Historical Themes

From the first to the fifth century, Britain was a province of the Roman
Empire, inhabited by the Celtic-speaking Britons, who became Christians
along with Constantine. In the fifth century, the Roman legions withdrew in
an attempt to defend Rome from barbarians, leaving the island vulnerable
to invasions of Germanic sea traveling peoples; in decades the Anglo-
Saxons managed to push the Britons to the mountainous regions of Wales;
Christianity only remained in the remote regions where the Anglo-Saxons
could not make effective incursions. In the end of the sixth century,
missions were ordered by the Pope, concomitantly with the activities of Irish
missionaries in the north; as a result, by the last quarter of the seventh
century Christianity was again predominant in Britain. The converted Anglo-
Saxons adapted Christian principles to their social code; this is clear
throughout Beowulf; as when Hrothgar tells Beowulf about the sin of covet
in selfish kings:

What he has long held seems to him too little, angry-hearted he covets, no
plated rings does he give in mens honor, and then he forgets and regards
not his destiny because of what God, Wielder of Heaven, has given him
before, his portion of glories…

The Norman Conquest in 1066 marks the transition from the Old English
period to Middle English. The Normans spoke French and were Christians.
Their dominion resulted in a hiatus in written literature in Old English,
although the language continued its development, and works continued to
be written in the island in French and Latin, by court and clergy. In the
fourteenth century, there were the first half of the Hundred Years’ War, the
first epidemic of the bubonic plague, and a loss of reputation by the Church
from the split in the papacy, as well as its hypocrisy in this chaotic context.
As a result there were economic difficulties and popular upheavals. In the
Canterbury Tales Chaucer illustrates the hypocrisy of the church in the
Pardoner, in lines 688-689 of the general prologue; we can also see the
development of the language:

His walet lay biforn hym in his lappe

Bretful of pardoun come from Rome al hoot.

From 1399 to 1485 we have the deposition and murder of Richard II, plotted
by Bolingbroke; he reigned as Henry IV and passed the crown on to his son
Henry V, whose premature death resulted in the Wars of the Roses between
the houses of Lancaster and York. The feud lasted more than thirty years,
and ended with the defeat of Richard III and ascendance of Tudor as Henry
VII. This marks the end of the middle ages in England.

The sixteenth century is marked by the growth of commerce, cities, literacy

and the Renaissance, the rebirth of letters and arts fueled by the
rediscovery of classical philosophy and aesthetic models; during Henry VIII’s
reign there was more political stability and this movement was greatly
intensified. The Protestant Reformation is an event of huge importance, for
its principles of the primacy of the Scriptures over ecclesiastical authority,
and of God’s grace and personal faith over religious practices and good
deeds, united many groups against Rome.

In England, however, the split with the Church of Rome happened because
of the Pope’s refusal to concede a divorce to Henry VIII, who needed a wife
able to conceive an heir; the resulting principles of the English church were
in essence protestant. Edward VI, Henry VIII’s son, ruled for six years and
provided the English church with more strength and allowed the coming of
Protestants to England, which motivated translation of the bible and
publication of prose for discussion of ecclesiastical disputes. His half-Spanish
sister and successor, Mary Tudor, tried to reverse the changes made by the
Reformation, by pursuing Protestants as heretics; her effort however was
unsuccessful because of practical as well as political barriers. With her death
in 1558, Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth Tudor ascended to the throne as
Queen Elizabeth I, and molded the English church in terms which satisfied
neither the Roman Catholics nor the Puritans, but were acceptable to her
subjects and accommodated the larger part of the population, providing
sovereignty to her rule. The Elizabethan age was a period of great national
unity, harmony in international relations, consolidation of dominion over
Ireland, and of patronage to art; literature and theatre flourished.

Literary Style (Characterization, narrative, tone, themes)

In the Old English, themes are feats of legendary or historical characters

from a distant past. The Germanic society presented has a notion of nation
related not to geographical area but to kinship, the basis for the heroic
moral code. In essence, the clan is ruled by a Lord (ring-giver) who has the
loyalty of a group of kinsmen (retainers); he leads them to battle and
generously shares the conquered spoils. For that, the retainers must fight
for him to death, and avenge him when necessary even if it means certain
death. If a kinsman is killed, he must be avenged, or the aggressor must pay
wergild, a material compensation for the offense. The world in this literature
has dystopian tones; the only cheerful moments happen at the mead hall,
where men drink, eat and boast about their accomplishments in battle.

Characters seem to embody values and obligations of the few parts one
might take in society, such as a king, or a warrior; they are in result highly
impersonal, representative of nations rather than individuals.

Poetic speech is rather distant from everyday spoken language, in the sense
that figures of speech are used to give language an indirect tone, through
synecdoche and metonymy, as in ’battle-dress’ and ‘you will not need hide
my head if he takes me…’ ; another device seems to be the use of irony
with macabre tones, as in ‘…she repaid him his gift with her grim claws…’;
also, we can find the use of litotes, or ironic understatement, as in ‘No help
or backing was to be had then from his high-born comrades’, to say that the
retainers in Beowulf’s final fight were cowards not to help him.
The themes in the Middle English Period were much more diversified,
derived from the social and linguistic diversity of the period. Still, the
dominant thematic is religious. We have the mystery plays, dramatizations
of biblical episodes used to preach morals to the laity. A typical secular
genre is the romance; basically, the hero must prove his knightly worth to a
lady of higher rank, rising through his noble deeds rather than birth.

