At that time foreign words made us blush, like saying the name of a secret love. Like children who repeat signifiers for the sheer pleasure of the way they sound and feel in the mouth, but with no comprehension of what they mean, so a foreigner can articulate a foreign word without understanding its meaning or connotations.
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The signifier is set free from the signified: French allowed Wilde to pit himself against the doxa of Victorian convention and constraint and to rewrite the Biblical story casting it in the lurid light—or rather darkness—of obsession and murder. The manuscript caption annotating the caricature illustrates the point made by Chris Snodgrass: I will not consent to call myself a citizen of a country that shows such narrow mindedness in its artistic judgements.
One such significant error occurs in the stage directions on the first folio of the Rosenbach manuscript and serves as an indication of how English is just below the surface of the French. He did not use the subjunctive precisely because he wanted to stage the intangible which the subjunctive conveys. That form was corrected in the final manuscript version to: He begins by marking impatience: Wilde thus makes the five lettered French word into a sign which he invests with different shades of meaning according to the context.
The English version thus retains the sense that the language is virtual, but the image is actually put into words by the speaker. She has a strange look about her. He is like an image of silver. He is like a moon-beam, like a shaft of silver. These incongruities 13 are not simple errors, but reflect the tension Wilde felt between trying to chime in with the Biblical tone of the story while at the same time making it more accessible to a contemporary audience. Agenouillez-vous au bord de la mer, et appelez-le par son nom. The verbal echoing in French is completely lost in the English translation of the words: Her simple statement of fact: In addition, the phrase is repeated incessantly and obsessively, thus dulling its impact and muting its semantic value.
There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of blood? Mais il est terrible, il est terrible. His composition therefore has the quality of a musical Urtext which contains no dynamic markings, in other words no indication about how to play the notes. In the second draft, Wilde simply indicates and underlines: It is not until the typescript stage that he specifies: He varies the number of suspension points as if to indicate the duration of the silence or pause.
At the end of his speech, his final—sacrilegious—suggestion is followed by a silence marked by six dots: Only a few other texts, all religious in content, survive from before about Early texts show a broad division between the speech of northern Gaul, which had suffered most from the invasions, and that in the more stable, cultured south, where the Latin spoken was less subject to change.
From the last one stemmed Anglo-Norman, the French used alongside English in Britain, especially among the upper classes, from even before the Norman Conquest until well into the 14th century. Each dialect had its own literature. But, for various reasons, the status of Francien increased until it achieved dominance in the Middle French period after , and from it Modern French developed. Old French was a fine literary medium, enlarging its vocabulary from other languages such as Arabic, Occitan, and Low Latin. It had a wide phonetic range and, until the decay of the two-case system it had inherited from Latin, syntactic flexibility.
Whatever Classical literature survived the upheavals of the early Middle Ages was preserved, along with pious Latin works, in monastic libraries. By encouraging scholars and writers, Charlemagne had increased the Latin heritage available to educated vernacular authors of later centuries. He also left his image as a great warrior-emperor to stimulate the legend-making process that generated the Old French epic. There one finds exemplified the feudal ideal, evolved by the Franks, that was the means of establishing a hierarchy of dependency and, thereby, a cohesiveness that would lead to a national identity.
As stability increased under the Capetians , windows opened onto other cultures and elements: The Roman Catholic church grew in wealth and power, and by the 12th century its schools were flourishing, training generations of clerks in the liberal arts. Society itself became less embattled, and the nobility became more leisured and sophisticated.
The machismo of the epics was tempered by the social graces of courtoisie: By the 13th century an additional source of patronage for writers and performers was the bourgeoisie of the developing towns. New genres emerged, and, as literacy increased, prose found favour alongside verse. Much of the literature of the time is enlivened by a rather irreverent spirit and a sometimes cynical realism, yet it also possesses a countercurrent of deep spirituality.
In the 14th and 15th centuries France was ravaged by war, plague, and famine. Along with a preoccupation in literature with death and damnation, there appeared a contrasting refinement of expression and sentiment bred of nostalgia for the courtly, chivalric ideal.
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At the same time a new humanistic learning anticipated the coming Renaissance. The jongleurs , professional minstrels, traveled and performed their extensive repertoires , which ranged from epics to the lives of saints the lengthy romances were not designed for memorization , sometimes using mime and musical accompaniment.
Seeking an immediate impact, most poets made their poems strikingly visual in character, more dramatic than reflective, and revealed psychology and motives through action and gesture. Such oral techniques left their mark throughout the period. Most are anonymous and are composed in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses strophes based on assonance and, later, rhyme. Their length varies from about 1, to more than 18, lines. The genre prospered from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms.
Under the influence of the genre known as romance, however see below The romance , the chansons de geste lost some of their early vigour.
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Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
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Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already familiar. The epics in the Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from Carolingian history some years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit.
In fact, very few texts belong to the period before The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great , Thebes , Aeneas , and Troy were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting them in a more detached fashion.
It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue , and more authorial intervention. There is more interest in psychology, especially in the love situations. The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the midth century, apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland and moving south.
The context and nature of French medieval literature
The main French versions both fragmentary are by the Anglo-Norman poet Thomas c. His first known romance, Erec et Enide Erec and Enide , is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic enchantment. Yvain ; ou, le chevalier au lion The Knight with the Lion treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide.
The grail , first introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette Aucassin and Nicolette , a charmingly comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse to be sung and prose to be recited , pokes sly fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike. Its first exponents were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval Occitan, of whom some are known by name.
Among them are clerics and both male and female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men. The canso French chanson , made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi , was the favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted.
Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine see William IX , the first known poet in the Occitan language , mixed obscenity with his courtly sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour ; Jaufre Rudel , who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de Born ; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even autobiographical mode though the personal details are probably fictional on a variety of subjects: It appears in pious and didactic literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions.
They are played out in all classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals , inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces, bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio. Inspired partly by the popular animal fable , partly by the Latin satire of monastic life Ysengrimus ; Eng.
Ysengrimus , the collection of ribald comic tales known as the Roman de Renart Renard the Fox began to circulate in the late 12th century, chronicling the rivalry of Renart the Fox and the wolf Isengrin, and the lively and largely scandalous goings-on in the animal kingdom ruled by Noble the Lion.
By the 14th century about 30 branches existed, forming a veritable beast epic. Full of close social observation, they exude the earthy humour of the fabliaux; but, particularly in some of the later branches, this is sharpened into true satire directed against abuses in church and state , with the friars and rapacious nobility as prime targets. Allegory , popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as Augustine , Prudentius , Martianus Capella , and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de la rose The Romance of the Rose , where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined.
Guillaume, however, left the poem unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned. Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a misogynistic tone pervades the writing.
The Treasure of the City of Ladies sets out in detail the important social roles of women of all classes. Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de Machaut , the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of narrative dits amoureux short pieces on the subject of love and a quantity of lyric verse. A talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms: A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music.
Jean Froissart , the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose poetry had a greater individuality. There is an elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts in , he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and manslaughter. The Testament and Other Poems. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice , Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging. Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair, however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of their art.
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly Other Arthurian romances adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between and , with its five branches by various hands. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. The bawdy tales of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles c. Pious and instructional works abound. More interesting are the chronicles, which avoid the romantic extravagances of their verse predecessors.
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Jean, sire de Joinville , was 84 when, in , he completed his Histoire de Saint Louis , a flattering biographical portrait of his intimate friend Louis IX , whom he had accompanied on the Seventh Crusade. Chronicles of the Crusades.