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The "Pearl Poet" is the name given to the author of Pearl, a poem written in Middle English alliterative verse during the 14th century.
From linguistic and stylistic evidence, its author is widely supposed to have also written the poems Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, and Cleanness, all found in a single manuscript, the British Library holding Cotton Nero A.x. Some scholars have suggested he may also have composed Saint Erkenwald, a poem found in the manuscript MS. Harley 2250. This body of work includes some of the greatest poetry written in Middle English.
The poet, also referred to as the "Gawain-poet", is in modern scholarship most often identified as John Massey, a member of the landed gentry from Cheshire. There is still considerable doubt, however, as to whether Massey was actually the author of the Cotton Nero A.x poems.
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Conjectured biography
The language of the poems shows that the poet was a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and William Langland, who are sometimes (following the suggestion of academic John Burrow) collectively called the 'Ricardian Poets' in reference to the reign of Richard II of England.1 All four poems of the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript are in the same Middle English dialect, localised to the area of north-western Staffordshire and south-eastern Cheshire, in the north-west of England. This may merely indicate the dialect of the scribe responsible for copying the poems, but there is good evidence that the dialect of poet and scribe were very similar.2 It is, therefore, thought most likely that the poet was a native of east Cheshire or west Staffordshire and was writing in the latter part of the 14th century, and internal evidence indicates that all four works were probably written by the same author.
Any other information must be deduced from the poems' themes, as there is neither a definite authorial attribution within them nor any 'tradition' as to the author's identitity (as with Langland and Piers Plowman). The poet would seem to be exceptionally conversant with learning, shows a deep knowledge of technical vocabulary about hunting and the court, vividly describes the landscape of his region, and has an interest in poverty as a Christian virtue. However, the writer of the Cotton Nero A.x poems never refers to contemporary scholarship as Chaucer, for example, does; he shows much more of a tendency to refer to materials from the past (the Arthurian legends, stories from the Bible) than any new learning, so it is perhaps less possible to associate him with the universities, monasteries, or the court in London. Despite this, he must have been educated and probably of a certain social standing, perhaps a member of a family of landed gentry. J. R. R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, after reviewing the allusions, style, and themes of Gawain and the Green Knight, concluded in 1925:
He was a man of serious and devout mind, though not without humour; he had an interest in theology, and some knowledge of it, though an amateur knowledge perhaps, rather than a professional; he had Latin and French and was well enough read in French books, both romantic and instructive; but his home was in the West Midlands of England; so much his language shows, and his metre, and his scenery.4
Theories as to possible identity
John Prat, John Donne
A number of scholars have proposed that Pearl was written to commemorate the daughter of John Hastings, Earl of Pembroke, and two clerks from Pembroke, John Prat and John Donne, have been advanced as possible candidates for authorship.5
"Huchoun"
A theory current in the early part of the 20th century held that a man called Huchoun ("little Hugh") may have authored the poems, having been credited with several works,including at least one known to be in the alliterative form, in the Chronicle of Andrew of Wyntoun. As Cotton Nero A.x contains the words "Hugo de" added in a later hand, its contents were indentified with some of the works mentioned by Wyntoun.
This argument, made in greatest detail by a Scottish antiquarian, George Neilson (who claimed that Hugh was a Scottish knight, Hugh of Eglington) is nowadays disregarded, mainly because the poems attributed to Hugh seem to have been composed in widely varying dialects.
John (or Hugh) Massey
The surname of Massey, that of a prominent Cheshire family, is associated with St Erkenwald, a poem occasionally claimed to be another of the Pearl poet's works; the names of Thomas Massey and Elizabeth Booth (a member of the Booth family of Dunham Massey) are written in St Erkenwald's manuscript.
In 1956 Ormerod Greenwood, working on a translation of Gawain, made the suggestion that the author of Pearl and Gawain was one of the Masseys of Sale. He suggested Hugh Massey, based on a number of puns he found incorporated in Pearl (in addition to the "Hugo de" inscription in Cotton Nero A.x)6 Given the obvious link through the name "Hugh", Hugh Massey has been conflated with Huchoun by some academics.
A later suggestion that has found a good deal of favour is John Massey of Cotton (a village mentioned in Gawain); this was first put forward by Nolan and Farley-Hills in 1971.7 John Massey's authorship is further supported, according to Nolan, by one of Thomas Hoccleve's poems, in which the Hoccleve mentions "my maister Massy", indicating him to be a fearsome critic of poetic metre. The attribution to John Massey is the most common in modern scholarship, though it is not, however, supported by all critics.8
References
- ^ Burrow, J. Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the "Gawain" Poet, Penguin, 1992
- ^ Duggan, H. 'Meter, Stanza, Vocabulary, Dialect', in Brewer and Gibson (eds), A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, Cambridge, 2007, pp.240-242
- ^ See Twomey, M. Travels with Sir Gawain, ithaca.edu
- ^ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Edited J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, revised Norman Davis, 1925. introduction, xv. ASIN B000IPU84U
- ^ Stanbury, S. Pearl: Introduction, Medieval Institute Publications, 2001
- ^ Greenwood, O. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Fourteenth-Century Alliterative Poem Now Attributed to Hugh Mascy, London, 1956
- ^ Nolan, B. and Farley-Hills, D. 'The Authorship of Pearl: Two Notes,' Review of English Studies n.s. 22 (1971), 295-302
- ^ Turville-Petre, T. and Wilson, E. 'Hoccleve, "Maistir Massy" and the Pearl Poet: Two Notes', Review of English Studies, 1975, XXVI:129-143
External links
- The text of Pearl
- Scholarly Introduction to Pearl, Sarah Stanbury
- Michael Twomey. "Travels with Sir Gawain". Retrieved on 2007-06-23.
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Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 22 October 2008, at 08:32.
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