Pearl in Its Royal Setting: Ricardian Poetry Revisited

Pearl in Its Royal Setting: Ricardian Poetry Revisited John M. Bowers University of Nevada Las Vegas Tfuu, poems of Brit;,!, Libmcy M,nuwipt Cotton Nero A, have long been regarded as the chance survivors of a fringe culture that flourished unexpectedly at some backwoods court in Cheshire.1 Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight were upland masterpieces, it was thought, composed in a dead-end dialect whose ambitions as a literary language were thwarted by the triumph of Chaucer's London English. A. C. Spear­ ing succinctly expressed this common view: "These poems, then, originate in an area remote from the metropolis and from the cultural influences which, especially under Richard II, radiated from the royal courr."2 Such a notion of a rustic genius accorded perfectly with the Romantic ideology that prevailed when these texts were initially offered to modern readers, first in Sir Frederic Madden's 1839 edition of Gawain, then in Richard Morris's 1864 edition ofPearl, Cleanness, and Patience in the inaugural issue of the Early English Text Society.3 The idea of a provincial master 1 Angus McIntosh, "A New Approach to Middle English Dialectology," ES 44 (1963): 5, has localized the dialect to "SE Cheshire or just over the border in NE Staffordshire." I cite the five poems in the following editions: E. V. Gordon, ed., Pearl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953); J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, eds., Norman Davis, rev., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); Cleanness, Patience, and Saint Erkenwald in Malcolm Andrew, Ronald Waldron, and Clifford Peterson, eds., Casey Finch, trans., The Complete Works of the "Pearl" Poet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). 2 A. C. Spearing, The Gawain-Poet: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 3. 3 Sir Frederic Madden, ed., Syr Gawayne: A Collection ofAncient Romance-Poems by Scottish and English Authors, Relating to That Celebrated Knight ofthe Round Table, Bannatyne Club, vol. 61 (London, 1839), pp. 3-92 and 299-326; Richard Morris, ed., Early English Alliterative Poems in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century, EETS, o.s., vol. 1 (London, 1864). These nineteenth-century assumptions have been examined by Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1983), esp. pp. 3139 , 49-56, and Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding ofMedieval Literature (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 9-18. 111 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER also appealed to what has been perceived as a critical bias in favor of middle-class creativity against the sterility of royal culture, even for a poet such as Chaucer with documented attachments to the court.4 Pearl's formalistic brilliance made it, specifically, a favorite of New Critics for whom the quest for authorship, so vigorously pursued at the beginning of the twentieth century, was gladly abandoned.5 What was abandoned, too, was any attempt to situate the poem in a precise historical context. Though Ian Bishop's "Pearl" in Its Setting (1968) spoke of recon­ structing "literary, intellectual, cultural and ecclesiastical traditions,"6 those traditions turned out to be medieval, in a monolithic sense, rather than specifically fourteenth-century English. John Burrow's Ricardian Po­ etry (1971) was more forthright in disavowing any direct connection be­ tween the monarch and the vernacular poetry of the period over which he reigned. For Burrow's purposes, the term "Ricardian" serves almost exclu­ sively as a chronological marker.7 During the past two decades, however, Michael J. Bennett's studies of the social and economic structures of Cheshire culture have reached the remarkable conclusion that the poet's dialect region did not contain any aristocratic court with sufficient wealth, stability, and sophistication to have supported the Pearl poet or served as his original audience. A more likely milieu would have been the Ricardian "court"--a complex network that embraced the king's chamber, the royal household, the council, the offices ofstate, the chief law courts, even the Parliament, as well as the far­ flung affinity of royal servants, lesser officials, church appointments, king's knights, archers, and yeomen of the Crown.8 And a more likely audience 4 In...