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Medieval romance developed in western
Europe from the 12th century onward, and was extended up to and after the
Renaissance, and reemerged in the 18th century. (see also
Middle Ages, literary
genre)
The Old French word romanz originally meant "the speech of the people," or
"the vulgar tongue," from a popular Latin word, Romanice, meaning written in the vernacular, in contrast with the
written form of literary Latin. Its meaning then shifted from the language in
which the work was written to the work itself. Thus, an adaptation of Geoffrey
of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae (c.
1137), made by Wace of Jersey in 1155, was known as Li
Romanz de Brut, while an anonymous adaptation (of slightly later date) of
Virgil's Aeneid was known as Li Romanz d'Enéas; it is difficult to tell whether in such
cases li romanz still meant "the
French version" or had already come to mean "the story." It soon
specialized in the latter sense, however, and was applied to narrative
compositions similar in character to those imitated from Latin sources but
totally different in origin; and, as the nature of these compositions changed,
the word itself acquired an increasingly wide spectrum of meanings. In modern
French a roman is just a novel,
whatever its content and structure; while in modern English the word
"romance" (derived from Old French romanz) can mean either a medieval narrative composition or a love
affair, or, again, a story about a love affair, generally one of a rather
idyllic or idealized type, sometimes marked by strange or unexpected incidents
and developments; and "to romance" has come to mean "to make up a
story that has no connection with reality." (see also
French literature, classical
literature)
For a proper understanding of these
changes it is essential to know something of the history of the literary form to
which, since the Middle Ages, the term has been applied. The account that
follows is intended to elucidate historically some of the ways in which the word
is used in English and in other European languages.
The romances of love, chivalry, and
adventure produced in 12th-century France have analogues elsewhere, notably in
what are sometimes known as the Greek romances--narrative works in prose by
Greek writers from the 1st century BC to the 3rd century AD. The first known,
the fragmentary Ninus romance,
in telling the story of the love of Ninus, mythical founder of Nineveh,
anticipates the medieval roman d'antiquité.
A number of works by writers of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD--Chariton,
Xenophon of Ephesus, Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, and Longus--introduce a theme
that was to reappear in the roman d'aventure: that of faithful lovers parted by accident or
design and reunited only after numerous adventures. Direct connection, however,
can be proved only in the case of the tale of Apollonius
of Tyrepresumably
deriving from a lost Greek original but known through a 3rd- or 4th-century
Latin version. This too is a story of separation, adventure, and reunion, and,
like the others (except for Longus' pastoral Daphnis
and Chloë), it has a quasi-historical setting. It became one of the
most popular and widespread stories in European literature during the Middle
Ages and later provided Shakespeare with the theme of Pericles
(see also Ancient Greek
literature, roman d'aventure)
But the real debt of 12th-century
romance to classical antiquity was incurred in a sphere outside that of subject
matter. During the present century, scholars have laid ever-increasing emphasis
on the impact of late classical antiquity upon the culture of medieval Europe,
especially on that of medieval France. In particular, it is necessary to note
the place that rhetoric (the
systematic study of oratory) had assumed in the educational system of the late
Roman Empire. Originally conceived as part of the training for public speaking,
essential for the lawyer and politician, it had by this time become a literary
exercise, the art of adorning or expanding a set theme: combined with grammar
and enshrined in the educational system inherited by the Christian Church,
rhetoric became an important factor in the birth of romance. Twelfth-century
romance was, at the outset, the creation of "clerks"--professional
writers who had been trained in grammar (that is to say, the study of the Latin
language and the interpretation of Latin authors) and in rhetoric in the
cathedral schools. They were skilled in the art of exposition, by which a
subject matter was not only developed systematically but also given such meaning
as the author thought appropriate. The "romance style" was,
apparently, first used by the authors of three romans
d'antiquité, all composed in the period 1150-65: Roman
de Thebes, an adaptation of the epic Thebaïs
by the late Latin poet Statius; Roman
d'Enéas, adapted from Virgil's Aeneidand Roman
de Troiea retelling by Benoît
de Sainte-Maure of the tale of Troy, based not on Homer (who was not
known in western Europe, where Greek was not normally read) but on 4th- and
5th-century Latin versions. In all three, style and subject matter are closely
interconnected; elaborate set descriptions, in which the various features of
what is described are gone through, item by item, and eulogized, result in the
action's taking place in lavish surroundings, resplendent with gold, silver,
marble, fine textiles, and precious stones. To these embellishments are added
astonishing works of architecture and quaint technological marvels, that recall
the Seven Wonders of the World and the reputed glories of Byzantium. Troie
and Enéas have, moreover, a strong love interest, inspired by the
Roman poet Ovid's conception
of love as a restless malady. This concept produced the first portrayal in
Western literature of the doubts, hesitations, and self-torment of young lovers,
as exemplified in the Achilles-Polyxena story in Troie
and in the Aeneas-Lavinia story in Enéas.
