Lands of All Play and No Work: Cockayne and the Abbey of Thélème

 

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses either to lines of “the Land of Cockayne” or to chapters of Gargantua.   Translations from Rabelais are makeshift, but my own. 

 

      Eve and Adam were chagrined to discover that even in the Garden of Eden, there were rules, and in the twentieth century the Rolling Stones still complained “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”  St. John of the Cross adopted a contrarian approach, concluding that “In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything,/ Desire to have pleasure in nothing,” [1] but, several hundred years later, Freud treated the pleasure principle and its frustration as the most universal of motives.  People feel sufficient wistful longing for a world that never was, where limits no longer contain individual desire, that they have sometimes sketched dream-like pictures of impossible sensual utopias. 

     “The Land of Cockayne” (ca.1330) is contained in a book called the Kildare Lyrics which contains, for the most part, devotional and moralizing poems, an unsurprising subject matter as the collection was probably made by a Franciscan friar. Most are vigorous with vernacular and convey orthodox Christian sentiments, often in highly conventional treatments. [2]  The frolicking light-hearted tone of the first poem, “The Land of Cockayne,” is unique.  The poem is set “Fur in see bi west Spayngne,” perhaps in the neighborhood of the garden of the Hesperides, Hy-Brasil, or Tír na nÓg, the land of the ever-young.  In this land the residents enjoy uninterrupted pleasure (24), prominently including unlimited eating and drinking.  The catalogue of available culinary pleasures includes buildings made entirely of food and rivers of “oile, melk, honi and wine” (46).  A place of superabundant luxury, among the delights of Cockayne are precious gems on every side and the aromas of all the spices of the Orient. 

 

In the praer is a tre,

Swithe likful forto se.

The rote is gingeuir and galingale,

The siouns beth al sedwale,

Trie maces beth the flure,

The rind canel of swet odur,

The frute gilofre of gode smakke.

Of cucubes ther nis no lakke.  

                                                (71-78)

 What is more, fanciful whimsy is afforded free play.  There is no dirt, no flies, fleas, or lice (37).  In Cockayne the church windows are photochromic and adjust themselves to provide appropriate light.  The monks are so “heigh of mode” (125) that they flit about in the sky in play when they are not busy acting like stallions in teaching the nuns “a prayer,” “up and down” with “legs in the air” (165-167).

     In spite of the distractions, food is the primary appeal of the land.  In Cockayne cooked fowl fly to the diner to offer themselves.  Through the glorious plenitude of food in this land of wish-fulfillment one may glimpse the sometime rigors of a medieval diet.  The fascination with food is the obsession of the periodically deprived.  The dream of a full larder, often unrealized, had earlier found expression in the Classical cornucopia associated variously with Gaia, Plutus, Demeter, or Abundantia and the Dagda’s cauldron of plenty (the coire ansic) in Irish lore. 

     The speaker’s attitude toward this embarrassment of riches is unequivocal delight.  The monks flutter down from the sky for evensong, attracted by the exposed white buttocks of a “maidin,” (136) and the tone is altogether jolly.  Far from censorious, the poet’s attitude is “ribald,” with the sort of harmless innocence of adolescent fantasy difficult to imagine in the present era. 

     Though readers have sometimes taken the poem as a fiercely critical satire of clerical corruption, such a motive finds no support whatever in the text.  The poem opens with the speaker finding Cockayne so appealing, it is preferable even to Heaven.   

 

Þoȝ paradis be miri and briȝt.

Cokaygn is of fairir siȝt.

                                            (5-6)

(Though Paradise be merry and bright, Cockayne is a fairer sight.)

 And the poem ends with what looks very like instructions on how to “win” the prize of spending time in such a marvelous place.  One might atone for time in Cockayne by spending seven years wading in pig excrement but it sounds as though the author considers that a fair enough bargain.

 

Whose wl com þat lond to.

Ful grete penance he mot do.

Seue ȝere in swine-is dritte.

He mot wade, wol ȝe i-witte. ⁠

Al anon up to þe chynne.

So he schal þe lond[e] winne.

                                              (177-182)

(Whoever wishes to visit that land must perform a heavy penance.  Seven years in pigshit he must wade, up to his chin, you may well know, in order to win that land.)

 The poem ends with a prayer to God, not to protect Christians from worldly temptations, but rather kindly asking that the reader may one day enjoy the opportunity to experience Cockayne.

     Far from moralistic, the poem is an ebullient, light-hearted acknowledgement of the sensual inclinations of humans (indeed, of all organisms).  It no more implies acceptance of free love or gluttony than enjoyment of a Chaplin short requires endorsement of kicking people from behind.  Rather like the world of a silent film comic, the poet’s Cockayne is Carnivalesque; norms may be harmlessly transgressed in an interval of festive gaiety even if they revert to their default settings the next morning.  The low mimetic focus on appetite is far more conducive to comedy than to realism or idealizing, but the laughter is entirely hearty and sweet-tempered, far from the Swiftian “fierce indignation” of satire.. 

     The poem need not contradict the principles of a religious vocation.  Readers sometimes look for more consistency in literature than they do in life.  The same poet may write a tenderly respectful lyric and one of selfish lust, possibly even with the same evening in mind.  Both may be equally “true.”  The pious monk to whose book we owe the preservation of this poem may have seen no impropriety at all in having a wry laugh at the spectacle of human weakness.  “The Land of Cockayne” has preserved such a spell of sublime mirth in reaction to the human condition.  It is funny and warm and oh-so-human, the opposite pole from anything as serious as a polemic.     

     Two hundred years later, another presumably sincere monk, another Franciscan, in fact, at the beginning of his career, imagined an equally permissive territory, Gargantua’s Abbey of Thélème, where the sole rule of the order is notoriously “Do as you like” [3]  Far from being rooted in egoistic desire, this rule against rules expresses humility.  When Gargantua offers to reward his ally the valiant Friar John with the creation of a new and innovative religious establishment of his own design, the monk’s reply is charmingly modest: “But how” says the monk, might I be able to govern others when I am not able to govern myself?” [4]  Accordingly, Thélème invites both men and women to live together without any vows whatsoever. 

     Not only are the residents free from oppressive rules, they live in opulent luxury.  They go about in the finest clothes, covered with jewels.  Even their dressing is no chore, thanks to the attentions of their “masters of the wardrobe” [5].  They amuse themselves in a huge multi-story library.  Each is able to “read, write, sing, play musical instruments, and speak five or six languages” [6].  In addition, they enjoy the aristocratic amusements of hunting and hawking as well as agreeably passing time in each other’s society.  This is the greater pleasure, as they are all themselves beautiful people; neither men nor women may be admitted who are not “good-looking, well-built, and with a pleasant nature” [7].  The inscription over the abbey’s door invites “noble gentlemen” and “ladies of aristocratic birth” [8] while barring greedy professionals such as lawyers and usurers whose goal is the mean accumulation of wealth. Such mean money-grubbers are distasteful and likely to be ugly. 

     Moral excellence is bound up with intellectual achievements and aesthetic cultivation, indeed, with idleness, in this world in a fantasy of a sensitive and elegant ruling class, resembling nothing so much as the almost exactly contemporaneous world of Castiglione’s The Courtier.  It is as though Plato’s philosopher-kings did not have to bother with ruling, but could devote their entire lives to entertainments.  Contrary to history’s evidence, which has no lack or malicious and rapacious nobles, freedom makes them altogether virtuous.  “Because free people, well-born and educated, familiar with honest society, are by nature and impulse propelled always to virtuous acts and away from vice, by an impulse they call honor.“ [9]  The abbey is a post-industrial paradise in which people may develop their sensibility and, in fact, enjoy life without regard for the Reality Principle. 

     People in the “Land of Cockayne” found utter satisfaction in sensual delights of food and drink and love with only a few signifiers (like the beautiful tree, sweet odor, precious stones, and lovely birdsong   to betoken luxurious beauty. (67-100)  Placed in such a setting, with every appetite instantly satisfied, the reader might well imagine agreeing with the author’s encomium.

 

Þer n'is lond on erthe is pere.

Vnder heuen n'is lond iwisse.

Of so mochil ioi and blisse.

(21-⁠24)

            (No land on earth is its peer.  Under heaven there is no land, I                 know, of so much joy and bliss.)

      Since in Cockayne the only acknowledged human desires are physical, the tone is comic, in an ebullient Carnivalesque mode in which the human dependence on food and sex is ridiculous and insistent, but nonetheless endearing.  In the Abbey of Thélème the animal pleasures are taken for granted and the stress is on imaginative delights, culture, art, and civilized company, the sophisticated manipulative play with symbols that most distinguishes our species from the beasts.  Thus, while Rabelais’ tone is extravagant and fanciful, it contains as well a program for how to live life well that goes beyond a full belly, and among the fanciful and humorous elements notes of high seriousness are discernable. 

