lysten this laye’ (20, 23, 25, 30) (And when this Britain had been established by this noble knight . . . More frequent marvels have occurred here in this country . . . of all who built here . . . If you will listen to this lay). Deixis predominates in the third stanza too, as it moves in still closer to focus on a Christmas feast at Camelot—‘This kyng . . . tho rich brether . . . thise gentyle knightes . . . this fayre folk’ (37, 39, 42, 54) (This king . . . those noble brethren . . . these excellent knights . . . this ﬁne company)—and virtually throughout the poem thereafter. The effect is notably cinematic: the camera moves in the opening stanzas from long shot to close-up, and if the third stanza contains more distal deictics than the second it is perhaps because it is now close enough to the activities at Camelot to move among them, distinguishing between nearer and further. Seeing the matter in these terms makes it clear, I believe, that what is involved is not the characterization of an individual narrator whose distinctive point of view we must recognize and through whose consciousness we must interpret what we are told; it is a pervasive heightening of the general characteristics of the narrating process in Middle English romance—dramatic immediacy, emotional identiﬁcation, wholehearted commitment to a ﬁctive reality shared by story and audience.

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The Gawain poet often qualiﬁes these characteristics with hints of irony, especially in his uses of the heroic idiom he inherits from the tradition of alliterative poetry (Borroff 1962: pt. I; Burrow 1971: ch. 1). This is already apparent in the wheel of the third stanza, where he writes of the festive company at Camelot that ‘Hit were now gret nye to neven | So hardy a here on hille’ (58–9) (It would nowadays be very hard to name so bold a band of warriors in any castle3 ), when what has actually been described is not warriors in a castle but a group of courtiers of both sexes indulging in ‘alle the mete and the mirthe that men couthe avyse’ (45) (all the food and pleasure that could be devised) and conspicuously lacking in warlike characteristics. Similar examples of ironic colouring can be found in passages already quoted, such as the comment on the silence of the courtiers in response to the Green Knight’s demand to know where their master is to be found—‘I deme hit not al for doute | Bot sum for cortaysye’—or that on the aged chaperone later identiﬁed as Morgan la Fay: ‘A mensk lady on molde mon may hir calle, | for Gode!’ Given the current fashion for discovering fallible narrators, it is perhaps surprising that critics have not generally interpreted such ironies as the comments of a simple-minded narrator who really believes that the courtiers in the opening scene have been described as a band of warriors, that some of them are likely to have been motivated by courtesy rather than fear when confronted with the Green Knight, and that the chaperone with her wrinkled cheeks, black chin, and bleary eyes is truly charming. But most critics have rightly resisted the temptation to think of the subjectivization of storytelling in Sir Gawain as the expression of a ﬁctive human consciousness through which the story is transmitted to us. One exception is worth attention because it illustrates so clearly the consequences of the ‘fallible narrator’ approach. Blanch and Wasserman (1995) consider the roles of narrators in the four poems. As in most criticism of the Cotton Nero poems (and this includes earlier writing of my own), the term ‘narrator’ is used as if unproblematic, and they state that ‘the narrator of the Gawain poems becomes an important ﬁrst-person presence who frequently manipulates the events in the ﬁctive world of the poems in order to establish his own function as ‘‘maker’’ of the text’ (111–12). In discussing Patience and Cleanness they refer to 3

The formula on hille is generally thought to imply ‘on a castle-mound’.

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this ‘presence’ and the ‘creator/narrator’ (112) or ‘poet/narrator’ (115), but in Sir Gawain they ﬁnd a narrator who is distinguishable from the poet by his fallibility as a glossator or interpreter: the Gawain-narrator would enter his text and gloss its action. But like the Dreamer/narrator of Pearl, he misinterprets wildly. In fact, the narrator of Gawain is a storyteller who is remarkably adept in explaining the reason for the knights’ silence, the meaning of the pentangle, the status of Gawain’s soul. In such cases, he always assures us of the facts, but assuredly those ‘facts’ are not always correct, as in the case of his overlong gloss of the pentangle, the very length of which calls into question the narrator’s powers of judgment. (136)

This narrator, Blanch and Wasserman claim, ‘stands between us and his characters, often presenting them as they are seen through the lens of his own peculiar values and assumptions. And it is an important part of his narrative strategy that when he would turn from his characters and speak almost confessionally to us, these are the times we as readers should keep him at arm’s length’ (137). They add, though, that unfortunately ‘the narrator’s remarks have generally gone unchallenged’ (138). One problem here is confusion as to the status of this narrator. The poem’s characters and narrative strategy are his, and yet he ‘misinterprets wildly’ and needs to be kept ‘at arm’s length’ by readers, so presumably Blanch and Wasserman must see him as an incompetent ﬁctive poet distinct from the actual Gawain poet, or perhaps as an incompetent commentator, like the one in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, who has somehow wormed his way into the poetic text itself. There is then the further problem, already encountered in narrator interpretations of Chaucer, of deciding how we know when this narrator is misinterpreting what he tells us. The examples of misinterpretation mentioned by Blanch and Wasserman include these: the narrator supposes that the Green Knight is ‘Half-etayn’ (line 140) (half-giant), but this is not so; he tells us that the courtiers’ silence ‘is not due to fear but to courtesy, though clearly that is not the case’; the interpretation of Gawain’s pentangle badge is too long, and it informs us that Gawain was ‘faultless in the ﬂesh, a notion directly contradicted by Gawain himself’; the narrator states that when Gawain confesses to the priest at Hautdesert he is ‘absolved as surely as if Judgment Day were tomorrow (1883–84), despite the questionable nature of Gawain’s confession’ (1995: 137–8). Here I believe several kinds of misunderstanding emerge. Inconsistencies in a

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medieval narrative, even one as sophisticated as this, may be accidental, or playful, or they may be designed to provoke discussion (did Gawain see his retention of the green girdle as a sin he needed to confess?); they do not necessarily tell us anything about a supposed narrator. The poet’s suggestion that perhaps not all the courtiers were afraid, some may have been politely waiting for Arthur to speak ﬁrst, is ironic, and, as was pointed out by Wayne Booth (1961: 159), ‘difﬁcult irony is not sufﬁcient to make a narrator unreliable’—though an inability to grasp it may be a sign of unreliability in readers. And in general we ﬁnd here what is usual in ‘fallible narrator’ interpretations of medieval poems: a determination to see behind a poem regarded as unsatisfactory a poet who, as Kittredge wrote of Chaucer, ‘always knows what he is about’, and is always about something of which the modern critic approves. If readers in 1995 ﬁnd the interpretation of the pentangle ‘overlong’, that is not because they are viewing it ‘through the lens of [their] own peculiar values and assumptions’, but must be because it was intended by the fourteenth-century poet to arouse their suspicions as to its reliability. Whether the personalizing elements in the narratorial discourse are to be understood as deriving from a ﬁctional (and here fallible) narrator is a matter of interpretation, not, as Blanch and Wasserman apparently suppose, of preconception; and it seems clear that the argument for such an interpretation is weak, and the price paid for it too high. The storytelling technique of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is recognizably similar to that of Havelok, though more polished and sophisticated, and in both poems the narratorial ‘I’ is essentially a function of the rhetoric of medieval romance. Something comparable is true in Patience and Cleanness. These belong to a different genre, one that the poet in effect made or remade for himself—scriptural narratives framed, retold, and reorganized to become exempla of the themes indicated by the poems’ ﬁrst words, Pacience and Clannesse. (In the manuscript, all four poems lack titles.) Here the explicit ﬁrst person, relatively infrequent, seems to have two main functions. First, there is the ‘I’ of the framework into which the poems’ scriptural stories are ﬁtted—three stories in Cleanness, one in Patience. This ‘I’ is so presented as to claim authority to interpret Scripture. In Cleanness this derives from study: I have herkened and herde of mony hyghe clerkez, And als in resounez of ryght red hit myselven,

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That that ilk proper Prynce that paradys weldez Is displesed at uch a poynt that plyes to scathe; Bot never yet in no boke breved I herde That ever He wrek so wytherly on werk that He made . . . As for fylthe of the ﬂesch that foles han used. (193–202) (I have listened to many eminent scholars and heard them say, and have also read for myself in true discourses, that that same noble Prince who rules over paradise is displeased by everything that tends towards sin; but I have never yet heard it set down in any book that He ever punished his own creation so harshly . . . as for the ﬂeshly impurity that fools have practised.)

By such means, the ‘I’ has gained understanding and authority to interpret God’s meanings; and thus he is able to select, and to shape into a poem, scriptural narratives that demonstrate God’s hatred of impurity: Thus upon thrynne wyses I haf yow thro schewed That unclannes tocleves in corage dere Of that wynnelych Lorde that wonyes in heven. (1805–7) (Thus I have shown you clearly in three ways that uncleanness cuts into the precious heart of that gracious Lord who dwells in heaven.)

In Cleanness the role of this ‘I’ is focused more sharply as an analogy emerges between him and Daniel. Daniel is the central ﬁgure of the last of the three scriptural stories, and he announces himself to Belshazzar as being (like the poet) an expositor of a threefold narrative, a divine message, merked in thrynne, That thretes the of thyn unthryfte upon thre wyse. Now expoune the this speche spedly I thenk. (1727–9) (written as three words, threatening you for your wickedness in three manners. Now I propose to expound these words to you without delay.)

In Patience there is less emphasis on study (though here too the ‘I’ of the framework has listened carefully to God’s word in the Bible), and correspondingly more emphasis on what he has learned from his experience of life: Yif me be dyght a destyn´e due to have, What dowes me the dedayn, other dispit make? Other yif my lege lorde lyst on lyve me to bidde

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Other to ryde other to renne to Rome in his ernde, What graythed me the grychchyng bot grame more seche? (49–53) (If it is laid down for me to receive an inevitable fate, how does it beneﬁt me to be indignant or deﬁant? Or if it should please my liege lord in this life to order me to travel to Rome on his business, either on horseback or on foot, what would grumbling avail me except to invite greater trouble?)

If the ‘I’ of the framework in Cleanness resembles Daniel as a clearsighted expositor, that of Patience is more like Jonah, the central ﬁgure of the scriptural story, who has to learn from experience how little choice he has about preaching God’s word. Within the scriptural narratives the functions of the explicit ﬁrst and second persons are similar to those in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The reality and immediacy of events are conﬁrmed by ﬁrst-person commentary, ranging from speculation to sarcasm: Lot ordered his wife to serve no salt to his angel guests, ‘Bot yet I wene that the wyf hit wroth to dyspyt’ (Cleanness 821) (But yet I suppose that the woman took it amiss), and when Belshazzar summoned enchanters to interpret the writing on the wall at his blasphemous feast, they understood as much ‘As thay had loked in the lether of my lyft bote’ (Cleanness 1581) (As if they had peered into the leather of my left boot). And we are interpellated as listeners to whom the storyteller owes as much deference as if he were the reciter of a romance: ‘Yif ye wolde tyght me a tom telle hit I wolde . . .’ (Cleanness 1153) (If you would grant me an opportunity, I would tell . . .). Here as in Sir Gawain, even when explicit references to ‘I’ and ‘you’ are missing, other forms of deixis have the effect of subjectivizing the narrative without producing consistent impersonation of a speciﬁc narrator. More important, both scriptural poems are governed by a rhetoric that makes narrative expository. What this involves I will try to show by analysing a single illustrative passage. The conclusion of the ﬁnal scriptural story in Cleanness is a greatly ampliﬁed version of the closing verses of Daniel 5: . . . et praedicatum est de eo quod haberet potestatem tertius in regno suo. Eadem nocte interfectus est Baltassar rex Chaldaeus. Et Darius Medus successit in regnum annos natus sexagintaduos. (. . . and it was proclaimed of him [Daniel] that he had power as the third man in the kingdom. The same night, Baltasar the Chaldean king was slain.

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And Darius the Mede succeeded to the kingdom, being threescore and two years old.)

This simple narrative is expanded into over ﬁfty lines of Middle English verse (1745–96), of which the following is an extract: Thys watz cryed and knawen in cort als fast, And alle the folk therof fayn that folwed hym tylle. Bot howso Danyel watz dyght, that day overyede; Nyght neghed ryght now with nyes fol mony, For dawed never another day, that ilk derk after, 1755 Er dalt were that ilk dome that Danyel devysed. The solace of the solempnet´e in that sale dured Of that farand fest, tyl fayled the sunne; Thenne blykned the ble of the bryght skwes, Mourkenes the mery weder, and the myst dryves 1760 Thorgh the lyst of the lyfte, bi the low medoes. Uche hathel to his home hyghes ful fast, Seten at her soper and songen therafter; Then foundez uch a felawschyp fyrre at forth naghtes. Baltazar to his bedd with blysse watz caryed; 1765 Reche the rest as hym lyst: he ros never therafter; For his foes in the felde in ﬂokkes ful grete, That longe hade layted that lede his londes to strye, Now ar thay sodenly assembled at the self tyme. (1751–69) (This was immediately proclaimed and made known in the court, and all the people who owed him [i.e. Daniel] allegiance were glad of it. But whatever Daniel’s situation, that day passed; night with many troubles approached at this very moment, for no second day dawned after that same darkness before the very judgement expounded by Daniel was fulﬁlled. The joyful celebration of that splendid feast continued in that hall until the sun set; then the colour of the bright skies faded, the pleasant air darkens, and the mist rises along the edge of the sky beside the low meadows. Every citizen hastens very quickly to his home, they sat down to their supper, and sang afterwards; then every company of guests departs later in the night. Belshazzar was ceremoniously carried to his bed; let him obtain rest as he pleases: he never got up afterwards. For his enemies, who had long sought that prince to destroy his lands, are now suddenly gathered at this very moment in great crowds in the countryside.)

When I wrote about Cleanness and Patience in my book on the Gawain poet (Spearing 1970), I was especially interested in his imaginative realization of his Vulgate sources—the addition of concrete detail

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and the evocation of time and space occupied and deﬁned by that detail. Examples from the lines quoted would include the mention of Belshazzar’s bed, the imagining of subordinates to carry him there and earlier of others to take pleasure in Daniel’s promotion, and the sensory evocation of nightfall as beautiful in itself yet sinister in what it conceals from Belshazzar and his r´egime. What most strikes me now is rather the reprocessing of linear narrative as logical exposition, by an ‘I’ implied but rarely stated, varying in relation to what is narrated, yet possessing the authority, personal and/or institutional, to explain purpose as well as sequence. The poet converts the relatively simple syntax of Old Testament narrative into hypotactic forms, full of subordinate clauses, and the structure of subordination implies his ability to grasp God’s purpose in the syntax of the ‘fair poem’ that, for Augustine, constitutes sacred history (Tasker 1945: ii. 327). He makes frequent use of explanatory conjunctions such as for (1755, 1767) and bot (1753). (In both scriptural poems for is a favourite conjunction, often prominently placed, as here, as the ﬁrst word of a line; forthi, supplying consequence as for supplies cause, is another favourite.) Temporal deictics such as now (1754, 1769) imply presence in the midst of events as they occur, and the varying combinations of present and past tenses with proximal and distal indications of time—thenne (1759, 1764) as well as now —produce the sense of a cine-camera constantly in motion as it takes in a complex story. Emphatic demonstratives such as that ilk (1755, 1756) and the self (1769) indicate ﬁrm grasp of the divinely shaped connections among the components of the narrative. Perhaps most strikingly, locutions such as ‘Bot howso Danyel watz dyght’ (1753) and ‘Reche the rest as hym lyst’ (1766) imply simultaneously God’s irresistible control over events, regardless of the concerns and wishes of the stories’ human actors, and the poet’s ability to recognize that control and authority to expound it. The overall effect, here and in Patience, is of what I have called ‘expository narrative’, in which ‘I’ is not the label of a ﬁctive person, whether fallible or omniscient, but the effect of a narrative genre.

‘First-Person’ Narration Pearl is a poem of a fundamentally different kind from the other three; it is what is usually called a ﬁrst-person narrative, in which ‘I’ gives an account of experiences in which ‘I’ has participated. Here the experiences

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take place largely in a dream, occupying 91 of the poem’s 101 stanzas, and so can only be narrated in the ﬁrst person, because the dreamer is the only possible source of information about the content of his dream. As is often noted, ‘ﬁrst-person’ is an unsatisfactory term for this kind of narrative, because, in so far as the narrating agent of any kind of narrative is personalized at all it is usually as ‘I’ (Jahn 1983: 234 ), and in this sense Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with its ‘I wot . . . I haf herde telle . . . I attle to schawe . . . I schal telle hit astit’, has as much claim to be called a ﬁrst-person narrative as Pearl does. So I am going to use the more technical term ‘homodiegetic’ to refer this type of storytelling; its etymology (‘same-narrating’) can make it, too, misleading when applied to medieval narratives, but its relative unfamiliarity may give it the advantage of discouraging too-familiar habits of thought.5 In this area of narrative, as in others, current theoretical discussion is based largely on prose ﬁction composed since the rise of the novel, and interpretation of Pearl, while generally innocent of any explicitly theoretical consideration of its homodiegesis, has almost always taken for granted assumptions that derive from thought about more recent ﬁction. One sign of this is the critical habit of regarding the ‘I’ of Pearl as essentially a fallible narrator, of much the same kind as the supposed (heterodiegetic) narrator of Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale. In my book on the Gawain poet I called the ‘I’ of Pearl ‘ridiculously inept’, ‘hopelessly literal-minded’, ‘amusingly undigniﬁed’, while others have criticized him as ‘thoughtless’, ‘confused’, ‘na¨ıve’, ‘prideful’, ‘obtuse’, ‘irritable’, ‘cantankerous’, ‘querulous’, ‘slow-witted’. Most readers of the present book are likely to be familiar with the general tendency represented by these epithets, the assumption of what Cohn calls ‘the cognitive privilege of the narrating over the experiencing self’ (1978: 151). I shall therefore not attempt a historical sketch, as I did with the Man of Law’s Tale and with Troilus and Criseyde, of the process by which Pearl has come to be interpreted through the supposed faults of its narrator. Such an account would be tedious to read; it would also tend to encourage 4

Citing Tamir (1976: 415): ‘Every narrator is a ﬁrst person narrator.’ ‘Homodiegetic’, borrowed from Genette (1980), has become an accepted term in narrative theory. Genette uses it to refer to texts ‘with the narrator present as a character in the story he tells’; the ‘strong degree of the homodiegetic’, in which ‘the narrator is the hero of his narrative’, he calls ‘autodiegetic’ (245). In these terms Pearl might well be called autodiegetic, though in the dream ‘I’ shares the stage with the Pearl Maiden. 5

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in a different form precisely the fault that has characterized readings of the unfortunate narrator—a triumphal sense of superiority over misunderstandings that could easily have been avoided. A few critics have rightly deplored this fault6 , but I know, because I feel it myself, that there will be resistance to any suggestion that the ‘I’ of Pearl should not be imagined as a unitary ﬁctive person, and one with the shortcomings we have been in the habit of attributing to him; and so, before turning to the poem, I want to examine some assumptions about homodiegetic narrative that underlie this approach to its ﬁrst person. I begin with a deﬁnition by the respected theorist F. K. Stanzel: It is characteristic of the ﬁrst-person narrative situation that the mediacy of narration belongs totally to the ﬁctional realm of the characters of the novel: the mediator, that is, the ﬁrst-person narrator, is a character of this world just as the other characters are. The world of the characters is completely identical to the world of the narrator. (1984: 4; italics in original)

Stanzel, then, explicitly basing his conception of homodiegesis on the novel, regards the ‘I’ of the ﬁrst-person novel as ‘a character . . . just as the other characters are’. That conception—appropriate enough to many novels—of the narrating agent as a ‘character’, in the sense that he affects us as having within the ﬁction the solidity that we attribute to human beings in the real world, is not conﬁned to homodiegesis. As Booth (1961: 273) puts it, we usually ﬁnd our emotional and intellectual reactions to [the narrator] as a character affecting our reactions to the events he relates . . . Though it is most evident when a narrator tells the story of his own adventures, we react to all narrators as persons. We ﬁnd their accounts credible or incredible, their opinions wise or foolish, their judgments just or unjust.

We have seen that that generalization has been true for the last halfcentury for most readers of Chaucer’s heterodiegetic narratives, Troilus and Criseyde and the Man of Law’s Tale; but why should the sense of a narrator as a person be still more evident in homodiegesis? The obvious reason lies in the apparent ontological identity of the narrating ‘I’ with the ‘I’ who participates, as a person, in the narrated events. If the ‘I’ of 6 e.g. Kirk (1995: 215 and n. 2) refers to ‘the overwhelming tendency of modern commentary . . . to deal patronizingly and often pompously with the Dreamer’s self-pity and possessiveness’ and notes the corrective to this tendency in Aers (1993).

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what is narrated is ‘a character . . . just as the other characters are’, how can the same not be equally true of the narrating ‘I’? In Pearl nearly all the events in which the ‘I’ participates occur in a dream set in the other world. In it he meets a Pearl Maiden and engages with her in a lengthy dialogue, in which she repeatedly corrects his misunderstandings of the nature of life beyond death and the basis of heavenly rewards; so it seems natural to suppose that, as in a novel, we must be intended to ﬁnd a similar human solidity in the ‘I’ of the narration. To be sure, we can expect there to be signiﬁcant tension within the continuity between the ‘I’ of what is narrated and the ‘I’ of the narration, if only because, on the supposition that both these pronouns refer to the same ﬁctive person, they must refer to him at different points in time. In order to narrate the events of the story he has to tell in the present, he must have experienced them in the past; and whereas in an epistolary novel (or in a sequence of epistolary lyrics such as those by Charles of Orleans discussed in Ch. 7) past events can be related in successive instalments as they are occurring, no one can tell a dream while dreaming it, and so the dream must belong to the past before it can be told. Let me quote Stanzel again: The characteristic feature of the quasi-autobiographical ﬁrst-person narrative situation is the internal tension between the self as hero and the self as narrator. In an earlier book, I suggested the terms ‘experiencing self’ and ‘narrating self’ for these two phases in the life of the narratorial ‘I’. The narrative distance separating the two phases of the narratorial ‘I’ temporally, spatially and psychologically, is generally a measure of the intensity of the process of experience and education to which the narrating self was subjected before it began the narration of its story. (1984: 212–13, quoting from Stanzel 1971: 61)7

We shall need to consider whether this formulation holds good if applied to the ‘the quasi-autobiographical ﬁrst-person narrative situation’ of Pearl; but ﬁrst there is one more point to be made about homodiegesis. Discussing ﬁrst-person narrators, Riggan (1981: 19–20) notes that precisely because of these narrators’ simulated humanness and because of the realism inherent in the situation of a character’s speaking to us directly, the

7 For the continued currency of Stanzel’s view, see Fludernik (2001: 106): ‘most ﬁrst-person texts typically foreground the dynamic interaction between narrating and experiencing selves’.

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natural limitations of human knowledge and judgment and memory come into play . . . First-person narration is, then, always at least potentially unreliable, in that the narrator, with these human limitations of perception and memory and assessment, may easily have missed, forgotten, or misconstrued certain incidents, words, or motives.

This idea, of the intrinsic potential of homodiegesis for unreliability, is restated in a recent study by Greta Olson (2003: 101, quoting Stanzel 1984: 11): ‘it appears necessary to consider the general limitations of homodiegetic narrators . . . As Stanzel writes, it is the particular quality of ‘‘personalized narrators’’ to demonstrate to us ‘‘the biased nature of our experience of reality’’. Homodiegetic narrators are subject to the epistemological uncertainty of lived experience.’ In this generalization, connecting homodiegesis with ‘epistemological uncertainty’, I believe we may ﬁnd a pointer to an important difference between medieval narrative and the more recent narratives on which current theory is largely based. What Riggan, Stanzel, and Olson write about homodiegesis is a special case of an important suggestion about the general signiﬁcance of the narrator—narrators of any kind—made in one of the earliest modern treatments of this ﬁgure, K¨ate Friedemann’s Die Rolle des Erz¨ahlers in der Epik. Friedemann, writing nearly a century ago, stated that the narrator ‘symbolizes the epistemological view familiar to us since Kant that we do not apprehend the world in itself, but rather as it has passed through the medium of an observing mind’ (1910: 26, cited by Stanzel 1984: 4). The belief that we have no access to the external world except as mediated through an observing consciousness can surely be found earlier than Kant, but it does not seem to have played a central part in medieval thought. As Joseph Owens puts it (1982: 459), in the Middle Ages ‘The discussion of cognition . . . was carried on apart from any inkling that epistemology might be looked on as a distinct science.’ If Friedemann, Riggan, and Olson are right to suggest some general connection between narratorial unreliability and a historical worldview, that might help to explain why narrators, and especially homodiegetic narrators, regarded as ﬁltering and often distorting consciousnesses, have been so much more important in more recent ﬁction than they are in medieval narratives. And further, if we can ﬁnd in Chaucer early glimpses of an explicit awareness that the bias or blindness of an individual consciousness can affect what it perceives as truth, whether in the world or in stories, that would be in keeping with the fact that in

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the Canterbury Tales he took unprecedented pains to achieve at least a generic consistency (though rarely a psychological consistency) between the pilgrims and the tales he assigned to them. In Chapter 4 I noted the shrewd comment in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue on the shaping of misogynistic ﬁctions by the consciousnesses of old and impotent male celibates. Another sign of Chaucer’s awareness of the tendency of the ‘observing mind’ to affect what it perceives as truth is a passage in The Book of the Duchess, where the Black Knight asserts that his lady was better than any other, tells the ‘I’ of the poem that he must believe this, and receives this reply: Sire, so do I; I leve yow wel, that trewely Yow thoghte that she was the beste And to beholde the alderfayreste, Whoso had loked hir with your eyen. (1047–51; my italics)

‘Whoso had loked with your eyen’ might be a motto for ‘the narrator’ as conceived in much discussion of prose ﬁction; yet for Chaucer this seems to have been an isolated insight rather than a programme to be carried out in the systematic way imagined by Kittredge and his successors, and I cannot see that it plays any part at all in the Pearl poet’s handling of narration. The story told by Pearl is conveyed with deliberate obliquity. A man’s beloved daughter died in infancy; bitterly mourning her loss, he had a drem (1170) or ‘veray avysyoun’ (1184) (true vision) in which he encountered her once more, now transﬁgured into a heavenly queen and Bride of the Lamb, and capable of informing him of fundamental truths about grace and salvation. At his request, he was allowed to see her in the New Jerusalem, as described by St John in the Apocalypse, but only from a distance. Unable to resist attempting to join her, he brought the vision to a premature end, but subsequently recognized that he must submit to God’s will and commit her to God with a father’s blessing. The protagonist of this sequence of events is as solid a person as Gawain or Jonah or Belshazzar (it would not be hard to imagine a heterodiegetic version of his story, if only a dream could be narrated by someone other than the dreamer), but we cannot disregard the effect caused by the telling of his story by as well as about ‘I’. This is a respect in which Pearl resembles the Apocalypse of St John, but differs from

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the illuminated Apocalypse manuscripts by which it is likely to have been inﬂuenced and with which it has been compared (Nolan 1977; Whitaker 1981), for in those pictorial renderings the visionary St John is represented as both watching and participating but cannot himself be the subject of a narrative ´enonciation. In Pearl, to use Stanzel’s terminology, there appears to be an identiﬁcation of the ‘experiencing self’ with the ‘narrating self’. This terminology, though, begs the question whether the narrating ‘I’ in a medieval dream-poem can properly be regarded as a ‘self’. Here it will be helpful to consider the tradition of dream-poetry in which Pearl was written. In the most inﬂuential of all medieval dreampoems, Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose, which the Pearl poet almost certainly knew,8 there comes a point at which the God of Love summons Dolz Regart (Pleasant Looks) to string his bow and provide him with ﬁve allegorical arrows. The God then proceeds to stalk the ‘I’ of the dream as he strolls through the garden, discovers the spring of Narcissus, looks into it, sees rosebushes reﬂected in it, and chooses a rosebud that he ﬁnds especially attractive. At this point the God shoots the arrows through his eye into his heart. Until the ﬁrst arrow strikes, the ‘I’ as experiencing subject is unaware of his danger and continues to walk about the garden, while the narrating ‘I’ utters a prayer on his behalf: Bow in hand, the God of Love then began to follow me at a distance. Now may God keep me from mortal wound if he should happen to shoot at me! I, unaware of all this, continued to wander happily and freely through the garden while he made haste to follow me . . . And all this time the God of Love followed me, watching like a hunter, who waits until the animal is in a good position before loosing his arrow. (1311–18, 1418–22)9

If ‘I’ as dreamer was unaware of what was happening behind his back, how could ‘I’ as narrator narrate it? If ‘I’ as narrator, recounting the dream after he has wakened, knows that the God of Love did wound the ‘I’ of the dream, what is the point of the prayer to preserve him? Are we to say that two different selves are involved, both called ‘I’? It seems to me 8 He refers to Jean de Meun’s continuation in Cleanness 1057, and probably alludes to it in Pearl 750; and virtually all three hundred-odd Roman manuscripts include Guillaume’s original as well as Jean’s continuation. 9 Quoted in French from Lecoy (1965–70: i); translations based on Horgan (1994), with some divergences, usually towards greater literalism.

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more plausible to suppose that here, as in heterodiegetic narratives such as Havelok or Sir Gawain, the narrating ‘I’ is not constituted as a self or a character at all, but is merely a function of the process of narration.10 This does not seem to have been recognized as a possibility even by the most perceptive scholars. Zink (1999: 151), for example, writes of the thirteenth-century French poetic tradition of which Guillaume de Lorris is the originator that ‘Allegory appeared only through one set of eyes and one point of view—the narrator’s . . . It was a reﬂection of truth in a consciousness’. The epigrammatic neatness of this formulation needs to be resisted, because it takes for granted precisely what is in question, that there is a unitary narratorial consciousness. As readers we need to know that the ‘I’ of the dream is in danger and that it is the choice of a rosebud as the object of his desire that leads to the wounding of his heart; in a homodiegetic narrative that information has to come to us through the homodiegesis; but there is no reason to suppose that Guillaume or his medieval readers would have made the same assumption as Zink and thus seen here an epistemological puzzle as to how the textual ﬁrst person could know what he does not know. A similar question has arisen in a more central way for modern readers of Chaucer’s earliest dream-poem, The Book of the Duchess. In his dream the experiencing ‘I’ comes upon a knight ‘clothed al in blak’ (457) and overhears him speaking a lyric which includes the lines Now that I see my lady bryght, Which I have loved with al my myght, Is fro me ded and ys agoon. (477–9)

The experiencing ‘I’ addresses the knight, engages him in conversation, remarks that ‘in gret sorowe I yow see’ (547), invites him to reveal the sorrow’s cause, and offers to do anything he can to remedy it. The remaining 750 lines of the dream consist largely of dialogue between the two in which the knight expatiates on his sorrow at losing his lady, while the experiencing ‘I’ fails to understand him, supposing the loss to mean the lady’s rejection of his love. At last the knight speaks with unmistakable plainness, exclaiming, ‘I have lost more than thow wenest. | . . . She ys ded!’ (1306–9), to which ‘I’ can only reply, ‘Is 10 See Vitz (1989: ch. 2) for a heroic attempt to avoid this supposition by analysing the ﬁrst person of Guillaume’s Roman into ‘four distinct identities’ (47).

