Text – The Medieval Kingfisher

October 16, 2023October 16, 2023

Hamlet

Category	Text
Form	Play
Genre	Tragedy
Author	William Shakespeare
Time	Between 1599 and 1601
Language	Early Modern English
Featured In	Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or quite simply, Hamlet, is William Shakespeare’s longest play and one of his most famous tragedies, written between 1599 and 1601. Set in Denmark just as the medieval world began to transition to the Renaissance period, the play spans five acts, comprising seven soliloquies and 4000 over lines that cleverly place thematic extremes – for instance, madness and sanity, love and hate, life and death – on both sides of the same coin. Such deliberation over the human condition at once provides insights into the circumstances of its time and imbues the play with a timeless quality, generously allowing for continued retelling and recontextualization.

_SUMMARY

Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus and the Ghost (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4), engraved by Robert Thew after Henry Fuseli’s conception, stipple engraving, first published 1796. From The Met Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Hamlet, distilled down to the mere unfolding of its plot, tells of Prince Hamlet’s revenge against King Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, after learning from the ghost of Old King Hamlet that Claudius had murdered the Old King Hamlet in pursuit of “[his] crown, [his] own ambition, and [his] queen” (Act 3 Scene 3, line 55). Duty bound by the ghost’s demand to be avenged, the shaken Prince seeks to verify the ghost’s words, and thereby the presence of a supernatural being, as part of his plan for revenge by putting on an “antic disposition” (Act 1 Scene 5, line 179). Though Hamlet’s subsequent act of madness and erratic behavior – as observed by Ophelia, Hamlet’s love interest, and later reported to her father, Polonius – is initially thought of as a result of distress and grief over his father’s death, Claudius soon becomes suspicious, and observes as Hamlet wittingly deflects Polonius, Ophelia, and his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Upon learning of the acting troupe brought in by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet stages The Murder of Gonzago, ‘The Mousetrap’ that reveals, to both Hamlet and the audience, Claudius’s guilty conscience.

Gertrude, the Queen, summons Hamlet to her chambers for an explanation as to Hamlet’s offending of Claudius. On the way to her chambers, Hamlet stumbles upon Claudius and, seeing Claudius praying, chooses to withhold his murderous intent for fear that killing Claudius then would send him to Heaven whilst Old King Hamlet stays in Purgatory. In Gertrude’s chambers, Hamlet confronts his mother with her incestuous deed and the truth of Old King Hamlet’s death. The spying Polonius behind the curtains, thinking Hamlet will kill his mother, calls for help, and is promptly stabbed by Hamlet, who believes Claudius to be in the chambers and who proceeds to audaciously insult Gertrude for her ignorance of Claudius’s depravity. The ghost then appears only to Hamlet to berate him for his inaction and his harsh words while Gertrude, only witnessing Hamlet’s fear, believes her son to be mad.

The Death of Hamlet, by Eugène Delacroix and Villain, lithograph, 1843. From The Met Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The simultaneous occurrence of Polonius’s death and Hamlet’s slipping control over his sanity brings about a series of deaths in the remaining half of the play. Ophelia, upon learning of her father’s death, becomes mad with grief and drowns (accidental, or otherwise), causing Laertes much grief. His thirst for vengeance leads him to go along with Claudius’s suggestion to engage in a fencing match with Hamlet using a poison-tipped foil and, if Hamlet wins, to offer a glass of poisoned wine as congratulations. The plan goes terribly awry – Gertrude drinks the poisoned wine as a toast to Hamlet’s initial wins, and though Laertes manages to injure Hamlet as planned, Hamlet wounds Laertes too with the poisoned foil. As Laertes lies dying, he exposes Claudius’s plan, prompting Hamlet to kill Claudius. The play ends with Hamlet begging Horatio not to commit suicide and to tell his story as Fortinbras marches through, taking the crown for himself and ordering a military funeral in honour of Hamlet.

_DISCUSSION

Reading Hamlet’s whirlwind of a trajectory as the above summary has done so leaves one bewildered by the many inconsistencies and discontinuities that would appear, at times, irrational if not for Hamlet’s soliloquies. Each of the seven soliloquy expresses Hamlet’s inner psyche at various stages of the play’s development, as Hamlet mourns for and struggles to comprehend the loss of his father that has been complicated and made ambiguous by the ghost, whose presence, claim of murder, and dwelling in purgatory entirely destablize Hamlet’s Protestant beliefs and understanding of reality. Finding himself caught in an aporia, he exclaims to Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,//Than are dreamt of in our philosophy” (Act 1 Scene 5, lines 174 – 75, emphasize mine). While mourning is a transitive process when loss is definitive and comprehensible, Hamlet’s enigmatic loss causes him to remain in an intransitive state of mourning,¹ which he describes to be like a “heartache, and the thousand natural shocks//That flesh is heir to”—for, as he confesses to Horatio, “in [his] heart there was a kind of fighting//That would not let [him] sleep” (Act 5 Scene II, line 4). Hamlet’s bodily description of his conscious faculty – the repeated motif of his “heart,” reference to the “flesh” and his insomnia – presents his intransitive state of mourning to be that of a melancholic² disposition that infects his soliloquies³. In his fourth soliloquy⁴, he laments:

To be or not to be, that is the question:
… To die – to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished: to die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. (Act 3 Scene I, lines 57-65, emphasis mine)

Hamlet’s repetition of the words “die (death)”, “sleep” and “dream” in a fervent attempt to draw connections between these notions expresses his struggle to comprehend the mortal condition. Upon suggesting that death is a kind of “sleep” that would forebode unknown “dreams,” Hamlet concludes that it is the feared possibility of “dreams,” of the afterlife that causes a “pause,” an inability (or refusal) to make peace with death. The conclusion of this fear, as hinted by his metaphorical reference to the afterlife as an “undiscovered country” later in this soliloquy (Act 3 Scene I, line 80), is very much born out of his attempt at registering the presence of the ghost that reveals the political corruption in Denmark. Hamlet’s lengthy soliloquizing, then, as both a result of and a cause of his melancholia, not only pushes the physical and temporal boundaries of the stage and provides insights into his psychological state, but also shows how Renaissance thought is motivated by the age that precedes it.

Hamlet’s pause caused by his struggle to comprehend death and the afterlife also effectively prepares the audience for the chain of unnatural deaths that will occur later in Act 5, seemingly perpetuated by an unknown force. As the play develops, Hamlet’s mulling over of divine justice and retribution almost writes itself, with deaths happening spontaneously in a reversal of fortune, as my classmates and I had (mirthfully) concluded below:

Missing above is Hamlet’s causing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s deaths, as well as the soldiers’ deaths at the battlefield that went unaccounted for.

Most of the characters’ deaths are unwittingly a result of their misdoings, suggesting the capricious Rota Fortunae⁵, the Fortune’s Wheel which the goddess Fortuna spins at random, changing the position of those on the Wheel. The medieval and Renaissance period saw the use of the wheel in the “Mirrors for Princes,” a popular genre of writing that sets out advice for the ruling classes on the wielding of power, shifting the Wheel from the Goddess to the hands of humans. For Prince Hamlet, figures of philosophy like Fortune are not personified as divine guides, but rather figuratively addressed:

A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards
Hath ta’en with equal thanks; and blest are those
Whose blood and judgement are so well commingled
That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger
To sound what she please. (Act 3 Scene II, lines 62 – 66)

Here, Hamlet likens Fortune’s control over humans’ “buffets and rewards” to that of a musician playing a pipe, and suggests that humans’ ability to reason and judge frees us from becoming Fortune’s fool. As Hamlet later exclaims, “Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me” (Act 3 Scene II, lines 353 – 354), seeing Fortune as the mere making of human manipulation, and perceiving himself to be above that. Yet Hamlet himself is also manipulated, as his effort to serve divine retribution (his revenge that results in Ophelia’s undeserving death) in turn provokes Laertes’ desire for revenge against Hamlet:

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well
When our dear plots do pall; and that should teach us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will – (Act 5 Scene II, lines 8 – 10)

Print depicting the Wheel of Fortune, engraved by Martin Rota, 1572.

