9 - Popular Romances and Young Readers

Summary

The phrase ‘popular romance’ has received extensive scrutiny in two recent collections of critical essays on Middle English romance, where various binary configurations have been offered to explore its semantic field: popular/ courtly romances; popular/official culture. Nicola McDonald celebrates the ‘inherent unorthodoxy’ of popular romance, as she seeks to expose the conventional prejudices of critical discourse from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries but, despite noting the popularity of medieval romance judged by the diversity of its audience, her argument draws attention to critical prejudice in relation to age. McDonald alludes to the early reading habits of Sir Walter Scott, ‘whose recollection of reading Percy as a boy in the mid 1780s confirms the logic that identifies romance with childish intellects’. Why should boyhood reading construct the texts read as inferior? The young Scott was at the same time reading the works of Shakespeare, Spenser, Ariosto, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Mackenzie. Dickens creates a similar collection of books for the boy David Copperfield, and addresses the issue of the child reading texts not specifically defined as fit for children: ‘I have been Tom Jones (a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together.’ Such texts are understood to be available, even if on different terms, to readers of all ages, and this is an equally important consideration in relation to the readership of medieval popular romance.

The label ‘popular romance’ is indeed often used to convey a critical estimate of texts as unsophisticated and appropriate for a non-learned readership. Recent scholarly discussions have on the whole not sought to oppose these estimations outright, but rather to re-evaluate them in terms appropriate to medieval experiences of narrative instead of modern critical preconceptions. Thus Ad Putter, for example, interrogates the alternative term ‘crude’, often used of popular romance, in the case of Sir Percyvell of Gales, arguing persuasively that the ‘raw’ quality of the prominent story structure is a positive strength in this and comparable Middle English romances, where a desire for logical, sequential action is the overriding formative concern, privileging the characteristic effects of ‘a sense of direction and a sense of narrative shape’ above the complex plot, non-linear narrative and richness of allusion in a text such as Chrétien's Conte du Graal.