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that youre los? Be God, hyt ys routhe!’ (1310). His apparent failure to grasp a truth which he has heard the knight reveal has been the source of much disagreement between those who believe that the poem’s ‘I’ is na¨ıve and indeed obtuse in his failure to understand the knight’s lyric and those who argue, on the contrary, that he shows great tact in pretending not to know that the lady is dead and thus giving the knight the opportunity to express his grief and get through the process of mourning. Other explanations have also been suggested, for example that the experiencing ‘I’ could have taken the knight’s lyric to be ﬁctional rather than autobiographical, and that not knowing what one somehow does know is an irrationality characteristic of dream experience. But the basis of the controversy has been the assumption that in The Book of the Duchess we must ﬁnd some way of identifying a narrating self with an experiencing self, an assumption I believe to be mistaken. The same assumption of a unitary textual ‘I’, at once a narrating and an experiencing self, would produce a parallel discrepancy in Chaucer’s last dream-poem, the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women. Addressing the God of Love, his queen names herself as Alceste (F 432, G 422) in a speech which Chaucer supposedly must overhear in order that he can report it; yet when the god asks him whether he knows who the lady is, he answers, ‘Nay, sire, so have I blys’ (F 505, G 493), and a little later, having been given a clue, he asks wonderingly, ‘And is this good Alceste?’ (F 518, G 506). In a medieval dream-poem there may, perhaps must, be an experiencing self but the ‘I’ of narration need not be identical with it. Closer examination of The Book of the Duchess will show how this works. It begins with a kind of prologue (1–43), a statement of the situation of the ‘I’ as one suffering from melancholic insomnia; here every verb is in the present tense. Then follows a longer section (44–290) narrating the events leading up to the dream, in which what is narrated is consistently set in the past while references to the act of narration are equally consistently set in the present. Both of these early sections present themselves as communication from an ‘I’ to a listening audience. Within what is narrated in the second of them is the encapsulated story of Ceyx and Alcyone, read to pass away a sleepless night; this too is narrated in the past tense, though with two occurrences (78, 212) of the ‘historic’ present normal in medieval heterodiegetic narrative. In this section ‘I’

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appears exclusively in relation to the act of narration, in subjectless phrases such as ‘To tellen shortly’ (68) and ‘Now for to speke’ (76) and longer interventions such as ‘As I have told yow here-to-fore; | Hyt ys no nede reherse hyt more’ (189–90) and ‘I hadde unneth that word ysayd | Ryght thus as I have told hyt yow’ (270–1). The one instance of an explicit ‘I’ that extends beyond the present moment of narration comes in the engagingly paradoxical phrase ‘I, that made this book’ (96): ‘I’, speaking now, has already composed the book in which the spoken narration is recorded. Once the dream begins, the conﬁnement of the narrating subject to narration is complete. An ‘I’, explicit or more often implied, narrating and explaining in the present, appears fairly frequently alongside the ‘I’ experiencing in the past, but always in brief phrases such as ‘sooth to seyn’ (321, cf. 460, 514), ‘Hyt ys no nede eke for to axe’ (416), or ‘as I yow telle’ (711, 1321), formulas that oil the wheels of storytelling without having any characterizing effect. What is narrated is couched entirely in the past tense, with a single exception: the knight was pale because his blood had ﬂed to his heart and so ‘noo blood ys sene’ (498; my italics) in his limbs.11 Finally, in a very brief waking conclusion (1324–34) after the dreaming ‘I’ has been disturbed by a noise within his dream, the gap opened by ‘I, that made this book’ is neatly closed in a past-tense narration: he found himself in bed, clasping the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, and thought, ‘I will try to put this dream into rhyme.’ After the ﬁrst forty-three lines, then, with their exposition of the mental state of an ‘I’ who both experiences and narrates (and their implicit pointer to the psychological causation of the dream to come), The Book of the Duchess almost completely separates the functions of the experiencing ‘I’ from those of the narrating ‘I’. The former is richly characterized, the latter not characterized at all (and only brieﬂy deﬁned even as the writer of the poem). The Book’s readers need to know from the beginning the cause of the knight’s sorrow, in order that his elaborate account of his loss may not seem excessive; and this was probably especially true for its original audience, because it is thought to have been written to commemorate the untimely death of John of Gaunt’s ﬁrst wife, with the knight representing Gaunt. (This allegory 11 The four textual witnesses all have ys. Skeat (1894–7) and Pollard (1898) both emended ys to was, but modern editors have retained ys.

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is conﬁrmed by a cluster of puns in lines 1318–19, but only after the fact of the lady’s death has been made explicit.) If readers need to know something in a homodiegetic narrative, there is no way it can be revealed to them except through the homodiegesis. Here, in a dream-poem written well over a century later than Guillaume’s Roman, by a poet who was beginning—but only beginning—to be interested in what Stanzel calls ‘the biased nature of our experience of reality’, the apparent contradiction is less glaring than in the earlier poem: the information we need is narrated not directly by an ‘I’ who, as experiencing subject, cannot possess it, but indirectly, as an account of words spoken by another character. But in my view it is still only an apparent contradiction, one not likely to have been perceived as such by medieval readers, and indeed never noticed, so far as I know, before Kittredge called attention to it early in the twentieth century. The subject of narration is not a self, and such inconsistencies are not evidence of narratorial shortcomings devised as part of the meaning of the poem. With all this in mind, let us return to Pearl. I begin with its ﬁrst group of ﬁve stanzas, which to me seem stranger than they evidently have done to other readers. The poem opens in an apparent mode of lyric celebration—‘Perle, plesaunte to prynces paye | To clanly clos in golde so clere!’ (1–2)12 (Pearl, delightful to the pleasure of princes, to set elegantly in gold so bright!)—which then turns out to be mourning on the part of a connoisseur of jewels for the loss of this uniquely precious object of his love: ‘I leste hyr in on erbere’ (9) (I lost her in a garden) in the past, ‘I dewyne, fordolked of luf-daungere | Of that pryvy perle’ (11–12) (I languish, wounded by rejection in love by that special pearl) in the present. The last stanza in this group uses only the past tense to narrate a struggle within the experiencing ‘I’ between grief on the one hand and reason and Christian consolation on the other, leading to his sleep on the grave-mound. But stanzas 2, 3, and 4 of the opening group combine the past, the instant present (), the gnomic or omnitemporal present (), and the present perfect () in a syntactical and temporal disorientation that intensiﬁes the obscurity of the situation evoked—has a jewel been lost? has love been rejected? has a person died? is the garden with its spicy scents and mysterious songs 12 Punctuation here mine; the exclamation mark seems to be called for by the opening vocative, but the syntax of the opening lines can be variously interpreted.

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a scene of death or of growth? The sequence of tenses is set out in the following summary: Stanza 2: Since the pearl escaped me [], I have often watched [], longing for what was accustomed to comfort me []. That pierces my heart []. The song that reached me [] seemed incomparably sweet []. Indeed many songs reached me []. Earth, you mar a pretty jewel []. Stanza 3: The place where such wealth has rotted [] must [] be overgrown with spices. Flowers shine there []; ﬂowers and fruit may not fade [] where it fell []. Each plant must grow [] from dead seeds; each good thing has always sprung [] from something good; such a ﬁne seed could not fail []13 to give birth to spices. Stanza 4: To reach the spot I am describing [], I entered the garden [] in August when wheat is reaped []. Plants shaded the mound [] where it fell []. It was lovely to see [] and fragrance ﬂoated from it []. I believe and know [] that the pearl dwells there []. What emerges is a general shift of the centre of experience from the present, via the omnitemporal presents of stanzas 3 and 4, to a past experiential sequence of which the narrating ‘I’ is giving a present account. The tenses of stanza 5 place it entirely in the past, but that temporal location is reached only through apparent contradictions, by which grief is still being felt in the present during the narration of a series of past events. It is surely a mistake to try to read these opening stanzas either as a communicative act like the opening of The Book of the Duchess (there is no you, no place in the text to be occupied by readers or listeners) or as a monologue expressive of a unitary consciousness in a speciﬁc situation. I am far from suggesting that the effect of d´er`eglement in the poem’s opening section is a fault. It is dreamlike, strange but beautiful; the pearly light that radiates from it arouses curiosity and bewilderment in equal measure. What it does not do is to give dramatic expression to a unitary narratorial consciousness,14 least of all one whose 13

But with an omnitemporal sense? Cf. Martin (1997: 322), commenting on earlier, more rigid interpretations of Pearl in terms of fourfold scriptural allegory: now ‘Narrative voices sound less unitary: the narrator of Pearl inhabits several time-frames’. 14

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fallibility the poetry is designed to express. Ad Putter, one of the few critics to have commented on the uncanny effect of these stanzas, ingeniously proposes (1996: 182) that ‘the reason why we must rely on our own resources in sorting out what has happened is that the Dreamer refuses to confront it openly. His evasiveness hides from us that his daughter has died, because he is hiding it from himself.’ In my view, though, this psychological diagnosis of a divided self is inappropriate, because the ‘I’ of the poem’s opening, not yet even a dreamer, is not a self. The suggestive ambiguities and obscurities of the language, its ‘evasiveness’, are poetic devices, not characterizing devices.15 Once the dream begins, this disorientation largely disappears, or at least becomes manageable as the experience of a self in a speciﬁc though bewildering situation, with only a single inexpressibility-topos to remind us of the present in which experience is being converted into narration: ‘More of wele watz in that wyse | Then I cowthe telle thagh I tom hade’ (133–4) (There was greater happiness in that state than I could tell even if I had leisure). The ‘I’ ﬁnds himself in a glittering, bejewelled landscape of crystal cliffs, indigo trees with silver leaves, singing birds that seem like marvellous toys designed by goldsmiths ‘to keep a drowsy Emperor awake’. It is as if he had awakened from his sleep inside a manuscript illumination, or rather inside a product of some impossible combination of all the luxury arts of his time, a visionary heightening of an aristocratic playground such as the French monarchy’s park of Hesdin, among ‘Les ars, les engins, les conduis’16 (the artiﬁces, the automata, the watercourses). Dubbed wern alle tho downez sydez With crystal klyffez so cler of kynde. Holtewodez bryght aboute hem bydez Of bollez as blwe as ble of Ynde; As bornyst sylver the lef on slydez, That thike con trylle on uch a tynde; Quen glem of glodez agaynz hem glydez, 15 Contrast Cohn’s assertion (1978: 160) that ‘all formal elements in ﬁrst-person narration contribute to the characterization of the narrator, and therefore call for more than merely formal interpretation’. I see no ground for this other than the whole cluster of assumptions about narration as speech that I am attempting to dislodge. 16 Machaut, Remede de Fortune 814 (Wimsatt and Kibler 1988: 213), part of a description of Hesdin.

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Wyth schymeryng schene ful schrylle thay schynde. The gravayl that on grounde con grynde Wern precious perlez of oryente; The sunne bemez bot blo and blynde In respecte of that adubbement. (73–84) (The sides of all those hills were adorned with crystal cliffs that were clear by nature. Bright hilly woods surround them, with tree-trunks as blue as indigo; the leaves, sliding over each other like burnished silver, quiver thickly on every branch; when the gleam from sky-glades [i.e. clearings in the clouds] glides over them, they shone most sharply with a fair shimmer. The gravel that crunched on the ground was precious orient pearls; the beams of the sun were but dark and dim in comparison with that adornment.)

The fantastic wonder and beauty of the setting are made irresistibly delightful by the ingenuity of the poet’s verse; and this is a convenient context in which to make a point that applies to the entire diegesis of Pearl (as I have argued it does, mutatis mutandis, to Troilus and Criseyde and the Man of Law’s Tale). If the ‘I’ of the diegesis were a consistently obtuse or fallible narrator, ‘hopelessly inept’ or ‘ridiculously literal-minded’ as I called him in 1970, there would surely have to be something wrong with this scene, which we perceive only through his senses and in his words: either its beauty would be deliberately deceptive or the reader would be mistaken to think it beautiful. Most fallible narrator readings of the poem have simply disregarded this problem (as I did myself), but one that does not is instructive in the length to which it is driven in the effort to confront it. This is the interpretation by Gregory Roper, which sees Pearl as a penitential work, with the ‘narrator’ or ‘dreamer’ characterized as a sinner who in the course of the poem achieves a certain degree of self-knowledge and thus penitence. Roper writes (1993–4: 171) of the dream landscape that while it is objectively a manifestation of the heavenly realm he [the ‘dreamer’] is approaching, seen from his viewpoint (as the poem presents it) it also seems a projection of his own disordered, worldly, and covetous desires. It is, indeed, a beautiful landscape . . . But the dreamer seems a little too caught up in the sensual beauty and expense of the place; he can only see the land in terms of jewels and their ‘schymeryng’ value.

I ﬁnd this unconvincing. I do not see how the landscape the poet describes can be both ‘a manifestation of the heavenly realm’ and a

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projection of the dreamer’s ‘disordered, worldly, and covetous desires’, and I do not believe that a critic as acute as Roper shows himself to be would have entered into this excessive subtlety if not driven by the preconception that Pearl is organized around a unitary narratorial consciousness. Roper’s interpretation is more determinedly consistent than mine of 1970 was, but the more consistent an interpretation based on this premise, the less persuasive it becomes. The ‘I’ moves as if enchanted through this paradis artiﬁciel till he encounters a river-barrier, which he supposes to be ‘a devyse | Bytwene myrthez by merez made’ (139–40) (a division between pleasure-gardens laid out beside pools). He is drawn forward by an ever-increasing desire, ‘For if hit watz fayr ther I con fare, | Wel loveloker watz the fyrre lond’ (147–8) (For if it was beautiful where I was travelling, the more distant land was still more lovely). He believes the heavenly city must be within reach; and then, sitting at the foot of a crystal cliff beyond the river, he sees a lady dressed entirely in white, her face as pale as polished ivory, her unbound hair shining like gold leaf, and at once feels, ‘I knew hyr wel, I hade sen hyr ere’ (164) (I knew her well, I had seen her before). She rises and, as she approaches the far bank of the stream, he sees that her white silk garments and her crown are entirely covered in pearls, and that she wears at her breast ‘a wonder perle withouten wemme’ (221) (a wondrous pearl without ﬂaw), so huge that no human mind could take its measure. In what follows a series of hints gradually identiﬁes her as his daughter, dead in infancy and innocence, and now a Bride of the Lamb.17 The next sixty-three stanzas consist of dialogue between the two, in which the Pearl Maiden meticulously unpicks and corrects the dreamer’s misunderstandings about the nature of the heavenly kingdom and the means of gaining it. The dialogue includes an encapsulated heterodiegetic narrative, a retelling by the Maiden of the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard. There has been much commentary on the dramatic qualities of the dialogue and its theological implications, but to summarize it here would not be to the purpose. The one point I need to make is that a narrating ‘I’ appears only rarely, and then in formulas that, as in The Book of the Duchess, do nothing to characterize 17 Not all scholars accept this interpretation of a designedly riddling ﬁction; e.g. Staley (2000) argues that the poem is not about a daughter’s death but about her entry into a religious order, while Bowers (2001) sees it as being about the death of Anne of Bohemia.

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the agent of narration. There is another inexpressibility-topos—‘I hope no tong moght endure, | No saverly saghe say of that syght’ (225–6) (I believe no tongue could sufﬁce to describe that sight in adequate speech)—and some asseverations: ‘at my devyse’ (199) (in my opinion) and ‘I wot and I wene’ (201) (I know and believe). These come quite early, and once the dialogue is fully underway the only reminders of narration are inquit-formulas, mainly of the ‘quoth I’ and ‘quoth scho’ type, the longest being ‘Then more I meled and sayde apert’ (589) (then I spoke further and said explicitly). None of these has any personalizing effect: no ﬁgure of a narrator is evoked, and certainly none of a fallible narrator. Not even those who write most patronizingly of the poem’s ‘I’ express doubt, for example, as to whether bias or inadequacy is causing him to misrepresent the doctrinal argument or to fail to remember and report accurately the Maiden’s often extensive speeches. There is indeed nothing to incite any such suspicion, for we are never made aware of the narrating ‘I’ as anything but transparent. The Maiden is, as she claims, one of those who ‘thurghoutly haven cnawyng’ (859) (possess comprehensive knowledge) of divine truth; the experiencing ‘I’ brings no greater cnawyng to this heavenly encounter than he possesses on earth, and, while attempting to respond to what she tells him with arguments from reason and Scripture, several times acknowledges his own inferiority to her. The inferiority, in his perception, is not solely of knowledge and understanding, but of social rank. She is now a queen, though he cannot grasp how, having died as an infant, she can deserve so high a position— Of countes, damysel, par ma fay, Wer fayr in heven to halde asstate, Other ellez a lady of lasse aray; Bot a quene!—hit is to dere a date. (489–92) (By my faith, it would be marvellous, damsel, to hold the position of a countess in heaven, or else a lady of lower rank—but a queen! That’s too exalted a station.)

—or again how she can have a queen’s unique role, while being only one of 144,000 Brides of the Lamb, and without usurping the place of the Blessed Virgin. He, by contrast, is quite out of place in the heavenly world of his dream, and feels himself to be ‘bustwys as a bose’ (911) (as rough as a peasant). As I and others have argued elsewhere, the force

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of the argument is not merely doctrinal: it involves painful emotional turmoil on the part of the dreaming ‘I’, as he is obliged to accept a double inversion of earthly hierarchies—the subordination of females to males and of children to parents—and to acknowledge his daughter’s authority over him. Medieval readers would be likely to share in that turmoil, because to them too the hierarchies involved would probably seem both natural and divinely ordained. If they were familiar with the tradition of visionary writing, they might also recognize a generic inversion, a turning upside-down of the type of dream known as the oraculum, deﬁned in Macrobius’s inﬂuential categorization (Stahl 1952: 90) as one in which revelatory teaching comes from ‘a parent, or a pious or revered man, or a priest, or even a god’.18 In widely read medieval dream-poems the ﬁgure from whom authoritative religious teaching comes may sometimes be female, like Holychurch in Piers Plowman, but if so she is envisaged as a mother to the dreamer, not a daughter: teaching of an adult by a child, and especially by his own child, could not fail to feel unnatural.19 Moreover, what the Maiden teaches about her life in heaven and the basis for heavenly rewards, while its truth does not invite question, is delivered without daughterly respect and with what seems unfeeling callousness. She may bow and remove her crown when greeting the dreamer (235–7), but she soon puts it on again (255) and addresses him not just ex cathedra but insultingly and with the thou appropriate from father to daughter but never from daughter to father: Wy borde ye men? So madde ye be! Thre wordes hatz thou spoken at ene: Unavysed, forsothe, wern alle thre. Thou ne woste in worlde quat on dotz mene— Thy worde byfore thy wytte con ﬂe. (290–4) (Why do you men joke? You are completely mad! You have said three things at the same time: all three of them were truly ill-considered. You don’t know what in the world one of them means—your speech has ﬂown ahead of your wits.) 18 Macrobius’s work survives in many manuscripts, and, as noted by Kruger (1992: 63), his categorization of dreams was repeated by medieval writers such as John of Salisbury and Pascalis Romanus. 19 Holychurch addresses the dreamer of Piers Plowman (Schmidt 1987b) as ‘Sone’ (B . 5); she is God’s daughter (B . 29–30), not his. Cristina Cervone reminds me, though, that just such inversions are common in hagiographical writings, where the unnaturalness of instruction given by a saintly infant is precisely the point.

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Moreover, quite apart from its manner of delivery, much of her teaching about heavenly things is simply incomprehensible to the human understanding that readers share with the poem’s ‘I’. Modern scholars, well informed about medieval religious doctrine, are often tempted to imagine that no one who was not ‘hopelessly literal-minded’, ‘obtuse’, or ‘slow-witted’ could fail to grasp the Maiden’s teaching, and that this would especially be the case for medieval readers to whom, they evidently suppose, a correct understanding would be readily available. But the simple fact is that no correct understanding of the transcendent heavenly realm was or is possible, except perhaps for those beyond death; in the realm that readers, whether medieval or modern, share with the poet, it is only the shape of error that reveals the boundaries of truth. And, given the painful humiliation and ultimate humility of the poem’s ‘I’, it ought surely to be the case for readers that ‘Any inclination to judge is forestalled because he judges himself’ (Davenport 1978: 10). Yet the central tendency in interpretation of Pearl, as I have noted, has involved an attitude of patronizing superiority towards the poem’s ﬁrst person; and I have argued that this has been inﬂuenced by ‘fallible narrator’ assumptions derived from more recent literature (often itself recalled in stereotyped ways) and from narrative theory, when in reality there is no characterization of that ﬁrst person speciﬁcally as a narrator. The later stages of the poem, after the dialogue across the river between the Maiden and the experiencing ‘I’ has concluded, bring this out with particular clarity. The dreamer asks where the Brides of the Lamb live; she tells him, in Jerusalem, explaining that she means not the Old Jerusalem in Judaea, but the New which lies beyond the river. He is not permitted to enter, but the Lamb will allow him to see it. What he sees, we are repeatedly told, is exactly what St John saw in the Apocalypse, a heavenly city made of twelve kinds of precious stone, through the streets of which the wounded Lamb passes in procession, followed by the Brides, among them the Maiden herself, touchingly referred to by the dreamer as ‘my lyttel quene’ (1147) (my little queen). Overwhelmed by longing to rejoin her, he attempts to cross the river, but the effort wakes him from his dream, and he ﬁnds himself back in the garden where he lost his pearl. There he ruefully reﬂects that if only he had been patient, ‘As helde, drawen to Goddez present, | To mo of His mysterys I hade ben dryven’ (1193–4) (Likely enough, drawn into God’s presence, I would have been brought to more of His mysteries).

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The last two stanzas of Pearl represent a kind of return to the disorientation of the poem’s opening. The ‘I’ has undergone a second deprivation comparable to his initial loss, and this now past event is framed between two statements in the omnitemporal present, the ﬁrst generalizing his situation as typical of the human liability to desire excessively, the second diagnosing human resistance to God’s will as a form of madness (paralleling both in content and in exclamatory form the Maiden’s earlier ‘Wy borde ye men? So madde ye be!’): Bot ay wolde man of happe more hente Then moghte by ryght upon hem clyven; Therfore my joye watz sone toriven, And I kaste of kythez that lastez aye. Lorde, mad hit arn that agayn The stryven, Other proferen The oght agayn Thy paye! (1195–1200) (But man always wishes to grasp more good fortune than could justly belong to him. Therefore my joy was soon snatched away, and I was expelled from the everlasting realms. Lord, mad are those who strive against You or propose anything against Your will!)

The next and last stanza begins with another omnitemporal generalization, linked to a perfect-tense statement that seems at once experiential and narratorial: To pay the Prince other sete saghte, Hit is ful ethe to the god Krystyin; For I haf founden Hym, bothe day and naghte, A God, a Lorde, a frende ful fyin. (1201–4) (To please or be reconciled to the Prince is very easy for the good Christian; for I have found him, by day and night, a perfect God, master and friend.)

Placed as it is in the poem’s ﬁnal stanza, it might be expected that this statement would sum up what has been learnt from the dream, but that surely cannot be so, for the dream, so abruptly brought to an end with what we have just been told is punishment for the dreamer’s all-too-human excess, does not show how easy it is to be on good terms with God. And then, what past is referred to by ‘I haf founden’? Again we might expect it to be that of the dream, but ‘bothe day and naghte’ implies some longer stretch of experience in which the dream might or might not be included, and in any case it is hard to see how the

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dream has shown God’s friendship for the dreamer, in allowing him a tantalizing glimpse of what he is not allowed to possess. These lines are so placed as to seem like retrospective reﬂection on the truth a dreamer has learnt from his dream, yet on closer inspection their content seems to forbid that explanation: they belong to the level of poetic didacticism, but can be related to the poem’s experiencing ‘I’ only if we supply a psychological or spiritual explanation too weighty for the context to bear.20 Next comes what really does seem like closural retrospection: this is what happened to me as I lay on the mound lamenting my pearl, and then I committed it to Christ, with a father’s blessing. But the poem’s ﬁnal lines return to the mode of omnitemporal generalization, referring to Christ’s daily presence to all believers ‘in the forme of bred and wyn’ (1209), and praying that He will allow ‘us’ to be His household servants and precious pearls for His pleasure. This unexpected ﬁnal turn wields enormous power in its silent evocation of the pearl-like whiteness, roundness, and perfection of the eucharistic wafer as the body of Christ, a body that is also the Church, the us in which the poem’s ‘I’ is ﬁnally merged. This is the only true consolation for the inability of that ‘I’ to achieve reunion with what he has lost, to heal the wound of desire, or even to deﬁne the mysteries that he might have experienced in God’s presence. The consolation is present as poetry, but not as human experience. We, the readers of a poem that refuses to acknowledge its existence as a poem, cannot deﬁne those heavenly mysteries either; nor indeed can they be expressed in human language (though that could not be guessed from many discussions of the poem); whereas the Eucharist is a link with the divine always available to all members of the Church.21 A link with the divine, but one that belongs to the earthly, not to the heavenly world; for in the heavenly city, as it has been seen across the river, there is neither ‘Kyrk . . . , | Chapel ne temple’ (1061–2) (church, chapel, or temple), and, though the Brides of the Lamb may appear as ‘mylde as maydenez seme at mas’ (1115)

20 I have in mind something like the exhausted ‘Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something | Upon which to rejoice’ of T. S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, or some theological paradox along the lines that God shows his true friendship precisely in denying false consolation. 21 Cf. the different view taken of the poem’s ending in Spearing (1987: ch. 8).

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(mild as maidens appear at mass), there is no mass, no celebration of the Eucharist in the heavenly Jerusalem, because the Lamb himself is ‘the sakerfyse ther to refet’ (1064) (the sacriﬁce there as refreshment). Once more, in these closing sections, the poem’s ‘I’ makes no explicit appearance as narrator. The importance of this absence will become clearer if I pause brieﬂy to consider a recent study of the poem by Helen Barr, signiﬁcantly entitled ‘Pearl —or ‘‘The Jeweller’s Tale’’ ’. This gives a fashionably materialist spin to the tradition of reading in terms of narratorial consciousness, asserting that ‘in casting the Dreamer as a jeweller, the poet establishes a material consciousness right at the heart of the poem’, so that in the initial description of the Maiden ‘we are looking at a woman through the gaze of a merchant’. Barr similarly claims that ‘we see the Heavenly Jerusalem through the eyes of a merchant keen to observe jewels, courtliness and aristocratic artistry, hence the long description of all the precious stones in 11.989–1020’ (2001: 43, 46, 54 n. 44).22 The poem’s description of the Heavenly Jerusalem is perhaps disappointing—I once described it (1970: 166) as ‘something that appealed to medieval taste but does not appeal to ours’—but it largely consists of a dutiful reproduction in verse of a passage from the Vulgate. In lines 989–1020 an experiencing ﬁrstperson subject occurs only three times: the ﬁrst two to state and to conﬁrm that ‘I’ knew the names of the twelve precious stones of which the city was built from reading the Apocalypse— As John thise stonez in writ con nemme, I knew the name after his tale. Jasper hyght the fyrst gemme That I on the fyrst basse con wale— He glente grene in the lowest hemme . . . (997–1000) (As John named these stones in writing/Scripture, I knew the name [of each] according to his account. Jasper was the name of the ﬁrst gem which I perceived on the ﬁrst course—it shone green on the lowest edge . . .)

—and the third at the end of the list to summarize this dependence on John’s account: ‘I knew hit by his devysement | In the Apocalyppez, the apostel John’ (1019–20) (I knew it from his, John the Apostle’s, 22 Barr’s reading of the poem pushes to an extreme the implications of the more nuanced account in Riddy (1997).