     While a dramatic contrast is evident between the riotous “low” aim of Cockayne’s utopia and the more “noble” and cerebral occupations of the Thélèmites, the two libidinal Edens have in common that each is enabled by the abolition of labor.  In Cockayne the unlimited availability of everything good means that competition need not exist.  There can be no motive for theft, no distinction between the industrious and the idle or, in the end, between the vicious and the virtuous when each individual is the recipient of superfluous unearned wealth.  The Abbey seems to be underwritten by Gargantua’s endless purse, so its residents need tend only to themselves.  The lifestyle of the inmates of Thélème is supported by an entire townful of workers: goldsmiths, jewelers, embroiderers, tailors, goldworkers, velvet-makers, tapestry makers, and upholsterers.” [10]  Of course, every high culture from ancient Athens through Heian Japan and Victorian England has been created by a leisure class of intellectuals and artists supported by the labor of others.

     Something not far from a land of “all play and no work” in which labor is pleasant and voluntary was conceived by William Morris in News from Nowhere and during the nineteen-sixties seemed actually possible to the theorists of “post-industrial society” [11], though working hours never shrank much and, in recent years, have been rising.  The work of Marshall Sahlins suggesting that hunter-gatherers who needed only to work fifteen to twenty hours a week to satisfy their needs were the original “affluent society” made the possibility of a largely work-free life more plausible.  

     In Genesis work seems to have arrived only to the fallen world where it seems very much like a punishment linked closely with mortality: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”  Perhaps the thrill of sexuality and the comfort of a good meal can only exist with the contrast of field-work or housework.  Even if pleasure cannot be experienced by one who does not feel pain as well, the thought of constant bliss (or at least well-being) is itself beguiling enough to inspire such dreams as the fabulous land of Cockayne and the wonderful Abbey of Thélème. 

 

  

1.  Ascent of Mt. Carmel 1.13.11.

 

2.  One poem “The Song of Michael of Kildare” identifies its author as "Frere Michel Kyldare,” and as a "frere menour."  Among the collection is a touching lullaby “Lollai, Lollai, litil child” and a verse reminiscent of Sei Shonagon “Five Hateful Things” beginning “Bissop lorles.”

 

3.  Ch 57 “Fay ce que vouldras.”

 

4.  Ch.  52  “Car comment (disait-il) pourrait-je gouverner autrui, qui moi-même gouverner ne saurrais?”

 

5.  Ch. 56 “Maîtres de garde-robes.”

 

6.  Ch. 57 “lire,  ecrire, chanter, jouer d’instruments harmonieux, parler de cinq et six langages.”

 

7.  Ch. 52 “belles, bien formées, et bien narturées.”

 

8.  Ch. 54 “Compagnons gentils” and “dames de haut parage.”

 

9.  Ch. 57 “Parce que gens libres, bien nés, bien instruits, conversant en compagnies honnêtes ont par nature un instinct, et aiguillon, qui toujours les pousse á faits vertueux, et retire de vice, lequel ils nommaient honneur.”

 

10.  Ch. 56 “orfèvres, lapidaires, brodeurs, tailleurs, tireurs d’or, veloutiers, tapissiers, et haut lissiers.”

 

11.  The term was popularized by Ivan Illich, Daniel Bell, and others after arising a few years earlier among the more utopian strains of leftists and cultural revolutionaries.  More recently, advocates of a guaranteed annual income have argued that not everyone need work.

The Transvestite Knight: Ulrich’s Frauendienst in Performance

Ulrich’s Frauendienst is odd and obscure enough that perhaps some general readers could learn something from a simple description. This fresh impression, recorded after a first reading, adds yet one more voice to the conversation among the work’s readers, a conversation which reveals, I think, as much about each critic’s sensibility as about Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s.


     The greatest medieval European epic-length narrative poems were composed in German around the turn of the twelfth century. The Nibelungenlied, Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde, and Wolfram’s Parzifal are encyclopedic, culture-defining works, illuminated by the ancient motifs of Celtic and Germanic paganism. Sophisticated narratives woven of masterful poetry, each has a broad array of thematic implications embracing politics, love, death, and the divine.
     Only a few years later Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauendienst (Service of Women or the Woman) was rooted in the shallower soil of courtly love. That term has, of course, been questioned and indeed such ambiguity is Ulrich’s chief theme and mine. Before relating something of the reception history of the concept of courtly love and of Ulrich’s own version of it, though, a summary of his narrative, though it will have no value for those who have read it, may intrigue some who have never previously heard of it. The plot is nothing short of outlandish.
     Frauendienst is a first-person narrative in stanzas containing a number of interpolated poems in other forms. In his youth Ulrich, the persona, serves a noble lady and develops such a devotion to her that he drinks the water with which she washes. Later as a knight he dedicates his service to her despite her rejection of his love-messages. When she criticizes the appearance of his lip, he immediately seeks out a plastic surgeon. To honor his beloved and all women he disguises himself as Venus and, dressed as a woman, tours from Venice to Vienna, challenging all he meets to “break lances” in jousts. A lady in church sees through his costume (which could hardly be convincing to anyone) when she is to give him a “kiss of peace” only to kiss him anyway in the best of humor. An unknown admirer covers him with flower petals when he is in his bath (while pretending to be a woman). His lady convinces him to join the lepers who wait for alms outside her castle with the promise that she will eventually admit him. As he waits there the watchman urinates on him. He later undertakes another pilgrimage in the person of King Arthur serving a different, more obscure damsel who barely enters the story, but the latter part of the work abandons the more or less continuous narrative of these adventures and substitutes more poems and apothegms with a scattering of fragmentary narrative passages.
     This sketch is sufficient to make the absurdity of the story abundantly clear. Strange as it may seem to contemporary readers, the earlier scholars commenting on Ulrich’s work concurred in considering the work as essentially an authentic autobiography. For Tieck in 1812 the book was simply the “Geschichte und Liebe des Ritters und Sängers Ulrich von Liechtenstein von ihm selbst beschrieben.” For years readers assumed the story was factual. Reinhold Bechstein in his 1888 edition unreservedly calls it a “Selbstbiographie” [1] and goes yet further, declaring that “Ulrich’s narration makes such an impression of candor that we can have no doubt of his love of truth, indeed, all the less, since he reports many things that are in no way flattering to him.” [2] Based on the assumption of the text’s literal truth, it was studied for many years more as a historical than as a literary document.
     While modern readers smile at what seems the credulity of earlier generations, more recent readings of the text have ranged from the reasonable and productive to anachronistic and fanciful. The suggestion of Ulrich Müller and Franz Viktor Spechtler who consider the work “a sincere autobiographical romance,” an Ich-Roman that relays “the author’s psychological states, his unconscious or only semi-conscious fears, anxieties, and even obsessions,” is highly suggestive. [3] Albrecht Classen, denying significant autobiographical content, finds the poem an analysis of “the theatrical nature of courtliness,” revealing “the precariousness and thus the extreme value of courtly culture” and allowing performer and audience “self-confirmation” though he gives scant attention to its comic elements. [4]
     Ulrich’s translator and editor J. W. Thomas to whom the Frauendienst is a humorous “fiction” focuses on the poems relation to other poems, finding in it a catalogue of Minnesang conventions in the lyrics accompanied by a humorous parody of the same conventions in the narrative passages. [5] While this seems eminently reasonable it leaves open the questions of theme and reception.
     More suspicious are such conclusions as those of Ingrid Bennewitz to whom Ulrich’s cross-dressing represents his “insecurity with his male body” [6] or Lisa Perfetti for whom the poem “subverts the lyric genre’s conventional silencing of women” and exposes the “pretense of the male voice” which claims to be “dedicated to serving women as a sham.” [7] Andrea Moshövel’s characterization of cross-dressing as "a “misogynistic and homophobic expression of anxieties over the dissolving of gender boundaries.” [8] sounds like an exportation of contemporary attitudes backwards in time.
     The disputed terrain between those who take Ulrich’s quests in behalf of love as straightforward amatory heroism and those to whom his adventures are primarily comic, ironic, or subversive mirrors critical attitudes toward courtly love as a whole. Brought into common usage with Gaston Paris [9], the term had become generally accepted, particularly after C. S. Lewis’s popular The Allegory of Love. Courtly love seemed to have settled into the realm of received ideas until the sixties when D. W. Robertson declared it “an impediment to the understanding of medieval literature” [10] and a couple of years later E. Talbot Donaldson wrote of “The Myth of Courtly Love.” [11] J. J. Wilhelm argued for dropping the term entirely. Without surveying the vast bibliography on this topic, it is sufficient here to observe that the issue as a whole has been deeply contested.
     Even more broadly, on strictly formal grounds, every convention has the potential to bring to birth a panoply of variations in a process I name “transformation of convention.” [12] The establishment of a steady rhythm, for example, allows the listener to perceive the absence of a beat or a change on tempo. In this way the semantic density of the aesthetic work is greatly heightened. Conventions provide a dynamic technique for poetry’s exploration of ambiguities and contradictions.
     The performative aspects of medieval literature are often neglected as moderns read in library or study. Yet Frauendienst was in fact recited and its lyrics sung in a social situation, and the context of Ulrich’s poem shapes its substance. The poem offers ample opportunity for performative elements apart from the text. Many passages in which Ulrich comments with satisfaction on his feminine garments would almost inevitably be presented with mincing gestures. The repetitive description of jousting matches with specific opponents, often characterized in the most general terms, may bore modern readers, but in the original context, they likely represented “shout-outs” to individuals whose friends and relatives, if not they themselves, were in the audience. The comic aspect of the story, unnoticed for years, would have been explicit. Surely the singer’s sly glance around the room would accompany Ulrich’s sudden brief mention of interrupting his love-service for a few days to look in on his wife or his “pleasant” time among the Viennese women. [13]
     The reception of the narrative must be of a piece with that of the interspersed lyrics, despite apparent contradictions. Imagining this dramatic situation it is natural to take courtly love poems in general as sophisticated flirtatious courtly entertainments, celebrating the men of the nobility as warrior-lovers and the women as paragons of beauty, the more alluring for their discreet reserve. The courtly love paradigm regularly casts the he-man and the glamour girl in leading roles, but they are not always presented straightforwardly. The hefty measure of idealization does not foreclose possibilities such as irony, comedy, or obscenity, possibilities necessary to reflect the range of human responses to love.
     Ulrich is telling a tall tale, but his extravagances are far from arbitrary. For courtly love as a whole, the essential datum is the power of sexuality. The primary signification of the love-service is the lover’s feeling of helplessness in the experience of erotic desire at least from the male point of view. [14] He may experience such vulnerability even in a patriarchal society. To address the lady as “my lord” (Midons)as the Old Occitanian poets did, expresses an authentic emotional truth while not altering the balance of social, economic, or political rule in the least. All courtly poetic practice occurs within the complex ironies of this realization.
     Through poetry which enacts the dynamic contradictions of desire, the court became a theater of erotic play. Ulrich is telling a tall tale based in his own sexuality. His status as a supreme athlete for love is confirmed by his endurance of harsh treatment at the lady’s hands, his lying with lepers, his determination taken to the point of absurdity, all this accumulates to suggest that he is, in fact, the greatest lover the world has ever known. It is immaterial that in a realistic situation a man would surely either divert his attentions to a more welcoming quarter or, in some circumstances, force his will upon the woman.
     Thus Ulrich’s Frauendienst is realistic in depicting the coercive imperium of sexuality at the same time as it is recognizes the irony of this female power in a patriarchy through fantastic parody. An outright boast of sexual prowess might have found fewer listeners than Ulrich’s whimsical and self-mocking tale. Apart from increasing entertainment value, the two-sided meaning of the love epic is in fact more true to human nature than either half of its vision would be. Ulrich does not seek to dismantle the social order of feudal society; rather he performs the role of an artist by pointing toward its contradictions and tensions, the delights and the shackles of the world in which he lived, the most important of which are little changed in the three-quarters of a millennium since.



