The Alliterative Revival: A Poetic Movement of the Late Middle Ages
Definition
The Alliterative Revival was a poetic movement of the late 14th and 15th centuries that produced a large number of poems written in alliterative form, often unrhymed, but sometimes using rhyme as well as alliteration. At the center of the movement is a group of poems of high literary quality, several of which present historical material, such as the life of Alexander the Great, Jewish history, the Troy story, and the last years of Arthur. There are also poems based on Old Testament stories (Cleanness and Patience), romances (William of Palerne and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), and poems presenting social, political, and ethical issues (Winners and Waster and Piers Plowman). What defines the works as a group is their metrical practice, but the poems also share certain characteristic attitudes of high seriousness and moral integrity.
Origin
The use of alliteration as a structural principle of a verse line is an ancient Germanic form, and it is natural to assume a link with pre-Conquest verse. Features of vocabulary also recall the poetic diction of Anglo-Saxon poets. However, as far as the written record goes, the classical form of Old English verse died out soon after the Conquest.
It was replaced by looser forms with irregular rhythmic and alliterative patterns. The most distinguished example of this is Layamon’s Brut, a long chronicle of Britain composed in the late 12th or early 13th century. It used to be the general view that the unrhymed alliterative line survived in oral form from the Conquest to the mid-14th century.
More recently, objections have been raised to this idea, in particular that the sophisticated literariness of the poems of the Revival, many of which are based on (or even closely translated from) long texts in French and Latin, can owe nothing to an oral stage of transmission. It has instead been proposed that the written tradition was maintained by monastic authors and scribes in the West Midlands, but that all manuscripts of such earlier texts have been lost.
Yet, it is difficult to understand how all trace of such poems could have vanished. An alternative hypothesis is that the movement was a new creation of 14th-century poets, developed from a variety of preexisting forms—in particular, alliterative verse in rhyming stanzas and alliterative rhyming prose. However, the shared metrical practices of the poets are so deep-rooted, subtle, and apparently traditional that it is difficult to see how they could have been quickly assimilated and adopted.
Authors and Topics
Many of the authors of the Alliterative Revival were highly educated and able to translate Latin and French. They expected their audience to be attracted away from frivolous subjects toward a learned presentation of historical, social, and religious matters. They also relied on their audience having an appreciation of the techniques of such arts as hawking, hunting, and siege warfare.
While works of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate are sometimes preserved in de luxe copies made for the aristocracy, manuscripts of alliterative poetry are humbler and less richly executed, suggesting ownership by a lower social class.
Vocabulary
The vocabulary of alliterative poetry is distinctive and markedly different from that of poems of southern writers. Part of the difference is simply regional; the poets write in their own dialect using words common in their own area. For example, laik, “play,“ is a noun and verb of Old Norse origin, common in northern dialects even today. This word is common in alliterative poems but absent from the vocabulary of Chaucer and Gower.
A notable group of synonyms frequently used in alliterative poems but never by Chaucer and Gower are the words for “man, knight”: Of these gome, burn, and lede occur occasionally in nonalliterative poems. But freke, hathel, shalke, segge (all from Old English) and tulk (from Old Norse) are almost entirely confined to the poems of the Revival.
The Alliterative Line
The metrical structure of the alliterative line is essentially straightforward and may be illustrated by lines from Gawain. Each line is constructed of two half-lines of two stresses; the two stresses of the first half-line alliterate with the first stress of the second half-line. Consonants alliterate with identical consonants, and consonant groups, such as st- or sp-, often alliterate with themselves. Any vowel may alliterate with any other vowel or with h-. Some first half-lines have three prominent syllables, often with alliteration on all three.
4.2 The Gawain-Poet and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Manuscript
Sir Gawain is extant in a single manuscript: British Library, Cotton Nero A.x., fols. 91a-124b. In the manuscript Sir Gawain is preceded by three other works titled by modern scholarship Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience. This vellum manuscript has been regarded as a copy, due mainly to the occurrence of scribal errors. About the manuscript provenance, we know that the antiquary Sir Robert Cotton acquired it at the death of Henry Savile of Bank (1568-1617), and that it survived the fire that devastated the Cottonian collection in 1731. This is more or less all the factual information that we have. Sir Gawain provides internal information that points to the north-west Midlands as the place of composition. First, there is a topographical description (lines 691-702) that requires a great degree of familiarity with Wirral and North Wales. Second, there is linguistic evidence that corroborates this, with many northerly features present in the text.
Date
The manuscript itself provides the evident terminus ante quem, and it has been dated on stylistic grounds around 1400. The terminus post quem has been inferred from the descriptions of the Dead Sea in Cleanness, which are thought to have been inspired by the Insular Version of the Mandeville’s Travels, which circulated in England before 1390.
Author
The conjectural identification of authorship can offer only a socio-literary profile. The four poems feature in common: Dialect// Themes// Concepts// Attitudes// Vocabulary// Stylistic characteristics.
This conformity, however, is not conclusive in establishing a common author for the four texts. The single anonymous authorship has been conventionally accepted, but we can wonder if such unanimity would have been reached had the four texts not been preserved in the same codex.
Owing to the lack of biographical material, modern critics have had to rely on textual evidence to construe the poet’s identity. The poet’s clerical status has been adduced because of his extensive literary readings. He must have lived in a noble household because of his familiarity with courtly behavior. There is a possibility that he lived in London during his period of literary production and that he was close to the court of Richard II. This presence in London can help us explain his acquaintance with writers that would be unobtainable in the Midlands, especially Boccaccio and Dante. Furthermore, the Gawain-poet also had access to more widely disseminated works, both in French and in Latin. Worth mentioning is his familiarity with French Arthurian romance and with the Latin Vulgate. To sum up, this is a poet with a very solid biblical education, who was also well-read in other contemporary authors, and who conducted his literary activity in a provincial household but with access to the metropolis.