Art of the Gawain-poet: New Edition

The Art of the GawainsPoet

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The Art of the Gawain'Poet W. A. DAVENPORT

THE A T H L O N E P R E S S London 8c Atlantic Highlands

Published by THE ATHLONE PRESS LTD i Park Drive London NW 11 ysc and 165 First Avenue Atlantic Highlands, NJ 07716 © W. A. Davenport 1978 Reprinted 1991 I S B N o 485 11050 x

Reprinted in Great Britain by B I L L I N G S & S O N S LTD Worcester

To Hester, Imogen and Olivia

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Acknowledgements I have to thank the then Principal and the Council of Royal Holloway College for granting me sabbatical leave during the session 1972-3, when most of the first draft of this book was written, and Professor Francis Berry and my colleagues in the English Department for putting up with the various inconven' iences which this caused. I am grateful to Professor Barbara Hardy, formerly head of the English Department at Royal Holloway College, now head of the English Department at Birkbeck College, for her interest and encouragement during the ever/lengthening period of time which this book has taken to complete. To the anonymous academic adviser of the Athlone Press I am grateful for some unsparing criticism of my first draft, as a result of which this book is better than it was, though doubtless still imperfect in many ways. My greatest debt is to my wife for her constant enx couragement, criticism, typing and everything.

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Contents

Bibliographical Preface 1. Introduction

xi i

2. Pearl 1. 2. 3. 4.

The main elements of subject-matter and presentation The dream and the dreamer Formal devices in Pearl Conclusion: feeling versus form

7 27 39 50

3. Purity 1. 2. 3. 4.

Introduction The poet as teller of tales The poet as homih'st Themes versus instances

55 56 85 92

4. Patience 1. 2. 3. 4.

Introduction The prologue Story and epilogue The dangerous edge of things

103 111 115 130

5. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 1. The literary sophistication of Sir Gawain 2. Gawain's adversaries PART I: THE CHALLENGER

136 152

PART II: THE CASTLE PART III: HUNTSMAN, TEMPTRESS AND HOST PART IV: THE JUDGE 3. The poet's treatment of the hero and his adventure

180

X

CONTENTS

6. The Poet and his Art 1. The poet's view of things 2. The poet's artistic aims 3. The man behind the masks Notes Index

195 207 215 221 229

Bibliographical Preface Abbreviations The following abbreviations have been used in the notes. Patience ed. J. J. Anderson (Manchester, 1969). Anderson L. D. Benson, Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and tlx Green Benson Knight (New Brunswick, NJ, 1965). Ian Bishop, Pearl in its Setting (Oxford, 1968). Bishop R. J. Blanch (ed.), Sir Gawain and Pearl: Critical Essays Blanch (Indiana, 1967). Brewer, D. S. Brewer, 'Courtesy and the Gawain/Poet', in J. Lawlor 'Courtesy' (ed.), Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory of C. S. Lewis (London, 1966). D. S. Brewer, 'The Gawain/Poet: A General Appreciation Brewer, 'The Gawain'Poet' of the Four Poems', Essays in Critiscim 17, 1967, 1 30-42. Burrow, J. A. Burrow, A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London, 1965). Reading J. A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry (London, 1971). Burrow, RP J. Conley (ed.), The Middle English Pearl: Critical Essays Conley (Notre Dame and London, 1970). ESts English Studies. Dorothy Everett, Essays on Middle English Literature (Oxford, Everett 1955). Forum for Modern Language Studies. FMLS Pearl ed. E. V. Gordon (Oxford, 1953). Gordon Pamela Gradon, Form and Style in Early English Literature Gradon (London, 1971). D. R. Howard and C. Zacher (ed.), Critical Studies of Sir Howard and Gawain and the Green Knight (Notre Dame and London, 1968). Zacher Journal of English and Germanic Philology. JEGP

xii

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL PREFACE

MS

P. M. Kcan, The Pearl: An Interpretation (London, 1967). Medieval Studies.

Menner

Purity ed. R. J. Menner (New Haven, 1920, reprinted 1970).

