Периоды английской литературы. Карпова В.А. - 6 стр.

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professional story-tellers at the courts of kings and nobles in early medieval
France and England, the Bretons told their tales in French. Thus what may have
been originally Celtic tales were made into French romances, influenced in
greater or less degree by the spirit of the troubadours. From French they passed
into German and English. So the gods of ancient mythology became medieval
knights, the spring or earth goddesses became courtly ladies or queens.
        If we compare the extant romances we should quickly recognize that a
number of themes or motifs keep recurring in them, though always as variations.
There is, for example, the theme of the union of a mortal with an other-world
being. Sometimes a mortal queen meets a splendid other-world stranger, or she
is abducted by the king of the Other World. Or a mortal man – a knight – may
meet in a forest a lady, surpassingly lovely, who is clearly a fay and who woos
him.
        In many romances the theme is of a succession of tests – a kind of
initiation - which a knight must undergo to prove his manhood; of a contest
between a knight and some other than human or other-world character. This
contest may be prolonged and may take many forms other than that of a direct
combat. But a combat is frequently the climax.
        After the ritual combat follows the ritual marriage. The victor marries the
goddess or queen. This goddess, the spring or earth goddess, has become in the
medieval romances the faery lady or queen.
        The Middle English romances are largely in verse, a few alliterative,
others in couplets or stanzaic forms borrowed from France. In comparison with
French romances they usually show inferior artistry, less attention to
psychological treatment, more credulity and use of grotesque, and a higher
moral tone.
        It is hard to feel, reading the current histories of English literature, that
justice has yet been done to the strength and variety of the achievement of the
fourteenth-century English literature. Chaucer, of course, has had his due; but
the alliterative tradition which has, in a sense, roots even deeper in the national
consciousness, and which produced in the North-west that highly individual
development of medieval romance, “Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight”, and in
the Midlands, “Piers Plowman”, has tended to receive the almost exclusive
attention of the philologist.
        Of William Langland, the author of “Piers Plowman”, a work in its own
kind comparable in greatness to the best of Chaucer, almost nothing is known
except what the poem itself has to tell us. Langland, in fact, was a great poet,
and the quality of his greatness throws some light upon the nature of the English
contribution to poetry. The greatest English poets have been those who have
followed the genius of the language in resisting false convention. Shakespeare
and Donne, in their day, were great poets because they freed English from the
bondage of a dead scholarship and restored to it expressiveness and idiomatic
strength. Their idiom was similar to that of Langland, whose language was
living English and the alliterative metre into which it naturally fell the vital
vehicle for it. Langland’s metre, in fact, was the natural setting of a living

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