1. Page VIII.

2. Page IX. The translation is mine.

3. Ulrich Müller and Franz Viktor Spechtler, “Ulrich von Liechtenstein,” in German Literature of the High Middle Ages edited by Will Hasty and James N. Hardin. Müller goes too far when he claims in another article that “Ulrich seine Rolle als Mann und Ritter nicht akzeptiert.” (“Ulrich von Liechtenstein und sein Männerphantasien; Mittelalterliche Literatur und modern Psychologie,” in Ich -- Ulrich von Liechtenstein, ed. Franz Viktor Spechtler).

4. Albrecht Classen, “Moriz, Tristan, and Ulrich as Master Disguise Artists: Deconstruction and Reenactment of Courtliness in ‘Moriz von Craû’, ‘Tristan als Mönch’, and Ulrich von Liechtenstein's Frauendienst,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Vol. 103, No. 4 (Oct., 2004), pp. 475-504.

5. See J. W. Thomas, “The Minnesong Structure of Ulrich von Liechtenstein's 'Frauendienst,'” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, 102. Bd., H. 3 (3rd Quarter, 1973), pp. 195-203 and his introductory material in Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Service of Ladies.

6. Ingrid Bennewitz, “Der Körper der Dame. Zur Konstruktion von ‘Weiblichkeit’in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters,” in ‘Aufführung’ und’ Schrift’ in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, 222-238.

7. “‘With them she had her playful game’ The Performance of Gender and Genre in Ulrich von Lichtenstein’s Frauendienst,” in Women & Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature, ed. Lisa Perfetti.

8. My translation. Andrea Moshövel, “Ulrich von Liechtenstein” Wîplich man. Formen und Funktionen von ‘Effemination’ in deutschsprachigen Erzähltexten des 13. Jahrhunderts, Aventiuren Bd. 5.

9. In his "Lancelot du Lac, II: Le conte de la charrette" in Études sur les romans de la Table Ronde. The term not only described a set of conventions recognizable to any reader of medieval literature; it occurred only perhaps twice in Old Occitanian (“cortez amors” in Peire d'Alvernhe and “amor cortes” in Flamenca). Some prefer the term fin’amor because it and variations occur far more commonly, but poets often refer to love as essentially courtly. For Marcabrun “cortesia es d’amar” in “Cortesamen vuoill comenssar . . .” The opening phrase also identifies the court with artfulness.

10. In “Clio and Venus: An Historical View of Medieval Love ,” in The Meaning of Courtly Love.

11. In Speaking of Chaucer. John A. Yunck, reviewing Donaldson’s book for Criticism : a Quarterly for Literature and the Arts (Vol. 13, No. 4 [Fall 1971]) called courtly love a “scholarly figment” as though the issue was settled.

12. A number of articles on this site employ this term and offer fuller explanation of it. See, for instance, “Transformation of Convention ,” “William IX: A Study in Transformation of Convention,” “Transformation of Convention in Early Minnesang,” “The Mule in Blues Imagery,” and others.

13. See, for instance, st. 989 in which the local noble jokes about Ulrich’s change from female to male or st. 134 in which bystanders laugh at the lady’s insulting him. His visit to his wife is st. 707. He also spend a “pleasant” time among the Viennese women. (994)

14. A particularly rich body of work survives by trobairitz, female Troubadours. Accessible anthologies include those by Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner (Songs of the Women Troubadours) and Magda Bogin (The Women Troubadours). See also Peter Dronke’s Women Writers of the Middle Ages.

Tone in Middle English Double Entendre Songs

Double entendre lyrics appear worldwide and throughout history. In the late Middle Ages, as some performers came to rely on written texts, a number of such songs were recorded in manuscript. While most of the scant body of earlier secular lyrics on the theme of love were written casually and almost accidentally preserved, sometimes in margins by clerics primarily occupied with religious writings, [1] these poems provide a direct glimpse into the popular music of the day. Among the songs recorded from the late 14th and early 15th centuries, the double entendre genre was not confined to stimulating a “wink wink nudge nudge” Eric Idle-type response. One such work is an ingenious and elegant riddle, while another is coarse and transgressive, with hints of aggression and nastiness, and a third sounds like a good-natured joke. Each expresses an element of human eroticism.



1

I haue a gentil cook,
Crowyt me day.
He doth me rysyn erly,
My matyins for to say.

I haue a gentil cook,
Comyn he is of gret.
His comb is of reed corel,
His tayil is of get.

I haue a gentyl cook,
Comyn he is of kynde.
His comb is of red scorel,
His tayl is of Inde.

His legges ben of asor,
So geintil and so smale.
His spores arn of syluer qwyt,
In to the worte wale.

His eynyn arn of cristal,
Lokyn al in aumbyr,
And euery nyght he perchit hym
In myn ladyis chaumbyr.


This poem, perhaps the best-known of the late medieval English double entendre songs, is included in a 15th century manuscript on the same page as the beautiful haunting religious lyrics “Adam lay ibounden” and “I syng of a mayden.” [2] The rooster – cook is a variant form of cock -- has a history as an emblem of Christ from the earliest times, a tradition toward which this poet nods with the reference to the bird’s awakening him “my matyins for to say,” yet this association is playfully misleading. In fact, the expression “to say matins” was a euphemism meaning to copulate. [3]

With its extended description the poem resembles Old English riddles, and, as in some of those, the answer is erotic. According to the OED the earliest denotative use of cock in the sense of male genitals is not until 1618, but verbal play with the association existed long before then. It will strike the young as extraordinary that, until a half century ago, scholars read, analyzed, and anthologized this poem with the assumption that it is simply an elegant and affectionate account of a pet bird. [3]

“I haue a gentil cook” is indeed an affectionate lapidary tribute to its subject. Though some have had difficulty in applying certain particulars of the rooster’s appearance to the genitalia, other critics have found every detail apt. The male organs have found few such worshipful tributes between this and Auden’s “A Day for a Lay.” [4] Emphasizing the cock’s “gentility” (mentioned six times in the piece’s twenty lines) and his beauty, described as though it were Cellini’s enameled gold salt cellar, the poet seeks to remove any trepidation or reluctance on the lady’s part. This unthreatening seduction technique is similar to that of Mississippi John Hurt in “Candyman” which includes lines like “His stick candy don't melt away/ It just gets better, so the ladies say,” delivered in a disarmingly sweet and gentle tone.

