Pride and Penitence: Political and Moral Allegory in Medieval Arthurian Romance and Richard II

Thomas, Alfred

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-90218-0_2

Alfred Thomas³

Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages ((TNMA))

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Abstract

This chapter traces the trajectory from pride to penitence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Alliterative Morte Arthur, and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and sees it as providing a moral blueprint for Shakespeare’s Richard II (1595). Whereas the medieval romance deploys the story of King Arthur’s rise and fall to draw parallels between the mythic King of Britain and the doomed historical figures of Richard II and Henry VI, Shakespeare uses the failings of Richard II to comment allegorically on the discontents of another childless monarch with no obvious successor—Queen Elizabeth I. In all these texts the parallels between historically distant and present rulers are deliberately camouflaged but would have been recognized by medieval and early modern readers and audiences.

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Notes

1.
See Stephen Knight, Arthurian Literature and Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983), 50.
2.
See Juliet Barker, 1381: The Year of the Peasants’ Revolt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
3.
See King Richard II, edited by Charles R. Forker (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), 6–7.
4.
Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 452.
5.
Hartman von Ouwe, Der arme Heinrich, edited by J. Knight Bostock (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 23.
6.
Hartmann von Aue, “The Unfortunate Lord Henry,” translated by Frank Tobin in Medieval German Tales, edited by Francis Gentry, The German Library, volume 4 (Continuum: New York, 1983), 1–21.
7.
Six Middle English Romances, edited by Maldwyn Mills (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1973), 126. Modern translation is my own.
8.
See Christine Chism, “Friendly Fire: The Disastrous Politics of Friendship in the Alliterative Morte Arthure”, Arthuriana, vol. 20, no. 2 (summer 2010), 66–88. Also Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
9.
For the popularity of penitential romance in Shakespeare’s England, see James Wade, “Penitential Romance after the Reformation” in Medieval into Renaissance, 91–106 (95). For medieval penitential romances, see Andrea Hopkins, The Sinful Knights: A Study of Middle English Penitential Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
10.
C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 225.
11.
Anne Curry, Agincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 48.
12.
Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
13.
Gervase Mathew, The Court of Richard II (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968), 117.
14.
See Ad Putter, Sir Gawain and the Green and French Arthurian Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 191–192.
15.
Michael Bennett, Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), 42.
16.
Jill Mann, “Courtly Aesthetics and Courtly Ethics in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 31 (2009), 231–265.
17.
Nicholas Watson, “The Gawain-Poet as a Vernacular Theologian” in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 293–313 at 299.
18.
The Works of the Gawain Poet, edited by Ad Putter and Myra Stokes (London, Penguin Classics, 2014), 278.
19.
Carolyn Dinshaw , “A Kiss is just as Kiss: Heterosexuality and its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Diacritics 24 (1994), 205–226.
20.
The Westminster Chronicle 1381–1394, edited and translated by L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 189–191.
21.
Mann, “Courtly Aesthetics,” 240–241; Ann W. Astell, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 125.
22.
After de Vere’s fall, Stanley returned to England in 1388 but the Appellants reappointed him the king’s lieutenant Ireland for three years in 1389. See Saul, Richard II, 275.
23.
John M. Bowers, An Introduction to the Gawain Poet (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2012), 4.
24.
See footnote in Putter and Stokes, The Works of the Gawain Poet, 655–656.
25.
The Gawain Poet: Complete Works, translated by Marie Borroff (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 257.
26.
Writing in 1371–1372, Geoffrey de la Tour Landry similarly portrays Bathsheba as a seductress and implies that she staged the encounter with David . See Deirdre Jackson, Medieval Woman (London: British Library, 2015), 22.
27.
It is of interest that the spelling of Bertilak’s name, albeit presumably of French origin, recalls the Czech names of some of Queen Anne’s Bohemian household, such as Nicholas Horník, her confessor.
28.
John Wyclif’s Polemical Works in Latin, edited by R. Buddensieg, 2 vols (London, 1883), vol. 1, 168. See also Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 30.
29.
Richard Rex, The Lollards (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 47.
30.
The original name was probably “Lollards’ Church.” See Ralph Elliott, “Landscape and Geography” in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (D. S. Brewer: Cambridge, 1997), 105–117 (116–117).
31.
Morte Arthure: A Critical Edition, edited by Mary Hamel (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984).
32.
The Death of Arthur: A New Verse Translation by Simon Armitage (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 269–271. Subsequent modern citations of AMA refer to this translation.
33.
See, for example, J. L. N. O’Loughlin, “English Alliterative Romances.” In Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, edited by Roger Sherman Loomis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 520–527 (523).
34.
Larry D. Benson, “The Date of the Alliterative Morte Arthure,” in Medieval Studies in Honor of Lillian Herlands Hornstein, edited by Jess B. Bessinger Jr. and Robert R. Raymo (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 19–40.
