A Little History of Literature (6 page)

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 Miller. 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

T
HE
M
YSTERY
P
LAYS

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:

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.