Middle English lyrics and ballads

A large body of medieval lyrics still survives. Most of them are anonymous.

They are re-workings of existing themes, conventions or poetical forms common throughout the Middle Ages

But in the best of them there is a freshness of response to the conventions that can give the impression of an individual voice.

Poems were often set to music and meant to be sung

Thus, we have:

-the spring song,

-the love lyric

-the love complaint,

-the religious lyrics

Middle English metrics doesn't break completely with the Old English tradition, but rather develops it.

The great novelty introduced by French literary models were:

rhyme

stanzaic forms.

These were written in patterns of metrical feet.

Even though the French models supplanted the older English tradition of alliterative verse,

alliteration is still a core device in English poetry

Sottoargomento

In the Middle Ages, verse was still much more of a everyday medium for expression than it is now. So, for example:

Sermons could be written in verse

scientific discourse could contain verse.

Tecnically speaking, the ballad can be defined as a form of popular verse

usually narrative

and employing

very direct language

simple metrical pattern:

stanzas of 4 lines (quatrains)

rhyming abcb or abab

4 beats in each line

The musical origin of the ballad is testified by its name

which comes from the Old French balade

Ballads are:

short

anonymous

narrative poems

song

elaboreted by oral trasmission over the ages

Most ballads speak about of

tragic events (death)

including supernatural elements

They are based on:

romantic figures

real historical events

The most popular form of art in the Middle Ages was drama

in the sense that it was a public show attended by most social classes.

The 2 main forms of drama in England were

the Mystery Plays

based on episodes from the Bible

the Morality Plays

based on a moral and allegorical reading of man's life

Drama was written in English, not in Latin.

The sudden appearence of drama has 3 important reasons

the rise of the middle class;

the grown of towns

the formation of religious and trade guilds.

Medieval drama doesn't descend directly from classical drama.

The origins lie instead in church cerimonies like

Christmas

Easter

The next step cam when the rudimentary but popular form of drama was taken over by town corporations.

When drama moved from the church to the streets, the new representations were called "plays".

the best form of literary prose in the Middle Ages is the romance.

has as subject the deeds of knights:

fighting

romantic love

supernatural events.

the great age of the medieval romance was the 12th and early 13th centuries.

It was the expression of the highly cultivated aristocratic society of France.

Ethically, the true knight is bound in absolute duty to

his God

his king

his lady

Medieval romance is a portrayal of feudal knighthood in both its exterior and ethical aspectcs.

the romance may be considered as the ancestor of the modern novel, drew on a number of sources, both

classical

contemporary

The stories that make up the corpus of medieval romance materials, called "matters", are divided into 3 groups:

the matter of France; with the stories of Charlemagne, Roland exc...

the matter of Britain; with the stories of the Arthurian legend

the matter of Rome; including the stories of Troy and the stories of Alaxander the Great.

The best example of an English medieval romance is Morte D'Arthur, by Thomas Malory who put together French and English versions of the various stories of the knights of the Round Table

and gave them narrative unity:

the romance begins with the birth of king Arthur

and ends with his death.