An Introduction to The Gawain-Poet

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• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317893110
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The late 14th century produced a crop of brilliant writers: Chaucer, Langland and Gower. Their achievement was rivalled only by a series of four works generally agreed to have been written by a single northern author, known as the Gawain-Poet. This book introduces the reader to the Gawain-poet's four surviving works: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, Pearl and Cleanness. The four poems are made accessible to the student by setting them in their relevant historical and cultural context and by developing some lines of critical argument. All studies are based on the author's own research and translations.

Chapter 1

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The Gawain-poet in context

Introduction

The works of the Gawain-poet have come down to us in a single manuscript: British Library, Cotton Nero A.x. This manuscript had been gathering dust for centuries before the poems it contains began to attract a wide readership. Only in 1839 did the whole of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight first appear in print. The Gawain-poet’s other works—Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience—had to suffer neglect longer still, until 1864, when Richard Morris edited the four poems of Cotton Nero A.x. in the first volume of the Original Series of the Early English Text Society (Turville-Petre 1977, 127). Since then, the Gawain-poet has been read and re-read, and his works have been the subject of lively critical debate. Today, Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are also inspiring contemporary literature and art in a way they never seem to have done in the poet’s own lifetime.¹

The fortunes of the disappointingly small and unimpressive manuscript reflect the Gawain-poet’s recent rise to fame.² Its first known owner was Henry Savile of Bank (1568–1617), a lesser Yorkshire gendeman. From him it passed into the hands of Sir Robert Cotton, the famous antiquary and book-collector. Cotton seems not to have recognized the Gawain-poet for the genius he was, and his librarian bound the manuscript of his works in with two unrelated Latin moral treatises. Still unrecognized, the Gawain-poet’s works might well have perished forever when a fire raged through the Cottonian library in 1731, destroying many texts that might have shed more light on the Gawain-poet. Fortunately, Cotton Nero A.x. escaped with little damage and, along with other survivors of the fire, the original manuscript was transferred to the British Library. In 1964, the manuscript containing the Gawain-poet’s works was rebound into a separate volume, as it was originally, and Cotton Nero A.x. has now made its way into the display cabinets of the British Museum, where it belongs.

The particular qualities and characteristics of the Gawain-poet’s works, to which the manuscript owes its present visibility in the British Museum, are the subject of the four main chapters in this book, which are devoted to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, Pearl, and Cleanness respectively. In this chapter I will be concerned with the Gawain-poet’s works only in so far as they shed light on the issue of the Gawain-poet’s social circumstances and historical situation. The questions that will occupy me here are what kind of background and what kind of milieu we should be imagining for the Gawain-poet.

If in trying to answer these questions we were to limit ourselves only to incontrovertible ‘facts’, this chapter would be very brief, for one of the surest facts about the Gawain-poet is that there are not many. The ‘Gawain-poet’ (or ‘Pearl-poet’) is himself a scholarly invention, merely a convenient name given to the single author who is now commonly accepted as having written all four poems in Cotton Nero A.x.³ Attempts to unmask the ‘ Gawain-poet’ have so far failed to gain wide acceptance. The idea that the Gawain-poet might be a certain ‘Massey’ (a common Cheshire name) is the most recent conjecture and the only one with any serious support, but it depends on straining one’s eyesight (and perhaps one’s credulity) in order to see an anagram of the poet’s name in selected words from Pearl (Peterson 1974), or a signature in the doodles underneath an ornamental letter in the manuscript (Vantuono 1975). Whilst many would dispute the identification of the Gawain-poet with John (or Hugh) Massey, the Cheshire origin of the Gawain-poet is well attested by the poet’s dialect, which has been localized near Holmes Chapel in east Cheshire (McIntosh 1963).

In addition to his dialect, we also know, with some degree of certainty, when the Gawain-poet’s works were composed. The latest possible date is that of the manuscript, which can be dated on the basis of the handwriting and the manuscript illuminations to about 1400. The presence of scribal errors in the manuscript suggests that Cotton Nero A.x. is some stages removed from the author’s original, which must therefore have been written some time before 1400. For the earliest possible date we must turn to internal evidence from the poems themselves. The most revealing clue comes from Cleanness, where the poet probably used Mandeville’s Travels for his descriptions of the Dead Sea and the vessels at Belshazzar’s feast (Brown 1904, 149–53). Mandeville’s Travels, which purports to be a first-hand account in French of an amazing journey around the world, was compiled by an armchair traveller on the continent in about 1357, and soon became an international best-seller. The French version of Mandeville’s Travels known to the Gawain-poet was the so-called Insular Version, which presents a slightly later text than the Continental Version, though at least one copy is known to have circulated in England before 1390 (Seymour 1993, 8). This would place Cleanness in the last decades of the fourteenth century. Certain descriptive details—such as the architecture of Castle Hautdesert in Sir Gawain —likewise point to the end of the fourteenth century. Going about as far as the evidence allows, the Middle English Dictionary dates the Gawain-poet’s works to about 1390. This means that the Gawain-poet must have been writing his poems at around the same time that Geoffrey Chaucer was working on his Canterbury Tales, that John Gower was completing his first version of the Confessio Amantis, and that William Langland was rewriting Piers Plowman.

The facts thus far: somewhere in England, towards the end of the fourteenth century, an unknown Englishman wrote four poems in a north west Midlands dialect. In order to say more about the poet and his milieu it will be necessary to make informed guesses on the basis of clues from the Gawain-poet’s own works, or on the basis of similar works that might furnish some point of comparison. In the rest of this chapter I shall be trying to reconstruct a picture of the Gawain-poet, building first of all on the poet’s reading, secondly on the poet’s self-presentation and outlook in his works, and finally on evidence about the milieux and audiences of other alliterative poets. With the exception of pp. 25–6, which will help to acquaint first-time readers of the Gawain-poet with the basic principles of alliterative metre, this discussion is not meant to be introductory to the later chapters, nor should it be seen as a necessary preliminary to reading the poems. The Gawain-poet left us no life records apart from his literary oeuvre, so that, like all research into the Gawain-poet’s social background, my own argument cannot avoid leaning heavily on the poems themselves. In what follows I am therefore already presupposing in my reader some familiarity with the Gawain-poet’s characteristic voice. Newcomers to the Gawain-poet might prefer to move straight to the chapters on the poet’s works, each of which is an accessible and more or less self-contained study, and return to the following discussion afterwards.

THE POET’S READING

One source of evidence that sheds some light on the poet’s social position is formed by the kind of reading that went into the making of his poems. What we know about the sources for the Gawain-poet’s works, about his reading, strongly suggests a clerical background and education. It is true that many of the books which the Gawain-poet knew, particularly those in French, were mainstream enough. Mandeville’s Travels, a source for Cleanness, was widely disseminated. Another popular French source for the Gawain-poet was the Roman dela Rose (Pilch 1964), an early-thirteenth-century allegorical dream vision by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, whom the poet refers to as ‘Clopyngnel’ (Jean de Meun’s birthplace) in Cleanness (1057). Even more so than Mandeville’s Travels, the Roman de la Rose took later medieval England by storm: it was, for instance, translated by Chaucer, who incidentally also knew the version of Mandeville’s Travels which the Gawain-poet used in Cleanness. The poet’s main sources (again French) for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight were Arthurian romances, the favourite reading matter of the well-to-do of fourteenth-century England. The Gawain-poet shows a deep familiarity with the conventions of the genre, and occasionally in Gawain it is possible to detect borrowings from specific romances, such as Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide (c. 1170), the First Continuation of Chrétien’s Perceval (c. 1195), or the Prose Lancelot (c. 1220) (Putter 1995). In the last lines of Gawain the poet also alludes to ‘þie Brutus bokez’ (2523), which are called on as witnesses to the fabulous story he has just narrated. The mention of books about the history of Britain and its mythical founder Brutus may allude to Wace’s French Brut (c. 1160), which made available to a wide readership Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin ‘history’ of the founding of Britain and King Arthur’s glorious reign. But again the Brut was too widespread to tell us much about the Gawain-poet’s background. In the fourteenth century, the Brut sparked off a host of adaptations and translations in Anglo-Norman and English.

The sources mentioned so far were immensely popular, and anyone in later-medieval England who was educated, and who had access to manuscripts—precious commodities, let us not forget—might sooner or later have come across them. But things are different for the (in contemporary terms) avant garde sources that have been suggested for Pearl: Boccaccio’s Olympia and Dante’s Divina Commedia. The first of these is a pastoral elegy in Latin in which Boccaccio, through the persona of a shepherd named Silvius, mourns for the death of his small daughter.⁴ Like the Pearl-poet’s daughter, she appears to him in a vision of Paradise, and reminds her father that virtuous behaviour may bring him to heaven as well. The similarities in situation and (possibly hence) expression between Pearl and Boccaccio’s Olympia are close, and scholarly opinion might well have embraced Olympia as one of the Gawain-poet’s sources if it were not for the fact that no manuscript of Boccaccio’s Olympia is known to have circulated in England when Pearl was composed (Carlson 1987). Nor is this surprising: when the Gawain-poet was writing his poems Boccaccio had only just died (in 1375), and Olympia was completed only a few years before this date. These facts seriously weaken the case for a direct link between Pearl and Olympia, though the case need not perhaps be closed: why, for instance, might not the Gawain-poet, like Chaucer, have travelled to Italy? Or why could he not have gone to London, where, among the thriving community of Italian bankers and merchants, the latest Italian literature seems to have been available (Childs 1983)? True, these possibilities would conflict with the old view of the Gawain-poet as a provincial and isolated poet, but, as I shall argue later, the latest research does little to support that view.

Dante’s Divina Commedia is a far more likely source for Pearl than Boccaccio (see below pp. 188–9). There is some evidence—which is more than can be said for Boccaccio’s Olympia—that Dante’s masterpiece was known in fourteenth-century England. Chaucer had read it, and another alliterative poet from Cheshire, the poet of St Erkenwald, may also have known the Divina Commedia in a glossed version (Whatley 1986). Even so the Gawain-poet’s acquaintance with Dante would place him in a very small company. However, the grounds for supposing that he belonged to that company are solid. Like Dante in Purgatorio, the Gawain-poet in Pearl describes his vision of the beautiful landscape surrounding heaven. Walking through this se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Note on references and abbreviations
• Dedication
• Chapter 1 The Gawain-poet in context
• Chapter 2 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Chapter 3 Patience
• Chapter 4 Pearl
• Chapter 5 Cleanness
• Bibliography
• Index