Alliterative Revival

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The Alliterative Revival is a term adopted by literary historians to refer to the resurgence of poetry using the alliterative verse form in Middle English between c. 1350 and 1500. Alliterative verse was the traditional verse form of Old English poetry; the last known alliterative poem prior to the Revival was Layamon's Brut , which dates from around 1190.

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Scholarly opinion has been divided on whether the Alliterative Revival represented a conscious revival of an old artistic tradition, or merely signified that despite the tradition continuing in some form between 1200 and 1350, no poems survived in written form. Major works of the Revival include William Langland's Piers Plowman , the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and the works of the Gawain Poet: Pearl , Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , Cleanness , and Patience .

History of academic recognition of the Revival

It was not until the later 19th century that editors began to consider the problems caused by the chronology of surviving medieval alliterative verse. Although he offered no comment himself, the work of Walter William Skeat made it apparent to students for the first time that there was a gap during the 13th and 14th centuries when no verse was written using an alliterative stave. [1] By 1889 the philologist ten Brink spoke of a "revival of alliterative poetry" in the later 14th century, and the term was in routine use by the early 20th century. [1]

The concept was further developed by scholars such as Israel Gollancz, James R. Hulbert, and J. P. Oakden. Their work developed a regionally based, nativist formulation of alliterative poetry which argued it expressed selfconsciously 'English' and archaic modes, revived from previous centuries, in opposition to the modern French-influenced court poetry of the south and east of England. [2]

While the arguments of Gollancz and early 20th century academics strongly supposed continuity between Old English verse forms and those of the Revival, academics of the 1960s and 70s increasingly began to stress the discontinuities in the forms, suggesting that 14th century alliterative verse was a purely new invention. [3] Writers such as Elizabeth Salter, David Lawton and Thorlac Turville-Petre notably refused to hypothesise the existence of poetry that had not survived in the written record, preferring instead to seek possible inspiration for the Revival's poetry within rhythmic prose traditions of the 13th and 14th century. [3]

Verse

Alliterative "long line"

The rules by which alliterative verse was composed in Middle English are unclear and have been the subject of much debate. No metrical rules were written down at the time, and their details were quickly forgotten once the form died out: Robert Crowley, in his 1550 printing of Piers Plowman, simply stated that each line had "thre wordes at the least [...] whiche beginne with some one letter", assuring readers that "this thinge noted, the miter shal be very plesaunt to read". [4]

Verse of the Alliterative Revival broadly adheres to the same pattern shown in Old English poetry; a four-stress line, with a rhythmic pause (or caesura) in the middle, in which three of the stresses alliterate, i.e. aa / ax. However, there are very significant differences. Amongst the features differentiating the Middle English alliterative style from its predecessor is that the lines are longer and looser in rhythm, and the medial pause is less strictly observed, or often absent entirely; hundreds of rhythmic variations seem to have been permitted. [5] While Old English poetry generally employed a clear syntactic break in the middle of the line, in Middle English the line is generally a complete syntactic unit: some poets composed sentences extending over several lines. [6] An example of this style is shown by a few lines from Wynnere and Wastoure:

Whylome were lordes in londe that loved in thaire hertis
To here makers of myrthes that matirs couthe fynde,
And now es no frenchipe in fere bot fayntnesse of hert,
Wyse wordes withinn that wroghte were never,
Ne redde in no romance that ever renke herde.(19-23)

There has been much debate on the subject of how lines containing more than two alliterating syllables before the medial pause, which are common in verse of the Revival, should be read. [7] While some scholars have described these additional syllables as a "minor chief syllable" or as having "secondary stress", they have also been interpreted as not altering the four-stress pattern while still contributing to the effect of the line. [8] Some of the most recent analysis proposes that the traditional four-stress model of both Old English and Middle English alliterative verse is a "misapprehension" [9] and that a focus on other apparent rules clarifies the evolution of the form, with Layamon's Brut emerging as a key text in the development of alliterative verse. [9]

Stanzaic poems

A second type of verse combining rhymed stanzas, usually of thirteen or occasionally fourteen lines, with the basic four-stress line also appeared during the Revival: it appears to have been a new development of the 14th century. [10] Here the alliteration may often follow the pattern aa / aa, ax / aa, or even aa / bb, though lines with four alliterating words are much more common than in verse using the unrhymed long line.