The listener’s solution of the riddle will dawn with a sense of discovery analogous to that of sexual exploration. Here is no suffering in love, no courtly self-subjugation, simply a celebration of the gift of sexuality. The speaker is secure in the knowledge that the cock has a nightly perch “in myn ladyis chaumbyr.” The verses are pretty and warmly charged with the potential for pleasure. Though male boasting about one’s sexual member or experiences is universal and often coarse, the tone here might even be called decorous.


2

Other late Middle English double entendre poems are not so refined. “May no man slepe in youre halle,” also from a songbook, [5] is far more explicit, The tone is raucous and dirty.




May no man slepe in youre halle
For dogges,
Madame,
For dogges,
Madame,
But gyf he haue a tent of xv ynche
With twey clogges
To dryue awey the dogges,
Madame.
Iblessyd be such Clogges
That gyuef such bogges
By twyne my lady legges
To dryue awey the dogges,
Madame.

May no man slepe in youre halle
For rattys,
Madame,
For rattys,
Madame,
But gyf he haue a tent of xv enche
Wyt letheryn knappes
To dryve awey the rattys,
Madame.
Iblessyd be suche knappes
That gyveth such swappes
Vnder my lady lappes
To dryve awey the rattys,
Madame.

May no man slepe in youre halle
For flyes,
Madame,
For flyes,
Madame,
But gyf he haue a tent of xv enche
Wyt such byes
To dryve awey the flyes,
Madame.
Iblessyd be such byes
That maketh such suyes
By tuynne my lady thyes
To dryve awey the flyes,
Madame.


Since vermin such as rats and flies, not to mention the notoriously unwanted attention of dogs, flock to the lady’s “hall,” the man’s role is, in the first instance, to drive off all the competition for what is variously called “between her legs,” her “lap,” and her “thighs.” [6] Hints of bestiality, corruption, and illness are here associated with sex.

The scene is essentially comic, low-mimetic. The sexual parts are not compared to precious and beautiful objects but to functional tools of wood and leather. Emphasizing its distance from a love lyric, the persona does not even seek to join the woman himself, rather with ironic mocking graciousness, he expresses the hope that whoever dares take her on will be up to the challenge. Outsize penises are virtually always comic, and, at any rate, the fifteen inch threshold would surely mean that few, if any, could qualify.

Though “I haue a gentil cook” derived its appeal from its polish and tasteful obliqueness and “May no man slepe in youre halle” is coarse, almost rude, glorying in its dubious propriety, both may well have been performed on the same occasion, perhaps along with pious Christian songs. The crudely bawdy and the sublimely erotic are never far apart in Classical literature or the work of the Troubadours. The testimony of literature suggests the same paradoxical mélange in the human mind.


3

The tone is quite different in “I have a newe gardin.” [7] Here the sexuality is high-spirited, wholesome and fresh. Rather than sounding transgressive, this verse is light and sweet, melodious, contrasting with the percussive effects in “May no man slepe in youre halle.”


I have a newe gardin,
And newe is begunne;
Swich another gardin,
Knowe I not under sunne.

In the middis of my gardin
Is a peryr set,
And it wele non per bem
But a per Jenet.

The fairest maide of this towne
Preyed me
For to griffen her a grif
Of min pery tree.

Whan I hadde hem griffed
Alle at her wille,
The win and the ale
She dede in fille.

And I griffed her
Right up in her home;
And be that day twenty wowkes,
It was quik in her womb.

That day twelve month,
That maide I mette;
She said it was a per Robert,
But non per Jonet.



The riddling opening phrase “I have a . . .” introduces the central image of the pear tree in the garden. A playful slipperiness surrounds the associated significations. While the garden makes one think of the Garden of Eden and the Fall, it is also a lovers’ bower, a locus amoenus. The pear tree, clearly phallic, is at the same time identified with the woman. The image of conception as grafting derives straight from medical description, including a passage in Hippocrates. [8] The punning on Jenet/Jonet is perhaps the main gag, and I use the term because this poem seems to me a joke in verse. Jenet, today Janet, is an early fruit as well as a personal name which may be either female or male. The phonological identity of pear and père supports this jeu de mots.

The ambiguity of the conclusion is the punch line. Is the speaker named Robert or John? If Robert, the final two lines mean that, rather than an early pear, the speaker has made him a father. It could be read, however, as revealing that he, John, is not the father, the father is another lover previously unmentioned, named Robert. While the explanation may be ponderous, the actual telling unfolds with a light and natural conversational ease, leaving the listener suspended between the possibilities.

The levity with which the subject is treated is in part derived from the speaker’s apparent youth (a “new” garden, just begun). The woman approaches him “alle at her wille” asking for the “graft.” So pleased was she that they partied with wine and ale. The relationship, whoever may be the father of the baby, seems entirely consensual.


4
Conclusion

Each of these songs entertains the audience with the riddle-like game implicit in every metaphor. The territory shared by the sexual meaning and the non-sexual varies widely to represent different aspects of the erotic, yet in each case the ludic character of the double entendre form emphasizes the positive. In “I haue a gentil cook” sexual vaunting is given an artful form in which what amounts to praise of one’s own body is done so playfully that it verges on self-satire. “May no man slepe in youre halle” is a rowdy, insulting verse of a sort that might have found favor at a modern fraternity stag. In the end high spirits and good humor mask the potential nastiness of the underlying misogyny. Finally, “I have a newe gardin” is a pleasant telling of an old story which at any rate acknowledges the possibility of a child. In this merry version no one seems to suffer. If the poet’s “gardin” is not Eden, it yet may feel for some moments as though it is.






1. The borderline between the pious and the improper was often ill-defined. Apart from the church’s toleration of parody ceremonies such as the Drinkers Mass (Missa Potatorum), the Gamblers Mass (Officium Lusorum) and the Feast of Fools (Festum Fatuorum), one may think of much of Rabelais and, among critics, of Huizinga and Bakhtin.

2. Sloane 2593, ff.10v-11. See Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages edited by Jan M. Ziolkowski. The same essay provides overwhelming evidence from parallel passages in English and other languages to support the identification of cock and penis.

3. For the suggestive use of matins, see Ziolkowski p. 123.

4. Auden’s poem includes lines admiring his young friend’s “delicate wrinkles and the neat/ Sutures of the capacious bag.” Written in 1948, Auden’s poem was unpublished until 1965, when Edward Sanders printed it in Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts (Vol 5 No 8) in March 1965, with a cover by Andy Warhol. It is sometimes titled "The Platonic Blow" or “The Gobble Poem.” Its publication history can be found in Bloomfield and Mendelson’s W. H. Auden: A Bibliography 1924-1969.

5. Cambridge University Add. 5943.

6. Bugs in the crotch are, of course, most likely pubic lice.

7. Again, from British Museum Sloane 2593.

8. On the Nature of the Child.

The Uses of the Monstrous: Chaucer’s “Anelida and Arcite”

