Session 2: Medieval Literature/Shakespearan Comedy

What are the two key periods in Medieval Literature?

• Old English Literature: c. 650 – c. 1100 (example: Beowulf)

• Middle English Literature: c. 1066 (Norman Conquest) –1500 (example: The Canterbury Tales)

Beowulf

• Old English heroic poem

• Consists of more than 3000 alliterative long lines

• Set in Scandinavia

• Cotton Manuscripts (Beowulf-Manuscript)

• Dated between 8th and 11th century

What is the binary opposition in Beowulf?

• construction of the archetypal ‘heroic’ individual in binary opposition to the ‘villain’

• absolute moral values of the community embodied by the victorious hero (supported by divine authority), in contrast to the monstrous ‘Other’

What are Grendel’s and Beowulf’s characteristics?

Grendel:

• killing soldies in their sleep

• creeping, accursed by God, savage

• secrecy

• unfair advantages

• described as an enemy of God

• honour does not seem to be a relevant concept

Beowulf:

• great, brave, praised

• acts out in the open

• fairness

• supported by divine authority

• honour → value warrior culture

Context of Beowulf

• Anglo-Saxon warrior culture

• oral transmission of the work: use of mnemonic techniques and space for improvisation (e.g. alliterative verses)

• epic poem

• explicit moral judgement

• stereotypes/archtypes and stories reassuring

• affirmation of values

The Canterbury Tales

written 1387 – 1400

story-telling contest of a group of pilgrims on

the way to Canterbury

narrative perspective in the Canterbury Tales

• use of a frame narrative / palpable first-person narrator

• subjectivity of first person narrator

What is different in the Canterbury Tales in comparison to Beowulf?

• panorama of medieval society (vs. focus on the heroic individual in Beowulf)

• • tales mirror the tellers’ professions and social standing in language

  use and style → character types

  • use of irony and satire

  → (humorous) social criticism, points out shortcomings in their society

• has character types just like Beowulf, but the judgement is the narrator’s, no overall moral authority

typical features of (classical) Comedy

• main topic: love (‘romantic comedy’)

• youthful lovers in conflict with the patriarchal system / social establishment

• often shift to natural spaces (freedom from social conventions, e.g. Forest of Arden)

• use of disguise

• often leads to play with gender categories

• especially complex against the background of Elizabethan theatre conventions

(Rosalind as Ganymede, being addressed as Rosalind by Orlando)

What are the functions of the last act?

• removal of obstacles to love

• ‘correct’ allocation of the lovers into couples

• marriage(s)

o community festival

o promise of continuity (future generations)

→ similar to tragedy

Shakespearan Comedy

• often have some serious elements, i.e. some degree of genre mixing (cf. comic relief in tragedy)

• most obvious at the end: restoration of order

• important in the Elizabethan world picture

• return to fixed (gender and class) hierarchies