Readings in Medieval Poetry by A. C. Spearing (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Schmidt, like his medieval predecessors, seems to know what the meaning should be before he has worked out the pun. Or, rather, he knows that he has worked out the pun properly because it has produced the right meanmg. Gerard Manley Hopkins found Langland's poetry "not worth reading," and a good many more favorably disposed readers have been content to be swept along, conscious that extraordinary things were being done with language but not quite sure what. Schmidt offers many rebukes to the careless and inattentive reader, demands a kind of attention to Langland's verse that it surely deserves, and draws out of the poetry, in the subtle and detailed analysis of specific passages of which his book mostly consists, its emotional charge as well as its intellectual challenge. He is somewhat insistent at times on our agreement, and his sentences are often clogged with parentheses, quotations, and words in inverted commas and in italics, as if he were still writing his notes to the B text and had to cram everything into the shortest possible space. His book is not an easy read, but, then, neither is Langland. DEREK PEARSAIJ. Harvard University A. C. SPEARING. Readings in Medieval Poetry. Cambridge, London, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. ix, 270. $44.50. This book is a collection of nine essays, some of them already published, treating selected works of medieval literature from the Chanson de Roland ro Piers Plowman. Spearing's purpose is to introduce new readers to old poetry, a goal also shaping his critical approach: "Old poems need to be looked at in new ways if they are to attract the attention of new readers and also perhaps if they are to retain the living interest of old ones" (p. vii). These new ways turn out to be importations from social linguistics, social anthropology, and deconstruction, which Spearing, who describes himself as "eclectic and uncommitted" in dealing with theory (p. vii), has com­ bined with close reading. Needless to say, thisconscious eclecticismaccounts not only fora plethora of methodologies but also for a certain arbitrariness. The presence of the critic becomes overwhelming: he selects the passages to be discussed, he 290 REVIEWS fixes their meaning, and he evaluates the literary criticism, most of which, as is to be expected, does not meet with his approval. From reading Spearing's chapters on Sir Orfeo and the alliterative Morte Arthure, it becomes clear that these two works have been sadly misinterpreted by modern critics.Especially the Marte Arthure "needs to be defended from scholars who are too ready to use against it the drastic method King Arthur applies to another giant, and cut it down to size" (p. 172). A close reading of some passages, however, which results in the unstartling recognition that there are two conflicting value systems-on the one hand unquestioning celebration of personal loyalty and martial prowess and, on the other, Christian compassion for the victims of martial glory and disapproval of pride in conquest-turns out to be a weak defense. But now to the content of the book. The first four essays can be seen as a unit in which specimens taken from the chanson de geste, the romances and Chaucer's early poetry are discussed in terms of "elaborated" and "restricted" codes. Thisconcept is derived from thesociolinguistic theory of Basil Bernstein, who differentiates between cultures or subcultures which emphasize the "we" over the "I" and those which raise the "I" above the "we." To both social structures corresponds a specific linguistic code called restricted in the first instance and elaborated in the second. The dominant features of the restricted code are the following: short, grammatically simple, often unfinished sentences; simple and repetitive use of conjunc­ tions; paratactic structures; groups of idiomatic phrases, from which the speaker can select; and lack of symbolism. By applying these concepts to a close reading of passages from the Chanson de Roland, King Horn, Havelok, Sir Orfeo, The House ofFame, and The Book ofthe Duchess, Spearing illustrates how a gradual transition from a restricted to an elabo­ rated code took place-a development which among other matters led to...