[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Yet these pleas and prayers provide the chief matrix within whichwhat we might call autobiographical writing first grows and develops inEngland.They take various forms.Medieval man considered himselfto be dependent for his prosperity and happiness upon the grace andfavour of those set above him; and one way to win such favour was topray for it, either directly or through intercessors.The supreme sourceof favour was God.One could pray directly to God, or else pray othersto intercede with him on one’s behalf—other living men, or the saintsin heaven, or the Virgin Mary.On earth the pattern was the same.Menwho had favours to bestow, from kings and archbishops downwards,40Writers, audiences, and readerscould be approached either directly or else indirectly through the goodoffices of some member of their household who himself enjoyed thelord’s favour.Any such petition, whether to God or to some secularor ecclesiastical patron, would gain strength from a description of thepetitioner’s plight; but the really fundamental requirement was that thewould-be beneficiary should be clearly and unambiguously identified—otherwise the favour might go to the wrong person.This simple observation, which would seem to have little to do withpoetic individuality of any sort, in fact goes a long way to explain whymedieval writers name themselves when they do.It also helps to explaintheir characteristic manner of self-portraiture.They are discovered, asit were, upon their knees; and they speak of themselves most often, notin the pride of the poet, but in the humility of the petitioner.Theirusual tone is one of complaint and of entreaty.The only known poet from the Anglo-Saxon period to whom a sub-stantial body of surviving verse can be attributed is Cynewulf.Cynewulfwove his name, spelled out in runic letters, into the closing passages of four poems.As Kenneth Sisam pointed out, his motive was the desire tobe remembered by name in the prayers of others.10 Thus at the end of Juliana he writes: ‘I beg every man who repeats this poem to remember me by name in my need.’ But Cynewulf gives little more than hisname in these passages.His accompanying description of himself as asinner, growing old and facing judgement, is highly conventional, in themanner of Anglo-Saxon elegiac complaint.The monastic civilization ofthe time was not favourable to poetic individuality.However, if we passto the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we find Early Middle Englishwriters already beginning to fill out their petitionary passages withpersonal detail.The prologue to LaZamon’s Brut, from which I have already quoted, begins as follows: ‘There was a priest among the peoplewho was called LaZamon.He was the son of Leovenath—may God bemerciful to him! He lived at Areley, at a noble church, on the banksof the Severn.’ The same prologue ends like this: ‘Now LaZamon prayseach noble man, for the sake of almighty God, if he reads this book andlearns these runes, that he utter faithful words for the soul of the father who brought him up and the soul of the mother who bore him and hisown soul, that it may be the better for it.’ Thus LaZamon’s account ofhow he wrote his book, though it may betray some pride in authorship,is framed by references to the author and his parents which are of apurely petitionary character.The stiff formality of LaZamon’s third-person account of himselfcreates a distinctly archaic effect; but in another poem of about thesame time we find a more flexible and personal development of theWriters, audiences, and readers41petitionary role.In The Owl and the Nightingale, quite early in the debate between the two birds, the Owl raises the question of who is going to act as judge between them.The Nightingale without hesitation proposesMaster Nichol of Guildford—a man, she says, of great wisdom anddiscretion.The Owl accepts the proposal: when he was young, she says,Nicholas was somewhat wild and favoured nightingales; but now he ismature and steady in judgement (‘ripe and fastrede’) and therefore, sheimplies, will favour her.Much later in the poem, the Wren tells the twocontestants where Nicholas is to be found, at Portesham in Dorset, andadds her own word in praise of his wisdom.It is a disgrace, she says,that bishops give livings to unworthy recipients and allow a man likeNicholas to live modestly in such a remote parish.The poem ends as thebirds fly off to Portesham to receive Nicholas’s judgement.Accordingto the best recent opinion, Nicholas of Guildford was probably himselfthe author of the poem.If so, The Owl and the Nightingale provides a subtle and amusingly shameless instance of petitionary autobiography.The object of this petition is not salvation but preferment, so the peti-tioner’s merits can be described—and in a very human, even worldly,fashion.The ripeness of Nicholas places him, as it were, at the apexof an equilateral triangle, equidistant from the solemn Owl and thejoyous Nightingale, and so acceptable to them both.The Owl’s accountsuggests merely that Nicholas has followed a natural order of moraldevelopment in his life, from wild youth to settled maturity; but thefact that Nicholas proves equally acceptable to the Nightingale suggeststhat his present maturity is not of the kind that simply supersedes thejoy of youth—rather, it includes that joy in a higher synthesis.Thus the two birds can join, with the Wren, to act as intercessors on behalf ofNicholas.The poet himself neither directly addresses the patron norinvites the reader to speak for him.His plea is conducted obliquely,within the fiction of the bird debate.‘The discovery of the individual was one of the most importantcultural developments in the years between 1050 and 1200.It wasnot confined to any one group of thinkers.Its central features maybe found in many different circles: a concern with self-discovery; aninterest in the relations between people, and in the role of the indi-vidual within society; an assessment of people by their inner interestsrather than by their external acts.’11 These bold words of the historian Colin Morris sum up a view of the twelfth century which is sharedby several recent writers on political, legal, and cultural history.Inthe Latin literature of that century, not least in England, one can findmany signs of such a ‘discovery of the individual’.E.R.Curtius pointsout that twelfth-century Latin writers frequently identify themselves42Writers, audiences, and readersby name and display an ‘unadulterated pride of authorship’, unliketheir monastic predecessors.12 It cannot be said, however, that Early Middle English literature provides any very striking instances of the‘discovery of the individual’.One would hardly cite LaZamon as a caseof unadulterated pride of authorship; and the ideal of wise maturitywhich Nicholas of Guildford represents leaves little room for personalinflections or idiosyncrasies.The real discovery of the individual comes in English literature much later—with the great writers of the Ricardianperiod and their successors in the fifteenth century.The Gawain-poet preserves his anonymity; but his contemporaries, Chaucer, Langland,and Gower, are poets with names and identities who speak in distinctivevoices.The same can be said of the next generation: Lydgate andHoccleve, for instance.In this later medieval period, in fact, anonymity increasingly becomes characteristic of certain specific types of writing—ballad, for instance—while other types reveal more and more abouttheir authors
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