     Horace begins his “Ars Poetica” [1] by recommending propriety and adherence to convention, suggesting that works with ill-fitting parts lack unity and must be monstrous, similar to a human with a horse’s neck or a feathered mammal. He says a beautiful woman above the waist whose body is that of a fish below is unsightly and, at best, comic.
     Yet that last example might imply that even monsters have their uses. What struck Horace as a hideous freak was to Tennyson an ideal of beauty: “I would be a mermaid fair.” [2] Chaucer’s “Anelida and Arcite” is generally slighted by critics, largely because of its discordances. A recent critic characterizes the poem’s reputation in short by describing it as “one of Chaucer’s most abused poems.” [3]
     The poet himself may have shared this dismissive attitude. The work is unfinished, which certainly could suggest a failed experiment, though many of Chaucer’s other works, including, of course, the monumental Canterbury Tales, is similarly incomplete. Despite its well-accepted place in his canon from contemporary scholars, Chaucer himself did not mention it when cataloguing his works. To many it is an ungainly compound of the third person narration in uniform stanzas and the metrically elaborate first person complaint. The combination of sources -- from Boccaccio in the story and Machaut in the stanzas given to Anelida [4] -- has better pleased scholars tracing Chaucer’s career than those looking for coherence, unity, and organic form. Chaucer himself mentions neither influence directly, but claims Statius as his source, going to the length of including a few lines from the Thebaid as a sort of guarantee. Having dodged acknowledging his French and Italian sources, he compounds the question by mentioning a certain “Corynne,” generally identified with the female Greek poet contemporary with Pindar. He further confuses the issue of sources by using the name of a figure in Boccaccio to tell a story that seems to be original with him. His elusiveness about the issue of authority may be taken as an emblem that well represents the ambiguities the poem presents as a whole.
     The fact that the poem is unfinished marks it for some as inferior, an aborted experiment, perhaps, unworthy even in the eyes of its creator. However, one might as well view its truncated form as exemplary of lived experience, for is not every one cut off in life rudely before one is sufficiently prepared? One can lend cast one’s autobiography in a comely form, but the result is artful and not inevitable. The lack of an ending then might be regarded as rendering the poem more adequate to represent life as lived.
     The double invocation must strike the reader as odd. It seems epic in ambition, though the poem lacks such a grand scale. What follows is anything but an epic; the story is primarily a frame for the complaint. The second invocation, to the Muses, might pass as a throw-away convention, but the first to Mars is more surprising. War is only in the background of what plot there is, but the mention of the god of war, the lover of Venus, though here immediately doubled by a female counterpart Bellona, reminds the reader of the countless poems -- Romance of the Rose, which Chaucer translated, for one -- in which male/female relations are represented in terms of battles. Chaucer here lightly evokes that immense field of associations which reinforces the suggestion of peril and vulnerability that accompanies love. In an echo of this martial opening, “The Story” does open with the aftermath of military action and, in fact, the “ymage of Mars” carried in the field, (31) the public suffering of war preceding the private suffering of love-longing.
     It is as though Chaucer is playing a game with his reader’s expectations. Writing at a time when convention and its play were centrally important to poetry, he yet managed to twist the tropes round to make something new. One of the conventions he honors by refracting in unpredictable ways is the appeal to authority. Chaucer claims value for his work by attributing it to imitation of a Classical model. “First folowe I Stace” (l. 21) implies that he derives his poem from Statius’ Thebaid. The manuscripts even open “The Story” with a few lines of Statius’ Latin. Yet in fact Boccaccio’s Teseida is his most significant source for the narrative and Machaut for the complaint. Unsatisfied with this shell game, he realizes he can do as he pleases because his story is basically an original one, after all, and he tosses off another source: “Corynne” (21), generally identified with the Greek poet contemporary with Pindar. This suggestion, apart from the satisfaction of its providing another male/female doubling, is entirely a playful red herring. As Chaucer comments, time has a way of devouring all things. (12 ff.)
     The implications of this complex attribution of authority are clear: every work is original and no work is original. Where one thinks a notion arose may be altogether different from where it in fact did. The Classics provide a rich field for training readers in the fabulous potential of poetic language, but they are not the last word. Experimentation seems to assert itself in one aspect after another of “Anelida and Arcite”
     The combination of narrative and complaint might be considered as a representation of the duality of objective/subjective in everyday life. Instead of constituting an aesthetic failing it may be a bold move to record life as it is experienced. The continual check of one’s sense of what seems true to the observer on the individual subjectivity is one of the consistent rhythms of consciousness.
     While apparently Chaucer’s own invention, the story is in part quite traditional. Anelida suggests the archetype of the faithful woman like Constance in the “Man of Law’s Tale” or Griselda in “The Clerk’s Tale.” Her loyalty is contrasted with Arcite’s faithlessness which is not portrayed as the failing of an individual but rather as a typical male characteristic since the time of the first polygamist: “he were fals, for hit is kynde of man/ Sith Lamek was.” (149-150) [6] Men’s pursuit of novelty in love is said to be inherent: “The kynde of mannes herteis to delyte/ In thing that straunge is.” (201-202)
     Arcite is said to have used the conventions of love poetry with exactly the same rhetorical competence that Anelida displays, but toward his own false and treacherous ends. To him the “ful mykel besynesse” (99) of the seduction includes declaring that his is like to go mad or to “dyen for distresse.” (101) Thus the plot arises from the capacity of language to represent either truth or lies, positioning even the text itself balanced on a ridgepole of doubt. Whereas compliance with readers’ conventional expectations will in general reaffirm received ideas, Chaucer’s innovative manipulation of familiar literary usages must cultivate critical questioning.
     Almost in order to wink at the twenty-first century critic, the author specifically refers to his “slye wey” of writing. (48) [7] Whether that be a mirage or not, with its fragmentary character, its wild wrenching of convention, and its “sly” self-questioning, “Anelida and Arcite” may be read as an early predecessor of modernism. Horace’s rule covers in fact only half the house of literature: those texts which reinforce (or refine or further develop) preconception. It is through the violation of convention that authors question assumptions and introduce new ideas and forms.


1. More properly the Epistula ad Pisones.

2. From “The Mermaid.” Of course, in general the mermaid’s beauty is balanced against her destructive potential exemplified by the Sirens of the Odyssey or the Lorelei. Many other tropes exist such as the frightening and serious mermaids of Neruda “Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks” and Yeats “The Man Young and Old: iii “The Mermaid.”

3. T. S. Miller, “Chaucer's Sources and Chaucer's Lies: Anelida and Arcite and the Poetics of Fabrication,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 114, No. 3 (July 2015), pp. 373-400. To Manly it was “purely an experiment in versification.” (Chaucer and the Rhetoricians, 98).

4. The debt to Boccaccio is evident throughout the narrative; that to Machaut is exhaustively demonstrated by Madeleine Fabin in “On Chaucer's Anelida and Arcite,” Modern Language Notes , Vol. 34, No. 5 (May, 1919), 266-272).

5. Compare the use in the “Friar’s Tale” to describe the summoner’s system of spies. “A slyer boye nas noon in Engelond.” (Canterbury Tales 1322)

6. “Kind,” of course, or “kynde” meant nature or natural in Middle English. In the University of Michigan MED: “inherent qualities or properties of persons, animals, plants, elements, medicines, etc.; essential character.”

7. Lines 162-164 question whether any poet might be able to do justice to the story, asking “what man hath the cunnyng or the wit?” Though “cunning” at the time meant only competence, it already by the late 16th century suggested trickery, implying the same duality of truth and lie. This association must surely have been taking shape for some time.

Two Early Ballad Tales of Robin Hood

     The story of Robin Hood is remarkable for its longevity. The films and television shows based on the medieval outlaw have proliferated to the present day, not to mention such phenomena as the Robin Hood Foundation (whose goal is to “end poverty in New York”), Robinhood (a “zero-commission stock broker”), the Robin Hood Brewing Company, and the like. These latter-day uses of his name only emphasize the unsurprising fact that the meanings of stories about him have varied over the years.
     Some of those that might appear to be firmly rooted in history are in fact of fairly recent origin. For instance, the association of Robin Hood with the virtuous King Richard against the villainous John and with the Saxon nobility who resent domination by tyrannical Norman lords gained currency only with Scott’s immensely popular Ivanhoe (1820). [1] Late versions often credit him with noble birth (such as the 17th century broadside of “Robin Hood and Maid Marian” which calls Robin the Earl of Huntington), though the earlier texts regularly exhibit hostility to the gentry. Two of the earliest ballad tales, “Robin Hood and the Monk” and “A Gest of Robyn Hode,” both extant in manuscripts dated to the mid-fifteenth century but recording older songs, suggest an archaic background of myth, ritual, and magic against which complaints arise against the wealthy aristocracy and clergy.
     The stories are, like all folk tales, first of all entertainment. They regularly feature suspense and reversals while, in the popular manner, always ending in the defeat of the bad guys. Robin’s role as a trickster figure resembles countless figures worldwide. Disney was not only complying with “funny animals” conventions when he portrayed Robin Hood as a fox in his 1973 film. Readers had long noticed similarities between the tales of Renard and those of Robin Hood. The most popular trickster figure of the Middle Ages is particularly appropriate for the subversive elements of Robin Hood’s story. As an outlaw guile and cunning are essential to his cause. Disguise and trickery play a markedly greater role than force. In “Robin Hood and the Monk,” Robin behaves rather churlishly toward Little John, refusing to pay a bet which he had himself proposed. When he is captured after attending mass alone, [2] his party manages to free their leader by impersonating the monk and page (whom they had killed) before the king and then acting as the king’s emissaries toward the sheriff. In “A Gest of Robin Hood” the entire tone is light-hearted (in spite of deaths) and several characters employ subterfuges. Robin anticipates a victim as though he were awaiting a dinner guest. (“Gest,” 24) Little John manages to find service with the sheriff and later the king himself (named as Edward) dresses as a monk to locate the band of thieves and finds himself striking Robin after besting him at archery.
     Robin Hood, like Renard, provided a vehicle for social protest. In many ways he is a prime example of what Hobsbawn called “social bandits.” [3] The “Gest” concludes with the lines “For he was a good outlawe,/And dyde pore men moch god.” (1823-4) He will steal neither from yeomen nor men who have little nor from any company that includes women. He exempts as well small farmers and even knights and squires should they be “gode felawe[s].” (“Gest,” 53, 973, 39-40, 51, 55-6) Indeed, he will give or lend money to those in need. An early 15th century clerical author refers to him as “much praised," [4] yet various judicial records use his name to indicate a dangerous miscreant or a murderer. He enumerates his local foes as “bisshoppes” and “archebishoppes,” as well as “the hye sherif of Notyingham.” ( “Gest” 56, 58)
     The early ballads assume a very specific social focus. Their authors and presumably their audiences identify as yeomen, not as peasants or bourgeois. Though “yeoman” was an elastic term in the fifteenth century [5], Robin’s animus against the wealthy is evident. He demands payment from the knight (“Gest” 148) yet gives him money when he finds him poor. His sympathy multiplies when it turns out that the knight has been impoverished by a “ryche abbot.” (215) In “Monk” Robin is fingered by a “grete-hedid [i.e. arrogant] munke” (75) who later is decapitated unceremoniously in the safety of the greenwood. (203)
     Robin Hood is, however, very conventional in his piety and in his loyalty to the crown. He endows a chapel to Mary Magdelene and goes on pilgrimage. (“Gest,” 1757, 1767) In “Monk” he is described as one who “has servyd Oure Lady many a day,” (133) and he is apprehended only because he insists on attending Mass (and refusing to take an adequate company). In the “Gest” he is said to attend mass daily (32) and to be especially devoted to Mary. (35) The Marian emphasis acquires an edge in “Gest” however, when he indulges in considerable play over the concept that the loan he made to the poor knight has been cosigned by the Virgin Mary, entitling him to collect the purse from any passing monk. (“Gest,” 259, 940) Surely in his era his religiosity, if not his witty (seemingly cynical) elaboration of it, would be a natural concomitant with virtue in general.
     The Robin Hood texts are meant for a popular audience (the story-teller addresses his listeners on occasion), Robin has some courtly characteristics, though these early poems have no love interest. “Robyn coud his courteysy.” (1539) In certain ways he follows the rules of his culture more scrupulously than do his antagonists. He is captured in “Monk” only because his enemies ignored the tradition of sanctuary within a church (83-86), while the Sheriff in the “Gest” is said to violate such civilized rules as those governing hospitality (1186).
     In spite of the fact that he identified as a “traytur” (“Monk,” 91) He regularly expresses his obedience to the nation’s leader and falls to his knees when he recognizes the king. (“Gest,” 1620) Indeed, he reconciles with the crown and is pardoned. Declaring loyalty to his sovereign, he lives for a short while in town. The king even decides he would like some outfits of Lincoln green for his own men. (“1669 ff.) After a time he notices he is spending money and his archery skills are in decline. (1741) Given a week away, he does not ever return and apparently lives in the forest for twenty-two years. It is as though his essential wildness was not possible to contain for more than a short while.
     The archaic mythic layer of the Robin Hood stories is signaled by the emphasis on the wild forest setting which acquires an almost numinous quality in the tales. Robin is clearly associated with “green man” or “wild man of the woods.” [6] The “Monk” begins “In somer, when the shawes be sheyne,” and the date turns out to be Whitsun or Pentecost, an important springtime holiday for the Middle Ages closely paralleling the pagan Beltane, which included a fair, festivals, dancing, and the rule of a King and Queen of the May. [7] These figures, themselves derived from more ancient pagan deities and among the clearest vestiges of pre-Christian survivals were replaced in many villages by Robin Hood and Maid Marian. [8] The forest’s green, adopted by the band of thieves for their costume (Lincoln green, produced from woad and weld [9]) is mentioned repeatedly in an almost incantatory refrain. Surely the passage in which Robin is called a green “ryght fayre harte,” a “mayster-herte” (“Gest,” 738, 752) sounds like a reference to a theriomorphic deity obscured by time. Since Thomas Wright’s speculations in early Victorian essays, Robin Hood has been linked to the Celtic Cernunnos, the Greek Pan, even the Germanic Odin, while to Margaret Murray he was the high priest of a witches’ coven. [10] The cliché of the “merry men” was still novel in the fifteenth century. Flush with the joy of nature and the reverdie of the springtime Robin’s men are lifted by a sort semi-divine afflatus.


