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Thematic Structure and Symbolic Motif in the Middle English Breton Lays

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 February 2016

Shearle Furnish
Shearle Furnish*
Affiliation:
Youngstown State University
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Extract

The Breton Lays in Middle English is an enigmatic label customarily used to designate eight or nine brief narratives: Sir Orfeo, Sir Degaré, Lay le Freine, “The Franklin's Tale,” Sir Launfal, The Earl of Toulouse, Emaré, and Sir Gowther. The label is awkward because it may seem to suggest that the poems are consistently derived from or inspired by Breton or Old French sources and thus are a sort of stepchildren, little more than translations or, worse, misunderstandings of a multi-media heritage. Most scholars have seen the grouping as traditional and artificial, passed along in uncritical reception, not resting on substantial generic similarities that distinguish the poems from other literary forms. John Finlayson, for instance, concludes, “In fact, considered coldly, shortness and adventure or ordeal would seem to be the only things that can really be isolated as universal characteristics.” Some scholars have accounted for the poems as a set. The distinctions they discuss commonly include the lays' close relation to the conventions of the folk-tale, relationship to provincial audiences, and a growing sophistication of the craft of fiction.

Type
Research Article
Information
Traditio , Volume 62 , 2007 , pp. 83 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © Fordham University 

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References

1 Sir Orfeo , ed. Bliss, A. J. (London, 1954); Sir Degaré in Medieval English Romances , ed. Schmidt, A. V. C. and Jacobs, Nicholas (New York, 1980), 2:57–88; Lay le Freine in The Middle English Breton Lays , ed. Laskaya, Anna and Salisbury, Eve, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, 1995), 68–87; Sir Launfal , ed. Bliss, A. J. (London, 1960); The Earl of Toulouse, in Middle English Metrical Romances , ed. French, Walter Hoyt and Hale, Charles Brockway (New York, 1930), 383–419; Emaré , ed. French, and Hale, , Middle English Metrical Romances, 423–55; Sir Gowther , ed. Laskaya, and Salisbury, , Middle English Breton Lays, 274–95; and “The Franklin's Tale” in The Riverside Chaucer , ed. Larry, D. Benson (Boston, 1987), 178–89. Quotations from these works are identified by line numbers. For convenience, I do not include in this study a major source of Thomas Chestre's Sir Launfal, a poem entitled Landevale. Anna Laskaya and Eve Salisbury add Sir Cleges to the contents of their anthology “based upon common topoi that render it compatible with the Middle English Breton Lays” but seem hesitant to call it a lay explicitly, except by its inclusion (Laskaya and Salisbury, Middle English Breton Lays, vii). In explaining their exclusion of Chaucer's contributions to the genre, Laskaya and Salisbury observe that the “Wife of Bath's Tale” is also widely recognized as a Breton Lay. Although currently engaged in examining it as a lay for another study, I exclude the “Wife's Tale” here only because she does not make the point of its genre as the Franklin does.Google Scholar

2 E.g., Spearing, A. C., “Marie de France and Her Middle English Adapters,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 (1990): 117–56. Among other underestimations of the English tradition arising from the assumption that the English versions should be seen solely or mostly as translations, Spearing (ibid., 118) writes of Sir Launfal, “Chestre destroys the meaning of Lanval precisely by identifying totally with the very fantasies it represents.” For an opposing view of Chestre's artistry, see my “Civilization and Savagery in Thomas Chestre's Sir Launfal,” Medieval Perspectives 3 (1988): 137–49. Constance Bullock-Davies clarifies the famous semantic confusions surrounding the term lai and describes the various features that might have gone into the ancient performances originally called lais, already obsolete when Marie wrote. See eadem, “The Form of the Breton Lay,” Medium ævum 42 (1973): 18–31. Clearly, from Marie onward, the most that poets could have accurately meant by associating their compositions with the term lai is the literary residue or poetically commemorated aventure that in earlier times may have been just one, and not the most important, feature of the performance. I use the term in this sense. Like my study, Bullock-Davies's also emphasizes the crucial function of technical form in the distinction of the genre.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Finlayson, John, “The Form of the Middle English Lay,” Chaucer Review 19 (1985):354.Google Scholar