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description in the Apocalypse). Throughout lines 1000–18, listing eleven of the twelve stones, the catalogue is entirely impersonal: there is no distinctive ‘narrative voice’ (Barr 2001: 54 n. 4), and nothing to indicate that the city is being seen through anyone’s eyes. (In this respect the passage might be contrasted with the description of Sir Bertilak’s castle in lines 785–806 of Sir Gawain, where the various architectural features are consistently represented as seen from the viewpoint of Gawain as he looks up at it from beyond its moat.) The catalogue of precious stones is in effect a citation in paraphrase of the words of the Bible, no more ‘seen through the eyes of a merchant keen to observe jewels, courtliness, and aristocratic artistry’ than, say, the ﬂat texture of a brocaded garment in a contemporary manuscript illumination would be represented as seen in the perspective of some speciﬁc observer. But Barr’s claim is that ‘the long description of all the precious stones’ was included as a means of characterizing the poem’s ‘I’, so that it becomes yet another case of a kind of poetry that evidently does not appeal to the modern critic being explained as intentionally and appropriately unappealing because designed to express the character of a fallible narrator. Pearl as the Jeweller’s Tale, in this reading, has much in common with the story of Constance as the Man of Law’s Tale. Such readings depend on the assumption that a narrative is to be read primarily as the expression of a distinctive narratorial consciousness which can be separated from that of the author, and which will manifest itself in the language of narration. In fact, though, the language and style of narration in Pearl rarely have characterizing features, as can be seen by comparing them with the quoted speeches of the ‘I’ as dreamer. The latter frequently show a na¨ıvet´e or awkwardness not found in the narration: they characterize the dreamer just as the Maiden’s speeches characterize her. In medieval literature characterization belongs to mimesis much more than to diegesis, though for modern readers of a homodiegetic narrative, bringing to it the whole invisible cluster of assumptions derived from a restricted range of more recent ﬁction and conﬁrmed by modern theory, this distinction may be difﬁcult to make. In The Book of the Duchess, as we have seen, the narrating ‘I’ is deftly identiﬁed with the poet: he is ‘I, that made this book’. The same is true of the narrating ‘I’ of Guillaume’s Roman de la Rose. In the opening lines Guillaume writes,

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Et se nule ne nus demande comant je veil que li romanz soit apelez que je comanz, ce est li Romanz de la Rose. (34–7) (And if any man or woman asks what I wish this romance that I am beginning to be called, it is the Romance of the Rose.)

and he adds, ‘doint Dex qu’en gr´e le receve | cele por qui je l’ai empris’ (40–1) (God grant that she for whom I have undertaken it may receive it with pleasure). In Pearl there is nothing corresponding to this identiﬁcation of a narrating ‘I’ with a writing ‘I’—not even at the end of the poem, where such identiﬁcation might be expected in a medieval narrative, accompanied by some acknowledgment of an audience addressed, as in Havelok’s conclusion with a request for prayers ‘For him that haveth the rym maked’ (2998) and Chaucer’s in The Book of the Duchess with a vow to ‘put this sweven in ryme’ (1332). (Note, in both cases, the self-reﬂexive reference to the literary form—rhyme—of the text we are reading.) In Pearl, indeed, the narrating ‘I’ is nowhere referred to as a writer. This is also true of the other three Cotton Nero poems. The poet’s words often suggest that he must have been a book-lover, as in Cleanness, where someone puriﬁed by absolution is described as ‘polysed als playn as parchmen schaven’ (1134) (polished as smooth as shaved parchment), referring to the processes by which animal skin was prepared as a writing surface, and God’s destruction of the Cities of the Plain is compared to ‘leves of the boke that lepes in twynne’ (966) (leaves of a book which splits apart)—as though no more horrifyingly destructive act could be imagined than the breaking of a book. Similarly in Patience a strong sense is given of the Bible as writing, imagined as occupying space: the Beatitudes with their framing mentions of poverty and patience are referred to as ‘the tyxte there thyse two arn in teme layde’ (37) (the text where these two are yoked together). And yet the narrating ‘I’, when he appears at all in the text of these poems, does so not as a writer but as one speaking to hearers (see Spearing 1997). In Pearl too his instrument is not the pen but the tongue, as in the inexpressibility-topos quoted above: ‘I believe no tongue could sufﬁce to describe that sight in adequate speech.’ In Pearl this is all the more surprising in view of the poet’s repeated emphasis on how his vision of the New Jerusalem parallels that of St John in

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his Apocalypse, for apocalypses form an intrinsically textual genre. As Kerby-Fulton has noted (1990: 81), ‘The apocalypse is a completely literary form, a message disseminated through a book. ‘‘What thou seest, write in a book’’ (Apocalypse 1:11) is the watchword . . . The scribal character of apocalypses, then, contributes to a strong self-consciousness of literary activity.’ And Teodolinda Barolini, discussing the ‘apocalyptic allegories’ of Dante’s Purgatorio 32, remarks that ‘as in John, and as in many visionaries following John, this is a place of self-consciousness regarding the act of representation’. Barolini actually adduces Pearl’s account of the heavenly city as a parallel case, yet in fact there is no mention there or anywhere else in Pearl of the poet’s literary activity or his ‘act of representation’, but only of his seeing what John saw (1992: 158–9, 159 n. 51). Even John’s role as one who wrote is acknowledged only once—‘As John hym wrytez yet more I syye’ (1033) (as John himself writes I saw yet more)—and there is no acknowledgment at all of the further act of writing or telling by which the poem becomes a conﬁrmatory supplement to the text created by John.23 Most readings of the poem seem to me to have disregarded this absence of any identiﬁcation of the narrating ‘I’ with the writer of the poem. In the event of such an identiﬁcation we might be justiﬁed in regarding the ‘I’ as having achieved mastery of what he experienced, in the form of an enlightenment that enabled the poem to be written. But, in a way that may seem incongruous in a poem whose outward form displays such poetic mastery, the conclusion shows little sign of any mastery of experience. Sandra Pierson Prior has noted that, ‘Although the dream moves forward in its revelations, there is little suggestion that the Jeweller himself progresses from his earthbound self to enlightenment . . . most of the progress in the dream is not earned by the Jeweller. It is not internalized . . .’ (1994: 40–1). As this way of putting it reminds us, the experiencing ‘I’ is frequently addressed by the Maiden as a jeweller, and readers are often tempted to think of the poem as a jewel he has created. Yet the poem’s central symbol of value, the pearl, is something already perfect in itself. It is not created by the 23 In Spearing (1976) I noted that in Pearl ‘the Dreamer never appears in the role of poet’ (119). If, as critics often have done, we think of Pearl as an elegy, that too is a genre strongly marked by just the poetic self-consciousness that is missing from Pearl (Sacks 1985: 2).

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jeweller’s art, and when the poem’s ‘I’ asks the Pearl Maiden, ‘Quo formed the thy fayre fygure?’ (747) (who formed your beautiful shape for you?), he recognizes that Pymalyon paynted never thy vys, Ne Arystotel nawther by hys lettrure Of carped the kynde these propert´ez. (750–2) (Pygmalion never painted your face, nor did Aristotle with his learning deﬁne the nature of these properties.)

Art cannot create a pearl and natural philosophy cannot deﬁne one; and the reference to Pygmalion, signiﬁcantly, is borrowed from Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose, where Pygmalion is a ﬁgure of the lover-poet creating the object of his own idolatry. The jeweller’s art does not even transform the pearl as it might do a diamond, revealing a brilliance beyond that of its natural state; as a medieval Latin love-lyric about a lady called Margarita (Pearl) puts it, ‘this precious Pearl has value of herself, not polished by a craftsman’s hand’ (Nolan 1977: 158 n. 5, citing Dronke 1968: ii. 386). The pearl’s perfection could only be destroyed by any direct application of human artistic skill; at best the poem is a setting for it, for a symbol of transcendent value that can never be fully grasped, an enlightenment envisaged but never complete. If the poem did end with its narrating ‘I’ becoming the poet who wrote it, the dream-experience would demand to be read in terms of a pervasive irony. Every past-tense statement of what ‘I’ saw, thought, felt, did, would have to represent a limited understanding seen through the aperture of a subsequent enlightenment, and the appropriate mode of reading would involve a sense of superiority over that ‘I’, who foolishly mourned, felt foolish surprise at ﬁnding his pearl not really lost but a queen in heaven, foolishly imagined it possible to rejoin her, and so on. That has been the normal way of reading it, but I do not believe it was a medieval way of reading it. Burrow notes (2001: 18) that in England ‘When fourteenth-century dream poems arrive at their waking conclusions, narrators such as Will in Piers Plowman or Geoffrey in The Parliament of Fowls make little claim to have learned from what they dreamed,’ but the model for this way of reading a homodiegetic visionary work is Dante’s Commedia. There is a long tradition of reading the Commedia in terms of a dichotomy between ‘Dante the pilgrim’ and ‘Dante the poet’. The pilgrim is the ‘I’

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who undergoes the long, gruelling, and eventually exalting experience of visiting the other world and re-encountering his earthly lady Beatrice in transﬁgured heavenly form; the poet is the transformed ‘I’ who, having undergone this experience, then records it in words as best he can, with the beneﬁt of all that he has learned in a past now complete. That way of reading Dante was doubtless the model for Donaldson’s interpretation of Chaucer’s General Prologue, an interpretation that similarly distinguishes sharply and clearly between Chaucer the pilgrim and Chaucer the poet.24 There is some justiﬁcation for reading the Commedia in that way, because Dante lays out an exact time scheme that distinguishes the past of otherworld pilgrimage from the earthly present of writing, and because there are many places where he calls attention to the difﬁculty of writing what he saw and focuses on his own role as a poet. Even in the Commedia, though, as recent critics such as Barolini have pointed out, too schematic a distinction tends to obscure the reality that Dante the pilgrim is a poet, greeted as such in the course of his journey through the other world, and that the very substance of that journey is created not, as he pretends, by God, but by himself. The distinction between poet and pilgrim is ultimately an illusion created by Dante, an illusion in which the academic Dante-industry has been very willing to collude, because it provides such a powerful and satisfying interpretative device, aligning poet and reader in an orthodoxy from which the pilgrim’s errors can be infallibly diagnosed and corrected. That is indeed how the much smaller Pearl-industry has taught us to read Pearl. (And further encouragement has been added by the assumption that the poet must have read Dante—a possibility that cannot be excluded, but for which evidence is lacking.25 ) But in Pearl,

24 The Dante model has been even more fully imposed on the ‘I’ of the Canterbury Tales by de Looze (1997), asserting that ‘Between the two selves’ of the General Prologue and the teller of the Melibee ‘lies the journey during which supposedly a man who evidently never dreamed of telling stories at all . . . evolves into a supernarrator, a po`ete, capable of writing the ‘‘tales of Canterbury’’ in their entirety’ (136). Such fantasies derive not from anything in the medieval text but from the assumption that the narrating ‘I’ is an experiencing self. 25 I know of no evidence that any poetry in Italian was known to late-medieval English poets other than Chaucer, who presumably encountered it as a result of his visits to Italy; still, if we were to read a literal autobiographical signiﬁcance into the Pearl-poet’s reference in the prologue to Patience to travelling to Rome, we could suppose that he too had encountered the Commedia in Italy. For argument in favour of the poet’s knowledge

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as emerged from my analysis of the shifting temporality of the opening group of stanzas, there is no such time scheme as in the Commedia; and, if Pearl demanded to be read in terms of a similar distinction, then, even if the text systematically conﬁnes its ‘I’ to the subsidiary role of jeweller and contains no allusions to his role as poet, at least the waking section of the poem could surely be expected to make the structural irony explicit by showing how the ‘narrator’ reached the understanding that enabled him to write the poem. We have seen how in The Book of the Duchess the experiencing ‘I’ is brieﬂy identiﬁed as the poet who composed the book: he ﬁgures once as ‘I, that made this book’ and the poem ends with his resolution to turn his experience into rhyme. In Pearl, though, not even that tenuous link is established between the ‘I’ who dreamed and the ‘I’ who writes; they never coincide in the textual present, because the ‘I’ who writes and thus sets down the earlier misunderstandings of the experiencing ‘I’ is never realized in the poem at all. To read Pearl with an awareness of the implications of this absence is bound to be hard for modern readers, primed as we are to expect that in a homodiegetic narrative the ‘I’ will be shown undergoing what Stanzel calls ‘the process of experience and education’ that ﬁts it to begin ‘the narration of its story’. The reward for such a reading, though, is that it permits the recognition of a single but imperfect understanding as unequivocally and unironically present at every moment in the story told, and thus removes the embarrassment (I am tempted to say, the spiritual danger) of feeling ourselves encouraged to triumph over the past inadequacies and misunderstandings of ‘the narrator’. We are not obliged to construct a ‘narrator’ as the ground on which to feel morally superior to the poem’s intensely self-critical protagonist, and if we can resist the temptation to do so we shall gain a more valuable experience as readers. I believe that we shall also achieve an experience closer to that of Pearl’s medieval readers, for whom the distorting concept of ‘the narrator’ did not yet exist. of Dante, see Payne (1989: 27–58) and Shoaf (1990). Payne studies textual parallels and believes on grounds she does not state that ‘medieval English writers and readers knew the progression of Dante’s literary career far better than scholars have realized until very recently’ (3). Shoaf suggests that knowledge of Dante could have been brought to England by merchants, bankers, or Augustinian friars, but remarks that ‘it is a matter of indifference to me whether the Pearl poet ‘‘actually’’ read Dante’ (n. 6).

6 Lyrics The four preceding chapters have concerned medieval narratives and have argued, against the main tendency of current interpretation, that in them the narrating ‘I’, if there is one, does not invite construction as a self or, in Stanzel’s terms, a character in the ﬁctional realm ‘just as the other characters are’. The last of these chapters has also argued, no doubt counter-intuitively, that this is true even in the case of a homodiegetic narrative such as Pearl. The term ‘narrator’ may be neutral in itself, but, as actually used, it strongly tends to imply the existence of such a self or character behind or in the narrative text—in other words, to imply that occurrences of the grammatical ﬁrst person of narration can and should be consistently referred back to a ﬁctive human person. The concept of a narrator may be helpful and sometimes necessary in discussion of many post-medieval writings, but it is apt to mislead us when we read medieval narratives, and to do so especially by encouraging interpretations based on the assumption that a narratorial view of a story can be distinguished from that of the author, as unreliable, misleading, or incomplete. My aim in those earlier chapters was to show that medieval narratives are not generally transmitted through a unitary ﬁctional subjectivity, and that this is true even of the Canterbury Tales, where each narrative is formally attached to a speciﬁc pilgrim teller. Still less were medieval narratives created in order to express such a subjectivity, and to attempt to read them in those terms is almost inevitably to distort and diminish the narratives themselves. The Man of Law’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde become narrower, less signiﬁcant, and less interesting poems if read as expressions of the subjectivity of the ﬁctional persons supposed to be their tellers, while Pearl becomes incoherent, or (worse) gains a false, diminished coherence, if read in this way; for, as I have shown, the critics who interpret the poems in these terms regularly use ‘the narrator’ as an explanation for supposed inadequacies in the perceptiveness and

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poetic quality of the poems themselves. In the present chapter I turn to courtly lyrics, shorter poems that really are centred on an ‘I’ and do not tell stories having an objective status outside its sphere—poems, that is, that do appear to exist precisely as expressions of subjectivity. In Chapter 7 I shall move on to one particular category of lyric, that which presents itself as a letter, and thus makes explicit the absence of the subject from the text.

What is a Lyric? ‘Lyric’ is a term far vaguer in reference than ‘narrative’. I can usually recognize a narrative, but I am less sure why many of the poems called lyrics are so categorized, or again whether ‘lyric’ is the right word for the typical short piece of verse currently published in a single volume along with other similar pieces by the same writer.1 I do not seem to be alone in this bewilderment, and widespread uncertainty as to what counts as a lyric presumably accounts for the fact that, while narratology is a well-developed and ﬂourishing ﬁeld of academic study, complete with its own journals and conferences, there appears to be no such thing as ‘lyricology’. In one gesture towards the establishment of such a ﬁeld, the author suggests that ‘the very indeterminacy that exasperated me in the quest to deﬁne the lyrical may turn out to be the long-missing criterion: a lyric is that which resists deﬁnition . . . In other words, a lyric is magical’ (Albright 1985: p. viii). Though engaging, this is not very helpful. Medieval lyric is left virtually undiscussed by Albright and most other modern scholars, for whom post-classical lyric poetry seems to begin with Petrarch. Medieval lyric is even more lacking in deﬁnition and analysis than lyric of other periods. Those who have written about it with most enthusiasm tend to be more concerned with its subject matter than with what it is or how it represents that subject matter: To describe the mediaeval lyric is, in a very real sense, to describe mediaeval life—thought, sensation, and sight—for no other genre is so comprehensive in its range and appeal. The world of the mediaeval lyric is the world of Celtic hermit and French courtier, Castilian monarch and Icelandic farmer, English civil servant, German aristocrat, and Italian friar. (Salter 1973: 445)

1 Note the intelligent but despairing proposal of Jeffreys (1994) that shortness should itself be regarded as ‘the chief deﬁning characteristic’ of lyrics (118 n. 7).

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There are many anthologies of ‘medieval English lyrics’, often with learned and informative introductions, but they rarely specify the criteria for inclusion. The impression conveyed is that it would be hard to deﬁne a medieval English lyric as anything more precise than a relatively short poem of the kind that can be found in anthologies of medieval English lyrics. In these circumstances, a brief historical sketch may be helpful. My aim, as with narratives, is not just to present an argument about the interpretation of speciﬁc texts but to urge and aid the reader to think about ‘medieval English lyrics’ in ways that may be unfamiliar. The word ‘lyric’ did not exist in medieval English; the earliest uses recorded are from the 1580s. Derived from ‘lyre’, it implies association with music, and the Oxford English Dictionary deﬁnes it as follows: ‘Of or pertaining to the lyre; adapted to the lyre, meant to be sung; pertaining to or characteristic of song. Now used as the name for short poems (whether or not intended to be sung), usually divided into stanzas or strophes, and directly expressing the poet’s own thoughts and sentiments.’ A century later, the initial deﬁnition of medieval lyrics in an authoritative work on French literature follows the same outline: they are ‘compositions which tend to be strophic, sung to music, and organized around a ﬁrst-person voice’ (France 1995: 476). Earlier medieval lyrics such as those of the Occitan troubadours and French trouv`eres, and some Middle English lyrics, originated as songs, and the conception of lyric as tending to be strophic or stanzaic doubtless derives from this musical origin; but many, perhaps most, of the courtly English lyrics of the later Middle Ages are no longer directly associated with music.2 Though the poems may sometimes be referred to as songs, as in Chaucer’s claim in his Retractions to have written ‘many a song and many a leccherous lay’ (Canterbury Tales . 1086), that does not necessarily mean that they were really sung. In The Book of the Duchess Chaucer is careful to explain that when the ‘man in blak’ ‘made of rym ten vers or twelve | Of a compleynte’, ‘He sayd a lay, a maner song, | Withoute noote, withoute song’ (445, 463–4, 471–2; my italics). In this later period, ‘Musicality comes to be regarded as an inherent trait of poetry which no longer 2 Cf. Boffey (1985: 94) ‘the number of surviving musical settings for English secular lyrics is minute in comparison with comparable material in French, Flemish, and Italian sources’.

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needs the addition of a musical accompaniment’ (France 1995: 476), and such poetry circulates in writing, independently of any speaker or performer. I shall consider only the textual dimension of the poems I discuss, partly because I am not competent to analyse any musical dimension they may have, but chieﬂy because I wish to argue that in many cases their conscious and autonomous textuality is a crucial part of their meaning and effect.3 The two deﬁnitions just quoted are remarkably similar, but there is one major difference, that between ‘directly expressing the poet’s own thoughts and sentiments’ and the more cautious ‘organized around a ﬁrst-person voice’. I set the later deﬁnition aside for the moment, and concentrate on the earlier. This assumes, in a way that has probably come to seem na¨ıve, that the words of a lyric are direct expressions of the poet’s own inner life, so that a crucial question would be whether or not we judged him4 to be ‘sincere’. My discussion will be conﬁned to secular lyrics, which means in practice love-lyrics; and that in turn means, for late-medieval English love-lyrics, poems in a tradition that originated elsewhere several centuries earlier. Courtly lyrics of love5 were composed in many European languages, but the earliest substantial vernacular corpus, from which all the others derive directly or indirectly, is that of the twelfth-century troubadours who wrote in the Romance language now known to scholars as Occitan, in and for courts in the western part of southern France. The courtly lyric in English is modelled not directly on those of the troubadours but on those of their northern French equivalents, the trouv`eres, transmitted to Chaucer and his contemporaries through French poets of the fourteenth century

3 But for a powerful and provocative recent reading of both textual and musical dimensions of a lyric by Machaut, see Butterﬁeld (2003). 4 Most medieval English lyrics are anonymous, but I use the masculine form because all those discussed here are, or purport to be, written by men. There are many medieval lyrics by women—see e.g. those discussed by Dronke (1984: ch. 4)—though relatively few, so far as can be told, by women writing in English, and it is possible that some of those written from a masculine subject-position were in fact by women. But to use inclusive forms such as ‘herself or himself’ for the poems discussed here would be misleading as well as clumsy. 5 I deliberately avoid referring to lyrics of ‘courtly love’, a term whose history has so burdened it with connotation and implication (Eleanor of Aquitaine, Marie de Champagne, Andreas Capellanus, courts of love, codes of love, The Allegory of Love . . .) that it can no longer be sufﬁciently demythologized to function as an aid to thought.

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who were clerkly as well as courtly—Machaut, Froissart, Deschamps, Granson, and others. Their work was well known in English courtly circles, where French was still the fashionable language and where the poets themselves sometimes wrote: Froissart, for example, spent much time at the court of King Edward III, as secretary to his queen, Philippa of Hainault, while Granson was in the service of both Edward III and Richard II. Chaucer was strongly inﬂuenced by these French poets in his dream-poems and lyrics, and he in turn was a powerful inﬂuence on later writers of courtly lyrics in English. The doctrine of sincerity, now generally associated with Romanticism, can be traced back to this tradition of love-lyrics. It can be illustrated in its most explicit form from the opening stanzas of two cansos (lyrics) by one of the greatest of the troubadour poets, Bernart de Ventadorn, who wrote around the middle of the twelfth century: Non es meravelha s’eu chan melhs de nul autre chantador, que plus me tra·l cors vas amor e melhs sui faihz a so coman. Cor e cors e saber e sen e fors’ e poder i ai mes. Si·m tira vas amor lo fres que vas autra part no·m aten. (1: 1–8) (It is no marvel if I sing better than any other singer, because my heart draws me more towards love, and I am better suited to [obey] its/his command.6 Heart and body and knowledge and feeling and strength and power I have set on it. The bridle so pulls me towards love that I cannot look in any other direction.) Chantars no pot gaire valer si d’ins dal cor no mou lo chans; ni chans no pot dal cor mover, si no i es ﬁn’ amors coraus. Per so es mos chantars cabaus qu’en joi d’amor ai et enten la boch’ e·ls olhs e·l cor e·l sen. (2: 1–8)

6 Here, as in many poems of the troubadours and their successors, the status of ‘love’ is uncertain. Amor hovers among three possibilities, abstract noun, personiﬁcation, and mythical person (the god of Love, Cupid).

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(Singing can scarcely be of value if the song does not come from within the heart, nor can the song come from the heart if heartfelt true love is not there. Thus my singing is supreme, because in love’s joy I hold and direct my mouth and eyes and heart and feeling.)7

The leading idea of these lines, that the ‘song’ of the love-poet is of no value if not an expression of his actual experience or feeling of love, often known as the ‘sincerity-topos’, appears to originate with Bernart himself (Kay 1990: 139). He writes in another canso, ‘ab joi comensa mos chans’ (10: 7) (my song begins from joy), an assertion in line with the doctrine stated by Wordsworth in that manifesto of Romanticism, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, that ‘poetry is the spontaneous overﬂow of powerful feelings’.8 The main difference is that for Wordsworth many powerful feelings are capable of giving rise to poetry, while for Bernart only one feeling matters, and that, the reﬁned joy or woe of ﬁn’ amors, is the sole topic of ‘song’. The idea that troubadour lyrics ‘directly express the poet’s own thoughts and sentiments’, so that the lyric ‘I’ is a textual representative of the actual or empirical poet, was taken seriously and literally in the Middle Ages. It led to the composition, from the early thirteenth century onwards, of the prose writings known as razos and vidas. Razos are brief prefaces to individual lyrics, explaining the supposed circumstances in which they were composed on the basis of the ‘sincerity’ attributed to them. Vidas are biographies of troubadours prefaced to manuscript collections of their works, somewhat on the model of the Latin accessus composed to introduce the writings of classical authors such as Ovid. In both cases, the biographical information was largely ﬁctitious, and, in the case of the vidas, was taken from the lyrics themselves on the assumption that they reﬂected the poets’ actual love-affairs. Thus the commonest vida of Bernart de Ventadorn asserts that, while in the service of the Viscount of Ventadorn, he had an affair with his lord’s young wife, was banished, went to Normandy, and there had another affair with none other than Eleanor of Aquitaine (who, when this allegedly occurred, was already married to King Henry II of England). This exciting life story, for which there is no other evidence, is constructed from a reading of the 7 Bernart is quoted from Lazar (1966); translations are mine, with much help from published versions. 8 For the predominance of this idea in Romanticism, see Abrams (1953: 48–53).

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poems as an autobiographical sequence, motivated by the assumption that they express the poet’s own feelings. The sincerity-topos remains central to the tradition of the courtly lyric of love as it is transmitted from Occitania to northern France and from there to England. To trace the historical process by which this occurred would take too many pages, and for my present purpose it will be enough to illustrate its survival in Chaucer. Whereas in troubadour lyrics, composed in the small courts of Occitania, the identities of beloved ladies, rivals, friends, and the omnipresent enemies supposedly on the watch to break the secrecy of love, are often at once concealed and revealed through the use of senhals, or pseudonyms, the tradition as it came to Chaucer through northern French poetry was one of greater generalization and abstraction. In the Franklin’s Tale he writes how the young squire Aurelius, passionately in love with Arveragus’s wife but never daring to reveal his love to her, expresses his passion in the various forms of lyric developed by French courtly poets: He was despeyred; no thyng dorste he seye, Save in his songes somwhat wolde he wreye His wo as in a general compleynyng;9 He seyde he lovede and was biloved no thyng. Of swich matere made he manye layes, Songes, compleintes, roundels, virelayes (. 943–8)

In his ﬁrst-person poems, Chaucer nearly always represents himself as not having experienced personally the feeling expressed in courtly lyrics, and as knowing it only from his reading of these lyrics and from other sources such as romances and histories. This is put with particular clarity in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, where he calls on ‘lovers that kan make of sentement’ (F 69) (lovers who know how to compose poetry out of what they feel) to assist him in praising the ﬂower he most loves, the daisy, and to forgive him if he merely repeats what they have already expressed in their ‘fresshe songes’ (F 79) (original lyrics). The role of outsider in relation to the charmed circle of lovers—whether 9 Lines 944–5: ‘except that in his songs he would somewhat reveal/conceal his misery in the form of a general lamentation’. Wreye can mean either ‘betray’ or ‘conceal’, and here both meanings seem possible: Aurelius somewhat reveals his unhappiness even as he cloaks it in the generalities of late-medieval courtly lyricism. I punctuate line 945 differently from L. Benson (1987).

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because he has never known the sentement of love at all, or because he has no experience of success in love—is Chaucer’s favourite, in part perhaps because the association in courtly ideology between noble or gentle birth and the capacity for love made it appropriate for the upwardly mobile son of a prosperous wine-merchant. It was also adopted by some of the English poets most inﬂuenced by him, such as the civil servant Hoccleve and the monk Lydgate. But the tradition deriving from the troubadours, of love-lyrics purporting to express the poet’s own feelings, is continued in much of the English courtly poetry of the century and more after Chaucer. These lyrics, strongly inﬂuenced by Chaucer in style, are often anonymous, though some may be attributable to poets of high rank, such as William, Duke of Suffolk, and Charles, Duke of Orleans, for whom the choice to write as ‘makers of sentement’ would be socially appropriate.

‘Lovers that kan make of sentement’ I shall examine some ﬁfteenth-century courtly lyrics of love to see how they encode subjectivity, beginning with those purporting to be direct and transparent expressions of the poet’s feelings, and moving on to others in which a consciousness of textuality plays a more explicit part. In recent years there have been remarkable developments in the study of the manuscripts in which lyrics survive—often, for English lyrics, miscellanies or commonplace books where they are juxtaposed with material of very different kinds—and in the study of the lyrics themselves in their manuscript contexts rather than in the scientiﬁcally sterilized setting of modern editions. My choice to look closely at individual lyrics may seem retrograde; it does not imply doubt about the fruitfulness of codicological work, but responds to the evident truth that the poems discussed are also designed as individual compositions of speciﬁc kinds. The ﬁction of the simplest kind of love-lyric is that the poet is present, here and now, inhabiting the ‘I’ of the poem, and is conveying his own sentement to his lady as ‘you’. Little is lost, perhaps, by the reader’s temporary acceptance of this ﬁction as reality; yet in many of these apparently uncomplicated medieval lyrics there is a fundamental complication that troubles such an acceptance. The feeling expressed is characteristically one of sorrow at separation; it is because of that separation of the ‘I’ from the ‘you’ that the poem exists; yet this means that the ‘you’ cannot be copresent with the ‘I’, and that

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very fact explains why it exists as a written document. Separation as the motive for love-poetry is no doubt a universal theme. It was certainly prominent among the troubadours, as in this stanza from a canso by Bernart de Ventadorn: Encontra·l damnatge e la pena qu’eu trai, ai mo bon uzatge: c’ades consir de lai. Orgolh e folatge e vilania fai qui·n mou mo coratge ni d’autra·m met en plai, car melhor messatge en tot lo mon no·n ai, e man lo·lh ostatge entro qu’eu torn de sai. (38: 73–84; my italics) (In the face of the loss and pain I suffer I have my own good custom: I always think of there. Presumption and folly and coarseness it is if anyone distracts my heart or engages it with another woman, for no better messenger I have in all the world, and I send it to her as hostage until I return from here.)

This poem turns on the dialectic of ‘there’ and ‘here’, lai and sai, the place where ‘she’ is and the place where ‘I’ am; and, in the poem’s ﬁction, the poet’s heart is sent as messenger and hostage to cross the distance between lai and sai. (In later courtly poetry, and perhaps here, the idea of the heart as messenger seems sometimes to have been given reality in the form of the gift of a heart-shaped jewel, which the poem accompanies (Green 1983).) The same dialectic is at work in another of Bernart’s cansos, this time with the poet’s ‘spirit’, thought to dwell in the heart, as messenger: Mo cor ai pres d’Amor, que l’esperitz lai cor, mas lo cors es sai, alhor, lonh de leis, en Fransa. (4: 33–6; my italics) (My heart keeps close to Love, and my spirit runs to it there, but my body is here, elsewhere, far from her, in France.)

In this case lai is speciﬁed as Occitania, sai as northern France; and in both poems proximal and distal deictics (I, here/she, there) mark

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out the distance necessary for the existence of the love-longing which is their theme. This distance, however, also begins to suggest a distance between the poem and the poet to whose feelings it purports to give direct expression. The lover and the lady are not literally copresent, and the words of the poem cannot be imagined only as the poet’s own speech—‘the lyric voice, which speaks in the moment of feeling’ (Davenport 1988: 8)—because they have to be transmitted by the heart or its spirit. Bernart, though he refers repeatedly to his ‘song’, can also envisage his poems as written texts, and at the end of one, indeed, he speciﬁcally mentions the literacy of the lady to whom it is directed: ela sap letras et enten, et agrada·m qu’eu escria los motz, e s’a leis plazia, legis los al meu sauvamen. (40: 53–6) (She knows and understands letters, and it pleases me to write the words, and, if she liked, she might read them so as to bring about my salvation.)

From this situation, as we shall see, derives the conception of the love-lyric as love-letter. By the later Middle Ages, this kind of poem had become formalized as part of a larger tradition of ‘complaint’, a capacious genre, ‘stretching’, in W. A. Davenport’s words, ‘from the passionate soliloquy of self-pity to the plaintiff’s statement in court and the satirist’s ululations’. Here my concern is with the type of lyric that he calls the courtly complaint. ‘The main idea of the courtly complaint is the lover’s expression of his suffering’ (1988: 3, 6) (as in the compleynte of Chaucer’s ‘man in blak’), but ‘complaint’ also implies the pleading of a grievance, often in a legal or quasi-legal context, in the form of an address to a person who has power to relieve it. If the complainant or plaintiff is a lover, that power is attributed to the lady who could relieve his suffering by granting him her love, or at least her company, in return. My ﬁrst English example of the courtly lyric of love justiﬁes its existence as the immediate product of speech (or song) by the hopelessness of complaint as petition: the lady is too disdainful to receive any such plea. It is a late-ﬁfteenth-century virelai, a songlike form that originated in fourteenth-century France and is somewhat rare in English: Alone walkyng, In thought pleynyng,

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And sore syghyng, All desolate, Me remembryng 5 Of my lyvyng, My deth wyssyng Erly and late, Infortunate Ys soo my fate 10 That—wote ye whate?— Oute of mesure My lyfe I hate; Thus desperate, In suche estate 15 Do I endure. Of other cure Am I nat sure, Thus to endure Ys hard, certayn. 20 Suche ys my ure, I yow ensure; What creature May have more payn? My trouth so pleyn 25 Ys take in veyn, And gret disdeyn In remembraunce; Yet I full feyne Wold me compleyne 30 Me to absteyne From thys penaunce. But in substaunce, Noon allegeaunce Of my grevaunce 35 Can I nat fynde; Ryght so my chaunce With displesaunce Doth me avaunce— And thus an ende. (Duncan 2000: no. 21) 40 (Walking alone, lamenting in thought, and sighing deeply, utterly desolate, remembering my life, wishing for death at all times, my fate is so unfortunate

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that—do you know what?—I hate my life beyond measure; thus I endure, in despair, in such a state. I can rely on no other remedy [than death]; it is indeed hard to go on living like this. Such is my customary experience, I assure you; what creature can have greater pain? My manifest ﬁdelity is received in vain and remembered with great disdain; yet I would most willingly make a complaint so as to avoid this suffering. But in reality I can ﬁnd no alleviation of my grievance; in this way my fortune promotes me only to misery—and thus an end.)

