A History of English Literature PDF

 A History of English Literature MICHAEL ALEXANDER [p. iv] © Michael Alexander 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No par...

 A History of English Literature MICHAEL ALEXANDER [p. iv] © Michael Alexander 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W 1 P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2000 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 0-333-91397-3 hardcover ISBN 0-333-67226-7 paperback A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 O1 00 Typeset by Footnote Graphics, Warminster, Wilts Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts [p. v] Contents Acknowledgements The harvest of literacy Preface Further reading Abbreviations 2 Middle English Literature: 1066-1500 Introduction The new writing Literary history Handwriting and printing What’s included? The impact of French Tradition or canon? Scribal practice Priorities Dialect and language change What is literature? Literary consciousness Language change New fashions: French and Latin Other literatures in English Epic and romance Is drama literature? Courtly literature Qualities and quantities Medieval institutions Texts Authority Further reading Lyrics Primary texts English prose Secondary texts The fourteenth century PART 1: Spiritual writing Medieval Julian of Norwich 1 Old English Literature: to 1100 Secular prose Orientations Ricardian poetry Britain, England, English Piers Plowman Oral origins and conversion Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Aldhelm, Bede, Cædmon John Gower Northumbria and The Dream of the Rood Geoffrey Chaucer Heroic poetry The Parlement of Fowls Christian literature Troilus and Criseyde Alfred The Canterbury Tales Beowulf The fifteenth century Elegies Drama Battle poetry Mystery plays  Morality plays Religious lyric Deaths of Arthur The arrival of printing Scottish poetry [p. vi] Robert Henryson The drama William Dunbar The commercial theatre Gavin Douglas Predecessors Further reading Christopher Marlowe Part 2 The order of the plays Tudor and Stuart Histories 3 Tudor Literature: 1500-1603 Richard II Renaissance and Reformation Henry IV The Renaissance Henry V Expectations Comedy Investigations A Midsurnrner Night's Dream England's place in the world Twelfth Night The Reformation The poems Sir Thomas More Tragedy The Courtier Hamlet Sir Thomas Wyatt King Lear The Earl of Surrey Romances Religious prose The Tempest Bible translation Conclusion Instructive prose Shakespeare's achievement Drama His supposed point of view Elizabethan literature Ben Jonson Verse The Alchemist Sir Philip Sidney Volpone Edmund Spenser Further reading Sir Walter Ralegh 5 Stuart Literature: to 1700 The ‘Jacobethans’ The Stuart century Christopher Marlowe Drama to 1642 Song Comedy Thomas Campion Tragedy Prose John Donne John Lyly Prose to 1642 Thomas Nashe Sir Francis Bacon Richard Hooker Lancelot Andrewes Further reading Robert Burton 4 Shakespeare and the Drama Sir Thomas Browne William Shakespeare Poetry to Milton Shakespeare's life Ben Jonson The plays preserved Metaphysical poets Luck and fame Devotional poets Cavalier poets John Milton Paradise Lost The Restoration The Earl of Rochester John Bunyan Samuel Pepys [p. vii] The theatres Non-fiction Restoration comedy Edward Gibbon John Dryden Edmund Burke Satire Oliver Goldsmith Prose Fanny Burney John Locke Richard Brinsley Sheridan Women writers Christopher Smart William Congreve William Cowper Further reading Robert Burns PART 3 Further reading Augustan and Romantic 7 The Romantics: 1790-1837 6 Augustan Literature: to 1790 The Romantic poets The eighteenth century Early Romantics The Enlightenment William Blake Sense and Sensibility Subjectivity Alexander Pope and 18th-century civilization Romanticism and Revolution Joseph Addison William Wordsworth Jonathan Swift Samuel Taylor Coleridge Alexander Pope Sir Walter Scott Translation as tradition Younger Romantics The Rape of the Lock Lord Byron Mature verse Percy Bysshe Shelley John Gay John Keats Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Romantic prose The novel Belles lettres Daniel Defoe Charles Lamb Cross-currents William Hazlitt Samuel Richardson Thomas De Quincey Henry Fielding Fiction Tobias Smollett Thomas Love Peacock Laurence Sterne Mary Shelley The emergence of Sensibility Maria Edgeworth Thomas Gray Sir Walter Scott Pre-Romantic sensibility: ‘Ossian’ Jane Austen Gothic fiction Towards Victoria The Age of Johnson Further reading Dr Samuel Johnson PART 4 The Dictionary Victorian Literature to 1880 Literary criticism 8 The Age and its Sages James Boswell The Victorian age [p. viii] Moral history Middlemarch Abundance Daniel Deronda Why sages? Nonsense prose and verse Thomas Carlyle Lewis Carroll John Stuart Mill Edward Lear John Ruskin Further reading John Henry Newman 11 Late Victorian Literature: Charles Darwin 1880-1900 Matthew Arnold Differentiation Further reading Thomas Hardy and Henry James 9 Poetry Aestheticism Victorian Romantic poetry Walter Pater Minor verse A revival of drama John Clare Oscar Wilde Alfred Tennyson George Bernard Shaw Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning Fiction Matthew Arnold Thomas Hardy Arthur Hugh Clough Tess of the d'Urbervilles Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti Minor fiction Algernon Charles Swinburne Samuel Butler Gerard Hopkins Robert Louis Stevenson Further reading Wilkie Collins 10 Fiction George Moore The triumph of the novel Poetry Two Brontë novels Aestheticism Jane Eyre A. E. Housman Wuthering Heights Rudyard Kipling Elizabeth Gaskell Further reading Charles Dickens PART 5 The Pickwick Papers The Twentieth Century David Copperfield 12 Ends and Beginnings: 1901-19 Bleak House The new century Our Mutual Friend Fiction Great Expectations Edwardian realists ‘The Inimitable’ Rudyard Kipling William Makepeace Thackeray John Galsworthy Vanity Fair Arnold Bennett Anthony Trollope H. G. Wells George Eliot Adam Bede The Mill on the Floss Silas Marner [p. ix] Joseph Conrad Fairy tales Heart of Darkness C. S. Lewis Nostromo J. R. R. Tolkien E. M. Forster Poetry Ford Madox Ford The Second World War Poetry Dylan Thomas Pre-war verse Drama Thomas Hardy Sean O'Casey War poetry and war poets Further reading Further reading 14 New Beginnings: 1955-80 13 From Post-War to Post-War: 1920-55 Drama Samuel Beckett ‘Modernism’: 1914-27 John Osborne D. H. Lawrence Harold Pinter The Rainbow Established protest James Joyce Novels galore Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man William Golding Ulysses Muriel Spark Ezra Pound: the London years Iris Murdoch T. S. Eliot Other writers The love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Poetry The Waste Land Philip Larkin Four Quartets Ted Hughes Eliot’s criticism Geoffrey Hill W. B. Yeats Tony Harrison Hugh MacDiarmid and David Jones Seamus Heaney Virginia Woolf Further reading To the Lighthouse Postscript on the Current Katherine Mansfield Internationalization Non-modernism: the Twenties and Thirties Postmodernism Modernism fails to catch on Novels The poetry of the Thirties Contemporary poetry Political camps Further reading W. H. Auden Index The novel Evelyn Waugh Graham Greene Anthony Powell George Orwell Elizabeth Bowen [p. x] Acknowledgements Having decided the scope of this history, and that it would be narrative but also critical, the task of selection imposed itself. In order to sharpen my focus, I then invited, at a preliminary stage, twenty university teachers of English literature each to send me a list of the twenty works which they believed would have to receive critical discussion in such a history. Some of those who replied evaded my rigour by including Collected Works in their list. But I thank them all. I have a much longer list of colleagues to thank for answering more scholarly queries. I name only Michael Herbert, George Jack, Christopher MacLachlan, Rhiannon Purdie and Michael Wheeler, who each read a chapter for me, as did Neil Rhodes, to whom I turned for advice more than once. Thanks also to Frances Arnold and Margaret Bartley at Macmillan, who invited me to write this book; I enjoyed the reading, and the rereading. Thanks to Houri Alavi, who has patiently shepherded the monster forward into the arena. Thanks most of all to my family, especially to Mary and Lucy for reading many pages, and for listening. The book itself is also a kind of thank you - to those who wrote what is now called English literature; to scholars, editors, critics; to the English teachers I had at school; to fellow-students of literature, especially at Stirling and St Andrews; to all from whom I have learned. I still have much to learn, and thank in advance any reader who draws to my attention any errors of fact. Illustrations AKG Photo, London, pp. 94, 110, 133, 150, 241; E.T.Archive, pp. 21, 28, 45, 207, 202; The British Library, p. 190; The British Museum, pp. 23, 27; J. Burrow and T. Turville-Petre, A Book of Middle English, Blackwell Publishers, p. 37; Camera Press, London, p. 349; Corbis Collection, p. 340; Corpus Christi College, Oxford, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library, p. 50; Courtauld Institute of Art, London, p. 138; Judy Daish Associates, p. 364; Norman Davies, The Isles, Macmillan, p. 12; The Dickens House Museum, London, p. 277; The Dorset Country Museum, p. 301; Edifice, pp. 170, 248; Mark Gerson, p. 367; The Hulton Getty Picture Collection Ltd, pp. 270, 317, 321, 347, 372; Image Select International, pp. 96, 139, 185, 335, 338; The National Portrait Gallery, pp. 98, 212, 223, 273, 374, 379; Nottingham County Library, The D. H. Lawrence Collection, p. 326; RIBA Library Photographs Collection, p. 255; Ann Ronan at LS.L, pp. 54, 62, 79, 106, 232, 242, 251, 263, 268, 278, 282, 287, 291, 298, 300; John Timbers, Arena Images, p. 363; Utrecht University Library, p. 108; The Victoria and Albert Museum, pp. 64, 168, 213. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. [p. xi] Preface This History is written for two audiences: those who know a few landmark texts of English literature but little of the surrounding country; and those who simply want to read its long story from its origins to the present day. The history of English writing begins very early in the Middle Ages and continues through the Renaissance, the Augustan and Romantic periods to the Victorian age, the twentieth century, and down to the present. This account of it is written so as to be read as a coherent whole. It can also be read in parts, and consulted for information. Its narrative plan and layout are clear, and it aims to be both readable and concise. Attention is paid to the greater poets, dramatists, prose writers and novelists, and to more general literary developments. Each part of the story gains from being set in literary and social contexts. Space is given to illustrative quotation and to critical discussions of selected major authors and works. Minor writers and movements are described rather than discussed, but a great deal of information about them is to be found in the full apparatus which surrounds the narrative. This apparatus allows the History also to be used as a work of reference. A look at the following pages will show the text supplemented by a set of historical tables of events and of publications; by boxed biographies of authors and their works; and by marginal definitions of critical and historical terms. There are some sixty illustrations, including maps. There are also suggestions for further reading, and a full index of names of the authors and works discussed. [p. xii] Abbreviations ? uncertain Anon. anonymous b. born c. circa, about d. died ed. edited by edn. edition et al. and others etc. and other things fl. flourished Fr. French Gk. Greek Lat. Latin ME Middle English med. Lat. medieval Latin MS., MSS. manuscript, manuscripts OE Old English [p. 1] Introduction Contents England has a rich literature with a long history. This is an attempt to tell the story of English Literary history What’s included? literature from its beginnings to the present day. The story is written to be read as a whole, Tradition or canon? though it can be read in parts, and its apparatus and index allow it to be consulted for Priorities reference. To be read as a whole with pleasure, a story has to have a companionable aspect, What is literature? and the number of things discussed cannot be too large. There are said to be ‘nine and twenty Language change Other literatures in English ways of reciting tribal lays’, and there is certainly more than one way of writing a history of Is drama literature? English literature. This Introduction says what kind of a history this is, and what it is not, and Qualities and quantities defines its scope: where it begins and ends, and what ‘English’ and ‘literature’ are taken to Texts mean. Further reading Primary texts ‘Literature’ is a word with a qualitative implication, not just a neutral term for writing in Secondary texts general. Without this implication, and without a belief on the part of the author that some qualities of literature are best appreciated when it is presented in the order in which it appeared, there would be little point in a literary history. This effort to put the most memorable English writing in an intelligible historical perspective is offered as an aid to public understanding. The reader, it is assumed, will like literature and be curious about it. It is also assumed also that he or she will want chiefly to know about works such as Shakespeare’s King Lear and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the poems of Chaucer, Milton and T. S. Eliot, and the novels of Austen and Dickens. So the major earns more space than the minor in these pages; and minor literature earns more attention than writing stronger in social, cultural or historical importance than in literary interest. Literary history Literary history can be useful, and is increasingly necessary. Scholars specialize in single fields, English teachers teach single works. Larger narratives are becoming lost; the perspective afforded by a general view is not widely available. Students of English leave school knowing a few landmark works but little of the country surrounding them. They would not like to be asked to assign an unread writer to a context, nor, perhaps, to one of the centuries between Chaucer and the present. ‘How many thousands never heard the name/Of Sidney or of Spencer, or their books!’, wrote the Elizabethan poet Samuel Daniel. This history offers a map to the thousands of people who study English today. University students of English who write in a final exam ‘Charles Dickens was an eighteenth-century novelist’ could be better informed. A reader of this book will gain a sense of what English literature consists of, [p. 2] of its contents; then of how this author or text relates to that, chronologically and in other ways. The map is also a journey, affording changing perspectives on the relations of writing to its times, of one literary work to another, and of the present to the past. Apart from the pleasures of discovery and comparison, literary history fosters a sense of proportion which puts the present in perspective. What’s included? The historian of a literature tries to do justice to the great things in its tradition, while knowing better than most that classical status is acquired and can fade. As for literary status itself, it is clear from Beowulf that poetry had a high place in the earliest English world that we can know about. The first formal assertion of the classical potential of writing in a modern European vernacular was made about 1307 by the Italian poet Dante. Such a claim was made for English by Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poetry (1579), answering an attack on the theatre. Puritans closed the public theatres in 1642. After they were reopened in 1660, literature came to take a central role in English civilization. From 1800, Romantic poets made very great claims for the value of poetry. Eventually the Victorians came to study English literature alongside that of Greece or Rome. Literature has also had its enemies. The early Greek writer-philosopher Plato (c.429-347 BC), in banning poets from his imaginary ideal Republic, acknowledged their power. The English Puritans of the 17th century, when they closed the theatres, made a similar acknowledgement. After 1968, some French theorists claimed that critics were more important than writers. Some Californian students protested, at about the same time, that dead white European males were over-represented in the canon. Tradition or canon? A canon is a selection from the larger literary tradition. The modern English literary tradition goes back to the 15th century, when Scottish poets invoked a poetic tradition with Chaucer at its head. As the Renaissance went on, this tradition was celebrated by Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton and their successors. Tradition implies participation and communication: it grows and fades, changing its aspect every few generations. When scholars first looked into English literary history in the 18th century, they found that the medieval phase was stronger and longer than had been realized. In the 19th century, the novel became stronger than drama. Writing and literature continue, as does the study of English. Since about 1968, university English departments have diversified: literary tradition has to contend with ideology and with research interests. Other writing in English had already come in: American, followed at a distance by the writing of other former colonies. Neglected work by women writers was uncovered. Disavowing literature, ‘cultural studies’ addressed writing of sociological or psychological interest, including magazine stories, advertising and the unwritten ‘texts’ of film and television. Special courses were offered for sectional interests - social, sexual or racial. The hierarchy of literary kinds was also challenged: poetry and drama had long ago been joined by fiction, then came travel writing, then children’s books, and so on. Yet the literary category cannot be infinitely extended - if new books are promoted, others must be [p. 3] relegated - and questions of worth cannot be ignored indefinitely. Despite challenge, diversification and accommodation, familiar names are still found at the core of what is studied at school, college and university. Students need to be able to put those names into an intelligible order, related to literary and non-literary history. This book, being a history of the thirteen centuries of English literature, concerns itself with what has living literary merit, whether contemporary or medieval. Priorities Although this history takes things, so far as it can, in chronological order, its priority is literary rather than historical. Shakespeare wrote that ‘So long as men can read and eyes can see,/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’. The belief that literature outlives the circumstances of its origin, illuminating as these can be, guides the selection. Ben Jonson claimed of Shakespeare that he was ‘not of an age, but for all time’. This distinguishing characteristic is at odds with historicizing approaches which have sought to return literature to social or political contexts, sometimes with interesting results. Beliefs and priorities apart, not many of these 190,000 words can be devoted to the contexts of those thirteen centuries. The necessary contexts of literary texts are indicated briefly, and placed in an intelligible sequence. Critical debates receive some mention, but a foundation history may also have to summarize the story of a novel. Another priority is that literary texts should be quoted. But the prime consideration has been that the works chiefly discussed and illustrated will be the greater works which have delighted or challenged generations of readers and have made a difference to their thinking, their imaginations or their lives. But who are the major writers? The history of taste shows that few