The Politics of Pearl: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II by John M. Bowers (review)

REVIEWS poet Bernart de Ventadorn, work that seeks to understand the religious and ethical dimensions of sacrificial desire (see ‘‘A Martyr to Love: Sacrificial Desire in the Poetry of Bernart de Ventadorn,’’ JMEMS 31). Although this book asks about the power of the sacred today and about what kinds of experiences still count as sacred, it does not explore the literary dimensions of the drama (and is not really interested at all in their textuality) nor the complex psychoanalytic dynamics of its sacrificial aspects. Literature and religion come together here, insofar as they both engage with the abyss of and in the Other’s desire that is represented by the Real (that which lies beyond symbolization). In Gaunt’s words, ‘‘Art organizes itself around the abyss, religion tries to avoid it’’ (p. 499). This does not mean that art and religion are opposed; it means rather that they both have a relation to desire. This is not an easy book to read or to get along with. Nearly every sentence feels wrung from its author. Paradoxically, it seems unable to elucidate the texture of medieval popular devotion or identify the sources of its pleasure, then or now. For Beckwith, ‘‘the separation of theology and theater, of religious and theatrical history’’ (p. 123) has been ‘‘disastrous.’’ But disastrous for whom? What this difficult and intellectually challenging book still leaves unanswered is how the plays continue to be meaningful today without casting our responses as either false consciousness or wilful misunderstanding of their theology. Ruth Evans University of Stirling John M. Bowers, The Politics of Pearl: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001. Pp. xx, 236. $75.00. In The Politics of Pearl, John Bowers makes a strong argument for an affinity between the Pearl-poet’s interests and those of Richard II’s court in the late 1380s and 1390s. As he asserts in an opening Excursus, Bowers seeks to recover Pearl’s ‘‘public life’’ (p. 16), lost in more traditional formalist readings of the poems of BL MS Cotton Nero A.x. The book is organized into three main sections, ‘‘Pearl and the Politics of Class,’’ ‘‘Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II,’’ and ‘‘Love and Loss at the Ricardian Court.’’ The image of the Pearl-poet that emerges from 351 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:54:52 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER his chapters on the chief issues of the period, including anticlericalism, Wycliffite heresy, and the labor crisis, is that of a staunch royalist from the same Cheshire milieu as many of Richard’s most loyal retainers. Bowers gathers an immense amount of contextual material in order to bolster his claims about the king’s direct patronage of this author, situating the poem’s concerns within the myriad intentional courtly discourses of the late fourteenth century. Bowers describes his methodology as an ‘‘heuristic argument’’ to recover ‘‘a previously overlooked specimen of court poetry operating according to a cultural logic that renders each of the poet’s literary decisions suggestive of whole registers of social meaning’’ (p. 37). Pearl itself and the other poems attributed to its author remain, however , curiously elusive in Bowers’s account of Ricardian culture. Perhaps this is because these aesthetically intricate works do not lend themselves easily to a coherent ideological program. Indeed, as Bowers puts it, the poet is neither a royal apologist like Lydgate nor a critic like the author of ‘‘Richard the Redeless’’ (p. 21). The so-called ‘‘Poems of the Pearl Manuscript’’ and the similarly alliterative ‘‘St. Erkenwald,’’ whether they were composed by one hand or more, are suffused with loss, moral failure, and notoriously unfixed meanings. In Pearl, the dreamer’s own desire undoes him when his frenzied plunge into the stream that separates him from the Pearl-maiden wakes him up and prevents him from learning more of the ‘‘new city of Jerusalem.’’ Gawain, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, reacts to the revelation of the beheading-game as a second fall from Eden and wears the green girdle as a ‘‘token of untrawthe ’’ until Arthur and his merry knights reinterpret it as a badge of honor...