Alliterative Revivals

Introduction

Introduction Theghosts were not an attempt at evasion ... Rather, the questions became more insistent, more powerful, for beingprojected into the mouths ofthe dead. PAT BARKER, The Ghost Road THE EPIGRAPH DESCRIBES THE ORGANIZING metaphor of this book: a drama of historical revival. It proposes that death grants ghosts an interrogative force, imbuing the impossible, unceasing communication between the dead and the living, the past and the present with fearful intimacy. For ghosts never return alone. They drag along on their mantles lost memories that compel their audiences to confront their foundational evasions, to rewrite their histories, and to renovate themselves. Ghosts trouble the strategic amnesias, substitutions, and transcendences through which history is shaped and the contours of the present are inaugurated. And the living respond, not simply because the burden of survival guilt is being tweaked, but because we construct ourselves as citizens of the present at once through our solicitation of the past and its gentle collateral forgetting . To revive the dead as the dead is to give a new shape and authority to what is lost. The revived dead distress their own erasure, goad us into self-questioning, and, like some mortifying mafia, make offers that can't be refused-this is why we summon them. This book is about the revival of the dead and the past performed in eight Middle English alliterative poems, St. Erkenwald, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Wars ofAlexander, The Siege ofjerusalem, the alliterative Morte Arthure, De Tribus &gibusMortuis, The Awntyrs offArthure, and Somer Sunday. Five of these poems are alliterative romances; three of them, De Tribus &gibus Mortuis, Awntyrs offArthure and Somer Sunday didactically meditate on alliterative romance themes and are therefore fascinating in the way they crystallize and critique the concerns of the genre. In selecting these poems I pursued a single current in the flexing, multifarious , polymorphic, widely penetrating stream that is Middle English alliterative poetry and its tributary (or cross-current), rhythmical prose.1 2 Introduction What will draw together the alliterative romances in this study is not primarily metrical, dialectical, or formal, but rather thematic: their embodied and spectacular performance of history. These alliterative romances enact an association with past traditions, histories, and languages.2 They harness a highly sophisticated historic consciousness to a spectacular imagination. They dramatize the uses and dangers ofconfronting the past while remaining alert to the interests and anxieties of contemporary audiences.3 Like their insular romance predecessors described by Rosalind Field and Susan Crane;4 these poems (1) investigate the historical antecedents of medieval structures of authority;5 (2) dramatize the questioning of cultural centers from outsider (or provincial) perspectives;6 and (3) centralize the historical exigencies of a world in flux rather than aiming primarily at more transcendent concerns with the afterlife? However, alliterative romances extend these themes, accentuating the mutually structuring oppositions between past and present, center and periphery, secular and religious trajectories, in order to interrogate their reciprocal debts and interdependencies. These poems animate British history by reviving past bodies-the pagan judge, the giant of St. Michael's Mount, Sir Priamus, dead fathers and mothers, and the Green Knight himself-whose potentially threatening authority must be encountered and arbitrated. Such dramatic confrontations bring into focus late fourteenth-century disjunctions between monarchy and nobility, ecclesiastic authority and lay piety, and monarchical and provincial culture. These poems were written toward the end ofa period-the medievalthat everyday parlance makes an epitome of pastness, yet which recent scholarship, mostly on Chaucer, has illuminated as a society anxiously, innovatively, and opportunistically transacting social changes, and therefore invested in recreating and forgetting its own complex histories.8 These romances improvise a form that flaunts a traditionality in its alliteration and diction even as it innovates underhandedly in its meter.9 They declare a genre-historical romance-preoccupied similarly both with origins and renovations. David Lawton makes a useful, if not watertight, stylistic distinction within alliterative poetry between "the plainer or 'informal' style ofLangland" and his followers, and the more "ornate, 'formal' style?' All of the poems that I examine are from this second group, characterized not only by its stylistic and metrical bravura but also by "extensive resources of ingenious and sometimes archaic diction?'10 Innovation meets archaism as alliterative romance performs its traditionality, coming to life in the risky transactions constituting old against new, past against present, predecessor against successor. This precarious enactment receives thematic exploration Introduction 3 in alliterative...