Yet even more important is the way in which this new theme is introduced:
the rhetorical devices appropriate to expounding an argument are here employed
to allow a character in love to explore his own feelings, to describe his
attitude to the loved one, and to explain whatever action he is about to take.
(see also Latin
literature)
As W.P. Ker, a pioneer in the study of
medieval epic and romance, observed in his Epic
and Romance (1897), the advent of romance is "something as momentous
and as far-reaching as that to which the name Renaissance is generally
applied." The Old French poets who composed the chansons
de geste (as the Old French epics are called) had been content to tell a
story; they were concerned with statement, not with motivation, and their
characters could act without explicitly justifying their actions. Thus, in what
is one of the earliest and certainly the finest of the chansons de geste, the Chanson
de Roland(c.
1100), the hero's decision to fight on against odds--to let the rear guard
of Charlemagne's army be destroyed by the Saracen hordes in the hopeless and
heroic Battle of Roncesvalles rather than sound his horn to call back
Charlemagne--is not treated as a matter for discussion and analysis: the
anonymous poet seems to take it for granted that the reader is not primarily
concerned with the reason why things happened as they did. The new techniques of
elucidating and elaborating material, developed by romance writers in the 12th
century, produced a method whereby actions, motives, states of mind, were
scrutinized and debated. The story of how Troilus
fell in love with Briseïs and how, when taken to the Grecian camp, she
deserted him for Diomedes (as related, and presumably invented, by Benoît
de Sainte-Maure in his Roman de Troie) is not one of marvellous adventures in some exotic
fairyland setting: it is clearly a theme of considerable psychological interest,
and it was for this reason that it attracted three of the greatest writers of
all time: Boccaccio in his Filostrato(c. 1338), Chaucer in his Troilus and Criseyde(before 1385), and Shakespeare in his Troilus
and Cressida (c. 1601-02). With the 12th-century pioneers of what came to be
called romance, the beginnings of the analytical method found in the modern
novel can easily be recognized. (see also Charlemagne
legend, "Troilus and
Cressida")
Where exactly medieval romance writers
found their material when they were not simply copying classical or
pseudo-classical models is still a highly controversial issue. Parallels to
certain famous stories, such as that of Tristan
and Iseult, have been found in regions as wide apart as Persia and Ireland: in
the mid-11th-century Persian epic of Wis
and Ramin and in the Old Irish Diarmaid
and Gráinne; but while in the latter case it is possible to argue in
favour of a genetic link between the two traditions, the former is more likely
to be a case of parallel development due, on the one hand, to the inner logic of
the theme and, on the other, to certain similarities in the ideological and
social background of the two works. Failure to maintain the essential
distinction between source and parallel has greatly hindered the understanding
of the true nature of medieval romance and has led to the production of a vast
critical literature the relevance of which to the study of the genre is at best
questionable.
The marvellous is by no means an
essential ingredient of "romance" in the sense in which it has been
defined. Yet to most English readers the term romance does carry implications of
the wonderful, the miraculous, the exaggerated, and the wholly ideal. Ker
regarded much of the literature of the Middle Ages as "romantic" in
this sense--the only types of narrative free from such "romanticizing"
tendencies being the historical and family narrative, or Icelanders'
sagas developed in classical Icelandic literature at the end of the 12th
and in the early 13th century. The Chanson
de Roland indulges freely in the fantastic and the unreal: hence
Charlemagne's patriarchal age and preternatural strength (he is more than 200
years old when he conquers Spain); or the colossal numbers of those slain by the
French; or, again, the monstrous races of men following the Saracen banners.