Hit befel on Whitson
Erly in a May mornyng,
The son up feyre can shyne,
And the briddis mery can syng.

"This is a mery mornyng," seid Litull John,
"Be Hym that dyed on tre;
A more mery man then I am one
Lyves not in Cristianté.
“Monk,” 9-16


     Surely this joyful and sensual impression of the gathering energies of the organic world about them underlies the nature introductions of a thousand medieval poems. Telling tales of such an inspiriting flush of élan vital doubtless acted as a sort of mild recreational sympathetic magic for the medieval audience.
     Though Robin Hood was yet to acquire a lover or an aristocratic pedigree, these early texts provide powerful examples of the character’s potential for expressing social discontent against the rich and criticism of the religious hierarchy not long after the era of the Peasant’s Revolt and of Wyclif. Much of the brooding, if belated, numinous glow the ancients saw in the natural world survives in these lively and colloquial tales.



1. The dating to Richard’s realm derives from William Stukeley, the eighteenth century divine and antiquary who studied Stonehenge so long he began to fancy himself a druid. Scott may also have been influenced by the Scots role in the United Kingdom (Union was hardly more than a hundred years earlier and the battle of Colloden less than that). Was it a similar sympathy for the underdog that was expressed in Ivanhoe’s highly sympathetic depiction of the Jews Isaac of York and his daughter Rebecca?

2. Robin was alone because he insisted on entering town accompanied only by Little John who left him after his leader churlishly refused to pay a bet he had proposed and lost. The hero is not portrayed as a perfect valorous and powerful fighter. His lapses in judgment often generate action and early ballads show him defeated in scuffles with random tradesmen and acting unfairly to his own followers.

3. See Eric Hobsbawm Primitive Rebels 1959 and Bandits 1969. In the introduction of the former Hobsbawm refers to “the classic Robin Hood who was and is essentially a peasant rebelling against landlords, usurers, and other representatives of what Thomas More called ‘the conspiracy of the rich.’” (page 4)

4. Andrew of Wyntoun's Orygynale Chronicle says they were “commendit gud.”

5. Deriving from the simple expression “young man,” the term originally meant an attendant on a nobleman. According to the OED, it came to be used for a “mediocre” individual, neither aristocracy nor peasant, but it was not commonly used for the bourgeois residents of cities engaged in trade or professions. I am reminded of the American phenomenon in which virtually everyone considers him or herself “middle-class.”

6. See Lady Raglan’s article in The Folklore Journal coined the term "Green Man" in her March 1939 article "The Green Man in Church Architecture"(no. 50, pages 45–57). A related figure is the “jack of the green” of May day festivities.

7. Whitsuntide was one of three week-long holidays for medieval peasants. Whit Monday continues to be a holiday in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and many other countries, as it was until 1967 in the U.K., 1973 in Ireland, and 2004 in Sweden.

8. Marian is unmentioned in the early texts. It seems clear that she was imported through the influence of Adam de la Halle’s late thirteenth century Jeu de Robin and Marion though the play is a dramatized pastourelle in which Robin is simply a shepherd. The coincidence of the name must have been irresistible, though Robin was sometimes used as a generic male name as a modern American might use Joe or Mac.

9. The color was no literary fancy. In Spenser’s Faerie Queene a “woodman” is described as "clad/ Of Lincolne Greene, belay'd with silver lace." (VI, 2, stanza 5)

10. See Essays on Subjects Connected with Literature, Popular Superstitions, and the History of England (1846). Wright had published on the topic of Robin Hood as early as 1837. Margaret Murray’s argument for Robin as god and priest is included in The God of the Witches (1937).

Courtly Love in Romance of the Rose

     The thirteenth century allegory Romance of the Rose was immensely popular. Over three hundred manuscripts exist, and other authors frequently allude to the poem. A reading of this poem cannot fail to bear on the most fundamental discussions of the nature of courtly love, still in dispute after almost a millennium. The combination of sensual, spiritual, aesthetic, social, and political ideals produces a fascinating play of tensions in the poem, as indeed in lived experience.
     To limit the scope of this consideration, I will discuss only the first 4058 lines, those by Guillaume de Lorris. [1] This decision is, I know, reductive. The poem, including the more than 17,000 lines added by Jean de Meun, was read as a single work for hundreds of years and I believe that produces the best results, just as it does with the Bible (and Huizinga was speaking of the Romance considered as a whole when he called it the “breviary of the aristocracy”).
     The physical, erotic element is central. Unlike Jaufre Rudel’s love from afar or the dolce stil novisti, physical consummation is the explicit goal. At the conclusion of his part of the poem, Guillaume’s speaker makes love to the rose and expects her to be available in future despite their temporary separation. (anonymous conclusion, l. 34) Initially he had been attracted by her scent (VII, 48) and, when the companions of Mirth abandon their dance, it is to make love “beneath the secret-keeping boughs” (V, 11). How could it be otherwise when, as the poet says,


. . .there’s no better paradise on earth
than any place where lover finds a maid
responding freely to his heart’s desire.
(V, 16-18)