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12 Harrington, David, “Redefining the Middle English Breton Lay,” Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 16 (1988): 73–95, at 74.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., “Redefining,” 93.Google Scholar

14 Woolf, Rosemary, “Later Poetry: the Popular Tradition,” History of Literature in the English Language, vol. 1 of The Middle Ages , ed. Bolton, W. F. (London, 1970), 268. Harrington (“Redefining,” 82) also notes Woolf's observation and its implications for an under-standing of the relationship between form and meaning in the lay.Google Scholar

15 Kiernan, Kevin, “Athelston and the Rhyme of the English Romances,” Modern Language Quarterly 36 (1975): 353, 347–51. Both Kiernan's attention to parallel structure and mine to symmetrical, thematic repetition of symbolic objects are reminiscent of Vladimir Propp's assertion that, as opposed to study of broad narrative types, “study according to small component parts is the correct method of investigation.” See Propp, , Morphology of the Folktale , trans. Scott, Laurence, ed. with introduction by Svatava Pirkova-Jakobson, Bibliographical and Special Series 9 (Philadelphia, 1958), 10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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17 Strohm, , “Origins and Meaning” (n. 5 above), 25.Google Scholar

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19 As Propp (Morphology, 18) promises at the outset of his important study of folktales, “The result will be a morphology (i.e., the description of the folktale according to its component parts and the relationship of these component parts to each other and to the whole).” My claim is similar for the Breton lays in Middle English.Google Scholar

20 Colopy, Cheryl, “Sir Degaré: A Fairy Tale Oedipus,” Pacific Coast Philology 17 (1982):31–39, at 31–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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23 See Rosenberg, Bruce A., “The Three Tales of ‘Sir Degaré,”’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 76 (1975): 39–51, at 42–43.Google Scholar

24 As R. W. Hanning points out, this growth is of a different sort than a character's in modern fiction: “As we respond to the motive clues in a string of episodes, we become increasingly aware of the main issues of the romance; in other words, while there seems no ‘development’ in the character of the hero, there is development of our awareness as an audience.” See “The Audience as Co-Creator of the First Chivalric Romances,” Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981): 1–28, at 15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Kiernan, , “Athelston” 348.Google Scholar

26 For the perception of the poem's structure as nesting-box sequences of episodes within larger narrative patterns, I am indebted to Hill, D. M., “The Structure of ‘Sir Orfeo,”’ Mediaeval Studies 23 (1961): 136–53. Hill (ibid., 139) sees these structural divisions: “The major assay concerns the testing of Orfeo and Heurodis and through them the quality of human heterosexual (if you like, ‘romance’) love. The minor assay concerns the testing of the steward and through him the quality of male (epic, and romance) love.” For a concise comparison of different views of the structural divisions in Sir Orfeo, including her own emphasis on the pattern of loss and restoration to which my view is indebted, see Hynes-Berry, Mary, “Cohesion in King Horn and Sir Orfeo,” Speculum 50 (1975): 652–70, at 663–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Cf. Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957). Describing the analogous relation of romance to innocence and realism to experience, and the relation of all four concepts as quadrants of a wheel, Frye (ibid., 162) remarks: “The downward movement is the tragic movement, the wheel of fortune falling from innocence toward hamartia, and from hamartia to catastrophe. The upward movement is the comic movement, from threatening complications to happy ending and a general assumption of postdated innocence in which everyone lives happily ever after.” Google Scholar

28 Beston, (“Breton Lai,” 323) among others, observes ideas and phrases in Sir Degaré borrowed from Lay le Freine. Google Scholar

29 That is, in terms of plot outline, major characterizations, and motivations. For an analysis of the substantial differences in tone, diction, and audience, see Spearing, , “Marie de France” (n. 2 above), 126–33.Google Scholar