Pious legends, saints' lives, and stories of such apocryphal adventures as those
of the Irish St. Brendan (c. 486-578) who, as hero of a legend first written down in the
9th-century, Navigatio
Brendaniand later widely translated and adapted, wanders among strange
islands on his way to the earthly paradise--these likewise favour the
marvellous. The great 12th-century Roman d'Alexandrea roman d'antiquité based
on and developing the early Greek romance of Alexander the Great (the Alexander
romance), was begun in the first years of the century by Alberic de Briançon
and later continued by other poets. It introduces fantastic elements, more
especially technological wonders and the marvels of India: the springs of
rejuvenation, the flower-maidens growing in a forest, the cynocephali
(dog-headed men), the bathyscaphe that takes Alexander to the bottom of the
ocean, and the car in which he is drawn through the air by griffins on his
celestial journey.
The fact that so many medieval romances
are set in distant times and remote places is not an essential feature of
romance but rather a reflection of its origins. As has been seen, the Old French
word romanz early came to mean
"historical work in the vernacular." All the romans d'antiquité have
a historical or pseudohistorical theme, whether they evoke Greece, Troy or the
legendary world of Alexander; but, while making some attempt to give antiquity
an exotic aspect by means of marvels or technological wonders, medieval writers
were quite unable to create a convincing historical setting; and thus in all
important matters of social life and organization they projected the western
European world of the 12th century back into the past. Similarly, historical and
contemporary geography were not kept separate. The result is often a confused
jumble, as, for example, in the Anglo-Norman
Hue de Rotelande's Protesilaus, in
which the characters have Greek names; the action takes place in Burgundy,
Crete, Calabria, and Apulia; and Theseus is described as "king of
Denmark." This lavish use of exotic personal and geographical names and a
certain irresponsibility about settings was still to be found in some of
Shakespeare's romantic comedies: the "seacoast of Bohemia" in The
Winter's Taleis
thoroughly medieval in its antecedents. In the medieval period, myth and
folktale and straightforward fact were on an equal footing. Not that any marvel
or preternatural happening taking place in secular (as opposed to biblical)
history was necessarily to be believed: it was simply that the remote times and
regions were convenient locations for picturesque and marvellous incidents. It
is, indeed, at precisely this point that the transition begins from the concept
of romance as "past history in the vernacular" to that of "a
wholly fictitious story."
In his Historia
regum BritanniaeGeoffrey
of Monmouth "invented history" by drawing on classical authors,
the Bible, and Celtic tradition to create the story of a British kingdom, to
some extent paralleling that of Israel. He described the rise of the British
people to glory in the reigns of Uther Pendragon and Arthur, then the decline
and final destruction of the kingdom, with the exile of the British survivors
and their last king, Cadwalader. Romances that have Arthur or some of his
knights as main characters were classified as matière de Bretagne
by Jehan Bodel (fl. 1200)
in a well-known poem. There is in this "matter of Britain" a certain
amount of material ultimately based on the belief--probably Celtic in origin--in
an otherworld into which men can penetrate, where they can challenge those who
inhabit it or enjoy the love of fairy women. Such themes appear in a highly
rationalized form in the lays (lais)
of the late 12th-century Marie de
France, although she mentions Arthur and his queen only in one, the lay
of Lanval. (see also
Celtic literature)
It was Chrétien de Troyes (fl.
1165-80) who in five romances (Erec; Cligès;
Lancelot, ou Le Chevalier de la charrette; Yvain, ou Le Chevalier au lion; and
Perceval, ou Le Conte du Graal)
fashioned a new type of narrative based on the matter of Britain. The internal
debate and self-analysis of the roman
d'antiquité is here used with artistry. At times, what seems to
matter most to the poet is not the plot but the thematic pattern he imposes upon
it and the significance he succeeds in conveying, either in individual scenes in
which the action is interpreted by the characters in long monologues or through
the work as a whole. In addition to this, he attempts what he himself calls a conjointure--that
is, the organization into a coherent whole of a series of episodes. The
adventures begin and end at the court of King Arthur; but the marvels that bring
together material from a number of sources are not always meant to be believed,
especially as they are somehow dovetailed into the normal incidents of life at a
feudal court. Whatever Chrétien's intentions may have been, he
inaugurated what may be called a Latin tradition of romance--clear, hard,
bright, adorned with rhetoric, in which neither the courtly sentiment nor the
enchantments are seriously meant. Chrétien had only one faithful
follower, the trouvère Raoul de Houdenc (fl. 1200-30), author of Méraugis
de Portlesguez. He shared Chrétien's taste for love casuistry,
rhetorical adornment, and fantastic adventure. For both of these authors,
elements of rhetoric and self-analysis remain important, although the dose of
rhetoric varies from one romance to another. Even in Chrétien's Perceval,
ou Le Conte du Graal("Perceval,
or the Romance of the Grail")--the work in which the Grail
appears for the first time in European literature--the stress is on narrative
incident interspersed with predictions of future happenings and retrospective
explanations. Arthurian romances of the period 1170-1250 are romans
d'aventure, exploiting the strange, the supernatural, and the magical in the
Arthurian tradition. A number (for example, La
Mule sans frein ["The Mule Without a Bridle"], c.