Mirroring uncertainty over the evolution of alliterative verse in general, it is still uncertain as to whether this tradition developed from the unrhymed alliterative template or from rhymed verse forms on which the traditional alliterative stave was superimposed. While the poems in the thirteen-line stanza have generally been considered a part of the alliterative tradition, they have also been argued to be a related but distinct offshoot, incorporating elements of rhythm and metre that are in direct conflict with the conventions of unrhymed alliterative verse. [10]

The surviving stanzaic alliterative poems are generally of northern English provenance; some, such as Somer Soneday or The Three Dead Kings , are of very complex form.

Development of the Revival

The dialects shown in the surviving poems often point towards a northern and western provenance. The traditional interpretation of the Revival argues that such verse first began to be produced in the south-west Midlands, perhaps towards the start of the 14th century, and spread gradually northwards and eastwards, eventually becoming limited to the far north and Scotland by the close of the 15th century. This view suggests that the Revival was a largely self-contained movement whose "contacts with the metropolitan, Chaucerian tradition were slight". [11] The words of the Parson in the prologue to Chaucer's Parson's Tale , that as a "Southren man" he cannot recite alliterative verse - "I kan nat geeste 'rum, ram, ruf' by lettre" - have often been taken as supporting evidence that alliterative verse was associated only with the north of the country. [12]

In more recent years medievalists have begun to challenge the idea that alliterative verse and its "revival" was an exclusively regional phenomenon, limited to the north and west of England. Although, as academic Ralph Hanna observes, the records of early alliterative poetry cluster overwhelmingly around the literary communities of Worcester, in the west, and York, in the north, alliterative poetry at least subsequently developed "as one competing form of a national, not regional, literature". [13] This view interprets alliterative verse as part of the common literary culture of the time: although it was most appreciated in the rural north-west, several poems seem to have a definitely eastern (and in the case of The Blacksmiths, possibly urban) origin. The apparent flowering of the alliterative style in the period may have been due to social changes occurring in the wake of the Black Death, which would have thrown vernacular literary styles into greater prominence, or may simply be the result of the fact that the fifteenth century saw a general uptick in the amount of English-language literature being composed and copied. [14]

Ultimately, changing literary fashions, along with its perhaps old-fashioned and provincial associations, led to the abandonment of the alliterative form. Its use persisted in Scotland long after it had become a curiosity in an English literary culture totally dominated by the Chaucerian tradition: from 1450 until the following century, every major Scots court poet composed at least one alliterative poem. [15] It is likely that the move of the court of James VI and I from Edinburgh to London in 1603 finally broke the continuous tradition of alliterative metre: its compositional rules were soon forgotten, following which it became "as inaccessible as a dead language". [4]

Audience and authors

Gawain tempted by Sir Bertilak's wife: an illustration from the manuscript of Gawain and the Green Knight. Several authors of the Alliterative Revival chose to rework Arthurian stories Lady tempt Gawain.jpg
Gawain tempted by Sir Bertilak's wife: an illustration from the manuscript of Gawain and the Green Knight. Several authors of the Alliterative Revival chose to rework Arthurian stories

The cultural milieu of the alliterative poets is often described as one more provincial and backward-looking than that of Chaucerian, courtly poetry of the time, with the poems being appreciated by an audience drawn from the landed gentry of the shires rather than the urban sophisticates of the court. The Arthurian subjects of many Revival poems have sometimes been taken as evidence of the movement's provincial or antiquarian character or even of a form of English nationalism. Most of the authors use language closer to the vernacular, use archaic or dialect terms, and structure their work as if to be read aloud to a mixed group of listeners. [16] A more recent interpretation suggests that these qualities are due to alliterative poetry's status as a popular mode closer to the vernacular, or to its tendency to preserve older linguistic forms through poetic formula and convention, [17] rather than resulting from conscious antiquarianism or cultural chauvinism.

Several academics, beginning with James Hulbert, have suggested that the Revival's poets could have had a more noble audience, and were part of a conscious regional identity encouraged by powerful northern and western magnates - the Mortimer Earls of March, the Bohun Earls of Hereford and the Beauchamp Earls of Warwick - as a political counterweight to the court. [18] However, as Richard II of England and John of Gaunt both had substantial support and connections in the north-west, it is equally possible to argue that the alliterative poets of this period could easily have had courtly connections.

