Late Shakespeare and the Middle Ages.
- Author/Editor
- van Es, Bart.
- Title
- Late Shakespeare and the Middle Ages.
- Published
- van Es, Bart. "Late Shakespeare and the Middle Ages," in Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents, ed. Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 37-51.
- Review
- The influence of medieval romance is omnipresent throughout the plays of Shakespeare. In the late plays, however, it becomes "conspicuous" to the point of defining a Shakespearean "romance" genre of its own (37). A prime example of "'the medieval' in Shakespeare" is the character Gower in "Pericles: 564 ff., as he narrates an episode of knights in armor not found in any source for the play, including the "Confessio Amantis" (38). Why such "deviation from precedent," including the "remarkable decision to use Gower as presenter" . . . [speaking in] "old-fashioned tetrameters" that would have sounded, to a "sophisticated" audience, decidedly "then" as opposed to "now" (40)? This semi-comic Gower (1607 or later) is in stark contrast with the poet's sixteenth-century reputation for "authority, moral weight, and contemporary relevance," as well as a humanistic devotion to "renew[ing] the vernacular" and excellence of English style (42), per Berthelette, Spenser, Gabriel Harvey, and Robert Greene (41-43). What explains this skeptical new approach to Gower and medieval romance? "Shakespeare's oeuvre sits across [the] temporal fault line" (51) of 1605, when the term "Middle Age" was first used by William Camden to define the centuries in between the classics and the Elizabethan revival of learning. Camden "values [the Middle Age] as one of high martial honour and poetic passion, but also stresses its lack of decorum" (44). The year 1605 also saw the publication of "Don Quixote," with its new "authorial self-consciousness" and "delicate irony" at the expense of the still-"admire[d]," but now "outmoded" conventions of medieval romance (45-46). In his latest plays including "Pericles," Shakespeare manipulates the perception of "antiquity . . . artificiality" and "Cervantean play" to heighten the effect of "an old tale," deploying "characters [such as Gower who] articulate the fictive quality of the events that they see unfold" (49). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1]
- Date
- 2013
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion