12. The Medieval Period: Anglo-Norman literature of the 11-13th centuries

The Normans brought with them their language and culture. Latin remained the language of learning; Old English was spoken and written; but the machinery of government and law was conducted in French, and the French taste in literature and arts prevailed. As the languages evolved and combined, ‘Middle English’ – the language of Chaucer – developed. It is an amalgam of Old English and the Germanic French of Normans.

Native English literature did not flourish (расцвела) during this time. Very little survives the period from 1066 to 1200. Aristocratic and educated families were broken up, displaced, and forced into service with the Norman invaders.

William started a Doomsday Book – a record of the feudal obligation of each of William’s vassals.

Written English literature began to appear at the end of the 12^th century. Most of it was popular origin; it had simpler, less epic language structures, since it was written in the language used by the people, rather than in French or Latin. It had a wide diversity of styles, tones, subjects, and genres, and was adressed to a popular rather than a religious or highly educated audience. In such works, the hero is not a distant or idealized as, for example, ‘Beowulf’: he fights and fights again, but also laughs, cries, and falls in and out of love. And literature now included women. It also contained much more humour, even in hopeless situations.

People’s lives were unchanging in the large scale: most people were born, lived and died in the same town as their grandparents, and did the same work, with the same tools, had the same sports and festivals, the same lives. Change was perceived as dangerous, and was therefore slow.

But in the people’s daily lives, change was constant and inevitable, and generally not for the better, they faced wars, famine (голод), and plagues; murder, public executions and witchcraft trials were common features of medieval life. The inevitability of change for th worse is a recuring theme of medieval literature. Wars, combined with the plundering of peasant lands by the powerful; the severity of laws, combined with the failure to enforcethem against the powerful and rich; hunger, combined with the coldness and darkness of the English winter – all this was reflexed in medieval literature, which portrays life as bleak, dark, and hopeless except for the reliance on a better afterlife.

Pleasure, therefore, was very important. People took a tremendous interest in colour, dress, ritual, elaborate food and drink, parade and spectacle. They were also accepting of emotional extremes, in life and in characters they read and heard about; laughing and crying were acceptable behaviour for both men and women.

One of the forms of literature which reflected these values and evolved in Middle Ages was the romance. It was primarily developed in France, in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, and then transported to England, where it was adopted to a local culture. Generally, it has the following features:

• the story conserns knights and involves lots of fighting and miscellaneous adventures

• the story makes liberal use of the supernatural and the improbable

• the story often involves romantic love

• there are standart character ‘types’ used for heroes, heroines and villains (злодей)

• there is a plot with many events, and a gret deal of repetition

• the style is colloquial, informal and repetitious

• a new concept – Chivalry – takes the placeof the Heroic Ideal

• fame and everlasting life would be won by Chivalry qualities

13. The Medieval Period: literature of the 14^th century

14. English folk ballads of the 14-15^th centuries: structure, themes, genre peculiarities (особенности)

Although most people in the British Isles were unable to read or write for centuries after the Norman Conquest in 1066, they, like human beings everywhere, told stories to one another. We have inherited their folk ballads, the stories they told in verse and usually sang. Transmitted orally from generation to generation, most of the English and Scottish ballads we know date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries but were not collected and printed until the eighteenth century.

Love, adventure, courageous feats of daring, and sudden disaster are frequent topics of folk ballads. Folk ballads relate out-of-the-ordinary incidents – ones that might make headlines now, such as a shipwreck or an accidental death. Despite such tragic subjects, ballads rarely contain opinions on what has happened. The narrative usually dramatizes a single incident with little attention to characterization, background, or description. Why do the charactrs act as they do? How did they get into such a plight (обязательство)? We must read between the lines and supply our own answers, as we hear the little dramatic scenes unfold (разворачиваться). Indeed, the ballad presents action as sparsely (скудно) as posible, often through dialogue – the speech of the characters involved. We should not, however, think that ballads are simple or shallow (поверхностные). They may be brief and sparse-econonic – but they contain sharp psychological portraits and much folk wisdom.

The original authors of ballads are unknown; in fact, a given ballad may exist in several versions, because many different people told and revised the ballad as it travelled from village to village. Nevertheless, when a version seemed just right, its teller would be urged (убеждён) to recite (повторить) the story again without changing a thing.

It is important to remember that most ballads were originally sung. But even when read - preferably aloud – enough remains to place the best of the folk ballads among the most haunting narrative poems in British literature. After all, folk ballads have lasted this long partly because they are dramatic staries particularly well told.

So the main peculiarities of Folk Ballads are:

- usual topics ( extraordinary incidents, tragic subjects)

- author unknown

- no opinion on the events

- no attention to descriptions and characterizations

- dialogs are included

- quick movement from scene to scene, straight narrative style

- not simple and shallow – full of folk wisdom, psychological portraits

15. Geoffrey Chaucer: life and creative activity

Geoffrey Chaucer (along with William Shakespeare and John Milton) comes to most scholars’ minds when they list the three greatest poets of the English language. Chaucer’s most important work, The canterbury Tales, vividly demonstrated the literary potential of the English language in the 1300s. It also preserved for all future ages a realistic, detailed and comprehensive panorama of daily life at that time.

Like the other two – Shakespeare, the actor, and Milton, the public servant – Chaucer led an extremely busy life. In fact, he was so active in public affairs that we may reasonably wonder how he found time to write as prolifically (плодовито) and as well as he did. The son of a wealthy London wine merchant, Chaucer had the good fortune to serve as a page (слугой) in the royal household while in his early teens. Later, he maried one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, was sent as the king’s emissary to France and Italy, and held various positions in the home government: controller of customs, justice of the piece, member of Parliament, clerk of the king’s works, and deputy forester (заместитель лесничего) for a royal forest. Yet despite the demands that such responsibilities placed on him, Chaucer somehow found timeto produce an astonishing body of prose and poetry. He died while still at work on his poetry and was burried in Westminster Abbey in London. Around his burial spot has grown the famous Poets’ Corner.

Chaucer’s poetry is generally divided into three periods. The earliest poetry is in the artificial (синтетический) manner of the great French poets of the day: drean visions and allegories, which were more to the taste of medieval than of modern people. This French period was followed by an Italian period, inspired by the poet’s own journeys to Italy as a royal emissary (агент). Influenced by the vigor of three great Italian writrs – Dante, Petrarch, and especially, Boccacio – Chaucer brought to his own verse a new strength. During this phase he produced one of two masterpieces: Troilus and Criseyde, along narrative poem based on Boccaccio’s retelling of a classical love story set during the legendary Trojan War. The greatest of Chaucer’s achievements – and one of the glories of all literature – was a product of his final, English period: The Canterbury Tales. At last Chaucer broke away from French and Italian models and fully realized his own style in his narrative tongue.

Chaucer’s works are in Middle English, the English of London in the 1300s. Middle English did not have the prestige of the French language introduced to England by the Normans or of the Latin used by the Roman Catholic Church. Chaucer changed all that.