Counsel and strategy in Middle English romance (review)

Reviews Barnes, Geraldine, Counsel and strategy in Middle English romance, Cambridge, D . S. Brewer, 1993; cloth; pp. xii, 163; R.R.P.£29.50/US$65.00. Medieval literary criticism in the last thirty years has seen a growing rehabilitation of Middle English romance, for too long under the shadow of Continental French romance and regarded as its disadvantaged and backward cousin. Yet in more recent discussions of the ways in which English romance charts the moral development of its heroes, the paradigm for this growth to maturity tends still to be taken from Frenchtexts,notably those of Chretien de Troyes, where the hero learns through hisrelationshipwith women and his experience of 'courtly' and passionate love. Middle English romances are awkwardly assimilated to this pattern. Some do notfitit at all. Geraldine Barnes's book provides a new andrefreshingangle on a large group of them, suggesting that then heroes develop, not through love and marriage, but through a growing ability to listen to good advice and to practise 'strategy"4 , in other words, to 'achieve then objectives by devious and ingenious means'. This welcome and often Uluminating change of perspective is supported by a detailed survey of the historical and political background to these thirteenth- and fourteenth-centurytexts.Then putative audience emerges as one far more likely to be interested in misuses of royal authority and issues of good and bad government such as whether a king was wiUing to consult, or to ignore, the opinion of his subjects, than in a ruler's emotional education. While in many respects this point is made convincingly, it cannot be applied merely to Middle English romances. Then predecessors, the AngloNorman romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, provide not only then plots but also many of the details adduced by Barnes as characteristic of Middle English romance's concern with 'counsel' and 'strategy' (or gyn). In other words, these are concerns which were not original to the Middle Englishtextsbut which pre-existed them. The corollary follows, perhaps, that the Anglo-Norman audience was in certain ways similar to the Middle English one. Barnes's point seems to be irrefutable whenever she discusses texts for which there is no previous Anglo-Norman source or analogue. Thus the 112 Reviews examination of Gamelyn, Arthour and Merlin, Richard Coeur de Lyon, and The Seven Sages is excellent. It is the more welcome since most of these are seldom treated critically. N e w light is also cast on Sir Orfeo, a text more congenial to, and popular with, critics. The discussion of Floris and Blancheflour is also convincing, since here Barnes makes a close and iUuminating comparison of the poem with its Continental French source. But in the case offiveromances, then Anglo-Norman predecessors have already treated the themes which Barnes discerns. Sometimes they did so, interestingly, with a more positive and less misogynistic attitude to then heroines. Barnes remarks that the increasing readiness to accept good counsel in the eponymous hero of Havelok is indicative of the good judgement marking his maturation. In the Lai d'Haveloc, the judgement of his wife Argentine is good from the start, with theresultthat she, not he, is sent the dream about his future. And she can interpret itrightiy,as he cannot. She is still advising and manipulating him later in the plot, when she counsels a successful military ruse. Josiane in Beves of Hampton, rightiy characterized by Barnes as 'one of the most enterprising women in Middle English romance', is already enterprising in the Anglo-Norman Boeve, where her gyn, or resourcefulness and talents, is even greater, where she rather than Boeve is given good advice by Bonefey, and where she in turn counsels the hero. As another reviewer has already remarked, the counsel given to Guy of Warwick figures no less prominently in Gui de Warewic, where the scribe of M S . C even made his own additions on the subject (see A. Ewert, Gui de Warewic [Paris, 1933], notes to 1. 1444). The Folie Tristan d Oxford hinges entirely on the subject of Tristan's cunning and deception, which Barnes discerns as the focus of the English Sir Tristrem. Indeed, the multiplicity of terms connoting the...