1200, and L'Âtre périlleux
["The Perilous Churchyard"], c.
1250) have as their hero Arthur's nephew Gawain,
who in the earlier Arthurian verse romances is a type of the ideal knight.
The treatment of love varies greatly
from one romance to another. It is helpful to distinguish sharply here between
two kinds of theme: the one, whether borrowed from classical antiquity (such as
the story of Hero and Leander or that of Pyramus and Thisbe, taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses)
or of much more recent origin, ending tragically; the other ending with
marriage, reconciliation, or the reunion of separated lovers. It is noteworthy
that "romance," as applied to a love affair in real life, has in
modern English the connotation of a happy ending. This is also true of most Old
French love romances in verse: the tragic ending is rare and is usually linked
with the theme of the lover who, finding his or her partner dead, joins the
beloved in death, either by suicide or from grief. (see also
courtly love)
The greatest tragic love story found as
a romance theme is that of Tristan and Iseult. It was given the form in which it
has become known to succeeding generations in about 1150-60 by an otherwise
unknown Old French poet whose work, although lost, can be reconstructed in its
essentials from surviving early versions based upon it. Probably closest in
spirit to the original is the fragmentary version of c. 1170-90 by the Norman poet Béroul.
From this it can be inferred that the archetypal poem told the story of an
all-absorbing passion caused by a magic potion, a passion stronger than death
yet unable to triumph over the feudal order to which the heroes belong. The
story ended with Iseult's death in the embrace of her dying lover and with the
symbol of two trees growing from the graves of the lovers and intertwining their
branches so closely that they could never be separated. Most later versions,
including a courtly version by an Anglo-Norman poet known only as Thomas,
attempt to resolve the tragic conflict in favour of the sovereignty of passion
and to turn the magic potion into a mere symbol. Gottfried
von Strassburg's German version, Tristan
und Isolde(c.
1210), based on Thomas, is one of the great courtly romances of the Middle
Ages; but, although love is set up as the supreme value and as the object of the
lovers' worship, the mellifluous and limpid verse translates the story into the
idyllic mode. Another tragic and somewhat unreal story is that told in the
anonymous Chastelaine de Vergi (c. 1250),
one of the gems of medieval poetry, in which the heroine dies of grief because,
under pressure, her lover has revealed their secret and adulterous love to the
duke of Burgundy. The latter tells it to his own wife, who allows the heroine to
think that her lover has betrayed her. The theme of the dead lover's heart
served up by the jealous husband to the lady--tragic, sophisticated, and
far-fetched--appears in the anonymous Chastelain
de Couci (c. 1280) and again in Daz
Herzmaere by the late 13th-century German poet Konrad von Würzburg. The
theme of the outwitting of the jealous husband, common in the fabliaux
(short verse tales containing realistic, even coarse detail and written to
amuse), is frequently found in 13th-century romance and in lighter lyric verse.
It occurs both in the Chastelain de Couci and
in the Provençal romance Flamenca(c. 1234), in which it is
treated comically. (see also German
literature)
But the theme that has left the deepest
impress on romance is that of a happy resolution, after many trials and manifold
dangers, of lovers' difficulties. As has been seen, this theme was derived from
late classical Greek romance by way of Apollonius of Tyre and its numerous translations and variants. A
somewhat similar theme, used for pious edification, is that of the legendary St.
