Lyric Tactics. Ingrid Nelson
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 of voice converge in lyric texts, they navigate these norms erratically. This is not to say that voice is equivalent to tactics. Rather, inasmuch as theories of voice prescribe normative vocalizing practices, the ways in which lyrics move among writing and performance encourages, even necessitates, a tactical approach to these prescriptions. The rhetorical figure known as “ethopoeia,” which went under several different names in the Middle Ages, is helpful for understanding these tactics. As we shall see, this figure unites the affective, social, and circumstantial particulars of a speaker in literary voice.
The scribe-compiler of MS Harley 2253 interleaves prayers, dialogue poems, refrain poems, and single-voice poems in ways that draw on features of medieval and proto-modern theories of voice. Although not anthologized by genre, lyrics constitute an important class of texts within this compilation. As critics have increasingly noted, the relationship between the Harley lyrics and the other texts of this manuscript is less that of figure to ground than of tile to mosaic.4 Yet, as we shall see, these lyrics exemplify medieval theories of the relationship between voice and speaking subject that at once resonate with the manuscript’s nonlyric texts and distinguish lyric as a specific class of texts among them. The social, performative, and textual qualities of this kind of voice create not a single lyric “speaker” but rather voices for lyric readers, performers, and audiences that express tactical relationships to normative structures.
Most critics have agreed that the speaker of a medieval lyric is a chimera, less a definitive subject than a placeholder for successive writers, readers, or performers of the text.5 As we have seen in the previous chapter, the idea of a lyric speaker derives largely from post-Romantic definitions of the genre. If instead we consider lyric in terms of voice, we can draw on a rich body of medieval philosophical and scholastic theory. As the lyrics of MS Harley 2253 demonstrate, voice inheres in both performance and text in medieval theory and practice. To begin to understand how this works, consider the well-known Harley lyric, “When the Nightingale Sings”:
| When the nyhtegale singes, the wodes waxen grene; | grow |