30 Hill (“Structure,” 149) observes in Sir Orfeo this relationship between private love and social belonging. For a similar view, see Lucas, Peter J., “An Interpretation of Sir Orfeo” Leeds Studies in English 6 (1972): 1–9, at 5. Seth Lerer also stresses “patterns of domestication” and “civilizing power” in the poem, but attributes them not to love but to Orfeo's music; see “Artifice and Artistry in Sir Orfeo” Speculum 60 (1985): 92–109, at 105.Google Scholar

31 Cf. Beston, (“Breton Lai“ 327–28): “If the le Freine poet is describing the lais as ‘mest o loue’ (so also the Ashmole MS, but ‘moost to lowe’ in the Harleian MS of Sir Orfeo), then he is referring almost exclusively to Marie, since love as a main theme appears only incidentally elsewhere, except in that group of lais that the English lay-writers do not seem to have known.” Google Scholar

32 Frye, Northrup ( The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance [Cambridge, 1976], 86) remarks, “When we come to this mythical core of a common, even a hackneyed situation, we come back to the problem … of having to distinguish what the individual story is saying from what the convention the story belongs to is saying through the story.” Google Scholar

33 Carole Koepke Brown asserts the key role of formal structure — specifically, alternating episodic parallelism — in the articulation of theme and meaning in Chaucer's lay; see “‘It Is True Art to Conceal Art’: The Episodic Structure of Chaucer's Franklins Tale,” Chaucer Review 27 (1992): 162–85.Google Scholar

34 Strohm, , “Origins and Meaning” (n. 5 above), 4.Google Scholar

35 Harrington (“Redefining” [n. 12 above], 86) asserts that the triple resolution “memorably epitomizes the benevolent spirit” that he finds a characteristic feature of Middle English Breton lays. My analysis and Harrington's assertion, of course, concentrate on the pilgrim Franklin's point of view toward his story, a point of view whose arriviste tendencies are responsible for his naive misunderstanding of what a historical knight like Arveragus might resolve to do under the circumstances, and, no doubt, his idealistic confidence in the bonds of marriage. My study does not intend to diminish or lose sight of the poet Chaucer's superbly ironic analysis of gentry or bourgeois sensibility in the Franklin.Google Scholar

36 Loomis, , “Chaucer and the Breton Lays” (n. 7 above), 18–26.Google Scholar

37 Few commentators have liked Sir Launfal. Among the stronger negative reactions, Spearing (“Marie de France,” 144) charges Chestre with “a strong identification … with his hero,” which he reads to Chestre's embarrassment since “Sir Launfal is a fascinating specimen, because of the strength and transparency of Chestre's self-delusion. It has the extreme and powerful badness found in other works of self-pitying self-revelation that also at times plead to be rescued by being read as deliberate self-parody” (ibid., 156). In Middle English Literature: A Critical Study of the Romances, the Religious Lyrics, “Piers Plowman” (London, 1951), 34, George Kane calls Chestre's expanded opening “mealy-mouthed and sanctimonious.” Defenders include Martin, B. K., “Sir Launfal and the Folktale,” Medium ævum 35 (1966): 199–210; Robson, , “Symmetrical Composition” (n. 16 above), 29–33; Lucas, P. J., “Towards an Interpretation of Sir Launfal with Particular Reference to Line 683,” Medium ævum 39 (1970): 291–300; and my “Civilization and Savagery” (n. 2 above), 137, 146–48, which suggests that the poem's problems of bad taste are not unconscious but in fact thematic issues in a self-reflexive examination of the function of courtly literature in a post-chivalric culture.Google Scholar

38 For a discussion of Chestre's strategic modifications of Landevale and the simpler story told by Marie, see Furnish, , “Civilization and Savagery,” 137–43.Google Scholar