Whether it is the inevitable submission to the whims of Fortune⁶ (whereby death is the divine retribution for having sinned, prior to repercussions in the afterlife) or undeserving deaths as a result of human folly (Ophelia’s death, as well as that of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and the soldiers involved in the war between Denmark and Norway), Hamlet addresses the limitations of letting “your own discretion be your tutor,” wherein our moments of irrationality, although beyond our control, are also part of what “shapes our ends”. Through Hamlet’s consciousness, then, Hamlet goes beyond the singular focus of a revenge tragedy plot to consider the vicious cycle of revenge that interweaves the characters’ (including the barely mentioned soldiers) fate, exposing human reasoning as limited by the human condition which, in effect, presents the dichotomies⁷ of Renaissance thought.

Indeed, Hamlet’s focus on the individual’s mourning and their positioning in a complex web of human relations allows us to better comprehend the occurrence of mass deaths that often ironically evade our empathy and ability to fully register the gravity of our loss. Hamlet’s continued use of the collective pronoun “we” and “us” in his soliloquies (and his addressing of Horatio) includes the audience, extending the ‘pause’ beyond himself which makes room for “commentary and reflection instead of narration” (Genette Gerard, Narrative Discourse 36). Through the experience of mourning, insights on death very much inform life, for the play, “despite its concerns with death, is bursting with life” (General Introduction 29). With Hamlet’s eventual acceptance – “since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.” (Act 5 Scene II, lines 169-170), one is prompted to accept the dramatic portrayal of sentiments – excessive fear, anger, love and hate, mourning and mirth – and failings that are only human, as a form of peace-making with death.

_FOOTNOTES

¹_{Mourning as a response to loss can be transitive and intransitive (“mourn, v.1”).}

² _{According to Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholia (1883), melancholia is a disposition as much as it is a ‘habit’; in other words, melancholia is an affect that is “an act of Mortality” that manifests as a treatable physical “settled humour” of black bile (93). Hamlet is also described as cloaked in black (Act 1 Scene II, line 77) and he confesses to have already “lost all of [his] mirth, forgone all custom of exercise” (Act 2 Scene II, line 294), both of which are also symptoms of melancholia.}

³ _{Here I refer to his soliloquies that come after his meeting with the ghost.}

⁴ _{For the purpose of this essay, I focused largely on the fourth soliloquy, for it is in Act 3 where Hamlet is most unsettled, having confirmed the presence of the ghost.}

⁵ _{The Rota Rotunae was greatly popularized for the Middle Ages by its extended treatment in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and was widely used as an allegory in medieval literature and art to aid religious instruction.}

⁶ _{Charles M. Radding states in his article ‘Fortune and her Wheel: The Meaning of a Medieval Symbol’:“If the popularity of Fortune in the central Middle Ages does not reflect a new social reality, then it is likely that it was meant to suggest [that] the operation of a force distinct from necessity and also (one might add) from divine justice… the meaning of the Wheel of Fortune is thus quite general: that everyone in human society is subject to the whims of Fortune, that not all of the world’s gifts or the world’s tragedies are deserved” (133).}

⁷ _{That is, the extremes of reasoning and faith. The opposing ends of Renaissance thought presents either an entire lack of faith in the divine (as proposed by the philosopher Edward Herbert of Cherbury) or, according to Blaise Pascal, total disbelief in the human ability to understand the world with certainty (Fieser).}

_REFERENCES

Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Claxton & Co. 1883. Internet Archive, urn:oclc:record:1039522579

Fieser, James. “Renaissance and Early Modern Philosophy.” The History of Philosophy: A Short Survey, 2020, https://www.utm.edu/staff/jfieser/class/110/6-renaissance.htm

Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin, Cornell UP, 1980

Radding, Charles M. “Fortune and Her Wheel: The Meaning of a Medieval Symbol.” Mediaevistik, vol. 5, Peter Lang AG, 1992, pp. 127–38, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42584434.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Bloomsbury Arden, 2016.

“mourn, v.1.” OED Online, Oxford UP, March 2021, www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/11125. Accessed 5 March 2022.

_{CREATIVE INTERPRETATIONS}

The following creative projects, produced for the course on Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature, offer further perspectives and insights on Hamlet and its thematic concerns:

Hamlet in Bukit Brown: A Creative Exploration

The Ripple Effects of Hamlet’s Murder

_{IMAGE CREDITS}

^{[Featured Image & Fig. 1] http://www.strangehistory.net/2014/11/17/daily-history-picture-playing-medieval-chess/}

^{[Fig. 2] https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/library/files/special/exhibns/chaucer/works.html}

^{[Fig. 3] https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1873-0809-801}

^{CONTRIBUTED BY YAP JIA YI (’21)}

February 2, 2023July 6, 2023

Piers Plowman (/A Brechtian Reinterpretation)

Category	Text
Form	Poetry
Genre	Allegory, Alliterative Verse, Dream Vision
Author	William Langland
Time	Late 14th Century
Language	Middle English
Featured In	Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)

Piers Plowman is the highly acclaimed Middle English allegorical poem by William Langland, written after the Black Death. The alliterative poem is divided into multiple sections or visions (termed “passus”). The narrator encounters various allegorical characters ranging from “Reason”, “Fortune”, “Wrath”, to rather unapologetically named ones such as “Do-Just-So-Or-Your-Dame-Will-Beat-You” and “Suffer-Your-Sovereigns-To-Have-Their-Will-Condemn-Them-Not-For-If-You-Do-You’ll-Pay-A-Dear-Price-Let-God-Have-His-Way-With-All-Things-For-So-His-Word-Teaches”, all in effort to learn and understand how to live life as a good Christian.

_{REFLECTIONS AND ENGAGEMENT}

As a theological and social allegory, Piers Plowman pushes its literary form to the limit, with its endless search for authority and meaning in a post-plague era of death and social upheaval. During the medieval period, it was widely read and proved to be an influential text, even being used as inspiration during the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. Given Piers Plowman’s social relevancy and popularity, my project hopes to re-imagine the text in a modern context while keeping its resonances as boundary-pushing social commentary. Moreover, just as Langland pushed against the didactic form of the allegory, my creative intervention attempts to move the theatrical form to the limits of realism, to comment on the crisis of society after a period of uncertainty, a reality we are still grappling with today.

CREATIVE PROJECT BY ASHLEY SIM SHUYI (’22)

Piers Plowman: A Brechtian Reinterpretation
Literary Art / Performing Art (Stage Play and Artistic Direction)
An Interpretation of Piers Plowman
Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)
2021

Artist’s Remarks

My creative project will approach Piers Plowman from two directions – first as the writer of the Brechtian re-imagination of the text and secondly, as the artistic director commenting on the script with staging ideas. In this fictious production, I imagine that the play is put up by a very small team with aims to use art to generate some kind of social change, hence, the creative process between artistic collaborators is more transparent. As the writer, my re-interpretation of Piers Plowman focuses on picking out key moments in Passus V and VI and creating a montage-like sequence, one of the characteristics of Brechtian-inspired work. Moreover, as the script writer, I used the source text as the main inspiration, quoting the translation and the middle English to respect the socio-cultural world of the play, an important aspect of Brechtian work. Conversely, as the artistic director, I explain more fully what the staging could look like, while also removing more suspension of disbelief so the ‘audience’ (ie the reader of the script) can see behind the veil of the play’s staging, another Brechtian characteristic. This feature should also figure into the staging of the play as the set changes and costume changes happen in front of the audience. Overall, I want to construct a play, set during the time of Piers Plowman, that makes the audience confront the intellectual experiences of thinking about social issues rather than the feelings that heart-wrenching realism may invoke.