Here is a perfect example of the lyric as deﬁned by the Oxford English Dictionary: a short poem, musical in manner whether or not it was intended to be sung, divided into stanzas, and directly expressing the poet’s own thoughts and sentiments—or representing itself as doing so. The poet as lover would like to compose a complaint addressed to the lady (urging, presumably, that his ﬁdelity deserves a better reward than her disdain, and that unless she grants it she will be responsible for his death), but he is unable to do so, because she has made herself inaccessible to his approaches. Thus the poem is not the complaint it would like to be, and the ‘you’ addressed in lines 11 and 22 is not the lady but ourselves as audience. The feeling expressed in this lyric lacks complexity, but it is not an unsophisticated piece, or a mere exercise in verbal musicality. The poem as voice of the moment of feeling exists only in relation to and in tension with what it is not, the phantom document it would like to be; and the sequence of stanzas is governed by an intelligible though simple logic, mirrored in the concatenations of the rhymes, which means that, unlike those of many medieval love-lyrics, they do not seem interchangeable. The solitary walk of stanza 1 is the appropriate setting for a song of unrequited love, and the suspension of action evoked by the many present participles that provide the rhymes already implies the absence of remedy. Then the extremity of the poet’s situation is set out in stanzas 2 and 3; the wish for redress in stanza 4; and the impossibility of redress and thus the absence of any scope for further development in stanza 5. Ende as the last word, contrasting in its simplicity with the ‘French’ reﬁnement of the stanza’s other rhymes, refers to this absence and hints at the end of life by suicide, as well as marking the end of the poem. My next two love-lyrics both come from the Findern manuscript, a large anthology compiled about 1500 in a Derbyshire country house, which has been described as ‘an index of taste of the upper classes at the

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end of the ﬁfteenth century’ (Robbins 1952: p. xlvi). Its contents were written down over a period of time in many different hands, and include poems by Chaucer and Lydgate. The ﬁrst of my examples expresses a single, unchanging mood of sorrow: As in my remembrauns non but ye alone, Wiche me causithe bothe to sygh and playne, I have no comfort—wher schall Y make my mone? So far from you, that is all my payne; My dyscomfort I may hit nat refreyne 5 Tyll Y be sewre of youre hartys ese: Nothing but hit may my grevys pese. Allwey to endure thus in woo, What wondyr is thow Y sore complayne? Youre goodlyhed hathe peryschid myn hert soo, 10 Sythe of the trowthe I schall nat fayne, Hit causith myn yen oft for to rayne When Y thin[k] on you and am absent, For, alas, departyng hath my hert schent. (Robbins 1952: no. 168)10 (With no one but you alone in my memory, giving me cause both to sigh and to lament, I have no comfort—where shall I make my complaint? [To be] so far from you, that is [what causes] all my suffering; I cannot restrain my misery until I may be certain of your heart’s content: nothing but that can pacify my grief. Always enduring thus in unhappiness, what wonder is it if I bitterly lament? Your beauty has so pierced my heart that—since I am not to dissemble the truth—it often causes my eyes to shed tears when I think of you and am absent [from you], for, alas, separation has broken my heart.)

This little poem conveys stasis, an effect especially marked in the absence of ﬁnite verbs from the openings to both stanzas. The grief caused by separation brings paralysis, and the lack of any change in feeling is matched by the lack of any development in argument. Most of the terms ostensibly indicating logical structure (As . . . , Sythe . . . , For . . .) are mere gestures without substance. The lines could often be in a different order (1 and 3 could change places, and so could 2 and 4), as indeed could the two stanzas, and the single b-rhyme running through both stanzas, besides heightening their plangency, 10 I have restored the manuscript reading ‘As’ as the ﬁrst word in place of Robbins’s emendation ‘Is’, and have changed his punctuation in several places.

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underlines this interchangeability.11 Though the poem seems to be a spoken expression of feeling, its second person exists only as an image ‘in my remembrauns’ (1), and, more strikingly, the ‘I’, entering into the perspective of this imaginary substitute for the beloved, also experiences himself as ‘absent’ (13). Touching though it is, the lack of metrical control indicates lack of sophistication, and I would guess that the writer was hardly aware of how these absences substitute textuality for his implicit claim to be a speaker. The conventions of courtly poetry require that love should be secret: there is no conﬁdant to whom the poem’s words can be addressed. And ‘wher schall Y make my mone?’ (3) also points to the way that the poem exists not as a means of person-to-person communication but as a substitute for it: the ‘you’ is always elsewhere, outside the structure of words—but then so is the ‘I’. The second example from the Findern manuscript is another poem of separation in rhyme royal stanzas, using many of the same rhymes as the ﬁrst example—payne, playne, compleyn, fayne—but with three stanzas and a refrain, so that it corresponds to the ﬁxed form known as the ballade: I may well sygh, for grevous ys my payne Now to departe fram yow thys sodenly. My fayre swete-hert, ye cause me to compleyn; For lacke of yow Y stande full pytously, Alle yn dyscomfort, wythowten remedy, Most yn my mynde, my lady soverayn: Alas for woo, departyng hath me slayn! Farewell, my myrthe and chefe of my comfort! My joy ys turnyd ynto hevynesse Tyll Y agayn to yow may resort; As for the tyme, Y am but recurles, Lyke to a fygure wyche that ys hertlees; Wyth yow hyt ys, God wote, Y may not fayne: Alas for woo, departynge hath me slayne! Yyt notwythstondynge, for all my grevaunce, Hyt shall be taken ryght pacyently; And thenke hit ys to me but a plesaunce

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11 Cf. Holmes (2000: 12): ‘The numerous permutations of stanzas in different manuscript versions of troubadour songs suggest that the texts did not necessarily have a deﬁnitive internal ordering; they did not ‘‘go’’ anywhere.’

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For yow to suffre a grete dele more, truly; Wyll never change but kepe unfeynyngly Wyth all my myght to be bothe true and playn. 20 Alas, for woo, departynge hath me slayn! (Robbins 1952: no. 169) (I may well sigh, for I suffer grievous pain in parting from you now so suddenly. My fair sweetheart, you are the cause of my complaint; for lack of you I stand most pitifully in complete misery, lacking remedy, with you, my sovereign lady, most in my mind: alas for woe, separation has destroyed me! Farewell, my happiness and my chief comfort! My joy is turned into sorrow until I can return to you again; for the present, I have no hope of recovery, resembling an image without a heart; God knows, it [my heart] is with you, I cannot dissemble: alas for woe, separation has destroyed me! Yet despite this, for all my suffering, I shall accept it [my situation] with great patience, and think that it is nothing but delight to me, truly, to suffer a great deal more for you; I will never change, but will sincerely take care with all my power to be both faithful and honest. Alas for woe, separation has destroyed me!)

This poem, even more than the one before, presents itself as a direct expression of the poet’s thoughts and sentiments, emerging at the very moment of separation, ‘Now’ (2), and vowing constancy in suffering until a vaguely imagined future time when ‘Y agayn to yow may resort’. If the poem’s ‘now’ is the moment of parting, then its ‘you’, apostrophized in lines 3, 6, and 8, can perhaps be envisaged as literally present to hear the speech of its ‘I’. There is some progression in thought: the ﬁrst stanza expresses sorrow at separation and almost seems to blame the lady addressed (‘ye cause me to complayn’); the second introduces the idea that the separation is only temporary (‘Tyll . . .’, ‘As for the tyme’); the third, explicitly turning on notwythstondynge, states that the ‘I’ is willing to suffer this and more for his lady’s sake. But the exactly repeated refrain seems to contradict this progression, and its effect appears mechanical rather than calculated. The logical sequence of the three stanzas does not extend to the poem’s microstructure: within a stanza, lines are again interchangeable (1 and 3, 8 and 10, and others). The syntax is often paratactic and thus ambiguous; for example, my translation assumes that line 6 is an absolute construction (‘with you, my sovereign lady, most in my mind’), but there is no way of being certain of this, and the omission of the ﬁrst-person subject in line 19, perhaps a colloquialism, produces another blurred effect, of a kind quite common in Lydgate and his followers, a tradition in which Latinate

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absolute constructions are markers of stylistic elevation. Indeed, I am far from sure that the poem really has the temporal structure indicated above: if the parting takes place ‘now’, why does the refrain line have a perfect verb that seems to emerge from a present in which it has already occurred in the past? There is a tension, perhaps not intended or fully controlled, between the imagining of a change for the better and the determination not to change: ‘I’ asserts that he ‘Wyll never change’ in his ﬁdelity and will persuade himself that his suffering, patiently endured, is actually pleasure, but he also looks forward to a moment at which it will give way to the pleasure of reunion. The poem’s most striking feature is the simile in line 12, comparing the ‘I’ to a fygure without a heart. In a poetic mode that repeatedly stresses the heart as the source and representative of ‘affective life and interiority’ (Le Goff 1989: 16), the lover whose heart is elsewhere, accompanying his lady, is like a statue, resembling a human being but empty, paralysed, lacking inner life. But then, how can a poem emerge as speech from a statue?

Lyric as Dramatic Monologue? In these English lyrics of separation, whether caused by some external force or by the lady’s disdain, the ‘I’ is little more than an empty space, waiting to be occupied by any reader. The reader envisaged is usually male, as is indicated by details such as the reference to ‘my lady sovereyn’ in line 6 of ‘I may well sygh’, but the ‘I’ is not so strongly characterized as masculine that a female reader would be barred from adopting it as hers—indeed, Robbins notes that in the Findern manuscript ‘some of the poems have been transcribed by women, who have signed their names after the poems and on various other pages’ (1952: p. xlvi). As with medieval religious texts in the tradition of affective spirituality, the ﬁrst person, which functions as the source of ‘thoughts and sentiments’, can readily be identiﬁed with the author precisely because it lacks most characterizing features, and can therefore also be taken over without difﬁculty by any likely reader. Not all courtly lyrics are like this, and it will be helpful now to return to the more recent deﬁnition quoted above, as a poem ‘organized around a ﬁrst-person voice’, which, while still envisaging the lyric as speech, allows for the possibility that the speaker may not be a textual representative of the poet. The implications of this change have frequently been noted in recent approaches to an as

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yet unformulated lyricology. The later deﬁnition, with its substitution of ‘voice’, or sometimes ‘speaker’, for ‘poet’, can be found restated in many different ways, in literary handbooks that accept it—a lyric, states one, is ‘any fairly short, nonnarrative poem presenting a single speaker who expresses a state of mind or a process of thought and feeling’ (Abrams 1981: 99)—and also in more recent theoretical discussions by those wishing to dislodge or supersede it. Many contemporary critics are responding to innovative and experimental kinds of poetry which cannot readily be understood as the utterances or unuttered interior monologues of any speaker;12 and, as Fludernik remarks, ‘in the realm of extremely experimental writing the traditional distinctions between genres have become erased’ (1996: 306). But, in so far as generic terms such as ‘lyric’ and ‘narrative’ are felt to retain any signiﬁcance, this conception of lyric is still widely accepted, and no other agreed theory has taken its place. The lyric is the ‘dramatized consciousness of a speaker’ who can be distinguished from the poet (Culler 1987: 195), and the reader’s initial task is to infer from the poem’s words that speaker’s ‘posture, situation, intention, concerns, and attitudes’ (Culler 1985: 38), or to make ‘some sort of tentative decision about who the speaker is, what his situation is, and who he seems to be addressing’ (Scholes 1969: 12)—to read it, in effect, as a dramatic monologue. We have already encountered this assumption of the priority of ‘voice’ or ‘speaker’ in discussions of medieval narrative; I have tried to show how distorting it can be, and have argued that a narrative need not be regarded as having a narrator. But with lyrics the assumption is less easily discarded, because, so long as the seemingly natural notion of writing as a representation of speech is retained, it may be hard to see what the poems we call lyrics are doing if they are not expressing someone’s inner life in a distinctive voice. English courtly lyrics that seemingly ask to be read as dramatic monologues, with a ‘speaker’ potentially distinguishable from the poet, can sometimes be found, especially towards the end of the medieval period. Here is an example, taken from the commonplace book of a Cheshire gentleman called Humfrey Newton (1466–1536), and probably composed rather than collected by him: 12 See, for extreme examples, Golston (1998), and McHale (1999) on Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets.

Lyrics Alas, a thousand sith alas, For won that is of ble so briht That alle my hert for ever sho has To have and hold as I her het. Alas, I may not with her speak That is so faire and fresch of face; Alas, how shuld my hert be liht? Alas, a thousand sithe alas! Bot fare wele my rihtwise joy and blis, Fare wele my worschipe and my wele, Fare wele my myrth withoutyn myse, Fare wele comfort of home and hele; Bot fare wele truest and most lelle, Fare wele as swet as ros on hill, Fare welle as oft as tong can tell: I take my leve ageyne my will. Now fare wele the tokens all bedene: Fare wele the hrynge god and true, Fare wele bocles, broch so fyne, Fare wele the rynge of silver newe, Fare wele the baw-bond and the arow therein, Fare wele the perle so shene, Fare wele the frends that were with me: In hast I will cum home agayn. Now fare well aples faire and swete, Fare wele pomegarnet that was red, Fare wele the poynt of yelo silk, Fare wele the lettul wordes that chastyn my mod, Fare wele the lawes and lettres covert, Fare wele the berrer tru to layn, Fare wele the reder, and herken most of alle, For in hast I wil cum home agayn. Now fare wele the Sondays that we se, Fare wele the Wennysdays that rull so fast, Fare wele the sterres appon the sky That nyht I slepe and tak goode rest; Fare wel the armes that were so fayre, Fare wel the hond in hond, I wene. To de for her sak me had [be] lever Than fro her ever that I wold twyne.

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But fare wele, quene that I love best, And violet that sho weres on. How that I fare, wele mot sho rest, And gif her grace me to thynk on. Fare wele the kirk that sho did in kneled, 45 Bot and the peler mad of ston; Ther oft on me has she smylid, Bot talis have fersed me out of ton. Bot now fare wele lokynge and lahynge bothe, And fare wele skynnynge on iche sid; 50 To go fro her then am I lothe, So that fals talis I may not abide. Fare wele, fare wele a thousand sithe! Be this same tru tokynynge I tellid you how longe I wolde abid: 55 Ye said, ‘Alas, how shall I do so longe?’ (Silverstein 1971: no. 143) (Alas, a thousand times alas, for one who is so radiant of complexion that she has my whole heart for ever, to have and to hold as I promised her. Alas, I may not speak with her who is so fair and fresh of face; alas, how should I be light of heart? Alas, a thousand times alas! And farewell my true joy and bliss, farewell my honour and my wealth, farewell my unfailing mirth, farewell comfort of home and health; and farewell, truest and most loyal, farewell as sweet as rose on hillside, farewell as often as tongue can tell: I take my leave against my will. Now farewell at once all the tokens: farewell the good and true praise[?], farewell buckles and brooch so ﬁne, farewell the ring of new silver, farewell circlet with bow and arrow in it, farewell the pearl so bright, farewell the friends who were with me: I will come home again in haste. Now farewell apples beautiful and sweet, farewell the pomegranate that was red, farewell the lace of yellow silk, farewell the little words that chasten my mood, farewell the rules and secret letters, farewell the bearer who concealed them truly, farewell the reader, and harken most of all, for I will come home again in haste. Now farewell the Sundays that we saw, farewell the Wednesdays that passed so quickly, farewell the stars in the sky the night I sleep and take good rest;13 farewell the arms that were so beautiful, farewell the holding of hands. I would rather have died for her sake than ever part from her. And farewell, queen whom I love best, and the violet she wears. However I get on, may she rest well, and be granted the grace to think of me. Farewell the church in which she knelt, and also the

13 I am not sure how to interpret the apparent contradiction between the present tense of slepe and tak and the past implied by the distal That except as part of the poem’s imaginative confusion.

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pillar made of stone; there she has often smiled at me, but slanders have driven me out of town. And now farewell both looking and laughing, and farewell secretly glancing each way; I am reluctant to go from her, in order to avoid false gossip. Farewell, farewell a thousand times!—by this same true token: I told you how long I would stay [away]: you said, ‘Alas, how shall I manage for so long?’)

This is yet another lament by a lover at being separated from his lady to avoid talis, slanderous gossip (48, 52)—a theme that goes back to the troubadours—but, unlike the examples above, it is one in which speciﬁc detail, some of only private signiﬁcance, is used to evoke a recollected experience that claims to be real. He promises to return soon ‘in hast’ (24, 32), but, presumably to avoid the tale-bearers, the farewell cannot be spoken face to face (5), and the poem takes the place of speech, incessantly repeating the word ‘farewell’ (including the ingenious ‘fare, well’ of line 43); so this ‘monologue’ in fact acknowledges its own textuality. It refers to the lady as ‘she’, but also in the ﬁnal stanza as ‘you’, as though she were going to read it, or as though she were vividly present to the writer’s imagination and he imagined himself speaking instead of writing to her. The ﬁrst two stanzas, about the lover’s grief and the lady’s value, include much formulaic phraseology, usually alliterative: ‘of ble so briht’ (2), ‘To have and hold’ (4), ‘faire and fresch’ (6), ‘my worschipe and my wele’ (10), ‘myrth withoutyn myse’ (11), ‘home and hele’ (12). After this the poem becomes a catalogue of much more speciﬁc objects and activities, charged with emotion through their association with the lady and their relationship. From some of them we seem invited to reconstruct further ‘real-life’ experience: jewels, and also the friends of line 23, in the third stanza; a miscellaneous collection, including secret letters, their bearer and their reader (perhaps the conﬁdante who read them to the lady) in the fourth; things associated with their physical relationship in the ﬁfth stanza (presumably they saw each other in church on Sundays, hence lines 33 and 45–7). The sixth stanza takes the farewell back to the lady herself, with memories and hopes; and the seventh recalls laughter and secret glances, and leads up to the lady’s very words, the most speciﬁc and private token of their intimacy. The ‘monologue’ ends, then, with actual speech, but, it is important to note, speech that occurred in the past (‘Ye said . . .’) and is now quoted in writing.

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The idea of ‘tokens’ (18, 54) is important: in life, jewels given as presents are tokens of love; in the poem, speciﬁcity is a token of documentary truth. And metrical roughness further seems to betoken the ‘biographical’ truth of the experience recorded, telling us that this is the expression of true sentement. The poem is about a secret relationship, and even the act of taking leave must be secret; yet poems exist to be read as public structures of words. Perhaps this one was really a unique record of actuality, set down to be read only by Humfrey Newton himself, or maybe by his lady too, as one of those ‘lettres covert’ (29) to which it refers. That we shall never know; and for readers now the poem can only be a ﬁction of the biographical, skilful in its very clumsiness, with all its speciﬁcities examples not of a reality to which we have no access, but of a literary effet de r´eel. And the inner life evoked is that of the writer as writer, as much as of the ‘I’ of what is written. Here is another poem from Humfrey Newton’s commonplace book, one related in many ways to the previous example, but in which textuality is more central as a theme: Go, litull bill, and command me hertely Unto her that I call my trulof and lady, Be this same tru tokynnynge: That sho se me in a kirk on a Friday in a mornyng With a sperhauk on my hand, And my mone did by her stond; And an old womon sete her by, That litull cold of curtesy; And oft on her sho did smile To loke on me for a wile; And yet be this another token: To the kirk she comme with a gentilwomon; Even behynd the kirk dore They kneled bothe on the ﬂore And fast thay did piter-pater— I hope thay said matens togeder! Yet ones or twyes at the lest Sho did on me her ee kest; Then went I forthe prevely And haylsed on thaym curtesly. Be alle the tokens, truly, Comand me to her hertely. (Duncan 2000: no. 15)

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(Go, little letter, and commend me heartily to her that I call my true-love and my lady, by this same true sign: that she saw me in a church on a Friday one morning, with a sparrow-hawk on my hand, and my servant stood by her, and an old woman sat beside her who knew little of courtliness; and she often smiled at her in order to glance at me for a moment. And let this be a second sign: she came to the church with a gentlewoman; right behind the church-door they were both kneeling on the ﬂoor, and whispering fast (I suppose they were saying matins together!). Yet once or twice at least she cast her eye on me; then I went forward discreetly and courteously greeted them. By all these signs, truly, commend me to her heartily.)

This takes as its ‘you’ not a lady but a letter to be sent to her, yet it evidently also is that letter; and it diverges from the formal manner of the ﬁfteenth-century document of greeting or plea for redress, to become a love-letter for use in a highly speciﬁc situation. (I shall come back to the conventions of epistolarity in Chapter 7.) This lyric, like the previous one, could well have been composed by Humfrey Newton to be sent to an actual lady, but, as read ﬁve centuries later, has become a kind of dramatic monologue—or rather the written record of a dramatic monologue, the record in writing of a speaker’s ‘posture, situation, intention, concerns, and attitudes’. ‘Tokens’ (3, 11, 21) are now even more explicitly the theme: exact recollections of what happened on a particular occasion become signs conﬁrming that the writer was really present and was the object of the lady’s glances in church: this is how she will know that the voiceless writing she receives has behind it the man who aroused her interest. Thus the poem depends for its effect on a double relation between writing and presence: this is only writing, which is intrinsically anonymous in its separation from its originator, yet its content will make it unmistakably clear that it was written by a speciﬁc person. What difference is made, we cannot help wondering, when the poem stands in a commonplace book, to be read not by the speciﬁc lady to whom it purports to have been addressed, but by anyone who happens to look at it? The details also conﬁrm that the writer was attending closely (to the lady rather than the church service) and must be designed to evoke a sense of shared intimacy. Hence the location is evoked as in lines 45–7 of ‘Alas, a thousand sith alas’—and medieval churches were undoubtedly places where provocative glances, assignations, and pickups occurred (remember where Troilus ﬁrst sees Criseyde!)—and also the time (Friday morning); the sparrowhawk, appropriate to a young

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gentleman, though not perhaps in church; the old woman sitting nearby yet outside the realm of curtesy; the gentlewoman who accompanied the lady and their rapid whispers while kneeling behind the church door (with the little joke about how he supposes they were saying matins); and the way he politely greeted the two ladies as he quietly left the church by the same door. As with the stanzas of ‘Alas, a thousand sith alas’, the metrical unevenness of the couplets adds to the poem’s charm by heightening the sense that it is not a literary exercise, and that the many details are there for a human rather than a poetic purpose. Again the inner life evoked as the medium for the trivial outward incidents recalled seems to me to be that speciﬁcally of the writer, eagerly recollecting the details, setting them down randomly as they come back to him, and perhaps calculating with enjoyment the giggles or sighs that the letter will evoke in the lady when she receives it—the ‘I’ as writer, rather than the ‘I’ to whom the events recorded originally occurred. At its most extreme, the way of reading lyrics that treats them as ‘dramatization of consciousness attempting to engage the world’ (Culler 1987: 194) enters willingly into the illusion of the presence of a speaker whose words express that consciousness. One consequence is that the medium by which the poem is normally received is occluded—the fact that it consists of written words forming a certain pattern, and that those words come in some speciﬁc material form: black and red ink on vellum or hand-made paper, black printer’s ink on machine-made paper, patterns of pixels on a glowing monitor. This point can best be illustrated with a nineteenth-century example, which I hope will not seem too tangential to my purpose. It is a famous fragment by John Keats, once thought to have been addressed to Fanny Brawne: This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d. See here it is— I hold it towards you. (Allott 1975: 700–1)

Here the ﬁction of presence, claimed by the insistent deictics ‘now’, ‘here’, ‘I’, ‘you’, is at its height, and is perhaps supported by the (apparent) fragmentariness of the text. Yet what it produces in the

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reader of a printed volume of poems by Keats is surely not an illusion of presence, but the very opposite: an intense awareness that we are not in the presence of a speaker or a ‘living hand’ but only of words. The ‘now’ and ‘here’ can only be instances of textual deixis, referring to the moment of reading and the place in the text, and the ‘I’ and ‘you’ are mere phantoms, haunting perhaps, but not made of ﬂesh and blood. And, I would add, even supposing that the lines were indeed addressed to Fanny Brawne and were read by her in the poet’s handwriting after his death, that must still have been the effect, not accidental but carefully calculated: ‘see here it is’ must always have meant ‘see here it is not’, and the blank space after ‘I hold it towards you’, where the verse-line is left unﬁnished, must always have been more chilling than the illusion of silence after the illusion of a speaking voice. We shall ﬁnd similar, if less melodramatic, manipulations of absence in late-medieval epistolary lyrics but, before leaving this topic, let me mention a comparable effect in another ﬁrst-person poem, not a lyric, from the late Middle Ages. This is The Kingis Quair, attributed to King James I of Scotland. It is a dream-poem, but one of a different kind from Pearl, in that the ‘I’ of the Quair (the word means ‘book’) explicitly recounts how he came to write it. Lying in bed unable to sleep, he turns to a book, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, but far from acting as a remedy for insomnia it interests him so much that he reads till his eyes are sore, meditating on the part Fortune has played in his own life as well as that of Boethius. The matins bell rings, and he fantasizes that it is urging him to tell the story of his own life: ‘tell on, man, quhat thee befell’. Under its inﬂuence he determines to write ‘Sum new[e] thing’ (Norton-Smith 1971, lines 77, 89), makes a cross with his pen, and begins. The cross he makes is represented in the only manuscript not by the word cros but by a cross; and, though the manuscript cannot be an autograph, the device seems designed to create the effect of living evidence of a new beginning.14 Yet the real effect is surely as much of absence as of presence: even if we were reading a manuscript in James I’s own hand (something that perhaps never existed, since a king, even if a prisoner as James may have been when this poem was written, would be likely to dictate his words

14 For perceptive discussion of this and other aspects of the ‘personal’ manuscripts produced in the century before the introduction of printing, see Burrow (1986: esp. 241).

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to a secretary), the text and the cross would be perceived as signs from which life had escaped, markers of absence.

Chaucer’s Complaint Unto Pity This is no less true, I believe, of the ‘tokens’ mentioned in the two poems from Humfrey Newton’s commonplace book: their poignancy comes from the fact that they are not tangible things but memories, and is redoubled by our awareness that the memories survive only as written words. It is still truer of epistolary lyrics, poems whose form cannot but emphasize their textuality. But before focusing on epistolary writings in my next chapter, I want to examine one more non-epistolary lyric, the success of which can be appreciated only if we resist interpreting it as words spoken in a voice expressing a consciousness. This is Chaucer’s Complaint Unto Pity, a poem that has attracted little attention—The Riverside Chaucer remarks that ‘most critics have simply ignored it’ (L. Benson 1987: 1077)—and that has generally been seen as an unsophisticated, convention-bound exercise, which must therefore date from early in Chaucer’s career.15 Consisting of seventeen rhyme-royal stanzas, it falls into two parts: the ﬁrst eight stanzas form a homodiegetic allegorical narrative in which the poem’s ‘I’ tells how he intended to present a compleynt (43, 54) to Pity but was unable to do so because she had died, while the remaining nine consist of the petition’s text. At ﬁrst glance, no difﬁculty might be seen in interpreting the poem as a dramatic monologue expressing the consciousness of an unhappy lover, ﬁrst in speech and then in writing, perhaps intended for use in the courtly game of love as a witty plea for the favour of an actual lady (Stevens 1963: pt. 2); but on closer inspection there is much in it to complicate that pattern. The Complaint Unto Pity will sustain fuller analysis than the later lyrics already discussed, because it is far more close-packed in meaning. It is able to be so because it draws on an expected understanding of a complex structure of conventions, derived not only from the general courtly tradition that goes back to the troubadours but also from a more speciﬁc tradition of love-allegory that goes back to the Romance of the Rose. The basic situation, of a male lover tormented by desire, and

15

A notable recent exception is the powerful discussion in Simpson (2002: 128–31).

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lacking what, within the courtly tradition, is the only remedy, is stated from the very beginning: Pit´e, that I have sought so yore agoo With herte soore and ful of besy peyne, That in this world was never wight so woo Withoute deth—and yf I shal not feyne, My purpos was to Pit´e to compleyne Upon the crueltee and tirannye Of Love, that for my trouthe doth me dye.

(1–7)

How are we to interpret the ‘I’ who appears in this opening stanza and throughout the poem—one in which ﬁrst-person pronouns I , me, my(n) occur sixty-nine times in 119 lines? In 1959 the earliest of the few articles devoted solely to the Complaint referred to its ‘I’ as ‘Chaucer’ or ‘the poet’ (Pittock 1959), but in 1987 Stephens questioned this approach, arguing in favour of ‘a distinction between Chaucer and the unnamed persona of the poem’. This was in a study that begins by explicitly proposing the belated application to Chaucer’s lyrics of the narrator theory whose dominance in interpretation of Chaucer’s narratives we have examined in earlier chapters: ‘For a long time now Chaucer criticism has been making the assumption that in the narrative works some degree of separation has to be recognized between the poet himself and the ﬁrst-person narrator who tells the story’ (Stephens 1986–8: 361, 360). This assumption, Stephens urges, needs to be extended to many of Chaucer’s lyrics, including the Complaint Unto Pity; consequently, he refers to this poem’s ﬁrst person as ‘the persona’ or ‘the speaker’. The arguments against this way of reading will by now be familiar, but, at the risk of repetition, it may be helpful to rehearse them here in relation to a single short poem. First, then, this approach derives from the fundamental postulate that writing is a representation of speech and that a single speaker (whether ‘the poet’ or a ‘persona’) will be identiﬁable for any unit of writing. This proposition, discussed in general terms in Chapter 1, seems especially questionable here, in the case of a poem where the second half is presented as a document, a bille (49, 55) beginning in a written style so formal that it refers to the petitioner in the third person: Humblest of herte, highest of reverence, Benygne ﬂour, coroune of vertues alle,

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(57–63)16

The interpolated ﬁrst-person construction in ‘yf I durste me so calle’ serves to remind us of the difference between speech and writing; there are then no ﬁrst-person constructions in the following thirty lines. Stephens nevertheless refers to the ‘speaker of the complaint proper’ (370; my italics), and treats the lyric as a whole as having a single ‘speaker’, evidently constructed as a consistent representation of a ﬁctional human being. Second, Stephens’s approach is based on a distinction between ‘poet’ and ‘speaker’ (or ‘persona’), the plausibility of which depends on their being taken as alternatives on the same ontological plane—two persons, one real, the other ﬁctional—a false distinction, because ‘the poet himself’, the ﬂesh-and-blood human being whose ‘living hand’ composed the text of the poem, is not and cannot be part of that text in the same way as a verbally constructed persona. Third, this poet/persona distinction gives rise to questions regarding agency or responsibility, of which Stephens, like most proponents of speaker or narrator interpretations, seems to be unaware. Which parts of the poem are to be attributed to the poet, and which to the speaker he has invented? Though Stephens does not discuss this, the persistence with which he uses the terms ‘speaker’ or ‘persona’ in relation to the entire lyric, including the compleynt, indicates that for him it is all to be read as a product of its ﬁctional speaker’s consciousness. The question is especially important in relation to lyric, because, as Culler puts it, This model makes it difﬁcult to deal pertinently and convincingly with aspects of poems that cannot easily be explained by reference to a consciousness: sound patterns, typographic arrangements, intertextual relations. Intertextual echoes, for instance, must be translated into attitudes. We are enjoined by this model to attend to sound patterning [only] when it can be seen as elucidating the attitude 16 Fisher (1985) suggests that it was through training in the ars dictaminis, which taught the rules of composing such ofﬁcial documents, that Chaucer learned to address readers rather than listeners, but he does not mention this bille or other dictaminal ﬁctions in Chaucer’s work as supporting evidence.