names are oblivion-proof. In Western literature only those of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare are undisputed, and for ages the first two were lost to view. Voltaire, King George III, Leo Tolstoy, G. B. Shaw and Ludwig Wittgenstein thought Shakespeare overrated. Yet ever since the theatres reopened in 1660 he has had audiences, readers and defenders. So continuous a welcome has not been given to other English writers, even Milton. This is not because it is more fun to go to the theatre than to read a book, but because human tastes are inconstant. William Blake and G. M. Hopkins went unrecognized during their lives. Nor is recognition permanent: who now reads Abraham Cowley, the most esteemed poet of the 17th century, or Sir Charles Grandison, the most admired novel of the 18th? The mountain range of poetry from Chaucer to Milton to Wordsworth has not been eroded by time or distance, though a forest of fiction has grown up in the intervening ground. Prose reputations seem less durable: the history of fictional and non-fictional prose shows whole kinds rising and falling. The sermon was a powerful and popular form from the Middle Ages until the 19th century. In the 18th century the essay became popular, but has faded. In the 18th century also, the romance lost ground to the novel, and the novel became worthy of critical attention. Only after 1660 did drama become respectable as literature. In the 1980s, while theorists proved that authors were irrelevant, literary biography flourished. As for non-fiction, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded in 1950 to the philosopher Bertrand Russell and in 1953 to Winston Churchill as historian. Thereafter, non-fictional writing drifted out of the focus of literature, or at least of its professional students in English departments in Britain. There are now some attempts to reverse this, not always on literary grounds. [p. 4] What is literature? What is it that qualifies a piece of writing as literature? There is no agreed answer to this question; a working definition is proposed in the next paragraph. Dr Johnson thought that if a work was read a hundred years after it had appeared, it had stood the test of time. This has the merit of simplicity. Although favourable social, cultural and academic factors play their parts in the fact that Homer has lasted twenty-seven centuries, a work must have unusual merits to outlive the context in which it appeared, however vital its relations to that context once were. The contexts supplied by scholars — literary, biographical and historical (not to mention theoretical) — change and vary. A literary text, then, is always more than its context. This is a history of a literature, not an introduction to literary studies, nor a history of literary thought. It tries to stick to using this kitchen definition as a simple rule: that the merit of a piece of writing lies in its combination of literary art and human interest. A work of high art which lacks human interest dies. For its human interest to last - and human interests change - the language of a work has to have life, and its form has to please. Admittedly, such qualities of language and form are easier to recognize than to define. Recognition develops with reading and with the strengthening of the historical imagination and of aesthetic and critical judgement. No further definition of literature is attempted, though what has been said above about `cultural studies', academic pluralism and partisanship shows that the question is still agitated. In practice, though the core has been attacked, loosened and added to, it has not been abandoned. In literary and cultural investigations, the question of literary merit can be almost indefinitely postponed. But in this book it is assumed that there are orders of merit and of magnitude, hard though it may be to agree on cases. It would be unfair, for example, to the quality of a writer such as Fanny Burney or Mrs Gaskell to pretend that the work of a contemporary novelist such as Pat Barker is of equal merit. It would be hard to maintain that the Romantic Mrs Felicia Hemans was as good a poet as Emily Brontë. And such special pleading would be even more unjust to Jane Austen or to Julian of Norwich, practitioners supreme in their art, regardless of sex or period. It is necessary to discriminate. The timescale of this history extends from the time when English writing begins, before the year 680, to the present day, though the literary history of the last thirty years can only be provisional. The first known poet in English was not Geoffrey Chaucer, who died in 1400, but Cædmon, who died before 700. A one-volume history of so large a territory is not a survey but a series of maps and projections. These projections, however clear, do not tell the whole story. Authors have to be selected, and their chief works chosen. If the discussion is to get beyond critical preliminaries, authors as great as Jonathan Swift may be represented by a single book. Half of Shakespeare’s plays go undiscussed here, though comedy, history and tragedy are sampled. Readers who use this history as a textbook should remember that it is selective. Language change As literature is written language, the state of the language always matters. There were four centuries of English literature before the Anglo-Saxon kingdom fell to the Normans. Dethroned, English was still written. It emerged again in the 12th and [p. 5] 13th centuries, gaining parity with French and Latin in Geoffrey Chaucer’s day. With the 16th-century Reformation, and a Church of England for the new Tudor nation-state, English drew ahead of Latin for most purposes. English Renaissance literature became consciously patriotic. John Milton, who wrote verse in Latin, Greek and Italian as well as English, held that God spoke first to his Englishmen. English literature is the literature of the English as well as literature in English. Yet Milton wrote the official justification of the execution of King Charles I in the language of serious European communication, Latin. Dr Johnson wrote verse in Latin as well as English. But by Johnson's death in 1784, British expansion had taken English round the world. Educated subjects of Queen Victoria could read classical and other modern languages. Yet by the year 2000, as English became the world's business language, most educated English and Americans read English only. Other literatures in English Since - at latest - the death of Henry James in 1916, Americans have not wished their literature to be treated as part of the history of English literature. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are not English poets. For reasons of national identity, other ex-colonies feel the same. There are gains and losses here. The English have contributed rather a lot to literature in English, yet a national history of English writing, as this now has to be, is only part of the story. Other literatures in English, though they have more than language in common with English writing, have their own histories. So it is that naturalized British subjects such as the Pole Joseph Conrad are in histories of English literature, but non-Brits are not. Now that English is a world language, this history needs to be supplemented by accounts of other literatures in English, and by comparative accounts of the kind magnificently if airily attempted by Ford Madox Ford, who called himself ‘an old man mad about writing’, in his The March of Literature: From Confucius to Modern Times (1938). The exclusion of non-Brits, though unavoidable, is a pity - or so it seems to one who studied English at a time when the nationality of Henry James or James Joyce was a minor consideration. In Britain today, multi-cultural considerations influence any first-year syllabus angled towards the contemporary. This volume, however, is not a survey of present-day writing in English, but a history of English literature. The author, an Englishman resident in Scotland for over thirty years, is aware that a well-meant English embrace can seem imperial even within a devolving Britain. The adoption of a national criterion, however unavoidable, presents difficulties. Since the coming of an Irish Free State in 1922, Irish writers have not been British, unless born in Northern Ireland. But Irish writing in English before 1922 is eligible: Swift, Berkeley, Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke, Edgeworth, Yeats and Joyce; not to mention drama. There are hard cases: the Anglo-Irish Samuel Beckett, asked by a French journalist if he was English, replied ‘Au contraire’. Born near Dublin in 1906, when Ireland was ruled from Westminster, Beckett is eligible, and as his influence changed English drama, he is in. So is another winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Seamus Heaney, though he has long been a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, and, when included in an anthology with ‘British’ in its title, protested: ‘be advised/My passport’s green./No glass of ours was ever raised/To toast The Queen’. Born in 1939 in Northern Ireland, he was educated at a Catholic school in that part of the United Kingdom and at Queen’s University, Belfast. [p. 6] Writing read in Britain today becomes ever more international, but it would have been wholly inconsistent to abandon a national criterion after an arbitrary date such as 1970. So the Bombay-born British citizen Salman Rushdie is eligible; the Indian Vikram Seth is not. Writing in English from the United States and other former colonies is excluded. A very few non- English writers who played a part in English literature - such as Sir Walter Scott, a Scot who was British but not English - are included; some marginal cases are acknowledged. Few authors can be given any fullness of attention, and fewer books, although the major works of major authors should find mention here. Literary merit has been followed, at the risk of upsetting partisans. Is drama literature? Drama is awkward: part theatre, part literature. Part belongs to theatre history, part to literary history. I have rendered unto Cæsar those things which are Cæsar’s. Plays live in performance, a point often lost on those whose reading of plays is confined to those of Shakespeare, which read unusually well. In most drama words are a crucial element, but so too are plot, actors, movement, gesture, stage, staging and so on. In some plays, words play only a small part. Likewise, in poetic drama not every line has evident literary quality. King Lear says in his last scene: ‘Pray you undo that button.’ The request prompts an action; the button undone, Lear says ‘Thank you, sir.’ Eight words create three gestures of dramatic moment. The words are right, but their power comes from the actions they are part of, and from the play as a whole. Only the literary part of drama, then, appears here. It is a part which diminishes, for the literary component in English drama declines after Shakespeare. The only 18th-century plays read today are in prose; they have plot and wit. In the 19th century, theatre was entertainment, and poetic drama was altogether too poetic. The English take pride in Shakespeare and pleasure in the stage, yet after 1660 the best drama in the English tongue is by Irishmen: Congreve, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Shaw, Wilde and Beckett. Qualities and quantities ‘The best is the enemy of the good,’ said Voltaire. As the quantity of literature increases with the centuries, the criterion of quality becomes more pressing. Scholarly literary history, however exact its method, deals largely in accepted valuations. Voltaire also said that ancient history is no more than an accepted fiction. Literary histories of the earliest English writing agree that the poetry is better than the prose, and discuss much the same poems. Later it is more complicated, but not essentially different. Such agreements should be challenged, corrected and supplemented, but not silently disregarded. In this sense, literary history is critical-consensual, deriving from what Johnson called ‘the common pursuit of true judgement’. A literary historian who thought that Spenser, Dryden, Scott or Eliot (George or T. S.) were overrated could not omit them: the scope for personal opinion is limited. The priorities of a history can sometimes be deduced from its allocation of space. Yet space has also to be given to the historically symptomatic. Thus, Thomas Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard (1750) is treated at length because it shows a century turning from the general to the personal. This does not mean that the Elegy is worth more than the whole of Old English prose or of Jacobean drama, which are [p. 7] summarily treated, or than travel writing, which is not treated at all. Space is given to Chaucer and Milton, poets whose greatness is historical as well as personal. Where there is no agreement (as about Blake's later poetry), or where a personal view is offered, this is made clear. Texts The best available texts are followed. These may not be the last text approved by the author. Line references are not given, for editions change. Some titles, such as Shak-espeares Sonnets, and Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe, keep their original forms; and some texts are unmodernized. But most are modernized in spelling and repunctuated by their editors. Variety in edited texts is unavoidable, for well-edited texts can be edited on principles which differ widely. This inconsistency is a good thing, and should be embraced as positively instructive. Further reading Primary texts Blackwell's Anthologies of Verse. Longman's Annotated Anthologies of Verse. Penguin English Poets, and Penguin Classics as a whole. Oxford Books of Verse. Oxford and Cambridge editions of Shakespeare. Oxford University Press's World's Classics. Secondary texts Drabble, M. (ed.). The Oxford Companion to English Literature, revd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). The standard work of reference. Rogers, P. (ed.). The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987; paperback, 1990). Well designed; each chapter is by an expert scholar. Jeffares, A. N. (general ed.). The Macmillan History of English Literature (1982-5) covers English literature in 8 volumes. Other volumes cover Scottish, Anglo-Irish, American and other literatures. The Cambridge Companions to Literature (1986-). Well edited. Each Companion has specially-written essays by leading scholars on several later periods and authors from Old English literature onwards. [p. 11] Contents Orientations PART ONE: MEDIEVAL Britain, England, English 1. Old English Literature: to 1100 Oral origins and conversion Aldhelm, Bede, Cædmon Northumbria and The Dream of the Rood Overview Heroic poetry Christian literature The Angles and Saxons conquered what is now called England in the 5th and 6th Alfred centuries. In the 7th century, Christian missionaries taught the English to write. Beowulf The English wrote down law-codes and later their poems. Northumbria soon Elegies Battle poetry produced Cædmon and Bede. Heroic poetry, of a Christian kind, is the chief The harvest of literacy legacy of Old English literature, notably Beowulf and the Elegies. A considerable Further reading prose literature grew up after Alfred (d. 899). There were four centuries of writing in English before the Norman Conquest. Orientations Britain, England, English the cliffs of England stand Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’ (c. 1851) The cliffs at Dover were often the first of Britain seen by early incomers, and have become a familiar symbol of England, and of the fact that England is on an island. These cliffs are part of what the Romans, from as early as the 2nd century, had called the Saxon Shore: the south-eastern shores of Britain, often raided by Saxons. The Romans left Britain, after four centuries of occupation, early in the 5th century. Later in that century the Angles and Saxons took over the lion's share of the island of Britain. By 700, they had occupied the parts of Great Britain which the Romans had made part of their empire. This part later became known as Engla-land, the land of the Angles, and its language was to become English. It is not always recognized, especially outside Britain, that Britain and England are not the same thing. Thus, Shakespeare’s King Lear ends by the cliff and beach at Dover. But Lear was king not of England but of Britain, in that legendary period of its history when it was pre-Christian and pre-English. The English Romantic poet William Blake was thinking of the legendary origins of his country when he asked in his ‘Jerusalem’ [p. 12] And did those feet in ancient time St Bede (676-735) Walk upon England's mountains green? Monk of And was the holy Lamb of God Wearmouth and On England’s pleasant pastures seen? Jarrow, scholar, biblical Blake here recalls the ancient legend that Jesus came with Joseph of Arimathea to Glastonbury, in commentator, Somerset. One answer to his wondering question would be: ‘No, on Britain’s.’ historian. Literature is written language. Human settlement, in Britain as elsewhere, preceded recorded history by some millennia, and English poetry preceded writing by some generations. The first poems that could conceivably be called `English' were the songs that might have been heard from the boats crossing the narrow seas to the ‘Saxon Shore’ to conquer Britannia. ‘Thus sung they in the English boat’, Andrew Marvell was to write. The people eventually called the English were once separate peoples: Angles, Saxons and Jutes. St Bede recounts in his Latin Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 731) that the Jutes were invited into Kent in 449 to save the British kingdom from the Saxons and Picts. The Jutes liked what they saw, and by about 600 the lion's share of Britannia had fallen to them, and to Saxons and Angles. The Celtic Britons who did not accept this went west, to Cornwall and Wales. The new masters of Britain spoke a Germanic language, in which ‘Wales’ is a word for ‘foreigners’. Other Britons, says Bede, lived beyond the northern moors, in what is now Strathclyde, and beyond them lived the Picts, in northern and eastern Scotland. English was first written about the year 600 when King Æthelred of Kent was persuaded by St Augustine of Canterbury that he needed a written law-code; it was written with the Roman alphabet.  The coming of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries [p. 13] Old English Historical The peoples to be called the English lived in a mosaic of small tribal kingdoms, which linguists speak of Old gradually amalgamated. The threat of Danish conquest began to unify a nation under King English (OE), 450-1100; Alfred of Wessex (d. 899). Under his successors, Angel-cynn (the English people and their Middle English (ME), territory) became Engla-lond, the land of the English, and finally England. English literature, 1100-1500; and Modern which had flourished for four centuries, was dethroned at the Norman Conquest in 1066, and for English, after 1500. some generations it was not well recorded. Homer (8th century BC) The author of two After 1066 the English wrote in Latin, as they had done before the Conquest, but now also in magnificent verse epics: French. English continued to be written in places like Medehamstead Abbey (modern The Iliad, about the siege Peterborough), where the monks kept up The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle until 1152. Not very much of Troy and the anger of English writing survives from the hundred years following the Conquest, but changes in the Achilles; and The language of the Peterborough Chronicle indicate a new phase. ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (AS) is a Odyssey, about the Renaissance Latin term, used to designate both the people and the language of pre-Conquest adventures of Odysseus as England. The modern academic convention of calling the people Anglo-Saxons and their he makes his way home language Old English should not detract from the point that the people were English, and that from Troy to Ithaca. their literature is English literature. runes A Germanic alphabetic secret writing. Linguistically and historically, the English poems composed by Cædmon after 670 and Bede Runic letters have straight (673-735) are the earliest we know o£ Manuscripts (MSS) of their works became hard to read, lines, which are easier to and were little read between the Middle Ages and the reign of Queen Victoria, when they were cut. See Franks Casket. properly published. Only then could they take their place in English literary history. Old English is now well understood, but looks so different from the English of today that it cannot be read or made out by a well-educated reader in the way that the writings of Shakespeare and Chaucer can: it has to be learned. Linguistically, the relationship between the English of AD 1000 and that of AD 2000 might be compared to that between Latin and modern French. Culturally, the English of 1000 had none of the authority of Latin. In terms of literary quality - which is the admission ticket for discussion in this history - the best early English poems can compare with anything from later periods. Literature changes and develops, it does not improve. The supreme achievement of Greek literature comes at the beginning, with the Iliad of Homer (8th century BC); and that of Italian literature, the Commedia of Dante (d.1321), comes very early. Any idea that Old English poetry will be of historical interest only does not survive the experience of reading Old English poetry in the original - though this takes study - or even in some translations. Old English literature is part of English literature, and some of it deserves discussion here on literary merit. Besides merit, it needed luck, the luck to be committed to writing, and to survive. The Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes were illiterate: their orally-composed verses were not written unless they formed part of runic inscriptions. The Britons passed on neither literacy nor faith to their conquerors. The English learned to write only after they had been converted to Christ by missionaries sent from Rome in 597. Strictly, there is no Old English writing that is not Christian, since the only literates were clerics. Oral origins and conversion It would be a mistake to think that oral poetry would be inartistic. The Germanic oral poetry which survives from the end of the Roman Empire, found in writings from Austria to Iceland, has a common form, technique and formulaic repertoire. [p. 14] Places of interest in Old and Middle English Literature Oral poetry was an art which had evolved over generations: an art of memorable speech. It dealt with a set of heroic and narrative themes in a common metrical form, and had evolved to a point where its audience appreciated a richly varied style and storytelling technique. In these technical respects, as well as in its heroic preoccupations, the first English poetry resembles Homeric poetry. As written versions of compositions that were originally oral, these poems are of the same kind as the poems of Homer, albeit less monumental and less central to later literature. Just as the orally-composed poetry of the Anglo-Saxons was an established art, so the Roman missionaries were highly literate. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People makes it clear that the evangelists sent by Pope Gregory (in 597) to bring the gospel (godspel, ‘good news’) to the Angles were an elite group. Augustine was sent from Gregory’s own monastery in Rome. His most influential successor, Theodore [p. 14] (Archbishop from 664), was a Syrian Greek from Tarsus, who in twenty-six years at Canterbury organized the Church in England, and made it a learned Church. His chief helper Hadrian came from Roman Africa. Theodore sent Benedict Biscop to Northumbria to found the monastic communities of Wearmouth (674) and Jarrow (681). Benedict built these monasteries and visited Rome six times, furnishing them with the magnificent library which made Bede’s learning possible. Throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, clerics from Ireland and England travelled through western Europe, protected by the tonsure which marked them as consecrated members of a supranational church with little regard to national jurisdictions. English literature, as already noted, is both literature in English and the literature of England. In the 16th century, England became a state with its own national church. Before this, English was not always the most important of the languages spoken by the educated, and loyalty went to the local lord and church rather than to the state. Art historians use the term ‘Insular’ to characterize British art of this period. Insular art, the art of the islands, is distinctive, but of mixed origins: Celtic, Mediterranean and Germanic. The blended quality of early English art holds true for the culture as a whole: it is an Anglo- Celtic-Roman culture. This hybrid culture found literary expression in an unmixed language. Although Britannia was now their home, the English took few words from the languages of Roman Britain; among the exceptions are the Celtic names for rivers, such as Avon, Dee and Severn, and the Roman words ‘wall’ (vallum) and ‘street’ (strata). Arriving as the Roman Empire faded, the Saxons did not have to exchange their Germanic tongue for Latin, unlike their cousins the Franks, but Latin was the language of those who taught them to read and write. As they completed their conquest of Britain, the Saxons were transformed by their conversion to Catholicism. Gregory’s mission rejoined Britain to the Judaeo-Christian world of the Latin West. Aldhelm, Bede, Cædmon Although Cædmon is the first English poet whose words survive at all, the first known English poet is Aldhelm (c. 640-709). King Alfred thought Aldhelm unequalled in any age in his ability to compose poetry in his native tongue. There is a tradition that Aldhelm stood on a bridge leading to Malmesbury, improvising English verses to the harp in Border to attract his straying flock. Aldhelm's English verse is lost; his surviving Latin writings are exceedingly sophisticated. Aldhelm (c. 640-709), the monastic founder of Malmesbury, Frome and Bradford-on-Avon, was the star pupil of Hadrian’s school at Canterbury, and became Bishop of Sherborne. His younger contemporary Bede wrote that Aldhelm was ‘most learned in all respects, for he had a brilliant style, and was remarkable for both sacred and liberal erudition’. Aldhelm’s brilliance is painfully clear, even through the dark glass of translation, as he reproaches an Englishman who has gone to Ireland: The fields of Ireland are rich and green with learners, and with numerous readers, grazing there like flocks, even as the pivots of the poles are brilliant with the starry quivering of the shining constellations. Yet Britain, placed, if you like, almost at the extreme edge of the Western clime, has also its flaming sun and its lucid moon... Britain has, he explains, Theodore and Hadrian. Aldhelm wrote sermons in verse, and a treatise in verse for a convent of nuns, on Virginity. He also wrote an epistle to his godson, King Aldfrith of Northumbria, on metrics, which is full of riddles and [p. 16] Dates of early writings and chief events Date Author and title Event AD 43 Conquest of Britain by Emperor Claudius 98 Tacitus: Germania 313 Toleration of Christians 314 Council of Arles 330 Constantinople founded St Helena finds True Cross 384 St Jerome: Vulgate edition of the Bible 410 Legions recalled from Britain 413 St Augustine of Hippo: The City of God 417 Orosius: History of the World 430 St Patrick in Ireland St Ninian in N. Britain 449 Hengest and Horsa: Conquest by Angles, Saxons and Jutes begins c. 500 British resistance: Battle of Mons Badonicus; St David in Wales c. 521 Hygelac the Geat (d.) 524 Boethius: Consolation of Philosophy 529 St Benedictfounds Monte Cassino Legendary reign of Beowulf c. 547 Gildas: Conquest of Britain 563 Venantius Fortunatus: Hymns of the Cross St Columba on Iona 577 Battle of Dyrham: British confined to Wales and Dumnonia 591 Gregory of Tours: History of the Franks 597 Aneirin: Y Gododdin Gregory sends Augustine to Canterbury St Columba (d.) c. 615 Aethelfrith King of Bernicia defeats Britons at Chester 616-32 Edwin King of Northumbria 627 Edwin converted by Paulinus 632 (?) Sutton Hoo ship burial 635 Oswald King of Northumbria defeats Cadwallon at Heavenfield 643 From this date: early heroic poems: Widsith, Deor, Mercia converted  Finnsburh, Waldere 664 Synod of Whitby accepts authority of Rome 657-80 Cædmon'sHymn Hilda Abbess of Whitby Cædmonian poems:Genesis A, Daniel, Christ and Satan 669-90 Theodore of Tarsus Archbishop of Canterbury; Wearmouth and Jarrow founded 678 Earliest date for composition of Beowulf 688 (?) Exodus [p. 17] Dates of early writings and chief events - Continued Date Author and title Event 698 Eadfrith: Lindisfarne Gospels First linguistic records Ruthwell Cross 731 Bede: Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum 756-96 Offa King of Mercia 782 (?) The Poetic Elegies Alcuin at Charlemagne's court 793 Vikings sack Lindisfarne 800 After this date: Cynewulf: Christ II, Elene, Charlemagne crowned Emperor Juliana, Fates of the Apostles 802 Egbert King of Wessex 851 (?) Genesis B Danes spend winter in England 865 Danish army in East Anglia 871-99 (?) Andreas Alfred King of Wessex, the only kingdom unconquered by Danes 878 Alfredian translations: Pastoral Care, Alfred at Athelney Ecclesiastical History, Orosius, Boethius, Defeat of the Danes: Treaty of Wedmore Soliloquies; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle begun 909 (?) Beowulf composed by this date 910 Abbey of Cluny founded (Burgundy) 911-18 (?) Judith 919 (?) The Phoenix Mercia subject to Wessex 924-39 Athelstan King of Wessex 937 Brunanburh in Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Battle of Brunanburh: Athelstan defeats Scots and Vikings 954 End of Scandinavian kingdom of York: England united under Wessex 959-75 Reign of Edgar 960-88 Monastic revival Dunstan Archbishop of Canterbury 973 Coronation of Edgar 978-1016 The major poetry manuscripts: Junius Book, Reign of Ethelred II Vercelli Book, Exeter Book, Beowulf MS 991 After this date: The Battle of Maldon Battle of Maldon 990-2 Aelfric: Catholic Homilies 993-8 Aelfric: Lives of the Saints 1003-23 Wulfstan Archbishop of York 1014 Wulfstan: Sermo Lupi Ad Anglos Swein of Denmark king of England 1017-35 Reign of Cnut 1043-66 Reign of Edward the Confessor 1066 Harold king Battle of Stamford Bridge Battle of Hastings William I king 1154 End of Peterborough Chronicle [p. 18] word games. Even if Aldfrith and the nuns may not have appreciated Aldhelm's style, it is clear that 7th-century England was not unlettered. More care was taken to preserve writings in Latin than in English. Bede’s Latin works survive in many copies: thirty-six complete manuscripts of his prose Life of St Cuthbert, over one hundred of his De Natura Rerum. At the end of his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum Bede lists his ninety Latin works. Of his English writings in prose and in verse, only five lines remain. As Ascension Day approached iñ 735, Bede was dictating a translation of the Gospel of St John into English, and he finished it on the day he died. Even this precious text is lost. On his deathbed, Bede sang the verse of St Paul (Hebrews 10:31) that tells of the fearfulness of falling into the hands of the living God. He then composed and sang his ‘Death Song’. This is a Northumbrian version: Fore thaem neidfaerae naenig uuirthit thoncsnotturra, than him tharf sie to ymbhycggannae aer his hiniongae hwaet his gastae godaes aeththae yflaes aefter deothdaege doemid uueorthae. Literally: Before that inevitable journey no one becomes wiser in thought than he needs to be, in considering, before his departure, what will be adjudged to his soul, of good or evil, after his death-day. The ‘Death Song’ is one of the rare vernacular poems extant in several copies. Its laconic formulation is characteristic of Anglo-Saxon. Bede is one of the five early English poets whose names are known: Aldhelm, Bede, Cædmon, Alfred - two saints, a cowman and a king - and Cynewulf, who signed his poems but is otherwise unknown. Oral composition was not meant to be written. A poem was a social act, like telling a story today, not a thing which belonged to its performer. For a Saxon to write down his vernacular poems would be like having personal anecdotes privately printed, whereas to write Latin was to participate in the lasting conversation of learned Europe. Bede’s works survive in manuscripts across Europe and in Russia. The modern way of dating years AD - Anno Domini, ‘the Year of Our Lord’ - was established, if not devised, by Bede. Bede employed this system in his History, instead of dating by the regnal years peculiar to each English kingdom as was the custom at the time. His example led to its general adoption. Bede is the only English writer mentioned by Dante, and the first whose works have been read in every generation since they were written. The first writer of whom this is true is Chaucer. English literature is literature in English; all that is discussed here of Bede’s Latin History is its account of Cædmon. But we can learn something about literature from the account of the final acts of Bede, a professional writer. This shows that composing came before writing: Bede composed and sang his ‘Death Song’ after singing the verse of St Paul upon which it was based. Composition was not origination but re-creation: handing-on, performance. These features of composition lasted through the Middle Ages, and beyond. Cædmon was the first to use English oral composition to turn sacred story into verse; the English liked verse. Bede presents the calling of this unlearned man to compose biblical poetry as a miraculous means for bringing the good news to the English. He tells us that Cædmon was a farmhand at the abbey at Whitby, which was presided over by St Hilda (d.680), an old man ignorant of poetry. At feasts when [p. 19] all in turn were invited to compose verses to the harp and entertain the company, Cædmon, when he saw the harp coming his way, would get up from table and go home. On one such occasion he left the house where the feast was being held, and went out to the stable where it was his duty that night to look after the beasts. There when the time came he settled down to sleep. Suddenly in a dream he saw a certain man standing beside him who called him by name. ‘Cædmon’, he said, ‘sing me a song.’ ‘I don’t know how to sing,’ he replied. ‘It was because I cannot sing that I left the feast and came here.’ The man who addressed him then said: ‘But you shall sing to me.’ ‘What should I sing about?’ he replied. ‘Sing about the Creation of all things,’ the other answered. And Cædmon immediately began to sing verses in praise of God the Creator that he had never heard before, and their theme ran thus. Bede gives Cædmon’s song in Latin, adding ‘This the general sense, but not the actual words that Cædmon sang in his dream; for verses, however masterly, cannot be translated word for word from one language into another without losing much of their beauty and dignity.’ The old man remembered what he had sung and added more in the same style. Next day the monks told him about a passage of scriptural history or doctrine, and he turned this overnight into excellent verses. He sang of the Creation, Genesis, and of Exodus and other stories of biblical history, including the Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, Pentecost and the teaching of the apostles, and many other religious songs. The monks surely wrote all this down, though Bede says only that ‘his delightful renderings turned his instructors into auditors’. In 1655 the Dutch scholar Junius published in Amsterdam ‘The monk Cædmon’s paraphrase of Genesis etc.’, based on a handsome Old English manuscript containing Genesis, Exodus, Daniel and Christ and Satan. The poems are probably not by Cædmon, but follow his example. John Milton knew Junius and read Old English, so the author of Paradise Lost could have read Genesis. He calls Bede's account of the calling of the first English poet perplacida historiola, ‘a most pleasing little story’. In the margins of several of the 160 complete Latin manuscripts of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History are Old English versions of ‘Cædmon’s Hymn’, differing in dialect and in detail, as usual in medieval manuscripts. Their relation to what Cædmon sang is unknown. Here is my own translation. Praise now to the keeper of the kingdom of heaven, The power of the Creator, the profound mind Of the glorious Father, who fashioned the beginning Of every wonder, the eternal Lord. For the children of men he made first Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator. Then the Lord of mankind, the everlasting Shepherd,  Ordained in the midst as a dwelling place alliteration The -The almighty Lord-the earth for men. linking of words by use of the same English is a stressed language, and the Old English verse line is a balance of two-stress phrases initial letter. In linked by alliteration: the first or second stress, or both, must alliterate with the third; the fourth must Old English verse, not. Old English verse is printed with a mid-line space to point the metre. Free oral improvisation in a all vowels set form requires a repertory of formulaic units. The style is rich in formulas, often noun-phrases. Thus alliterate. in the nine lines of his ‘Hymn’ Cædmon has six different formulas for God, a feature known as variation. The image of heaven as a roof and of the Lord as protector is characteristically Anglo-Saxon. [p. 20] Northumbria and The Dream of the Rood Many of the manuscripts which perished in the 1530s in Henry VIII's destruction of the monasteries (see Chapter 3) may have been in Old English. About 30,000 lines of Old English verse survive, in four main poetry manuscripts. These were written about the year 1000, but contain earlier material. Much is lost, but three identifiable phases of Old English literature are the Northumbria of the age of Bede (d.735), the programme of Alfred (d.899), and the Benedictine Revival of the late 10th century. The artistic wealth of Northumbria is known to us through Bede, but also through surviving illuminated books such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Codex Amiatinus, and some fine churches, crosses and religious art. The Ruthwell Cross is from this period: in 1642 this high stone cross near Dumfries, in Scotland, was smashed as idolatrous by order of the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland. In 1823, however, the minister reassembled and re-erected it, and it now stands 5.7 metres tall. It was an open-air cross or rood, covered with panels in deep relief showing scenes from the life of Christ, each with an inscription in Latin. On it is also carved in runic characters a poem which in a longer MS. version is known as The Dream of the Rood. This longer text in the Vercelli Book (c. 1000) has 156 lines. The Ruthwell text, which once ran to about 50 lines, is itself a great poem. If carved c. 700, it may be the first substantial English verse to survive. The Dreamer in the poem sees at midnight a glorious cross rise to fill the sky, worshipped by all of creation. It is covered with gold and jewels, but at other times covered with blood. The Dreamer continues: Yet lying there a long while I beheld, sorrowing, the Healer’s Tree Till it seemed that I heard how it broke silence, Best of wood, and began to speak: ‘Over that long remove my mind ranges Back to the holt where I was hewn down; From my own stem I was struck away, dragged off by strong enemies, Wrought into a roadside scaffold. They made me a hoist for wrongdoers. The soldiers on their shoulders bore me until on a