Compared to other medieval texts such as Dante’s Inferno or Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess, Langland does not invoke as many intertextual references to the literary canon, but rather, is interested in depicting social reality as a means to grapple with it. In a similar way, Brecht believed that “Art is not a mirror with which to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it”¹, with his work often being tied to specific social contexts. Thus, I see a striking similarity between Brechtian theatre and Langland’s poem as both attempt to use art and culture to reflect deeply on society in a way that requires several layers of interpretation and understanding. Piers Plowman is not obviously didactic; however, it forces the reader to confront absurd scenarios that astound and confuse, much like how Brechtian theatre is staged. In my re-imagination of Piers Plowman, I have utilized many Brechtian techniques to reflect my initial process of encountering Piers Plowman for the first time. Some key Brechtian theories I have chosen to employ include Verfremdung (V-effect), a devising process that aims to make the familiar strange as a means for the audience to reach a deeper level of understanding by being forced to resolve surface contradictions and Gestus, a type of physicality that hopes to represent a character rather than embody it. Just as Langland’s poems alienate the modern reader, I hope to do the same in my theatrical re-interpretation. In the process of reconstituting Lamgland’s poem into a play, I looked into medieval morality plays such as Everyman to understand how medieval theatre incorporated allegory. I noticed that the practice of stating the didactic purpose of the morality play at the beginning fits in nicely with Brecht’s V-effect as this sort of declarative statement in modern day would serve to alienate, allowing for an interesting cross-pollination of medieval and modern theatrical practice.

Additionally, in my theatrical re-interpretation, I wanted to highlight the feelings of anxiety after the plague, which had pushed the world to the brink of disaster. Seen through Piers Plowman and the narrative itself, the text constantly grasps for meaning as the characters clamour to find ‘Truth’, a religious symbol of redemption. Thus, Piers Plowman becomes a vehicle to embark on this spiritual quest as he becomes a pseudo-Christ-like figure, who in the process of leading them to salvation, re-affirms strict social hierarchies where “wives and widows [should] spin wool and flax” (Langland 6.13) and the knight should “uphold [his] obligation” to “take care” (Langland 6.33) of the people. However, this spiritual quest underpins larger societal issues as individuals such as the “pickpocket”, “ape-trainer” and “cake-seller” (Langland 5.630 – 634), believe that they have “no kin” with Truth, speaking to the larger issue that only communities of aristocrats believed that they have access to spiritual redemption. Compounded by the historical context of peasants being forced to work under the Ordinance of Labourers of 1349, I wanted to explore this social commentary through my use of placards which have often been used to comment on the unseen in Brechtian plays. Another way that Langland has created boundary-pushing social commentary is through his allegory of Hunger, which is also tied to the labour crisis. The violence with which Hunger is used to control the Waster is striking, as Hunger “gripped [the Waster] so that his eyes gushed water” (Langland 6.175). While exhibiting cruel violence, Hunger is simultaneously shown to restore social order. I wanted to figure this duality of Hunger into my montage sequence, choosing to construct Hunger as a modern-day rock star – a symbol of both vice and virtue. To do this, I conceived of unique staging elements such as costuming and lighting to create a jarring quality, alienating the audience.

To me, this project is a creative exercise in relating modern theatrical practice to Langland’s unique use of form. It is interesting to see many resonances with how literature and art tends to move after a catastrophic event such as the plague, or the pandemic, as there is clearly a pattern of art moving towards more absurd, post-modern directions. Other artistic movements such as Dadaism or the rise of Zoom theatre reflects this human desire to construct meaning in chaos by pushing the limits of the known. Piers Plowman represents this human impulse to explain the inexpressible, in a constant struggle to find meaning in a world surrounded by death, and it is my hope that my Brechtian reimagination of the text pay homage to its enduring relevance in the 21^st century.

_FOOTNOTES

¹ _{The source of this quote has been disputed greatly so it is difficult to find where it was originally quoted from. However, this quote is one of the most commonly-attributed quote to Brecht.}

_{IMAGE CREDITS}

^{[Featured Image] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piers_Plowman}

_{CONTRIBUTED BY ASHLEY SIM SHUYI (’22)}

September 29, 2022July 4, 2023

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Category	Text
Form	Poetry
Genre	Romance
Author	Pearl Poet / Gawain Poet
Time	Late 14th Century
Language	Middle English
Featured In	Medieval Romance: Magic and the Supernatural (YHU2309); Real and Imagined Animals in Medieval Literature (YHU2330)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the most renowned Arthurian Romances of all time. Written in alliterative verse, the narrative stars the titular Sir Gawain, one of the knights from King Arthur’s Round Table, who accepts the challenge of a strange entity known as the Green Knight – who invites any courageous knight to strike at him with an axe, knowing that they must allow the Green Knight to return the gesture in a year and a day. The text is written by an unknown author, who is thought to also have penned another famous Middle English poem, Pearl.

_{REFLECTIONS AND ENGAGEMENT}

The text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was quite popular across all courses and classes that featured it. A class activity took place in the Spring 2020 iteration where students formed groups to reimagine the text as a movie and to film movie trailers for their different visions.

^{An example of one of the trailers filmed for the class by YAP JIA YI (’21), NIKKI YEO YING YING (’22), & TOH HONG JIN (’23).}

_{THE GREEN KNIGHT}

“A text is a weave of knowing and not-knowing.”¹ As stated by critic Geraldine Heng with regards to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the narrative is full of unanswered questions. The Green Knight is a mysterious character both known and unknowable. His first appearance is a shock to Arthur’s court, and though we eventually glean some insight as to his origins, there still lurks questions, such as: why does Morgan le Fay hate Guinevere? How does Guinevere react? The binaries of knowing and not-knowing form a compelling narrative.

With the text described as a “weave,” I was inspired to embroider. In fact, various narratives refer to embroidery as a medium for communication. For instance, in the Middle English Breton Lai Emare, Emare’s luxuriously embroidered robe plays a central role in the narrative. The robe depicts different pairs of lovers. With its images of true loves, the robe becomes representative of a “gallery of ideals,” integral to the romance of the story.² Embroidery was a common pastime for women in the Medieval period, akin to a symbol of status. Embroidered items were often created with expensive materials like silk, silver or gold, and given as presents to promote the political interests of the family. A valuable gift, embroidery was a medium of communication, signalling friendly intentions and furthering alliances.³ In embroidery, various stitches are used; the split stitch was popular in Medieval England, and so I mainly used this stitch, as seen in the border and leaves.⁴

Regarding the Green Knight, what struck me was the ambiguity of what he represented. While at first an ominous appearance in Arthur’s court, by the end of the tale, we learn he is the friendly lord who welcomed Gawain into his court. In fact, the Green Knight possesses many paradoxical qualities, seen in lines 151-220, expounding his appearance in excruciating detail. He is green and supernaturally strong, yet appears human at the same time. He appears offering symbols of peace (the holly sprig) and of violence (the axe). He could be good or evil. As such, I decided to focus on embroidering just the Green Knight, although in the narrative, he enters Arthur’s court on his green horse. Moreover, I kept his face empty, in order to underscore the mystery of his identity—Arthur’s court knows nothing about the Green Knight’s origins when he first arrives.

The most striking aspect of the Green Knight is, as his name suggests, that he is entirely green. Specific shades of green are mentioned; he is the green of nature, be it “forest-green” or “grass-green” (lines 220 and 235). To highlight the greenness of the knight, I decided to use green cloth for the background, overtly highlighting the green-ness of the Green Knight and the overall piece. The only parts of the piece that are not green are the gold accents and the items he wields.