39 Ross Arthur cautions against over-reading the gem-cloak as sign; see “Emaré's Cloak and Audience Response” in Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature , ed. Wasserman, Julian and Roney, Lois (Syracuse, 1989), 80–92, at 84–86.Google Scholar

40 Marchalonis, Shirley, in “Sir Gowther: The Process of a Romance,” Chaucer Review 6 (1971): 14–29, at 20–23, discusses certain parallel associations working in the progressive scheme of black, red, and white colors. Among other associations, she identifies the pattern as significant of Christian penance, purification, and salvation, and also of chivalric humility, nobility, and freedom. The double association reinforces the poem's suggestion that Christian profession is integral to chivalry.Google Scholar

41 I discern underlying coherent, episodic structure despite this appearance of disjointedness; see my “The Modernity of The Erle of Tolous and the Decay of the Breton Lai,” Medieval Perspectives 8 (1993): 69–77, at 70–72.Google Scholar

42 In “The Modernity of The Erle of Tolous,” 73–76, I interpret this magnification of focus as a sign of the genre in decadence.Google Scholar

43 Cf. Donovan, “Breton Lay” (n. 9 above), 209.Google Scholar

44 For an account of the symbolic function of beauty and eros in The Earl , see Furnish, , “The Modernity of The Erle of Tolous,” 73–76.Google Scholar

45 Frye, ( Secular Scripture [n. 32 above], 59) observes that in contrast to realism, “The symbolic spread of a romance tends rather to go into its literary context, to other romances that are most like it in the conventions adopted. The sense that more is meant than meets the ear in romance comes very largely from the reverberations that its familiar conventions set up within our literary experience, like a shell that contains the sounds of the sea.” Google Scholar

46 Kiernan, , “Athelston” (n. 15 above), 353.Google Scholar

47 This view of the lay implies that it serves as a comic complement for the de casibus tragedy, another formally distinctive genre taking the form of the wheel of fortune. In the de casibus tragedy, of course, the plot commences and concludes at the nadir of the wheel.Google Scholar

48 Rumble, Thomas, following other editors, emends in Sir Degaré an initial identification of the hero's father (line 100 of Schmidt's edition, “Iich am comen here a fairi knyzte”) because it is inconsistent with the poem's ending, where Degaré's parents are at last wed. Evidently, some editors assume that the poet needs a mortal man for this resolution. Rumble's corresponding line (90) reads “Y am com to the as a knyght.” See Sir Degaré , in The Breton Lays in Middle English (Detroit, 1965), 45–78. The emendation, however, merely trades one inconsistency for another, for in the Auchinleck MS context, the knight's long-standing secret knowledge of the maiden and his assault in the forest can hardly be under-stood as other than a mysterious fairy intrusion of the sort in Sir Orfeo or, for that matter, in Yonec. Google Scholar

49 Discussing a similar problem in the opening and closing frame of the Apollonius story, Frye (Secular Scripture, 49–50) observes that “This principle of action on two levels, neither of them corresponding very closely to the ordinary world of experience, is essential to romance, and shows us that romance presents a vertical perspective which realism, left to itself, would find it very difficult to achieve. The realist, with his sense of logical and horizontal continuity, leads us to the end of his story; the romancer, scrambling over a series of disconnected episodes, seems to be trying to get us to the top of it.” Google Scholar

50 Cf. Arthur, (“Emaré's Cloak” [n. 39 above], 82): “He functions, therefore, as a kind of touchstone for faith.” Google Scholar

51 Spiers, John, Medieval English Poetry: The Non-Chaucerian Tradition (London, 1947), 157.Google Scholar

52 Loomis, Laura Hibbard, Mediaeval Romance in England: A Study of the Sources and Analogues of the Non-Cyclic Metrical Romances (1924; repr., New York, 1969), 29.Google Scholar

53 Lerer, (“Artifice and Artistry” [n. 30 above], 94) asserts Sir Orfeo's self-conscious “vision of art's power to reshape experience.” Google Scholar