POETRY

The story of English literature begins with Beowulf, a poem about adventures taking place in Danemark, Gaetland and Sweden . The poem is in written Old English, it tells the deeds of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero . He goes to Danemark to fight and kill Grendel and his mother, two supernatural fiendish creatures, who entered the king's hall at night and slaughtered his thanes .

The poem's subject matter derives from the Icelandic and Scandinavian “sagas”, tales and legends which were probably inspired by ancient historical events . Beowulf can be likened to epic poetry of classical times because it tells of the brave actions of a mythical hero . Alliteration as well as the repetition of fixed phrases and ornate expressions were used to help memorisation .

Old English poetry like Beowulf was composed orally by bards or “scops” who recited tales and poems by heart to the accompainement of harp or lyre . Anglo-saxon poems are mainly about religious subjects .

After the Norman conquest, litterature did not produce anything until about the year 1200 . in the 13^th century, the nobility favoured the French form of the romance, long narrative poems telling heroic adventures of noble knights including intricate love stories . Romances became extremely popular, and also English romances flourished in great number .

A book written in Latin about 1130 had an enormous influence on English and French litterature . It bacame the source of thr cycle of legends dealing with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table . The Arthurian cycle describes the heroic life abd deeds of King Arthur and his knights . As the cycle developed , the interest moved from Arthur to his knights , the chief of whom was Sir Lancelot , and to their search for the Holy Grail . Geoffrey Monmouth's inspired the first national English epic poem which traces the story of Britain from his foundation up to Arthur's reign .

From the Norman invasion the language underwent significant changes . French and English amalgamated . The term “Middle Ages” refers to the English language spoken from 1150 to 1500 .

This language had a wider vocabulary but a simpler structure . There were several varieties of English, dialects spoken in London, Cambridge and Oxford established their supremacy bacause of the importance of these places as centeres of education, law , government and trade .

Geoffrey Chaucer spent most of his life as a civil servant in the couts of Edward III and Richard II . He recived a good education, knew Latin, could speak French and Italian . While leading his busy life, Chaucer was also writing poetry . His decision to write in English was a revolutionary decision .

The Canterbury Tales, his main work, were begun in about 1387 . Chaucer borrowed the device for strinting together a collection of stories from Boccacio's Decameron . A group of pilgrims is the narrator of the tales in this collection . The work in mainly written in verse, altought there are parts in prose, and the predominant form is the rhyming couplet (two rhyming lines which frequently are iambic pentameters) . The story tellers in The Canterbury Tales represent various classes of English society of the later Middle Ages : the military, the clergy, the middle class, the trades . Each one has an economic, social and moral dimension . The tales are often a means to illustrate aspects of the personalities of the tellers more clearly . One of the most famous character is the Wife of Bath an emancipated and sucessful buisness woman, a weaver and very skillful at her work, representative of the rising middle class . Chaucer is probably the first humanist in litterature and the first realist in portraying personal and social relations and is often referred to as “the father of English poetry” because of the several metrical innovation he introduced .

At the end of the 14^th century poetry was no longer anonymous . Ballads were among the most popular forms in poetry of the period . They were anonymous songs committed to memory and handed down orally from one generation to the next . The subjec matters were drawn from events and situations of everyday life , from the border conflicts between English and Scots , and from the legends of Robin Hood .

DRAMA

The origins of British drama in the Middle Ages began to emerge from the rituals of the Church . Drama was used to give illiterate peasants a religious education in the mysteries of faith and the Bible . Religious processions developed into a new form of drama which took place outside the churches and consisted of a number of plays dealing with stories of the Old and New testament . These were called Mistery plays .

Mistery plays were single episodes strung together in a Mistery cycle . The subject were either biblical stories, such as Noah and the flood, or events from the life of Christ . They were written in the English spoken by local people and included episodes in which certain human types appeared who could be immediatly recognized by the spectators . The setting of these Mistery plays was not Palestine or Egypt but English counties . Each play was financed and performed by the trade or craft guilds of the town . The Mistery cycle was staged outdoors; each play was performed on a movable stage wagon called “pageant” . All buisness and activities were suspended so that everybody could take part in the festivities .

In the late Middle Ages, other forms of drama became popular . They were called Morality plays and were also anonymous . Their characters were allegorical personification s of abstractions from theology or symbols of various aspects of the human condition .

The finest morality play which has come to us is Everyman . Its hero, who also gives his name to the title of the play, is a character representing mankind . The story offers a moral lesson for the salvation of man's soul .

Medioeval drama was important in the developement of the genre because it added a human element to the religious themes of the Mistery and created characters corresponding to Engish social types .