In comparison to some of the authors of syllabic rhymed verse during this period, such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate, almost nothing is known about the authors of alliterative poetry. The greatest of them, the Gawain Poet, author of Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , and that of Alliterative Morte Arthure are both completely anonymous, though the former has been tentatively identified as a John Massey, member of a Cheshire landowning family. Even William Langland, the author of the hugely influential Piers Plowman , has been identified largely through conjecture. The longest poem of the Revival (over 14,000 lines), The Destruction of Troy , is ascribed to a John Clerk from Lancashire, but little else is known about him. A notable exception to this lack of information is Scottish court poet William Dunbar; Dunbar generally wrote in syllabic metres, but displays a masterful use of the alliterative line in one poem at the very end of the period.

One man known to have appreciated alliterative verse during the time it was still being composed was Robert Thornton, a 15th-century landowner from North Yorkshire. Thornton's efforts in copying these poems, for the use of himself and his family, resulted in the preservation of several valuable works.

Chronology

The first alliterative poem after the Brut for which a date can be established is Wynnere and Wastoure , which from internal evidence is usually dated to around 1352, though the Alexander A and B fragments have been suggested to be as early as 1340. The last, Scottish Ffielde , was composed in c. 1515. From in between these dates, a number of examples of verse have survived, of which some are listed below:

Some elements of the alliterative technique survived in Scotland until the late 16th century, appearing in The Flyting Betwixt Montgomerie and Polwart dated around 1580. [20]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Poetry</span> Form of literature

Poetry, also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle.

A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in the final stressed syllables and any following syllables of two or more words. Most often, this kind of perfect rhyming is consciously used for a musical or aesthetic effect in the final position of lines within poems or songs. More broadly, a rhyme may also variously refer to other types of similar sounds near the ends of two or more words. Furthermore, the word rhyme has come to be sometimes used as a shorthand term for any brief poem, such as a nursery rhyme or Balliol rhyme.

Patience is a Middle English alliterative poem written in the late 14th century. Its unknown author, designated the "Pearl Poet" or "Gawain-Poet", also appears, on the basis of dialect and stylistic evidence, to be the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Cleanness and may have composed St. Erkenwald. This is thought to be true because the techniques and vocabulary of regional dialect of the unknown author is that of Northwest Midlands, located between Shropshire and Lancashire.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alliterative verse</span> Form of verse

In prosody, alliterative verse is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principle ornamental device to help indicate the underlying metrical structure, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of the Germanic languages, where scholars use the term 'alliterative poetry' rather broadly to indicate a tradition which not only shares alliteration as its primary ornament but also certain metrical characteristics. The Old English epic Beowulf, as well as most other Old English poetry, the Old High German Muspilli, the Old Saxon Heliand, the Old Norse Poetic Edda, and many Middle English poems such as Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Alliterative Morte Arthur all use alliterative verse.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Skald</span> Old Norse poet

A skald, or skáld, is one of the often named poets who composed skaldic poetry, one of the two kinds of Old Norse poetry, the other being Eddic poetry, which is anonymous. Skaldic poems were traditionally composed on one occasion, sometimes extempore, and include both extended works and single verses (lausavísur). They are characteristically more ornate in form and diction than eddic poems, employing many kennings and heiti, more interlacing of sentence elements, and the complex dróttkvætt metre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sapphic stanza</span> Four-line stanza form

The Sapphic stanza, named after Sappho, is an Aeolic verse form of four lines. Originally composed in quantitative verse and unrhymed, since the Middle Ages imitations of the form typically feature rhyme and accentual prosody. It is "the longest lived of the Classical lyric strophes in the West".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gawain Poet</span> Unknown medieval poet

The "Gawain Poet", or less commonly the "Pearl Poet", is the name given to the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an alliterative poem written in 14th-century Middle English. Its author appears also to have written the poems Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness; some scholars suggest the author may also have composed Saint Erkenwald. Save for the last, all these works are known from a single surviving manuscript, the British Library holding 'Cotton MS' Nero A.x. MS Nero A X. This body of work includes some of the most highly-regarded poetry written in Middle English.

<i>Pearl</i> (poem) 14th-century English poem

Pearl is a late 14th-century Middle English poem that is considered one of the most important surviving Middle English works. With elements of medieval allegory and dream vision genre, the poem is written in a North-West Midlands variety of Middle English and highly—though not consistently—alliterative; there is a complex system of stanza linking and other stylistic features.

Cleanness is a Middle English alliterative poem written in the late 14th century. Its unknown author, designated the Pearl poet or Gawain poet, also appears, on the basis of dialect and stylistic evidence, to be the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Patience, and may have also composed St. Erkenwald.

