Letteratura inglese - schemi

[Alexis22]

BRITAIN AFTER NORMAN CONQUEST
HAROLD's reign (he had no real pedigree, was elected to fill a power vacuum) was one of the shortest in English history; it was disputed by WILLIAM DUKE OF NORMANDY who claimed the throne.1066:HASTINGS: Normans across the English channel to do battle with Harold’s English army (they were defeated and Harold died pierced by an arrow:longbow. Battle recorded in the BAYEUX TAPESTRY a woven mural in Bayeux, Normandy).
William was crowned on Christmas day in 1066 IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY. England became part of a cross-channel kingdom. The conquest wasn’t easy: Normans had to live like an army of occupation and there were uprisings in every year from 1067 to 1072. To keep Anglo-Saxons under control, Normans built several castles (Tower of London). People were forced to accept a new culture and language. Normans introduced French and a hierarchical FEUDAL SYSTEM based on a static agrarian economy (king allotted land to his barons, who gave lands to knights). The recipients (vassals) had to swear allegiance and pledge service to their overlords. (peasants into 2 categories: villains and freemen).
1086:William made an ECONOMIC SURVEY to know how much money he could collect with taxes, gelds. The result of this survey can be found in the DOMESDAY BOOK (precious document about the social structure of England during Norman conquest). Merchants gained a great deal of influence in the court because MONEY became MORE IMPORTANT than SERVICES. (2 effects: more power to barons and merchants; mobilization of large numbers of peasants who became paid soldiers.
Time of contamination and bilingualism:loanwords from French to Anglo-Saxon(but with the Hundred Years war English regained its importance)passage from Old English to Middle English: disappearance of the gender of nouns, French influence in the fields of law, fashion, architecture, art
FIRST ANGEVIN KING:HENRY II: common law weakened the feudal structure of society by referring to a relative system based on custom and comparison with previous cases (and not to an absolute idea of justice decreed by the king). Establishment of trial by jury, a system still used in Britain.
1189:RICHARD I (Third Crusade). Crusades: had begun in 1095 on the orders of Pope Urban II, intended as military expeditions to recover the “Holy Land” and Jerusalem. Richard (lionheart because of his knightly virtues) set off when Saladin stopped the Christian conquest of the east by conquering Jerusalem.
JOHN LACKLAND: avid and greedy. He wanted to levy higher taxes to pay for disastrous war campaigns to protect his lands in France. He became more and more economically dependent on the wealthy barons and merchants, who forced him to sign the MAGNA CARTA in Runnymede which prevented him from claiming taxes without the approval of a council of advisors (no free man could be arrested, imprisoned or dispossessed of his property without a fair trial). Beginning of an epocal shift in power, from the king to a small elite of nobles (RISE OF MIDDLE CLASSES)
HENRY III: first of the Plantagenets. Under his reign Simon de Montfort and Earl of Leicester created a parliament. There was a rebellion in which De Montfort was killed, but Edward I recognised the effectiveness of the parliament, including not only barons and clergy, but also knights and citizens (Model Parliament:foundations for House of Lords and House of Commons). Establishment of government offices in major towns such as London and York.
CONFLICT OF INTERESTS between Church and State: king Henry II made his friend Thomas Becket Archbishop, hoping he could control the power of the Church. But Becket turned against him by refusing to support The Constitution of Clarendon, which was to give the king more authority in religious matters. Becket was then murdered in Canterbury Cathedral and made martyr.
14TH CENTURY : LOLLARDY REFORM MOVEMENT led by John Wycliffe was devoted to the study of holy scripture; its aim was to remove the Church’s wealth to use it for more charitable purposes and it was against war and capital punishment. Its supporters were burned as heretics.
1337: HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR: EDWARD III claimed the French crown (‘cause he said that his mother Isabella was the daughter of the French king; in reality the causes were partly territorial-possession of the duchy of Aquitaine- partly economic-Flanders and cloth manufacturing possession).
1415 BATTLE OF ANGICOURT (English victory) 1429 Orleans (Joan of Arc, French victory).
Decisive English victory at Castillon in 1453
WAR OF THE ROSES between LANCASTER and YORK, which lasted 30 years from 1455 TO 1485 (Richard II died without heirs, his throne was usurped by Henry IV duke of Lancaster, but Edmund duke of York had a better claim to the throne, and the disagreement became civil war in 1455, complicated by internal rivalries).
CHIVALRY was a set of values- loyalty, bravery, honesty and glory- by which knights were supposed to live and die. It was used to justify the war campaigns to ensure the financial and material support raised through taxes and military service (propaganda: proclamations, songs and ballads, church sermons).
BLACK DEATH 1348: epidemic of bubonic plague caused by infected rats travelling on the ships trading with Europe. Paradoxically the living conditions of the poor improved. Peasants were able to demand payment for their work, and they could leave their Lords to go in search of a better offer.
1380: PEASANTS PROSPERITY AND FREEDOM was a threat to the noble and merchant landowners who imposed a tax on all the population in order to remove the financial power that the peasants had acquired. But the peasants had already created a union and were preparing for an armed revolt
1381:WAT TYLER marched on London and occupied the city forcing the government to take refuge in the tower. The government agreed to meet the peasants’ demands on condition that they disperse, and many of them did. But then the rebels were not strong enough, and the government executed their leader and began taking reprisals. Despite the failure of the revolt, the peasants started to see themselves as a class with interests to defend.
RISE OF THE MERCHANTS that should work in the image of God…
TIME IS MONEY (Jacques Le Goff: time is an object to be measured in terms of the length of a given operation or process). The time was bought and sold, usually with interest. The Church was against this practise because time was God’s gift to man that he should freely give in turn to accomplishing God’s works.
The growth of towns brought new occupations: smiths, shoemakers, carpenters, butchers, bakers who organized themselves into guilds, laying the foundations of an urban bourgeoisie.
In the countryside a new minor aristocracy, the gentry, was emerging among freeholders of land who were becoming wealthy because of the rents.
There was also the spread of education beyond the realm of the Church and the monasteries.