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of the speaker . . . It is as though in operatic arias one were supposed to attend only to that which contributed to understanding of a character. (1987: 197)

It has often been noted (e.g. Norton-Smith 1974: 22–3) that the last line of the Complaint Unto Pity, ‘With herte sore and ful of besy peyne,’ repeats its second. Since both lines relate to the ‘I’, this repetition could reasonably be understood as serving a dramatic as well as an aesthetic purpose. In V. J. Scattergood’s words, the ending ‘fashions an elegant completeness for the lyric, but it also ﬁgures the trapped mind of the speaker, enclosed in its own powerlessness’ (1995: 469). But another aspect of the poem’s elegance of pattern does not lend itself to explanation in terms of a speaker’s consciousness, and probably for that reason does not appear to have been noticed by critics. This is its organization about a centre. Alastair Fowler has called attention to the importance of the central position in Renaissance pageantry, architecture, and literature, and to the frequency with which that position is marked as the ‘sovereign mid point’ by some manifestation of royalty (1970: 21–5). He mentions Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite and Troilus and Criseyde as medieval cases of signiﬁcant symmetry and centrality (1970: 97); and, following him, I have argued elsewhere that manifestations or signiﬁcant displacements of sovereignty can be found at the centres of other medieval poems, including The Awntyrs off Arthure and Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls.17 The Complaint Unto Pity has a similar organization, of a very straightforward kind. It consists of seventeen stanzas, and the central stanza (lines 57–63), the ninth of the poem and the ﬁrst of the compleynt, was quoted above. Pity, the virtue to which the poem is dedicated, is enthroned at its centre in this formal address, and is described in the central stanza as the sovereign of the virtues, ‘coroune of vertues alle’, and addressed as ‘youre rial excellence’. The salutation of a petition or other dictaminal document is ‘a highly protocol-governed greeting that makes explicit the social rank of sender and recipient’ (Camargo 1996: 8) (here ‘servaunt’ and ‘rial excellence’, but in the opposite order, reﬂecting the requirement that the recipient’s name should precede the sender’s18 ), but there was no requirement that 17 Spearing (1982) (Awntyrs off Arthure, Henryson’s Morall Fabillis, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight); Spearing (1985: 126–9) (Awntyrs off Arthure); Spearing (1987) (Parliament of Fowls). 18 Pseudo-Alberich, Rationes Dictandi, as summarized by McKinnell (1979: 79).

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Pity should be given royal rank, and the stanza saluting her as royal certainly did not need to be placed at the poem’s centre. This patterning was Chaucer’s deliberate choice, and it gives a structural emphasis to the poem’s celebration of Pity that is independent of the consciousness of a supposed ‘speaker’; it is not an auditory but a written and spatial pattern, characterizing not a voice but a verbal object. For readers it is also a temporal pattern, and so, somewhat as in The Awntyrs off Arthure, a turn on the central stanza makes possible a reversal of what we have been led to expect. In the Awntyrs a warning in the poem’s ﬁrst half of the approaching downfall of the Round Table through covetousness is transformed, via a midpoint where Arthur is enthroned, into a second episode illustrating not the expected fall but a moment of triumph achieved by his noble generosity. In the Complaint Unto Pity, on its smaller scale, the announcement of the death of Pity and the uselessness of petitioning her is succeeded, via a midpoint where Pity reigns in ‘rial excellence’, by the text of the intended petition. A fourth argument against a speaker reading is that the poet/speaker distinction functions, in a way that seems unavoidable with such readings, as the path to an ironic interpretation. Some kind of inadequacy is found in the views or attitudes explicitly expressed in the poem and attributed to the ‘speaker’, while more satisfactory views or attitudes are ascribed to the poet. Absent from the text, these invariably coincide with those of the critic. Thus Stephens warns that in the Complaint we should be aware of ‘the presence of the poet behind the poem manipulating the speaker’s self-deception’ (364–5). My reason for rejecting this approach needs fuller exposition, because it relates especially to the poem’s debt to the tradition of love-allegory. ‘Pity’ is a personiﬁed abstraction, and the ﬁrst part of the poem tells an allegorical story. The lover has intended to present a petition to Pity, a compleynt ‘Upon the crueltee and tirannye | Of Love, that for my trouthe doth me dye’ (6–7). But he ﬁnds that Pity is dead, swoons in horror, and then hastens to view her corpse. He goes on to explain that, even though her death was not sudden, no one is aware of it but himself. He ﬁnds many allegorical mourners, personiﬁcations of the qualities thought appropriate to ladies—here ‘construed as household retainers’ (Scattergood 1995: 469)—gathered about Pity’s hearse, but sees that they are ‘Confedred alle by bond of Cruelt´e’ (52) to kill him, and so suppresses his compleynt —for, after all, ‘Withoute Pitee ther may no bille availe’ (49). The second half of the

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poem nevertheless tells us what was in the petition: a warning to Pity of the conspiracy by which Cruelty is planning to usurp her sovereignty, a plea to her to overcome it so as to relieve the petitioner’s suffering and fear of death, and a ﬁnal vow to remain in her service whatever the outcome. In Stephens’s reading, the allegory and its interpretation become the responsibility not of Chaucer, as the poem’s writer, but of the supposed persona as its ‘speaker’. Thus, as he puts it (362), ‘the speaker assumes that Pity is the essence of his Lady, not just one of her aspects . . . The question then arises as to whether this conﬂation of the two is a confusion made by the speaker or a deliberate metonymy, a rhetorical ploy of which the speaker is aware.’ The conﬂation, he claims (365), is ‘a false generalization made possible by the allegorical mode which has abstracted an aspect of the Lady as the concept Pity, and the critical problem lies in interpreting the signiﬁcance of the falseness’. And the ‘speaker’ is to blame for claiming that the consequence of Pity’s death is felt by all— What maner man dar now hold up his hed? To whom shal any sorweful herte calle? Now Cruelt´e hath cast to slee us alle (24–6)

—but also that it is peculiar to himself: But yet encreseth me this wonder newe, That no wight woot that she is ded, but I— So many men as in her tyme hire knewe. (29–31)

This reveals his ‘logical and emotional inconsistency’. His ‘attempt to argue for compassion is clearly ﬂawed’ (366), and ‘the speaker’s desire for a simple response to his need is emotionally inadequate’ (369). And so, Stephens concludes, by creating an identiﬁable narrator-ﬁgure Chaucer has been able to transform very conventional materials into a psychological and emotional situation rather more complex than the conventions might normally be expected to yield up. By revealing that the speaker’s interpretation of the Lady’s behavior as the conventional ‘cruelty’ is na¨ıve, the poet demonstrates an awareness of the limitations imposed by convention even as he ﬁnds a way to extend the convention. (369)

As with the narrator readings of Troilus and Criseyde and the Man of Law’s Tale, this speaker reading of the Complaint Unto Pity comes at a

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high price; in order to demonstrate the inadequacy of the ‘speaker’ and the superiority of the poet, it diminishes the poem. In effect, Stephens accepts C. S. Lewis’s criticism of the Complaint (1938: 167) as an instance of ‘the use of personiﬁcation at its lowest level—the most faint and frigid result of the popularity of allegory’, but deﬂects blame for this inadequacy from Chaucer to the poem’s ‘speaker’. Stephens sees the allegorical narrative as a matter of ‘convention’ imposing limits of which the ‘speaker’ is unaware, while Chaucer manipulates them and him to achieve greater complexity. To me it seems, on the contrary, that for Chaucer the conventions of love-allegory did not necessarily limit complexity or awareness, and that in this poem he uses them with ﬂexibility and conscious wit. The Complaint Unto Pity, though preoccupied with stasis and death, is above all a witty poem. Pity is an ethical concept of central importance in Chaucer’s work, but that does not mean that his attitude towards it must be the same in every poem. In Troilus and Criseyde, for example, he shows the received idea that pity is the supreme womanly virtue being used as a lever by men against a woman. Elsewhere he deﬁnes pity more spaciously as the human ability to enter empathetically into the sufferings of others—‘Feelynge his similitude in peynes smerte’ (Squire’s Tale . 480)—and as the crucial manifestation of gentilesse. In the Complaint pity remains a personiﬁed abstraction and the paradoxes involved in attributing agency and personhood to abstract nouns are fully appreciated and wittily exploited, much as they are in the Romance of the Rose (the workings of which Chaucer must have come to understand extremely well when he translated at least some of it into English19 ). The Complaint ﬂirts, 19 In the Roman, e.g., the lady’s welcoming attitude is personiﬁed as Bel Acueil (Fair Welcome), who has to be male because acueil is masculine in gender. Inﬂuenced by Venus, the lady is persuaded to grant the lover a kiss. On the level of the allegory, this means that Bel Acueil has to grant the kiss, and at this Male Bouche (Evil Tongue, personifying the tale-bearers who are the lovers’ enemies in troubadour lyrics) accuses the lover of being engaged in ‘un mauv´es acointement’ (Lecoy, line 3507) with Bel Acueil, that is, a homosexual relationship. This may hint at the homosocial basis of ‘love’, but does not primarily imply criticism of the lover or of the poem’s ‘speaker’; it is a joke about allegory itself. Another example of a joke about the allegorical medium, underlined by wordplay, can be found in a later courtly allegory, Machaut’s Remede de Fortune. ‘I’ reaches the place where his Lady dwells, feels frightened, and is comforted by Hope. Hope then tells him, ‘A Dieu; je m’en departirai, | Sans ce que de toy me departe; | Car il couvient que je me parte | En plus de. c. mille parties | Qui aus amans sont departies’ (Wimsatt and Kibler, lines 3172–6; my italics) (‘Farewell; I shall depart, but without

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but only ﬂirts, with the serious moral issues raised by pity elsewhere in Chaucer’s work. Nothing in it encourages us to imagine the lady’s subjectivity as if she were Criseyde or to criticize the lover for failing to do so: it is the twentieth-century critic, not the poet, who sees confusion and na¨ıvet´e in the assumptions that ‘Pity is the essence of his lady’ and that her lack of pity is cruelty. In a sense the lover is the ‘I’ of the poem, but to describe him as its speaker is to distort its effect, because the poem’s textual artistry at every level, from the elegance of its organization about a ‘sovereign mid point’ to the ingenuity of its development of the paradoxes of personiﬁcationallegory, belongs to Chaucer and is not intended primarily to characterize the poem’s ‘I’. Tense-slippage means that that ‘I’ has no ﬁxed position in time: ‘I have sought’ Pity ‘so yore agoo’ (1); on account of my ﬁdelity, Love ‘doth me dye’ (7); ‘I fond hir ded’ (14); ‘Thus am I slayn’ (22); ‘A compleynt had I’ (43), ‘Th’effect of which seith thus’ (56); ‘Then leve I al these vertues’ (50).20 Nor is the ‘I’ ﬁxed in relation to any ‘you’, as would be necessary if the poem could properly be read as communicative speech. This is not only a matter of the abrupt shift from narrative to a written petition made useless by the events recorded in the narrative; within the petition, supposedly written before ‘I’ knew of Pity’s death, Pity is addressed as dead (117–19)!21 The Complaint Unto Pity has a fundamental instability of deixis which discourages the attempt to interpret it as a persona’s monologue. To avoid awkwardness, I refer to the ‘I’ as ‘the lover’, but this poem is not ‘The Unhappy Lover’s Tale’ any more than Pearl is ‘The Jeweller’s Tale’. Chaucer’s ideal audience must have shared his familiarity with the technique of the Romance of the Rose and its successors in French and English, and that familiarity was what made possible the compression and agility of his manipulation of love-allegory in the Complaint Unto Pity. To unpack the detailed workings of the allegorical narrative is parting from you; for I must partition myself into more than a hundred thousand parts to be parted among lovers’). Hope, the speaking personiﬁcation, takes his leave, but hope, the human faculty he personiﬁes, remains with the ‘I’ and with all other lovers. 20 Simpson (2002: 129) notes that ‘the second stanza deliberately confuses the tenses’, but the confusion extends more widely. 21 Norton-Smith (1974: 22), followed by Charles J. Nolan (1978–9: 369), tries to remove this inconsistency by proposing that ‘The ‘‘bille’’ proper ends at line 116’, but there is nothing in the poem’s text to indicate this to a reader.

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inevitably to make its deftness seem clumsy, but I must make a limited attempt to do so. In the allegory, the lady’s pity becomes a great lady called Pity, and the lover’s love for her (‘love’ in the sense of exigent male desire, as always in this tradition) becomes Love, the demanding lord of a myth that goes back at least to Ovid. The lover proposes to deliver a petition to Pity, ‘to compleyne | Upon the crueltee and tyrannye | Of Love’, but before he can ‘prayen hir on Cruelt´e me awreke’ (11), ‘I fond hir ded, and buried in an herte’ (14). Already, then, Love’s cruelty has become Cruelty; far from having the rigidity often attributed to it, the allegory of love is inﬁnitely ﬂexible—as ﬂexible as language itself in its capacity to turn abstract nouns into the subjects and objects of verbs (cf. Quilligan 1979). And line 14, as Pittock remarks (1959: 164), ‘causes a surprise analogous to that received from the conceits of later poetry’: the unambiguous snap of its rhythm in closing a stanza underlines the ingenuity of what it implies, that if pity is dead, the lady’s heart must be its grave. Now, though, the lover sees Pity’s corpse on its hearse and prepares to pray for her soul; if pity can live and then die as a personiﬁcation, Pity must have a body that can become a corpse, but there must also be the possibility that she will live an eternal life. If pity is dead, there is no hope for any ‘sorwful herte’ (25), and the lover’s ﬁrst person singular merges temporarily into a ﬁrst person plural: ‘Now Cruelt´e hath cast to slee us alle’ (26)—all unhappy lovers, all sorrowful hearts, all (male) human beings? Yet the thought that now occurs to him is ‘That no wight woot that she is ded, but I—| So many men as her tyme hir knewe’ (30–1). Here Chaucer plays with special sprightliness on the duality of Pity as abstract noun and as personiﬁcation. Many men knew the lady’s pity when she was alive (were aware of it, or perhaps even experienced it), but on the level of the allegory this allusion to her generosity becomes a more explicit and indecorous jab at her promiscuity: many men ‘knew’ Lady Pity, perhaps in the most bodily sense, in her time. What, after all, does a lady’s ‘pity’ mean in the language of courtly poetry? The very range of possibilities, from gracious receptiveness to sexual availability, is precisely what makes it so suitable for allegorization, superimposing a body on an idea. Lady Pity (the lady’s pity) is dead to the lover, and has always been so—‘she was ded er that I koude hir fynde’ (35)—but pity cannot die until all ladies cease to feel it.

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Analysis of the poem’s narrative could be extended much further, but before the reader’s patience is exhausted I need to say something about the petition. Charles J. Nolan has demonstrated that it follows the pattern of a ‘legal bill’, a written request to a superior authority such as the king to intervene in some dispute so as to redress the applicant’s alleged grievance, and that it conforms to the ‘tripartite division’ of such documents, ‘consisting of an address, a statement of grievance, and a prayer for remedy’ (1978–9: 364). The address, in the poem’s central stanza, is directed, as we have seen, to Pity as ‘rial excellence’ (59), a queen or princess. She is referred to later as ‘Herenus quene’ (92), queen of the Erinyes or Furies, perhaps because she has become indistinguishable from Cruelty, her opposite (Simpson 2002: 128). The grievance is that Cruelty, disguised as ‘womanly Beaut´e’ (66), has conspired with ‘Bount´e, Gentilesse, and Curtesye’ (68) to deprive Pity of her proper role, which would be ‘To helpe Trouthe in his adversyt´e’ (74). The bill warns of a twofold consequence if the grievance is not redressed: Pity’s retainers will be slain and she herself will lose her renoun (63, 86, 88). As the repetition of renoun indicates, this is of special importance. Renoun means ‘name’: Pity will lose her reputation—a crucial consideration to any medieval lady, and to any ruler—but will also lose her name in the sense that she will no longer be recognizable as the abstract noun she personiﬁes. Here Chaucer is once more playing on the basic paradox of personiﬁcation-allegory, ﬁrst developed in the Romance of the Rose, that its abstractions are at the same time persons. In the Romance, to take a single instance, the lady is symbolized as a rose, and Dangier, one of her attributes or moods, meaning ‘haughtiness’ or ‘standofﬁshness’, is personiﬁed as a churl armed with a club. He initially resists the lover’s attempt to approach her, but is temporarily persuaded to cease resistance while Bel Acueil (Fair Welcome) permits the lover to steal a kiss. Dangier begins to fall asleep; but then Honte (Shame) angrily rouses him, pointing out that he ought to be the very opposite of Bel Acueil: Il n’aﬁert pas a vostre non que vos faciez se anui non: soit Bel Acueil et franc et douz, et vos soiez fel et estouz et plains de rampone et d’outrage. (Lecoy, lines 3677–81; my italics)

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(It is not ﬁtting to your name to cause anything but distress: let Bel Acueil be open and gentle, and you be cruel and violent, and full of insolence and offensiveness.)

In the Middle English translation a line is added, emphasizing the importance of ‘name’ in its double sense: Shame tells ‘Be like thi name, which is Daunger’ (4040), meaning both ‘live up to your reputation’ and ‘correspond to the abstract noun (non) after which you are named’. (And indeed this addition draws out a further layer of meaning, because in telling Daunger to live up to his reputation, Shame is not merely the lady’s shame; now it is Daunger whose shame he is attempting to incite.22 ) The third division of the bill, the prayer for remedy, does not venture to be speciﬁc; it simply begs Pity, ‘For Goddis love have mercy on my peyne’ (98), but vows lifelong ﬁdelity whatever her response. The lack of speciﬁcity in this section follows the pattern of the legal bills studied by Nolan, but according to a different logic. In the bills, the plaintiffs defer to the wisdom and power of their superiors to determine a remedy, but in the Complaint it is indicated that speciﬁcity would be pointless, and for two reasons. One is that the lover’s peyne, a word repeated again and again (98, 99, 106, 116, 119), is so universal that no speciﬁc remedy can be imagined: ‘every woo that herte may bethynke | I suffre’ (107–8). And indeed the stanza conveying the scope of his peyne has a remarkably sombre generality: My peyne is this, that what so I desire That have I not, ne nothyng lyk therto; And ever setteth Desir myn hert on ﬁre. Eke on that other syde where so I goo, What maner thing that may encrese my woo, That have I redy, unsoght, everywhere. (99–104)

The suffering deﬁned here is that identiﬁed by Lady Philosophy in Boethius’s Consolation as the condition not of lovers or of a speciﬁc lover but of Boethius himself, Boethius as the representative of humanity in general, which is ‘alwey in angwyse of somwhat’:

22 This incident comes from a part of the Middle English Romaunt not thought to be by Chaucer himself; but if he did not write it, he must certainly have read it.

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‘And was nat that,’ quod sche, ‘for that the lakkide somwhat that thow noldest nat han lakkid, or elles thou haddest that thow noldest nat han had?’ ‘Ryght so is it,’ quod I. (Boece III pr. 3. 1–2, 30–7)

Chaucer sees the lover’s longing for the unattainable as a special case of the universal human condition; in the Complaint Unto Pity elegant artiﬁce momentarily opens a window on to darkness. It is the generality of the statement itself that carries weight, not any attribution to the consciousness of a ‘speaker’ in a speciﬁc situation. The second reason for the lack of speciﬁcity in the appeal for remedy is that the lover already knows that Pity cares nothing for his fate. How can she when she is dead? The ﬁnal ‘inconsistency’ by which he mentions her death in a petition written before he knew of it is in fact part of the wit arising from Chaucer’s grasp of the internal contradictions of personiﬁcation-allegory. ‘Pity’ is both the lady’s pity and Lady Pity; if on one level the lady has so little pity that she does not care ‘whether I ﬂete or synke’ (110), on another that must mean that Pity is dead. To insist on reading the poem as the expression of an individual consciousness is to fail to grasp not only its glimpse of existential emptiness but also the deftness with which it dissects the conventions of its own allegorical form. It does so in a manner that depends on the coexistence of two incompatible discourses, the written imitation of speech addressed to an audience in the ﬁrst eight stanzas and the acknowledged writing addressed to a personiﬁed abstraction in the last nine. I would suggest, ﬁnally, that a way of reimagining the Complaint Unto Pity that might help us to escape from the stiﬂing conception of the lyric as dramatic monologue would be to see it as partly analogous to experimental lyrics of our own time whose very form renders them unspeakable. An example I have in mind is a poem by Brad Leithauser written in two columns and therefore offering more than one possible sequence of words; the reader is left to decide how meaning can be constructed from them, and the poem’s multiple possibilities of meaning are retained only in its textual form. (The same would be true of various other postmodern texts, including Derrida’s Glas.) Of Leithauser’s poem Marjorie Perloff writes that ‘the verbal play generated by the two-column structure undercuts the controlling voice’. In the Complaint Unto Pity the possibility of a controlling voice is cancelled out by somewhat similar means—the juxtaposition of the ﬁctionally spoken

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and the actually written—and any attempt to recuperate the whole text as speech is doomed to failure. In the same context Perloff observes that ‘to build one’s discourse on citation is to regard language less as a means of representation than as the very object of representation’ (1990: 12). I hope to have shown that language is also the object of representation in this highly sophisticated poem by Chaucer, and that this cannot be grasped by readings that insist on construing it as speech expressing the consciousness of a persona.

7 Epistolary Poems In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, as Giles Constable puts it (1976: 13), The letter was . . . regarded as half of a conversation or dialogue between the sender and the addressee, and it involved a quasi-presence and quasi-speech between the two. According to Ambrose, ‘The epistolary genre (genus) was devised in order that someone may speak to us when we are absent’; and the medieval masters of letter-writing similarly deﬁned a letter as ‘sermo absentium quasi inter presentes’ [speech of those absent as if between those present] and ‘acsi ore ad os et presens’ [as if mouth to mouth and present].1

The paradox involved in this conception of the letter as writing substituted for speech is sharpened in what was perhaps the most frequently repeated medieval statement about letters, that of John of Salisbury in the twelfth century, which lacks the ‘as if’ of the instructional manuals: letters ‘speak voicelessly the utterances of the absent’ (Littere . . . absentium dicta sine voce loquuntur) (Clanchy 1997: 385, translating Webb 1929: 32).2 John was referring to the formal letters or writs issued by rulers and other authorities, but his deﬁnition applies equally to personal letters, which, as Constable observes (1976: 23) ‘were often referred to by the same names, drawn up by the same persons, and found mixed together in the same collections’. Letters normally exist only because of the absence from each other of the sender and the recipient(s); they are replacements for spoken communication, which ‘speak’, but do so ‘without voice’. Personal letters, and love-letters above all, express intimacy, but the more intimate their concerns, the more conscious 1 The Ambrose quotation is from his Epistle 66, the other two from medieval artes dictandi. Gregory Hays points out to me that similar statements are already to be found in Cicero. 2 John of Salisbury drew on an earlier deﬁnition in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae. Litterae, like ‘letters’, means both epistles and the letters of the alphabet.

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sender and recipient are likely to be of their bodily separation, and of the fact that writing can never be fully equivalent to presence. NortonSmith (1966: 159) mentions ‘the vast number of amatory verse epistles . . . written in England in the ﬁfteenth century’, and Camargo, in his comprehensive study of ﬁctional love-letters in verse, noting the vogue of this literary form, mentions some of its distinctive features: Since letters are seen as speaking for an absent person, it is not surprising that the theme of separation and its attendant hardships is proportionally more common in verse love epistles than in amatory complaints as a class. Many verse love epistles also thematize the physicality of the text through apologies for the tearstains that blot it, expressions of envy at the letter’s good fortune in being held by the beloved, and simple references to the act of writing. (1991: 15)

In Chapter 6 we have seen the recurrence of separation as a theme of courtly lyrics of love; in the epistolary poems to be discussed now it is even more central, and the physicality of the text will be added to it. My main concern will be with late-medieval English epistolary lyrics, especially those of Charles of Orleans, but ﬁrst I want to look at some examples of the most inﬂuential epistolary love-poems ever written.

Ovid’s Heroides P. Ovidius Naso, perhaps the favourite Roman poet among Latinate medieval readers, lived from 43  to  18, ending his life in an exile imposed by Augustus. The Heroides or Epistulae Heroidum were probably his second major work, written between the Amores and the Ars Amatoria; in this original form they consisted of ﬁfteen letters in verse, all from women to men, but Ovid later added three more pairs of letters, in which a woman writes and the man replies. The letters from women are addressed to men who have wronged them in matters of love. Other than one poem by Propertius, they appear to be the ﬁrst love-letters in verse, and indeed the ﬁrst ﬁctional letters in verse, written in Latin. They were widely read in medieval schools, and many scholastic accessus (introductions) to them and commentaries on them were produced, also in Latin, purporting to explain Ovid’s intention in writing them. The intentio auctoris (intention of the author), the commentators explained, differed from the intentions of the ﬁctional writers of the letters: Ovid wrote the Heroides in order to ‘castigate men and women who are held fast in the grip of foolish and unlawful love’ (Minnis and Scott 1988: 20;

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see also Hexter 1986), and thus to discourage his readers from indulging in it. But it seems highly likely that the witty elegance of their style and their intense pathos in the depiction of female suffering were enjoyed for their own sake, and there are many signs of their inﬂuence on vernacular poets. Chaucer in particular wrote repeatedly under the inﬂuence of the Heroides, for example in The House of Fame and Troilus and Criseyde, and especially in The Legend of Good Women, where the lives of Cupid’s saints have the Heroides as their chief source, and that of Dido ends with a translation of the opening lines of Heroides VII followed by the words, ‘But who wol al this letter have in mynde, | Rede Ovyde, and in hym he shal it fynde’ (1366–7). Even the Complaint Unto Pity is marked by the same inﬂuence, as Simpson has recently noted: ‘The act of writing a document that the author knows to be useless already evokes the Ovidian tradition of the Heroides, the series of letters written by often dying heroines, just as it provokes a very Ovidian awareness of the act of writing itself’ (2002: 130). The idea of the ‘document that the author knows to be useless’ is central to the Heroides, where words are manipulated all the more strenuously not despite but because of their inability to change reality. Ovid ingeniously exploits the possibilities of epistolary writing, and especially the recurrent movements among different imagined centres of consciousness, giving rise to the shifts and projections of deixis noted by modern theorists as characteristic of this form (e.g. Wright 1989; see also Altman 1982). The past recounted in a letter, and made so vivid that it seems to be present; the present in which the letter is being written, which will be past for the reader; and the future, in which the recipient and subsequent readers will look back over a complex layering of different pasts—these effects give the Heroides some of their distinctive ﬂavour. Ovid also evokes vividly the interplay of presence and absence: the presence of the ﬁctional writer to herself, her sense of absence from the recipient and his absence from her, and also the absence of both from the very words that evoke their absences and presences. Discussion of the Heroides has sometimes been in terms of their relation to the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia—‘the introduction of a person speaking words suitable to himself and his particular situation’ (Jacobson 1974: 327)—but to see them in that way is to occlude one of their most distinctive features, that they present themselves not as speech but as writing, writing that represents writing, and therefore cannot be

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interpreted without serious loss as merely a representation of speech. Letters may be read aloud, but they are essentially written words; they are thus substantial, but of a manifestly different substance from that to which they refer, the bodily presence for which they are a substitute. This quasi-Derridean insight motivates the whole series, from the opening lines of the ﬁrst letter onwards: ‘Haec tua Penelope lento tibi mittit, Ulixe; | nil mihi rescribas attinet: ipse veni!’ (. 1–2) (These [words] your Penelope sends you, O slow Ulysses; writing back to me is pointless: come yourself!3 ) In the Ars Amatoria Ovid advises the lover, when writing a letter to the woman he wishes to seduce, to use everyday language, ‘praesens ut videare loqui’ (. 468) (as if seeming to speak in her presence), but the letters of the Heroides are not like this: their style is not colloquial but intensely rhetorical, and they never allow us to forget their textuality and its consequences.4 I shall comment on a few of these epistolary poems, choosing from the original collection of ﬁfteen some in which the connections between writing and absence are especially conspicuous. In Heroides III Briseis writes to Achilles. Briseis, the ‘historical’ original underlying the medieval Criseyde, was the daughter of Brises of Lyrnessus, and became Achilles’ captive and concubine until Agamemnon stole her from him. The letter originates from the forced separation that makes writing necessary as a means of contact: Achilles is about to leave her behind. (In Troilus and Criseyde, while Criseyde shares in Briseis’ fear of what would happen to her in wartime if she tried to return 3 Heroides quoted from Showerman (1977); translations loosely based on those in this edition, modiﬁed to achieve greater literalness and avoid archaism. 4 Jacobson (1974: 336) quotes the phrase from the Ars Amatoria in the course of a discussion of the ‘double nature’ of letters, as writing and as the ‘imaginative reality’ of presence. He seems to me to give excessive weight to the second feature, and to underplay the emphasis of the Heroides on the merely illusory effect of their words. I ﬁnd a similar one-sidedness in Bond’s discussion of the 11th-cent. Ovidian epistolary poetry of Baudri of Bourgueil. To take a single instance, Baudri writes: ‘O utinam legatus ego meus iste fuissem | vel quam palparet cartula uestra manus, | Et michi, qui nunc est, tunc idem sensus inesset, | sed neque me nosses, donec ego superem’ (O would that I had been my own messenger | Or the letter which your hand stroked. | And that I had then the same consciousness I have now, | And that you would not have recognized me until I wished) (Baudri, Carmen 108, cited and translated by Bond 1987: 103). Bond sees such Ovidianism in terms of ‘voice’ and ‘persona’; he rightly notes the association here of skin with parchment and thus of reading with loving (1995: 64), but gives insufﬁcient weight to the way that utinam marks impossibility and leaves the reader with a reality that is only textual. Parchment is a form of skin, but processed sheepskin is very different from the living skin of a loved one—at best, a fetish-like substitute.