hill-top they set me up; Many enemies made me fast there. Then I saw, marching toward me, Mankind’s brave King; He came to climb upon me. I dared not break or bend aside Against God’s will, though the ground itself Shook at my feet. Fast I stood, Who falling could have felled them all. Almighty God ungirded Him, eager to mount the gallows, Unafraid in the sight of many: He would set free mankind. I shook when His arms embraced me but I durst not bow to ground, Stoop to Earth’s surface. Stand fast I must. [p. 21] I was reared up, a rood. I raised the great King, Liege lord of the heavens, dared not lean from the true. They drove me through with dark nails: on me are the deep wounds manifest,  Wide-mouthed hate-dents. I durst not harm any of them. How they mocked at us both! I was all moist with blood Sprung from the Man’s side [Figure omitted] ‘Carpet’ after He sent forth His soul... page from the Lindisfarne These last lines appear on the Rood at Ruthwell. The Ruthwell Cross is an expression of the Gospels, a Latin Gospel Book (see page 20), written veneration of the Cross which spread through Christendom from the 4th century. Constantine and painted on vellum by had been granted a vision of the cross, which told him that in that sign he would conquer. Eadfrith in 698, who Victorious, the new emperor declared toleration for Christianity, and built a basilica of the became Bishop at Holy Sepulchre on Mt Calvary. In excavating for the foundations, fragments of what was Lindisfarne, founded believed to be the Cross of the crucifixion were discovered, and miraculous cures were indirectly from the Irish attributed to it. The emperor’s mother Helena was later associated with this finding of the monastery on long. The Cross. Encased in reliquaries of gold and silver, fragments of the Cross were venerated all ‘carpet’ design of the Cross over Europe. One fragment was presented by the Pope to King Alfred, and is now in the 10th- may have come to Ireland century Brussels Reliquary, which is inscribed with a verse from The Dream of the Rood. from Egypt. The close detail is in the Insular style of In warrior culture, it was the duty of a man to stand by his lord and die in his defence. But inlaid metalwork, a the lord in The Dream is an Anglo-Saxon hero, keen to join battle with death. The cross is the Celtic/Mediterranean/Anglo uncomprehending but obedient participant in its lord’s -Saxon blend. [p. 22] death: ‘Stand fast I must.’ The cross yields his lord’s body to his human followers, who bury him. The three crosses are also buried. But ‘the Lord's friends learnt of it: it was they who girt me with gold and silver.’ In a devotional conclusion, the cross explains that it is now honoured as a sign of salvation, and commands the dreamer to tell men the Christian news of the Second Coming, when those who live under the sign of the cross will be saved. The poem exemplifies both the tradition of the vision, in which a bewildered dreamer is led from confusion to understanding, and the medieval ‘work of affective devotion’, affecting the emotions and moving the audience from confusion to faith. It boldly adapts the Gospel accounts to the culture of the audience, employing the Old English riddle tradition, in which an object is made to speak, and telling the Crucifixion story from the viewpoint of the humble creature. The poem fills living cultural forms with a robust theology, redirecting the heroic code of loyalty and sacrifice from an earthly to a heavenly lord. Heroic poetry Early literatures commonly look back to a `heroic age': a period in the past when warriors were more heroic and kings were kings. The Christian heroism of The Dream of tile Rood redirected the old pagan heroism which can be seen in fragments of Germanic heroic poetry. Waldere, an early poem, features the heroics of Walter’s defence of a narrow place against his enemies. Finnsburh, another early poem set on the continent, is a vividly dramatic fragment of a fight in Beowulf. Such poems recall times before the Angles came to Britain in the 5th century, as do the minstrel poems Widsith and Deor. Widsith (meaning ‘far-traveller’) is the name of a scop (poet), who lists the names of continental tribes and their rulers, praising generous patrons. Deor is a scop who has lost his position; to console himself, he recalls famous instances of evil bringing forth good, and after each stanza sings the refrain Thœs ofereode, thisses swa rnaeg: ‘That went by; this may too.’ Deor is one of only three stanzaic poems. The first stanza goes: Wayland knew the wanderer’s fate: That single-willed earl suffered agonies, Sorrow and longing the sole companions Of his ice-cold exile. Anxieties bit When Nithhad put a knife to his hamstrings, Laid clever bonds on the better man. That went by; this may too. This story of the imprisonment of Wayland, the smith of the gods, has the (heathen) happy ending of successful multiple vengeance. The hamstrung Wayland later escaped, having killed his captor Nithhad’s two sons and raped his daughter Beadohild; Beadohild bore the hero Widia, and was later reconciled with Wayland. A scene from this fierce legend is carved on an 8th-century Northumbrian whalebone box known as the Franks Casket: it shows Wayland offering Nithhad a drink from a bowl he had skilfully fashioned from the skull of one of Nithhad’s sons; in the background is a pregnant Beadohild. Little of the unbaptized matter of Germania survives in English. The Franks Casket juxtaposes pagan and Christian pregnancies: the next panel to Wayland, Nithhad and Beadohild shows the Magi visiting Mary and her child. Although English writing came with Christianity, not everything that was written was wholly Christian. Pope Gregory, according to the story in Bede, saw some fair- [p. 23] The front of the Franks Casket, a small carved whalebone box given by Sir A. Franks to the British Museum. Runic inscription: ‘This is whale bone. The sea cast up the fish on the rocky shore. The ocean was troubled where he swam aground onto the shingle.’ For a key to the lower panels, see page 22. Left, adoration of the Magi; right, Wayland. haired boys for sale in the Roman slave market: on hearing that they were Angles and heathen, he sent Augustine to convert the Angles, to change them so that, in a famous papal wordplay, the Angles would become worthy to share the joys of the angels. Cædmon converted the traditional praise of heroism performed by poets such as Widsith and Deor to spreading the Gospel. But so strongly heroic was the poetic repertoire that the Angles at times seem to translate the Gospel back into heroic terms, as The Dream of the Rood had, but without reconceiving heroism. Here is the opening of Andreas in the translation of C. W. Kennedy: Lo! We have heard of twelve mighty heroes Honoured under heaven in days of old, Thanes of God. Their glory failed not In the clash of banners, the brunt of war, After they were scattered and spread abroad As their lots were cast by the Lord of heaven. Eleven of the twelve heroic apostles were martyred - St Andrew by Mermedonian cannibals, according to Andreas, the Acts of the apostle Andrew. Much Old English prose and verse is given to the Saint’s Life, a genre popular with Anglo-Saxons of AD 1000. Miraculous, sensational and moralistic stories still abound today in daily newspapers, although they rarely feature heroic Christians. Sophisticated pagans of Constantine’s day expected miracles as much as simple Christians did. Most of the official and popular writing of the medieval period is of interest to later generations for historical and cultural rather than literary reasons - as is true of most of the writing of any period. Christian literature The dedicated Christian literature of Anglo-Saxon England is of various kinds. There are verse paraphrases of Old Testament stories, such as Cædmon’s: Genesis and Exodus, Daniel and Judith. They emphasize faith rewarded. There are lives of saints such as Andrew or Helena; or the more historical lives of contemporaries such [p. 24] as St Guthlac (an Anglian warrior who became a hermit), of Cuthbert of liturgy (Gk) A religious service; the words Lindisfarne, or of King Edmund (martyred by Danes). And there are sermons, for the prayers at a service. wisdom literature, and doctrinal, penitential and devotional materials - such as The Dream of the Rood.  The New Testament is principally represented in translation and liturgical adaptation. Translation of the Bible into English did not begin in the 14th or the 16th centuries: the Gospels, Psalms and other books were translated into English throughout the Old English period; parts of several versions remain. The Bible was made known to the laity through the liturgical programme of prayers and readings at Mass through the cycle of the Christian year. The liturgy is the source of poems like Christ, and contributes to The Dream of the Rood. Modern drama was eventually to grow out of the worship of the Church, especially from re-enactments such as those of Passion Week. Christ is a poem in three parts also known as the Advent Lyrics, Ascension and Doomsday. The seventh of the lyrics based on the liturgy of Advent is Eala ioseph min (‘O my Joseph’), in which Mary asks Joseph why he rejects her. He replies with delicacy and pathos: ‘I suddenly am Deeply disturbed, despoiled of honour, For I have for you heard many words, Many great sorrows and hurtful speeches, Much harm, and to me they speak insult, Many hostile words. Tears I must Shed, sad in mind. God easily may Relieve the inner pain of my heart, Comfort the wretched one. O young girl, Mary the virgin!’ It is from liturgical adaptations like this that the drama developed. Parts 2 and 3 of Christ are signed ‘Cynewulf’ in a runic acrostic. The approach is gentler than that in Andreas. Ascension, for example, is addressed to an unknown patron. Cynewulf begins: By the spirit of wisdom, Illustrious One, With meditation and discerning mind, Strive now earnestly to understand, To comprehend, how it came to pass When the Saviour was born in purest birth (Who had sought a shelter in Mary’s womb, The Flower of virgins, the Fairest of maids) That angels came not clothed in white When the Lord was born, a Babe in Bethlehem. Angels were seen there who sang to the shepherds Songs of great gladness: that the Son of God Was born upon earth in Bethlehem. But the Scriptures tell not in that glorious time That they came arrayed in robes of white, As they later did when the Mighty Lord, The Prince of Splendour, summoned his thanes, The well-loved band, to Bethany. Cynewulf, an unknown cleric of the 9th century, is the only Old English poet to sign his poems. [p. 25] Names and dates are almost wholly lacking for Old English verse. The four chief verse Alfred (d.899) King manuscripts are known as the Junius Book, the Exeter Book, the Vercelli Book and the Beowulf of Wessex from 871, manuscript. Each is a compilation of copied and recopied works by different authors, and each is of who defended his unknown provenance. Though composed earlier, these manuscripts were written about the year kingdom against the Danes and translated 1000 during the Benedictine Revival, the period of the prose writers Ælfric and Wulfstan, and of a wisdom books into few late poems such as Judith and The Battle of Maldon. We turn now from the golden age of English. Northumbria, the lifetime of Bede (d. 735), to the age of Alfred (d. 899). Alfred Bede and Ælfric were monks from boyhood, Cædmon was a farmhand. The life ofAlfred casts an interesting light on literacy as well as on literature. The fourth son of the king of Wessex, he came to the West-Saxon throne in 871 when the Danes had overrun all the English kingdoms except his own. Though Danes had settled in east and north England, an area known as the Danelaw, the Danes whom Alfred defeated turned east and eventually settled in Normandy (‘the land of the northmen’). Alfred wrote that when he came to the throne he could not think of a single priest south of the Thames who could understand a letter in Latin or translate one into English. Looking at the great learning that had been in the England of Bede, and at the Latin books which were now unread, the king used the image of a man who could see a trail but did not know how to follow it. Alfred was a great hunter, and the trail here is that left by a pen. Riddle 26 in the Exeter Book elaborates what a book is made of: I am the scalp of myself, skinned by my foeman, Robbed of my strength, he steeped and soaked me,  Dipped me in water, whipped me out again, Set me in the sun. I soon lost there The hairs I had had. The hard edge Of a keen-ground knife cuts me now, Fingers fold me, and a fowl’s pride Drives its treasure trail across me, Bounds again over the brown rim, Sucks the wood-dye, steps again on me, Makes his black marks. At the end the speaker asks the reader to guess his identity; the answer is a Gospel Book, made of calf-skin, prepared, cut and folded. The pen is a quill (a ‘fowl’s pride’); the ink, wood-dye. Writing is later described as driving a trail of ‘successful drops’. And to read is to follow this trail to the quarry, wisdom. Reading is an art which Alfred mastered at the age of twelve; he began to learn Latin at thirty-five. Having saved his kingdom physically, Alfred set to saving its mind and soul. He decided to translate sumœ bec, tha the niedbethearfosta sien eallum monnum to wiotonne (‘those books which be most needful for all men to know’) into English; and to teach the freeborn sons of the laity to read them so that the quarry, wisdom, should again be pursued in Angelcynn, the kindred and country of the English. Old English verse was an art older than its written form. Old English prose had been used to record laws, but in The Anglo- Saxon Chronicle for 757 we find evidence of narrative tradition in the story of Cynewulf and Cyneheard. In authorising versions of essential books from Latin into English prose, however, Alfred established English as a literary language. The books he had translated were Bede’s Ecclesiastical [p. 26] Alfred’s needful authors History, Orosius’ Histories, Gregory’s Pastoral Care and Dialogues, Augustine’s Soliloquies Alfred’s wise authors and Boethius’ Consolation o f Philosophy, later to be translated by both Chaucer and Elizabeth I. were Augustine (354- Alfred also translated the Psalms. It was in his reign that The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (ASC) 430), Orosius (early 5th began: the only vernacular history, apart from Irish annals, from so early a period in Europe. The century), Boethius (c. early part draws on Bede; the West-Saxon Chronicle then records Alfred’s resistance to the 480-524), and Gregory (c. 540-604). Danes. The ASC was kept up in several monastic centres until the Conquest, and at Peterborough until 1154. It used to be regarded as the most important work written in English before the Norman Conquest, a palm now given to Beowulf. Here is the entry for the climactic year of the Danish campaign, written by a West-Saxon. 878 In this year in midwinter after twelfth night the enemy came stealthily to Chippenham, and occupied the land of the West Saxons and settled there, and drove a great part of the people across the sea, and conquered most of the others; and the people submitted to them, except the king, Alfred. He journeyed in difficulties through the woods and fen-fastnesses with a small force... And afterwards at Easter, King Alfred with a small force made a stronghold at Athelney, and he and the section of the people of Somerset which was nearest to it proceeded to fight from that stronghold against the enemy. Then in the seventh week after Easter, he rode to ‘Egbert’s stone’ east of Selwood, and there came to meet him all the people of Somerset and of Wiltshire and of that part of Hampshire which was on this side of the sea. And they rejoiced to see him. And then after one night he went from that encampment to Iley, and after another night to Edington, and there fought against the whole army and put it to flight... Alfred stood sponsor at the baptism of the defeated King Guthrum at the treaty of Wedmore (878). The Somerset marshes are also the scene of the story of Alfred hiding at the but of an old woman, and allowing the cakes to burn while he was thinking about something else - how to save his country. Alfred’s thoughtfulness is evident in his two famous Prefaces, to the Pastoral Care and the Soliloquies. His resolute and practical character was combined with a respect for wisdom and its rewards. Alfred added to his Boethius the following sentence: ‘Without wisdom no faculty can be fully brought out: for whatever is done unwisely can never be accounted as skill.’ In his Preface to his later translation of the Soliloquies he seems to be looking back on his career as a translator when he writes: Then I gathered for myself staves and posts and tie-beams, and handles for each of the tools I knew how to use, and building-timbers and beams and as much as I could carry of the most beautiful woods for each of the structures I knew how to build. I did not come home with a single load without wishing to bring home the whole forest with me, if I could have carried it all away; in every tree I saw something that I needed at home. Wherefore I advise each of those who is able, and has many waggons, to direct himself to the same forest where I cut these posts; let him fetch more there for himself, and load his waggons with fair branches so that he can weave many a neat wall and construct many an excellent building, and build a fair town, and dwell therein in joy and ease both winter and summer, as I have not done so far. But he who taught me, to whom the forest was pleasing, may bring it about that I dwell in greater ease both in this transitory wayside habitation while I am in this world, and also in that eternal home which he has promised us through St Augustine and St Gregory and St Jerome, and through many other holy fathers... Alfred builds a habitation for his soul with wood taken from the forest of wisdom. In the next paragraph he asks the king of eternity, whose forest this is, to grant the soul [p. 27] a charter so that he may have it as a perpetual inheritance. The simple metaphysical confidence with which this metaphor is handled shows that Alfred’s later reputation for wisdom was not unmerited. Later writers also call him Englene hyrde, Englene deorlynge (‘shepherd of the English, darling of the English’). Alfred’s educational programme for the laity did not succeed at first but bore fruit later in the Wessex of his grandson Edgar, who ruled 959-76. After the Ages of Bede and Alfred, this is the third clearly-defined Age of Anglo-Saxon literature, the Benedictine Revival, under Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury 960-88, himself a skilled artist. Bishop Æthelwold made Winchester a centre of manuscript illumination. In its profusion of manuscripts the Wessex of Dunstan, Æthelwold and Ælfric is better represented today than the more remarkable early Northumbria of Bede. In this period English prose became the instrument for a flourishing civilisation, with scientific, political and historical as well as religious interests. It was in this second Benedictine age, towards AD 1000, that the four poetry manuscripts were made: the Vercelli Book, the Junius Book, the Exeter Book and the Beowulf manuscript. Beowulf Like Greek literature, English literature begins with an epic, a poem of historic scope telling of heroes and of the world, human and non-human. Compared with the epics of Homer, Beowulf is short, with 3182 verses, yet it is the longest as well as the richest of Old English poems. Like other epics, it has a style made for oral composition, rich in formulas. The poem is found in a manuscript of the late 10th century, but was composed perhaps two centuries earlier, and it is set in a world more than two centuries earlier still, on the coasts of the Baltic. This was the north-west Germanic world from which the English had come