Alliterative Revival

The Alliterative Revival

The Alliterative Revival is the name modern scholars give to a remarkable burst of fourteenth-century English poetry that abandoned the French rhyme conventions of the Middle English mainstream and returned, three centuries after the [[norman-conquest|Norman Conquest]], to the [[alliterative-verse|alliterative meter]] of the [[anglo-saxon|Anglo-Saxon]] poets. The revival is one of the strangest events in English literary history: a meter that had been dormant for two and a half centuries was suddenly composing masterpieces again, in a small body of work by a tiny number of identifiable hands, in the regional dialects of provincial England rather than the capital. The chief surviving works of the revival are the four poems usually attributed to the anonymous [[pearl-poet|Pearl-Poet]] — Pearl, [[sir-gawain-and-the-green-knight|Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]], Cleanness, and Patience — and William Langland's vast allegorical dream-vision [[piers-plowman|Piers Plowman]]. The poems were composed in the [[west-midlands|west midlands]] of England, far from London where Chaucer was inventing what would become the dominant tradition of English verse. The revival raises one of the great unanswered questions of medieval English literary history: was this actually a "revival" of a dormant tradition, or was alliterative verse continuously composed in regional England all along and we simply have manuscripts only from this brief late-fourteenth-century moment? Scholars have gone back and forth on the question for over a century. The mainstream view today is something in between — that alliterative composition persisted at a low level in regional and oral contexts throughout the post-Conquest period, but that the late fourteenth century saw a sudden flowering of ambitious literary-quality alliterative work, possibly driven by patronage in the west midlands, regional pride in the face of London's growing cultural dominance, or a deliberate return to native English forms during the linguistic shift back toward English as a literary language.

The Context

After the [[norman-conquest|Norman Conquest]] in 1066, French became the language of court, law, and high literature in England for roughly three centuries. English continued to be spoken by the great majority of the population but was demoted to the language of peasants and small landholders, written down rarely, and absent from the prestige genres. The English that re-emerged as a literary medium in the fourteenth century — Chaucer's English, the English of Wycliffe's Bible — had been transformed by centuries of contact with French. Its inflectional endings had eroded, its vocabulary had absorbed thousands of French and Latin loans, and its prestige genres followed continental models with end-rhyme and syllable-counting. Against this background, the decision of a fourteenth-century west-midlands poet to write in the [[alliterative-verse|alliterative meter]] of Beowulf was a statement of literary independence. It was deliberately rough, deliberately rooted, deliberately not what Chaucer was doing in London. The Pearl-Poet and Langland were not naive primitives unaware of fashion. They were sophisticated artists choosing an older form because it carried meaning their content required.

The Poets

[[piers-plowman|Piers Plowman]], composed in three successive versions between roughly 1370 and 1390, is the longest and most ambitious alliterative poem in Middle English. Its author, William Langland, is the only Alliterative Revival poet whose name is known with reasonable confidence. The poem is a sprawling religious-political allegory — a dream-vision in which the narrator Will encounters personified figures of virtue and vice and eventually meets Christ in the guise of Piers the Plowman. It was enormously influential in its own time and contributed to the rhetoric of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt; one of the rebel leaders quoted it in a letter rallying support.

The [[pearl-poet|Pearl-Poet]] — the anonymous author of four poems preserved in a single manuscript — is the other major figure. His four poems are Pearl (an elegy for a dead child, written in elaborate stanzas combining alliteration with rhyme), [[sir-gawain-and-the-green-knight|Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]] (an Arthurian romance considered one of the masterpieces of Middle English literature), Cleanness (a sermon on the virtue of purity), and Patience (a retelling of the Book of Jonah). His name is permanently unknown. Internal evidence — the dialect, the obsessions, the sophistication — suggests a single author of remarkable range, almost certainly a cleric or scholarly layman attached to a wealthy patron's household in the northwest of England.

The Meter

The Alliterative Revival meter is loosely related to its Anglo-Saxon ancestor but not identical to it. The four-stress line with caesura survives, and the alliteration of stressed syllables across the caesura survives, but the strict rules of the classical Anglo-Saxon line — particularly the prohibition on the fourth stress alliterating — were loosened in the fourteenth-century practice. Some of the revival poets added end-rhyme on top of alliteration, producing hybrid forms. Pearl is the most extreme example: its stanzas use both alliterative four-stress lines and elaborate end-rhyme schemes, threading the older native meter through a continental stanza form. The revival's relationship to its source is therefore not slavish imitation but creative reinvention. The poets reached back to a form they recognized as English in a way the French-influenced mainstream was not, and they re-tooled it for the religious, allegorical, and romance subjects their fourteenth-century audience wanted.

The Aftermath

The Alliterative Revival did not last beyond the fourteenth century in any vital form. Manuscripts of Sir Gawain and Pearl survived in just one copy — Cotton Nero A.x at the British Library — and were essentially forgotten until the nineteenth century rediscovered Anglo-Saxon and Middle English literature. The revival's afterlife belongs entirely to the modern era. Tolkien's 1925 edition of Sir Gawain (co-edited with E.V. Gordon) and his 1975 prose translation made the poem central to twentieth-century medieval studies. Simon Armitage's 2007 verse translation brought it to a wider modern audience. The revival is also one of the great historical demonstrations that a literary form can come back from apparent death. Six hundred years of dormancy did not finish the alliterative line. It waited, found a fourteenth-century moment, produced a small body of masterworks, and waited again. Modern poets — Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Simon Armitage — still occasionally reach for the four-stress alliterative line, and when they do, they are reaching past the Norman Conquest into a current the Anglo-Saxons started and the Pearl-Poet refused to let die.