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secretly to her lover, the main pathos of betrayal and abandonment is transferred from Briseis/Criseyde to Troilus—a marked instance of the Chaucerian feminization of male experience noted by Mann 1991.) Briseis complains that, to add to her sufferings, including the deaths of her husband and brothers, Achilles has made no effort to regain her and is now proposing to leave the siege of Troy without her. Her letter begins by referring to its own writtenness, and to the difﬁculty she has in writing Greek, and also to its material nature, blotted with tears, in just the way noted by Camargo in English poems of ﬁfteen centuries later: Quam legis, a rapta Briseide littera venit, vix bene barbarica Graeca notata manu. quascumque adspicies, lacrimae fecere lituras; sed tamen at lacrimae pondera vocis habent. (. 1–4) (The letter you are reading comes from stolen Briseis, set down with difﬁculty in Greek by a barbarian hand. Whatever blots you see, her tears have made; but tears too have none the less the weight of spoken words.)

The letter ends with a series of references to Briseis’ bodily existence—body, complexion, breast, blood—as absent from her words as she is from Achilles: ‘abiit corpusque colorque’ (141) (gone is my ﬂesh, and gone my colour), ‘stricto pete corpora ferro’ (145) (draw the steel and plunge it in my body), ‘est mihi qui fosso pectore sanguis eat’ (146) (I have blood to ﬂow when once my breast is pierced). The verbal elegance and wit of this letter, as of the Heroides in general, have the effect of reminding us throughout that it is only words, playing with the things and bodies to which the words refer. There can even seem to be a kind of desperate excess in the repetitiveness of the verbal play: Si mihi pauca queri de te dominoque viroque fas est, de domino pauca viroque querar . . . nam simul Eurybates me Talthybiusque vocarunt, Eurybati data sum Talthybioque comes. (5–6, 9–10) (If it is right for me to utter brief complaint of you, my master and lover, of you, my master and lover, will I utter brief complaint . . . for as soon as Eurybates and Talthybius came to ask for me, I was given over to Eurybates and to Talthybius, to go with them.)

Much of what is referred to is absent, not-present in the sense of being either past or future (the verbal play conspicuously embraces tenses and

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moods, as in the queri . . . querar of lines 5–6); only the words are actually present. And even the tear-blotted material letter supposedly containing the words is as much an illusion created by the words as the ‘living hand’ of the poem by Keats quoted in Chapter 6. That is true of all writing, of course, but its truth is especially conspicuous in writing that so insistently lays bare its own writtenness. Heroides IV is addressed by Phaedra to Hippolytus. Married to Theseus, Phaedra fell passionately in love with Hippolytus, his son by the Amazon queen Hippolyta. This incestuous passion is an extreme example of the ‘foolish and unlawful love’ seen by medieval commentators as condemned by Ovid; readers of Phaedra’s epistle would have known that its words would leave Hippolytus unmoved, and her love would lead to the deaths of both. Love here is personiﬁed in a way that deﬁnes it as obsession, as a cruel tyrant who commands Phaedra to write—and ‘quidquid Amor iussit, non est contemnere tutum’ (11) (whatever Love has commanded cannot safely be scorned)—and is evoked by metaphors of ﬁre, wounds, Bacchic frenzy, madness (furor). As in Heroides I, the opening lines stress their writtenness, and here they are followed by lines explicitly contrasting writing with speech: perlege, quodcumque est—quid epistula lecta nocebit? te quoque in hac aliquid quod iuvet esse potest; his arcana notis terra pelagoque feruntur. inspicit acceptas hostis ab hoste notas. Ter tecum conata loqui ter inutilis haesit lingua, ter in primo restitit ore sonus. qua licet et sequitur, pudor est miscendus amori;5 dicere quae puduit, scribere iussit amor. (3–10) (Read to the end whatever is in it—what harm can reading a letter do? In this one, too, there may be something to give you pleasure; in these writings secrets are carried over land and sea. [Even] an enemy looks into the writings received from an enemy. Attempting three times to speak to you, my tongue stopped uselessly three times, and three times the sound halted at the threshold of my mouth. Wherever modesty may attend on love, love should not lack in it; what it was shameful to speak, love commanded me to write.)

5 I do not know how to make sense of this line as it stands; my translation despairingly repeats that in Showerman (1977).

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Here notae, writings that are merely signs of words, are contrasted with sonus, sound produced by tongue and lips, and the opposition is neatly summed up in line 10, in that between dicere and scribere, to speak and to write. The closing lines of the epistle similarly contrast bodily with written expressions, lacrimae with verba, now with deictic projection into the experience of Hippolytus at the future point when he will be reading it: ‘verba precantis | qui legis, et lacrimas ﬁnge videre meas!’ (175–6) (you are reading the words of one who prays; imagine that you are seeing my tears!). The word ‘tear’ is not the same as a tear; if it were, there would be no need to beg for that effort of imagination. In this epistle, unlike that of Briseis, the letter itself is not imagined as having a tear-stained material reality. Later in her letter, Phaedra recalls her ﬁrst sight of Hippolytus, beginning in the past tense—‘candida vestis erat, praecincti ﬂore capilli, | ﬂava verecundus tinxerat ora rubor’ (71–2) (Your clothing was shining white, your hair bound round with ﬂowers, a modest blush had tinged your bronzed face)—and then moving into the present as recollection verges on hallucination: ‘te tuus iste rigor positique sine arte capilli | et levis egregio pulvis in ore decet’ (77–8) (That hardness of yours, and the hair arranged without art, and the light dust on your splendid face, suit you well). In this lingering description, the body of the desirable but unattainable hunk Hippolytus really does seem almost present; but the force of the contextual emphasis on writing insists that the presence is illusory. Hippolytus is absent from Phaedra, and equally absent from the words that describe him. And Phaedra herself is aware of absences, especially that of her husband, which after all is what makes the letter possible: ‘tempore abest aberitque diu Neptunius heros’ (109) (opportunely, the hero son of Neptune is absent and will be absent for a long time). Phaedra insists too that concepts such as incest and adultery are ‘nomina vana’ (130) (empty names/nouns), and that, since she is Hippolytus’ stepmother, ‘cognato poterit nomine culpa tegi’ (138) (our fault will be able to be covered under the name of kinship). By the same token, though, the kisses that she says he can continue to give her openly (144) are also, for us, mere names; and so are the arms with which she says she clasps his knees, and so are the knees (153–4). The letter can never be anything more than a substitute for the bodies it invokes. Heroides XI, a letter from Canace to her brother Macareus, also concerns incestuous love. The siblings became lovers, and Canace gave

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birth to a son; the situation from which the letter begins is that their father Aeolus, god of the winds, has discovered the truth, has had the child abandoned in the wilderness, and has sent her a sword to kill herself. The opening lines, here especially abrupt, refer as so often to the material form of the letter, not blotted, as ﬁctional love-letters usually are, with tears, but to be blotted with its writer’s blood—Canace uses future tenses as she envisages the form in which Macareus will receive it:6 Siqua tamen caecis errabunt scripta lituris, oblitus a dominae caede libellus erit. dextra tenet calamum, strictum tenet altera ferrum, et iacet in gremio charta soluta meo. haec est Aeolidos fratri scribentis imago; sic videor duro posse placere patri. Ipse necis cuperem nostrae spectator adesset, auctorisque oculis exigeretur opus! (. 1–8) (If any of what I write is [lit. ‘will be’] illegible because blotted out, it will be because the little roll has been stained by the shedding of its mistress’s blood. My right hand holds a pen, the other holds a drawn blade, and the paper lies unrolled in my lap. This is the image of Aeolus’s daughter writing to her brother; this, it seems, is how I can please our hard-hearted father. I could wish that he were present to see my death, and that the work were done in the sight of him who commands it.)

In this sensational imago (5)—a portrait or phantom, not identical with the reality—the scroll in her lap, about to be stained with her blood, is the letter that we are reading and that Macareus is to read, but perhaps also a substitute for their child, blood-stained from the womb or from its fate in the wilderness. It is a horrifying picture of female authorship, but at the same time she refers to her absent father as the auctor of this opus (8)—the person responsible for the scene, but also the true author of the work.7 And her wish that he could be present is one of the many reminders in the Heroides of the distance between writing and presence. 6 Cf. Constable (1976: 14): ‘The writer of a letter knew that it would be received, if at all, some time in the future, and the use of tenses in letters may reﬂect this temporal gap.’ 7 Cf. the use of auctor and opus in the opening lines of XV, discussed below.

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What follows is a vivid, subjectively coloured recollection of the past, but repeated shifts of tense and of other deictic features make that past also ‘as if’ present. I shall not attempt a complete analysis,8 but mention only one passage. Canace describes her experience of labour largely in the narrative present. She writes that she was on the point of death in childbirth when Macareus arrived and brought her back to life by comforting her and promising to marry her, and: ‘Mortua, crede mihi, tamen ad tua verba revixi: | et positum est uteri crimen onusque mihi’ (63–4). Here the awkwardness of a completely literal translation is needed: ‘Dead, believe me, yet at your words I came back to life, and the reproach and burden of my womb was brought forth.’ Canace seemed dead at that past moment, but the present-tense address to Macareus (‘crede mihi’) helps to merge the past into the present—the present not of writing but of reading. The ‘you’ addressed is both Macareus in the past made present by words and Macareus in the future in which he will read the words. Mortua thus has a shadowy second meaning: when Macareus reads the letter, Canace will be literally dead (though perhaps its words may make her seem alive for him once more). The sequence of tenses in this letter is particularly complicated and telling, as for example in the future perfect used when Canace envisages what others will say of her after she has followed her baby into death: ‘nec mater fuero dicta nec orba diu’ (120) (I shall not long have been called either mother or bereaved). In the course of her narrative of the past, she tells how she accepted the sword from her father’s guard, ‘et utemur violento fortiter ense’ (97) (and I shall bravely make use of the violent blade); her suicide is in the future as she writes, but will be in the past when Macareus reads. The extraordinary juggling with tenses occurs because what we are reading functions not as a self-effacing window on to the reality of a story but as writing that represents writing and never lets us forget that it consists of written words. It is composed word by word in the writer’s present to give an account of the past leading up to that present (that writer being on one level Canace and on another Ovid), and it can then be read at many different future times by readers from Macareus to ourselves. My ﬁnal example is the opening lines of the last epistle of the original collection, Heroides XV, from Sappho to Phaon. (Its Ovidian authorship 8 For a fuller account of Heroides XI in relation to Gower’s adaptation in Confessio Amantis, Book III, see Spearing (1993).

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may be questionable, but it was read as authentic in the Middle Ages.) Phaon was an old boatman to whom Venus gave the gift of youth and beauty; the epistle assumes the truth of the legend by which the famous Greek lyric poet Sappho, notorious for loving women, fell in love with him and when rejected threw herself into the sea to her death. The opening lines, as so often, refer to textuality and even to the form of verse in which the Heroides are written: Ecquid, ut adspecta est studiosae littera dextrae, protinus est oculis cognita nostra tuis— an, nisi legisses auctoris nomina Sapphus, hoc breve nescires unde movetur opus? Forsitan et quare mea sint alterna requiras carmina, cum lyricis sim magis apta modis. ﬂendus amor meus est—elegiae ﬂebile carmen; non facit ad lacrimas barbitos ulla meas. (. 1–8) (So, when you looked at the writing from my eager right hand, was it immediately recognizable as mine—or, if you had not read the author’s name, Sappho, would you not know from whom this brief work came? Perhaps, too, you may ask why my verses alternate, when I am better suited to lyric rhythms? I must weep for my love—and elegy is the weeping strain; the lyre is not at all suited to my tears.)

Throwing the deictic centre into a future in which Phaon will have received and read the letter, these lines ask whether he recognized the handwriting, and they imply the question whether he recognized the poetic style of the author before seeing the signature. And this leads into a further question that Ovid imagines Sappho imagining Phaon may ask: why is the letter in elegiac couplets rather than the lyrical forms for which Sappho was actually known? Script, signature, style, metre—the writtenness of writing could scarcely be more strongly emphasized. As Derrida puts it (1976: 40–1): ‘Psychology will never be able to accommodate within its space that which constitutes the absence of the signatory, to say nothing of the absence of the referent. Writing is the name of these two absences.’ In the Heroides there is much that falls within the scope of psychology, but psychology cannot fully accommodate the absences that are so clamorously insistent in these letters—the absence of the signatories, the absence of what the letters’ words refer to, and, indeed, the absence of the recipients from the moments of writing and from the written texts. Some part of those

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accumulated absences can doubtless by recuperated as psychology, as elements in the pathos of the human situations represented; but no account of the Heroides can be adequate that fails to focus on the absences whose name is writing, those inherent to the very form of the ﬁctional epistle, writing as a representation of writing. The same is true, as we shall see, of late-medieval English epistolary ﬁctions.

Two Middle English Epistolary Lyrics We have already encountered one late-medieval epistolary lyric in English, in Chapter 6. The most accomplished poems of this genre are those in the lengthy sequence of English lyrics by Charles of Orleans, but before turning to them I want to discuss two less distinguished epistolary lyrics, not necessarily written earlier than Charles’s sequence, but illustrative of the level from which it emerges. The ﬁrst survives in three sources, one of them the Fairfax manuscript, an important midﬁfteenth-century collection of English courtly poems, some by Chaucer (including The Parliament of Fowls) and others in a post-Chaucerian style. In that manuscript it occurs in a section characterized by ‘a concern with lyrics as pseudo-documents which . . . relies for much of its effect on the physical existence of written copies’ (Boffey 1985: 91). It has been attributed to a speciﬁc aristocratic writer, William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk,9 who is known to have had literary connections. He married Chaucer’s granddaughter, was a patron of Lydgate, and, having been one of Charles of Orleans’s hosts during his long detention in England, visited him at his chateau of Blois after his release. Still, the attribution is speculative, and far from certain. What is more important is that, as Pearsall has written (1977: 218), poems like this ‘give us a tantalising if unsubstantiated insight into a truly courtly milieu’, the circle in which Charles of Orleans wrote his sequence of lyrics. Myn hertys joy, and all myn hole plesaunce, Whom that I serve and shall do faythfully Wyth trew entent and humble observaunce Yow for to please in that I can treuly, Besechyng yow thys lytell byll and I

5

9 Proposed by MacCracken (1911); later scholarship has been sceptical. For a recent study, concluding that it is ‘not very important’ whether the poems in this section of the manuscript ‘can be attributed to Suffolk or to any other named author’, see Pearsall (2000: 156).

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May hertly, wyth symplesse and drede, Be recomawndyd to your goodlyhede. And yf ye lyst have knowlech of my qwert, I am in hele—God thankyd mot he be— As of body, but treuly not in hert, 10 Nor nought shal be to tyme I may you se; But thynke that I as treuly wyll be he That for your ese shall do my payn and myght As thogh that I were dayly in your syght. I wryte to yow no more for lak of space, 15 But I beseche the only Trinit´e Yow kepe and save be support of hys grace And be your sheld from all adversyt´e. Go, lytill byll, and say thou were wyth me Of verey trouth, as thou canst wele remembre, 20 At myn upryst, the fyft day of Decembre. (Robbins 1952, no. 189) (My heart’s joy and my entire pleasure, whom I serve and shall serve faithfully, with true purpose and humble duty, so as to please you truly however I can, I beseech you that this little letter and I may be heartily commended to your goodness, in sincerity and reverence. And if you wish to have knowledge of my health, I am well, God be thanked, so far as my body is concerned, but truly not at heart, nor shall I be till the time when I may see you; but believe that I will be one who will do the utmost for your comfort as truly as though I were in your sight every day. For lack of space I am writing no more to you; but I beseech the Holy Trinity to guard and save you with the aid of His grace, and to shield you from all adversity. Go, little letter, and say that you were with me, in all truth, as you can well remember, at my rising on the ﬁfth of December)

Though distant from the richly speciﬁc settings of the Heroides, this lyric brings the nameless and generalizing tradition of courtly poetry into a more deﬁnite human situation: a speciﬁed date and point in the writer’s everyday life, a function for the poem as a genuine letter scrawled in bed (hence the reference to ‘myn upryst’) on a scrap of paper or parchment where ‘lak of space’ limits its length, and (possibly) an identiﬁable poet. (All this, of course, may be ﬁction; what matters is the impression created, the effet de r´eel). The iambic metre is more smoothly Chaucerian than that of much ﬁfteenth-century poetry; only line 6 seems unmetrical, and that could be due to scribal error. The relation between syntactical pattern and metrical pattern has an unostentatious

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ease,10 especially in lines 8–11, where the parenthetic ‘God thankyd mot he be’ defers the moment at which health of body is distinguished from sickness of heart. In place of the Latinate polysyllabic formality of the more clerkly kinds of post-Chaucerian verse, simpler, often monosyllabic diction, as in lines 11–14, suggests aristocratic urbanity. The religious references in lines 9 and 16–18 also add to the air of everyday reality: this is not the ‘religion of love’ in literary ﬁction, but the real piety of late-medieval aristocratic life. Troilus’s letter to the absent Criseyde in Book V of Chaucer’s Troilus was a model for this and two other love-letters in the same section of the Fairfax manuscript (Camargo 1991: 123)—‘And yf ye lyst have knowlech of my qwert’ is especially close to Troilus’s ‘And if yow liketh knowen of the fare | Of me’ (Troilus . 1366–7)—but the poem’s literariness and its textuality are well concealed under the illusion of familiar address. So the effect is of speech, but ‘Myn hertys joy’ carefully follows the rules of the ars dictaminis, to such an extent that ‘the formal conventions of the genre are the main subject matter’ (Camargo 1991: 121), and in that way it conveys a consciousness of its nature as a written document occupying space on a material surface. ‘Go, lyttill byll’ (19) recalls Chaucer’s ‘Go, litel bok’ at the end of Troilus (. 1786), itself belonging to a long literary tradition of moments when a text in progress becomes a completed work separable from its author, sent out into the world; but this byll is more intimate in its address not to posterity but to a single recipient. Unlike its writer, the poem will be in the lady’s very presence, and can be imagined to speak directly to her. The dialectic of absence and presence is developed with some sophistication, especially in line 5, where three persons are involved, I , yow (the lady), and the letter—later addressed by the less respectful thou, but at this point still ‘thys lytell byll’ because not yet completed and detached from its writer. It is playfully assumed that the letter, when so detached, can remember and speak (19–20): a kind of metaphysics of presence still operates, but shared by the writer with the writing. In the end, though, the letter’s formal perfection and its apparent insertion into daily life do not conceal its paucity of content: the truth is, it has little or nothing to say. It is no more 10 Cf. Pearsall (2000: 155–6): ‘Few medieval English poets can so comfortably enfold the syntax of speech in the rhythms of rhyme royal.’

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than a polite exercise in epistolary rhetoric, and as such is completely self-contained, as much so as the scrap of paper or parchment on which it is supposedly written. The next example of an epistolary lyric is less smoothly accomplished in manner. It comes from a small late ﬁfteenth-century manuscript collection of verse and prose, Bodleian Rawlinson poet. 36. In my hertt is ther nothyng off remembrauns That to joy sownyth, save only to thyn[k] upon yow— This ys contynually myn ech day usaunce. And thyn[k] ye veryly that I sey yow now That wold God ye wyst in what wyse and how 5 I leve, wyssh, covete, and desyre also How yow to plese, what me ys best to doe. How ye be my soverayne lady, iwyss, I cannot wryte, Ne fynd I therto papyr nor yn[ke]; Wel I wote a hole yere it ys to lyte 10 To make yow to know so mych on yow I thynke— So farforth that when I sclepe or wynke Me thynkith I see yow veryly in fygure, The feyryst that levyth of any creature, To whom I recommaund me with all obeysaunce, 15 My hert, my love, my trowth and dylygence, So that yt may be yowre hertes plesaunce, And to yow also worchyp and reverense, Praying yow the effectt of my sentense Ye take in gre. How that my wrytyng be rude, 20 To trowth yt sownyth; and so Y conclude. (Robbins 1952, no. 192) (In my heart there is no memory that tends towards joy, except only to think about you—and to do this continually is my daily custom. And think that I am truly saying to you now, that I would to God you knew how and in what way I live, wishing, longing and desiring what I can best do to please you. How you are my sovereign lady, indeed, I cannot write, and I do not ﬁnd paper or ink to do so. I know well that a whole year is too little to let you know how much I think of you—so much that when I sleep or close my eyes I seem to see a true image of you, the fairest of all living creatures, to whom I submit in all obedience my heart, my love, my ﬁdelity, and my diligent service, so long as this may be pleasing to your heart and also honour and reverence to you, praying you to accept favourably the substance of my meaning. Though my writing may be unskilled, it accords with truth; and so I conclude.)

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This poem, for which no author is known or suggested, employs much of the Latinate diction of the clerkly aureate style, especially in the rhymes, but metrically it is often rough, and it gives a stronger impression than ‘Myn hertys joy’ of being driven by feeling. The ﬁrst two lines are notably irregular, often anapaestic, in rhythm; and the usual rhetorical form by which ‘recommending’ belongs to the exordium (as in ‘Myn hertys joy’, lines 5–7) is broken, so that here the rush of feeling defers it to the ﬁnal stanza. This poem is again highly conscious of its status as an epistolary document, but it is constantly trying to escape from the limits of the written by making the deictic centre the person behind the text. The recipient is urged to imagine that the writer is truly speaking to her; he claims, ‘I cannot wryte, | Ne fynd I therto papyr nor ynke’; and the last two lines propose a distinction, even an opposition, between wrytyng and trowth. (The reference to paper is worth comment. Not just the spread of literacy but the growing availability of paper, cheaper than parchment, must have been one factor in the increasing popularity of real and ﬁctional personal letters in the ﬁfteenth century. A letter on paper may have felt more impersonal, less like a substitute for the writer’s body, than one on skin; this letter, in any case, does not claim to be blotted with tears.) The inner life of feeling is deﬁned as that which cannot be written, that which overﬂows the bounds of metrical correctness and of paper and ink. This also means that it cannot be fully conveyed to the recipient: the ‘wold God ye wyst’ of line 5 implies impossibility.11 What can be set down on paper is sharply distinguished from what is ‘In my hertt’; he cannot write ‘How ye be my soverayne lady’, but her sovereignty is exercised in his heart, his thoughts, and even (again veryly, or so it seems) in his dreams and daydreams. The whole poem exists as a statement of its incapacity to express the writer’s true feeling; it conveys feeling precisely through a series of statements of inability to do so; and of course that inability constitutes a denial of the subject’s presence in the text.

Charles of Orleans The most important of all manuscripts containing epistolary poems in English is British Library Harley 682, comprising what Anne Coldiron 11

Cf. Baudri’s utinam in n. 4 above.

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describes as ‘a 6,531-line experimental lyric sequence that is England’s largest and earliest surviving self-contained, author-assembled body of personal lyric’ (2000: 16). The sequence consists of English adaptations of the French ballades and chansons collected together in a manuscript owned and partly copied by Charles, Duke of Orleans (BN MS f.fr. 25458), along with English poems on similar themes to which no French equivalents exist. Charles was captured by the English at Agincourt in 1415 and, because of his political importance, was retained as a prisoner until 1440. It is generally believed that the poems in Harley 682 are by Charles himself:12 already a poet at the time of his capture, he continued to write in his native language but also became a poet in English, and, developing his own idiosyncratic version of courtly Chaucerianism while working from but going beyond his French compositions, he eventually produced the largest single-authored collection of short poems in English that survives from before the sixteenth century. This innovation is in keeping with another that marks Charles as a lyric poet of a new kind: he had a selection of his French lyrics translated into Latin and ‘published’ in an illuminated vellum parallel-text manuscript—‘an unusually assertive action that claims a high-classical permanence and value for lyric’ (Coldiron 2000: 21)13 and for himself as a lyric poet. Like a sixteenth-century sonnet-sequence, the poems of Harley 682 are planned to give the impression of telling the story of a speciﬁc inner life, that of a man named in the opening epistle as ‘the duk that folkis calle | Of Orlyaunce’ (5–6).14 That impression should not be confused with reality: the sequence cannot be read as anything like a modern autobiography, though it does hint at a narrative continuity and at an identiﬁcation of the poetic subject with the writer of the sequence that justify our referring to its ‘I’ as Charles of Orleans. Arn has chosen Fortunes Stabilnes as its title; my own preference would be for The Duke’s Book, to pay tribute to its ‘bookness’—both in Burrow’s sense (1986: 12 The authorship question has been much disputed, with French specialists generally being less willing than English specialists to believe that Charles composed the English poems. For a survey, see Arn (1994: 32–7). I share Arn’s conviction that Charles wrote the English poems, but ‘the Harley 682 poet’ could generally be substituted for ‘Charles’ in my discussion without making much difference to the argument. 13 Coldiron devotes ch. 5 of her important book to a pioneering discussion of this manuscript, Grenoble 873, and its implications. 14 Charles quoted from Arn (1994), with line numbers given in text.

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230) that it is ‘a work in which separable items by a single author . . . are held together in a ﬁxed order within a single volume’, and in the more general sense that those items, many of them ﬁctitious documents, are shaped out of the existing books of an Anglo-French literary tradition (romances, dits amoureux, dream-poems, booklets of lyrics) as much as they derive from the events of a real life in history. Brieﬂy, The Duke’s Book falls into three parts, each with its own introductory section. The opening quire of Harley 682 is missing, but its contents can be reconstructed from the French collection to which it runs parallel. In it the ‘I’ of the sequence entered Cupid’s service, made his submission to his lady Bewt´e, received Cupid’s commandments, and was granted a patent of service. The surviving text begins with this document, admitting Charles as Cupid’s servant, commanding all lovers to assist him against Cupid’s enemy Daunger, and announcing that he has left his heart behind ‘in morgage’ (37) (as security). Charles requests Bewt´e’s heart in exchange for his own, but Cupid tells him he must win it ‘Bi goodly speche and curteys countenaunce’ (141). There follows a sequence of seventy-four ballades, many imagined as letters, that make up Part I of the book. In them the ‘I’ is represented as separated from Bewt´e, ﬁrst because he is a prisoner and then because she dies (as Charles’s wife, Bonne d’Armagnac, really died in France during his captivity in England), leaving him to mourn her loss. The introduction to Part II is a dream in which Charles meets Age, who persuades him that it is time to take an honourable leave of love and urges him not to trust Fortune. He wakes, presents a petition to Cupid, is granted a quytaunce (2881) (document of discharge), and has his heart restored to him. He retreats to the castle of No Care, where he offers lovers a Jewbil´e (3104) or retirement feast, in this case a banquet of songs. He may cease to be a lover, but he does not cease to be a love-poet. This forms the second part of the sequence, and in the course of it the parallelism of the English poems with Charles’s French originals, initially very close, gradually peters out. Another quire is missing from the manuscript, but the surviving pages contain ﬁfteen hundred lines of short love poems, chieﬂy roundels, that lay no claim to tell the story of an individual love but simply form a miscellany intended to please his guests—ourselves, the readers of ‘this bok’ (3128). The clearly marked distinction between these relatively trivial, though accomplished and charming, ‘songs’ and the preceding

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ballades with their textual ‘poetics of the interior’ (Coldiron 2000: 29) is one sign of Charles’s thoughtfulness about the nature of lyric, and implies that the ballades, by contrast, are intended to create the illusion of expressing the sentement of an individual. He concludes the feast with some advice to lovers, thus completing his Jewbil´e and promising, ‘And so my newe fortune wol folow soon’ (4486). Part III is introduced with a second dream. A friend asks Charles to compose on his behalf a poem lamenting not, as usual, the instability of Fortune, but ‘Fortunes stabilnes’ (4660)—hence Arn’s title—and, because he has been ‘so moche to Love biholde | In my fer afore past dayes olde’ (so greatly beholden to Love in the old days of my far distant past) (4655–6), Charles agrees. Wandering by the seashore, he writes the poem and then falls asleep. His dream is of a meeting with Venus, who ingeniously overcomes his reluctance to re-enter the dating scene. Now Fortune arrives, and on her wheel Charles sees a lady whom he ﬁrst imagines to be the one who died in Part I. Venus points out his error but encourages him to try to win this new lady, and carries him to the top of Fortune’s wheel to meet her; but at this point he wakes. Now, though, among a company of ‘gentil folkis’ (noble people) playing at the game of ‘post and piler’ (5203–4), he ﬁnds in waking life the lady of his dream. After some friendly conversation she agrees to receive his approaches. These are represented by a further collection of thirty-seven ballades, interrupted by one longer compleynt. But Part III hardly forms a sequence; it has a narrative skeleton, but is closer to being a miscellany, like Part II, as though Charles were using up poems not all written for this framework. It ends with a somewhat inconclusive farewell. The two dreams are presented as both marking and producing turning-points in his life as lover and as poet, and thus in the book made out of that life: the ﬁrst his abandonment of love after his lady’s death, the second his return to love.15 For my present purpose, what is important is that the dreams change his relation to writing. The ballades in the ﬁrst sequence, especially up to the point of his lady’s death, are full of references to themselves as written expressions of his own love. The Jewbil´e, however, is prefaced with an apologetic distinction between the past, when as a lover himself he was familiar with ‘The speche of love’

15

For a more detailed study of the dreams, see Spearing (2000).

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(3093), and his present situation as one who only writes for lovers and subject to their correction: But where Y fayle, Y pray yow hertily That rede my werk and kan doon bet than Y, Where as Y fayle, ye lust amende hit ay. (3085–7) (But where I fail, I earnestly beg you who read my work and can do better than I, that, in places where I fail, it should please you to correct it.)

