A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  So who was this man? He was born Geoffroy de Chaucer, his family name derived from the French chausseur, or ‘shoemaker’. The family had, over the centuries, risen well above the cobbler level and their Norman-French origins. In Geoffrey's time they had connections with, and received favours from, the court. Luckily, under Edward III the country was more or less at peace – although occasional forays were made into France, now a foe with whom England would be at odds for 500 years. Geoffrey's father was in the import/export wine trade. This line of work meant intimate contact with continental Europe, whose literatures (well ahead of England's at the time) would later be drawn on extensively by Geoffrey.

  Chaucer may have officially or unofficially attended one of the great universities or he may have received his impressive education from home tutors. We don't know. What is clear is that he came into manhood extraordinarily well read and fluent in several languages. As a young man he craved adventure and embarked on a military career. (One of his two great poems, Troilus and Criseyde, is set in the background of the greatest war in literature – that between the Greeks and Trojans.) In France the young English soldier was taken prisoner and ransomed. In later life his favourite thinker was the Roman poet Boethius who wrote his great treatise, The Consolation of Philosophy, in prison. Chaucer translated it from the original Latin, partly via a French version, into English, and absorbed its thinking, particularly on the uncertainty of ‘fortune’ – life's ups and downs.

  On his return from the wars he married and settled down. His wife, Philippa, was nobly born and brought him money as well as status. His private life is a matter of persistent debate. From his often bawdy writings, however, we can assume that Geoffrey Chaucer was not puritanical by nature. The term ‘Chaucerian’ has become proverbial for someone who enjoys life to the full.

  His early career was assisted by friends at court. Patronage was how you got on in those days. In 1367 the king settled a generous life pension of twenty marks on him for his service as ‘our beloved Valet’ (courtier). Today we would call Chaucer a civil servant. In the early 1370s he was employed in the king's service abroad. He may well have met the great Italian writers, Petrarch and Boccaccio, in Italy – then the literary capital of the modern world. Both would go on to be major influences on his own writing.

  In the mid-1370s Chaucer was appointed Controller of Customs in the Port of London. This was the highpoint of his professional life. Had he continued to rise in the world it is unlikely that we would have The Canterbury Tales. But in the 1380s, his fortunes declined. His friends and patrons could no longer help him. Now a widower, and out of favour at court, he retired to Kent, where he wrote The Canterbury Tales, his great Kentish poem. He had, at this stage of his life, apparently nothing to do but enjoy life as best he could in his provincial retirement.

  The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde are two supremely great poems. Both were momentously innovative. They changed literature. Troilus takes Homer's great epic, the Iliad, which Chaucer had picked up from Italian sources, and turns the war story into a love story – a full-blown romance. While the great battle rages outside the walls of Troy, one of the Trojan princes, Troilus, falls madly in love with a widow, Criseyde. Their relationship – as the code of ‘courtly love’ requires – must be kept secret from the world, in part to preserve its purity. She, however, betrays him. It destroys Troilus. Affairs of the heart, the poem intimates, can even overshadow great wars. How many future plays, poems and novels can we see anticipated in that plot?

  The Canterbury Tales remains, for modern readers, the best entry-point into Chaucer. Its format was in all likelihood taken from a more modern source than that for Troilus, Boccaccio's Decameron, in which ten refugees from plague-ravaged Florence tell each other tales (100 of them, no less) to while away the weary days of their quarantine. The Decameron is written in prose. The Canterbury Tales, although most of it is written in easy-flowing verse, can, like Boccaccio's book, be read now as a kind of early novel – or bundle of small novels. (See Chapter 12 for more on early novelish works in literature.)

  Each of Chaucer's tales is entertaining in its own way, and together they compose a small world, or ‘microcosmos’. The eighteenth-century poet, John Dryden (England's first poet laureate – see Chapter 22), said it contained ‘God's Plenty’. All life is there, from the lofty courtly love woes of ‘The Knight's Tale’ through the bawdy high jinks of the lower-class pilgrims' stories, to the orthodox religious advice given by the Parson. Unfortunately not all the poem is there, in the text we now have. Chaucer wrote his poem a century before the invention of printing presses. We have the poem in imperfect form as it survived in various manuscript transcriptions, none by Chaucer himself.

  The narrative opens in April 1387. Twenty-nine pilgrims (including Chaucer, who remains entirely on the edge of things) gather at the Tabard Inn on the south bank of the Thames in London. They intend to make the four-day, 100-odd-mile ‘pilgrimage’, by horse, in company, to the tomb of the martyr Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. Their host at the inn, Harry Bailey, appoints himself their guide on the journey, and – to foster togetherness and harmony – decrees that each of the pilgrims shall tell two stories on the way to Kent, and two on the way back. This would mean around 116 tales. That design was never completed, and perhaps it was never meant to be or, more likely, that Chaucer died before he had the chance. What has come to us are twenty-four tales, some fragmentary. It's tantalising, but more than enough to get a sense of the work's huge achievement.

