Materia di Roma

Speranza

Romance originally denoted languages (esp. French) derived
from Latin (i.e., "Roman"), later came to refer to something written
in French, and then referred as well to anything having
characteristics associated with writings in French.

The term came
eventually to have a very broad application.

We can, nonetheless, describe in a general way what the word
means when applied to medieval narrative. The basic material of
medieval romance is knightly activity and adventure.

We might
best define medieval romance as a story of adventure--fictitious,
frequently marvelous or supernatural--in verse or prose.

Earlier
romances in English are in verse.

Those in prose (Malory, for
example) are generally late.

Perhaps surprisingly, any "love interest" is likely to be incidental to
the story of a medieval romance.

An exception to this rule may be
found in the breton "lai".

The term refers both to the relatively brief
form of medieval French romances, professed to have been sung
by Breton minstrels on Celtic themes, and to the English medieval
poems written in imitation of such works.

These romances often
wove their stories around a famous legendary figure (Arthur, for
example, or Tristram) and took as their immediate subject matter
a love story of some kind.


Structurally, the medieval romance often follows the loose pattern
of the quest, tending thus to be merely episodic--to have a plot
structured by and-then rather than hence.

A romance like Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, of course, goes beyond this typical
structure by imposing an artificial structure on the inherited
structure, combining the plots to explain (insofar as explanation is
possible); note, however, that the "duple structure" of SGGK
explains not in terms of causation ("this was caused by that,"
"hence"), but in terms of juxtaposition and analogy ("this is like
that"). (For a more detailed discussion of ME romance, see More
on Romance and Selected ME Romances: Classifications below.)

Jean Bodel, a twelfth-century Frenchman, developed a three-part
classification of romance, by "matter" (i.e., subject matter), that is
still frequently used:

-- the Matter of France
-- the Matter of Britain,
-- the Matter of Rome the Great (often called the Matter of
Antiquity).

A fourth matter--the Matter of England--has been
added by modern scholars to more accurately describe the
medieval English romance.

Some of the Classic Treatments of Medieval Romance
Ker, W. P. Epic and Romance (1896): treats the earliest French
"chansons de geste" as heroic poems, real epics; useful for his
treatment of French romances, but his assertions do not apply so
well to English romances.
Griffin, Nathaniel E. "The Definition of Romance." PMLA 38
(1923): 50-70. Treats the development of the term romance much
as Dorothy Everett does (see below).
Everett, Dorothy. "A Characterization of the English Medieval
Romance." Essays and Studies (1929); rpt. in Essays on Middle
English Literature, by Dorothy Everett (Oxford, 1959; Westport,
CT, 1978): 1-22. [PR255 .E9 1978]

"In both French and English the history of the word
'romance' is a similar one.

It originally denoted the
vernacular language of France as distinct from the Latin
from which it was derived, but it soon extended its meaning
to cover works written in French, so that the medieval
English word can often be translated into modern English
as 'the French book'.

Very gradually there is a further
alteration of its meaning and it comes to be used for those
tales of knights and their doings for which the French were
first famous, without regard to the language in which they
were written. But owing to its previous wider connotation,
there is always a tendency to use it to mean any kind of
fictitious narrative, and even books of other kinds in the
French tongue" (2-3). Everett restricts herself in this essay
to "romances of chivalry."

Her considered definition of medieval romance, then, is as
follows:

"Medieval romances are stories of adventure in
which the chief parts are played by knights, famous kings,
or distressed ladies, acting most often under the impulse of
love, religious faith, or, in many, mere desire for adventure.
The stories were first told in verse, but when, later, prose
versions were made, they were also called romances. In
length the verse romances vary from a few hundred lines
to tens of thousands. . .; the prose ones are mostly very
long" (3).

Everett notes that whatever the original provenance of a
hero, he is always made to conform to medieval
conceptions of a knight.

Everything is medievalized (true of
most if not all medieval literature, not just romances).
Everett believes that romances appealed to the
fashionable society of the day, largely through their (then)
modernity.

Our distance, Everett argues, lends a
mysterious charm to the heroes (etc.) of romance, but the
mystery was probably a great deal less for a medieval
audience.
Q: How realistic?

A: Few as realistic as SGGK.

