Literature Focus II. The Ballad Tradition

“O I fear ye are poisoned, Lord Randall, my son!

O I fear ye are poisoned, my handsome young man!”

“O yes, I am poisoned; Mother, make my bed soon,

For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain would lie doon.”

—from “Lord Randall”

Six centuries ago, most people in the British Isles were unable to read or write. However, like people everywhere, they enjoyed hearing and telling a good story. Some of their stories still survive in folk ballads—rhymed verse that was recited or sung. The themes of these tales are familiar even today. Typical topics include:

• murderous acts and the desire for revenge

• tragic accidents and sudden disasters

• heroic deeds motivated by the quest for honor

• jealous sweethearts and unrequited love

For example, the stanza from “Lord Randall,” shown above, tells of a young man poisoned by his sweetheart.

The ballad genre is thought to be nearly 1,000 years old, with the earliest known ballad dating from about 1300. Because ballads were not written down until the 18th century, early ballads are all anonymous—the names of their composers lost forever in the mists of time. Most of the English and Scottish ballads we know date from the 14^th and 15^th centuries. In fact, a given ballad may exist in any number of versions, because of the memory and personal tastes of the many different people who passed it on from generation to generation. First collected and published during the 18^th century, the English and Scottish ballads we know share the following characteristics:

1. Dramatization of a single incident. The story begins abruptly, often in the middle of the action. Little attention is paid to characterization, background, or description.

2. L ittle reflection or expression of sentiment. Ballads focus simply on telling what happened rather than on what people may have thought or felt.

3. Dialogue or questions and answers that further the story. Typically, the tales are told through the speech of the characters rather than by first-person narrator.

4. A strong, simple beat and an uncomplicated rhyme scheme, or pattern. The ballads also contain repetition of a key word, line, or phrase to emphasize ideas, to heighten the emotional content, and to add to the musical quality of the verse.

5. Use of the refrain, a regularly repeated line or phrase at the end of a stanza. The refrain allowed listeners to join in the chorus and gave singers time to remember verses.

6. The tendency to suggest rather than directly state. Although sparsely told, the ballads often contain sharp psychological portraits and much folk wisdom.

7. Stories that were often based on actual events. These incidents—shipwrecks, murders, accidental deaths—might make headlines today.

The best of the folk ballads are among the most haunting narrative poems in British literature. Their universal themes and compelling rhythm and rhyme continue to entertain.

Literature Focus III. Miracle and Morality Plays

The prime entertainers in Anglo-Saxon Britain were storytellers and singing poets. Not until later medieval times did drama as public entertainment take hold. Like most forms of culture in those times, the theater had its beginnings in religion.

Rise of Medieval Drama Though the church had condemned plays as immoral in 692, it revived theater later in the Middle Ages for religious purposes. Medieval theater developed in the early 900s from the annual cycle of the church liturgy (religious rites) that presented events in the life of Christ. It began as a dialogue about Christ’s Resurrection performed by priests at Easter services. Later, clerical plays presented the events of Christmas and the Epiphany—the revelation of God to humankind in the form of Jesus—(the latter including a mechanical star of Bethlehem).

Miracle and Mystery Plays By the 1100s, the church had developed religious drama in order to teach Bible stories and the lives of saints to a mostly illiterate populace. Originally, members of the clergy performed these plays in church sanctuaries, acting out the parts of biblical characters or saints. These short, one-act dramas were called miracle plays, after the miracles performed by the saints. Later, after the performances were taken over by the trade guilds known as “mysteries” (from mystery, meaning “trade” or “craft,” related to the modern English word ministry), they became known as mystery plays.

Although based on religious subjects, medieval drama included elements of secular humor. In Noah’s Flood, for example, Noah has an easy time building the ark but a difficult time persuading his wife to get aboard.

Noah: Wife in this castle we shall be kept:

My children and thou I would in leaped!

Wife: In faith, Noe, I had as lief thou had slept,

for all thy frankishfare [nonsense]

For I will not do after thy rede [advice].

Noah: Good wife, do as I thee bid.

Wife: By Christ not, or I see more need,

Though thou stand all the day and rave.

Noah: Lord, that women be crabbed aye!

And never are meek, that I dare say.