  Chaucer's pilgrims comprise a mirror of society at the time – strikingly, in many of its features, like our own society. It is not a ‘Christian’ poem, despite its being centred on an act of devotion. The point Chaucer makes is that Christianity is a flexible creed which can contain all types of people in a generally secular social framework. You can be both ‘worldly’ and ‘religious’. Not every day of the week is Sunday. At the time Chaucer was writing, it probably seemed a radically new idea.

  Among the pilgrims are a number of ecclesiastics (church people), male and female: a Friar, a Monk, a Prioress, a Summoner, a Pardoner (whom Chaucer particularly despises for ‘selling’ forgiveness of sins) and a Parson (whom Chaucer reveres). These churchmen and women do not, on the whole, much like each other. Nor is the reader led to like all of them.

  At the bottom of the social heap are a Cook, a Reeve (a land agent), a Miller and a Shipman (a common sailor). A notch above them are a Merchant and a Franklin – members of the emergent bourgeois class. Both are rich. Likely even richer (well-off enough to have made three trips to Jerusalem) is the ‘Wife of Bath’. A self-made woman, she has prospered by the manufacture of cloth (toile de Nîmes – denim). A veteran widow of five marriages, both battered and educated by her husbands, she is female pluck personified. A feisty woman, she picks fights with her fellow pilgrims (notably the celibate Clerk) on the subject of marriage. She knows more than most about that particular institution – precisely five times more than the Clerk.

  Above this mercantile ‘middle class’ are members of what we would now call the professions: a doctor (the Physician), a lawyer (the Man of Law) and an academic (the Clerk – someone who makes a living with his reading and writing skills). Each of the pilgrims is sharply characterised in the ‘General Prologue’ and a shorter prologue to each tale. They live vividly in the reader's imagination. In the overall structure of the tales there emerge a number of debates: on marriage (should a wife be submissive or assertive?), on destiny (how can this pagan concept be combined with Christianity?) and on love (does it – as the Prioress's motto puts it – ‘conquer all’?).

  The pilgrim of highest ‘degree’ (social class) and, for that reason, the first tale-teller, is the Knight. His tale, set in ancient Greece, steeped in the codes of courtly love and Boethius's ideas about patiently suffering all misfortune, is appropriately ‘chivalrous’ – that is, knightly. It is followed, almost immediately, by a fabliau, or bawdy tale, told by the Mille
r. The love he chronicles, about an old carpenter, his young wife, and some mischievous young men, is anything but courtly. Texts of The Canterbury Tales were routinely censored for young readers until well into the twentieth century (including my own school copy, as I still, somewhat resentfully, recall).

  Many changes are rung throughout the two-dozen tales, concluding, appropriately, with a high-minded and earnest sermon by the Parson, after which the reader can depart in peace and having been thoroughly entertained. Dryden was right. All life is there. Our life as well.

  CHAPTER 6

  Theatre on the Street

  THE MYSTERY PLAYS

  In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the world of literature saw the emergence of both printing and the modern theatre. These two great machineries, the page and the stage, would be where great literature happened over the next four centuries. In this chapter we shall look at the early stirrings of drama in England. Not on the stage but in the streets of England's most vibrant towns.

  Where does theatre really begin? If you asked Aristotle, he would have said, look at your children. It originates in the make-up, or wiring, of human beings themselves. It's one of the things that makes us human. In the third chapter of his great critical treatise, his Poetics (see Chapter 4), he writes:

  Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation. And it is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation.

  By ‘imitation’ (mimesis) he means ‘play-acting’. When an actor comes on stage as, say, Richard III, he is pretending to be that character. He is not the king whose body was dug up in a car park in Leicester in 2013. And that pretence, or ‘imitation’, is at the very heart of drama. It points to one of the strangest aspects of theatrical experience – for those on both sides of the footlights.

  Of course we know, if we think about it, that Ian McKellen or Al Pacino (both of whom have played Richard III to huge applause) are who they are, while they are (the word ‘are’ gets slippery at this point) the Richard III they are ‘playing’. We know the actor is McKellen or Pacino, and so does he. But while we are watching the play are we, the audience, ‘carried away’? Do we, as the poet, critic and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it, in a wonderful phrase, ‘suspend disbelief’ – choose to be fooled? Deliberately ‘not know’ what we know? Or do we remain aware of the fact that we are sitting in a cinema or theatre, with other people, watching a person with make-up on their face reciting words written by someone else? It depends on the play you are watching. But the point to be made is that our experience of drama also requires certain skills in us, as the audience, as to how to respond, appreciate and judge the performance. The more you go to the theatre, the better you get at it.

  Theatres began long before the erection of the great wooden structures on London's south bank in Shakespeare's day, with their grand names like the Globe and the Rose. These new Thameside theatres could hold up to 1,500 people – most standing. But the theatre which preceded them, and the plays that were put on, had audiences of tens of thousands and entertained whole populations in the streets, both standing and walking.

