Middle English lyrics and ballads

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Medieval romance

The Arthurian romances

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:

and ends with his death.

the romance begins with the birth of king Arthur

the subject matter of romance

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

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

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

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

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

contemporary

classical

Characteristics of romance

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

Ethically, the true knight is bound in absolute duty to

his lady

his king

his God

The romance and its origins

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.

has as subject the deeds of knights:

supernatural events.

romantic love

fighting

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

Mystery Plays and Morality

The guilds' take over

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".

Origins of medieval drama

Medieval drama doesn't descend directly from classical drama.

The origins lie instead in church cerimonies like

Easter

Christmas

Medieval drama

The sudden appearence of drama has 3 important reasons

the formation of religious and trade guilds.

the grown of towns

the rise of the middle class;

Drama was written in English, not in Latin.

The 2 main forms of drama in England were

the Morality Plays

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

the Mystery Plays

based on episodes from the Bible

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.

Middle English lyrics and ballads

Medieval ballads

They are based on:

real historical events

romantic figures

Most ballads speak about of

including supernatural elements

tragic events (death)

Ballads are:

elaboreted by oral trasmission over the ages

anonymous

song

narrative poems

short

Features of ballads

The musical origin of the ballad is testified by its name

which comes from the Old French balade

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

and employing

simple metrical pattern:

4 beats in each line

rhyming abcb or abab

stanzas of 4 lines (quatrains)

very direct language

usually narrative

the predominance of verse

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

scientific discourse could contain verse.

Sermons could be written in verse

Metrical characteristics

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

alliteration is still a core device in English poetry

Sottoargomento

The great novelty introduced by French literary models were:

stanzaic forms.

These were written in patterns of metrical feet.

rhyme

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

Medieval lyrics

Thus, we have:

-the religious lyrics

-the love complaint,

-the love lyric

-the spring song,

Poems were often set to music and meant to be sung

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.

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