^{READ MORE}

_{THE GREEN KNIGHT: THE LIMITATIONS OF HUMAN CAPACITY}

In ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’ the Green Knight taunts the Arthurian court by using his grandeur to emphasize their shortcomings and haunts Sir Gawain, who comes to fear his mortality at the Green Knight’s hands. As I carried the Pearl poet’s Green Knight in my mind across the weeks, I realized that his existence is a direct challenge to the limitations of human capacity. I hoped to capture this aspect of the Green Knight’s existence in physical recreation. I have created a model out of crushed papers, fallen leaves, and green plastic bags in my creative interpretation. His armor is made of leaves painted over in green to cast them as “evergreen,” and as per the description in the text, the Green Knight remains shoeless. He is beheaded, holding his head – wrapped in green plastic – by his side. He has a red braid around his waist and decapitated head. My creative decisions in making this model are products of much deliberation. As this essay proves, my decisions document the dilemmas I faced as I worked within my own human capacity limitations.

From the introduction of the Green Knight, he is set apart from the knights of the Arthurian court in how massive his stature is. The first descriptions of the Knight depict him as “a mountain of a man, immeasurably high, / a hulk of a human” (lines 137-138), placing him (literally) a head and shoulders above the other knights. To attempt to capture this “most massive man” (line 141), I set out to create a model as large and sturdy as I could make it. The model is big – I was indeed questioned by passersby, who noticed I was carrying a rather large (and green) model of a man back and forth from the Art Studio. However, I admit he is not as large as I would have liked him to be. Running into issues of storage, transportation, and resource shortages pointed me to the limitations of my own capacity. I also planned to make this model out of wood to give him the bulk and durability that his title as the “mightiest of mortals” (line 141) commands. However, a lack of resources and expertise led me to use crushed papers to construct the base – unfortunately, making my model extremely flimsy. Again, I faced limitations in what I was capable of creating. In this trial-and-error process, I realized that these were uniquely human problems that curtailed how large and sturdy I could make the model I created with my own hands. I doubt nature runs into such issues in creating features of the natural world. Thus, in this failed venture of recreating the physicality of the Green Knight, I paralleled the Arthurian knights in my realization that I could not recreate his build in the same way the knights could not match the Green Knight’s stature.

^{READ MORE}

_FOOTNOTES

¹_{Heng, Geraldine. “Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” PMLA, vol. 106, no. 3, 1991, pp. 500–14, https://doi.org/10.2307/462782.}

²_{Mortimer J. Donovan, “Middle English Emare and the Cloth Worthily Wrought,” in Larry D. Benson, ed., The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature, Harvard English Studies 5 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 339.}

³ _{Diener, Laura Michele. “Sealed with a Stitch: Embroidery and Gift-Giving among Anglo-Saxon Women.” Medieval Prosopography, vol. 29, 2014, pp. 1–22, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44946967.}

⁴ _See_{https://youtu.be/JgN7osGCf5g for a tutorial.}

⁵ _{Besserman, Lawrence. “The Idea of the Green Knight.” ELH, vol. 53, no. 2, 1986, pp. 219–39, https://doi.org/10.2307/2873255.}

_REFERENCES

Armitage, Simon. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008.

Besserman, Lawrence. “The Idea of the Green Knight.” ELH, vol. 53, no. 2, 1986, pp. 219–39, https://doi.org/10.2307/2873255.

Diener, Laura Michele. “Sealed with a Stitch: Embroidery and Gift-Giving among Anglo-Saxon Women.” Medieval Prosopography, vol. 29, 2014, pp. 1–22, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44946967

Heng, Geraldine. “Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” PMLA, vol. 106, no. 3, 1991, pp. 500–14, https://doi.org/10.2307/462782.

Mortimer J. Donovan, “Middle English Emare and the Cloth Worthily Wrought,” in Larry D. Benson, ed., The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature, Harvard English Studies 5 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 339.

_{IMAGE CREDITS}

^{[Featured Image] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Gawain_and_the_Green_Knight}

^{CONTRIBUTED BY ASHLEY TAN (’25), OSHEA REDDY (’24), YAP JIA YI (’21), NIKKI YEO YING YING (’22), & TOH HONG JIN (’23)}

December 29, 2021July 2, 2023

Inferno

Category	Text
Form	Epic Poetry
Genre	Comedy
Author	Dante Alighieri
Time	Early 14th Century
Language	Tuscan / Florentine Vernacular (Italian)
Featured In	Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)

Inferno is an epic poem by Dante Alighieri, and is the first part of Dante’s Divina Commedia, of The Divine Comedy. The poem follows the pilgrim Dante’s descent into hell, guided by ancient Roman poet Virgil, whose epic poem Aeneid also explores the afterlife / underworld at some point.

_{REFLECTIONS AND ENGAGEMENT}

The text of Inferno had evoked very different responses across the class. A good half of the class eventually produced creative projects inspired by the Cantos that they personally found particularly striking and memorable:

_{CANTO 5}

In Canto 5 of Dante’s Inferno, the lustful are punished in a vortex of conflicting winds. This particular canto stood out to me because Dante is ambiguous in his treatment of the sinners who reside in this section of hell. He neither condemns them totally, nor does he absolve them of fault for giving in to their own desires. In this sense, Canto 5 demonstrates an obvious conflation between the figures of Dante the poet and Dante the pilgrim, as well as a true human weakness towards how we might come to negotiate our approach and position on types of love.

The bedrock of my impression of this canto rested in one line that stood out to me. It is when Dante seems to grant to the reader as he writes that he “came into a place where all light is silent” (Alighieri, 5.28), which means that we have left the realm where expressions of human knowledge can be relied upon to convey what we see. As a result, I chose to steer my creative interpretation in the direction of expressionism. In expressionist fashion, I aimed to depict subjective emotions rather than objective reality, which was appropriate in the narrative of Canto 5 given that Dante himself acknowledges that the human understanding of reality seems to melt away. I chose to distort and exaggerate what this subjective experience might be through widely contrasting and vibrant colors to create a jarring effect. I hoped that my choice in depicting Canto 5 in an expressionist style would convey a hallucinatory lunacy that demands that we leave common sense behind as we approach Dante’s work.

^{READ MORE}

_{CANTO 13}

Canto 13 begins with Dante and Virgil entering a poisoned forest, with Harpies perching on the branches. Dante hears lamentations of pain, but he cannot find the source of the sound until he discovers that the sinners have become the trees, punished to be fed on by harpies for all eternity. I chose to re-image this canto because I was intrigued by Dante’s description of the forest and the visceral image of the horrific punishment endured by those who commit suicide.

In the process of researching and re-imagining this Canto, I hoped to draw insight into how this Canto fit into the entire text, particularly with regards to immortalization and memory. This is one of the many instances where Dante tempts the sinner into sharing their story through the promise of glorious immortalization, where the sinner’s real ‘truth’ is revealed. With this in mind, I am interested in Dante’s text as a strategy of liberation – not only is the sinner liberated from being merely identified by his sin through Dante’s recording of his story, but his soul is also emancipated from its roots in the tree. On another level, Dante himself is liberated from the despair of hell by writing and recording this story. Due to these complex intersecting layers of memory, history and stories, I saw a need to combine multiple art and aesthetic forms for this creative re-interpretation.

^{READ MORE}

_{CANTO 34}

In Canto 34 of Dante’s Inferno, Brutus, Cassius, Judas, and Satan are imprisoned in the Ninth Circle of Hell for their treachery – Judas and Brutus for betraying Caesar and Rome, Judas for betraying Jesus, and Satan, the ultimate sinner, for opposing God.

^{Dante’s Satan – A Moving Image, by SIDHARTH PRVAEEN (’21).}

I chose to create an animation that depicts Dante’s Satan as he is described in Canto 34. The piece features Satan with three heads, a pair of wings and a beating heart. The head in the middle chews Judas, the one on the left, Brutus, and the one on the right, Cassius. To accentuate the nature of their sins, I borrowed the contrapasso elements from the ninth bolgia and the violence-against-God subcircle and weaved them into my animation. I also wanted to expound on the idea that we had discussed in class about Dante’s Satan as punishment but also the punished. As for the background music, I reversed Sunn O)))’s song Báthory Erzsébet to get the unsettling, disturbing sounds that I added to my animation. The track has a dark yet powerful energy and it seemed apt to me that in a space that punishes and disempowers Satan, the song’s reverse would play in the background.