St Erkenwald is a fourteenth-century alliterative poem in Middle English, perhaps composed in the late 1380s or early 1390s. It has sometimes been attributed to the Pearl poet who probably wrote the poems Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Tail rhyme is a family of stanzaic verse forms used in poetry in French and especially English during and since the Middle Ages, and probably derived from models in medieval Latin versification.

Huchoun, Huchown or Huchowne "of the Awle Ryale" is a poet conjectured to have been writing sometime in the 14th century. Some academics, following the Scottish antiquarian George Neilson (1858–1923), have identified him with a Scottish knight, Hugh of Eglinton, and advanced his authorship of several significant pieces of alliterative verse. Current opinion is that there is little evidence to support this.

The Alliterative Morte Arthure is a 4346-line Middle English alliterative poem, retelling the latter part of the legend of King Arthur. Dating from about 1400, it is preserved in a single copy in the early 15th-century Lincoln Thornton Manuscript, now in Lincoln Cathedral Library.

Bob and wheel is the term for a pairing of two metrical schemes. The wheel is a type of rhythm used in hymns or narrative songs sung in European churches or gatherings from the 12th to the 16th Centuries. A wheel occurs when at the end of each stanza, the song and the lyric return to some peculiar rhythm. In some instances the wheel is a return to something that resembles no definable poetic rhythm. A bob is a very short line, often two assertive syllables that announces the start of the wheel.

The Three Dead Kings is a 15th-century Middle English poem. It is found in the manuscript MS. Douce 302 in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and its authorship is sometimes attributed to a Shropshire priest, John Audelay. It is an extremely rare survival from a late genre of alliterative verse, also significant as the only English poetic retelling of a well-known memento mori current in mediaeval European church art.

Wynnere and Wastoure is a fragmentary Middle English poem written in alliterative verse around the middle of the 14th century.

Robert Thornton was a Yorkshire landowner, a member of the landed gentry. His efforts as an amateur scribe and manuscript compiler resulted in the preservation of many valuable works of Middle English literature, and have given him an important place in its history.

The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne is an Arthurian romance of 702 lines written in Middle English alliterative verse. Despite its title, it centres on the deeds of Sir Gawain. The poem, thought to have been composed in Cumberland in the late 14th or early 15th century, survives in four different manuscripts from widely separated areas of England.

The StanzaicMorte Arthur is an anonymous 14th-century Middle English poem in 3,969 lines, about the adulterous affair between Lancelot and Guinevere, and Lancelot's tragic dissension with King Arthur. The poem is usually called the Stanzaic Morte Arthur or Stanzaic Morte to distinguish it from another Middle English poem, the Alliterative Morte Arthure. It exercised enough influence on Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur to have, in the words of one recent scholar, "played a decisive though largely unacknowledged role in the way succeeding generations have read the Arthurian legend".

Thorlac Francis Samuel Turville-Petre is an English philologist who is Professor Emeritus and former head of the School of English at the University of Nottingham. He specializes in the study of Middle English literature.

References

  1. 1 2 Cornelius (2017), Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter, CUP, p.72
  2. ↑ Cornelius (2017), p.73
  3. 1 2 Cornelius (2017), p.74
  4. 1 2 Cornelius, 2017, p.55
  5. ↑ See Duggan, H. N. 'The Shape of the B-Verse in Middle English Alliterative Poetry', Speculum, 61 (1986), 564
  6. ↑ Turville-Petre, T. The Alliterative Revival, Boydell & Brewer, 1977, p.53
  7. ↑ Turville-Petre, T, 1977, p.54
  8. ↑ Turville-Petre, 1977, p.55
  9. 1 2 Cornelius, 2017, pp.4-5
  10. 1 2 Weiskott, English Alliterative Verse, 2016, CUP, pp.103-4
  11. ↑ Turville-Petre, T. The Alliterative Revival Boydell & Brewer, 1977, pp.34-35
  12. ↑ Burrow, The Gawain-poet, 2001, OUP, p.21
  13. ↑ Hanna, R. 'Alliterative poetry', in Wallace (ed.) The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, Cambridge: CUP, 2002, p.509
  14. ↑ Cornelius, 2017, p.7
  15. ↑ Hanna, p.497
  16. ↑ Hanna, p. 502
  17. ↑ Cornelius, 2017, p.6
  18. ↑ Wurster, J. 'The Audience' in Göller (ed.) The Alliterative Morte Arthure, Boydell & Brewer, 1981, p.45
  19. ↑ Hanna, R; Lawton, D (2003). The Siege of Jerusalem. Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press.
  20. ↑ Turville-Petre, p.118
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