     Even the artificial convention of love’s entering by the eyes accurately conveys the role of visual stimuli in people’s eroticism and the wounding by love’s dart implies a real life passivity and a “bittersweet” experience. (VIII, 10) This realistic biological focus provides the libidinous energy to support the elaborate structure of courtly love.
     Though contemplation of Ultimate Reality may seem far removed from sex, the two have been linked in many cultures. One reads in Frazer of traditional people having ceremonial intercourse on their fields to ensure their fertility. Daoist and Tantric adepts have sought to integrate the physical here-and-now with the eternal. For Plato the beloved leads naturally to the Perfect. Even in Christianity, with its deep suspicion of the body, the rhetoric of St. Bernard on the Song of Songs and of the Victorines, the poetry of Mechthild von Magdeburg and St. John of the Cross, to mention only a few names, all indicate deep and significant links between sexuality and worship. Indeed the whole approach of the devotional sensibility to the divine is susceptible to expression in the imagery of human love.
     The relationship may vary. The physical can present a comic or bathetic debunking of the pretensions of the holy. For Chaucer’s Prioress “amor vincit omnia,” yet for all the pious anti-Semitism of her tale, she is clearly no exemplar of the religious life. The love imagery may simply be the best worldly analogy for the devotional emotion of some devotees as in Hildegard of Bingen’s “Columba aspexit.” In such medieval lyrics as “Maiden in the mor lay” the two are so intimately commingled that critics debate whether the poems are secular or religious.
     Section XVI, in which Franchise and Pity intercede for the lover, features much religious terminology. They plead his case “for God’s love.” (6) When Danger (who had herself earlier sworn by Christ, XIII, 74) relents, he is “raised from Hell to Paradise” (72) as Fair Welcome leads in a recitation of the rosary. (74) Far from satire, the poet here emphasizes his case with the strongest language possible, rather like one saying his lover is most beautiful in the world or that their relationship is a unique marvel. The psychological reality may be that one feels such conviction at times, but these hyperboles are cultivated figures of speech as well, admired as elegant and artistic.
     In fact aesthetic criteria enter here no less than in the cast of unpleasant allegorical figures outside the wall. Obdurate rejection of the lover would be culpable “discourtesy” (50), a violation of taste and a lapse from the standards of one’s class. Danger is scolded, not for causing pain or doing wrong, but because “You dishonour but yourself .” (9)
     In a clever dodge of the moral implications of love, the lover’s particular infatuation in the Romance of the Rose arises not from the extraordinary qualities of the rose, but rather from a charm, rather like that in Tristan and Iseult. The lover is thus helpless, bound after a glance in the marvelous Mirror Perilous. [2] While this may convey the potent sense of compulsion felt by a lover, it also frees him from any responsibility for his actions.
     The aesthetic and the social meanings of courtly love are closely linked. Refinement and sophistication became important signifiers of high social position, a position they retain to some extent yet today. The earliest narratives about King Arthur focus almost exclusively on the king’s strength and martial valor, whereas the later ones dwell on the love-exploits of Galahad and Lancelot.
     Skill at love became another indicator of nobility (and treatment of women still provided the measure of the gentleman in Victorian times), but it was hardly the sole aristocratic skill. When King Mark’s huntsman first encounters Tristan in the woods, he shows them a more elegant way of butchering their prey, and then prescribes a ceremonious protocol for transporting it, impressing everyone including the king with his accomplished taste. From the quasi-martial tourneys, sports, and hunting to poetry, music, and wit, the courtly man sought to master each so that he might practice each with grace and ease. [3]
     The cultivated man, just like the man of sensibility in the eighteenth century (who survives today in etiolated form as the “sensitive” man) was necessarily a man of property. In fact, his aesthetic and cultural acquisitions imply wealth and may at least partly compensate for its lack. Tristan himself seemed a lost wanderer, but gained acceptance because of his sophistication. The same quality, however, made him a lover, and thus a threat to his patron the king.
     The first section of the Romance describes the ugly figures on the outside of the garden wall (which express in negative the glories within). Many are conventional moral failings such as hatred, anger, and covetousness, but others are purely aesthetic. Old Age, for instance, appears as hideous and apparently demented (II, 142 ff.), inspiring a wholly pagan riff on Time. Poverty is there as well, and the poet curses “the hour in which poor men are conceived” without any regard for their role in producing the wealth that supports the genteel.
     He does, however, recognize the essential characteristic of the ruling class when the dreamer is admitted to the exclusive garden by Idleness (III, 40), and in Part VIII (11 ff.) Love approaches the dreamer as a feudal vassal, reproducing even in the realm of desire the structures of society and thus reinforcing them.
     Surely, then, the most reasonable and productive concept of courtly love is pluralistic, recognizing a group of characteristics that may be selected and used by different writers over a number of centuries and over an entire continent (and beyond) [4] in a variety of ways and yet share enough elements to justify the common term. The continua I have suggested -- sensual, spiritual, aesthetic, and social -- may be useful for distinguishing one use of the concept from another while maintaining at the same time a clear view of the significant shared elements. Works that tend toward the encyclopedic (such as the entire Romance of the Rose, the Canterbury Tales, Confessio Amantis, the corpus of troubadour poetry or of romances) will be likely to vary considerably, even to the point of self-contradiction.
     In the Romance of the Rose the outright opponent of Love is Reason (XIV) which might imply an element of arbitrariness to all of those definitive social values for the upper class of the Middle Ages. One’s love, one’s god, one’s taste, one’s place in the structure of society – all of these perhaps would be equally liable to the assault of Reason, but the poet makes the human choice, rejecting logic for the endlessly absorbing pastime of elaborating the relations between men and women.



1. Some critics would have it that Guillaume’s section is less problematized than Jean’s. My partial reading here will make it clear that I cannot agree.

2. The incestuous father in Emaré is similarly under a spell. For a more extreme version of the Mirror Perilous, see Borges’ “Aleph.”

3. Castiglione’s The Courtier provides a full curriculum “to practice in all things a certain sprezzatura [nonchalance], so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.” 32

4. The partially Arab origins of Europeans’ courtly love has been demonstrated by Nykl and others. Beyond that rich evidence exists in Persian and Indian poetry, in Li Shang Yin, and elsewhere. Peter Dronke provides a nice collection of passages in Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric. See also Discourses of Power, Grammar, and Rhetoric in the Middle Ages by Carol Poster and Richard J. Utz

The Prima Etade of Literary Ambition: The Struggle to Overcome the Word in Petrarch’s Canzone 23