  Plays depicting biblical stories moved outside to the streets in several European countries in the Middle Ages. In England they were called ‘mystery’ plays. The French word was mystère, but in England ‘mystery’ could also mean your trade or profession, from the French word métier. The plays evolved out of popularised religious ritual, particularly what happened at Easter when, traditionally, congregations were free to ‘enact’ large parts of the service. They peaked in popularity in the period before Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists came on the scene.

  It was the guilds (the early trade unions) which sponsored and performed in the mystery plays. They sprang up in the prosperous towns and cities of an increasingly urbanised England – at a time when all emerging European countries were becoming more urban – but outside the hugely urbanised capital. They were ‘provincial’ not ‘metropolitan’. This tension in literature between what is produced by London (England's literary and theatrical ‘world’, as it likes to think of itself ) and places outside London (‘the sticks’, as some Londoners like to call it), is with us to the present day. The mystery plays were very ‘outside London’. And proud of it.

  In England's large cities the guilds nurtured the skills (and tricks) of their trades. Membership was strictly controlled. Members tended to be literate as well as skilled. The bulk of the population at the time was not (or at best was semi-) literate. The guilds passed their skills on through a master-apprentice system which survives to present times. They also held a monopoly over trades – you couldn't, for example, work as a builder (‘mason’) or a carpenter unless you belonged to the right guild and paid your ‘dues’. So they became rich and powerful. But they retained a strong sense of civic duty to the communities that had made them rich and powerful.

  In the medieval period the most important Book was the Bible. Without it, for people of the time, existence was meaningless. But much of the population could not read their own language, let alone the Latin of the standard Bible. Books were still hugely expensive even after the invention of printing in the late fifteenth century. The guilds took it on themselves to evangelise – spread the good word – by street entertainment. Drama served that purpose perfectly.

  Annually, on some particular holy day in the Christian calendar (usually the feast of Corpus Christi), dramatic ‘cycles’ (that is, the whole biblical narrative) would be staged. Each guild would sponsor a wagon, or ‘float’. Typically they would choose an episode from the Bible which fitted with their profession. The pinners (nail-makers), for example, would tell the story of the crucifixion, while the bargemen might tell the story of Noah and the Flood. The established Church was generally tolerant of all this. Indeed some clergymen, who would have been by far and away the most literate members of their community, probably helped write the plays. The guild stored lavish costumes, props and scripts for repeated use. Prompt-copies have survived for several of the city-based cycles, notably those of York, Chester and Wakefield.

  The mystery plays were immensely popular in their day – and it was, historically, a fairly long day: two centuries long. There is no question but that the young Shakespeare saw them during his childhood in Stratford, enjoyed them, and was influenced by them for the rest of his life. He occasionally refers to them in his plays as something his audience would have been familiar with as well.

  A particularly fine example of the mystery-play genre is the Second Shepherds' Play in the Wakefield Cycle. It is not a catchy title, but it is great drama, early as it may be. It was probably composed around 1475 and performed, with elaborations and topical adaptations, for many decades thereafter annually on the feast of Corpus Christi in May or June. The Yorkshire town of Wakefield was enriched in the Middle Ages by the wool and leather trades. Sheep and cattle grazed on the grassy hills around the town, which had good communication with the rest of the country and could get its wares to markets in the big cities. Wakefield also had a reputation for particularly enjoying itself at fairs and other public events and was nicknamed ‘Merry Wakefield’. The citizens liked a good laugh, and the Second Shepherds' Play supplied it.

  The entire Wakefield mystery cycle encompasses thirty plays, beginning with the Creation in Genesis and winding up with the hanging of Judas in the New Testament gospels. There are two shepherds' plays, celebrating the product (wool) that was the town's principal source of prosperity. The second play opens with three shepherds on the Bethlehem hills (definitely Yorkshire rather than Palestine hills) watching their sheep by night.

  December is a bitterly cold month to be out tending sheep. The first shepherd angrily bemoans the weather, and goes on to rail against the oppressions, including taxes, that poor folk like themselves must bear while the rich are snug, well-fed and warm in their beds. (Taxes we
re imposed by the guilds as well as the town authorities. It's a little in-joke.)

  We're so burdened and banned,

  Over-taxed and unmanned,

  We're made tame to the hand

  Of these gentry men.

  Thus they rob us of our rest, may ill-luck them harry!

  These men, they make the plough tarry,

  What men say is for the best, we find the contrary –

  Thus are husbandmen oppressed, in point to miscarry,

  In life,

  Thus hold they us under

  And from comfort sunder.

  It's an extraordinary outburst. And it speaks to us with a directness and force which carries across the centuries and resonates to the present day. Talk to citizens standing outside the job centre in Wakefield today and they might well complain in much the same way as does their distant predecessor, the first shepherd. And certainly with the same rich Yorkshire accent.

  The play, however, does not continue in this angry vein. There follows a hilariously comic episode. Mak, another shepherd, has stolen one of the lambs that his three comrades have been out all night guarding, frozen to their bones. Mak takes his booty home and hides it in a crib, disguising it as a newborn baby.