Anthony Burgess' English Literature

University of Brasília
English Literature 2
Fernando Meyer Fontes
17/0142078

Chapter 3: The First English Literature

The Britons, or original inhabitants of England, lived there since prehistoric times.
They had a fairly advanced civilization, and were ruled for a few centuries by the
Romans. The latter created towns, theaters and roads. When the Roman Empire
collapsed, peoples from Northwest Europe (mainly the Saxons and Angles) crossed
the sea and settled in the England, forcing the original Britons to move westwards and
reclaiming the land. These Britons are the ancestors of the Welsh people.
The legends of King Arthur are settled in this historic moment, telling the story of
how the Christian Britons fought the Saxon "barbarians" (meaning they were
heathens). The Anglo-Saxons brought with them their kind of literature, that was oral
and in verse. There are works of prose, but not literary ones. The oldest poem in the
English language is Beowulf, with more than three thousand verses, composed in the
continental Europe before the migration. It is a violent poem, a warrior's story. Beowulf
fights against the monster Grendel, and his monster mother. It is the product of an
advanced pagan civilisation, despite the Christian flavour given to it by the monk
scriber.
The violence of the poem is related to the violence of the language itself, that
uses many consonant clusters and loud noises (e.g. strength, breath and crash), which
is highlighted by the use of head-rhymes, that means, using words starting with the
same sound. After the Norman Conquest, the use of end-rhyme (ordinary rhyme)
prevailed, but the head-rhymes have always had an importance in English literature.
Its use in modern days can be attributed to Ezra Pound, that translated The Seafarer
into modern English retaining the original technique.
A consequence of this is called the inability "to call a spade a spade". There is
use of kennings to supply the need of words with the same initial sound (therefore,
"darkness" can become night-helmet and "sea" whale's road). This led to the
popularisation of riddles, short poems with fanciful description of common things.
The first Christian poem was composed by Caedmon by about 670, a key year
in English literature. It uses head-rhymes and the division of the verse in two halves
with four stresses. There is a haunting melancholy in the Old English poems, even
when the theme is war or an adventure.
Old English is an umbrella term that encompasses several dialects. Up to the
ninth century, the kingdom of Northumbria was the centre of learning in England, its
"library". With the invasion of the Danes and the looting of monasteries, many books
were lost. By this time, the intellectual centre shifted to Wessex, under the rule of
Alfred the Great, a patron of intellectual knowledge. He was not an artist, but with
helpers he translated many Latin prose works into English. He established the
continuous cultural tradition of England.
The most solid piece of prose work in Old English is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
the history of England from the middle of the ninth century until 1154, when Old English
was rapidly becoming a transitional language before the middle English period.

Chapter 4: The coming of the Normans

The Normans descended from the Danes, but were Christianised and lived in
France. Their lifestyle was more light-hearted, while the Anglo-Saxon one was grim
and heavy.
After the Norman Conquest, William I saw the whole of England as his personal
territory. The first book written under his rule was the Domesday Book, an inventory
of his properties. The Anglo-Saxon culture was despised under Norman rule, and their
literature died. The Old French literature, like the Song of Roland, is also warlike
centred, but much more colorful than that of the English. In Norman England, the
Norman Literature decayed. The English people was not very successful in learning
the ruler's language, and Latin was also used to write stories.
Mythology is the religious beliefs of a dead creed, and the fabulous characters of
a people. In the time of the Norman Conquest, the Arthurian tales quite ironically
became an important mythological character for the Anglo-Saxons. Geoffrey of
Monmouth wrote an important version of the tale. He lived in Wales, close to the
original Britons. Another very important myth was that of Robin Hood, and outlaw that
refuses to live under Norman Rule.
As time goes by, the English language prevailed, but with many borrowings from
Norman. This happened especially after 1204, when Normandy was lost and the
contact with the continent severed. But the mixture of the two languages was not
complete (walk is more natural than promenade, for example).
Then began the period of Middle English literature. Some important works were
influenced by the Christian faith, like the Ormulum, the Ancrene Riwle, and the Pricke
of Conscience, written probably by Richard Rolle by 1340, that describes with full
details the torments of Hell. Of the non-religious works, there are anonymous love
songs like Alison and lyrics (e.g. Sumer is icumen in). Longer important poems are
The Owl and the Nightingale, and Sir Gawayn and the Green Knight, in the Lancashire
dialect. An important book of travel was written by "Sir John Mandeville". He introduced
a number of French words in English (like "cause" and "quantity"). The last meritorious
writer to use the Old English technique of head-rhymes was William Langland. This is
an allegorical poem, like John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