MEDIEVAL POETRY
BALLADS were an essentially popular tradition of the illiterate which recalled the early oral verses of the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons. They generally used simple languages and were composed of shorts stanzas of two or for lines which usually rhymed. They began to appear when the ideas of courtly love was gaining popularity amongst the nobility. The balladeer relied on a stock of phrases which he combined in new ways. Ballad tend to be repetitive in structure as it makes them easier to remember, and guaranteed a particular emotional effect which may be comic or elegiac (this repetition is called refrain). The stories are usually tragic, and often have an underlying sense of black humour (border ballads: celebrate the rivalry between the English and the Scottish people; outlaw ballads: celebrate the lives of criminals such as Robin Hood; ballads of magic: recount stories about fairies, witches and ghosts; town ballads: subversive commentary on difficult urban conditions).
1476 WILLIAM CAXTON  FIRST PRINTING PRESS in England. From 1477 to 1491 80 books were published (broadsides = single sheets of paper). Swift, Coleridge, Wordsworth “Lyrical ballads”.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER
1343-44, born into an emerging wealthy class and educated well.
1372-73: turning point of his literary life. He was sent to Italy where it is probable that he met Petrarch in Florence, and became familiar with the work of Boccaccio and Dante.
1374: he was made controller of customs for hides, skins and wool of the Port of London.
1386: he was appointed Clerk of the Kings Works.
During the last ten years Chaucer worked on “The Canterbury Tales”.
3 periods into which Chaucer’s works are commonly divided:
- FRENCH PERIOD: comprehends his early works, influenced by the French model;
- ITALIAN PERIOD: Chaucer follows the examples of Boccaccio and Dante;
- ENGLISH PERIOD: he was mainly occupied with the writing of the Canterbury Tales, written in Middle English and where probably begun in 1387. He planed to write 120 tales giving four tales to each of his pilgrims, two to be told on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back, but he managed to complete 24 tales.

THE CANTERBURY TALES
They are structured as a series of interlinked stories told by a group of pilgrims who are journeying to Canterbury on a pilgrimage to visit the shrine of Thomas Beckett.
General Prologue: brief description of each of the pilgrims. It is the host, Harry Bailly, who proposes the TAIL-TELLING COMPETITION as a way of passing the time on the journey.
Each pilgrim will have to tell two stories on the way to Canterbury and two stories on the way back, and there will be a prize for the best stories (allusion to Boccaccio’s Decameron).
The pilgrims begin at the TABARD INN in London (place linked with pleasure and conviviality) and travel towards CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, a symbol of the holy celestial city. They come from DIFFERENT SOCIAL CLASSES (military, clergy, the middle classes and the trades; it is worth noticing that neither the aristocracy nor the purest ranks of society are included in Chaucer’s work.
CHARACTERS: the virtuous knight, the domineering wife, the libertine friar, the elegant prioress, the poor parson, and the astute miller. They all have a human quality which makes them extremely vital. They are described through detailed description of their clothes and tools that show their social standing, and morally, including qualities and weaknesses. Chaucer suspends judgement of his characters. The tales cover a wide range of themes such as corruption, hypocrisy and chivalry, and they permit open dialogue between people from different levels of society in which no one as the last word.
The framework structure of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is indebted to Boccaccio’s Decameron, assembled between 1349 and 1351. In the Decameron seven young ladies and three young men from Florence take refuge in a country villa to escape the plague, during which time they amuse each other by telling tales. Each person tells one tale each day for ten days so that there are 100 stories in all. By contrast, Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims are not escaping from anything, but are actually on a journey towards Canterbury Cathedral. His pilgrim form a much wider and more complex panorama of society. He probably new about the Decameron, though there is no proof of this: he mentions Petrarch and Dante, but never Boccaccio (even if its possible that he actually met him).

MEDIEVAL DRAMA
In the Middle Ages religious festivities were opportunities for entertainment. During the great Christian festivals the most important events of the Old and the New Testament were represented in forms of dialogues sung between a priest and the choir. In this way MYSTERY (event narrated in the Bible) and MIRACLE (stories from the lives of the saints) PLAYS came into being in the 13th century and developed over the next to 200 years.
The plays were mainly performed outdoors, on movable stages called pageants, drawn by horses and stopped often in the market place, as there were no proper theatres yet.
MORALITY PLAYS were another form of RELIGIOUS AND ALLEGORICAL DRAMA (characters were static symbols of fixed values and ideas, such as the vices, or the virtues, which disputed questions of morality)
EVERYMAN: man’s fear of death. (the seven deadly sins Bertolt Brecht)