In the background is Chaucer’s distinction in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women between truly courtly poets—‘lovers that kan make of sentement’ and thus compose ‘fresshe songes’ inspired by their own feelings—and his own humbler imitative art. Charles temporarily adopts a role similar to Chaucer’s, but not identical, because it is his former experience of love, and not just his ability to follow in the steps of earlier writers, that now enables him to compose love-poems. He addresses ‘yow . . . That rede’ (3085–6) and notes that because short poems are sweeter, ‘in rundelle Y hem write’ (3119) (I write them as roundels), but, when his form changes from the written ballade to the sung roundel and carole, references to the poems’ writtenness largely disappear. After the second dream, the ‘I’ reverts to his former role as lover–writer and to the written form of the ballade. Having prudently ascertained that his new lady can read (5311), he begs that she will ‘graunt me writ to yow’ (5313), and her answer is, ‘Y graunt hit yow. Writ on!’ (5317). That is what he does, in a second collection of ballades, once more containing many references to their own textuality. With The Duke’s Book, as with the Heroides, I shall focus on the relations between textuality and subjectivity. The whole text is, of course, a written document, and its ‘bookness’ is heightened by its many references to itself as written, but what especially interests me is the question it persistently raises as to the status of ‘I’ in a text so pervaded with acknowledgements of its own textuality. To state in an oversimpliﬁed way what I hope will emerge from the following discussion, it seems to me that here, in this series of poems whose subject is characterized as a poet, the ‘I’ of textuality, shifting and unstable, becomes the representation of a shifting and unstable self, a self that recurrently experiences itself as a text, fragmented in the mode of personiﬁcation-allegory. Through the chance loss of the opening quire, Harley 682 begins with a representation of a ﬁctional document,

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the patent in which ‘The god Cupide and Venus the goddes’ (1), the presiding deities respectively of Parts I and III, proclaim their acceptance of the Duke of Orleans as their servant. The document soon moves into Cupid’s ﬁrst person singular, as it commands all lovers to assist Charles against Daunger and announces that Charles has left his heart as security. This allegory, formally separating the lover and his heart, is the origin of the representation of subjectivity in Part I not as single and stable, but rather as a disputed territory whose boundaries shift as the relations of ‘I’, Heart, Love, Thought, Hope, Daunger, and other faculties and abstractions, change from moment to moment. The patent, like other legal documents drawn up under the auspices of a personal ruler, derives its authority from an ‘I’ named in it but always absent from it, and it seems likely that Charles, familiar with the problems of exercising authority over a dukedom from which he was so long absent, was especially conscious of this distinctive quality of letters. In any event, several other parts of the book also consist of written documents in which the grammatical presence of ‘I’ tends to call attention to bodily absence. Among them are Charles’s petition to Cupid for the return of his heart (2716 ff.), his letter to Cupid from the castle of No Care (2982 ff.), and the lament about Fortune’s stability written for his friend (4680 ff.). There are also numerous references to writings not quoted, such as the ‘lettir of tret´e’ (1109) by which Cupid made an alliance between Charles and his lady, the ‘writyng full notable’ (2680) from which he has learned of Love’s beneﬁcial power, and the quytaunce drawn up by Love’s secretary Good Trouthe (2778 ff.), granted him when he leaves Love’s service. But the most important writings, and those in which the dialectic of presence and absence operates most interestingly, are the ballades of Part I, where Absence itself often features as a leading personiﬁcation. Like other ﬁfteenth-century poems examined above, many of these have the effect of personal letters: each such ballade is situated as the expression of a moment in its author’s personal history, while at the same time, in acknowledging its writtenness, it acknowledges that author’s absence from himself. Many of the ballades, too, discuss other forms of writing and their dubious correspondence to lived reality. There are too many references to writing and absence for a comprehensive study to be possible, but I shall discuss some salient examples. Cupid tells Charles that, as a ‘gentill man’ (136), he must win his lady’s heart by gentiles (140) (noble conduct), ‘For to nobles longith

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sewte of curteys speche, | As he fynt tyme bi mouth or writyng seche’ (145–6) (For to nobility belongs petitioning in courtly terms, as he [the suitor] ﬁnds opportunity to entreat [the lady] by mouth or in writing). This distinction between mouth and writyng, corresponding to the legal differentiation between oral and written testimony (Fein 1983: 39), is crucial in what follows. Cupid withdraws, and, since Bewt´e is surrounded by Disdayne and Daunger, Charles dares not petition her ‘bi mouth’; but Hope ﬁnds him ‘penne and papir’ (197) and encourages him to write so that Good Will may assist his case. This conclusion of the introductory narrative thus deﬁnes the following ballades precisely as written ﬁctions of writing. Unlike speech or other forms of bodily communication, they can elicit no immediate response: the ‘you’ or ‘madame’ of the ballades is as much an effect of writing as the ‘I’. Comparison with the relation of frame to content in the Canterbury Tales may elucidate the situation. There the effect of the frame is to deﬁne the tales as speech and to represent them as eliciting spoken responses. Perceptive readers (though not, as we have seen, many Chaucer scholars) have always remained aware that this is a ﬁctional illusion, whereas Charles’s ballades really are writing: the ﬁction redoubles their lonely textuality, and the experience of reading heightens our awareness of the absence of selves from the text. Within the ballade sequence, the emphasis on separation and absence ﬁrst becomes acute in numbers 10–12, designed to form a group. Ballade 9 is an encomium of the lady, unusual in being represented as speech addressed to ‘Ye ladies and all fayre, bothe lowe and hie, | That herith this’ (485–6) (you ladies and all of the fair sex, of whatever rank, who hear this). In its successor, Charles turns back to the lady, from whom he is now separated, and laments that speech is useless in conveying his meaning to her: Madame, a trouthe not wot Y what to say Nor bi what ende that Y shulde ﬁrst bigynne The wofulle lijf unto yow to biwray Which shertith me more nerre than doth my skyn. Hit forto speke, as well, lo, may Y blyn, Forwhi bi speche not kan Y be the nerre. What helpe, God wott, as shulde Y bi hit wyn, Syn hit is so that Y am from yow f[er]re? What Y now se hit noyeth me, mafay, But Y for drede my countenaunce forp[yn]ne

495

500

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As with my mouth to shewe a laughtir gay When that myn hert as wepith me withinne. A martir me to calle hit were no synne, If Cupide make a seynt as of lover, For paynys thikke endewre Y, lo, not thynne, 505 Syn hit is so that Y am from yow fer. But nevyrtheles Y humbly thanke yow ay For yowre writyng; my woo hathe pesid syn With Swete Comfort Y took the selvyn day, The whiche Y more sett by then all my kyn, 510 That nevyr fro my brest as shall hit twyn; Which chaungith not, Y pray yow as Y dare, For now my blis on hit is to myssyn, Syn hit is so that Y am from yow fare. My ledy hert is lightid unto tyn 515 Bi Comfort, loo, but Absence doth me war, That more Y lust to wayle then laughe or gr[y]n, Syn hit is so that that Y am from yow fare. (Madame, in truth I do not know what to say nor at which end of my subject to begin, in order to reveal to you the unhappy life which clothes me more closely than my own skin. I might as well be silent, you see, as speak of it, because by speech I cannot be any nearer [to you]. What help, God knows, could I gain by it, since the truth is that I am far from you? What I see now distresses me, indeed, but I constrain my outward appearance out of fear, displaying gay laughter with my mouth when my heart is weeping within me. It would be no sin to call me a martyr, if Cupid makes lovers into saints, for I am enduring, you see, not few but many pains, since the truth is that I am far from you. Nevertheless, I humbly thank you again and again for your writing; my unhappiness has been lightened since the very day I received sweet Comfort, which I value more than all my kindred, so that it will never depart from my breast. Do not change things, I beg you so far as I dare, for now the happiness gained from your letter has ended, since the truth is that I am far from you. My leaden heart is made as light as tin by Comfort, you see, but Absence harasses me, so that I feel more like wailing than laughing or smiling, since the truth is that I am far from you.)

The lady has written to him, and her letter has brought him comfort, but the reality of separation, felt as part of his bodily existence, always supervenes to qualify it. As if he were a poetic exercise or a formal letter, he cannot express true feeling in his outward appearance. The

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poem’s words, like those of the letter received, like all writing, mark the absence of what they refer to—skyn (494), mouth (501), brest (511), hert (515)—but the letter is also a fragile material reality held close to his body. Thus it has a double existence, as a comforting object and as mere words (see further Coldiron 2000: 30–8). Absence, introduced in the envoi of Ballade 10, is also a theme of the next two ballades, and indeed is a ‘prime mover’ of the whole sequence (ibid. 33). (This is true only of the English version: where the English ballades have absent, the corresponding French poems repeatedly have only the less absolute loingtain (distant).16 ). Ballade 11 begins with an echo of the refrain of 10: Charles is far from the lady, but his heart remains with her. He has Woe and Distress for company, and daily seeks comfort from Pleasure, ‘which Absence holt undir kay, | That Y ne may now stroke yowre sidis pleyne’ (523–4) (which Absence keeps locked up, so that now I may not stroke your smooth ﬂanks). This is one of many allusions to physical imprisonment, in which the courtly metaphor of the lover as his lady’s captive17 seems to be reinforced by Charles’s experience of life as an actual prisoner. As a member of the highest Anglo-French aristocracy, ‘senior in rank to the various English noble families guarding him over the years’ (Coldiron 2001: 102), he was treated as an honoured guest of those, such as Suffolk, in whose households he stayed, and he never suffered the physical miseries of a medieval dungeon. He was certainly kept under surveillance, though, so that the Daunger (haughtiness, disdain) of the courtly tradition mutates in Ballade 51 into a spy who ‘wacchith day and nyght’ (1794). He could not go where he pleased or meet whom he pleased, and, perhaps most painful, he could never risk expressing his true feelings, but must always keep up a fac¸ade for the beneﬁt of his hosts who were also his gaolers. He was divided from himself as well as from others; his life was no more

16 French text quoted from Champion (1923: i), cited by page number in text. Like many of the French ballades, the counterpart to the English Ballade 10 has no envoi. 17 As found, e.g. in the game of prisoner-and-captor played by Sir Bertilak’s wife and Sir Gawain on the ﬁrst day of the Temptation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or in the words of another Frenchman during the Hundred Years War, Geoffroy de la Tour-Landry, who writes of telling a lady his father wanted him to marry, ‘I wold wel and had lever be youre prysoner than ony others | and I thenke that youre pryson shold not be so hard ne cruell | as is the pryson of English men’ (translated by Caxton; Offord 1971: 27).

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than a document devised not so much to express as to conceal its inner meaning. We may speculate that the lack of intimate human contact that was likely to be a condition even of a prince’s imprisonment, and the shifting of communication from speech to writing, led to a sense of the absence of the self, while the absence of the lovers from each other is reﬂected in the very condition of writing, in which neither ‘I’ nor ‘you’ is truly present except as a grammatical cipher. The longing to ‘stroke yowre sidis pleyne’ is a mere fantasy; in Absence’s realm, the desire for physical presence and physical contact becomes all the stronger, and is evoked in words precisely because it cannot exist in reality. Ballade 12 goes even further in its expression of wishful fantasies of bodily contact: Syn that Y absent am thus from yow fare (God wot, madame, how hit doth me ennoy!), I humbly biseche yow as Y dar, If hit plese yow of yowre curtesy, When ye ar soul, withouten company, A mollyng, swete love-cosse to wisshe in me, With a quyk hert and a thought lusty, Forto aslake my gret adversit´e. Bi nyght to slepe as have Y no power: Thought cometh on me, Lust werrith me (not Y why), In which thought oft Y thynke, and nevyr the ner, That Y in armes have yow, my lady, For which Y clippe my pylow, lo, and cry, ‘O mercy, Love, and make me so happy That Y may see this thought or that Y dy, Forto aslake my gret adversit´e!’ Hope makith me a promis in manar He will me helpe, and saith me, ‘Care not, fy!’ But what, the long abood sore doth me war; Yet, where so be Y witt do or foly, I holde my pese, so trust Y hym trewly (And Hope surmounte daungerous Crewelt´e, That he not long shall holde of me mastry) Forto aslake my gret adversit´e. In trewe service thus more and more joy Y, The God of Love bisechyng humbly

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Upon my carfull case to have pit´e, And of my wille to gyve me sum party, 580 Forto aslake my gret adversit´e. (Since I am so far absent from you (God knows, madame, how it distresses me), I humbly beseech you, so far as I dare, if it should please you of your courtesy, when you are alone, without company, to wish to me a tender, sweet love-kiss, with a sincere heart and eager thought, so as to assuage my great misfortune. I have no power to sleep at night: sorrow comes upon me, desire assails me (I do not know why), and in that sorrow I often think—yet it never brings me any nearer—that I have you in my arms, my lady, and so I embrace my pillow, you see, and cry out, ‘O have mercy, Love, and grant me the happiness to see what I am thinking of before I die, so as to assuage my great misfortune!’ Hope makes me a kind of promise that he will help me, and says, ‘Fie, don’t worry!’, but for all that the long delay harasses me; yet, whether it is wisdom or folly to do so, I hold my peace, I trust him so faithfully (if Hope can get the better of disdainful Cruelty, so that he does not have control over me for long) to assuage my great misfortune. Thus I take ever greater joy in my faithful service, humbly beseeching the God of Love to have pity on my sorrowful situation and grant me some part of what I want so as to assuage my great misfortune.)

The symptoms from which Charles suffers are those described by Chaucer in the ‘prologue’ to The Book of the Duchess —‘defaute of slep’ (5, 25), ‘melancolye’ (23), ‘fantasies . . . in myn hede’ (28)—and insomnia, melancholy, and obsessive fantasies were well known to medieval physicians as the tokens of love-sickness (Wack 1990). Here Thought, meaning at once thoughts, memory, and sorrow or anxiety, spreads to encompass the whole poem. Hope itself, in which Charles puts his full trust, may be no more than an illusion, its success dependent on an if, and the tender kiss he begs the lady to wish him can at best be no more than her solitary fantasy. The most vividly sensuous evocations of bodily contact are those produced by hallucinatory wishes, and they always remind us of the absence of what is evoked. There is a similar moment in Ballade 41, where Charles writes that he would forgive Fortune her enmity, if only she would grant ‘That Y myght wrappe within myn armes soft | The fayrist born in liche to my menyng’ (1462–3) (That I might wrap the fairest creature alive softly within my arms, in accordance with what I am thinking). But in writing, bodily contact is always a fantasy, Y and yow are always the signiﬁers of what is missing; and this is writing that declares itself as such.

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Ballade 19 also focuses on its own textuality and on the difference between speech and writing: Most goodly yong, O plesaunt debonayre, Yowre sendyng, which me gaf comaundement A balad forto make, ye speke so fayre That with glad hert Y shew here myn entent. Resceyvith hit as hit is to yow ment: Ye mow well se, if ye lust to bihold, The greef that doth my swelty hert forrent, As bi the mowth Y lever had yow told. Yowre goodlyhed, hit doth me to repayre To be yowre man in what God hath me lent, Desiryng most of alle lyvith undir ayre Yow forto serve, but what, the gret turment That Y endewre syn that Y am absent! And eek to write me noyeth dowble fold, For gyf Y myght bi othir wey or went, As bi the mowth Y levyr had yow told. Suche is Daungere, my crewelle adversayre That of long tyme hath me in armes hent: In every deede so fynde Y him contrayre, That he ys glad to se m[e] thys forschente. More to re[h]e[r]se hit were but laboure spent; What greef Y lede and have of dayes old Hit axith space, wherfore, if ye assent, As bi the mouth Y levir had yow told. Go, rewdisshe bel, complayne my ponysshement; But welaway, Y wolde if that Y shulde —For forgetyng to knowe my jugement— As bi the mowthe Y levyr had yow told.

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(Most beautiful young creature, O delightful and gracious one, your message commanding me to compose a ballade you phrased so sweetly that I show my willingness here with glad heart. Receive it as it is intended: you may well see, if it pleases you to look, the grief that lacerates my swooning heart, however much I would rather have told you by mouth. Your beauty makes me continue to be your vassal in all that God has granted me, desiring most, of all who live beneath heaven, to serve you; but, O, the great torment that I endure since I am absent! And writing doubles my distress, for if there were any way or means I could do so, I would rather have told you by mouth. Such is Disdain, my

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cruel adversary, who long ago seized me in his arms: I ﬁnd him opposed to me in every action, so that he is glad to see me thus ruined. To list [my troubles] further would be merely a waste of effort; the grief I endure, and have done for many a long day, demands space, and so, if you agree, I would rather tell you by mouth. Go, uncouth letter, appeal against my punishment; but, alas! to prevent you from forgetting the judgement against me, if only I could, I would rather have told you by mouth.)

The lady has ordered Charles to compose a ballade, and that is what we are reading, as is conﬁrmed by the textual deixis of here (765). In its words she can bihold (767) his sufferings, implying, I think, that she can see them but not feel them. One reason for this is that the ballade she has demanded is too narrow a room to contain all his sufferings. That is surely why a ballade is speciﬁed, and why it is as he approaches its end that Charles expresses a sense of the constriction it imposes: like Wordsworth’s sonnet, the ballade is a ‘scanty plot of ground’ on which to construct an adequate expression of a grief that ‘axith space’.18 A more fundamental reason for the inadequacy of the ballade to express what its writer feels is that indicated in the refrain-line: it is only writing, and ‘bi the mowth Y lever had yow told’. What can be conveyed by mouth between lovers is, of course, not only words unconstricted by any ﬁxed form but also kisses. In the envoi, found only in the English version, the poem is sent on its way to the lady, but the poet must remain behind. It is now momentarily envisaged as a petition intended, like Chaucer’s Complaint Unto Pity (5–6) ‘to compleyne | Upon the crueltee and tirannye’—but of whom? Like so many of the ballades in Part I of The Duke’s Book, this one is suspended between the personal and the political. If the lady is in a position to mitigate the jugement (788) made against the petitioner or the ponysshement (786) imposed on him, then Daunger must represent her own disdain, but the violence of the language used about Daunger may incline us to see

18 Arn (1994: 165) (gloss on lines 782–5) interprets space as referring to time, rather than to the space occupied by a ballade on the page. By the 15th cent. space could have either meaning (note the halfway position of Oxford English Dictionary’s sense I.4.e, with an example from 1440: ‘A spell of writing or narration’). I prefer the latter interpretation as in keeping both with the English poem’s intense textual reﬂexivity and with the corresponding French ballade’s reference to cest escript (Champion 1923: i. 37) (this writing). Cf. also line 15 of ‘Myn hertys joy, and all myn hole plesance’ on p. 222 above.

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him as personifying the enemies who keep Charles captive. As usual, the reference to absence (774) does not occur in the French text, and the envoi’s explicit separation of the poet from what he has written implies that it includes his absence not only from the lady but from the written words: only in communication by mouth would he be truly present. The ballade’s material (the poet’s suffering) derives from the very absence that causes it to exist as a text, and the poet’s absence from the lady makes it necessary for him to convey his suffering in a form from which he is himself absent: absence, pain, and writing are inextricably linked together. The following ballade continues to make explicit the text’s material textuality; its envoy (found only in the English version) begins by asking, ‘What nede Y more my papir spende or enke?’19 (why need I expend my paper or ink any further?) (820). And Ballade 21 foregrounds writing and its difference from speech in an especially striking way, for it is devoted to praise of the originator of writing itself: Honure and prays as mot to him habound That ﬁrst did fynde the wayes of writyng, For comfort gret ordeynyd he that stounde To suche as have of lovys payne felyng; For when to speke they nave tyme nor metyng To say ther ladies of ther adversit´e, Yet doth it them a gret tranquyllit´e Forto endite and sende as in writyng What grevous lijf they lede, as semeth me, Only for love and feithfull trewe servyng. Whoso that write how he is wrappid and wounde In suche greef as kan kepe him from laughyng, And so may sende it to his lady round, Which is the leche to all his soore felyng, If then to rede hit be to her plesyng, She may right well therin perceyve and se What woofull governaunce endewrith he, Of which Pit´e may geve hir, hit mevyng, That his desert is reward of mercy Only for love and feithfull trewe servyng.

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19 Cf. the corresponding line in Ballade 26: ‘What nede Y spende more enke or parchement?’ (1000).

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That hit is thus in myn hert have Y found, And knowe the craft, for when he tath sekyng 845 Nothyng kan him appese upon the ground To he have send or made sum endityng On the fayre which is his most likyng; Of which, if so that his fortune be To have a response, of hir gret bount´e, 850 He tath therin so huge a rejoysyng That forget is he had on his party, Only for love and feithfull trewe servyng. But what, madame, Crist ewre me so that ye May undirstonde as bi my mouth telyng 855 What Y have dewrid in tymys quantit´e Only for love and feithfull trewe servyng. (May honour and praise go in abundance to him who ﬁrst invented the means of writing, for at that time he provided great comfort to those who have experience of the pain of love; for when they have no opportunity to speak or to meet with their ladies to tell them of their misfortune, it brings them great comfort, it seems to me, to write down and send in written form what a wretched life they lead just because of their love and faithful true service. If someone writes how he is wrapped and wound in such misery as prevents him from laughing and can then send it at once to his lady, who is the physician for all his painful feelings, and if it then pleases her to read it, she can very well perceive and see in it what a miserable way of life he is enduring; and if this moves her, Pity may prompt her that he deserves to be rewarded by mercy just because of his love and faithful true service. I have found in my heart that it is so, and have learned this art, for when he [i.e. the heart] begins to sigh, nothing on earth can relieve him till he has sent or written something about the fair one who means most to him; and if it should be his fortune to have a reply from her, of her great generosity, he rejoices at it so greatly that he forgets what he had for his share [i.e., suffering] just for his love and faithful true service. But, O, madame, may Christ grant me that you may understand by words from my mouth what I have endured for a long time just for love and faithful true service.)

Most of this poem seems to be making a quite different point from Ballade 19: rather than stressing the shortcomings of writing as a substitute for bodily presence, it praises its efﬁcacy as a way of relieving the sorrow of separation. If the lady can ‘perceyve and se’ (839) the lover’s sufferings in his written words, that may be enough to stir her pity; and if she rewards him with a response (850)—presumably also

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written, given that they cannot meet in person (828)—that is enough to make him forget all he has endured. But the envoi (this time found also in the French version) implies that in the preceding stanzas Charles has been putting a good face on things: the craft he has learned (845), the ars dictaminis taught by his heart, is not enough, because what he really wants is to be in his lady’s presence, so that he can recount his sufferings not merely in written words, however skilful, but ‘bi my mouth’ (850), in spoken words that can be accompanied by kisses. Ballade 30 refers to a letter in which the lady wrot (1283) to Charles to put aside his grief and pledged that she would seek means to visit him. The refrain is ‘In trust that Y shall se yow hastily’ (1288, etc.), and this passionately expressed poem repeatedly contrasts the written pledge with the sight, which is always promised, never present. This is one of a series of ballades that emphasize the lady’s continuing absence, despite tantalizing tokens and promises of presence and sight. Yet though Charles never sees her, his verse-letters may: ‘Syn Y ne may as se yow, nevyrtheles | My writyng shalle, so Jhesu ben his gide’ (1374–5) (Since I cannot see you, nevertheless my writing shall, if Jesus may be its guide). Recurrent variants on the ‘Go, little book’ topos underline this separation between the poet and what he writes, while emphasizing the materiality of the written text—‘O goo, thou derke, fordullid, rude myture’ (1406) (O go, you gloomy, spiritless, clumsy poem). Y is repeated again and again in the ballades, yet it is only a written Y that can see the lady. Ballade 47 begins dramatically by welcoming ‘Fresshe Tidyngis’ (1659), presumably in the form of a letter, and asking whether it has ‘had of my ladi sight’ (1660), and whether she has changed from her who, ‘when last we partid compan´e’ (1663), said, ‘Tredyng my foot, and that so pratily, | ‘‘Teys yow to whom Y love am and no moo!’’ ’ (1665–6) (Pressing my foot with hers, and very prettily too, said, ‘It is you and no other whose love I am!’). The recollected game of footsie is an addition to the more decorous French, in which Charles asks whether the lady has changed from her who wrote, ‘C’estes vous de qui je suis amye’ (p. 69) (it is you whose love I am). This makes possible a more dramatic contrast in the English between an evocation of presence with bodily contact and the mere textuality of its written expression, for the envoi runs:

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I writen have within myn hert, trewly, As for lesyng, to kepe it where Y go, This refrayt, which Y love right hertily: ‘Teys yow to whom Y love am and no mo!’ (1685–8) (Truly, I have written within my heart, for fear of losing it, to keep it with me wherever I go, this refrain, which I love with all my heart: ‘It is you and no other whose love I am!’)

Thus in the English poem the words spoken by the lady become the written refrain of the ballade, presented precisely as a refrain and as written, and thus preserved from loss. They are written, though, not on the page but in the heart, while what we have before us is not the heart but the page, a mere text, in which the living words die even as they gain permanence. In Ballade 49, too, writing is used as a metaphor: ‘As in writyng Y putt have my wisshis, | And that even in the depist of my thought’ (1718–19) (I have put my wishes in writing, and that in the very depth of my memory). There they are ‘richely portrayde’ (1728) (vividly depicted) in the precious illuminated manuscript that is his book of memory, and his heart ponders them incessantly while muttering about the wounds Love has given him. The wishes avail Charles little, yet he will not sell them at any price, for fear that ‘therin ther were mysdemyng o[gh]t | Thorugh false conspire of sum unhappy wight’ (1724–5) (anything in them aroused suspicion through the false plotting of some wretched creature). Like the writing in his thought, that on the page, whether in this poem or in a prisoner’s coded messages, is liable to misinterpretation; what is written and then read by others passes beyond the writer’s control. The whole poem, far more than its French equivalent, is darkened by the fear of conspiratorial mysdemyng. Ballade 52 expresses fear of being forgotten, with the refrain,‘For whoo that absent is, is woobigoon’ (1819) (for he who is absent is beset with woe); as usual, absence is not mentioned in the corresponding French poem. Ballade 54, unusually long at ﬁfty-ﬁve lines, is another poem of absence (but only in its English version) and of the long-term captive’s dread that out of sight may mean out of mind. It urges the lady to keep remembrance of Charles ‘Within yowre thought enclosid pratily’ (1874) (prettily enclosed within your memory), and confesses his fear that she may have forgotten ‘this absent payne in which Y dry’ (1896) (this absent pain in which I suffer)—absent to her, pain to

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him. He has had no writyng (1900) to reassure him; yet he promises to do his best ‘Yow forto plese and this with Absence ﬁght’ (1909) (to please you and thus to struggle against Absence). She knows ‘Whi that Y absent am’ (1914) (why I am absent)—though the reason is never made explicit to us, and it is just this vagueness that makes possible the sequence’s fusion of courtly allegory with literal imprisonment. All that he needs for comfort is certainty of her love, but such certainty is never available, even when ﬁxed in writing, for absence is not a contingent but a necessary feature of textuality. In Ballade 55 news comes that the lady is sick. This is contradicted in Ballade 56—a perfect illustration of the unreliability of writing in its correspondence to reality—and then in Ballade 57 her death is announced. Now absence is redoubled and made permanent; not just the text but the world is deprived of the lady’s presence. And this in turn intensiﬁes Charles’s sense of his own absence, as the sequence brings us to focus on a textuality explicitly drained of presence. Ballade 58 is the ﬁrst in the sequence with no French equivalent: In slepe ben leyd all song, daunce, or disport, Al[l] prays of bewt´e, bote, or g[e]ntilesse; Now Deth, allas, hath to my discomfort Enrayﬁd me my lady and maystres! A, woofull hert, whos sorow kan not cesse, Round with hir deth thou shulde have tan thi bere, Dwellyng no more with joy nor yet gladness, For, without hir, of nought now lyve Y here. O myghti God, what am Y, quyk or deed? Nay, certis, deed, this am Y verry sewre, For fele Y plesere, joy nor lustihed. Wo worthe the fate of my mysaventure! Nought lak Y now but clothe my sepulture. O clothe me, care-sewte of my ladi dere, That fynde my silf an outcast creature, For, without hir, of nought now lyve Y here! Me thynkith right as a syphir now Y serve, That nombre makith and is him silf noon. O cursid Deth, whi nelt thou do me sterve, Syn my swet hert, syn my good sowl, is goon? Now may Y say, alone Y goo, alon Savyng with Sorow, Payne and Displesere,

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Epistolary Poems With whos deth all welthe bicame my foon, For, without hir, of nought now lyve Y here. I kepe no more of lijf then were my right, Forwhi it were extorcioun in manere; Wherfore Y wolde my lijf sum nedy wight Hit had, for now of nought as lyve Y here.

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(All song, dance, or amusement, all praise of beauty, goodness, or nobility, are laid asleep; now Death, alas, to my sorrow, has stolen my lady and mistress away from me! Ah, woeful heart, whose sorrow cannot end, along with her death you should have taken to your bier, dwelling no longer with joy nor yet with gladness, for, without her, I live here now to no purpose. O mighty God, what am I, alive or dead? Dead, certainly, I am completely sure of this, for I feel no pleasure, joy, or cheerfulness. A curse on my unfortunate fate! Nothing remains to me now but to prepare my grave. O shroud of my dear lady, clothe me, who ﬁnd myself an outcast creature, for, without her, I live here now to no purpose! It seems to me that now I function as a zero, which makes up a number without being one itself. O cursed Death, why will you not make me die, since my sweet heart, since my good soul, has gone? Now I may say that I walk alone, alone except for Sorrow, Pain, and Misery, for with her death all joy became my enemy, for, without her, I live here now to no purpose. I desire no more life than I have a right to, because that would be a kind of extortion; and so I wish that some creature in need could have it [i.e. my share of life], for now I live here to no purpose.)