There are varied tones, generally much lighter, with humor appearing in
potentially any situation, and lots of irony. The best representative of this
period is Chaucer; his Canterbury Tales provide a portrayal of society
through the voice of many classes and groups.

We start to see details of everyday life and speech in the characters’

detailed descriptions and actions; they are much deeper than in the Old
English, but retain a degree of generality, in the sense that they embody
specific social parts of a more complex society instead of pure personalities.

Renaissance writers were very concerned about knowing literary models

and conventions of the classical tradition as well as of the Continental
currents, with the intent of learn and transform these models. The result is a
variety of themes without precedents, predominantly secular and treated in
the most varied tones. Modes or ‘kinds’, as identified by Sidney, which refer
to the subject matter and tone of works include: pastoral, heroic, lyric,
satiric, elegiac, tragic and comic. Genres, which pertain not only subject
matter but also formal structure (like meter and size), include epic, tragedy,
sonnet, hymn and a huge variety of others; Elizabethans considered epic to
be the highest genre, and pastoral the lowest.

Characters are highly developed and individualized; they evolve with the
story, and show particular traits clearly though their variety of speech and
action, representing unique personalities.

Poetic Techniques (Alliteration, caesura; rhyming couplets; iambic

pentameter, rhyme schemes, blank verse, etc)

During the Old English period, secular literature remained mainly in oral
medium; very few survived in manuscripts. They use a lot of alliterative
verse and variation, as evident in ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’.

The verse unit in all of Old English poetry is the line; the link between
different lines is done through alliteration rather than rhyme. We have four
stresses, divided two in two by a strong pause, called ‘caesura’. The first
two stresses have the same sound as the beginning of the first word of the
second half; this links both halves.

The ‘caesura’ may relate to the fact that poetry was transmitted orally,
accompanied by instruments; the alliteration and the pause seem to give
melody and tempo to the verses. It gives the narrative a pagan communal
tone.
Middle English verse includes several variations of the alliterative verse and
‘caesura’, as well as the alternative rhyming verse with various stresses
schemes. But the predominant form is the rhyme in couplets; Chaucerian
verse usually presents rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter, which
became the standard poetic line of English. In the General Prologue, lines 1-
6:

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
5Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

In the renaissance the standard metric scheme of English was the iambic
pentameter. Iambic refers to the stress pattern of the poetic line; an iamb is
an element of sound comprised of two beats, the first unstressed and the
second stressed. Pentameter refers to the meter of the line, the number of
stressed syllables; in the case, five stresses.

Rhyme schemes are various; the sonnet, introduced by Petrarch in the

fourteenth century, was a novelty in the renaissance in England and
consists of a sequence of fourteen iambic pentameters, with many different
schemes such as Shakespeare’s abab cdcd efef gg.

Shakespeare also introduced the blank verse in iambic pentameter,

frequently used in his plays on the discourse of characters of higher social
status, and in solemn occasions; often, he will finish an important scene with
a couplet. This form of verse relates to the fact that the blank iambic
pentameter fits very well the verbalization of the lines by the actors, for the
beat goes well with the breath necessary to utter each line.

Love (Secular, Religious; Platonic, Erotic)

In the Old English period, love seems to occupy little part of the
preoccupations of the Anglo-Saxons, who seem to be more concerned with
heroic feats and protection from menaces from the outside. Love does not
seem to be religious. Women, not being fighters, seem to be charged with
the hosting of warriors in the mead hall, as shown by the example of queen
Wealhtheow in Beowulf:

Came Wealhtheow forth, queen of Hrothgar, heedful of courtesy, gold-

decked, greeting the guests in hall; and the high-born lady handed the cup
first to the East-Danes' heir and warden, bade him be blithe at the beer-
carouse, the land's beloved one.

In the Middle English period, we can see secular erotic love clearly in the
Miller’s Tale; the language used to describe Allison and used by Nicholas to
seduce her are explicitly sexual, as well as the actions described. In lines
168-171 of the Tale:
And prively he caughte hire by the queynte,
And seyde, "Ywis, but if ich have my wille,
For deerne love of thee, lemman, I spille."
And heeld hire harde by the haunchebones

We can see the same kind of love in the Wife of Bath’s Tale; she dominates
her first three husbands, who were old and rich, through sex; she is
unsatisfied with her fourth husband because he has a mistress, while she is
in the height of her ‘passion’; from her fifth husband, she accepted beatings,
because he satisfied her in bed. In lines 514-518 of her prologue:

But in oure bed he was ful fressh and gay,

And therwithal so wel koude he me glose
Whan that he solde han my bele chose,
That thogh he hadde me bet on every bon
He koude wynne agayn my love anon.

In the genre Romance, of the Middle English period, we find romantic

platonic love; the knight is in love with a damsel of higher birth,
unattainable at first; to get to her, he must prove his worth as a knight
through heroic feats, thus becoming worthy of her love.

In the Renaissance, we seem to encounter all types of representation of

love, but the dominant is the romantic love, secular; it is evident in
Shakespeare’s plays in matches like Bassanio and Portia, Lucentio and
Bianca. There is sexual some connotation in Petruchio and Katherine’s
relationship.