Most are
made of "high life idealized": heightening of characters and
action, accompanied by a simplification of "characterdrawing":
"The half-tones of ordinary human nature are not
for the romance writers; every man is either a hero and a
good man, or a villain. . . . Poetic justice reigns supreme. .
." (9).
If the romances are not "romantic" in Ker's sense of the
term (for Ker, romantic is "the name for the sort of
imagination that possesses the mystery and spell of
everything remote and unattainable"), how do we explain
the pervasive use of the "marvelous"?

The division
between the possible and the impossible was not so sharp
to the medieval audience as it is to us, according to Everett
(cf. Carolly Erickson's The Medieval Vision [1976]). Everett
finds the display of the marvelous in ME romance
excessive and decides that it was employed to satisfy a
medieval popular thirst for "incident" (writers--and their
characters--tend to take a rather matter-of-fact attitude
toward marvels) (10).

In her essay, Everett attempts to develop distinctions
between the romance and the saint's life, the romance and
the ballad, the romance and the chanson de geste, and the
romance and the tale.
Kane, George. Middle English Literature: A Critical Study of the
Romances, the Religious Lyrics, and Piers Plowman (1951).

"Wherever we turn . . . classification's usefulness [is] diminished
by their refusal to run true to form."
Mehl, Dieter. The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and
Fourteenth Centuries (1969).
Pearsall, Derek. "The Development of Middle English Romance."
Mediaeval Studies 27 (1965): 91-116. Pearsall is concerned with
romances written between 1240 and 1400 in England (1240 is the
date of the MS in which King Horn, etc., appear). (In another
article, Pearsall has specifically treated fifteenth-century English
romances.) "Any sophisticated historical morphology of romance
involves a knowledge of date, dialect, manuscript provenance,
metrical form, exact class of audience, type of source, type of
story, and the range of the art." Pearsall's classification takes into
consideration both the form and the content of the romance, then,
as well as the date.

Selected ME Romances: Classifications

1. Classification by "Matter"

The Matter of England The Matter of France
King Horn (ca. 1225, SWMid or SMid)
Havelok the Dane (ca. 1280-1300, NEMid)
Athelston (ca. 1355-80, EMid)
Gamelyn (ca. 1350-70, NEMid)
The Sowdon of Babylon (ca. 1400, EMid)
The Matter of Britain Arthurian
Sir Degaré (before 1325, SWMid)
Sir Orfeo (beginning of 14th c., SE)
The Earl of Toulouse (ca. 1400, NEMid)
Emaré (ca. 1400, NE)
Layamon's Brut (chronicle-romance; late 12th c.,
WMid)
Ywain and Gawain (ca. 1300-50, N)
Sir Perceval of Galles (ca. 1300-40, N)
Sir Launfal (later 14th c., SE)
The Avowynge of King Arthur (ca. 1425, N)
Composite The Matter of the Orient
Ipomadon (late 14th c., NMid)
Eger and Grim (ca. 1450, N)
The Squyr of Lowe Degre (ca. 1500, EMid)


The Seven Sages of Rome (early 14th c.)


The Lyfe of Alisaunder (early 14th c., S)

The Destruction of Troy (1350-1400, NWMid)

Miscellaneous
Floris and Blancheflur (ca. 1250, SEMid)
Chevalere Assigne (ca 1350-1400, EMid)
Sir Cleges (late 14th c., NMid)
Roberd of Cisyle (late 14th c., SEMid)
King Edward and the Shepherd (late 14th c., N)
The Tournament of Tottenham (1400-40, N)

2. Metrical Classification
Couplets (mostly octosyllabic) Tail Rhyme (Rime Couée)
Havelok the Dane
Sir Degaré
Sir Orfeo
Ywain and Gawain
Eger and Grim (tetrameter couplets, not necessarily
octosyllabic)
The Squyr of Lowe Degre
The Seven Sages of Rome
Floris and Blauncheflur
Roberd of Cisyle
King Horn (trimeter couplets)
Athelston
Sir Launfal
The Earl of Toulouse
Emaré
Sir Perceval of Galles
The Avowynge of King Arthur
Ipomadon
Sir Cleges
King Edward and the Shepherd
The Tournament of Tottenham (with a bob-and-wheel
stanza)
Alliterative Unrhymed Non-Alliterative Long Lines
Layamon's Brut
The Gest Historiale of the Destruction of Troy
Chevelere Assigne
Gamelyn (about 50% of lines alliterate)
The Tale of Beryn
Other
The Sowdon of Babylon (alternate rhymes)
The Generic Plot
Description
The following summary of themes of descent and ascent is adapted from
Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976).