^{READ MORE}

My postcard evokes Dante’s completed imaginative vision of the afterlife. It can be viewed from both portrait (upright / inverted) and landscape perspectives. The postcard’s interpretative nature expresses the commedia in the Inferno as an immortalization the word of the divine (audaciously so through the words of Dante the poet) that is at once elusive in its reference to the source of evil and clear in the call for recognition and rejection of sin. The absurdity of the postcard compels its recipient to view the world through Dante’s critical humour, albeit in another time and space.

^{READ MORE}

I have chosen to create a medieval manuscript page imitation, completed on paper using pencil and ink. It references the opening and closing Cantos (with direct quotations) to Dante’s Inferno, and draws inspiration from artworks on the mapping of Dante’s hell, fallen angels, and Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Aside from a broad overview of the pilgrim’s journey, this creative piece is most concerned with Lucifer, who was very much diminished and glossed over in the text. This manuscript imitation identifies Lucifer as the pivot that holds together Dante’s proposed structure of the universe according to his theological ideas. The piece can be flipped upside-down. By flipping it anticlockwise, the continuity in the quotes and the grandeur of the pilgrim’s journey can be more keenly felt. In the inverted perspective, the motion of Lucifer’s fall from Heaven and grace, enhanced by the superimposed drifting feathers, is immortalised.

^{READ MORE}

My decision to paint Dante’s and Virgil’s encounter with Satan in Canto 34 after their long and arduous journey through hell is rooted in my fascination with Satan’s unusual presentation. In the popular culture of the 21st century, Satan is portrayed in a seemingly glorified light and regarded as the ‘king of hell’: someone devious, scheming, and to be greatly feared. However, in Inferno, Dante brings to life an almost pitiable version of Satan in his work’s anti-climactic ending. The devil is regarded as “the emperor of the dolorous kingdom” (34.28), the most damned and pathetic sinner to be sentenced to eternal punishment in hell. I drew inspiration from Gustave Doré, one of the most widely known and celebrated illustrators of Inferno for my painting. Doré’s depiction of Satan in this sphere of suffering encapsulates the image that came to my mind upon reading this Canto: one of absolute isolation and sorrow.

^{READ MORE}

This project is an exploration of centring what is within the margins, and bringing new knowledge to light. It attempts to illustrate details and motifs that relate to Dante’s growing consciousness of sin, having reached the end of the journey in Inferno. This project also seeks to explore the relationship between Christ and Hell. As we come to discover, Hell is His design wherein His standards go forth.

The form of a portfolio intends to show the process of creative exploration, somewhat like Dante’s journey through the various layers. In attempting to visually map what I think Dante sees, I am also hoping to touch on questions of authorship. Much like the intertextual motifs in Inferno, our ideas are not wholly our own, and our recreations / imagined realities are not wholly novel. Where do we draw them from, and what do we hope to achieve? What and how do we see?

^{READ MORE}

_REFERENCES

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno. Translated by Robert M. Durling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

_{IMAGE CREDITS}

^{[Featured Image] Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Robert Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). ISBN: 978-0195087444.}

_{CONTRIBUTED BY DR. EMILY DALTON, TOH HONG JIN (’23), VIVIEN SIM (’24), ASHLEY SIM SHUYI (’22), SIDHARTH PRAVEEN (’21), YAP JIA YI (’21), OSHEA REDDY (’24), & SIMONE TAM (’22)}

December 29, 2021July 6, 2023

The Earth and Its Dead (/Possibly on Earth)

Category	Text (Part of The Dominion of the Dead)
Form	Prose
Genre	Theory
Author	Robert Pogue Harrison
Time	2003
Language	English
Featured In	Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)

“The Earth and Its Dead” is the first chapter of Robert Pogue Harrison’s The Dominion of the Dead, a meditation on how ideas of death have shaped (and are still shaping) the interaction between the dead and the living world in Western civilisation.

_REFLECTIONS

The thing that struck me the most within the chapter was Harrison’s descriptions of how differently we process death because signs of it are hidden from plain sight. For instance, Harrison writes that “Ruins in an advanced state of ruination represent, or better they literally embody, the dissolution of meaning into matter.”¹ The quotation suggests that a person, when coming across a ruin, witnesses the decay of man-made meaning in the form of buildings into the seemingly neutral substance of dirt. An ancient building implies human intervention in the form of creation and art. Dirt and other natural elements such as plants do not do the same thing as easily. As such, a ruin represents the decay of human creation and by extension, human civilization itself.

More terrifying than the earth, Harrison offers the even scarier option of the sea. He notes that “no doubt that is why the sea, in its hostility to architecturally or textually imprinted memory, often figures as the imaginary agent of ultimate obliteration.”² When I read this, I got the image of a seaman faced with the vast expense of the sea. There is a distinct lack of landmarks within this image, which means that any instinctual navigational skills used on land are immediately rendered useless. As a result, the sea within this image seems timeless. There are no human marks of age in the same way that the earth preserves layers of buildings that one can peel back with some effort. One also cannot re-dig up evidence of the dead that were thrown in. This image of the sea is both terrifying and comforting to me, terrifying in that it feels disorienting because its nature rejects my understanding of it within the scope of the timeline of my life, and comforting in that within a post-industrial world that is changing at the speed of light, the apparent consistency of the sea appears to be a form of constant that one might rely on.

_APPROACH

As a result of these two images of the earth and the sea, I felt that I wanted to do a work that touches upon this image of death presented by this text, something that might present the same feelings of wonder I experienced when I read about how the earth and the sea hide the dead from us, and something that was disturbing and humorous at the same time.

Before this course, I had always rejected the reflection on death to cling on to the stagnant notion that it is something to be avoided. This opinion was convenient but also gave me a lot of fear due to an inability to reflect on the deaths surrounding me in my life. I took this course as an attempt to evoke some reflection and bring about some process of personal mourning. This text was a wonderful beginning for the course because it posed the notion of the perception of death being a product of environmental forces as much as them being a product of society in a way that I could still see around me.

I took inspiration from a number of artworks that focus on the reexamination of rather severe situations through the bizarre. The first work I looked at was a short film called Possibly in Michigan³, Cecelia Condit’s 1983 short art musical that discusses the issue of sexual violence through the presentation of cannibalism. One of the things that stood out to me was its reversal of roles between the stalker and the victim. We expect, if anyone, for the man (stalker) to kill and eat the woman (presumed victim). Yet, the beauty ends up the beast as the woman and her friend kill and eat the man instead. The women’s thorough job at cleaning his bones and disposal and their discussion of their friend’s consumption of her own dog suggest a prevalence of women killing and eating creatures around them. I found this to be particularly relevant to the above presentation of death because I wanted to explore a situation where one might be able to regain some control over the loss of human creation through the decay of ruins.

The second work that I looked at was of a collage by Richard Hamilton titled Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?

What I love about the collage is the unexpected nature of it. At first glance, it appears to be a hastily pulled-together image of a modern home with the latest appliances. One might go a step further and say that the couple and the appliances represent the ideal American home. Yet any observer who lingers for a second longer might notice how the figures appear to almost be caricatures of the highly sexualized tropes of masculinity and femininity, which seem to be at odds with the conservative nature of the traditional household. As a result, the contrast seems to be an alluring yet unsettling update to the notion of a household. I wanted to create a collage that presented this image of a traveler moving through ruins from the work but with elements that did not seem to match the tone of the original work. I sought to create a strong feeling of unsettlement and confusion that forces the viewer to slow down and perceive the artwork.