Eustace, reputedly a high officer under the Roman emperor Trajan, who
lost his position, property, and family only to regain them after many
tribulations, trials, and dangers. The St. Eustace theme appears in Guillaume d'Angleterrea pious tale rather than a romance proper, which some have attributed to Chrétien
de Troyes. (see also Hellenistic
romance)
A variant on the theme of separation and
reunion is found in the romance of Floire et Blancheflor(c. 1170), in which Floire, son of
the Saracen "king" of Spain, is parted by his parents from
Blancheflor, daughter of a Christian slave of noble birth, who is sold to
foreign slave dealers. He traces her to a tower where maidens destined for the
sultan's harem are kept, and the two are reunited when he gains access to her
there by hiding in a basket of flowers. This romance was translated into Middle
High German, Middle Dutch, Norse, and Middle English (as Floris
and Blancheflur, c. 1250) and in the early 13th century was imitated in Aucassin
et Nicolettewhich
is a chantefable (a story told in
alternating sections of sung verse and recited prose) thought by some critics to
share a common source with Floire et
Blancheflor. In it, the roles and nationality, or religion, of the main
characters are reversed; Nicolette, a Saracen slave converted to Christianity,
who proves to be daughter of the king of Carthage, disguises herself as a
minstrel in order to return to Aucassin, son of Count Gavin of Beaucaire. Jean
Renart's L'Escoufle (c.
1200-02) uses the theme of lovers who, accidentally separated while fleeing
together from the emperor's court, are eventually reunited; and the highly
esteemed and influential Guillaume de
Palerne (c. 1200) combines the
theme of escaping lovers with that of the "grateful animal" (here a
werewolf, which later resumes human shape as a king's son) assisting the lovers
in their successful flight. The popular Partenopeus
de Blois (c. 1180), of which 10
French manuscripts and many translated versions are known, resembles the Cupid
and Psyche story told in the Roman writer Apuleius' Golden Ass (2nd century AD), although there is probably no direct
connection. In the early 13th-century Galeran
de Bretagne, Galeran loves Fresne, a foundling brought up in a convent; the
correspondence between the two is discovered, and Fresne is sent away but
appears in Galeran's land just in time to prevent him from marrying her twin
sister, Fleurie. (see also "Escoufle,
L' ")
The theme of a knight who undertakes
adventures to prove to his lady that he is worthy of her love is represented by
a variety of romances including the Ipomedon
(1174-90) of Hue de Rotelande and the anonymous mid-13th-century
Anglo-Norman Gui de Warewic. Finally,
there are many examples of the "persecuted heroine" theme; in one
variety a person having knowledge of some "corporal sign"--a birthmark
or mole--on a lady wagers with her husband that he will seduce her and offer
proof that he has done so (this is sometimes called the "Imogen theme"
from its use in Shakespeare's Cymbeline).
The deceit is finally exposed and the lady's honour vindicated. In the early
13th-century Guillaume de Dôle by
Jean Renart, the birthmark is a rose; and in the Roman de Violette, written after 1225 by Gerbert de Montreuil, it is
a violet. Philippe de Beaumanoir's La
Manekine (c. 1270), Jean
Maillart's La Contesse d'Anjou (1361),
and Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale (after
1387) all treat the theme of the tribulations of a wife falsely accused and
banished but, after many adventures, reunited with her husband.
The Arthurian prose romances arose out
of the attempt, made first by Robert
de Boron in the verse romances Joseph
d'Arimathie, ou le Roman de l'estoire dou Graaland Merlin(c. 1190-1200), to combine the
fictional history of the Holy Grail with the chronicle of the reign of King
Arthur. Robert gave his story an allegorical meaning, related to the person and
work of Christ. A severe condemnation of secular chivalry and courtly love
characterize the Grail branch of the prose Lancelot-Grail, or Vulgate, cycle as
well as some parts of the post-Vulgate "romance of the Grail" (after
1225); in the one case, Lancelot
(here representing fallen human nature) and, in the other, Balain (who strikes
the Dolorous Stroke) are contrasted with Galahad,
a type of the Redeemer. The conflict between earthly chivalry and the demands of
religion is absent from the Perlesvaus (after
1230?), in which the hero Perlesvaus (that is, Perceval) has Christological
overtones and in which the task of knighthood is to uphold and advance
Christianity. A 13th-century prose Tristan
(Tristan
de Léonois), fundamentally an adaptation of the Tristan
story to an Arthurian setting, complicates the love theme of the original with
the theme of a love rivalry between Tristan and the converted Saracen Palamède
and represents the action as a conflict between the treacherous villain King
Mark and the "good" knight Tristan.
In the 14th century, when chivalry
enjoyed a new vogue as a social ideal and the great orders of secular chivalry
were founded, the romance writers, to judge from what is known of the voluminous
Perceforest (written c.
1330 and still unpublished in its entirety), evolved an acceptable
compromise between the knight's duty to his king, to his lady, and to God.
