Lyric Tactics. Ingrid Nelson

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СКАЧАТЬ the friar’s own English hymn translations. This chapter demonstrates that for Herebert, the tactical practices encouraged by lyric language, with its tendency to adopt different meaning according to circumstances, pose a doctrinal problem. How can the popularity of lyrics be deployed in the service of pastoral care while preserving their doctrinal consistency, especially in a literary form whose tactics make it morally ambiguous? A little known Anglo-French lyric in Herebert’s compilation, “Amours m’ount si enchanté,” poses (and resolves) this problem thematically and formally. Herebert’s hymn translations draw on the tactics suggested by this poem to separate song’s affective power in performance from its doctrinal regulation in written texts. Lyric tactics thus permit Herebert to reconcile its performance practices with the more strategic forms of scholastic textual conventions.

      Whereas manuscript miscellanies use tactics to navigate between the performative and the written aspects of lyric practice, later insular lyrics increasingly explore relationships among literary forms. The second half of this book thus considers how these tactical relationships continue to inform the development of the medieval English lyric. Putting the lyrics in Geoffrey Chaucer’s longer works in dialogue with their literary and practical contexts, I demonstrate how later fourteenth-century lyrics continue the tactical practices that shaped earlier lyrics. This is not an argument for direct influence. Rather, my claim is that tactical practice continues to define the insular lyric even as new lyric forms and lyric theories, chiefly those of Continental poetry, influence English literature. Recalling that tactics are modes of relation to existing structures, we can see that these later English lyrics define themselves tactically in relation to other literary forms.

      In Chapter 3, “Lyric Negotiations: Continental Forms and Troilus and Criseyde,” I focus on the relationships between insular lyric practices, new Continental lyric forms, and the political issues raised by Chaucer’s historical romance. This chapter takes the social forms and practices of Antigone’s song as paradigmatic of Chaucer’s understanding of the insular lyric genre, even as it draws on French and Italian poetic sources. The poetics, performance context, and reception of the song present a tactics of negotiation, which speaks to Troilus and Criseyde’s political concern with reconciling individual and communal desires. Subsequently reading the cantici Troili and the palinode through the model of lyric developed from Antigone’s song, I demonstrate how Chaucer’s adaptations of Petrarch diminish the kind of panoptic authorial control that the original texts generated and, further, resist (even if they ultimately succumb to) totalizing Petrarchan models of poetics and governance. The lyric tactics of Antigone’s song permeate the poem’s formal and political concerns, as Chaucer uses the insular lyric’s practices to challenge Petrarchan absolutism.

      If the lyric tactics of Troilus and Criseyde motivate considerations that are essentially political, those of The Legend of Good Women (1385–96) are more ethically focused. Largely a collection of exempla, or short narratives that teach a moral lesson, The Legend of Good Women purports to act as a further palinode to Troilus and Criseyde by telling stories of faithful women. Chapter 4, “Form and Ethics in Handlynge Synne and The Legend of Good Women,” locates the Legend’s lyricism within an English tradition of practical ethical lyric: in particular, the use of lyric within exemplum. This chapter reads the lyric interludes in the Legend alongside those of Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne (1303), a collection of verse exempla. For both authors, lyric interpolations expose and reform the exemplum’s formal and ethical disjunction: its conflicting drives toward narrative contingency and moral closure that challenge a practice of moral reasoning based on cases. By contrast, lyric practices suspend exemplary narrative’s drive toward closure, encouraging an ethics that consists of recursion and attentiveness to contingency rather than telos. While all of the lyric interludes in these narrative poems draw on medieval and proto-modern lyric forms, ultimately their practices remain central not only to the definition of the genre but also to its ethical and cultural work. As the “father of English literature,” Chaucer has often figured in stories of origin: the “first” English poet, for instance, to appropriate and reform Latin theories of authorship.¹¹⁹ My reading of Chaucer is rather as a transitional figure, between the tactics of earlier English lyric and the increasingly vernacularized forms of textual authority.

      The lyric tactics described in these chapters suggest an alternate narrative of English lyric history, in which a distinct insular genre not only informs Chaucer’s lyrics but also continues to influence the development of lyric in the fifteenth century and beyond. By way of conclusion, I suggest that the tactical cultural work of lyric continues into the late medieval and early modern periods, even as they anticipate features of modern lyric. I discuss how the medieval Orphic myth of the verse romance “Sir Orfeo” offers an alternative to the classical Ovidian narrative of loss that can inform our reading of the relationship between medieval and modern lyricism, as well as read two later lyrics, the fifteenth-century “Adam lay y-bounden” and Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt,” through this alternate Orphic lens.

      To understand genre as a conjunction of practices rather than forms recovers the social and cultural existences of texts. Literature, in particular, offers audiences outside of institutions and their protocols flexibility in their adaptations of and responses to these texts. The forms of lyric poetry especially invite tactical practice. Their brevity, performativity, and stylistic features make them nimble and modular with respect to larger textual structures, both material and rhetorical. Even as lyric texts change forms, the practices they initiated continue to teach us to read, respond, and adapt poetry to our world and our world to poetry.

      CHAPTER 1

      The Voices of Harley 2253

      Each of the next two chapters explores how a manuscript compilation draws on and theorizes lyric tactics and demonstrates the ways in which medieval English records of lyrics articulate relations of practice. Because tactics are modes of relation, I examine multiple relationships within these compilations, from the broad compilational logic of the whole manuscript to more local interactions between a text, its page, and its surrounding texts. This approach has a natural affinity with studies of the so-called manuscript matrix, the method of philology that considers the place of individual texts within their books.¹ It also serves to elucidate an insular approach to lyric compilations that distinguishes them from their French counterparts, even as many of these English codices record French texts. Further, like much medieval literature, lyrics had a dual existence as performance and text. Yet where text is durable, persistent, and transtemporal, performance is transient, localized, and only partially documentable. Nonetheless, the marks of performance everywhere inflect written texts.² This chapter focuses on how tactical relationships between medieval performative and writing practices shape and are shaped by the lyric and nonlyric texts of one of the most important surviving collections of pre-Chaucerian lyric, British Library MS Harley 2253.

      In particular, I explore how these texts represent and theorize voice, a feature of lyric that illuminates the tactical relationships between the performative and the textual. Voice is central to lyric, which is frequently characterized by modern critics as an “utterance,” yet medieval lyrics use voice in ways that confound post-Romantic models of the genre. While many of these poems do present a single lyric “I” that represents, in the words of Rosemary Woolf, “one-half of a dialogue” with an absent interlocutor, others thematize and exemplify the tactical qualities of lyric voices.³ Medieval theories of voice engage both its abstract and practical aspects, attending to both its textual (in the work of medieval grammarians) and its performative (in the work of medieval philosophers and rhetoricians) functions. As my discussion of these theories will reveal, there are institutional contexts and norms intended to govern both of these aspects of voice. But when the biological, performative, and literary features СКАЧАТЬ