35.
See the essay on King Arthur in The Anglo-Saxon World, edited by Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 64.
36.
It is of interest that dreams of foreboding are also found in Shakespeare’s plays, such as Richard III, where the tyrannical King has nightmares before the Battle of Bosworth.
37.
See Sylvia Federico, New Troy. Fantasies of Empire in the Later Middle Ages, Medieval Cultures at Minnesota, 36 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 68.
38.
See Alfred Thomas, A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 75.
39.
John H. Harvey, “Richard II and York” in The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack, edited by F. R. H. du Boulay and Caroline M. Barron (London, 1971), 202–217 (214).
40.
Paul Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power 1200–1440 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995), 51.
41.
See Iva Rosario, Art and Propaganda. Charles IV of Bohemia, 1346–1378 (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000).
42.
Paul Binski, “The Liber Regalis: Its Date and European Context” in The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, edited by Dillian Gordon, Lisa Monnis, and Caroline Elam (London, 1997), 233–246 at 246.
43.
See Cherrell Guilfoyle, Shakespeare’s Play with Play: Medieval Imagery and Scenic Form in Hamlet, Othello and King Lear (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990), 100–101.
44.
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur. The Winchester Manuscript, edited and abridged by Helen Cooper (Oxford: Oxford World Classics), xii.
45.
David Grummitt, A Short History of the Wars of the Roses (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 52.
46.
See A. J. Pollard, The Wars of the Roses (London: Palgrave, 2001), 65.
47.
E. M. Albright, “Shakespeare’s Richard II and the Essex Conspiracy.” Publications of the Modern Languages Association (1927) 42: 686–720.
48.
See the introduction to William Shakespeare Richard II, edited by Frances E. Dolan (London: The Pelican Shakespeare, 2000), xxxv.
49.
J. Leeds Barroll, “A New History for Shakespeare and His Time,” Shakespeare Quarterly vol. 9, no. 4 (1988), 441–464.
50.
Janet Clare, “Art Made Tongue-tied by Authority”: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 47–51.
51.
Robyn Bolam, “Richard II: Shakespeare and the Language of the Stage” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays, edited by Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 141–157 (143).
52.
John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols (London, 1823), III, 552.
53.
Peter Lake , How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Politics in the History Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016, 267).
54.
See R. Lane, “‘The Sequence of Posterity’: Shakespeare’s King John and the Succession Controversy,” Studies in Philology vol. 92 (1995), 460–481; Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London, 1977), 107–111; Richard Dutton, “Shakespeare and Lancaster,” Shakespeare Quarterly vol. 49 (1998): 1–21.
55.
See the introduction to The Court of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, edited by John Guy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–19.
56.
Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, edited by Geoffrey Bullough, vol. 4 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 1–151.
57.
See Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962), 122–137.
58.
Arthur Marotti , “Shakespeare and Catholicism.” In Theater and Religion, 218–241 at 223).
59.
William Shakespeare, Richard II, edited by Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 36 (introduction).
60.
Richard Simpson, Edmund Campion: A Definitive Biography (TAN Books: Charlotte, North Carolina, 2013), 7.
61.
St Robert Southwell, Collected Poems, edited by Peter Davidson and Anne Sweeney (Manchester: Carcanet, 2007), 15. The poem is printed from the “Waldegrave” Manuscript (Stonyhurst MS A.v.27). The poem appears after “the burning babe” which Shakespeare cites in Macbeth (see Chap. 5). Thus it is likely that Shakespeare was familiar with both of Southwell’s poems.
62.
John Gerard recounts the story of a schismatic tutor named Thomas Smith whose confession he received amidst a torrent of penitential tears. Smith later became a priest at St Omers. See John Gerard S.J., The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, translated by Philip Caraman, S.J. (San Francisco: Saint Ignatius Press, 1988), 219–221.
63.
“Fortune’s buckets” may be proverbial but it is also literary and is attested in Guillaume de Machaut’s Remède de Fortune (ca. 1342) as well as Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale.” See Kiefer, Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy, 263 (footnote 10).
64.
Peter Milward, SJ, “The Catholic King Lear” in The Catholic Shakespeare? Portsmouth Review (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2013), 59–65 (60).
65.
See Antonia Fraser, Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), 230.
66.
Richard Wilson, Worldly Shakespeare: The Theatre of Our Good Will (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), Chap. 3. It is true that in the final scene of Henry VIII, Cranmer predicts the future greatness of the newborn Elizabeth; but given the double authorship of the play, it is unclear whether this praise is attributable to Shakespeare or to his collaborator John Fletcher. I would suspect the latter.

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Alfred Thomas

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Thomas, A. (2018). Pride and Penitence: Political and Moral Allegory in Medieval Arthurian Romance and Richard II . In: Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90218-0_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90218-0_2
Published: 19 June 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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