Chivalry as an exalted ideal of conduct finds its highest expression in the
anonymous Middle English Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight (c. 1370), whose fantastic beheading scene (presumably taken from a
lost French prose romance source) is made to illustrate the fidelity to the
pledged word, the trust in God, and the unshakable courage that should
characterize the knight.
The Vulgate Lancelot-Grail cycle displays a peculiar technique of interweaving
that enables the author (or authors) to bring together a large number of
originally independent themes. The story of Lancelot, of Arthur's kingdom, and
the coming of Galahad (Lancelot's son) are all interconnected by the device of
episodes that diverge, subdivide, join, and separate again, so that the work is
a kind of interlocking whole, devoid of unity in the modern sense but forming as
impregnable a structure as any revolving around a single centre. One of its most
important features is its capacity for absorbing contrasting themes, such as the
story of Lancelot's love for Guinevere, Arthur's queen, and the Quest of the
Grail; another feature is its ability to grow through continuations or
elaborations of earlier themes insufficiently developed. The great proliferation
of prose romances at the end of the Middle Ages would have been impossible
without this peculiarity of structure. Unlike any work that is wholly true to
the Aristotelian principle of indivisibility and isolation (or organic
unity), the prose romances satisfy the first condition, but not the
second: internal cohesion goes with a tendency to seek connections with other
similar compositions and to absorb an increasingly vast number of new themes.
Thus the prose Tristan brings together
the stories of Tristan and Iseult, the rise and fall of Arthur's kingdom, and
the Grail Quest. It early gave rise to an offshoot, the romance of Palamède
(before 1240), which deals with the older generation of Arthur's knights. A
similar example of "extension backward" is the Perceforest,
which associates the beginnings of knighthood in Britain with both Brutus
the Trojan (reputedly Aeneas' grandson and the legendary founder of Britain) and
Alexander the Great and makes its hero, Perceforest, live long before the
Christian era. (see also unities)
The Arthurian prose romances were
influential in both Italy and Spain; and this favoured the development in these
countries of works best described as romans
d'aventure, with their constantly growing interest in tournaments,
enchantments, single combat between knights, love intrigues, and rambling
adventures. In Italy, early prose compilations of Old French epic material from
the Charlemagne cycle were subsequently assimilated to the other great bodies of
medieval French narrative fiction and infused with the spirit of Arthurian prose
romance. The great Italian heroic and romantic epics, Matteo Boiardo's Orlando
innamorato(1483)
and Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso(1516), are based on this fusion. The serious themes of the Holy Grail and
death of Arthur left no mark in Italy. The romantic idealism of Boiardo and
Ariosto exploits instead the worldly adventures and the love sentiment of
Arthurian prose romance, recounted lightly and with a sophisticated humour. (see
also Italian
literature, Spanish literature)
In Spain the significant development is
the appearance, as early as the 14th, or even the 13th, century, of a native
prose romance, the Amadís
de Gaula. Arthurian in spirit but not in setting and with a freely invented
episodic content, this work, in the form given to it by Garci
Rodríguez de Montalvo in its first known edition of 1508, captured
the imagination of the polite society of western Europe by its blend of heroic
and incredible feats of arms and tender sentiment and by its exaltation of an
idealized and refined concept of chivalry. Quickly translated and adapted into
French, Italian, Dutch, and English and followed by numerous sequels and
imitations in Spanish and Portuguese, it remained influential for more than four
centuries, greatly affecting the outlook and sensibility of western society.
Cervantes parodied the fashion inspired by Amadís
in Don
Quixote(1605); but
his admiration for the work itself caused him to introduce many of its features
into his own masterpiece, so that the spirit and the character of chivalric
romance may be said to have entered into the first great modern novel.