For a clear example of both sets of
themes in a modern novel, see Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man.

For a completely different story with the same themes, see Tolkien's
The Hobbit.

Other works where the "generic plot" may be seen quite clearly
include the following: The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The New Testament, The
Divine Comedy of Dante, King Horn, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the
movie Labyrinth, and even the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.)

We can describe a "generic" (or "archetypal") plot shared by
many romances, one that manifests itself in many and highly
varied particular plots.

This plot can best be defined in terms of its
"themes of descent" and "themes of ascent."

In doing so, we
should keep certain qualifications in mind:


(1) These themes may appear in a displaced form. (Frye
defines displacement as "the adjusting of formulaic
structures to a roughly credible context.")

Thus, for
example, the story of Kirkê in The Odyssey might be retold
elsewhere (and probably later) in such a way that
Odysseus's men become bestial men rather than literal
beasts.

(2) Though we can define a "generic" or traditional plot, we
cannot safely draw from it automatic ("generic")
interpretations.

Thus we must continually ask questions:
How is the generic plot realized in the particular one?

What
details of the particular plot correspond most closely to the
generic one? What details differ most sharply? What
difference do these differences make? What sorts of
meaning emerge from reading the particular plot in light of
the generic one? Does doing so violate any commonsense
rules of interpretation? And so forth.


Frye notes that four levels of a "mythological universe" were
consciously recognized by the first eighteen centuries of the
common era and unconsciously understood both before and after:
Level 1 is "heaven, the place of the presence of God."

Level 2 is
"the earthly paradise or Garden of Eden, where man lived before
the fall."

Level 3 is "the world of ordinary experience we now live
in." And level 4 is "the demonic world, or hell." Movement among
these levels, of course, entails descent and ascent.
The themes of descent may be of two kinds: (1) those that
suggest descent from the sky (in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the
sky means heaven or Eden) and

 (2) those that suggest descent to
a lower world than the world of ordinary life.

When treating
medieval romance, our concern is generally with the second sort
of descent. Frye asserts that the "normal road of descent is
through dream or something strongly suggestive of a dream
atmosphere." Such a descent begins with what Frye calls the
Motif of Amnesia: the "catastrophe . . . may be internalized as a
break in memory, or externalized as a change in fortunes or social
context" (Frye). Whatever its narrative form, "the structural core is
the individual loss or confusion or break in the continuity of
identity, and this has analogies to falling asleep and entering a
dream world" (Frye). As the descent deepens, we find increased
erotic intensity, frequently manifesting itself in a hunt; sometimes
identity is established between the hunter and the hunted; and, in
any case--hunt or not--animal imagery frequently surrounds the
depths of descent. At the lower levels of descent, the night world
predominates and becomes "a world where everything is an
object, including ourselves" (Frye). Pushed to its logical
conclusion, plainly, this thingification (my coinage) would take the
characters in such a plot beyond individual problems of identity to
a world where no meaning exists because the discreet objects
that make up the world have no relationship to each other, can
form no intelligible patterns at all. "Every aspect of fall or
descent," Frye claims, "is linked to a change in form in some way,
usually by associating or identifying a human or humanized figure
with something animal or vegetable," and "[a]t lower levels the
Narcissus or twin image darkens into a sinister doppelganger
figure, the hero's shadow and the portent of his own death or
isolation."

The themes of ascent may also be of two kinds: (1) those that
suggest ascent from a lower world and (2) those that suggest
ascent to a higher world. In thinking about medieval romance, our
chief concern is generally with the first sort of ascent. The chief
conceptions here are these, though not necessarily in a fixed
sequence: escape ("the Houdini motif" for Frye), remembrance,
discovery of one's real identity, growing freedom, the breaking of
enchantment, and the reintegration of society or self. As Frye
points out, "One of the things that comedy and romance as a
whole are about, clearly, is the unending, irrational, absurd
persistence of the human impulse to struggle, survive, and where
possible escape.