Chapter 5: Chaucer and After

When Geoffrey Chaucer was about 20 years old (1360), the English language
was already established. He was a page of the Countess of Ulster and marriage in the
family of John of Gaunt, he learnt about the customs of the nobility and studied arts,
sciences and literature.
He used the West Midland dialect, spoken in London. In a sense, he had to
create the English language we know today and establish its literary tradition. His
masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, is eternal in its literary quality and ability to create
rapport, and for the first time, told a story about real people. Collections of stories like
that are an ancient idea, and very few of those tales are Chaucer's original.
Nonetheless, The Canterbury Tales are original in the sense that each character is
realistically portrayed, having an authentic voice and personality.
The plot is the following: there are many pilgrims going to the Canterbury
Cathedral. They stop to rest at a tavern, the Tabard Inn. The owner of the Tabard Inn
offers a free supper to whichever pilgrim shall tell the best story. We will never know
which pilgrim won, since the work is unfinished, but we know of a looser: Chaucer
himself, that depicted himself as a rather dull storyteller, in the self-deprecation
tradition of the British humour. The other stories are delightful and varied.
About the pronunciation of old English, the pronunciation of the vowels is similar
to that of the Latin languages, final "ng" sounds like "ngg", and the "gh" is a guttural
sound.
Another important long work of Chaucer is Troilus and Criseyde, with such a
developed character psychology that the work resembles a modern novel.
Remarkable are his love poems, based on French forms and full of conventions of
courtly love, although with a distinct humour still present.
By the middle of the 1400s, the English language began to suffer a change in
pronunciation. In particular, the final -e stopped to be vocalised. Then, many verses of
Chaucer lost their rhymes, and he lost his popularity. After Chaucer, Scotland
maintained a somewhat strong poetic tradition, while the only worthwhile mentioning
English poet was John Skelton (1460?-1529), that use an authentic style, with simple
verses and loose rhyme-patterns, with a wide range of topics.
The ballad was a species of poetry that flourished outside the mainstream,
especially in the border between England and Scotland. It tells a simple story (love,
war or supernatural). The Nut-Brown Maid is one of the best, telling the story of a man
that became murder because of a murder, and needs to live isolated in a forest. About
the prose, the most important work is Morte D'Arthur, by Sir Thomas Mallory, our main
source about the Arthurian cycle.
In 1604, King James I commissioned forty-seven learned men to produce an
authorized version of the Bible, task finished in 1611. Since then, there is no author
that was not influenced by it and its style.

Chapters 6 and 7: The Beginnings of Drama/English Drama

The drama is the most ancient of all art forms, based on imitation and beginning
in pre-history. It was, at first, a form of magic that evolved to fertility rites. With the
Greeks, the drama reached a high level of sophistication, being divided in tragedies
and comedies. But the Greek drama has had few influence on the English one,
especially because of different religious conceptions. To the Greek, the destiny is
already secreted, while in England, due to the Christian concept of free will, the hero
has always a choice. Therefore, if he fails, this is due to his own lack of (moral)
strength.
The Normans introduced religious dramas in England (the miracle plays), that
rapidly divorced from their strict religious meanings by a process called secularisation.
From that emerged the mystery plays, organised by professional guilds ("mystery" is
a word related to métier). The presentation of plays in commemoration of Corpus
Christi became one of their most important jobs. Each guild had its "pageant", a cart
used as a stage that could be set up at different spots in a town. All those plays were
anonymous.
The secular dramas began with a semi-religious genre called Moral plays. The
late moral plays, like The Child and the World and Youth are about the reformation of
vices, but this time not through religious exhortations, but through acquisition of
wisdom. In the last decades of the fifteenth century a new kind of drama appeared,
the Interlude, that was performed in the intervals of a feast. It was a kind of aristocratic
morality play, often assigned to an author (like Bale, the first Englishman to divide a
play into acts).
Perhaps the most enjoyable of the Interlude dramatists is John Heywood, whose
plays have no instructive purpose. Play of the Weather and The four P's are pure
entertainment, and their humour is gentle and refined.