MLN MLQ MLR MP

Modem Modem Modern Modem

Moorman

Charles Moorman, The Pearl"Poett Twayne English Author Series (New York, 1968).

NCT Q

Notes and Queries. Philological Quarterly. Publications of the Modem Language Association of America. Review of English Studies.

Kcan

PQ

PMLA RES Spearing TG/Davis

Language Notes. Language Quarterly. Language Review. Philology.

A. C. Spearing, The Gawain'Poet (Cambridge, 1970).

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon. Second edition revised by N. Davis (Oxford, 1967).

Waldron

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ed. R. A. Waldron, York Medieval Texts (London, 1970).

Texts I have quoted from the editions of the works of the Gawairi'poet listed above under Anderson, Gordon, Menner and TG/Davis, but I have re/punctuated when necessary, and I have modernised the spelling by eliminating obsolete letters (thorn and yogh) and by adopting modern practice in the use of i/j and u/v. I have also made some use of Patience ed. H. Bateson (Manchester 1918), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ed. I. Gollancz (London, E.E.T.S., 1940), and Waldron (listed above). For original manu' script readings, the reader is referred to Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain, reproduced in facsimile from MS Cotton Nero A.X., with introduction by I. Gollancz (London, E.E.T.S., 1923). The reader who finds the original language of these poems too daunting will find it easier to use Waldron's edition of Sir Gawain or Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. A. C. Cawley and J. J. Anderson (London, Everyman's Library, 1976), both of which are in slightly modernised English and provide glossaries and explanatory notes on the same page as the text. An edition of all four poems, edited by R. A. Waldron and M.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL PREFACE

Xlll

Andrew, is expected to appear in the York Medieval Texts series in 1978. I have not discussed St Erkenwald because I am sure, on sub' jective grounds, that this is by a different author. See L. D. Benson, 'The Authorship of St Erkenwald', JEGP 64 (1965) 393-405, and St Erkenwald ed. Ruth Morse (Cambridge, 1975). In quoting the Bible I have used the Vulgate text when the exact words of the Latin are necessary to the point, but have quoted the Authorised Version in some places where only the gist is required.

Bibliography The books and essays listed above form a basic bibliography for study of the Gawain'poet. Other works on particular aspects of the poems are referred to in the notes. Among works which apx peared too late to be adequately taken into account, the most important are A. C. Spearing, Medieval Dreant'Poetry (Cambridge, 1976) and Edward Wilson, The Gawain'Poet (Leiden, 1976). Wilson's approach to the four poems is so different from mine that our accounts of them rarely coincide. For fuller bibliographical detail the reader is referred to J. Burke Severs (General Editor), A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050-1500, Vol. I (New Haven, 1967), pp. 54-7 and 238-43 for Sir Gawain and Vol. II (New Haven, 1970), pp. 339-53 and 503-16 for 'The Pwr//Poet'; to G. Watson (ed.), The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature 1600-1660 (Cambridge, 1974), c°l- 401-6 and 547-54; and to the annual volumes of The Year's Work in English Studies.

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i. Introduction Though the Gawain'poet may not have existed, it has proved necessary to invent him. If evidence turned up that in Cheshire or Staffordshire in the late fourteenth century there were three medieval Brontes, working simultaneously on Patience, Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight after writing Purity as a collabora/ tive effort, then the case would be altered, but with virtually no evidence but the unique manuscript, British Museum MS Cotton Nero A.x., in which the four poems survive, the simplest way of accounting for the similarities among them is to assume that they had a single author.1 However, though most scholars now accept the idea of 'the Gawain'poet* (or 'the Pwr//poet', as some prefer), nearly all have been fittingly but disappointingly cautious about presuming on the idea. The poems have been mainly studied singly and the few critics who have discussed them jointly have been rather tentative in their approach, as if the fear of being proved wrong or the burden of demonstrating similarities weighed on their minds. The most thorough book to appear so far on the four poems is A. C. Spearing's The Gawain'Poet but, in spite of his title, Spearing offers 'a critical study of four great medieval poems' which 'would not, I think, be invalidated if it should eventually be proved by objective evidence that the poems were the work not of a single poet but of a school of poets'.8 It is true. It would not be invalidated, and this is, in one way, to be regretted. A critical study of a poet's works ought to be invalidated by the discovery that those works were written by several different people. But here lies the weakness of the case. In writing of the Gawain'poet one is simply backing one's judgement that a single mind seems to be at work in four anonymous poems. Naturally enough, caution keeps creeping in.