In this poem, conveying the sense of a self that, bereaved of its purpose in life, is experienced as emptiness or absence, Charles seems to me to achieve his most intense and painful focus on the absence inherent in writing. The refrain-line brings together the proximal deictics that are the linguistic basis of our belief in writing as presence—I-nowhere—but at the same time undoes them. On its ﬁrst appearance, that line means ‘Without her I live here to no purpose’, but as the poem proceeds it takes on new meaning. When Charles writes, ‘Me thynkith right as a syphir now Y serve, | That nombre makith and is him silf noon’ (2042–3), he introduces the concept of zero, adopted from arabic mathematics, using it as an analogy. As Thomas Usk had explained in the 1380s (also in the course of an analogy), ‘Althoughe a sypher in augrym have no might in signifycacion of it selve, yet he yeveth power in signifycacion to other’ (Shoaf 1998: 177) (Although in arithmetic a zero has no signifying power in itself, it gives signifying power to other

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[numbers]). Zero is nothing except in combination with other numbers, and the lady’s death reveals the emptiness of the textual subject; it is no more than a vacant position.20 But ‘That nombre makith and is him silf noon’ surely has another meaning too: he ‘makes number’ in the sense of composing verses that obey the rules of myture (1406),21 but what he is differs from what he writes. The here of the refrain initially implies ‘here on earth’, but in this context it becomes an instance of textual deixis: ‘I live here, in this writing, as nothing.’ In the remainder of The Duke’s Book writing and absence lose their thematic importance; the sequence becomes concerned with ﬁnding means of adjusting to life without the lady. Without sentimentalizing the book’s relation to Charles’s real life, we may suppose that, with the lady’s death, he needs to try to forget the reality she once possessed (there really had been a Bonne outside his writing) and the contrasting textuality in which he is now inescapably imprisoned. If he succeeds, writing can become his whole world and thus can become invisible, nowhere because everywhere. The refrain of Ballade 60 is ‘O wofulle wrecche, O wrecche, lesse onys thi speche!’ (2089 etc.) (O sorrowful wretch, O wretch, lose your speech once and for all), as though it were his wish to dissolve from voice into text, to be no more than the nothing, the cipher, the O, that is the ‘I’ of writing. But already Charles as author is making preparations for the renewal of love in Part III of his book. Ballade 61, one with a French original, describes a game of chess in which Fortune assisted Daunger to capture Charles’s lady; thus he is defeated, says the refrain, ‘Without so be Y make a lady newe’ (2118 etc.), meaning both ‘unless I should happen to queen one of my pawns’ and ‘unless I should ﬁnd myself a new lady to love’. Ballade 62, existing only in English, takes off from this refrain,

20 In The Kingis Quair James I similarly deﬁnes himself as zero, though without using the word, when he writes, ‘I suffer allone amang the ﬁguris nyne, | Ane wofull wrecche that to no wight may spede, | And yit of every lyvis help hath nede’ (194–6) (I alone suffer among the nine ﬁgures, a miserable wretch who can be of service to no creature, and yet needs help from every living being). An exposition of Lacan’s thought explains that there ‘Desire functions much as the zero unit in the numerical chain—its place is both constitutive and empty’ (Rose, in Mitchell and Rose 1982: 32). That seems to be much what James and Charles mean when, both writing as prisoners, they present themselves as embodiments of desire for the unattainable. In Dunbar’s Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (Bawcutt 1996), line 196, the phrase ‘syphyr in bour’ (zero in the bedroom) is used to refer to impotence. 21 See Oxford English Dictionary, ‘number’, sb., sense 17.

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beginning, ‘Shulde Y me make a lady newe? Fy, fy!’ (2141). But the very repudiation of the idea seems to give it substance: he would rather die than do so, ‘Nas she selfe same Y chees to my lady’ (2143) (Unless she were the very same one that I chose as my [ﬁrst] lady)—exactly what he will imagine in his second dream—and though his ﬁrst lady were just like the phoenix, with no descendents, still, ‘clerkys seyne, | Of this fenyx ther cometh an othir blyve’ (2149–50) (scholars say that from this phoenix another comes immediately). The speculation and the poem are brought to an end with ‘Lef of, my penne!’ (2167), implying, I think, that if he does not stop writing along these lines, he may write himself into acceptance of a second love. In the subtext, perhaps, lies the traditional identiﬁcation of pen with phallus, with the desire to write now seen as a mere surrogate for the sexual desire, personiﬁed by Venus, that overrides the permanent idealization of a speciﬁc object. In the roundels of Part II there are occasional references to writing, but the stories they tell do not place most of them as written documents motivated by the separation of lovers, and thus they do not produce the link between textuality and absence that characterizes Part I. When Charles agrees to write the ballade on Fortune for his friend, the materiality of writing is stressed once more: he takes ‘enke and papir’ (4664) and then, having mused, ‘gan my papir sprede | And wrote right thus, if so ye list to rede’ (4678–9) (spread out my paper, and wrote just as follows, if it should please you to read it). After Charles’s second dream, as we have seen, ‘my lady newe’ (5241) cheerfully agrees to enter into correspondence with him. Soon after this, as night falls, they part; the lady is eager to see him again, but he seems oddly reluctant to make a date with her: ‘But may ye not abide here to tomorow?’ ‘A, madame, no. Fare wel, seynt Johne to borow!’ ‘Bi holy God, Y trowe bet that ye may Ellis come and se us, lo, sum othir day?’ ‘Madame, a trouthe, Y thanke yowre ladiship: It may me happe to se yow here this weke.’ (5334–9) (‘But can’t you stay here till tomorrow?’ ‘Ah, madame, no. Farewell, and may St John protect you!’ ‘By holy God, I hope very much that in that case you can come and see us some other day?’ ‘Madame, in truth, I thank your ladyship: I may happen to see you here this week.’)

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Despite all he says about his quaking heart, this sounds remarkably like a brush-off. Kissing her goodbye, he exclaims, rather oddly, ‘Now, welcome sorow!’ (5332). Arn (1994: 524) rightly notes the relevance of earlier places in the sequence where sorrow has been said to accompany love, but the implication seems to me to be that he welcomes their separation because it provides both an excuse for writing and sorow to write about. The whole transition to the ﬁnal sequence of ballades is strange. He goes on to explain that he had a sleepless night trying to decide whether ‘To speke or writ when next Y came hir to’ (5344) (To speak or write when I next encountered her); he decides that ‘for fere of forgetyng, | Bi mouth Y wolde my mater to hir tell’ (5346–7) (for fear she should forget me, I would tell her by mouth); and yet what follows is a further series of written communications, full of references to ‘this scripture’ and ‘this meture’ (5600–2), questions as to ‘What may Y more yow write, at wordis fewe?’ (5836) (What more can I write you, in few words?), and injunctions to ‘Go, dul complaynt, my lady this report’ (5791 etc.) (Go, doleful complaint, and tell my lady this). There is no anguish now at the writer’s absence from what he has written, but almost a sense of safety. My impression is different from that suggested by Arn, who writes (1990: 26) that the love affair in Part III ‘seems to be conducted under the banner of Venus alone, who clearly represents physical love unadorned by courtly trappings. The persona seems to be playing a game of love all by himself, unaided in his amorous idealism by either the God of Love or his chosen lady . . . his case of ‘‘love’s malady’’ is incurable.’ My sense is that Charles, whether as ﬁctional lover or as actual poet (and I am not sure that the distinction can now be clearly made) has become habituated to absence and writing as the only medium for love.22 He sets out the situation with striking clarity towards the end of Part III: 22 There are no English precedents for Charles’s book, but he might have found a French precedent in Guillaume de Machaut’s Voir Dit, a more intricate narrative that also includes love-letters in verse. Of this Sylvia Huot has written (1987: 285–6), ‘What Guillaume discovers is that writing does not reenact or enable lovemaking but, rather, replaces it entirely . . . as love and eroticism are transposed into the language of poetry, poetic activity comes to replace sexual activity . . . writing, precisely because of its detachment from the empirical world, affords the opportunity for an idealization of love: the written text has the peculiar property of mediating between the lovers while at the same time shielding them one from the other.’ I suggest that some similar discovery may take place in the course of The Duke’s Book.

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Presence of yow hit causith my comfort, And so my payne when sight of yow Y mysse; And syn so is Y may not yow resort, This write Y yow, myn owen dere hertis blisse. (6395–8) (Your presence causes my comfort, and thus when I lack sight of you [it causes] my pain; and since the fact is that I cannot come to you, I am writing this to you, my own dear heart’s joy.)

The ﬁnal ballade adds: What may Y doon, now levyng yowre presence, But drawe me sool my silven to complayne, In waylyng so the tyme of yowre absence, Which is to me, God wot, most grevous payne? (6512–15) (Now leaving your presence, what can I do but seek to lament alone, bewailing the period of your absence, which to me is, God knows, most grievous pain?)

This is all too neat, too clear, both in argument and in the clockwork metrics. Once it is seen so plainly that absence is necessary to provide the occasion and subject-matter for courtly poetry, then (somewhat as when we read Derrida for the second time) the loss of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ becomes less shocking, and the afﬁrmation of ‘grevous payne’ less convincing. For whatever reason, Part III of Charles’s book, containing just half as many ballades as Part I, is not only less moving but less interestingly executed than Parts I and II—much of it could have been written by the Duke of Suffolk. But the book as a whole, hovering between drama and miscellany, and exploring with precision and passion some emotional consequences of the fact that even lovepoetry is made out of words and that its ‘I’ and ‘you’ mark not the presence but the absence of human subjects, remains an achievement that deserves far more attention than it has received.

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Index Abrams, M. H. 179 n. 8, 190 accessus 179, 212 Achilles 214–15 Adamson, Sylvia 5, 30, 33, 65, 67 n. 18, 127 Aers, David 33, 149 n. 6 Albright, Daniel 175 allegory 31, 153–4, 156–7, 170, 178 n. 6, 198, 202–7, 209, 229–30, 242 Allen, Rosamund 38 Altieri, Charles 31 Altman, Janet Gurkin 213 Ambrose, Saint 211 Andreas Capellanus 177 n. 5 Anne of Bohemia 93, 161 n. 17 Archibald, Elizabeth 135 Aristotle 9, 171 Arn, Mary-Jo 226 and n. 12, 246 Arnold, Matthew 106 ars dictaminis 200, 223, 240 ars poetica 83 Astell, Ann W. 101, 112–13, 117 n. 22, 118, 121 astrology 109–10, 134 Augustine of Canterbury, Saint 15 Augustine of Hippo, Saint 73, 147 City of God 116 n. 21 Confessions 33 Austen, Jane 65 Awntyrs off Arthure 201–2 Bakhtin, Mikhail 10 n. 9 Baldwin, Ralph 69 Bally, Charles 65 Banﬁeld, Ann 19 n. 18, 28–9, 48 n. 7, 65, 87 Unspeakable Sentences 28 Barker, Francis 32–3 Barolini, Teodolinda 170, 172 Barr, Helen 167–8 Barron, W. R. J. 49 Barthes, Roland 7, 18, 24, 48, 93 Baudri of Bourgueil 214 n. 4, 225 n. 11

Bede: Ecclesiastical History 13 Beichner, Paul E. 109 Belsey, Catherine 32 Benoˆıt de Sainte-Maure 95, 97 Benson, C. David 105 nn. 5–6 ´ Benveniste, Emile 6, 40–1, 91, 118–19 Bernardus Silvestris 110 n. 12 Bernart de Ventadorn 35, 178–9, 182–3 Beroul 22 Bestul, Thomas H. 73, 85 Blanch, Robert J. 4 n. 2, 141–3 Bloomﬁeld, Morton W. 71 Boccaccio, Giovanni 13, 81, 83–4, 85–6, 95, 98 n. 29 Decameron 120 Filostrato 75 Boethius: Consolation of Philosophy 197, 208–9 Boffey, Julia 176 n. 2, 221 Bokenham, Osbern 14 n. 14 Legends of Holy Women 35, 133 Bond, Gerald A. 214 n. 4 Bonne d’Armagnac 227, 244 Booth, Wayne 116, 143, 149 Børch, Marianne 68 n. 1 Borroff, Marie 141 Bowers, John M. 161 n. 17 Boyd, William 1 Bradshaw, Graham 76 Brawne, Fanny 196–7 Brewer, Derek 75 Briseis 214–15, 217 Bronson, Bertrand H. 71 n. 3, 75 Brooks, Cleanth 106 Browne, William H. 107 n. 9 Brownlee, Kevin 78 Bue˜na Cuevas, Manuel 65 Burrow, J. A. 83, 92, 99 n. 31, 141, 171, 197 n. 14, 226–7 Butterﬁeld, Ardis 177 n. 3 Bynum, Caroline Walker 31

268 Caie, Graham D. 117 n. 22 Camargo, Martin 201, 212, 215, 223 Canace 217–19 Capgrave, John 133 Carey, Kathleen 127 n. 30 Carruthers, Mary 10 n. 8, 127 n. 29 Carton, Evan 86 Cerquiglini, Bernard 65 Cervone, Cristina 163 n. 19 Charles of Orleans 13 n. 12, 35, 150, 181, 212, 221, 225–47 Chatman, Seymour 20, 30, 48 n. 7, 92 n. 21 Chaucer, Geoffrey 8, 30, 33–7, 47, 67, 70, 79, 92 n. 20, 107, 111, 142, 151, 172 n. 25, 177–8, 181, 186, 208 n. 22, 221 Adam Scriveyn 14 n. 14 Anelida and Arcite 201 Boece 209 Book of the Duchess 68, 71, 73, 104, 111, 151, 154–8, 161, 168–9, 173, 176, 235 Canterbury Tales 2, 68, 87, 95, 101–6, 117, 119–20, 130, 135, 151, 172 n. 24, 174, 231 Clerk’s Prologue 79 Clerk’s Tale 10 n. 9 Complaint Unto Pity 104 n. 4, 198–210, 213, 237 Franklin’s Tale 110–11, 126, 134, 180 General Prologue 12, 69, 101–2, 105, 108, 172 House of Fame 27, 104, 213 Knight’s Tale 119, 126, 133–5 Legend of Good Women 104, 119–20, 155, 180, 213, 229 Man of Law’s Prologue 110 n. 12 Man of Law’s Tale 21, 34, 101–36, 148–9, 160, 168, 174, 203 Melibee 172 n. 24 Miller’s Prologue 56 n. 13, 120, 126 n. 28 Monk’s Tale 79, 111 Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale 102–3, 111 Parliament of Fowls 86, 104, 171, 201, 221 Physician’s Tale 102–3, 108, 133 Prioress’s Tale 99, 111 Retractions 73, 130, 176

Index Second Nun’s Tale 99, 119, 131–33 Shipman’s Tale 119 Sir Thopas 81, 117 Squire’s Tale 67, 110, 204 Troilus and Criseyde 2, 12–13, 21–2, 34, 38, 40, 52, 66–101, 104, 106, 108, 118, 120–1, 123, 125–7, 129–30, 133–4, 137, 148–9, 160, 174, 195, 201, 203–5, 213–15, 223 Wife of Bath’s Prologue 26–7, 61 n. 15, 120, 151 Wife of Bath’s Tale 79, 111 Chr´etien de Troyes 37 Christina Mirabilis 132 Cicero 211 n. 1 cinematic narrative 30, 46–8, 67, 127, 140, 147 Clanchy, M. T. 10–12 Cleanness 34, 137, 141–7, 153 n. 8, 169 Clogan, Paul M. 118 Coghill, Nevill: The Poet Chaucer 68 Cohn, Dorrit 19–20, 24 n. 21, 29, 63, 65 n. 17, 91, 148, 159 n. 15 The Distinction of Fiction 21 Transparent Minds 2–3 Coldiron, Anne 225–6, 228, 233 Coleman, Joyce 10 Coleridge, S. T.: Biographia Literaria 33 communication theory of language/narrative 5, 24–5, 28, 45 complaint 183–5, 198–209, 246 Constable, Giles 211, 218 n. 6 Cooney, Helen 119 n. 24, 121 n. 25, 122 n. 26 Cooper, Helen 116–18, 130 ‘courtly love’ 177 n. 5 Critchley, Simon 28 Culler, Jonathan 190, 196, 200–1 Dante 10 n. 8, 74, 79, 81 Commedia 171–3 Purgatorio 170 Davenport, W. A. 164, 183 David, Alfred 110 Davis, Kathleen 114 n. 17 Dawson, Robert B. 107, 131–2

Index deixis 5–8, 11, 15, 29, 33, 39, 47, 65, 91–4, 127–8, 139–40, 145, 147, 182–3, 196–7, 205, 213, 217, 219–21, 225, 237, 244 Delany, Sheila 101 Delasanta, Rodney 110–12 DeLillo, Don: Libra 23 De Looze, Laurence 172 n. 24 Derrida, Jacques 13, 15, 45 n. 6, 118, 213, 220, 247 Glas 209 Limited Inc. 8 ‘Linguistics and Grammatology’ 5–9 De Saussure, Ferdinand 9 Course in General Linguistics 5–6 Descartes, Ren´e 27, 33 Deschamps, Eustache 78, 178 Diana, Princess 132 Dido 73, 213 Dinshaw, Carolyn 4, 104, 113, 116 n. 21 Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics 73–4 dit 35 Donaldson, E. Talbot 69–73, 75, 98–100, 104, 108, 172 Dorothea of Montau 132 dreams 71, 148, 150, 152–7, 163, 197, 227–8 Dronke, Peter 177 n. 4 Dryden, John 102 Dunbar, William: Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo 244 n. 20 Durling, Robert M. 72 Eberle, Patricia J. 134 Edward III, King 17, 178 Edwards, Robert R. 75 Eleanor of Aquitaine 177 n. 5, 179 Elias, Norbert 76 Eliot, George 113 n. 14 Eliot, T. S.: Ash-Wednesday 166 n. 20 Elizabeth of Spalbeek 132 Emar´e 136 enunciatio 11, n. 10 epistolary writing 35, 150, 175, 183, 194–8, 211–47 ‘ethic dative’ 138–9 Evans, Ruth 4

269 Fein, David A. 231 ﬁctional narrative 20–23, 60–2, 64–5 Field, Rosalind 22 n. 20, 38 n. 1, 50, 61 Finlayson, John 37, 38 n. 1 Fisher, John H. 200 n. 16 Flaubert, Gustave 29, 65 Fleischman, Suzanne 23, 39, 40 n. 5, 41 Tense and Narrativity 19 n. 18 Fludernik, Monika 5 n. 4, 6 n. 5, 28, 40, 113 n. 14, 150 n. 7, 190 The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction 28 n. 22 Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology 3 Foucault, Michel 32 Fowler, Alastair 201 Fowler, Elizabeth 116–17 Fox, Denton 96 n. 25 Frankis, John 80 n. 13 free indirect 6, 44, 65–6 Freud, Sigmund 97 n. 27 Friedemann, K¨ate: Die Rolle des Erz¨ahlers in der Epik 151 Froissart, Jean 178 Fuchs, Anna 7 Gaimar: Estoire des Engleis 48, 61 Ganim, John 37, 72 Gaylord, Alan 110 Genette, G´erard 148 n. 5 Geoffrey of Monmouth: Historia Regum Britanniae 13 Geoffrey of Vinsauf: Poetria Nova 86 Geoffroy de la Tour-Landry 233 n. 17 Georgianna, Linda 114 Gibson, Andrew 47–8 Giddens, Anthony 30 Glossa Ordinaria 12 Goldstein, R. James 99 n. 30 Golston, Michael 190 n. 12 Gordon, Ida L. 85 Gower, John 92 n. 20, 94, 108, 134 Confessio Amantis 101 n. 1, 107 n. 8 Granson, Oton de 178 Green, Richard Firth 182 Guido delle Colonne 95

270 Guillaume de Lorris 154 Roman de la Rose 31, 153–4, 168–9, 198, 204–5, 207–8 Haller, Robert S. 110 Hamburger, K¨ate 29, 60, 62–5 The Logic of Literature 19–21, 23–5 Hamilton, Marie P. 107 n. 9, 119 Hanks, D. Thomas 136 n. 33 Hansen, Elaine Tuttle 72 Harty, Kevin J. 96 n. 25 Havelok 21, 23–4, 37, 48–68, 71, 79, 82–3, 92, 94–5, 137, 143, 154, 169 Hawthorn, Jeremy 30 Hays, Gregory 211 Hazlitt, William 122 Hedley, Jane 7–8 Heidegger, Martin 28 Hendrix, Laurel L. 113–14, 116 n. 21 Heng, Geraldine 114 n. 17 Henry II, King 179 Henryson, Robert 22–3, 95–6 Morall Fabillis 201 n. 17 Hernadi, Paul 2 Hesdin 159 Hexter, Ralph J. 213 Hippolytus 216–17 Hjelmslev, Louis 9 Hoccleve, Thomas 14 n. 14, 181 Series 35 Holmes, Olivia 187 n. 11 homodiegesis 34, 137, 148–74, 198 Horgan, Frances 153 n. 9 Howard, Donald R. 66–7 Howells, Christina 13, 128 Huot, Sylvia 246 n. 22 Hupp´e, Bernard F. 73, 81 n. 15 Hymes, Dell 18 individualism 69–70, 105 Innocent III, Pope: De Miseria 107 n. 8, 110 n. 12 Isaiah 129 Isidore of Seville: Etymologiae 211 n. 2 Jahn, Manfred 1, 148 Jacobson, Howard 213, 214 n. 4

Index James I, king of Scotland: Kingis Quair 197–8, 244 n. 20 Jauss, Hans-Robert 40 n. 5 Jean de Meun 153 n. 8, 171 Jeffreys, Mark 175 n. 1 John, Saint (Apostle) 152–3, 164, 167–70 John of Gaunt 156 John of Salisbury 163 n. 18, 211 Jordan, Robert M. 71, 105 n. 5 Kamio, A. 21 n. 19 Kant, Immanuel 151 Kay, Sarah 179 Kean, P. M. 72, 130 Keats, John: Eve of St. Agnes 39 Ode on a Grecian Urn 106 ‘This living hand’ 196–7, 216 Keiser, George R. 135–6 Kellogg, Robert: The Nature of Narrative 17–18, 48 Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn 14 n. 14, 170 Kieckhefer, Richard 132 n. 32 King Horn 34, 37–49, 52, 54, 59, 79, 83, 95 Kinney, Clare Regan 3 n. 1 Kirk, Elizabeth D. 149 n. 6 Kiser, Lisa J. 72 Kittay, Jeffrey 11–12 Kittredge, George Lyman 4, 68, 87, 102–4, 106, 108, 111–12, 117, 130, 143, 151, 157 Chaucer and His Poetry 103 Knight, Stephen 72 Knopp, Sherron E. 95 n. 23 Knowlton, Edgar C. 107 n. 9 Kolve, V. A. 122, 133 Kruger, Steven 163 n. 18 Kuhn, Thomas S. 76 Kuroda, S.-Y. 3, 20–1, 24–5, 28–9, 45 Lacan, Jacques 32, 244 n. 20 Lai d’Haveloc 48 Landman, James 115, 119 n. 24, 121 Langland, William 117 Piers Plowman 14 n. 15, 35–6, 116 n. 21, 163, 171 Langtoft, Piers: Chronicle 16 Lavezzo, Kathy 115 n. 19

Index Lawlor, John 76 Lawton, David 36, 75, 118 n. 23 Layamon 16 Brut 13–15 Leclercq, Jean 14 n. 14 Le Goff, Jacques 189 Leicester, H. Marshall 13 n. 12, 115 n. 19 Leithauser, Brad 209 Lemaire de Belges, Jean 32 Lewis, C. S. 204 The Allegory of Love 68, 177 n. 5 Lewis, Robert E. 107 n. 8, 117 n. 22 Lips, Marguerite 6 ‘Lollius’ 21, 82 Loomis, Dorothy Bethurum 110 n. 11 Lounsbury, Thomas R. 107 n. 9 Lowes, John Livingston 68–9 L¨udeke, Henry 68 n. 1 Lydgate, John 10 n. 8, 133, 181, 186, 188, 221 Fall of Princes 86 n. 17 Lyons, John 6–7 lyrics 35, 174–210, 226 McAlpine, Monica 74, 80, 87 Macareus 217–19 MacCracken, Henry N. 221 n. 9 Machaut, Guillaume de 78–9, 178 Remede de Fortune 159 n. 16, 204 n. 19 Voir Dit 246 n. 22 McIntosh, Angus 8–9 Mackail, J. W. 122 McLellan, William 10 n. 9 Macrobius 163 Mailer, Norman: The Executioner’s Song 23 Mann, Jill 122–3, 135, 216 Mannyng, Robert: Chronicle 15–17, 61 n. 15 manuscripts Cotton Nero A.: 34, 137, 143, 163 Douce 114: 132 Ellesmere 102 Fairfax 221, 223 Findern 185–7, 189 Grenoble 873: 226 Harley 682: 225–7, 229–30 Rawlinson poet. 36: 224

271 Marie de Champagne 177 n. 5 Marie de France 65 Marie of Oignies 132 McHale, Brian 28–9, 190 n. 12 Marnette, Sophie 19 Martin, Priscilla 158 n. 14 Marx, Karl 26 Mehl, Dieter 52, 72, 73 n. 6, 75, 85, 94 ‘Mesnagier de Paris’ 27 metanarrative 82, 91–2, 125 Mieszkowski, Gretchen 97 n. 28, 99 Miller, Robert P. 101, 112 Moore, Colette 94 n. 22 Muscatine, Charles 71 Musil, Robert: The Man Without Qualities 20 Mustanoja, Tauno F. 41, 92 n. 20 Nabokov, Vladimir: Pale Fire 142 narrator (fallible, unreliable, etc.) 34, 37, 68–87, 98, 99 n. 30, 104–5, 108, 111, 113, 115–18, 120–1, 128, 130–3, 136, 141–3, 147–9, 151, 158–62, 164, 167–8, 171, 173–4, 199–204 Newton, Humfrey 190–6, 198 Nolan, Barbara 153 Nolan, Charles J. 205 n. 21, 207–8 Norton-Smith, John 201, 205 n. 21, 212 N¨unning, Ansgar 87 n. 18, 113 n. 14 Nuttall, A. D. 97 n. 27 Olson, Glending 78 n. 11, 79 Olson, Greta 151 omniscience: of narrator 24–5, 45–6 of poet 69 n. 2, 73–4, 106 oral delivery 10, 12, 15, 18, 50, 56, 58, 76, 102, 137–8, 139 Ovid 13, 179, 206 Amores 212 Ars Amatoria 212, 214 Heroides 26, 35, 212–22, 229 Owens, Joseph 151 Pascal, Roy 65 Pascalis Romanus 163 n. 18 Patience 34, 137, 141–5, 147, 169, 172 n. 25

272 Patterson, Lee 33, 72, 75, 78 n. 11, 95 n. 24 Paul, Saint 116 n. 21 Paull, Michael T. 132–3 Payne, Roberta L. 172 n. 25 Pearl 34–5, 137, 142, 147–73, 172 n. 25, 174, 197, 205 Pearl poet 10, 117, 137–73 Pearsall, Derek 75, 79 n. 12, 81 n. 16, 98, 116–17, 133, 221, 223 Penelope 214 Perloff, Marjorie 209–10 Perret, Mich`ele 39 n. 3 persona 69, 72–5, 80–81 n. 16, 101, 199, 203, 205, 210, 214 n. 4 Peter of Blois 73 Petrarch 79–80, 86, 175 Phaedra 216–17 Phaon 219–20 Philippa of Hainault 178 Pittock, Malcolm 199, 206 Plato 5, 9 Pollard, A. W. 156 n. 11 Prior, Sandra Pierson 170 prologues 13–17, 35, 101, 105, 155, 172 n. 25, 235 Propertius 212 prosopopoeia 213 Pseudo-Alberich 201 n. 18 Putter, Ad 159 Quilligan, Maureen 206 Racine, Jean 74 Raybin, David 131 Richard II, King 178 Riddy, Felicity 167 n. 22 Riggan, William 69, 150–1 Rigolet, Franc¸ois 32 Riverside Chaucer 198 Robbins, Rossell Hope 185–6, 189 Robertson, D. W. 72–3 Robertson, Elizabeth 114 n. 18 romance 37–67, 133, 135–7, 140, 143, 145 Root, Robert K. 68 Roper, Gregory 160–1 Rose, Jacqueline 244 n. 20 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 5, 9 Rowe, Donald W. 73, 80–1 Russell, Bertrand 9 Ryan, Judith 30

Index Sacks, Peter M. 170 n. 23 Said, Edward W. 114 saints’ legends 109, 118, 130–3 Salter, Elizabeth 70–1, 74–6, 175 Sappho 219–20 Saunders, Rebecca 3 Scattergood, V. J. 201–2 Schibanoff, Susan 114–15, 116 n. 21 Schmidt, A. V. C. 78 n. 11 Scholes, Robert 17–18, 48, 190 Schwerner, Armand: The Tablets 190 n. 12 Searle, John R. 8 Semino, Elena 7 sentement 180–1, 194, 228–9 Shakespeare, William 76, 106 King Lear 74 Shepherd, Geoffrey 76 Shepherd, Stephen H. A. 51, 66 Shoaf, R. A. 172 n. 25 Simpson, James 198 n. 15, 205 n. 20, 207, 213 sincerity 177–80 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 2, 4 n. 2, 34, 137–43, 145, 154, 168, 201 n. 17, 233 n. 17 Skeat, W. W. 156 n. 11 Smith, Sir Thomas 9 Smithers, G. V. 49, 51, 56 n. 12, 61, 66 South English Legendary 133 speaker, see speech Spearing, A. C. 46, 72 n. 5, 73, 146–8, 166 n. 21, 167, 169, 170 n. 23, 201 n. 17, 219 n. 8, 228 n. 15 speech 5–17, 28–9, 35, 41, 56, 94, 105, 113, 120, 125, 127 n. 30, 128, 159 n. 15, 190, 193, 195, 199–200, 202, 209–11, 213–14, 217, 223, 232, 234, 241 Spence, Sarah 32 Staley, Lynn 161 n. 17 Stanzel, F. K. 68–9, 149–51, 153, 157, 173–4 Theory of Narrative 2 Stephens, John 104 n. 4, 199–200, 203 Stevens, John 198 Stevens, Martin 107 n. 9 Stock, Brian 10

Index Strode, Ralph 94 Suffolk, duke of (William de la Pole) 181, 221, 233, 247 Swanton, Michael 50 synecdoche 46–7 Tamir, Nomi 148 n. 4 Tatlock, J. S. P. 13 n. 12, 78 n. 11 Taylor, Karla 87 tense 6, 8, 40–1, 44, 52 n. 11, 53–5, 86, 91, 93–4, 127–8, 139 n. 2, 147, 155–8, 165–6, 189, 192 n. 13, 205, 215–19 Thomas: Romance of Horn 11, 38, 41, 45 Toolan, Michael J. 77 n. 10 Tristram, Hildegard L. C. 41 Trivet (also Trevet), Nicholas 101, 121 n. 25, 134 troubadour poetry 26, 176–81, 187 n. 11, 193, 198 Turville-Petre, Thorlac 61 Uldall, H. J. 9 Ulysses 214 Usk, Thomas 243 Utz, Richard J. 80 n. 13, 96 n. 26 visions, see dreams Vitz, Evelyn Birge 154 n. 10 voice 1–2, 7, 10, 17, 28–30, 35, 40, 101–6, 108, 110, 112, 114–15,

273 117–23, 125, 126 n. 28, 129–30, 133, 136, 176–7, 189–90, 198, 209–11, 214 n. 4, 244 Wack, Mary F. 235 Wace: Roman de Brut 13, 16 Walsh, Richard 18 Wasserman, Julian N. 4 n. 2, 141–3 Waswo, Richard 81 n. 15, 86 Watts, Ann Chalmers 72 Weisberg, David 122 Weissman, Hope Phyllis 107, 119 n. 24 Wetherbee, Winthrop 80 n. 14, 106 n. 7 Whitaker, Muriel 153 Windeatt, Barry 86 n. 17 Wood, Chauncey 109–10, 112 Woolf, Virginia 29–30 To the Lighthouse 30 Wordsworth, William 237 Preface to Lyrical Ballads 179 Wren, Sir Christopher 7 Wright, Susan 213 writing 5–17, 35, 40, 45, 105, 118–20, 126 n. 28, 128, 169, 190, 193, 195–200, 202, 209–11, 213–14, 217–19, 223–5, 229–34, 236–42, 244–7 Zink, Michel

31–3, 154