CREATIVE PROJECT BY WAN JIA LING (’23)

Possibly On Earth
Collage
An Interpretation of “The Earth and Its Dead”
Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)
2021

Artist’s Remarks

For this collage, I wanted to make something that touches upon both the idea of death in the sea and on land. I decided to place the ruins of the buildings underwater to create the inversion of the notion that one cannot build anything within the sea. Within the last few years, it has become increasingly clear that humans are capable of locating some things within the ocean. I hope that the setting under the sea and delocalized buildings are disorienting to the viewer in a way not to suggest the destruction of a particular city, but to suggest that the destruction of places is universal.

Within The Earth and its Dead, Harrison presents the image of a modern traveler coming across a ruin from a time before themselves. I loved this image of the disconnection between the cultural context that the traveler comes from and the guesswork involved in trying to incorporate this bit of human history into the traveler’s own cultural context. As a result, I tried to force the viewer to consider that through the usage of ruins of architecture from this century and the whimsical painting of a couple on a romantic boat trip from what appears to be the 1800s. The cheerful image of their trip stands in stark contrast to the ruins, but also inverts the timelines. This seems to present the travelers not as pilgrims, but as tourists to the location of destruction. Their ornate boat and clothing suggest a personal intent to have an enjoyable trip set in the context of past destruction. The grey and bland color palette of the ruins is a familiar image from movies of apocalypse, which gives the modern viewer a feeling of dread and grief as one can easily imagine the loss of lives. The cheerful couple seem almost sadistic in their ignorance of this destruction around them. This was done intentionally to encourage the viewer to consider how we view ruins of today. One tries to fit them into their own context or tries to be educated through the wide availability of sources today. Yet we cannot deny that we often visit sites of old ruins with an odd cheerful fascination, while a survivor from the time may only see the complete collapse of their meaning of civilization.

The hand reaching in to pluck mushrooms was made with reference to the elements of absurdity in Possibly In Michigan. Harrison talks about the uncaring nature of the sea, which is not bound to human understanding of grief and loss. Amidst the terrible nature of the destruction and apparent casual cruelty of the couple, the giant hand and mushrooms suggest a world larger than this destruction. When we see the ruins, we see a loss of life as we know it. When the owner of the giant hand sees the ruins, they see a source of food. As a result, the viewer is forced to understand that the humans within this picture can hardly be considered the center of the picture. Other organisms continue with their lives against the backdrop of man’s attempts to grapple with and understand their own losses.

Finally, I made a version that moves because I enjoyed how the elements flew into frame one by one. It gave this collage an additional layer of artificiality, which it should. I made an artificial portrayal of nature, designed to evoke emotions and present my take on Harrison’s writing. Harrison, too, has created a way of examining death that others attempt to peer into. I simply wanted to comment on the artificial nature of the eternal human struggle to understand the collective history of one’s people that made this course so enjoyable.

_FOOTNOTES

¹_{Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (University of Chicago Press, 2010).}

² _Ibid.

³ _{The story centers around a young woman who meets her friend at the mall. They shop around and discuss their friend, who killed and ate her own poodle. They are stalked by a man who is disguised by a number of human and animal masks. He stalks the woman home and assaults her. Before he can kill her, he is killed by her friend with a gun. The two women cut him up and eat him. The film ends with the woman dumping a garbage bag with what one may presume to be the remains of his body onto her driveway for the trash-collector.}

⁴ _{“Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes so Different, so Appealing?,” Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation, May 13, 2021), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_what_is_it_that_makes_today%27s_homes_so_different,_so_appealing%3F.}

_REFERENCES

“The Dominion of the Dead.” University of Chicago Press, May 1, 2005. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo3617929.html.

“Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes so Different, so Appealing?” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, May 13, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_what_is_it_that_makes_today%27s_homes_so_different,_so_appealing%3F.

^{CONTRIBUTED BY WAN JIA LING (’23)}

November 8, 2021July 6, 2023

Earth Upon Earth (/Erthe)

Category	Text
Form	Poetry
Author	Unknown
Time	Mid 14th Century
Language	Middle English
Featured In	Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)

The anonymous poem “Earth Upon Earth” (Middle English: “Erthe Upon Erthe”) is an ambiguous exploration of the circularity of human experience upon earth – one that sees humans come from and return to the earth in life and death.

_{THE POEM}

Middle English	Translation
Erþe toc of erþe erþe wyþ woh erþe oþer erþe to þe erþe droh erþe leyde erþe in erþene þroh þo heuede erþe of erþe erþe ynoh	Earth took of earth, earth with woe, Earth other earth to the earth drew, Earth laid earth in an earthen tomb, Then had earth of earth, earth enough.

_{REFLECTIONS AND ENGAGEMENT}

Since reading this poem in the very first week of this course, I have carried it with me in the back of my mind, contemplating the relationship between man and the earth and what it means to be alive. This concern eventually culminated into a creative project.

CREATIVE PROJECT BY OSHEA REDDY (‘24)

Erthe
Sculpture
An Interpretation of “Earth Upon Earth”
Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)
2021

Artist’s Remarks

In my creative interpretation, I chose to create a spherical model comprised of layers of torn pieces of paper and pressed rose petals. In trying to capture the poem’s idea of the earth being a vessel containing the human life cycle within it, I envisioned this sphere to be an embodiment of both the earth and the endless cycle of life to death that is contained within it. The poem is equivocal in how it conflates the past and the present, the beginning and the end, and puts forward contradictory ideas of comfort and claustrophobia. To capture this ambiguity, my sphere is made up of recycled materials in an attempt to extend their lifespans by giving them new purpose. For instance, the dried rose petals are of a dead rose; in using its petals in the model, I recognize that I have created an ambiguous moment in the rose’s lifespan, where it is neither entirely dead nor entirely alive.

The pieces of paper have been soaked in tea to obtain a sepia tint, and they have both the poem and the word “earth” printed on them in as many different languages as I could fit onto the model. This was in an attempt to exhaust the capacities of each individual language in trying to express death, mirroring the manner in which the poem pushes linguistic capabilities in its intense repetition of the word “earth”. In the single word “earth”, the poem captures the entirety of human existence by speaking of the condition of our mortality without once mentioning the word “death”.

Ultimately, my sphere – ‘ball’ – became a physical manifestation of my reading of the poem, allowing me the exhilarating opportunity to indulge in the magic of cyclical existence and the powers of the earth in creating and ending human existence.

_{IMAGE CREDITS}

^{[Fig. 1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Of-Earth-You-Were-Made%3A-Constructing-the-Bilingual-Harrington/97150b0cee93ca06ac6f99b1ef518a0c7cc4a041}

_{CONTRIBUTED BY OSHEA REDDY (’24)}

October 8, 2021July 2, 2023

Lanval

Category	Text (Part of The Lais of Marie de France)
Form	Poetry (Lai)
Genre	Romance
Author	Marie de France
Time	Late 12th Century
Language	Anglo-Norman French
Featured In	Literature and Humanities 1 (YCC1111); Medieval Romance: Magic and the Supernatural (YHU2309)

“Lanval,” the fifth of Marie de France’s lais, is perhaps the one most directly influenced by ideas of the Celtic otherworld, and the only lai to allude to the figures of Arthurian romance. It appears in her collection after “Bisclavret” and before “Les Deus Amanz.”

_SUMMARY

The lai begins with the knight Lanval’s departure from King Arthur’s court on account of having been forgotten in a round of gift-giving. Pensive and melancholy, Lanval rides to a nearby stream, where he catches sight of two beautiful young women, who claim to have been sent by their mistress to fetch him. Lanval follows these messengers to a magnificent pavilion, where he meets a woman who offers him her love along with an inexhaustible capacity to bestow gifts: he can enjoy both of these, she tells him, as long as he keeps their love a secret.

