Melusine

The Middle English Melusine is a prose romance produced by an anonymous author in the late 15th century. It is a reasonably faithful translation of the French Roman de Mélusine, completed by Jean d’Arras in 1393 at the behest of Jean, Duc de Berri. Jean’s original text, together with a verse version, Roman de Partenay, penned by La Coudrette c. 1401–1405, enjoyed immense popularity in medieval western Europe, with a rich array of manuscripts and incunabula being produced and translations emerging in German, Dutch, and Castilian. There also exists an English translation of the verse romance, The Romans of Parthenay (c. 1500). A pseudohistorical narrative weaving elements of romance and chronicle, Melusine traces the foundation of the House of Lusignan to its mythical ancestor. Cursed to metamorphose into a snake below the waist on Saturday evenings, Melusine’s salvation is contingent upon her marrying a man who swears never to learn of or speak about her secret. After marrying a nobleman of Poitiers, Melusine quickly transforms the wild landscape of Poitou in northwestern France into a rich, cultivated, and prosperous region, constructing an impressive series of fortresses and churches within a matter of days. The first fortress becomes the realm’s main seat of power and is named “Lusignan” in honor of its patroness. Melusine and her husband soon have ten sons, most of whom bear strange facial markings that seem to allude to a supernatural parentage. Despite this, many of the sons venture off on crusade and conquest, spreading their dynasty’s influence across Europe and the Near East. Eventually, Melusine’s snake tail is discovered by her husband; when he reveals her secret to the court, she is forced to leave the human world forever and roam the Earth as a dragon until Judgement Day. As her curse dictates, Melusine must return to Lusignan to hail death and the transferal of power within her genealogical line. Little is known about the precise origins of the Middle English Melusine. As with many insular romances, the translator and patron remain anonymous, though the text’s colossal length would indicate a wealthy clientele. Contrary to literary trends in France and Burgundy, prose narratives written in English appeared relatively late in the 15th century, only truly gaining popularity after the arrival of Caxton’s printing press. The Middle English Melusine is therefore an important example of England’s early prose romances in the vernacular.

A Taste for Trifles

Chapter 3 focuses on how printers began to develop readers’ taste for cheap, entertaining pamphlets that frequently featured scurrilous humour or sensational episodes of a violent or sexual nature. It begins with Caxton’s prose romances and the way in which Caxton justified their reading by underlining their exemplarity. It then goes on to consider how, after Caxton’s death, the intervention of a Dutch printer, Gheraert Leeu, resulted in an increasing emphasis on the recreational pleasure to be had from reading romances rather than their moral function. It explores how de Worde built on this by first printing verse romances and then gests, but suggests it was another Antwerp printer, Jan van Doesborch, who exploited readers’ interest in the sensational to the utmost. The chapter ends by considering why a flourishing market in romances, jests, and bawdy fiction—for what were sometimes termed ‘nouelles’ and ‘tryfellys’—disappeared in the mid-1530s.

Provincializing Romance

This chapter begins with Coke’s and Selden’s speeches on liberty of person in the wake of the Five Knights’ Case (1627). Here civil law and supra-legal principles, or the national and the universal, converge, in a way running parallel to the period’s engagements of the romance tradition, which historically claims common cultural ground for Western Christendom but becomes dominated in the seventeenth century by narrower concerns. This shift is visible in John Barclay’s Argenis, effecting an unlikely marriage of romance and raison d’état. That proves to be an influential model in the prose romances of the 1650s—considered most closely are Theophania and Sir Percy Herbert’s Cloria and Narcissus. In a way recalling Arendt’s remarks on nomos, likely a response to Schmitt, these romances of the 1650s solidify the social ties of a disempowered elite while displaying a unique and fleeting posture of openness on the question of sovereignty.

Pure Northerness – William Morris and C.S. Lewis

Having seen one of Rackham’s illustrations to Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods in his youth, C.S. Lewis became instantly attracted to “pure ‘Northernness’”, a feature he would later associate with Scandinavian literature and mythology, Wagner’s music and William Morris’ romances. In a similar manner, Morris describes his reading of the Norse sagas as a momentous experience which influenced his later writings. However, the two authors seem to have responded to different aspects of the sagas: Morris to their realism of presentation and to their worship of courage, and Lewis to their use of magic and myth. Paradoxically, in spite of Morris’ paganism, his prose romances played an important part in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity.

Upstarts and Much Ado

Starting from a discussion of imitation and parody in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, this chapter moves through Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote to her compilation of sources, Shakespear Illustrated (1753–4). Objections to Shakespeare’s derivativeness, of the kind advanced by Lennox, go back to Robert Greene’s pamphlet Greenes Groatsworth of Witte (1592), where the dramatist is denounced as an ‘vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers’. To reconstruct the methods of Elizabethan playmaking is to find that the recycling of plays, poems, and prose romances on stage was standard. Competitiveness among players and playwrights led to accusations of plagiarism. What gives an edge to the accusation that Shakespeare is a crow in borrowed plumage is the notion of him as an upstart. Drawing on texts about acting, fashion in hair and dress, and the fashioning of plays, discussion moves from the Groatsworth to Much Ado as a comedy about upstarts that turns on borrowed attire.

Shakespeare's Originality

How original was Shakespeare and how was Shakespeare original? This book sets about answering these questions by putting them in historical context and investigating how the dramatist worked with his sources: plays, poems, chronicles, and prose romances. Shakespeare’s Originality unlocks its topic by showing through a series of case studies that range across the output—from the mature comedies to the great tragedies, from Richard III to The Tempest—what can be learned about the artistry of the plays and the nature of early modern authorship by thinking about these sources (including newly identified ones) after several decades of neglect. Discussion is enriched by such matters as Elizabethan ruffs and feathers, actors’ footwork, chronicle history, adaptations, notable performances, debts to classical tragedy, scepticism, magic and science, the agricultural revolution, and ecological catastrophe. This work is intended to be accessible to the general reader as well as a resource for students.

Topic, Focus and null subjects in Old French

Old French subject pronouns (Spro) were omissible if postverbal (Foulet 1928), but not freely so (Vance 1997, Zimmermann 2014). This article addresses their partial omissibility in discourse-syntax terms, following work on partial null subject languages by Holmberg and Nikanne (2002) and Modesto (2008). An observational study of dialogic responses in 13th century prose romances is first reported, finding strong indications of covariation between the Topic/Focus status of an initial non-subject constituent and the expression/omission of post-verbal Spro. A quantitative investigation, in such texts, of preposed discourse-linked anaphoric constituents and preposed intensifiers, taken as diagnostic of Topichood and Focushood respectively, confirmed this analysis. We take null Spro to be available (i) when a null Topic operator targets left-peripheral TopicP, and (ii) with a left-peripheral Focused expression. When a discourse-linked non-subject constituent occupies TopicP, however, Spro must be overt.

Stemmatics and the Old French Prose Arthurian Romance Editions

Stemmatics, that is the branch of philology concerned with analysing the relationships among extant variant versions of a text, is not a common tool in the study of the manuscript traditions of Arthurian Old French Prose Romances. Moreover, the lack of faith in the method has often led to its being implemented unsatisfactorily. However, it would be possible to proceed differently in applying stemmatics to this type of textual tradition; and this method could also be very useful in order to understand the genesis of texts, their reconstruction, and their reception. The discussion focuses on editions of the most important romances, such as the