     Petrarch's Canzone 23 is a dizzying and dazzling tour de force of transformation. The reader is allowed no illusion of rest from the impelling dynamic of change as the narrative voice describes his passage through six corporeal forms. The poem’s extraordinary complexity derives not only from the fast-moving procession of embodiments of the speaking voice (and the way in which each of these alters and edits its classical antecedents), but also from the many cunning authorial comments which unsettle interpretations even as they suggest themselves. The poem is not best read, however, as an encyclopedic inventory of possibilities like certain epic, oracular, and visionary works — the world as a whole is not the subject for its categorizations, nor do I find love itself to be the central concern of the poem (even in the extremely generalized sense in which all human energy may be regarded as erotic), nor is it — except in a rather specific way — about the elusive definition of the ego.
     The particular sort of self the poem does pursue is the poetic self, and the canzone is a self-reflexive commentary, a meditation on the nature of language and poetry, a work of theoretical criticism. It radically questions the validity of literature and explores the fundamentally doubled structure of language. The result in the end is not, though an answer that justifies the poem by placing it in a larger scheme, rather the result is the leap necessary to the “prima etade” of literary ambition, the engagement in struggle with the word which is poetry and which within literature can have no end and no victor.
     This sounds, perhaps, extravagant, but the approach is hardly novel. Not only must every poem necessarily make critical statements about the nature of poetry and about previous poems, but the specific tradition of which Petrarch is an exemplar played explicitly from William of Aquitaine to Shakesoeare on the relationship between the poem and the lover. Moreover, Canzone 23 is full of references to speech, writing, and literary fame. Before examining these in detail, I would like to review three earlier critics’ comments on Petrarch which seem to me to approach increasingly close to the point of view I mean to set forth.
     Burling in his introductory remarks broaches the possibility of a reading of the poem as criticism by identifying the theme as “the incomprehensible changeability of the self in love” and noting three points in the text at which the author is driven to, in effect, produce poetry within the narration. Further he notes that all the myths the poem recalls concern frustrated or disastrous speech or writing as well as deception or confusion over identity. Finally, he charts the basic antinomies governing the piece as follows: dismemberment vs. integration, death vs. poetic immortality, and sexual fear causing dumbness vs. poetic creation. His comments, however, in the brief scope of the preface, lead to no conclusion more precise than that Petrarch calls attention to the “psychologically relative, even suspect, origin of individual poems and thus of writing itself.”
     John Preston Brenkman’s “Narcissus in the Text: Toward an Analysis of the Literary Subject in Ovid, Petrarch, and Yeats” examines Petrarch’s sonnets 45 and 46, mentioning poem 23 as well. In Ovid's telling of the Narcissus myth, Brenkman finds a commentary on the deceptive capacities of language. He locates the critical elements for this reading in the shapeshifting uncertainty of the story's central figures. If Narcissus partakes of some of Echo's qualities, and if the author is not wholly distinct from either, if these identities are unstable through the course of the poem, then all utterance may likewise be doubted.
     In Brenkman’s view the confusion of identity so prominent in Petrarch further problematizes the status of the speaker. Suggesting that Petrarch undermines the distinction between body and image which is persistent if unstable in Ovid, he says that as Laura becomes less like Narcissus, the authorial voice resembles him more. Thus the sum of delusion remains always the same and the text “defines its own impasse as discourse” since it leaves no ground from which to judge reality, but only the patterns of appearances.
     Marguerite Waller in Petrarch's Poetics and Literary History does a thorough and convincing job along similar lines including a substantial treatment of Canzone 23 with exceedingly insightful and suggestive close readings of several passages. For instance, she is at pains to point out that in the first six lines of the poem, Petrarch does not unambiguously identify love as the source of his difficulty. She also questions the reality of any primal state of “libertade” and of its attainability in the future. The laurel is at once himself and his beloved; he passes through changes and yet never leaves it. Waller would translate 1. 167 “nor for a new figure have I known how to leave” and would interpret it as indicating the poet's imprisonment within language. No medium other than words is available to him and so whatever metaphorical forms of his subject he produces, these “figure only that figural production” itself. “Petrarch undercuts the authority of an allegorical narrative reading, demonstrating that the first figure itself is generated in an equally figural and arbitrary structural moment: the poet becoming identical with the laurel/Laura is one dimension (that of the linguistic signifier or figure), but remaining absent or different from it in another (that of the allegorical or interpretive reading, or figural significance. In the effort to recover the self and to emerge from figural to performative discourse, he cannot be wholly successful, but “while losing the self he gains the sign. While escape from the narrative problematic is impossible, narrative itself becomes possible.
     The sort of struggle Waller traces in the poem to make a perfectly signifying work and the partial failure that makes possible a partial victory is particularly likely in light of the place the poem occupies in Petrarch’s oeuvre. A marginal gloss in Petrarch’s hand identifies this poem as one of his earliest and the attempt to write the perfect poem may be seen as the young writer's attempt to work up his arrogance into the decision to write at all by means of the fantasy of success at writing the definitive poem. It is, then, in a way a tale of the birth of literary ambition as well as erotic emergence, and it tests the margins of both realms.
     The pun between Laura and the laurel (as a literary prize) joins love of self and love of other. The writer paradoxically demonstrates love for himself and love for the whole world by devoting himself to his work, to his muse. Waller suspects there may be a pun, too, in the word penosa (l. 11; meaning “painful” but penna is pen or quill). She does not mention, though the intention is indisputable, the play between foglia (leaf) and foglio (sheet of paper) in 1. 40 or with the word piuma (feather or plumage but also quill pen) in 1. 51. Having covered himself with pages and pens successively, after dedicating himself to the pursuit of literature the poet then finds himself a stone.
     In the serial progression of literary worth I am now delineating this is the withdrawal or descent into self that potentiates poetry. His next incarnation is as a fountain which brings inevitable associations of inspiration and productivity — I would say he has here crossed the stile into the precincts of art. While the penultimate form — the Echo-like stone and voice — raises new problems, it remains for the final transformation, the Actaeon-like stag to bring a dramatic resolution.
     Before returning to these last two images of the poet, I would like to discuss the poem’s references to 1anguage and its conclusion. Though Petrarch gets his poem going by asserting that it is efficacious to reduce his pain and he brings the piece to a halt by lofting into the empyrean on poetical wings, the references between to words are almost exclusively devoted to attesting their inadequacy, their failures. Already by 1. 11 everyone is said to be tired of his carrying on; in 1. 37 he declares wit and speech of no avail; in 52-62 his wailing is continuous only because it is ineffective. Getting directly to the point he tells his reader that his subject is beyond all speech (1. 71), that his pen cannot follow his will (1. 91). Pen and ink again disappoint expectation in 1. 100 and later he says that his words have the form of a lie (l. 156).
     All of these negative comments, however, are contained between two which, as I have noted, testify on the contrary to the actual power of speech and of poetry. The last passage is at once highly conventional as a description of poetic flight and very suggestive of sexual realization. As an apotheosis of poetry, though, the poem it ends must be its justification. Further, the complaints about the shortcomings of poetry are stated only in lines of poetry and they thus have a divided content anyway since their very existence as words is evidence that the author trusts in their potency. Only if the reader should indeed find them tiresome and leave off reading long before the conclusion will they have failed, and Petrarch provides even for that case. Line 12 tells us that every valley conveys his complaints so the message is virtually inescapable.
     The erotic double-bind is then accompanied or paralleled by a linguistic one. One way in which these profound ambivalences is traced is by the opposition of life and death. In stage one the “living man” is made a tree, clearly a decline in vitality, though not an absolute one. The process continues in form 2 when his hope, the internal essence of his being, is said to be dead. As a stone he is suspended between life and death and from this egg-like latency, he emerges in the fountain which in its exhilarated flow requires no mention of death. As the Echo-like stone he calls death by name, but this is now an objectified death, outside himself. Unlike the earlier death, he is now able to name it and manipulate it verbally.
     In the Actaeon-image of form 6, the situation would seem, to be a mortal one, yet again here death is not mentioned. The poet has, in the process of the poem, not banished death, but he has made it a part of his system. After his poem is born, he entertains no illusions about the powers of language, but he understands its nature more fully and by that understanding he controls it. Although the crisis may seem to evaporate in the heavenly flight at the end, the image of fleeing the hounds is not by any means obliterated.
     It is a dramatic and compelling moment near the end when the poet says that he is still fleeing the belling of the hounds. At once the reader recognizes the gravity of the situation as it is no longer recounted by a coolly detached voice sneaking elegantly of past travails (and the tone of mastery is important throughout the poem even in the parts that would be most anguished in some common-sense relation), but it speaks of its own present. It would be acceptable to most readers to comment that the sudden grip of panic that seizes the reader’s throat at this point may legitimately be said to indicate a continuation of this elastic present into the moment of the reading in a virtual reenactment of the event described.
     But just who are these hounds and of what does their noise consist? And what are those woods from one to another of which the poet is driven? It would be a psychoanalytical reading unusually rich in self-contradiction even to begin to explicate them as emblems of passion, even a passion made up as much of ambition as lust. However, I believe they are more tellingly glossed as the meaning of language pursuing language itself. It is in this sense rather than as psychic impulses that they have outlived Pope Innocent’s hunting dogs and that they still live and pursue their quarry on the page today. They represent both the fund of energy animating language and the desperation that arises from its repeated failures. The tracks of their pursuit are evident throughout the poem.
     Images of language as a two-fold structure are very old. In medieval books of rhetoric the most frequent form for this division is simply sound and sense. Words had always been recognized as arbitrary symbols and they had usually been admitted to be not wholly explicable. The bifurcation is reflected in Canzone 23 by a series of images of containment:

1. 20 “that within me” and “I the shell”
1. 24-26 the heart and "frozen thoughts"
1. 34 himself and his garment
1. 73 heart in his breast
1. 75 the beloved in a garment that makes her unrecognizable
1. 82 the poet and the stone
1. 95 heart and death all about
1. 106 the poet clothed in darkness

     All of these images convey the sense of what is truly important, truly human contained within a more death-like outer husk which either prevents communication, deceives, or denies the importance of affect. The barrier is broken at least implicitly in all of these instances but surely the most startling and disturbing is the occult surgery the beloved performs in 1. 74. In the terms by which I have been explicating the poem each of the occasions catalogued indicates the doubled character of language which makes possible its deceit (cf . Hesiod and Umberto Eco), and this amazing violation of the boundaries suggests the possible revelation of meaning in language in sudden moments prepared by pain, though more the pain of painstaking craft than that of romantic agony.
     If the outer layer in each of my containment images is that indifferent word which in its stubborn physicality seems altogether unresponsive to the demands placed upon it by human users, the withdrawal of the heart by the muse and indeed the very existence of Canzone 23 itself and its absorbing spell demonstrate that this husk is not a final one, that it may make possible an incubation from which a sort of new life can emerge.
     The problematic of literary identity remains and the problematic of language itself: nothing can mean exactly what we would have it mean, language is not constructed to perform such a role. If it were a single verse could bring instant illumination to anyone and literary success on that order is impossible. Petrarch's interest may be in that which is (l. 71) “beyond writing,” but only if it provides him with the trajectory along which he wishes to aim, if it gives the excuse that makes him want to write. Though fated not to strike that transcendental target (and so far as the love theme itself goes, does even Norman Mailer still seek the transcendental orgasm?). Petrarch leaves behind a poem which in struggling against these limitations both comes to understand them and overcomes them only to encounter the same problems the next time he is is faced with a blank page.
     In the passage following 1. 121 Petrarch suggests these ultimate pretensions with an analogy between the soul, God, and Laura. But the soul is accessible to others only through its outward form and its outward actions, the Lady through her person and the muse through concrete poems. Likewise the maker, whether divine or human, while never equivalent to his creation is pressed in it and the word, however inadequately it conveys meaning, appropriates that very inadequacy as part of its nature. The patterns of ambiguity and deceit that characterize language in general are just those elements that make literature. It is the distance between Actaeon and the hounds, between the word and its meaning, not the congruity of the two that makes poetry, but nonetheless the chase must go on. With the ceasing of the struggle would come the collapse of language.