As time went on, the plays grew more popular and the costumes and settings more elaborate—so much so that the churches could no longer hold such large audiences. The dramas moved outdoors and their production was taken over by the trade guilds. Guild members made scenery, props, and costumes and loaded them onto wagons (known as “pageants”) so that the plays could be performed at fairs, in marketplaces, at crossroads and, if the producers were lucky, in the great halls of castles, where people paid good money for entertainment.

Guild records indicate that performances featured music, dancing, and comedy. Some performances even included special effects. For example, to depict the drowning of the Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea, stagehands covered the actors with a large blue cloth, shaking it to imitate the movement of waves. No feast days were complete without miracle plays, and everyone turned out for these performances. Audiences were anything but silent—cheers greeted heroes and saints, while villains such as Lucifer and Herod were enthusiastically booed and hissed.

Gradually, these short plays began to be presented in day-long cycles, beginning with the story of the creation of the world and ending with the story of Christ. By the late 1300s, cycles that lasted for several days were being performed on wagon stages throughout such English towns as York and Wakefield. As time passed, plays were not limited to biblical stories in cycles. A non-cycle play, Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham, was often presented at May Day festivals.

The Morality Play In the early 1400s, a corps of professional actors arose who performed morality plays—plays that dramatized points of religious doctrine. Morality plays, as their name implies, centered on the moral struggles of everyday people. The characters in these plays had names such as Patience, Greed, and Good Works, and their dialogue was designed to teach people important lessons about salvation and the struggle between virtue and vice. As the popularity of morality plays grew, their staging became more sophisticated, while their subject matter moved from the church to the secular world. The morality plays established a theater tradition in England that eventually led to the plays of William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw.

Reading Check

1. What rhyming words do you find in “from The Creation of Adam and Eve”?

2. What slant rhyme is found in the selection?

3. What rhyme scheme do Eve’s lines follow?

UNIT 3. LITERATURE OF THE

RENAISSANCE PERIOD

KEY IDEA The English Renaissance nurtured the talents of such literary giants as Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne. Poetry, drama, humanist works, and religious writings defined the literature of the period.

Literature Focus I. Literature of the Time

Pastoral Poems and Sonnets

D

Pastoral Poems and Sonnets

• Pastorals portray shepherds and rustic life, usually in an idealized manner.

• Elizabethans admired intricacy and artifice.

• The sonnet is a 14-line verse form, often published in sequences.

uring the Renaissance, the creative energy of the English people burst forth into the greatest harvest of literature the Western world had yet known. Poets and playwrights, readers and listeners, all delighted in the vigor and beauty of the English language.

The glittering Elizabethan court was a focus of poetic creativity. Members of the court vied with one another to see who could create the most highly polished, technically perfect poems. The appreciative audience for these lyrics was the elite artistic and social circle that surrounded the queen. Elizabeth I herself wrote lyrics, and she patronized favorite poets and rewarded courtiers for eloquent poetic tributes. Among her protégés were Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh, in turn, encouraged Edmund Spenser, who wrote the epic The Faerie Queene (1590) in honor of Elizabeth. Sir Walter Raleigh and his contemporary Christopher Marlowe wrote excellent examples of a type of poetry popular with Elizabeth’s court: the pastoral. A pastoral is a poem that portrays shepherds and rustic life, usually in an idealized manner. The poets did not attempt to write in the voice of a common shepherd, however. Their speakers used courtly language rather than the language of common speech. The pastoral’s form was artificial as well, with meters and rhyme schemes characteristic of formal poetry.

Improving Nature The Elizabethans viewed nature as intricate, complex, and beautiful. To them, however, the natural world was a subject not for imitation but for improvement by creative minds. Nature provided raw material to be shaped into works of art. The greater the intricacy or “artificiality” of the result, the more admired the artistry of the poet. Elizabethan poets thus created ingenious metaphors, elaborate allegories, and complex analogies, often within the strictures of a popular verse form that came from Italy, the sonnet.

Earlier poets, such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, had introduced into England the 14-line verse form, modifying it to better suit the English language. During Elizabethan times, the sonnet became the most popular form of love lyric. Sonnets were often published in sequences, such as Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti, addressed to his future wife. William Shakespeare’s sonnets do not form a clear sequence, but several address a mysterious dark lady some scholars think may have been the poet Amelia Lanier. The English sonnet eventually became known as the Shakespearean sonnet, in tribute to Shakespeare’s mastery of the form.