2

INTRODUCTION

Yet the case for the common authorship of the poems is a strong one which has stood the test of time and which is based on wide/ ranging evidence. Though the evidence of common dialectal, linguistic and metrical features and of some shared characteristics of style has to be weighed against the similarities among poems of the alliterative tradition in general, there are enough features peculiar to the Cotton Nero poems to isolate them as a group. When this evidence is added to parallel structural devices, recurrent images and conceptions and shared themes and effects, the argument seems weighty.3 It is solid enough, to my mind, for one to hope that critical study of the poems may now take a bolder and more probing turn. It seems time for one to be able to take as read all that part of the consideration of the Gawain'poet which feels it has to make a case for the man's existence. Therefore, in writing this book, I have assumed that the four poems were written by one man and I have ignored the need to demonstrate the idea. I want to treat the poems as if we knew them to form a body of work and, as one would with the works of an identified writer, to bring out the in/ dividual quality of the separate works and to make comparisons not on the basis of trying to prove their similarity but with the in/ tention of trying to understand the writer, how his mind worked and how his art developed. Further, I intend to write about Pearl, Purity, Patience and Sir Gawain primarily in terms of their effectiveness as poetry and as fiction. The informed reader's response to poetry, rather than generic or historical criticism, seems to me a key which has not been tried often enough in this particular lock. It seems possible that what one can observe of the art with which each of these poems was com/ posed may tell one more about the poet's individual cast of mind than has been thought, or than has been identified by other means. I have ventured on this approach for a number of reasons. The basic reason for writing at all is, obviously, that I think the Gawain' poet was a great writer. The individual poems have, in themselves, qualities which are striking and enjoyable enough, but if the four were written by one man, as I believe they were, then he is a major poet whose works deserve exploration. He is the only English poet of the Middle Ages whose works have a range and quality com/ parable to those of Chaucer. He, like Chaucer, used a variety of genres, was capable of writing poetry of widely varying mood, had a

INTRODUCTION

3

professional command of the craftmanship of verse, and showed freedom and a rich imagination in his handling of borrowed tales and themes. For a full appreciation of his skill as an artist, close examination of the poems seems necessary. Secondly, I feel dissatisfied with what the tools of historical scholarship have so far managed to show about the poet. This is not to disparage the work of many good scholars whose investigations have cleared up obscurities in the poems. Indeed it will be obvious that I have benefited a great deal from the writings of many more scholarly than I am. But, when one turns from factual scholarship about the text, about the meanings of words or about allusions and source/material, to more speculative work of interpretation and criticism, then one feels less confident of the value of much of the work published about these poems. There are many different reasons for this, and it is not possible, in a limited space, to do more than make superficial reference to one or two of them. One is the fact that in the past the predominantly philological and and/ quarian interests of many experts on the Middle English period meant that such literary discussion as editors, for example, felt obliged to engage in was often very limited in nature. Another is the present state of things where there is much evidence of un/ certainty about the most appropriate way of discussing Middle English poetry; many essays on Middle English poems have been more concerned to demonstrate a particular critical method (script/ ural exegesis, literary anthropology, numerical symbolism and so on) or to assert a particular line of argument than to follow the logic of the poems themselves. Sir Gawain, in particular, has been the hive to which many a bee from a bonnet has come buzzing. But even if one ignores extreme, eccentric or inflexible views of these poems, one finds that more critics are concerned to relate the four anony/ mous works to a historical, cultural or moral context than to try to define the effects they have on the reader and the way the reader responds to them. Though it is necessary to study the putative source/ material of the poems, to attempt to relate them to contemporary thought and to identify common medieval literary traditions within them, the cumulative effect of seeing the works of the G