More important still for the development
of the novel form was the use
made by romance writers of the technique of multiple thematic structure and
"interweaving" earlier mentioned. Like the great examples of
Romanesque ornamental art, both sculptural and pictorial, the cyclic romances of
the late Middle Ages, while showing a strong sense of cohesion, bear no trace
whatever of the classical concept of subordination to a single theme: an
excellent proof, if proof were needed, of the limited relevance of this concept
in literary aesthetics. Even those romances which, like the Amadís
and its ancestor, the French prose Lancelot,
had one great figure as the centre of action, cannot be said to have
progressed in any way toward the notion of the unity of theme. (see also
cycle)
This is as true of medieval romances as
of their descendants, including the French and the English 18th-century novel
and the pastoral romance, which, at the time of the Renaissance, revived the
classical traditions of pastoral poetry and led to the appearance, in 1504, of
the Arcadiaby the Italian poet Jacopo Sannazzaro and, in about 1559, of the Diana
by the Spanish poet and novelist Jorge de Montemayor. Both works were widely
influential in translation, and each has claims to be regarded as the first
pastoral romance, but in spirit Diana is
the true inheritor of the romance tradition, giving it, in alliance with the
pastoral, a new impetus and direction. (see also
pastoral literature, "Diana,"
)
Medieval romance began in the 12th
century when clerks, working for aristocratic patrons, often ladies of royal
birth such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughters, Marie de Champagne and
Matilda, wife of Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, began to write for a leisured
and refined society. Like the courtly lyric, romance was a vehicle of a new
aristocratic culture which, based in France, spread to other parts of western
Europe. Translations and adaptations of French romances appear early in German:
the Roman d'Enéas, in a version
written by Heinrich von Veldeke before 1186, and the archetypal Tristan romance
in Eilhart von Oberge's Tristant of c.
1170-80. In England many French romances were adapted, sometimes very
freely, into English verse and prose from the late 13th to the 15th century; but
by far the most important English contribution to the development and
popularization of romance was the adaptation of a number of French Arthurian
romances completed by Sir Thomas
Malory in 1469-70 and published in 1485 by William Caxton under the title
of Le
Morte DarthurIn
the Scandinavian countries the connection with the Angevin rulers of England led
to importation of French romances in the reign (1217-63) of Haakon of Norway.
(see also Scandinavian
literature, Norwegian
literature)
As has been seen, in the later Middle
Ages the prose romances were influential in France, Italy, and Spain, as well as
in England; and the advent of the printed book made them available to a still
wider audience. But although they continued in vogue into the 16th century, with
the spread of the ideals of the New Learning, the greater range and depth of
vernacular literature, and the rise of the neoclassical critics, the essentially
medieval image of the perfect knight was bound to change into that of the
scholar-courtier, who, as presented by the Italian Baldassare Castiglione in his
Il
Cortegiano(published 1528), embodies the highest moral ideals of the
Renaissance. The new Spanish romances continued to enjoy international
popularity until well into the 17th century and in France gave rise to
compendious sentimental romances with an adventurous, pastoral, or
pseudo-historical colouring popular with Parisian salon society until c. 1660.
But the French intellectual climate, especially after the beginning of the
so-called classical period in the 1660s, was unfavourable to the success of
romance as a "noble" genre. Before disappearing, however, the romances
lent the French form of their name to such romans as Antoine Furetière's Le
Roman bourgeois (1666) and Paul Scarron's Le Roman comique (1651-57). These preserved something of the outward
form of romance but little of its spirit; and while they transmitted the name to
the kind of narrative fiction that succeeded them, they were in no sense
intermediaries between its old and its new connotations. The great critical
issue dominating the thought of western Europe from about 1660 onward was that
of "truth" in literature; and romance, as being "unnatural"
and unreasonable, was condemned. Only in England and Germany did it find a home
with poets and novelists. Thus, while Robert Boyle, the natural philosopher, in
his Occasional Discourses (1666) was
inveighing against gentlemen whose libraries contained nothing more substantial
than "romances," Milton, in Paradise
Lost, could still invoke "what resounds/In fable or romance of Uther's
son . . ."
The 18th century in both England and
Germany saw a strong reaction against the rationalistic canons of French
classicism--a reaction that found its positive counterpart in such romantic
material as had survived from medieval times. The Gothic romances, of which
Horace Walpole's Castle
of Otranto(1764; dated 1765) is the most famous, are perhaps of less
importance than the ideas underlying the defense of romance by Richard Hurd in
his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762).
To Hurd, romance is not truth but a delightful and necessary holiday from common
sense. This definition of romance (to which both Ariosto and Chrétien de
Troyes would no doubt have subscribed) inspired on the one hand the romantic
epic Oberon (1780) and on the other
the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott. But influential though Scott's
romantic novels may have been in every corner of Europe (including the Latin
countries), it was the German and English Romantics
who, with a richer theory of the imagination than Hurd's, were able to recapture
something of the spirit and the structure of romance--the German Romantics by
turning to their own medieval past; the English, by turning to the tradition
perpetuated by Edmund Spenser and Shakespeare. (see also
Gothic novel)
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