God’s “Inquits” and Exegetical Speech Theory in the Middle English Patience

The Middle English poem Patience is a relatively brief poem, but it is one of the best and most interesting narrative poems in the language. As one of the texts preserved in London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A. x, it has almost inevitably been overshadowed to some degree by comparison with the other poems in the manuscript, two of which (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl) are among the greatest poems in the English literary tradition as a whole, and the other a very interesting poem in its own right (Cleanness). Biblical paraphrase, even poetic Biblical paraphrase, is not a genre (or subgenre) that is taken very seriously, at least in the modern world, and Patience is a reasonably close retelling of the Biblical book of Jonah.¹

For these reasons, presumably, Patience has received less critical and editorial attention than either Gawain or Pearl. Those critics who have worked on Patience, however, have been impressed by the artistry and sophistication of the poet, and there are some (among whom I would count myself) who would argue that it is as great a literary achievement (albeit on a smaller scale) as either Gawain or Pearl. The poem is not simply a paraphrase of the Biblical narrative concerning the prophet Jonah, swallowed by a sea monster and then spewed onto dry land to prophesy doom to the citizens of Nineveh: it is in effect a revision and rewriting of a central Biblical text. Scripture is not often comic, and while there is some measure of irony in the Vulgate version of the story, it is not a particularly funny narrative. The poet, however, has revised this narrative and made it richly comic. The portrait of Jonah, the chosen prophet, who speaks the message of God to the Ninevites (but who is deeply resistant to his vocation), who must be compelled to preach, and who resists and resents the mercy of God even though he himself is a beneficiary of it, is based on the Biblical narrative, but goes far beyond it in rich comic specificity.

The first critics who commented on the poem praised it as a well-crafted narrative but seem to have thought of it as a popularization of the Biblical story, a judgment for which there is some basis. Later critics have emphasized the artistry and subtlety of the poet, but have insisted that the poet did not emphasize the allegorical aspect of the Biblical narrative, the way in which the entombment (if one can describe being swallowed by a sea monster as entombment) and eventual recovery of Jonah prefigures the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus. Since this typological parallel was part of the preaching of Jesus himself, it was, of course, universally accepted by patristic and medieval exegetes,² and indeed at certain junctures of the poem, the poet seems to allude to these parallels. Because of the ubiquity of this reading of the narrative, other critics have emphasized the typological aspect of the poem and the importance and relevance of medieval Christian ideas about the virtue of patience to this narrative.³ These two modes of thinking about the poem are, of course, not mutually exclusive—they exist in a sense as aspects of a dialogue, and it could be argued that the Patience-poet was very much aware of this possible dialogue.⁴

One aspect of Patience that has perhaps been overlooked to some degree is the way in which the diction and phrasing of the poem reflect the extraordinary craft of the poet.⁵ In this essay I focus on the problem of the speech of God, more specifically the way in which these speeches are introduced in the poem. One literary problem that Christian poets who write about Christian topics may face is how to present God as a character, particularly as a speaking character, in a literary text. The problem is sufficiently acute that many Christian poets have avoided the issue by either simply excluding God as a character from their fictions or by introducing or inventing some...