Back in Arthur’s court, Lanval gains a new reputation for generosity, and Queen Guinevere offers him her love. When he rebuffs her advances, she accuses him of homosexuality, telling King Arthur that in fact she had been the one to refuse Lanval and that, moreover, Lanval had boasted of having a lover more beautiful than Guinevere herself. The outraged king forces Lanval to submit to a trial: if he is able to summon a lady who turns out to be more beautiful than the queen, he will be exonerated; otherwise, he will be banished from the court. Knowing he has violated his vow to secrecy, Lanval at first despairs of being rescued, but at the last moment, two ladies arrive in court to announce their mistress’s approach. Lanval’s lover at last appears, and when she rides into the palace and unveils herself, all marvel at her unequalled splendour. After declaring that she loves Lanval, she begins to ride off; Lanval leaps up behind her onto the horse, and the two disappear forever into Avalon.

_DISCUSSION

Sight and secrecy are both significant to the lai, which dramatizes the tensions between a courtly culture of lavish display and the erotic allure of the secret liaison. The magical realm of Lanval’s mistress, which exceeds Arthur’s in opulence, offers an implicit critique of the court: whereas readers might expect the legendary King Arthur to perfectly embody the chivalric virtue of largesse, Lanval is in fact overlooked and excluded at the court, and the fantasy of infinite generosity is manifest only in the faerie realm. Through this juxtaposition, the lai explores how material wealth and economies of desire are mutually implicated: even the beauty of Lanval’s mistress is imagined as a commodity that can be objectively measured, exonerating him from the charges against him at the trial.

Image from author Mark E. Fisher's site.

Of all Marie’s lais, “Lanval” contains the clearest example of an Otherworld, a space contiguous with the world in which the protagonists live, but which offers an alternative reality free from the social constraints and hierarchies that order the outside world, a space where desires are fulfilled and obstacles fall away. The sudden appearance of the ladies in waiting, the marvellous pavilion, the injunction to secrecy, and the magical gift bear some resemblance to elements of otherworldly spaces in Celtic folklore, one repository of narratives which Marie may have encountered in some form. Such a cultural borrowing—along with her insistence on Breton sources—can be seen as part of a larger pattern of appropriating British and Welsh material for an Anglo-Norman audience in the post-colonial culture of twelfth-century England, reminding us of the complexity of political and cultural identities in the context in which she writes.

_REFERENCES

Marie de France. Marie de France: Poetry. Translated by Dorothy Gilbert, W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

_{IMAGE CREDITS}

^{[Featured Image & Fig. 1] https://lanvaltheloverblog.wordpress.com/summary/}

^{[Fig. 2] https://markfisherauthor.com/2016/12/ancient-celtic-otherworld-part/}

^{CONTRIBUTED BY DR. EMILY DALTON}

October 8, 2021July 2, 2023

Le Fresne

Category	Text (Part of The Lais of Marie de France)
Form	Poetry (Lai)
Genre	Romance
Author	Marie de France
Time	Late 12th Century
Language	Anglo-Norman French
Featured In	Literature and Humanities 1 (YCC1111); Medieval Romance: Magic and the Supernatural (YHU2309)

“Le Frene (or “Le Fresne”),” the third of Marie’s lais, is a story of twins that explores ideas of resemblance and likeness, showing how they can often manifest themselves in unexpected ways. It appears in Marie’s collection after “Equitan” and before “Bisclavret.”

_SUMMARY

The lai tells of two knights in Brittany, one of whom has a wife who gives birth to two sons. The other knight’s wife accuses this woman of adultery, claiming that no mother ever bore two children at once without their having two different fathers (a common belief in medieval Europe). Her accusation returns to haunt her when she herself gives birth to twin daughters several months later. Fearful of shame and ridicule, she decides she will kill one of the children, but is persuaded by a servant to have the child secreted away. After a long journey, the servant eventually leaves the child cradled in the branches of an ash tree, where she is soon discovered by the inhabitants of a nearby convent. The abbess of the convent decides to raise her as her niece, naming her “le Frene” (meaning “ash”) after the tree in which she was discovered.

World History Commons, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

Le Frene grows up and becomes the lover of a wealthy nobleman. She leaves the convent to live with him, but his barons begin to pressure him to instead marry a woman of legitimate birth. The woman he agrees to marry turns out to be Le Frene’s twin sister, La Coldre (whose name means “hazel tree”). Le Frene’s identity is revealed when her mother, present for the wedding, recognizes the linen which le Frene has laid out on the bed of the newlyweds as the very cloth in which she wrapped her infant child before abandoning her so many years ago. Her aristocratic origins thus revealed, le Frene is able to marry the man she loves, and her sister goes on to marry another wealthy nobleman in the land.

_DISCUSSION

As in “Bisclavret,” the crisis of “Le Frene” is precipitated by a woman’s treacherous speech, in this case the slanderous words of the mother who, in maligning her neighbor, implicates all women in her statement and thus unwittingly accuses herself.

Chance and coincidence play a significant role in the lai, so much so that at times they verge on the marvelous: despite the fact that the narrative features two sets of twins, the scene of recognition at the end of the lai is sparked not by any physical resemblance between the sisters, but on account of le Frene’s chance impulse to replace an old bedspread with her luxurious brocade, an exotic object originally imported from Constantinople and given to her mother as a gift. At the same time, inexplicably and mysteriously, both sisters are named after trees, and other characters in the lai discuss the qualities each sister shares with the tree whose name she bears: le Frene, they suggest, should be replaced by la Coldre because the hazel tree bears fruit while the ash does not. These and other aporia show how the concepts of resemblance, relation, and inheritance are often oblique and elusive: even as le Frene is eventually restored to her proper inheritance and her innate nobility is recognized, this restoration takes place through circuitous and unexpected means.

Perhaps some of the elusiveness of these concepts arises from the lai’s contradictory notions about twinning and doubling. As one critic notes, “le Frene” appears torn between the concept of twins as duality (competing opposites) and dualism (complementary parts of a whole); “these two views suggest the mind at work making sense of twins as a puzzle or contradiction: they are two and yet a unit, the same and the other” (Bruckner, 946). It is this disorienting doubling that propels the narrative of “Le Frene,” which concludes somewhat uneasily when the protagonist’s hidden identity is revealed and the twins are finally recognized as a pair who take their complementary places within the family newly restored to harmony.

_REFERENCES

Marie de France. Marie de France: Poetry. Translated by Dorothy Gilbert, W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, “Le Fresne’s Model for Twinning in the Lais of Marie de France,” MLN 121.4 (2006): 946-960.

_{IMAGE CREDITS}

^{[Featured Image & Fig. 1] https://worldhistorycommons.org/analyzing-literary-sources}

^{CONTRIBUTED BY DR. EMILY DALTON}

October 8, 2021July 6, 2023

Laüstic

Category	Text (Part of The Lais of Marie de France)
Form	Poetry (Lai)
Genre	Romance
Author	Marie de France
Time	Late 12th Century
Language	Anglo-Norman French
Featured In	Literature and Humanities 1 (YCC1111); Medieval Romance: Magic and the Supernatural (YHU2309)

The eighth lai in the collection, “Laüstic”, considers the tension between the need for secrecy in love affairs, the impossibility of privacy, and the act of revealing tokens of love to an outsider. It comes after the lai of “Yönec” and before “Milun”. It is also one of the shorter lais, consisting 160 lines.

_SUMMARY

The nightingale is killed and thrown upon the lady.

The lai begins like many others, with an extramarital affair, although the lovers in this case are neighbours. They communicated through their windows, tossing each other gifts and pleasing each other with words and speeches about love. One summer, the lady’s husband demanded to know her whereabouts as he does not see her often. The lady reveals that she has been enchanted by a nightingale and its song, angering her husband, who then captures the bird and kills it before her eyes. She sends the dead nightingale to her lover, who then makes a reliquary and keeps the bird within, from then on carrying it with him always.

