Thematic Structure and Symbolic Motif in the Middle English Breton Lays

THEMATIC STRUCTURE AND SYMBOLIC MOTIF IN THE MIDDLE ENGLISH BRETON LAYS By SHEARLE FURNISH The Rreton Lays in Middle English is an enigmatic label customarily used to designate eight or nine brief narratives: Sir Orfeo, Sir Degaré, Lay Ie Freine, "The Franklin's Tale," Sir Launfal, The Earl of Toulouse, Emaré, and Sir Gowther} The label is awkward because it may seem to suggest that the poems are consistently derived from or inspired by Rreton or Old French sources and thus are a sort of stepchildren, little more than translations or, worse, misunderstandings of a multi-media heritage.2 Most scholars have seen the grouping as traditional and artificial, passed along in 1 Sir Orfeo, ed. A. J. Bliss (London, 1954); Sir Degaré m Medieval English Romances, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt and Nicholas Jacobs (New York, 1980), 2:57-88; Lay le Freine in The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anna Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, 1995), 68-87; Sir Launfal, ed. A. J. Bliss (London, 1960); The Earl of Toulouse, in Middle English Metrical Romances, ed. Walter Hoyt French and Charles Brockway Hale (New York, 1930), 383-419; Emaré, ed. French and Hale, Middle English Metrical Romances, 423-55; Sir Gowther, ed. Laskaya and Salisbury, Middle English Breton Lays, 274-95; and "The Franklin's Tale" in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987), 178-89. Quotations from these works are identified by line numbers. For convenience, I do not include in this study a major source of Thomas Chestre's Sir Launfal, a poem entitled Landevale. Anna Laskaya and Eve Salisbury add Sir Cleges to the contents of their anthology "based upon common topoi that render it compatible with the Middle English Breton Lays" but seem hesitant to call it a lay explicitly, except by its inclusion (Laskaya and Salisbury, Middle English Breton Lays, vii). In explaining their exclusion of Chaucer's contributions to the genre, Laskaya and Salisbury observe that the "Wife of Bath's Tale" is also widely recognized as a Breton Lay. Although currently engaged in examining it as a lay for another study, I exclude the "Wife's Tale" here only because she does not make the point of its genre as the Franklin does. 2 E.g., A. C. Spearing, "Marie de France and Her Middle English Adapters," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 (1990): 117-56. Among other underestimations of the English tradition arising from the assumption that the English versions should be seen solely or mostly as translations, Spearing (ibid., 118) writes of Sir Launfal, "Chestre destroys the meaning of Lanval precisely by identifying totally with the very fantasies it represents." For an opposing view of Chestre's artistry, see my "Civilization and Savagery in Thomas Chestre's Sir Launfal," Medieval Perspectives 3 (1988): 137-49. Constance Bullock-Davies clarifies the famous semantic confusions surrounding the term tai and describes the various features that might have gone into the ancient performances originally called lais, already obsolete when Marie wrote. See eadem, "The Form of the Breton Lay," Medium Mvum 42 (1973): 18-31. Clearly, from Marie onward, the most that poets could have accurately meant by associating their compositions with the term tai is the literary residue or poetically commemorated aventure that in earlier times may have been just one, and not the most important , feature of the performance. I use the term in this sense. Like my study, Bullock- 84TRADITIO uncritical reception, not resting on substantial generic similarities that distinguish the poems from other literary forms. John Finlayson, for instance, concludes, "In fact, considered coldly, shortness and adventure or ordeal would seem to be the only things that can really be isolated as universal characteristics."3 Some scholars have accounted for the poems as a set. The distinctions they discuss commonly include the lays' close relation to the conventions of the folk-tale, relationship to provincial audiences, and a growing sophistication of the craft of fiction.4 Until recently, however, there has been no decisive view of the lay as an integrated form within Middle English romance in general, and most commentators would say that this is because such a view is not supportable.5...