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Courtly circles in England are his first audience.Ĭhaucer's public career is one of almost unbroken success in two consecutive reigns. Their range, from high romance to bawdy comedy, is well calculated to hold the listeners spellbound. Chaucer's poems are designed to be read aloud, in the first instance by himself. There can rarely have been a more inspired appointment. The young man's wife, Philippa, is already a lady-in-waiting to the queen.Ī few years later Chaucer becomes one of the king's esquires, with duties which include entertaining the court with stories and music. In 1367 one of four new 'yeomen of the chamber' in the household of Edward III is Geoffrey Chaucer, then aged about twenty-seven. The green knight spares his life but sends him home to Arthur's court wearing the wife's girdle as a badge of shame. In a tale of love (for the green knight's wife) and subsequent deceit, Gawain emerges with little honour. The rest of the poem concerns Gawain, a year later, at the green knight's castle. He cuts off the head of the green knight, who rides away with it. He invites any knight to strike him with an axe and to receive the blow back a year later. The characters derive partly from Arthurian legend.Ī mysterious green knight arrives one Christmas at the court of King Arthur. Where Piers Plowman is tough and gritty, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (dating from the same period) is more polished in its manner and more courtly in its content.
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It contains sharply observed details of a corrupt and materialistic age ( Wycliffe is among Langland's English contemporaries). Though mainly a spiritual quest, the work also has a political element. Piers the ploughman is one of a group of characters searching for Christian truth in the complex setting of a dream. If so he spends some twenty years, from about 1367, adjusting and refining his epic creation. It is considered probable that all three are by the same author. Piers Plowman exists in three versions, the longest amounting to more than 7000 lines. Nothing else, apart from this poem, is known of him. The narrator of Piers Plowman calls himself Will occasional references in the text suggest that his name may be Langland. Of these two great English alliterative poems, the second is entirely anonymous and the first virtually so. Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain: 14th century By contrast Chaucer, a poet of the court, ushers in a new era of English literature. Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain are masterpieces which look back to Old English.
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The hammer blows of alliteration are a type of verbal athleticism more likely to draw applause in a hall full of warriors.īoth traditions achieve a magnificent flowering in England in the late 14th century, towards the end of the Middle English period. Elegant or subtle rhymes have a courtly flavour. German poetry depends more on rhythm and stress, with repeated consonants (alliteration) to bind the phrases. The French poetic tradition inclines to lines of a regular metrical length, usually linked by rhyme into couplets or stanzas. French and Germanic influences subsequently compete for the mainstream role in English literature. The most significant turning point, from about 1100, is the development of Middle English - differing from Old English in the addition of a French vocabulary after the Norman conquest. Even so, there is a continuous linguistic development between the two. It is incomprehensible to a reader familiar only with modern English. This epic poem of the 8th century is in Anglo-Saxon, now more usually described as Old English. The story of English literature begins with the Germanic tradition of the Anglo-Saxon settlers.