_DISCUSSION

The setting of the mansions is described to be “strong and fortified” (Marie de France 120), castle-like despite the fact that their inhabitants are only ranked as knights. Even with all the fortifications, and the obstacle of “a great high wall of dark-hued stone” (121), the lovers are somehow still able to see and communicate with each other in secret easily, as though there was no barrier between them at all, and that it seems as though they are able to do so simply because there is such a need. Nonetheless, the close proximity of the mansions is a double-edged sword that makes it easy for the lady’s husband to notice her absences and even easier for him to catch the nightingale, which is often a metaphor for spring awakening and love.

The nightingale can be seen as a kind of token of love that allows the lovers to recognise each other. However, in this case, the token of love is revealed to someone aside from the lover, namely the lady’s husband, who then became angered and sought to ruin it. One may infer that the husband’s interrogation is a form of test for the relationship between the lady and her lover, and one that the lady fails the moment she speaks of the nightingale. Her reveal of the token of love to an outsider essentially exposes her affair, which perhaps constitutes a betrayal towards her true lover. Therefore, no further tests on the relationship are introduced, nor does the relationship continue, and the lai ends shortly after.

An example of a reliquary. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

One may question whether there was truly a specific nightingale which the lovers took as their token of love, given that it is only introduced when the lady is interrogated. In any case, the nightingale’s death suggests that the “birdsong”, which represents their loving meetings (122), has been abruptly cut short, and the death of the songbird corresponds to the death of their love. As a testament to this, the lady’s lover even places the dead bird within a “reliquary” (124)—a container for sacred relics—implying that their love is henceforth a thing of the past. Thus, the love symbolised by the nightingale, exposed and revealed when it is alive, is able to remain hidden away with the reliquary “sealed”. Yet Marie makes a final, somewhat playful remark on this story being spread to many people such that “it was no secret very long”, suggesting the action by the lady’s lover to be ultimately futile.

_{CREATIVE INTERPRETATIONS}

^{In Memoriam, by MANISHA SAIGAL (’24).}

The Lais by Marie de France is a collection of poems that explore different forms and boundaries of love and suffering. “Laüstic”, in particular, connects love and music in the form of birdsong; the song of a nightingale represents the connection between two distant lovers. I thus decided to reimagine “Laüstic” from The Lais as a 3-minute orchestral piece. I chose to write it as an orchestral piece to allow for more fluidity, conventional flexibility and elaborate nuances which enhance the emotion and imagery exhibited by the music. This piece is titled In Memoriam as it is written in memory of the life and death of the nightingale in the poem, and concomitantly, the love it represents.

^{READ MORE}

^{Mal Mariée: Dance as a Medium for Resistance, by CLAIRE ZHAI HUAN TING (’24).}

“Laüstic” is a poem that retells the experience of entrapment, encapsulated by the term Mal Mariée, a literary trope that appeared commonly in Medieval Romance. It refers to an unhappily married woman, under the constant surveillance and control of her husband. This piece of work seeks to pay tribute to the experiences of struggle of the female protagonist, and to explore dance as a medium for resistance, transposed to a modern setting. The definition of the body as a “complex, contradictory, and ever changing cultural site of ‘discursive intercourse’ which is constructed dialogically by the dancer and her audiences” (Reed, 519) equips movement with the tools to not only replicate experiences from the past, but also to inject new meaning into the endeavors and actions of characters. In this project, dance is examined as a channel for non-verbal communication, a physically situated activity that yields implicit meaning, and finally as a means for agency in the form of embodiment, therefore reflecting its capacity for resistance.

^{READ MORE}

_REFERENCES

Marie de France. Marie de France: Poetry. Translated by Dorothy Gilbert, W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

_{IMAGE CREDITS}

^{[Featured Image & Fig. 1] https://karligrazman.wordpress.com/author/karligrazman/}

^{[Fig. 2] https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/464490}

^{CONTRIBUTED BY TOH HONG JIN (’23),} ^{MANISHA SAIGAL (’24), & CLAIRE ZHAI HUAN TING (’24)}

October 8, 2021July 4, 2023

Bisclavret

Category	Text (Part of The Lais of Marie de France)
Form	Poetry (Lai)
Genre	Romance
Author	Marie de France
Time	Late 12th Century
Language	Anglo-Norman French
Featured In	Literature and Humanities 1 (YCC1111); Medieval Romance: Magic and the Supernatural (YHU2309); Real and Imagined Animals in Medieval Literature (YHU2330)

“Bisclavret,” the fourth of Marie de France’s lais, concerns shape-shifting, metamorphosis, and the liminal space between animal and human. It appears in her collection after “Le Frene” and before “Lanval.”

_SUMMARY

The lai recounts the story of a noble knight whose wife presses him to explain his weekly disappearances. He insists that revealing his secret to her will cause him to lose both her love and his own self. She persists in questioning him, however, and he finally admits that during his absences he becomes a werewolf, concealing his clothes beside a ruined chapel in the forest. Terrified and revolted, his wife colludes with a neighboring knight to steal her husband’s discarded clothing, without which he will forever remain a werewolf.

The following year, the king catches sight of the werewolf while hunting in the forest. With the royal hunting dogs in pursuit, the werewolf suddenly leaps toward the king and kisses his foot. Moved by this seemingly human gesture, which he interprets as a sign that the werewolf possesses human intelligence, the king decides to bring the werewolf back to his court, where he becomes well-loved for his gentleness. Meanwhile, his wife has married the knight with whom she conspired. When this man appears one day at the court, the werewolf rushes to attack him, and on a separate occasion he attacks his wife, biting off her nose. Perceiving that there must be some motive for this uncharacteristic violence, a wise man at the court suggests that the king interrogate the wife, who then confesses what she has done. Once the werewolf’s clothes are recovered and he is granted the privacy of the king’s bedchamber, the act of dressing allows him to transform himself into (or be recognized as) a man. The treacherous couple is exiled from the kingdom, and henceforth many of their female descendants are born without noses.

_DISCUSSION

Images like this one from the 13th century Rochester Bestiary unsettle the boundary between human and animal: here, we see a man who has been struck dumb by the gaze of a werewolf. In order to regain his speech, he must tear off his clothing and strike two stones together. Rochester Bestiary, London British Library MS 12 F.xiii, folio 29r.

The lai invites us to reflect on the continuum between human and animal, revealing how the same behaviors can be read as human or as bestial in different contexts (biting off his wife’s nose, for instance, is taken as a sign of a human desire for revenge). Through language and naming, Marie implies, we tend to create categories that seem definitive, but these ostensible distinctions may be an illusion based only on what we call things. Marie begins the lai by introducing two “kinds” of werewolf, the “garulf” (the Norman word for werewolf), characterized by violence and aggression toward humans, and the much more sympathetic “bisclavret” (the Breton word for werewolf). As the lai goes on, however, it becomes clear that this distinction may be a difference in name only. Even the line between human and animal turns out to be unstable: humanity is not limited to those with a stable human form, and what counts as humanity and courtliness is a matter of opinion rather than essence. Indeed, it is striking that the werewolf can only “become” human again once he has recovered his clothing, suggesting that humanity resides not in innate nobility of character but in external signifiers.

The world which “Bisclavret” presents is thus one of fluid movement and translatability between forms. In this context, the lai’s title takes on an added significance: the Norman word “garwulf” comes from the Germanic root-words meaning “man” and “wolf,” suggesting a hybrid creature that is half-man, half-wolf. “Bisclavret,” only the other hand, comes from the Breton words bleiz (“wolf”) and claffet (“ill, rabid”), hence “wolf-sick.” Imagining the werewolf state as a temporary affliction of the human, it suggests that animality is not so much a distinct category as a constitutive part of human identity.

_REFERENCES

Marie de France. Marie de France: Poetry. Translated by Dorothy Gilbert, W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

_{ADDITIONAL RESOURCES}

The Rochester Bestiary: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Rochester_Bestiary

_{IMAGE CREDITS}

^{[Featured Image & Fig. 1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RochesterBestiaryFolio029rvWolves.jpg}

^{CONTRIBUTED BY DR. EMILY DALTON}